Christian ethicists are far more reticent about how the United States should proceed in an Iraq exploding with car bombs than they were about whether to launch the present war in the first place. Their reserve is unsurprising, for both just war ethicists and pacifists have much to say about whether

Two articles about the Catholic Church’s process for granting an annulment of marriage were recently published in America: The Annulment, by Joseph A. Califano Jr. (11/15/04), and The Anguish of Annulment (2/28/05). We publish here a representative sampling of the letters prompted by these art

Federal Judge Denies Parents’ Bid to Reinsert Schiavo’s Feeding TubeAfter a Federal judge refused a request by the parents of Terri Schindler Schiavo to have her feeding tube reinserted, church officials condemned the decision and said that the brain-damaged woman must be given nutrition

Yves-Marie Congar, O.P., was the 20th century’s leading Catholic ecumenical theologian and one of the most influential contributors to the Second Vatican Council. Pope John Paul recognized his outstanding service to the church when he named him a cardinal not long before he died in 1995 at the

Since the flurry of biographies of Pope John Paul II appeared in the 1990s an uneasy deathwatch has set in among Vaticanologists who have been predicting his imminent death since 1994 The 84-year-old pontiff has not only refused to follow their scenarios he has actually buried many of his

New Lay Group Formed to Improve Church ManagementA group of U.S. Catholic bishops and lay church and business leaders announced on March 14 the formation of a group to be called the National Leadership Round-table on Church Management.Its goal is to help Catholic dioceses and parishes improve admini

In the fantasy novel That Hideous Strength, a young social scientist, hoping to break into the inner circle of the prestigious National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (acronym: NICE) discovers that the goal of the institute is to eliminate organic life. Filostrato, a physiologist who hates tr

Catholic Christianity’s understanding of and relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people was radically transformed by the the Second Vatican Council’s declaration, “The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.” On Oct. 28, 1965, Nostra Aetate formally declared t

François de La Rochefoucauld, a 16th-century French aristocrat, made a name for himself by writing tough-minded epigrams that he called maxims. In one of these philosophical wisecracks he noted: “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.” All the same, there are some people wh

Crippling debt burdens accumulated over the past several decades still weigh heavily on many of the world’s poorest countries. As they struggle to repay what they owe to rich countries and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, they find themselves with