On a Sunday afternoon at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, the shepherd of all Catholics in the U.S. military, administers the sacrament of confirmation to a group of young people and readies to make his plea. Before him, in the chapel, is an opportunity to replenish the armed forces’s diminishing ranks of Catholic … Read more
Congresswoman Anne Meagher Northup knew about personal responsibility when she was a 20-year-old student at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. It meant that she, not her father, would pay for her bus ticket back home for Christmas. It meant that if she wanted to join her nine sisters and one brother at home … Read more
Earlier this year, I wrote an article for the English Catholic Herald about the legacy left by the late Archbishop Derek Worlock to his Liverpool diocese. This led to me abruptly parting company with that newspaper and precipitated a great flurry of press comment about the state of the Church. Modernists and liberals were outraged … Read more
I have been clearing out rooms since the death of my husband and have been sometimes overcome by a sense of the charnel-house. The possessions of the dead can seem loathsome when they have lost all utility and are mere reminders of mortality, of corruption and decay, of grief and loss. Even evidence of past … Read more
When I was a child before I believed in God I was told Bible stories; I was given picture books featuring the life of Our Lord and made to sing hymns. None of this moved me in the slightest except in the direction of boredom. I felt repelled by the whole business, particularly by the … Read more