Last week President Obama declared ldquo I think same-sex couples should be able to get married rdquo His public support for gay marriage followed Joe Biden rsquo s remarks a few days prior in which the Catholic vice-president said that he had a change of heart over the years and felt compelle

Cambridge MA It is no easy thing to change the Church In part this is because we who are the Church do not change easily and in part because the institution as institution thrives on settled ideas and fixed ways of acting is loathe to change in new circumstances and fights off possibilities of

There is a certain image of a religious sister that is predominant in American culture Catholic and not one that has been reinforced by half a century of movies and literature but also buttressed by stereotypes both positive and negative that have developed over the years about the hundreds of th

Twenty-eight years of preaching Mother rsquo s Day sermons will seriously deplete one rsquo s supply of stories This year not having recently read anything useful that featured a mother I did what I always do when desperate nbsp I called home nbsp nbsp nbsp ldquo Hello rdquo my mom said

Thomas J Reese S J senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center in Georgetown and former editor in chief of America has sent us his keynote address to the Clergy Abuse Conference in Santa Clara University today I am not an expert on the crisis but rather a journalist commentator and

nbsp VATICAN CITY Catholic News Service -- Although she was never canonized St Hildegard of Bingen is to be added to the Catholic Church s formal list of saints and Catholics worldwide may celebrate her feast day with a Mass and special readings by order of Pope Benedict XVI nbsp The Vatica

A good friend sent me a link to this video mdash he included no descriptive comments that could have biased my opinion nbsp In fact I had no idea what it was about prior to viewing nbsp As it began I immediately thought this was either a trailer for the next mediocre Marvel Comics film

Thomas J Reese SJ senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center in Georgetown and former editor in chief of America has sent us his keynote address to the Clergy Abuse Conference in Santa Clara University today I am not an expert on the crisis but rather a journalist commentator and pries

nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp It was my honor to interview Sister Helen Prejean during her recent visit to Bakersfield for two talks that took place May 4-5 Sister Helen is well known as the ldquo Dead Man Walking rdquo nun the face of the global movement to

A couple months ago I wrote about immigration and the presidential contest at the website BustedHalo com where I touched on the DREAM Act The US Conference of Catholic Bishops went on record in favor of the DREAM Act with Los Angeles rsquo s Archbishop Jose Gomez writing The United States is a g

Links fixed nbsp Here are two profiles both sympathetic of two nbsp church leaders nbsp whose approach to dialogue and authority will be key factors in the ongoing Vatican review of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious nbsp The first is a short piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

nbsp I recently saw the excellent documentary film Bully which I found both quite absorbing and equally disturbing It documents several victims of bullying in mostly rural school settings I agreed with several of the leading film critics I checked out on the web site Rotten Tomatoes that the

I live in what is one of the more wealthy neighborhoods in the world By wealth I don rsquo t necessarily mean the income of the rich persons who live in the all the local apartment houses which block out our sky but the New York institutions clustered here that pull together a steady traffic of th

nbsp Catholics today are confronting horrible revelations of clerical abuse Will this ongoing scandal change our church Yes undoubedly this encounter with dreadful home truths is already changing us The sickening revulsion we have felt toward accounts of distant concentration camps torture ch

No artist wielded greater clout in his time than Bernini.

Googling a Masterpiece; Stolen Childhoods; Requiem for the 8-Hour Day?

A Christian response to our throwaway society