“It is the duty of those serving the people in public place,” said Grover Cleveland in his first inaugural address in 1885, “to closely limit public expenditures to the actual needs of the government economically administered.” That was, for Cleveland, plain common sense, and his practice proved that he meant it. He was an implacable … Read more
“No human law,” writes the great Pope Leo XIII, can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage, ordained by God’s authority from the beginning. Increase and multiply. Hence we have the family; the society of a man’s house — a society limited … Read more
Recently my state, Rhode Island, became the second in the nation to ban discrimination against people who have employed surgery and massive doses of hormones to form upon their bodies parodies of the sex God saw fit not to give them. Justices in California, meanwhile, overruling the little wards of that state (once upon a … Read more
Holy Father, welcome to my country. Your presence cheers thousands of us Catholic professors and students who love the Church and want her to be more of a presence in our lives at school. You will find more enthusiasm than suspicion among the young, who are coming to see that the secularism they have been … Read more
“What do you think you’re doing!” cried the great scientist to the soldier, as he leaned over his tracings in the sand. The soldier — who had no idea who the man was, and how much his commander wanted him alive — slew him on the spot. Had his world needed the works of … Read more
“Come sit over here,” my wife whispered to me. “Let’s give Dad a chance to be alone with her.” It was a quiet room in a hospice, the only sounds the muffled pumping of oxygen, and the softer and slower breathing of my mother-in-law, Esther, as she lay a few hours before her death. Her … Read more
The three boys have joined forces to run away from home and pillage their enemy towns on the banks of the great river. After they filch some of the necessities for a life of piracy—a side of bacon, some tobacco, hooks and lines, and a raft—and spend an afternoon enjoying the glory of spreading the … Read more
You must go visit the good sisters in Starrucca,” said my friend, Father Check. So there I was with my wife and son in the car, sliding along a slippery highway in rural Pennsylvania, wondering what I would find when I arrived. I’d been told by the mother prioress, Sister Therese, that if we got … Read more
“If any man,” says the preacher, “can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.” At that the door is flung open, and in strides anybody from a dozen old movies. The screenwriters knew their trade. The one marriage service from … Read more
Into the face that most resembles Christ now look: for by her radiance only she can render you prepared for seeing Christ. (Paradiso 32.85-87) So says St. Bernard to the pilgrim Dante, urging him to gaze into the countenance of Mary, as they stand at the threshold of the Beatific Vision. They are words I have … Read more
What wonders we American Catholics have seen. Schools, whose joists were sawn and spiked by the hands of men who would send their children there, now empty, crumbling; whole orders of nuns doffing their habits, then their faith and reason too, worthy societies dwindling into a few old men with beers and a shuffleboard table, … Read more
In the old days when Italians still had children, the mother of any large family, if she was devout, would single out one of her sons and pray that someday he would become a priest. In this tradition, my grandmother chose the gentlest and most intelligent of her four sons and encouraged him to be … Read more
Our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, reminds us always that the Church is something we receive as a gift. It is not a human work but God’s work, and only insofar as we unite ourselves to it can it be said, through God’s grace, to be our work, too. Only then can we claim that our … Read more
“How much shall we put you down for, sir?” asks the philanthropist on Christmas Eve, standing in the dingy countinghouse where Ebenezer Scrooge plies his lawful trade in misery. “Nothing.” “You wish to remain anonymous?” “I wish,” says Scrooge, “to be left alone!” Mine is a land of loneliness. We may not be as miserly … Read more
Our family has finally called it quits. We’ve folded our tents and abandoned the strip mall and peep show known as American television. We still have the machine in the living room, whereon we can watch Going My Way, with Bing Crosby as the “progressive” Father O’Malley, back when progressive meant that he took the … Read more
On a dead-end stretch of what was once U.S. 11 Route 22, in a small village with tacky-friendly billboards boasting “Genuine Dutch Cooking,” where old folks and even some of the young still scold their children or go a-courting or order scrapple and beer in Low German—in a veritable little oxbow lake cut off from … Read more
On a wintry day in Boston stood a man “devoid of genius, and with only an ordinary education,” eulogizing an insurrectionist hanged hundreds of miles away. He had too much integrity and too little imagination to compromise the single great principle of his life. “What is it,” he cried to the crowds gathered to hear … Read more
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Kraków, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Beth-salem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders … Read more
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Krakow, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Bethsalem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders … Read more