Guest Columnists

Thoughts on the Western Wall, 50 Years Later

June 7, 2017

PHOTOGRAPHS CAN capture exceptional moments in an iconic way, making the original experience “present” emotionally as well as pictorially. The photo of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi “means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said in 1945. The image of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s boyish salute as his father’s casket left Washington’s St. Matthew’s Cathedral in 1963 helped cement the “Camelot” myth into its seemingly impregnable place in American public life. The “Earthscape” pictures shot by Apollo 8 astronauts at Christmas, 1968, continue to play a not-insignificant role in today’s environmental movement.

I Didn’t Sign Up for This, Or Did I?

June 7, 2017

by Laura Kelly Fanucci

STRIPPING SOAKED sheets off a child’s bed for the third night in a row. Scrubbing vomit out of a carseat. Listening to a bedroom door slam with an angry “I hate you!”

Interreligious Dialogue With Edge and Purpose

May 31, 2017

THE EVENING OF Sept. 12, 2006, was, in a word, memorable. My wife and I were having dinner in Cracow with two of John Paul II’s oldest friends when my mobile phone rang and an agitated Italian journalist started hollering in my ear, “Have you zeen zees crazee speech zee Pope has given about zee Muslims? What do you zay about it?”

The Greatest Resurrection Gift

May 31, 2017

by Sister Ave Clark, O.P.

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL season Easter is – a time to sing joyously, Alleluia Alleluia! But I’ve been singing with some tears this Easter season for my dear friend Arthur.

Catholic Lite and Europe’s Demographic Suicide

May 24, 2017

TEN YEARS AGO, after my meditation on Europe, “The Cube and the Cathedral,” had appeared in several languages, I was invited to speak to the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. There, I tried to make what seemed three rather obvious points:

Technology and Faith

May 24, 2017

I once asked some high school students to identify a couple of trees – a birch and an elm – based on pictures of their leaves. They offered a few sheepish guesses: Oak? Maple? They kept guessing.

A Hillarian Lesson for Church Leaders

May 18, 2017

PERHAPS IT WAS being “overcome with Paschal joy” (as the Prefaces for Easter put it). Maybe it was my guardian angel whispering in my ear. Perhaps I’m just getting older and thus less crotchety. But for a brief moment, at around 7:30 EDT on the morning of May 3, I felt a blush of sympathy for Hillary Clinton for the first time in 25 years.

Mother and Child in Hispanic Catholic Eyes

May 18, 2017

by Dr. Hosffman Ospino

MAY IS TRADITIONALLY a month when Catholics turn our attention toward Mary more intentionally. Marian processions and crownings in parishes and schools remind us of childhood. I love processions!

The Fifty-Day Party

May 11, 2017

IF YOU CAN find it in your attic, open your old, pre-Vatican II missal, and look at the Sundays between Easter and Pentecost, which are titled “Sundays after Easter.” Now look at a contemporary Missal, or your current issue of Magnificat, and note the difference: those Sundays are now styled “Sundays of Easter.” Three letters were lost in the transition from after to of, but that subtraction represents a great recovery of liturgical insight.