January 1, 2018, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, falls on a Monday. Because it falls on a Monday it ceases, according to norms the American bishops adopted in 1992, to be a holy day of obligation. The Code of Canon Law contains ten holydays of obligation but allows local conferences of bishops to … Read more
Like Leslie Nielsen’s famous advice as the building explodes behind him—“OK, move on, nothing to see here, please disperse”—so The New York Times assures us that there’s nothing to the war on Christmas except, perhaps, Republican partisanship. “From the beginning, the War on Christmas was a homegrown Fox News cause, introduced by the so-named 2005 … Read more
A writer can learn a lot from people who comment on his writings. My Thanksgiving Day piece on the “Secular Puritan Covenant” elicited one reader’s opinion that we should celebrate a “Native Americans’ Day” to celebrate the contributions they made and the experiences they suffered during the settlement of North America. I initially demurred, noting that … Read more
Thanksgiving brings back memories for Americans of the Pilgrims and Puritans, carrying out their “errand into the wilderness” to build a “city on a hill,” surviving that first bleak Massachusetts winter of 1620-21. As a kid, I remember that cutting out Puritan hats from black construction paper and taping them to the school windows was … Read more
“Sticks and stones may break my bones / but names will never hurt me.” So goes the old children’s nursery rhyme. We know, of course, that the claim is not exactly true: CBS produced a documentary in 2011 about the effects of bullying in a digital age, “Words Can Kill.” What is less talked about … Read more
November is the month the Church especially dedicates to praying for the dead. To encourage this holy practice, the Church offers a daily plenary indulgence for the souls in Purgatory, under the usual conditions (right intention, confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope) to those who visit a cemetery in the period November … Read more
The feast of St. John Paul II was celebrated on October 22, the 39th anniversary of Karol Wojtyła’s formal installation as the Bishop of Rome. This occasion is an ideal time to reflect on St. John Paul the Great’s contribution to the Church and the world. Papal biographer George Weigel continues writing about the late Pope’s legacy, … Read more
President Trump’s welcome October 6 decision to roll back the Obama Administration’s trampling of conscience rights, which required employers to pay for abortifacients, in no time led to howls in the media and among Democrats about the “threat” to “contraceptives” and “birth control.” By the next day, my email contained an appeal from the Democratic … Read more
Both charity and etiquette once counseled not speaking ill of the dead. That’s generally why most obituaries take the form of encomia and why a certain “stretching of the truth” is often entertained in them. Discretion used to prove the better part of valor when discussing the dearly deceased whose vices were public knowledge. (But, … Read more
The July 9 New York Times Sunday Review contained a feature by Richard Conniff. Driven by his research on English moles, he visited the grave of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows. What impressed Conniff, and inspired his op-ed, was that Grahame’s grave was in both “a graveyard and a wildlife refuge. … Read more
The flow of time in which we find ourselves, between Pentecost and Corpus Christi, is a bit strange liturgically. Pentecost ends the Easter Season and launches us back into Ordinary Time. The first weeks of post-Pentecost Ordinary Time include two major solemnities: Trinity Sunday (which used to be connected with Pentecost by a suppressed octave, … Read more
The Economist began its editorial promoting paid surrogacy by quoting the Bible: the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar is an “exploitative version of surrogacy that still shapes attitudes and laws today.” Why the lessons of that story do not remain relevant for today (and today’s “attitudes and laws”) is never really explained. Neither the … Read more
Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. That descent changed them. It made a difference in their lives. The Upper Room had previously been a chamber of fears. “Surely not I, Lord?” (Mt 26:22) was the question on a certain Thursday night. About 72 hours later, it was a locked room … Read more
Vecuronium bromide is a drug that relaxes skeletal muscles and can be used in conjunction with surgical anesthesia. That is its usual medical application. Some states also use it in connection with capital punishment: it is one of several drugs used together to execute prisoners. Vecuronium bromide paralyzes the prisoner’s breathing. Potassium chloride is then … Read more
I recently took my nine-year-old son, Karol, to the National Gallery of Art here in Washington. I knew that a nine-year-old’s idea of a fun Sunday was not necessarily looking at art, but I thought he needs some exposure to it and we can do it in limited amounts, maybe once a month. Besides, I … Read more
Recently, I took my son swimming at a local rec center. Entering the men’s locker room, we encountered a sign: “Children over 6 must use the appropriate locker room.” For a moment, I was tempted to speed dial the ACLU and Human Rights Watch to roust some federal judge that Sunday morning who could save … Read more
Scholarship, like cooking, is as much a function of what one leaves out as much as what one puts in. Luke Timothy Johnson’s recent Commonweal essay on Scripture and trans-sexual issues is a case-in-point: what he chose to de-emphasize is as important (I would argue even more so) that what he emphasizes. Johnson seeks to … Read more
The Journal of Medical Ethics, a leading British bioethical journal, has done it again. Back in 2011, they offered us the barbaric thesis of Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva defending infanticide: the two authors argued for “after-birth abortion,” claiming that the killing of a child post-birth would be justifiable if done under “circumstances … that … Read more
Fr. Kenneth Doyle writes one of those syndicated columns in the Catholic press that answers questions about the Church that Catholics pose. Recently, a Minnesota correspondent wrote asking about confessions during Mass. The writer recalled being told in catechism that fulfilling the precept of attending Mass required attendance at the Gospel, offertory, and Communion, but his … Read more
At the National Prayer Breakfast February 2, President Trump pledged to repeal the “Johnson Amendment,” a provision added in 1954 to the Internal Revenue Code that is the statutory basis for the IRS to deprive a church of tax-exempt status if it does not comply with the Amendment’s absolute prohibition on any political engagement that … Read more