Oakland Diocesan Service Offers Apology for Clergy Sex AbusePain, anger and healing surged through an Oakland gathering as Bishop John S. Cummins and other leaders of the Diocese of Oakland publicly apologized to victims of clergy sexual abuse. More than 130 people, including survivors, their famili

A number of years ago, when I was a parish priest, a woman preparing for baptism at Easter asked if she could speak with me privately. There were various issues that had been bothering her, and she wished to discuss them. I had come to know her somewhat during the preceding months and appreciated th

I’ve just finished reading Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem (Harcourt Brace, 352p, $23 hardcover; Harvest, $15 paperback) with its wonderfully subversive and liberating subtitle, And Fall in Love With Poetry, andtrue to its promiseI have just fallen in love with poetry all over again.

The day after returning from a conference in Washington, D.C., in late February on the persistence of hunger in the United States, I took the subway to the upper west side of Manhattan to hear Mario Cuomo speak on a similar theme. His address was part of a forum called "The Intransigence of Pov

We Catholics are quite a strange lot actually We make the nastiest bigots and the most wonderful saints Of course such a potpourri of human experience could never be stirred by such clumsy tools as doctrine and church discipline No there rsquo s far more to it than that In the hands and throug

Agnes Browne is a Dublin widow with seven children six sons struggling to see her offspring into maturity in the Dublin of the early 1970 rsquo s It was the time of the first lurch toward prosperity that would anticipate the present era of the Celtic Tiger in which the standard of living of Irel

The death of the Jesuit moral theologian Richard A. McCormick at 77 forces an uncommon sadness not only on family and friends but on the world of scholarship as well. For in his own field Father McCormick has provided a remarkable example of five facets that should characterize the genuine Catholic

Academic authors occasionally write with verve and color there rsquo s no law against it but when their subject is academe itself caveat lector The historians Jon Roberts U of Wisconsin Stevens Point and James Turner Notre Dame devote a full third of their text to notes and glosses They

On the way as a guest to the annual meeting of the Chrysostom Society a community of Christian writers that includes novelists poets biographers and essayists I toted along this newly arrived book--oil to Houston perhaps By the time the plane landed in that city I had finished the seven grac

At first the inclusion of Brian De Palma among the six directors thoughtfully dissected in Richard A Blake rsquo s AfterImage The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers did not seem to fit The other five mdash Martin Scorsese Alfred Hitchcock John Ford Frank Capra and Franci

Everyone has been trying to see the big picture. We have been bombarded with a certain type of question. Who is the man or woman of the century—better, of the millennium? What are the happenings in the past thousand years that most changed the course of history?

Al Smith and John F. Kennedy must be enjoying a good chuckle as they watch Democrats and Republicans engage in finger-pointing about anti-Catholicism. Though at one time being Catholic was a liability when running for national office, now candidates try to outdo each other by professing their abhorr

All things are relative, as they say. With the domestic fuel supply dwindling and neither the president nor OPEC budging from the status quo, we have been told to expect at least a $2 per gallon automobile gas price by June. But then, as a local radio commentator remarked recently, just imagine the

Pope Preaches Reconciliation and Peace in Holy LandWith slow but determined steps, Pope John Paul II made his long-desired pilgrimage to the Holy Land, preaching peace and reconciliation among the region's peoples and religions. From the heights of Mount Nebo in Jordan to the shores of the Sea o

Heroes populate Ian Frazier rsquo s book about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota Some of the heroes are of his own making others we recognize by name and still others are unique to the Oglala Lakota who live on the reservation All of them are cast against a backdrop of problems

On the first Sunday of Lent of this jubilee year, Pope John Paul II celebrated a solemn liturgy in which he and the cardinals of the Roman Curia who joined him offered a "universal prayer," which had the title: "Confession of Sins and Asking for Forgiveness." This solemn act was

Every chance I get, I read. But why? For many reasons, of course: to educate myself, for aesthetic pleasure, to gather information and, underlying all the rest, out of a deeply ingrained sense of duty. I suppose a sense of duty is wrapped up in almost everything I do, including reading. Like any pro

Here are three books about Christian faith each orthodox in content diverse in approach and likely to appeal to different audiences I read them serially in under a month rsquo s time They deserve better Still I tried to imagine some ways in which readers might use these books to great advan

A League in SyncJames Martin, S.J., offers a comprehensive overview of anti-Catholicism in America and an excellent analysis of its root causes (The Last Acceptable Prejudice? 3/25). His position that the Catholic League is too overheated, however, deserves a response.Our style is not out of sync wi