Defending the indefensible is never pretty. Or so we’re reminded by recent attempts from the portside of the Catholic commentariat to defend the madcap analysis of America’s alleged “ecumenism of hate” that appeared last month in the Italian Catholic journal, La Civiltà Cattolica (edited by the Jesuits of Rome and published after vetting by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See).
When I entered the Little Sisters of the Poor, I think my family was very surprised – most probably because we seem better suited to a circus than a convent! My parents laughed and still wonder, “What did we do right?”
IT’S A SAFE bet that 99.95 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics have never heard of La Civiltà Cattolica [Catholic Civilization], a journal founded in 1850 by Jesuits of Rome to combat evils of the age (then taken to be secularist liberalism and freemasonry). Its current circulation is perhaps half that of First Things, and while it’s recently made attempts to broaden readership by publishing English, Spanish, French and Korean editions, it’s also a safe bet that Civiltà Cattolica will remain a small-circulation magazine with a readership confined to what we might call “Catholic professionals:” clergy of various ranks; papal diplomats; officials of the Roman Curia; academics and pundits.
by Msgr. Joseph Nugent
Like a couple falling in love and feeling a deep call to be with each other for the rest of their lives, I too felt a call to serve the Lord and His Church as a priest. In the old admonition before marriage, the couple was reminded that they “would take each other for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health – until death.” I said “Yes” to the Lord and His Church and experienced all of the above as a priest for more than 46 years.
by Bishop Raymond Chappetto
AN UNUSUAL STORY! Let me explain. Maryan Callahan was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a very Catholic family. As a young girl she became familiar with the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, known as the IHMs.
WHEN I FIRST visited Israel in 1988, my friend, Professor Menahem Milson, a distinguished Arabist at Hebrew University who was Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s military aide during Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, told me that “you have to meet my friend, Colonel Yigal Carmon.”
A family is like a tree: We, the branches, can all grow in different directions but our roots remain the same. Summertime becomes a chance to care for those roots by spending time with our loved ones.
The appointment of Hispanic bishops as ordinaries of dioceses in California, Texas or Florida is rather common. This is not surprising since most Catholics in the South and the West are Hispanic.
THE CLAIM THAT “the Cold War is over” and that the West needs a “new paradigm” for relations with Russia has become an antiphon in some conservative political circles, not least conservative Christian circles. The call for serious and creative thinking about Russia is welcome and sensible. The claim that the Cold War is over is not, because Vladimir Putin never got that memo. Ignoring that reality means danger in devising any new paradigm.
Asked to name books that gave me the greatest intellectual jolt in recent decades, I’d quickly cite two.
