Editor’s Note. “Families,” Pope Francis noted in a homily on Sept. 14, “are the first place in which we are formed as persons and, at the same time, the ‘bricks’ for the building up of society.” In preparation for the launch of the Synod of Bishops on the Fa

Paul Mayer who succumbed to cancer last November had a knack for noticing a moral crisis He might have learned it from his German-Jewish parents who whisked him from Frankfurt to New York just before Kristallnacht He grew up to become a Catholic and a Benedictine priest only to leave the clois

Blacks and Hispanics make up almost 60 percent of the prison population.