Archbishop Weakland Says He’s Not Disobeying PopeArchbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee declared, in a message read in all parishes on July 15, that he is not disobeying the pope by going ahead with the renovation of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The archbishop expanded on tha

When I began to think about psychiatry as a medical specialty in 1963, I was vaguely aware of a tension between the church and psychiatry. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen suggested on his weekly television show that Catholics would not need a psychiatrist if they made a good confession. G. K. Chesterton had

The issues confronting the church in our time are many. I have chosen three of them, well aware that this choice is doubtless both biased and incomplete. And I am also certainly under the influence of the situation in northern Europe, where the churches are exposed to the eroding influence of secula

The working document for next October’s international synod of bishops is now being circulated. The text, titled The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World, runs to 120 pages and has 229 footnotes. Significantly, the pope’s groundbreaking encyclical on Ch

You’ve heard the news, no doubt. The American family is changing. No, not just changing—it is being revolutionized. New models are replacing the old. The traditional family, announced one of the great newsweeklies, is fading fast. Who needs a husband? asks another. On the op-ed page of T

At a recent conference on managed care, one of the speakers, a physician, complained that all too often we don’t call patients “patients” any more. These days patients are referred to as either customers, consumers, clients or covered lives. As is often the case at such physician m

Defending human rights pays off not only in terms of justice but also in ways that can include greater economic growth a more protected environment better public health and a generally less violent world Such is the basic theme of this important book Written by someone who knows the human right

Pope Visits UkrainePaying tribute to Ukrainians who endured decades of repression and assuring the nation’s Orthodox majority of his respect for their faith and fidelity, Pope John Paul II ended his long-awaited visit to Ukraine. Over the course of the visit on June 23-27, the pope drew larger

As a fellow theologian, Jon Nilson has my great respect. As a soothsayer and prophet of doom (America, 5/28) he has my respectful but well-considered disagreement. Catholic higher education is so vigorous as a result of wrestling with ill-matched, superimposed rules that it would take much more than

Alison is nearly three years old. She was adopted last year by a single woman, Shannon, who is a campus minister at a Jesuit college. Both mother and adopted daughter have curly blond hair, round blue eyes, and fair skinthey look so alike that most people assume they are biologically related. This i

In his brief foreword to Ghislain Lafont rsquo s Imagining the Catholic Church Archbishop Rembert Weakland O S B calls attention to something that makes Lafont rsquo s voice different from other voices speaking today about the church Father Lafont does not think in words sentences and paragrap

Down through the centuries, church bells have served a number of purposes: to warn the community of impending dangers, to mark celebratory occasions like weddings and sorrowful ones like death. With death by execution in mind, Dorothy Briggs, O.P., in Medford, Mass., has begun a national ecumenical

Immigration law has long been a specialty in which relatively few lawyers, members of Congress and even federal judges have true expertise. In 1996 Congress greatly increased the complexities of this body of law by enacting two statutes: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and

When President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, the homeless did not appear in the nation’s vocabulary, except perhaps as bums or hobos. The visibility of homeless people increased in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when nearly a half-million hospital beds were c

quot The world is on the verge of new and great changes Mr Scrooge You agree quot --Jacob Marley upon meeting Ebenezer Scrooge in George Minter rsquo s 1951 film A Christmas Carol The above epigraph alluding to the social economic cultural and political upheaval of the Industrial Revolutio

Healing HeartsThanks for another fine article from the pen of Julie A. Collins, Virginity Lost and Found (5/21). In a fresh way, she continues to weave the advice of Ignatius into contemporary words as educators re-examine how to hear the beat of a teenage broken heart.Kathleen G. WillsAnnapolis, Md

Once a month in the late afternoon, I take the subway uptown to Spanish Harlem. There, I celebrate Mass for a small community of sisters—the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The subway leaves me at East 116th Street, and I walk on for several blocks through a world very different from m