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Editorials
The United Nations has reported that the number of chronically hungry people worldwide is increasing at the rate of five million annually. But even here in the United States, richest of all nations, hunger and food insecurity (limited access to nutritionally adequate foods) have been steadily rising
"In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin observed in 1789. On no day does this seem more true for most Americans than on April 15, the day they take part in the annual ritual of filing a tax return. Knowing that April is a time when taxes are much on the mi
Taxes and tax collectors have been around in one form or another for most of human history. Tax collectors appear in many of the Gospel stories, and the Evangelist Matthew was himself a tax man. Many American Catholics may not realize it, but their bishops are often tax collectors too, regularly lev
Arts & CultureBooks
The front cover of 'Living to Tell the Tale' shows the author as a wide-eyed child of 2, while the back cover shows the Nobel laureate as a distinguished gentleman of 75.
Editorials
Ninety years ago, a woman named Caroline Pratt started a school for a few children from Italian and Irish working-class families in the Greenwich Village section of Lower Manhattan. She took this step because she thought the neighborhood public schools were humdrum and ineffective. Her experiment wa
Feb. 27, 2004, was a bad day for the bishops of the United States. They received little credit from the media or victims’ groups for the study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the prevalence and incidence of sexual abuse of children by members of the Catholic clergy dur
For those who have been following the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church since the mid-1980’s, the reports by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People provided confirmation of hunches and the destruc
Letters
Resurrection Faith
Many thanks for the fine article by John W. O’Malley, S.J., on Anna Katherine Emmerich and the Mel Gibson film (3/15). His historical sketch of the Passion tradition prompts two thoughts regarding the relationship between that tradition and the post-Vatican lI emphasis on the Resurrection. That emphasis makes sense theologically, of course, but liturgically it has generated zingy church songs (I hesitate to call them hymns) in which we Catholics now celebrate ourselves as the finger-snapping people of God who, it seems, are so lucky to know that God loves us, thanks to our Resurrection faith. Fortunately, that is hard to do during Passion Week, one of the few times a Catholic is likely to hear a classic hymn in Latin. It also occurs to me that unlike Good Friday, or for that matter the Jewish Day of Atonement, Easter, which (as we might say) celebrates the fact that the last words of Jesus on the cross were not God’s last word, must compete with chocolate bunnies, egg-rolls, pagan sunrise services and other insipid rites of spring. Without the somberness of Passiontide, Easter these days would be unbearable, just as Good Friday without Easter would be meaningless.
Kenneth L. Woodward
Books
Tobias Wolff is best known as a memoirist both for This Boy rsquo s Life and In Pharaoh rsquo s Army as well as a fine short-story writer Old School his first novel though clearly labeled a novel takes the form of a first-person memoir about a schoolboy rsquo s encounters with books and their a
News
John Jay Report Undergoing RevisionsErrors in the report prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on sexual abuse by Catholic clergy leave unanswered one of the central questions the report was supposed to answer: How did church leaders respond to allegations of sexual abuse? The report
Faith
As predicted, the release on Feb. 27 of the report prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy created another sizable aftershock in the crisis that has shaken the Catholic Church.
The Word
The story of the woman taken in adultery raises several questions not the least of which is how does a person commit adultery alone The fact that only the woman was apprehended is an example of the gender bias of Jesus rsquo adversaries The compassion of Jesus toward this endangered woman is an
By now, even casual readers of newspapers and viewers of television know that in June 2002 the bishops of the United States, meeting in Dallas, Tex., set up a board of distinguished lay Catholic men and women to review the crisis created by the sexual abuse of minors by priests. On Feb. 27, 2004, th
Books
Although Gene Outka rsquo s The Ethics of Human Stem Cell Research first appeared in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal it serves as the centerpiece for the valuable collection God and the Embryo While size alone might indicate its strategic place it is at least two-thirds longer than the ot
Of Many Things
Sister Helen Prejean once again last fall spent several days with us at America House. She was in New York in November to consult with the actor-playwright Tim Robbins about the stage version of her book Dead Man Walking. She found time to stop by my office to speak about this latest reincarnation o
I admit with embarrassment that I found myself, on a recent evening of very low energy, staring at the concluding segment of a television show called “Extreme Makeover.” The three women featured—note that they were all women—had been shown earlier looking the way most of us l
Almost 37 years have passed since Pope Paul VI set in motion the restoration of the permanent diaconate with his apostolic letter of June 18, 1967, Sacram Diaconatus Ordinem. One year after the promulgation of that letter, the bishops of the United States began restoring the permanent diaconate in t
Books
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea is Thomas Cahill rsquo s fourth volume in the Hinges of History series which includes his How the Irish Saved Civilization The Gifts of the Jews and Desire of the Everlasting Hills In these books Cahill interprets the achievements of the ancient civilizations that are f
Faith in Focus
Some of the priests identified as abusers, staring out from the pages of the local newspapers, are not strangers to me. I was on the faculty of the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, N.Y., from 1965 through 1979. I taught Scripture all those years and was rector for the last six. I