During his years as professor of fundamental theology at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Salvatore “Rino” Fisichella was often cited by American seminarians as their favorite  professor — an exponent of dynamic orthodoxy whose engaging classroom style was a blessed relief from the stolid ways of the Roman academy. Later, after Pope John Paul II issued Fides et Ratio [Faith and Reason], the 1998 encyclical that set Voltaire spinning in his grave, the joke in Rome was that, given the text’s likely drafters, the “F” and “R” in Fides and Ratio stood for “Fisichella” and “Ratzinger.”

Dear Senator Vance:

As Americans celebrate a unique national holiday, the origins of which remind us that our democracy is an experiment in ordered liberty “under God,” let me wish you and your family a happy and holy Thanksgiving. You will soon take the oath of office as Vice President of the United States. Several of your predecessors took a dim view of the vice presidency, as you surely know. The first vice president, John Adams, called it the “most insignificant office” ever devised by the mind of man.

The Venerable Andrei Sheptytsky, who died eighty years ago on November 1, 1944, was one of 20th century Catholicism’s outstanding figures, whose remarkable life and heroic ministry as leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church spanned 43 years, two world wars, five pontificates, Stalin’s terror-famine (the “Holodomor,” in which at least six million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death), and a half-dozen changes of government in the territories in which he served.

In the annals of historical boorishness, it would be hard to find something more egregious than the Holy See’s timing as it renewed its 2018 agreement with the People’s Republic of China, which allows the Chinese Communist Party a significant role in the appointment of Catholic bishops.

Taking the last liturgical step on the path to the priesthood means vowing obedience, lying prostrate before the altar, and symbolically receiving the Book of the Gospels as a sign of one’s new role in the Church.

Pizza in the Eternal City tends to exemplify a proposition I have long defended: what crossed the Atlantic going west was usually improved in the process. I like Roman pizza, as I like Rome, but I like New York pizza, Chicago pizza, Detroit pizza, and just about every other variant of American pizza — except Hawaiian — more. Still, when in Rome, do as the Romans.