The memory of the Second Vatican Council, 40 years after the opening of the council, continues to arouse both acclamation and vilification. Its champions, in many cases, see it as having liberated Catholics from a long night of oppression, thus restoring to the people of God their rightful liberties

In the Western democratic tradition, debates over war and peace are recorded as far back as the Peloponnesian Wars. St. Augustine assumed, by the lights of his day, that the decision for war lay solely with the magistrate. By Shakespeare’s time, audiences had become sufficiently sophisticated

John W. O’Malley, S.J.: The ‘how’ of the church changed during the council.

In his foreword to Finding the Treasure Within A Woman rsquo s Journey into Preaching the spiritual author Ronald Rolheiser O M I writes We are forever caught up in situations that are less than ideal full of tension and fraught with potential for self-pity and bitterness So what can we

More words are misused in politics than in any other field of human endeavor Radical has come to mean something like extremist through repeated misapplication but it comes from the Latin radix meaning root radical politics is therefore supposed to be just another term for grass-roots activism Mi

American Catholics old enough to remember Bishop Fulton J Sheen and his famous chalk talks on televisionsermonettes punctuated by occasional salvos against Communism psychoanalysis and birth controlwill be stunned by how much more worldly engaging and hip apologetics can be in the hands of a maes

On the fortieth anniversary of its opening, two distinguished Jesuit theologians looked back on the myths and realities of Vatican II.

From our archives, 2003.

Vatican Opposition to War Based on Morality and Political RealitiesThe Vatican’s opposition to a war against Iraq is based on political realism as well as moral arguments, a leading Vatican official said. “From the outside, we may seem like idealists, and we are, but we are also realists