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
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
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
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
Many members of the current Congress came to Washington with promises to repeal the federal income tax or at least replace it with a flat tax. It hasn’t happened. They and their Congressional leaders discovered that the federal income tax is too deeply rooted to be ripped out or radically chan
Summer is not a good time to have significant events occur; too often they are missed by those who should know about them and would want to know about them. It is likely, for example, that even dedicated readers of the Catholic press did not see two announcements that should not go unacknowledged.Tw
If saints were still chosen by popular acclamation, those of us who knew Edward Skillin, the late publisher of Commonweal magazine, would be shouting his name from the rooftops. Edward stopped going into the Commonweal office only two years ago, at age 94. He first joined the staff in 1933, as a you