by George Weigel The flurry of instabooks published shortly after the election of Pope Francis didn’t shed much light on the formation, character and interests of Jorge Mario Bergoglio or the likely trajectory of his pontificate. Now comes something serious: “Pope Francis: Our Brother, Our Friend – Personal Recollections About the Man Who Became Pope,” […]
by Father Eugene F. Hemrick AFTER EXPERIENCING Christmas for so many years, it’s easy for it to become “just another” Christmas. It makes me think of a quote by A.J. Conyers in his book, “The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture.” Conyers says the following: “To be modern is to exist increasingly […]
by George Weigel IN HIS 2008 BOOK, “The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America,” Boston College historian James M. O’Toole did a fine job of fleshing out the conventional U.S. Catholic story-line by emphasizing the role prominent lay men and women played in the Catholic experience in these United States. Yet there seemed to […]
by Effie Caldarola In Flannery O’Connor’s novel, “Wise Blood,” the protagonist senses Jesus moving “from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure.” I fell in love with that phrase long ago and imagined Jesus, intriguing, mysterious and persistent, flitting in and out of our consciousness, but at the end […]
by Cindy Wooden Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation (See Page 11) on sharing the joy of the Gospel is a call to faith-filled optimism, recognizing challenges but knowing that God’s love and lordship will prevail, said Archbishop Rino Fisichella, introducing the text to the media. The archbishop, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, told […]
by John Garvey It was foggy this morning. I found it cozy. I always have. I love the fog. When I was a boy, we lived on a small lake in Pennsylvania. I liked to get up early to see the fog sitting on the bay. When the sun rose, it would roll out toward […]
by George Weigel There’s a lot for U.S. Catholics to be thankful for at Thanksgiving 2013: seminaries that have turned the corner from the doldrums of the immediate past and are now full, or getting close; a reform of the liturgical reform that is bringing a new sense of the sacred back to Catholic worship; […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk Guilt has gotten a lot of bad press recently. We live in an age where guilt is practically always something bad, something to get past with the help of a shrink. Particularly when discussing sex, people will declare that religion and morality do nothing more than make people feel guilty. Andrew […]
by George Weigel ON NOV. 22, 1963, the seventh grade at Baltimore’s Cathedral School was in gym class when we got word that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. A half-hour later, while we were climbing the stairs back to 7B’s classroom, Sister Dolorine’s voice came over the public address system. She announced that […]
by George Weigel THE REV. GEORGE William Rutler, S.T.D., a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a man of parts: graduate of Dartmouth, Oxford and Rome’s Angelicum (“the Dominican faculty that flunked Galileo,” he informs me); linguist, painter, violinist and boxer; and preacher extraordinaire. One of Catholicism’s most successful pastors, he has been […]
