Record Abuse Settlement Reached in CaliforniaThe Diocese of Orange, Calif., reached a reportedly record-breaking financial settlement with 87 alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse on Dec. 2. Judge Owen Lee Kwong, who oversaw the settlement, ordered participants on both sides not to discuss details,

The image of the Christ Child wrapped in swaddling clothes in the straw-filled manger surrounded by nodding donkeys and loving, weary parents is so familiar to us, it is as though we were eyewitnesses of the birth. We have read and heard the story again and again as part of our core faith tradition

A pioneering 20th-century stage and opera director Margaret Webster challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women A creative force in the United States and Great Britain Webster is credited with bringing Shakespeare to Broadway Her bold casting of Pau

Ukrainian Catholic Leaders Back Opposition, Speak of Electoral FraudUkrainian Catholic leaders backed opposition protests and said the presidential elections on Nov. 21 were marked by fraud. They also urged the government to avoid violence as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets o

I sit at lessons and carols for the second time, listening to St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation while a baby kicks and swims inside me. The church is candlelit and hushed, fragrant with pine boughs, nothing like the small, hot room where a Middle Eastern Jewish teenager learned from an an

Delivering a hot meal to an elderly woman in a public housing project is how my Saturday afternoons begin. Her meal and hundreds of others are prepared in the basement of a Manhattan church. Most are eaten right there, but enough are set aside to accommodate shut-ins as part of a program informally

A man stands in a cave Before him glitters an array of beautiful objects some dishes or platters but mostly cups All are enticing but only one is the object he seeks He reaches out and grasps the plainest of all That rsquo s the cup of a carpenter he avers Has he chosen correctly For reade

In the aftermath of John Kerry’s electoral defeat, Democrats have begun a conversation among themselves about the importance of being able to speak to, for lack of a better term, voters of faith. The Democrats, everybody seems to agree, just cannot manage to connect with Americans, particularl

I prayed over a dead man today. His name was Jocelyn, and he had only one leg. His other leg had been amputated “not too long ago due to complications from sugar,” said the man in the adjacent bed. That man’s legs had both been amputated at the knees. I guessed Jocelyn had been in

Robert Krieg professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame is the author of several studies of 20th-century German Catholic theologians In the work under review he examines the widely varying stances taken toward Nazism by selected Catholic theologians in Hitler rsquo s Germany His seco

Out today, back behind bars tomorrow: high rates of recidivism remain one of the most troubling aspects of our criminal justice system. Referring to released prisoners, President George W. Bush noted in his State of the Union speech in 2004 that we know from long experience that if they can’t

Four years ago, after the newly elected President George W. Bush’s inaugural address, 40 million people were without health care coverage in our nation. At that time, the Catholic Health Association of the United States called for a series of reforms and a sharing of responsibility for health

In 1997 literary luminaries like Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant hailed a collection of stories written by an Irish writer named Maeve Brennan Entitled The Springs of Affection Stories of Dublin Houghton Mifflin these stories were set in Ireland and often revolved around young girls or women Th

The debate over legalizing same-sex marriage has become a worldwide issue. On Sept. 4 Pope John Paul II denounced the notion to the new Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, Donald Smith. The issue also has been the subject of court decisions and legislative actions throughout the United States and w

There is a chip in the paint on my bunk bed where Keith hanged himself. Like everything else in prison, penitentiary paint is cheap. Even a suicide’s shoestring rope is enough to nick it. That scratch is all that is left of Keith now. In the year or so that we shared a cell, Keith and I never

In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, a combination of media experts and religious leaders have argued that “religion” and “moral values” have taken on a new importance in American political life. The evangelicals are claiming control of the Republican Party bec