Last Christmas, I borrowed a thought from the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander and suggested in this space that the wood of the manger anticipates the wood of the Cross: that Christmas points to Easter, but only by traversing the Via Crucis to Calvary.
The Catholic Church is prudently patient in awarding the title “Doctor of the Church” to her greatest teachers. However luminous someone’s explication of the truths of the Catholic faith may seem in his or her time, the efficacy of that teaching can only be tested over generations, sometimes centuries.
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.
