Continuing a venerable tradition, I offer the following for your canicular reading pleasure: John Hay spent decades at the center of American public life as Lincoln’s secretary and biographer, a Republican political operative, an accomplished diplomat, and Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state.John Taliaferro’s biography is terrific: “All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt” (Simon and Schuster).

Extra credit question: Name the author of this admonition – “Seeds of dissolution were already present in the ancient heritage as it reached the shores of America. [And] perhaps the dissolution, long since begun, may one day be consummated.

THIRTY YEARS AGO last week, Poland began to self-liberate from communism through the first semi-free elections held behind the iron curtain since World War II.

POPE FRANCIS’S recent motu proprio on sexual abuse, “Vos estis lux mundi” [You Are the Light of the World], was a welcome addition to Church law, as world Catholicism seeks to heal the wounds of abuse victims, promote chaste living, foster mutual accountability within the Body of Christ and restore the credibility of the Church’s leadership. The response to the motu proprio by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ably summed up that document’s achievement:

IN THREE WEEKS, a panel of senior judges will hear Cardinal George Pell’s appeal of the unjust verdict rendered against him at his retrial in March, when he was convicted of “historical sexual abuse.” That conviction did not come close to meeting the criterion of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is fundamental to criminal law in any rightly ordered society. The prosecution offered no corroborating evidence sustaining the complainant’s charge. The defense demolished the prosecution’s case, as witness after witness testified that the alleged abuse simply could not have happened under the circumstances charged — in a busy cathedral after Mass, in a secured space.

ON MAY 8, the Library of Congress and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars co-hosted a tribute to Dr. James H. Billington, who died last Nov. 20.

It was only a matter of time before this ersatz religion’s false anthropology and cosmology – its denial of the unique status of human beings in a natural order that’s created, not accidental – would lead to the grotesque. With human composting, gussied up as a matter of ecological responsibility, the grotesque has most assuredly arrived.

FOR OVER A HALF-CENTURY, what styles itself the “pro-choice” movement has thrived because of its extraordinary ability to mask what it’s really about – the willful taking of innocent human lives in abortion – through various rhetorical deceptions.

PUBLISHED A WEEK short of his 92nd birthday, Joseph Ratzinger’s essay on the epidemiology of the clergy sex-abuse crisis vividly illustrated his still-unparalleled capacity to incinerate the brain-circuits of various Catholic progressives.