The Church and the “New Normal”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision, these sober thoughts occur: (1) The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] has rendered a decision that puts the Court
The Pope’s Encyclical, at Heart, Is About Us, Not Trees and Snail Darters
The “dialogue with all people” and the “forthright and honest debate” for which Pope Francis calls in his new encyclical on “our common home” will certainly include — and, by
The Catholic Church’s German Problem
The 21st-century Church owes a lot to 20th-century German Catholicism: for its generosity to Catholics in the Third World; for the witness of martyrs like Alfred Delp, Bernhard Lichtenberg, and
What Catholics Forget About World Affairs
For quite some time now, commentary on world politics by leading Catholic officials, here and at the Vatican, has been marked by a certain softness, occasionally bordering on the surreal,
The Difference Cardinal George Made
On September 2, 1939, the House of Commons debated the British government’s response to the German invasion of Poland the previous day. The ruling Conservative Party was badly divided between
The Pontifical Spin Cycle
Imagine for a moment that the evangelist Luke lived today, in our world of 24/7 news cycles, ideological combat conducted in cyberspace, sound-bite “analysis,” and controversies manufactured by bloggers who
2015 Simon Lecture: Lessons in Statecraft
This article is adapted from the fourteenth annual William E. Simon Lecture, delivered on February 4, 2015. When the Catholic Church celebrated the canonizations of John Paul II and Pope John
St. John Paul II and the “Tyranny of the Possible”
The reputations of the great often diminish over time. Ten years after his holy death on April 2, 2005, Karol Wojtyla, Pope St. John Paul II, looms even larger than
The Indomitable and Effective Cardinal Pell
Shortly after George Pell was named Archbishop of Melbourne, he instituted several reforms at the archdiocesan seminary, including daily Mass and the daily celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours,
Keeping Catholic Schools Catholic
There seems to be some dispute as to whether the original Trotskyite—that would be, um, Leon Trotsky—ever said, “You may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is
On a Mission to the World
Pope Francis does not seem to be an instinctively retrospective man; his passion for seeking out the lost sheep along the highways and byways of the early twenty-first century, and
Evangelical Challenges for Vatican Diplomacy
The bilateral diplomacy of the Holy See is unique in world affairs, in that it has little or nothing to do with the things with which diplomats typically occupy their
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