I recently participated in a conference that explored the church’s sexual abuse crisis and the effect the crisis has had on the church’s witness in the public square. Midway through the conference, as we were turning our attention to the role of Catholic faith in public life, one of the organizer’s quipped, “Well, even if things are going badly in the church, at least things are going well in the country.”
Fifty years ago this week, the crew of Apollo 11, the world’s latest heroes, were doing decidedly unheroic things: napping, drinking beer, playing cards, reading magazines, and otherwise killing time in the Manned Spacecraft Center’s “Lunar Receiving Facility,” where they were quarantined to ensure that no lethal bugs had been brought back from the Moon’s surface by Neil Armstrong (who saved the mission by taking personal control of Eagle and landing it safely after overflying a vast field of lunar boulders), Buzz Aldrin (who memorably described the moonscape as one of “magnificent desolation”), and Michael Collins (who, orbiting the Moon in Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin were on its surface, was more alone than any human being since Genesis 2:22). The Lab was perhaps the least glamorous (and, as things turned out, least necessary) of NASA’s Apollonian inventions. For as Charles Fishman vividly illustrates in “One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon,” just about everything involved in effecting that “one small step….[and] one giant leap” had to be imagined, and then fabricated, from scratch.
by Msgr. Gregory MustaciuoloWhile there are differences in approaches and solutions, there is broad agreement that more needs to be done to improve health care in our nation. The same is true for this state we call home.
Thanks to President Trump’s “America First” rhetoric and the rise of populist-nationalist parties in Europe, there’s a lot of debate about “nationalism” these days. On that subject, as on so many others, it’s worth listening to Pope St. John Paul II, not least because last month marked the 40th anniversary of his epochal Nine Days in Poland in June 1979 — days on which the history of the 20th century pivoted in a more humane direction.
On first meeting Dr. Andrzej Grajewski, you probably wouldn’t guess that this mild-mannered Polish historian is one of the world’s leading experts on the ecclesiastical Dark Side of the Cold War: the relentless communist assault on the Catholic Church. But he is, and his expertise comes primarily from years of patient combing through the Bad Guys’ secret intelligence service files.
Throughout the 20th century — the greatest period of martyrdom in history — persecuted Christians used the dross of this world to make religious artifacts.
Continuing a venerable tradition, I offer the following for your canicular reading pleasure: John Hay spent decades at the center of American public life as Lincoln’s secretary and biographer, a Republican political operative, an accomplished diplomat, and Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state.John Taliaferro’s biography is terrific: “All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt” (Simon and Schuster).
Extra credit question: Name the author of this admonition – “Seeds of dissolution were already present in the ancient heritage as it reached the shores of America. [And] perhaps the dissolution, long since begun, may one day be consummated.
I don’t think our laws should treat animals better than humans, and I’m noticing a troubling trend in that direction. State lawmakers in Albany have introduced more legislation this year to protect animals than ever before.
by Father Cao Xuan HungWE ALL ARE BORN in debt. I don’t mean owing money. I mean the debt of gratitude to our parents.
