Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options

Faith
Kim Bobo
From the 1930’s through the 1950’s, Catholic parishes operated more than 100 labor schools in the basements of immigrant churches. Parishioners learned about their rights as workers, Catholic social teaching and how to organize unions. For many, being a good Catholic and a good labor lea
Leo J. O’Donovan, S.J.
No painting in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is more iconic than Paul Cézanne’s “Bather,” the pensive young man walking on water in a spare blue and beige landscape. For decades he greeted visitors in the first room of the earlier museum. He currently pres
News
From AP, CNS, RNS, Staff and other sources
Pope Benedict XVI Addresses Communion by Divorced and RemarriedDuring a meeting on July 25 with about 140 priests, religious and deacons from the Valle d’Aosta region of Italy, where he was vacationing, Pope Benedict XVI engaged in a wide-ranging discourse. Divorced and civilly remarried Catho
Donald J. Moore
Many times in recent months, friends have asked me, “Are you optimistic over the situation in the Holy Land?” In true Jesuit fashion, my response has been, “Yes and no.” Responding to “facts on the ground,” I find surges of optimism are followed by waves of pessim
Letters

Ignatian Perspective

The article A Veteran Remembers, by James R. Conroy, S.J., (8/1) offers an excellent perspective on the war in Iraq. By calling attention to the disproportionately large number of African-Americans and Hispanics who are serving and dying there, he asks us all to consider whether or not this really is our nation’s war. In addition, his reflections on his experience in Vietnam (first as a soldier and recently as a pilgrim) are the clearest examples I have seen of an Ignatian perspective on one’s own experience. If we are immersed in the work of living in the present, it will always be messy. I appreciate Father Conroy’s reminder of this.

Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.

FaithThe Word
Dianne Bergant
Today’s readings indicate that the religious leader is appointed by God and is accountable to God. They take their positions and responsibilities seriously, because the people of God deserve the best that they have to offer.
Arts & CultureBooks
Pam Kingsbury
Eudora Welty closed her best-selling autobiography One Writer rsquo s Beginnings with the words As you have seen I am a writer who came of a sheltered life A sheltered life can be a daring one as well For all serious daring comes from within Originally opposed to the idea of a biography towar
Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
In 2001, Col. Pat Lang, a Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, a leading Middle East intelligence analyst and now a well-known television commentator, called together a small group to develop a program for the Knights to support grass-roots peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians. Among the participa
John F. Kavanaugh
I received a thoughtful e-mail message recently from a late 1980’s graduate of a Jesuit university. He is strongly pro-life, armed with 27 hours of philosophy and theology requirements to boot, and is at loggerheads with some pro-choice friends who hold the position that there is a distinction
Film
C. T. Maier
To qualify as a Hollywood blockbuster, historical epics have to have several things: an anachronistically modern hero, a ruthless villain, a contrived love story, cataclysmic battle scenes and, of course, beheadings. But historical epics also have to have something else: a Big Idea, typically an idi
The Word
Dianne Bergant
Nobody wants to suffer Every living being cringes from pain It is almost as if we have within us a driving force to run away from it And then we come across readings like today rsquo s that admonish us ldquo to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice rdquo They seem to call us to act against
Arts & CultureBooks
Mark Mossa
One of the most enduring images I have of my visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City in 1999 is the proliferation of religious goods booths selling every conceivable souvenir or item of devotion which one must pass in order to reach the shrine itself I remember being troubled
Editorials
The Editors
In the final week of July 2005, a month darkened by terrorist violence in London, the Irish Republican Army officially declared an end to its armed campaign to eliminate British rule in Northern Ireland. The time had come, the I.R.A. statement said, to pursue a political and democratic path to a uni
James Ross
Being the only superpower means never having to say you’re sorry. In the year since the first photos of humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib prison were leaked, there has been a flurry of Pentagon studies, jump-started criminal investigations and disturbing new revelations in the media. Yet p
Culture
John Jay Hughes
In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV proposed terms of peace to the nations engaged in the First World War. Though so close in content and formulation to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 that Benedict’s most recent biographer, John F. Pollard, charges the Calvinist and notorio
Faith in Focus
James R. Conroy
Qui Nhon, in September of 1969, was a hot and dusty small Vietnamese city located on the blue-green waters of the South China Sea and rimmed by the coastal mountains of the Central Highlands. The older women wore the traditional ao dai that resembled shiny black pajamas. Their teeth were stained and
Arts & CultureBooks
Joan M. Nuth
Something happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne and the time of Tennyson and Browning wrote T S Eliot in his 1921 essay The Metaphysical Poets This something was the dissociation of sensibility from which we have never recovered He meant the separation of thought and fe
Letters

Culture of Absence

As one who has spent 10 years of his academic life in Germany, I simply could not relate to the essay by James Youniss, I Know It When I See It, (7/4). Such public policies as universal health care, efficient rail transportation, easy access to high culture, Saturday-Sunday closing laws and cradle-to-grave financial security may be compatible with Christian social teaching, but to suggest that they are inspired or motivated today by distinctive Christian commitments ignores public opinion polls and other empirical evidence of contemporary Germany’s loss of faith. Germans today would insist that these and related social programs are rooted in secular values associated with their country’s social democratic tradition.

Christian influences, particularly Catholic natural law teaching, were strongly represented in postwar West Germany, but with increasing secularization these influences have virtually disappeared from the nation’s public life. Two examples may suffice. German constitutional law, like the nation’s intellectual culture, has grown increasingly positivistic over the years. The same is true of German politics. The Christian Democratic Union (C.D.U.), founded explicitly on Christian principles in 1946, has lost its raison d’etre, while its main competitor, the Social Democratic Party (S.P.D.), is well known for its history of militant secularism.

During the Weimar Republic and in the early years of the Federal Republic, a vibrant Catholic intellectual tradition, centered on the church’s social teaching, flourished in Germany, but no equivalent of this exists today. Christian scholarship in the social sciences is notable for its relative absence. Religious studies, mainly the products of theological faculties, have little resonance in the larger society. Yet literary attacks on Christian belief and piety, such as The Da Vinci Code, seem never to leave the best-seller lists. Secularthat is, non-Christianvalues seem clearly regnant in Germany, the predominance of which has been extended and deepened by the nation’s reunification.

Pope Benedict XVI, a native of Germany, has often agonized over his country’s loss of faith. In book-length interviews with Peter SeewaldSalt of the Earth (1997) and God and the World (2002)the then-Cardinal Ratzinger repeatedly spoke of Germany’s increasingly de-Chistianized society and a public culture characterized by the absence of transcendence. In one of these interviews he observed with regret that only eight percent of the people in Magdeburg [an East German city] are Christians, and that was probably a generous estimate because, as sociological studies have disclosed, even the memory of Christ has almost totally disappeared among East Germans, particularly the young. Finally, and interestingly, Ratzinger makes no mention in these interviews of the connection between Christianity and the comforts, satisfactions or rewards of living in present-day Germany.

Donald P. Kommers

The Word
Dianne Bergant
Today we celebrate the feast of the Assumption of Mary as we proclaim that she was taken body and soul into heaven Unlike the Ascension of Jesus there are no biblical traditions associated with this teaching of the church The earliest references to Mary rsquo s assumption appear as early as the
Editorials
The Editors
A handful of the provisions of the USA Patriot Act are set to expireor sunset on Dec. 31, and Congress is therefore considering which of them to re-authorize. President Bush wants the entire act to be made permanent, contending that it has made the United States safer in the wake of the terrorist at