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A year ago, my subject would probably have struck some as counter-intuitive, implausible, even absurd: why would an octogenarian German theologian with little practical experience of political and economic life
The Enduring Importance of Centesimus Annus
Amidst the excitement of John Paul II’s beatification on May 1, the twentieth anniversary of the late pope’s most important social encyclical Centesimus Annus, got a bit lost. Blessed John
Maureen Dowd's Catholic Problem
Anti-Catholicism is arguably the oldest bias in the history of the American people. Or so Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.—who had no dog in the fight—once told the dean of U.S.
Reactionary Liberalism and Catholic Social Doctrine
The debate over Catholic social doctrine and U.S. social welfare policy took an unhelpful turn in May when a gaggle of academics fired a shot across the bow of House
Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture
The American narrative of the Catholic Church’s struggles with the clerical sexual abuse of the young has been dominated by several tropes firmly set in journalistic concrete: that this was
The Beatification of John Paul II
Rome — Two hours before the Mass of beatification for John Paul II began on May 1, I looked up from our NBC platform near the Castel Sant’Angelo and saw
A John Paul II Beatification Catechism
1. Has the beatification of John Paul II been a rush job, as some have charged? No one said that the beatification of Mother Teresa was rushed, despite the calumnies
Reforming Caritas International
ROME. Several weeks ago, the Vatican announced that it would not grant the necessary approval for Lesley-Anne Knight’s second, four-year term as secretary general of Caritas International, a global network
All War, All the Time
Martyrdom has been an integral part of Christian life since the Acts of the Apostles. Yet to many Christian minds, “martyrdom” is imaginatively confined to first-century Christianity — a matter
The Church and the Unions
Judging by the impassioned commentary from some Catholic quarters during recent confrontations between unionized public-sector workers and state governments, you’d think we were back in 1919, with the Church defending
Rome and Moscow
Russian Federation president Dmitri Medvedev’s recent visit to the Vatican, which included an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, is being trumpeted in some quarters as further evidence of a dramatic
The Chutzpa of the German Theologians
In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined chutzpa as “…Presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to” and then offered classic examples of
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