The Catholic Difference is a weekly column syndicated by the Archdiocese of Denver.
Ecumenism, Influence-envy, Etc.
Defending the indefensible is never pretty. Or so we’re reminded by recent attempts from the portside of the Catholic commentariat to defend the madcap analysis of America’s alleged “ecumenism of
Questions of Competence
It’s a safe bet that 99.95 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics have never heard of La Civiltà Cattolica (“Catholic Civilization”), a journal founded in 1850 by the Jesuits of Rome
Are Jihadis “Losers”?
When I first visited Israel in 1988, my friend Professor Menahem Milson, a distinguished Arabist at Hebrew University who was Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s military aide during Sadat’s historic visit
The Cooler Cold War
The claim that “the Cold War is over” and that the West needs a “new paradigm” for relations with Russia has become an antiphon in some conservative political circles—not least
Awkward? Or Wise?
Asked to name books that gave me the greatest intellectual jolt in recent decades, I’d quickly cite two. N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press) accepts every
Fifty Years of Friendship with Cardinal Pell
Msgr. Thomas A. Whelan, my pastor when I was growing up in Baltimore, was a striking character: Princeton friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald; former Wall Street broker; high-ranking Army chaplain
The Summer Reading List
I recently met the good people of St. Benedict Elementary School in South Natick, Massachusetts, which offers classical Catholic education to some very fortunate youngsters. The extensive summer reading lists
It’s Howdy Doody Time!
Three or four times each month, Father X (as I’ll call him here) celebrates the noontime daily Mass I regularly attend. I’m grateful for his homilies, which are almost always
Way Beyond the New Atheist Nonsense
Given the intellectual flimsiness of their work, it’s best to look for cultural causes to explain the popularity of the “New Atheists.” And surely one factor is the now-canonical notion
Thoughts on the Western Wall, Fifty Years Later
Photographs can capture exceptional moments in an iconic way, making the original experience “present” emotionally as well as pictorially. The photo of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo
Interreligious Dialogue with Edge and Purpose
The evening of September 12, 2006, was, in a word, memorable. My wife and I were having dinner in Cracow with two of John Paul II’s oldest friends when my
Catholic Lite and Europe’s Demographic Suicide
Ten years ago, after my meditation on Europe, The Cube and the Cathedral, had appeared in several languages, I was invited to speak to members of the European Parliament in
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