Whether in season or out of season, it falls upon any people who believe in objective truth and values to speak the unspeakable. What is or is not comfortable or politically correct, fashionable or unfashionable can neither postpone nor mitigate the timing or the urgency with which the message is delivered. In an age in […]
Editorials
The Year That Was
The 2,012th year of the Common Era draws to a close as editorialists dutifully rise (or fall) to the urge to become chronologers and critics of all that transpired therein. Readers and writers of Catholic news services are not removed from that world, even if we strive to be not of it. If granted the […]
Loved and Forgiven
The temptation to expect each Christmas to be a reprise of storybook models, reality-free, where innocence is spared the inevitable confrontation with the mystery of evil is less likely to hit us this year. As the day approaches, we adults customarily form a little pact between our children and the child within us to once […]
Treasure of Advent
Finding the treasure of Advent is the key to getting into the Christmas spirit. Even with Advent more than half over – or perhaps especially because of it – claiming the time to accept its graces will deepen both the joy and peace Christmas promises. St. John the Baptist, a paramount Advent figure, spent most […]
Patience and Hope
What we have seen and experienced in the last two weeks has been mind-numbing. Since we have weathered many hurricanes in the past, it is hard to believe that such a storm could create such havoc in our communities as Sandy did. There is a wide gap among the kinds of pain we all have […]
Vote Your Conscience
This Tuesday, Nov. 6, is a day on which every voting Catholic must make an important choice. We face the civic duty to be faithful citizens and the moral summons to be faithful to our consciences. Of the two, the moral obligation to follow one’s conscience comes first. We may not, in fact, support in […]
Human Life Matters
In the upcoming election, the principles upon which we make our choices will most probably display much about the authenticity and credibility of our witness as a Church in a country much in need of moral clarity. It is a matter of first principles, of which life itself matters most. A common misunderstanding of Catholic […]
Over the Top!
The venerable “wall of separation” has served as a cautionary metaphor for limiting the mutually deleterious influences that both Church and State have had – historically – when either exceeds the bounds of its authority and competence. Whatever else might be said about how the Vice President of the United States conducted himself at the […]
Who Owns America?
The incidence of Columbus Day poses the perennial question about what it really means to “discover” America and, by implication to “own” it. While conquest or the glory therein may have been prime among the motives of our earliest European settlers, any fair reading of history cannot so narrowly dismiss higher humane aspirations of the […]
Make It Happen in 2012
History is made up of three kinds of people: those who make it happen, those to whom it happens and those who wonder what happened! Whoever first observed this was onto something. Each of these options is a personal choice. What will ours be? As 2011 came to an end, it was only natural to […]