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My Alien Roommate
Kristeen A. Bruun
I needed a roommate to share the rent. He needed a place to live. We were introduced, shook hands, and a few days later Roberto moved all of his worldly possessions (carried in a battered sports bag, a backpack and a clothes basket) into my second bedroom, along with a commitment to refrain from smo
Arts & CultureBooks
Their Distinctive Presence
Allan Figueroa Deck
American Catholics have persisted in viewing both U S secular and church history as primarily a movement of Northern European people and institutions westward across the barren plains But the deeper truth that inexorably is catching up with us is that it is also increasingly the history of movem
Current Comment
Current Comment
The Editors
Sentencing SaddamWhen a court in Baghdad found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging, President George W. Bush hailed the verdict as a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law and a vindication
Columns
Vacancy: Apply Within
Margaret Silf
I still remember the day, back in 1953, when Mt. Everest was conquered. At the time there was great rejoicing, as Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tensing set the first human footsteps upon the virgin snows of the mountain’s peak. It was many years later that I heard the story of how differently the t
Faith in Focus
Its the End of the World (And I Feel Fine)
Jim McDermott
The apocalyptic literature of the Bible, which includes most notably Daniel and the Book of Revelation, exists in the popular consciousness as a sort of hitchhiker’s guide to the end times, chock-full of predictions of the historical events that will lead to the end of human history. Given the
Arts & CultureBooks
A Moral Enterprise
Myles N. Sheehan
I plan to make this book required reading for my first-year students at Loyola University Chicago rsquo s Stritch School of Medicine I also would highly recommend it to anyone facing serious illness And frankly that rsquo s all of us It is a marvelous book that will change those who read it and
Arts & CultureBooks
Military Monolith
Gene Roman
In October 1967 hundreds of thousands of college students and ordinary citizens gathered in Washington D C to express their outrage about the Vietnam War The pranksters of that time including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin told the newsmen covering the march that they also hoped to levitate the
Current Comment
Current Comment
The Editors
A Guest Comes, Christ ComesStealing a truck to go on a drunken bender in town is not a common occurrence in the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine community in Abiquiu, N.M. Yet the after-hours misdemeanor was perpetrated not by one of the monks, but by a twentysomething participant in
Columns
Cloning for Missouri
John F. Kavanaugh
The elections of 2006 were largely seen as a referendum on the policies of President George Bush, especially the military adventurism and looming failure in Iraq. Having learned from the defeat at the polls, the president accepted the resignation of his secretary of defense the following day. Perhap
Jolted by Affluence
Thomas G. Casey
The location for this year’s Ryder Cup epitomized the triumph of profit in Ireland. The organizers opted for the K Club, a mediocre golf course in comparison with such world-class links as Ballybunion, Lahinch, Portmarnock and half a dozen others. Certainly the infrastructure of the K Club is
Arts & CultureBooks
A Good Re-read
Ed Block
In an age habituated to sensationalism and big effects an austere and nuanced novel like Isobel English rsquo s Every Eyelike the work of her French predecessor Gustave Flaubertmay not appeal to everyone Even Madame Bovary has the soap opera appeal of adultery a theme by the way it shares with
Editorials
The People's Business
The Editors
The most obvious lesson of the 2006 elections, in which the Democratic Party became the majority party in both houses of Congress, is that the election was a referendum on the leadership of President George W. Bush. The president was quick to accept the verdict of the voters, announcing the followin
Friends of Mar Musa
John C. Haughey
Part of this story is about a man, Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian Jesuit in his early 50’s who felt called to work with Muslims while he was still in his early 20’s. The other part is about a place, Mar Musa, a centuries-old monastery in the Syrian desert that had been abandoned for
Faith in Focus
From Past to Future
Kathleen Hughes
The season of Advent has a timeless liturgical spirituality of longing, redemption and grace and an interesting, somewhat convoluted history. The several strands of its development illustrate the way in which the whole liturgical year has evolved over many centuries in relationship to cosmic time, t
FaithThe Word
Patience as Waiting and Hoping
Daniel J. Harrington
Advent is a time of waiting and hoping, of renewing our trust in God’s merciful love and care and of reflecting on the several comings of Christ in our lives.
Of Many Things
Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
Sometimes unexpected goodness just blows life open. It happened to me last year about six weeks after I was felled by a bad back. After I had declined an invitation from old friends for dinner because I couldn’t manage public transportation, they e-mailed back: “Come. We’ll send a
Arts & CultureBooks
As He Alone 'Sees' It
Robert F. Walch
Jason Robertsa contributor to The Village Voice among other publicationsbecame curious about a certain Englishman named James Holman after reading a brief chapter on him in a book about eccentric travelers Trying to learn more about the 19th-century blind man and his extensive travels Roberts was
News
Signs of the Times
From AP, CNS, RNS, Staff and other sources
U.S. Bishops Hold Fall General Meeting in BaltimoreAs the U.S. bishops were finishing their second day of business at their Nov. 13-16 fall general meeting in Baltimore, they allocated $335,000 for the next phases of a national study on the causes and context of sexual abuse of minors by members of
Admiring the Amish
Stephen J. Morgan
It was a crime against innocents - horrific and inexplicable - the kind that attracts worldwide attention and an outpouring of sympathy. Yet the shooting of 10 Amish girls in their one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pa., last October was particularly unfathomable because of who the Amish are
Letters
Letters
Our readers

To Be Heard

Have we, and the media in general, completely forgotten that one of the last great peace efforts by the dying Pope John Paul II was to send Cardinal Pio Laghi, the former Vatican ambassador to Washington (Signs of the Times, 11/6), to try to talk President Bush and his advisers out of their ill-advised rush to war? I am sure that today, in his deep heart’s core, our president really wishes he had heeded the pope’s voice.

Cardinal Laghi tried in vain to point out to him the difficulty of the language, the serious conflicts among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and that while America’s formidable war machine would make quick work of Hussein’s inferior defenses, unmanageable human problems would certainly follow.

I have come from Rome not only to hear you, Mr. President, but also to be heard, Laghi complained at one point in their conversation. I had the impression that they had already made their decision, Laghi said in a remarkable speech in Camaldoli (Arezzo, Italy) on Oct. 4, 2003.

President Bush had been offered the best intelligence available on Iraq. The bishops in Iraq are in touch with the apostolic nuncio in Baghdad, and he with the Vatican. They speak the people’s language and have their hand on the pulse of the nation. Their knowledge of Iraq was more reliable than that of our highly paid intelligence agencies who cost us billions but whose information has been repeatedly proven embarrassingly wrong and misleading.

It was President Reagan in 1984 who urged the Senate to confirm William A. Wilson, his personal envoy to the pope, as the first U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. His reason was his oft-repeated conviction that the Vatican is the world’s greatest listening post.

I spoke at length with Cardinal Laghi last September in Rome. He recalled his sense of failure when President Bush tried to end their meeting on a positive note: at least they held common positions on the defense of human life and opposition to human cloning. The cardinal replied that those issues were not the purpose of his mission to Washington.

Larry N. Lorenzoni, S.D.B.