When he looks back on the years when he was a young parish priest in suburban New Jersey and then in wounded, smoldering Newark, Msgr. Thomas A. Kleissler remembers the lessons he learned in the living rooms and kitchens of his parishioners. It was, he said, the richest experience of my life as a pr

It is safe to assume that within the communion of saints, envy doesn’t have a chance. It’s a good thing, too. After all, if saints weren’t so, well, saintly, imagine the plight of a noble Briton named Patrick. He’d surely be the subject of all kinds of begrudgery. Why? Most s

It was the final day of Catholic Schools Week, a dreary and wet winter’s day in the Vailsburg section of Newark, N.J. Stepping gingerly on the marble floor of Sacred Heart Church were 500 children from the parish school, who had come to hear the word of God at a special liturgy to mark the wee

At midday on Christmas Eve, I found myself under a large white tent adjacent to St. John’s Church in downtown Newark, where I was mingling with hundreds of poor and homeless people from that impoverished and battered city. I wish I could tell you I was there out of the goodness of my heart, gi

In the aftermath of John Kerry’s electoral defeat, Democrats have begun a conversation among themselves about the importance of being able to speak to, for lack of a better term, voters of faith. The Democrats, everybody seems to agree, just cannot manage to connect with Americans, particularl

Campaign 2004 is in its final frantic hours as these words are being written, but deadlines being what they arethe bane of the bellowing pontificatoryou’ll be reading this after the results are known. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you’re as clueless as I am as I write, although that would

What do you call a politician who supports incentives to buy and drive fuel-efficient vehicles, even if they happen to be made in Japan? One can easily imagine Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California curling his lips and referring to such a goody-goody colleague as, well, a girlie man. Schwarze

As the Roman world began to disintegrate and the emperor was far from home fighting wars on the Rhine, a group known as the Alemanni advanced from Germany to the very outskirts of the great global city. In this emergency, wrote Edward Gibbon in his masterful tale of Rome’s decline and fall, th

While the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore hardly speaks for most of those who believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, his efforts to portray Iraqi insurgents as heroic freedom-fighters heralds an intellectual crisis on the left. Do opponents of the war in Iraq also believe that the United St

Not long ago an English critic and essayist Geoffrey Wheatcroft cast a cold eye on the rash of memoirs written by Irish Catholics from both sides of the Atlantic Would there ever come a day Wheatcroft wondered when an Irish-Catholic memoirist would have something good to say about his or her f