The John Paul II Difference in 1989
Twenty-five years ago, on Jan. 27, 1989, a joint statement from the communist government of Poland, the Solidarity trade union, and the Catholic Church announced a national “Roundtable” to discuss
Cardinal George: An Anniversary Appreciation
When Francis Eugene George first sought admission to the Chicago seminary in the 1950s, Chicago Catholicism imagined itself the future of the Catholic Church in the western world—and not without
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
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
Pope Francis the Revolutionary
The first nine months of the pontificate of Pope Francis have often resembled a gigantic Rorschach test in which various commentators inside and outside the Catholic Church have “seen” their
JFK after Fifty Years
On November 22, 1963, the seventh grade at Baltimore’s Cathedral School was in gym class when we got word that President Kennedy had been shot. A half-hour later, while we
Georgian Delights
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
Middle East Reality Check
The humanitarian and strategic disaster of Syria should focus Catholic minds on the hard fact that there is no easy or quick path to peace in the Middle East, a
John Paul II’s Canonization Wasn’t Too Fast
In April 8, 2005, something happened in Rome that hadn’t happened for over 1,400 years: the congregation at a papal funeral Mass spontaneously proclaimed the deceased Pontiff a saint. The
The Christ-Centered Pope
Perhaps the most revealing detail in Pope Francis’s lengthy interview, conducted by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro and published yesterday in English translation in the Jesuit journal America, is the pontiff’s
G.K. Chesterton, Genius
In a review quoted on the back cover of Ian Ker’s G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford), Susan Elkin suggests that Fr. Ker’s book “has the potential to establish Chesterton in what Ker
Remembering Andrew Greeley
Let me begin by paying Father Andrew Greeley, who died this past May 29, a compliment he’d never have paid me, or indeed anyone of my “location” in the Church:
The Last Counter-Reformation Pope
When he was elected as Paul VI just 50 years ago, Giovanni Battista Montini seemed the perfectly prepared pope. He was the son of a middle-class family of Italian professionals
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Cardinal Lustiger, R.I.P.
Remembering John Paul the Great
