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Editorials
“Sneering and snobbery,” the philosopher Mary Midgeley has written, won dominance for linguistic analysis and existentialism in 20th-century philosophy. Although an overstatement, her comment hits the mark about philosophical fashions. It points to a desperate ploy in the war of ideas. W
Culture
The clergy sexual abuse scandal has left us stunned and confused. But crisis in the church is not a new phenomenon. One of the most important spiritual resources in times of crisis in the church has been Scripture. Two items in this year’s roundup of books on the Bible deal explicitly with Cat
Columns
Of the many epithets flung at the French in recent weeks, one particularly colorful phrase found its way into the vernacular: “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” This delightful slander first appeared in an episode of “The Simpsons,” where it was meant as a joke, and then was
Of Many Things
A mansion of 87 rooms, built on Long Island in the 1920’s, surrounded by spacious grounds—hardly the kind of setting in which you might expect to find a gathering of mostly middle-aged Hispanic men and women spending a weekend in prayerful silence. And yet there we were, a group of 14 ma
A few years ago the late Lou Bannan, S.J. was presiding at the noontime Mass on a first Friday of the month at Santa Clara University. In his homily he told us about ferrying a group of older retreatants to the San Jose airport and hearing them rave about a fellow Jesuit who’d wowed them with
Books
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the end of the policy of containment that had guided American foreign policy during the cold war Some commentators declared the Soviet demise to be the end of history and faulted presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton as bunglers They missed an e
News
Pope Says No to War; Church Opposition to Iraq Attack MountsIn a private audience with one of the staunchest supporters of possible military action against Iraq, Pope John Paul II urged British Prime Minister Tony Blair to make every effort to avoid war and spare the world new divisions. The encount
We who live today in a notably hierarchical church do not always find it easy to appreciate the important role of lay people in the early church, especially of women, even though we have heard about it repeatedly in the readings at Mass on Sundays. How often do we recall Tabitha, whose life “w
Letters
Credit Where Due
The prodigious Father Andrew M. Greeley, who observed his 75th birthday this month, used to direct his ire at incompetent bishops, faulty practitioners of sociology and resigned priests who wrote about the psychosexual problems of the clergy. In The Times and Sexual Abuse by Priests (2/10), he finds The New York Times guilty of atavistic no-popery.
Thereby he resembles, perhaps more than he would like, the 76-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the diviner of one’s innermost thoughts, who recently apodictically attributed the media’s coverage of clergy abuse to an intentional desire to discredit the church.
E. Leo McMannus
Editorials
From being a country that once welcomed immigrants, the United States has become a nation that has raised higher and higher barriers against them. These higher walls of exclusion are having a destructive effect on would-be immigrants from around the world, but especially on the people of one of our
Jan. 12, 1995 is etched permanently in my memory. My father, suffering a fatal bout of bronchial pneumonia, died peacefully at approximately 8 o’clock in the evening, in the intensive-care unit of Kettering Memorial Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. I will forever remember the details leading up to an
Books
If history is bunk any history of the Oscars is full of it We all know designation as Best Picture hardly means a film was the best movie of the year As Emanuel Levy readily concedes in All About Oscar Hollywood rsquo s decision making has always been flawed and as he details in some excellent
The Word
Last Sunday we reflected on our covenant relationship with the created world Today we consider the covenant promises made to Abraham Though often referred to as ldquo The Sacrifice of Isaac rdquo the story might be better named ldquo The Testing of Abraham rdquo The first line of the first r
Since the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has issued an unending stream of statements informing us that these barbarous crimes were committed by people who embrace a “perverted version of Islam” or by those
A surprising number of studies suggest that the appeal of traditional devotions among younger Catholics is on the rise. Some posit that the phenomenon reflects a growing conservatism among Catholics under 40. Others wonder if younger Catholics, who may not have been forced to participate in devotion
My first memory of hearing the Angelus prayed was on a hillside in Mexico. We were in a country place not far from Puebla. American college students were wandering around to get a sense of the culture and to see the sights. I was not a Catholic then, and was only gradually learning how religion had
Books
In Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse 1855 Matthew Arnold famously agonized over being caught between two conflicting worlds a beloved but dead faith and whatever unknown but no doubt chilling forces that would replace it Compared with the complex predicaments facing Yezad Chenoy and other ch
The Catholic Medical Association has urged U.S. bishops to screen out undesirable candidates for the priesthood, among whom they include homosexuals. According to the C.M.A., if a boy could not play sports because he was overweight or lacked hand-eye coordination, he may be in trouble. The letter su
Editorials
The welcome surprise in President Bush’s State of the Union address was his proposal for an Emergency Plan for Aids Relief. The president described the initiative as “a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” He asked the Congress to co