I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; my mother was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law was a nurse. My brother is a physician; so is one of my daughters, and so is her husband. An aunt was a registered nurse, and my niece is a hospital nutritionist.

Four years ago, this column praised the courage of Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for his Inauguration Day letter to President Joe Biden. In an entirely respectful tone, the archbishop pledged the bishops’ support for the president’s goal of healing our divided country while raising concerns about the abortion license as “a matter of social justice.”

Jubilee 2025 began on Christmas Eve 2024, with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s in Rome, and will conclude on January 6, 2026, when that door of the Vatican basilica is closed. The theme of this holy year is Peregrinantes in Spem (Pilgrims in Hope), and, like every other such celebration since Pope Boniface VIII inaugurated the practice of holy years in 1300, Jubilee 2025 is intended to intensify our experience of God’s grace — the divine life — at work within and around us.

A change of presidential administrations typically leads to changes in U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad, especially at the ambassadorial level. This, in turn, leads to speculations, some of them zany, about the post of U.S. ambassador to the Holy See (typically mislabeled as “U.S. ambassador to the Vatican”). Herewith, then, are some clarifications and demystifications about this position.

A friend told me recently that bookstores were making something of a comeback. I hope that’s true because browsing bookstores is one of life’s great pleasures. In the spirit of happy browsing, here are some suggestions for Christmas book-giving (not “gifting”!) at a historical moment that needs equal doses of realism and hope.

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.