DuPage County is one of the collar counties bordering Chicago. For years, it had the great good sense to send to the U.S. House of Representatives a man the late Cokie Roberts, no liberal, once described as “the smartest person in Congress”

The National Catholic Reporter recently saw fit to mark Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s 75th birthday by perpetuating two myths falsehoods, really — about events in contemporary Church history in which the cardinal was involved.

On Dec. 20, 2002, I was at lunch in the papal department when the wide-ranging conversation John Paul II always encouraged took an unexpected turn, with the pope asking me how President Ronald Reagan was doing.

The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was transactional: RFK 2.0 abandoned his 2024 presidential campaign (which was drawing sufficient support to pose problems for the Trump candidacy), and in return for switching teams received a position in the second Trump administration cabinet.

The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the nation’s capital is a magnificent Neo-Gothic structure, based on 14th-century English models, that calls itself “Washington National Cathedral”: a non-sequitur repeated by many others.

Today’s Russian Orthodox leadership is a theological, moral, and pastoral train wreck. U.S. foreign policy can’t fix that. Nonetheless, those responsible for devising U.S. foreign policy should recognize how that train wreck helps define Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine, even as it conditions any resolution of the war worthy of the name “peace.”

“Browsing Footprints in Time,” the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a tale from 80 years ago with a lesson for American public life today.

I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; my mother was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law was a nurse. My brother is a physician; so is one of my daughters, and so is her husband. An aunt was a registered nurse, and my niece is a hospital nutritionist.

Four years ago, this column praised the courage of Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for his Inauguration Day letter to President Joe Biden. In an entirely respectful tone, the archbishop pledged the bishops’ support for the president’s goal of healing our divided country while raising concerns about the abortion license as “a matter of social justice.”

Jubilee 2025 began on Christmas Eve 2024, with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s in Rome, and will conclude on January 6, 2026, when that door of the Vatican basilica is closed. The theme of this holy year is Peregrinantes in Spem (Pilgrims in Hope), and, like every other such celebration since Pope Boniface VIII inaugurated the practice of holy years in 1300, Jubilee 2025 is intended to intensify our experience of God’s grace — the divine life — at work within and around us.