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

News
From AP, CNS, RNS, Staff and other sources
Cardinal, Not Pope, Will Preside at Beatification of Marianne CopeMother Marianne Cope of Molokai, Hawaii, will be beatified in mid-May, but Pope Benedict XVI will not celebrate the beatification Mass. For years, Vatican officials and theologians have been discussing the possibility of returning to
The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, which was held in 1884, focused on Catholic education in the United States (public domain image via Wikipedia).
FaithShort Take
Russell Shaw
A plenary council or regional synod may not have been good ideas anyway. But more and more, the attitude appears to be that the church’s business is the bishops’ business and no one else’s; openness and a desire to involve others in church affairs seem to have become passé. It is worth considering why.
Arts & CultureBooks
Thomas H. Stahel
The thesis of this book is that like Nazareth this town hidden in the Cajun country of south central Louisiana has been the home of holy people whom an oblivious world ought to know about And it rsquo s true Grand Coteau La makes Nazareth in Galilee look like the Great White Way Can anything
Kevin M. Cahill
Shortly after a Vatican and hospital medical team completed emergency abdominal surgery on Pope John Paul II following an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981, they asked six international specialists to come to Rome as consultants. Two of those invited were from the United States, Harvard’s
Letters

A Very Simple Message

Much of the world stood still recently, at least for a few moments, to observe the passing of Pope John Paul II. Television coverage of the crowds of pilgrims making their way to view the body one last time was extraordinary. In a world often deemed indifferent to religion, who would have guessed a humble Polish priest would become a pope the whole world would mourn (4/18)?

I am a Catholic by birth and an editor at a Catholic publishing house by profession. Even among those of us who might be called professional Catholics, there has been a sense of awe and wonderment at the life and accomplishments of John Paul II. In August 2002 I watched television coverage of a visibly ailing, 82-year-old pontiff saying Mass in a field outside Krakow. The crowd was immensean estimated three million people. Everywhere John Paul II went there were crowdsseven million in the Philippines. His general audiences in Rome were attended by 14 million people. It’s difficult to imagine a person living or dead who has seen or been seen by more people than John Paul II. Why?

I decided to search for an answer by immersing myself in John Paul’s writings. He is perhaps the papacy’s most prolific writerauthor of 14 encyclicals, 42 apostolic letters, 15 apostolic exhortations, 10 apostolic constitutions, hundreds of public addresses, numerous poems, five books and a number of playsall this in addition to being the most traveled and most influential pope of the modern age.

What really amazed me, though, was the fact that the magnitude of John Paul II’s accomplishmentsas world statesman, theologian, philosopher and church leaderhad perhaps obscured his greatest role: that of a humble pastor. He knew something about how men and women can find God. He understood how the power of God can be released in our lives. His supreme desire was that we come to embrace a faith that transforms the way we work, the way we relate to other people and the way we live in the world.

John Paul returned again and again to a few basic themes in all his writings and talks: faith, prayer, family, suffering, the church, Mary and, most passionately, ChristChrist as the answer to all life’s mysteries. He traveled the world bringing this very simple message.

Though the papacy of John Paul II has ended, his legacy lies tangibly before us in his writings. We can touch his books, hold his pages in our hands, take his words into our hearts. We should do this. He wanted us to. In so doing we may discover that the secret to John Paul II’s immense popularity was that he really believed in a faith that could change the world for the better. His words will bear eloquent witness to this hope for many years to come.

Joseph Durepos

Arts & CultureBooks
This volume presumes an older one of Selected Poems which was published by New Directions in 1959 and again in 1967 in an enlarged edition with an introduction by Mark Van Doren Van Doren had been Thomas Merton rsquo s university professor and mentor at Columbia It was he who put Merton rsquo s
Editorials
The Editors
The editors on Joseph Ratzinger's election as pope
John W. OMalley
From 2005, John W. O'Malley, S.J., on the resurgence in Jesuit scholarship
The Word
Dianne Bergant
So many stories in the Bible recount the wondrous working of God In some of them the events are reported in such unremarkable ways that one wonders whether or not anything exceptional really happened An example of this might be God rsquo s revelation to the prophet Elijah in ldquo a tiny whisper
Arts & CultureBooks
George Kilcourse
The Catholic fiction writer from Georgia Flannery O rsquo Connor 1925-64 once volunteered that it would be 50 years before readers understood her stories Half a century after the publication of her first novel Wise Blood 1952 and the inaugural collection of her short stories A Good Man Is
News
From AP, CNS, RNS, Staff and other sources
Neighbors Describe Pope as Humble Cat LoverSince the papal election on April 19, tidbits have begun trickling out from those who came to know Pope Benedict the man, as distinguished from the theologian. "I like him more than Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II]. Maybe that’s because I knew him,&qu
George M. Anderson
They came from all over, some 220 parents and children, and waited in line for up to three hours to enter the century-old red brick building in East Harlem. In this once Italian neighborhood, they were now mostly Hispanic immigrants from all over Central and Latin America and the Carribean. What the
Arts & CultureBooks
Peter Heinegg
India has turned into something like the center of the world Forever touted as the world rsquo s largest democracy it is now about to become the world rsquo s most populous country The achievements of its scientists artists and writers many of them migr s are astonishing The thoroughly mod
Poetry
Christine Higgins
In a dream Perpetua beheld a bronze ladder
FaithThe Word
Dianne Bergant
The time between the feast of the Ascension and that of Pentecost is a period of liminality an in-between time Jesus has left but the Spirit has not yet come God rsquo s promises have been fulfilled in Jesus but in our liturgical observance we await the coming of the Spirit We now live in the
Arts & CultureBooks
Robert F. Walch
Kishore Mahbubani rsquo s bittersweet assessment of the recent shortcomings of U S foreign policy will more than likely fall upon deaf ears The dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore Mahbubani explains how American leaders have alienated governments around the world a fact
Columns
Terry Golway
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
Theater
James T. Keane
The 1985 bestseller and nostalgic spoof Growing Up Catholic included a parody of The Baltimore Catechism and asked the following question: “Who’s really in hell?” The answer: “We cannot say for certainty that anyone is in hell, except for maybe Hitler and Judas.” Even t
Arts & CultureBooks
Robert A Orsi Harvard Divinity School rsquo s Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America takes a complex approach to his own religion and academic disciplines drawing from his Italian-American family history to illustrate how mid-20th-century Catholics in the United States re
Editorials
The Editors
A tug of war is taking placenot among children, though they may be grievously affected by this contest’s outcomebut between the federal government and the states. The struggle is over Medicaid, the entitlement program that guarantees health care for over 50 million low-income Americans. So far