Health Care reform which is as much about insurance reform as health care reform is facing the hard choice now specifically how to pay for it This is also where scare tactics from those with vested interests in the status quo begin to work like acid eating away at the moral imperative for refo

Several years ago a Jesuit in our community brought back from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a print of a painting by an artist of whom I had never heard James Ensor nbsp The painting was among his most famous works Christ s Entry into Brussels above nbsp It was unlike anything I had

Wednesday night I have to cram two thousand years of Church History into a two hour presentation for the RCIA group at my parish This requires doing enormous violence to the historical record leaving out important qualifications and focusing only on the main themes As a historian by training I

The Feast of St Ignatius of Loyola the founder of the Jesuits is coming up--on July 31 In preparation for that day what should or could you do Well St Ignatius would probably be happy if you went to Mass on that day spent an hour in prayer and did some good work for the poor But rather

nbsp nbsp nbsp My dad died on the Fourth of July Tired of his losing battle against congestive heart failure and kidney failure he had decided on July 2 to stop his thrice weekly dialysis treatments The hospice people came to the house and set him up with a hospital bed a sweet and caring nu

The letter to the Ephesians devotes much of its content to establishing the unity of both Jew and Greek in the body of Christ the dividing wall has been torn down between us familial identity we are all children of God adopted through Christ into this one family and the new heavenly citizensh

Race remains an issue that cuts through American culture and society like a scythe The arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr has captured the imagination of the country and it is not difficult to see why The story only works because Gates is black and the arresting officer was white

The water stoup at the entrance to my parish church has been removed Our priest will not give Communion on the tongue only in the hand And we no longer shake hands to give the peace but put our hands together bow slightly and make smiling Indian gestures to each other nbsp It is not trendy l

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is simply wrong when he states as he did the other day that decisions about whether or not to cover abortions with federally funded tax dollars should be left to medical experts in the field The issue here is not a medical issue but a political one Will

Only days after the the Episcopal Church TEC at Anaheim Calif defied the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference by agreeing to resume gay blessings and consecrations of actively gay bishops -- read MSW here -- comes news that 34 American bishops have defied the defiers The rebels

When The Da Vinci Code exploded onto the literary sic scene it created a secondary cottage industry Catholic and other Christian scholars who responded to it either in Parish halls or in short book-length refutations See a nice online refutation from my colleague David Landry I was a part of

A reflection for today s Feast of St Mary Magdalene for Living with Christ Thanks to The Da Vinci Code millions of readers and moviegoers suspect falsely that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus nbsp Thanks to a misguided sermon by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century many of Christians belie

It would be funny if it wasn rsquo t so sad While senators worry about how to pay for health care reform threatening the best chance at achieving universal coverage in decades forty of them nonetheless voted to keep the F-22 fighter plane in production yesterday Hats off and fiscal kudos to th

Rocco Buttiglione arguably Europe s leading Catholic politician has given a very interesting interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera saying he no longer believes abortion should be made illegal The former friend of Pope John Paul II and Communion and Liberation member remains passiona

Yesterday rsquo s Washington Post had a story about an Episcopalian church in Virginia that is trying to decide whether or not to stay in the Episcopal Church or to break off and join the more conservative Anglican Church in North America Already four dioceses have made the break and dozens of chu

One of the comments on my post about the Sotomayor hearings claims that Trent Lott was run into the ground for far less than Sotomayor s comment about wise Latinas and their judgment I recall when Senator Lott had to resign as Majority Leader because in his effort to sing the praises of his fello

In traveling around the United States fairly intensively for the past dozen years and participating in events for Catholic churches dioceses colleges or universities I have been surprised at and interested in the responses generated if I mention that I did think about being a priest or a religiou

The new Washington Post-ABCNews poll shows that President Obama rsquo s approval ratings are returning to the earth rsquo s atmosphere Put differently the honeymoon is almost over And because the recession Obama inherited is still not over even though the honeymoon is views on the President rsq

How do you receive the word of God when you do not read This is a strange question to ask in an age of unprecedented literacy at a time when access to data texts and knowledge is constant No longer need one rely on books taken from the library you can carry Kindle and have over a thousand book

Justice for All Kathleen McChesney focuses on the most important aspect of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in her article on its relevance: the protection of children (“Is the Charter Still Relevant?” 6/8). Another aspect, protection of an accused priest again