Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
St. John Chrysostom once warned: Whoever is not angry when there is cause for anger sins. The 25 Catholics who gathered in the basement of St. John the Evangelist Church in Wellesley, Mass., on a Monday night in January 2002 were angry indeedangry and embarrassed because of the sexual abuse of so ma
Books
Randy Newman has a tune called God rsquo s Song That rsquo s Why I Love Mankind that can send a shiver down the spine of all believers even those who believe we would be better off without belief In it a malicious God sits in his heaven world-weary and sarcastic Man means less to me he says
Editorials
In the contest for the dullest book published by the federal government, the annual budget would appear in almost everyone’s top 10 list. Most Americans are numerically challenged, except when it comes to sports statistics. If presidential candidates devoted an evening to debating the federal
The United States today is indisputably the most powerful nation in the world militarily, economically and culturally. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that fact has been elevated to the level of a doctrine: the United States must exercise its “preponderance,” its superior
When Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” is released on Ash Wednesday, it will bring the 106-year tradition of the Jesus-film full circle. The very first films about Jesus, silent films lasting only a few minutes, were Passion plays. Since then, the genre has ranged widel
Letters
Long Trail
Your editorial in the Jan. 19 issue, like your other editorials, is biased and not balanced. The Kyoto Protocols did not require multinational controls on pollution. Only the United States was required to submit to tighter environmental guidelines. China, one of the worst environmental offenders, was let off the hook.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty was not signed by China, North Korea or Pakistan. Would you have those countries in control of nuclear weapons while the United States, France and England are forced to relinquish theirs?
I always heard that journalism should be fair and balanced. Obviously you never went to journalism school. If I practiced medicine the way you practice journalism, I’d have a trail of dead bodies a mile long.
William J. Somers. M.D.
The Word
Strange as it may seem it is very difficult for many of us to accept gifts When we do receive them we feel compelled to reciprocate in kind We often believe that we must earn what we get Perhaps we do not want to be beholden to others or we are convinced that we do not deserve any such gift O
Books
If war is hell a literary corollary might be that every society touched by warfare needs its own version of Virgil or Dante to journey to that hell and return to tell the tale In her collection of short stories Anthonia Kalu plays such a role with respect to the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-70 Thi
News
Boston’s Archbishop Troubled by Ruling on Gay Marriage Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley of Boston said the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s expanded ruling on gay marriage is more troubling than its initial decision. The court’s decision on Nov. 18 struck down the state&rsqu
Faith
It always disappoints me a bit when the celebrant at Mass chooses Eucharistic Prayer 1 (the Roman Canon) and skips the invocation of the saints, that resonant list of early martyrs recited before and after the institution narrative. The omission is all the more disappointing since one of those lists
Faith in Focus
Several years ago my husband, Jim, and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary in San Francisco. It was a vacation to remember, but not because of the sights. I went home with much more than I came with. It began one morning after leaving a bookstore in Union Square. We saw a bearded old man sitt
The 10th anniversary of the signing of the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel occurred on Dec. 30, 2003. David-Maria A. Jaeger, O.F.M., has served on the Holy See’s delegation to the negotiations with Israel since 1992 and is widely credited as the principal dra
Books
For Eugene Kennedy Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago 1928-96 is an exemplar of the paschal mystery ldquo Joseph Bernardin rsquo s life tells us what happens when a man accepts the destiny that is given to few on behalf of us who are the many to recreate the central motif of Christian spirit
Television
Sarah Jessica Parker has spent a lot of time at America House. Well, not really. But over the past several years, the cast and crew of the popular, and soon to be departed, HBO series Sex and the City (Sundays, 9 p.m. ET) have frequently been spotted filming on our block in midtown Manhattan, have d
The Word
quot Return to me with all your heart rdquo This is the cry of a lover who has been separated from the loved one either by distance or time or perhaps by betrayal It is a heart-to-heart cry In the writings of Joel it is God begging Israel to return to God rsquo s gracious and merciful love W
Of Many Things
A Pentecost wind—that’s what it felt like the afternoon I took a subway uptown to visit the Mother Cabrini shrine. It was her feast day, Nov. 13, and never having been there, it therefore seemed the right moment to do something I had thought about since my days as a seminarian. Back then
On a January Monday, after busloads of pilgrims returned from this year’s March for Life in Washington, D.C., Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Louis witnessed the installation of Archbishop Raymond Burke. It was an appropriate juxtaposition of events: local news coverage prior to the instal
We can be forgiven if we think the spirituality of aging applies only to the septuagenarians among us, but aging is a tricky term, for we are aging from the instant of our conception, and then there is the matter of perception. Victor Hugo noted that Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth
Books
Ernest Hemingway rsquo s famous comment about taking up a collection and sending John O rsquo Hara off to Yale once for all may have been a cheap shot but it was one O rsquo Hara rsquo s boorish streak nearly begged for In his unorthodox yet enlightening new biography Geoffrey Wolff makes the case