Medicare, the health insurance program for Americans over 65, is getting much attention these days, because of the president’s much-contested plan to provide prescription benefits for low-income seniors. Medicaid, on the other hand, which is supposed to provide medical care for poor people of

Vatican: Both Sides to Blame for Failure to DisarmExpressing deep pain at the start of U.S. military strikes on Iraq, the Vatican said both sides were to blame for failing to achieve the peaceful disarmament of Iraq under international law. In a statement on March 20, just hours after U.S. missiles

An overarching crisis in today’s church is a crisis of faith; not faith in God, not faith in Jesus Christ, but a crisis of faith in the institutional church. Members of an older generation have felt a certain testing of faith since the mid-1960’s. They remember their childhood: novenas,

Around Jesus rsquo time roughly from 20 B C to A D 70 Jews especially in Jerusalem developed the practice of a two-stage burial The corpse would first be laid out on a shelf cut into the wall of a burial cave and allowed to decompose Then a year later the bones would be gathered up and pl

Those of us who knew Paul Dinter as the Catholic chaplain at Columbia University in the 1970 rsquo s and 80 rsquo s were presented with a personable intellectually rigorous and obviously virtuous priest in a crisp Roman collar and well-tailored black suit It was not that he was an unblinking spear

Bishops’ Conference President on War and Wartime ConductJust before the United States began war with Iraq, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed “deep regret that war was not averted” and called on U.S. troops and their allies to “value the lives

Two friends have taken their own lives within a short time: one by consuming more of the drugs that were killing her anyway; the other, also enslaved to drugs, who hastened his death with a bullet. The phone rings: there has been a suicide. A life is ended. Just like that.The avoidability of these d

Lent for me evokes the memory of a semi-darkened church on the upper west side of Manhattan. During a Good Friday evening service there 30 years ago, a young man rose from a nearby pew and read a passage from Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958)—an autobiographical account of his experience as a t