If you are like me, you resent having your name on everyone’s mailing list, receiving direct mail of all sorts, mostly junk, and sometimes having your dinner hour interrupted with telephone solicitations. The scrupulous among us, however, not wanting to miss out on that one, real, authentic of

Criminal justice is on the agenda of the U.S. bishops at their annual fall gathering in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13-16. They will be discussing the draft of a pastoral statement entitled Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice. Their comm

On Nov. 17, 1953, the secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, sent a letter to the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bernard Griffin. Graham Greene’s book THE POWER AND THE GLORY, it began, published in London in 1940 and afterwards translated into several languages, has be

One of the first words my 20-month-old son learned was show, as in his favorite, eternally recurring program Barney. That most of what he watches is similarly innocuous doesn’t relieve our discomfort as he points to the television every morning and demands, Show! Show! Not that we deny him his

Maine ModestyI read with interest Of Many Things (10/21), which mentions my native city and tells the story of a golden boy by the name of Ian Crocker. I recently heard another amazing story about this ordinary Olympian. It seems he was working before he left for Australia this summer and mentioned

Scholars Say Vatican’s Published Material on Holocaust InadequateAfter a yearlong study, a commission of three Catholic and three Jewish scholars said that published Vatican material on World War II leaves unanswered many important questions about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. In a report m

A generation has elapsed since the close of the Second Vatican Council, and the church has underscored the council’s extraordinary ecclesial and historical significance by beatifying, this Sept. 3, Pope John XXIII. At the same time, however, the beatification of Pope Pius IX highlighted the ti

Facing the challenges and accepting the gifts offered by homosexual priests in the Catholic Church

American bishops discussed research describing changing parish staffing patterns at their national convocation in Milwaukee on June 15-17. The three-hour deliberation considered data showing that the number of priests continues to decline, while parishes are hiring more and more lay ministers. Archb

Although you would never know it from coverage of the Elián González custody battle, a quiet but thoroughly monumental revolution is taking place in the American family. The number of fathers solely responsible for the care of their children is growing at a rate almost twice that of single mothers