The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics were less than 1% of the population of Japan. Today, 80 years later, Catholics are still less than 1% of the Japanese population, although Japan — with a below-replacement-level birth rate for decades — is in demographic free fall.
Christian conviction continues to warp European high culture and erode European civil liberties. A vast immigration from North Africa and the Middle East has created immense social problems that feckless politicians seem incapable of addressing.
During the March 2013 interregnum following the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, and in the conclave itself, proponents of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, as Benedict’s successor described him as an orthodox, tough-minded, courageous reformer who would clean the Vatican’s Augean stables while maintaining the theological and pastoral line that had guided the Church since John Paul II’s election in 1978: dynamic orthodoxy in service to a revitalized proclamation of the Gospel, in a world badly needing the witness and charity of a Church of missionary disciples.
In a few days, it will be one year since Rita Hayden peacefully returned to the house of the Father. She passed on May 6, 2024, which is the month dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary (or Pompei).
Last Christmas, I borrowed a thought from the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander and suggested in this space that the wood of the manger anticipates the wood of the Cross: that Christmas points to Easter, but only by traversing the Via Crucis to Calvary.
The Catholic Church is prudently patient in awarding the title “Doctor of the Church” to her greatest teachers. However luminous someone’s explication of the truths of the Catholic faith may seem in his or her time, the efficacy of that teaching can only be tested over generations, sometimes centuries.
DuPage County is one of the collar counties bordering Chicago. For years, it had the great good sense to send to the U.S. House of Representatives a man the late Cokie Roberts, no liberal, once described as “the smartest person in Congress”
The National Catholic Reporter recently saw fit to mark Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s 75th birthday by perpetuating two myths falsehoods, really — about events in contemporary Church history in which the cardinal was involved.
On Dec. 20, 2002, I was at lunch in the papal department when the wide-ranging conversation John Paul II always encouraged took an unexpected turn, with the pope asking me how President Ronald Reagan was doing.
The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was transactional: RFK 2.0 abandoned his 2024 presidential campaign (which was drawing sufficient support to pose problems for the Trump candidacy), and in return for switching teams received a position in the second Trump administration cabinet.
