Despite all the talk about a vocation shortage, there is in fact no such thing in the Catholic Church. The real shortage is that of vocational discernment, and that is a very different problem. The shortfall in the number of candidates for the priesthood, the consecrated life and other forms of Chri
"In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin observed in 1789. On no day does this seem more true for most Americans than on April 15, the day they take part in the annual ritual of filing a tax return. Knowing that April is a time when taxes are much on the mi
Taxes and tax collectors have been around in one form or another for most of human history. Tax collectors appear in many of the Gospel stories, and the Evangelist Matthew was himself a tax man. Many American Catholics may not realize it, but their bishops are often tax collectors too, regularly lev
Every night about 11:00 P.M., after four hours of more or less continued operation, the electric power goes out in Adjumani, Uganda. The night becomes black, dotted with a kerosene lamp here and there and maybe a rare solar-powered lamp. It is a small town of a few thousand people, a northern point
As letters to America go, this one was nothing special. A Catholic physician had written to argue for a married Catholic clergy, listing a number of familiar arguments, including the superior ability of married Protestant ministers to relate to their congregations, the equivocal witness of early chu
Much Sadder Sentence
My friend Sam almost died last week. That was the first sentence of my article Growing Old in Prison, published in America last Nov. 10. Today I must write a new, much sadder sentence: my friend Sam died yesterday afternoon.
Five days ago, during a
The United Nations has reported that the number of chronically hungry people worldwide is increasing at the rate of five million annually. But even here in the United States, richest of all nations, hunger and food insecurity (limited access to nutritionally adequate foods) have been steadily rising