One day, I looked up to the statue of Our Lady and prayed: “God has taken my mother. I need you to be my mother.”

And dads, too.

In a new book, Helen Alvaré argues that a just society defends and protects its children from harms of all kinds.

The fertility rate in the U.S. is down, but the cost of raising a child may be to blame. If not for immigrant families, births would be down sharply.

Those whose children remain practicing Catholics have some ideas about why that may be the case, but they, too, are well aware that things could easily have turned out differently.

There have been times when I have only held onto my Catholic faith by the smallest of fingernails. I am a doubter. I am a protester.