From Our Archives

What caused the war in the former Yugoslavia? Over 15 or 20 years ago we had a feeling that the end of Communism was coming. The whole Medjugorje event was an intimation of things to come. We were happy that Communism was going to end, but we also knew that Marshall Tito’s powerful bureaucrac

The patient. At a Mercy Hospital in the Midwest, Steven Becker, a 28 year-old husband and father, lies in what is called a persistent vegetative state (P.V.S.) brought on six months ago when a cyst cut off blood in his brain. In the absence of advance directives, a hospital ethics committee recommen

Monsignor Jacques Suaudeau of the Pontifical Council for the Family recently published “Prophylactics or Family Values? Stopping the Spread of HIV/AIDS” in the weekly edition of L’Osservatore Romano (4/19). Here we find important signals of what many have suspected all along: that

Although their day has long passed, the moral theology textbooks in use before the Second Vatican Council were not without a number of enduring merits. These seminary manuals, for example, recognized the need, in establishing the truth of an ethical thesis, to define all relevant terms fully and exa

In normal usage, the word apologetics means the craft of arguing effectively. But I use the word here in an analogous sense. Beauty does not argue. It doesn’t have to. When I say beauty is a form of apologetic, I mean that the most powerful appeal of Catholicism both to its own membership and

If Booth Tarkington wrote Seventeen today, he’d have to call it Ten. Yet those in charge of Catholic catechesis, judging from their directories and vetting of texts, urge us to teach the young as if their families still routinely attend Sunday Benediction. Someone should inform the front offic

Perhaps it’s my 25 years as a teacher, but for me Dec. 31 rarely prompts much soul searching or melancholy musing on the passage of time. No, for me time’s movement becomes especially vivid and poignant in June. The school year ends and a teacher is left in a state of almost bipolar ambi

Who could have predicted 25 years ago, when three Trappist monks from a monastery in Massachusetts introduced contemplative prayer to a group of non-contemplatives, that its popularity would grow so dramatically? Today, thousands of believers from a variety of Christian denominations in every state