America Magazine - America Connects

January 5 -12 - America's New Look

Yet There Is Movement

All of my priestly life I have reflected, taught, and written on the question: What kind of morality and moral theology are needed for the church? My view of the moral quest was always influenced by, and understood within, the larger framework of another fundamental question: What kind of church is needed in our present and future world? Inseparable from these two fundamental queries was a third question: What kind of minister is needed for our church and world?

Because I have been happily and wholeheartedly a priest for 56 years and because, for most of that time, I have taught priests and seminarians, I was morally driven to address the kind of priest Jesus might have e

The Birth of a Christmas Classic

Strange and roundabout are the ways of Fame! Betsy Ross, like thousands of other Colonial daughters, could ply a handy needle, but because she worked on a certain square of material she stitched her way into immortality. Newton saw an apple drop from a tree and gave his mind to unraveling the great Law of Gravitation that has made him famous. The political importance of Sir Walter Raleigh is known to historians, but it is the rain puddle, over which he flung his velvet cloak in a gesture of respect to the haughty Elizabeth, that brings him popular fame. So that celebrated poem, "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," the most thumb-marked linen book in the nursery, the "best seller"

The First Catholic School

The connection is very close. The manger at Bethlehem was a school; its first pupils were Joseph, and the shepherds, and Our Blessed Lady. And we must add the little serving maid of whom tradition speaks.

It is true that we do not know her name, and she wrote nothing of what she saw on that blessed night. But what would you? Perhaps she could not write. What architect designed the Parthenon? He did not write, either. (She may have been Veronica who with womanly pity gave Him a handkerchief as He went to Calvary; but I am sure she must have been with the "many women" who kept near Him, when Peter and the rest fled.)

I am sure, too, that all the children in the neigh

Painting the Word

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) —artist, poet, music and theater lover, and Russian Jew who became a citizen of France—lived for nearly a hundred years. During his lifetime he witnessed Russian pogroms, two world wars and the Holocaust. Chagall escaped personal injury, but endured the pain of exile. In his work one sees towns aflame, people slumped in grief, buildings falling and one crucifixion after another. Yet he retained a boundless energy and a childlike way of peopling a page. Like his contemporaries Matisse and Picasso, Chagall designed stage sets and costumes, stained glass, ceramics, tapestries and mosaics, and made engravings and lithographs. He illustrated books and paint