The image of the pre-conciliar Catholic Church in the United States as catechetically effective and politically potent can be hard to square with the long-term damage done to Catholicism’s role in American public life by that very pre-Vatican II Catholic, John F. Kennedy.
The statement challenges the national drift toward concentrations of political and economic power while affirming the importance for a healthy democracy of natural associations (the traditional family) and the free associations of civil society (including the Church) — and thereby underscores the third foundational principle of the social doctrine, subsidiarity.
College is no longer a luxury for the privileged but rather a necessity for economic opportunity. Higher education is the key to success for one’s future career, and, as a result, there are additional demands placed on students when it comes to pursuing a degree.
Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Australian geologist, became infamous worldwide back in May of 1972 when he attacked and severely damaged Michelangelo’s masterpiece “La Pietà.”
The Church has designated the penultimate Sunday in October to promote the missions —this year World Mission Sunday falls on October 18th. World Mission Sunday is celebrated not only in the U.S. but globally; homilies are often given describing the work done in distant places, and sometimes there are appeals made for young people to consider a missionary vocation.
Defending Roe’s abortion license has become imperative for the Democratic Party. And because of that, far too many Catholic politicians, including the Democratic presidential candidates in 2004 and 2020, have put a canine fealty to a shabby judicial diktat above the truth of science (the product of human conception is a unique human being) and the moral truth we can know by reason (in a just society, innocent human life is protected in law).
Three U.S. Navy officers look out at me from a small, black-and-white snapshot, taken in Sasebo, Japan, on September 26, 1945: three and a half weeks after the Japanese Empire’s formal surrender aboard USS Missouri. These young Americans, assigned to an amphibious flotilla of landing craft, had spent the previous months on Okinawa, preparing to invade Dai Nippon.
In most cases, Catholics know very well about their obligation to have their wedding in the church and that the civil wedding is only for mundane legality. I understand that those who resort to a wedding before a civil authority have various reasons for their decision.
The loss of the Papal States was a great boon to the papacy and to the Church’s evangelical mission, and for several reasons. Civil governance of a considerable territory by a clerical caste had, over time, proven an obstacle to Catholicism’s evangelical, catechetical, and sanctifying missions.
When the choirs of angels led Father Paul Mankowski, S.J., into the Father’s House on Sept. 3, I hope the seraphic choirmaster chose music appropriate to the occasion. Had I been asked, I would have suggested the Latin antiphon Ecce sacerdos magnus as arranged by Anton Bruckner.
