President Reagan’s visit to the military cemetery at Bitburg where the bodies of fallen German soldiers lie buried provided the occasion for extraordinary reactions, not only on the part of the President’s natural enemies, the Democrats and the bulk of the press, but also and most unwisely on the part of Jews. The partisan effort … Read more
In the middle ages, a moving metaphor of life was found in the flight of a bird through the great banquet hall of a castle: out of the dark, a momentary enjoyment of light and warmth and merriment, then into the dark again. My candidate as substitute for this forceful image is the oases on … Read more
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin has done it again. In Chicago there has been a good deal of violence in the streets of late, with teen-age gangs engaging in what can only be called warfare. Even if he had not chaired the U. S. bishops’ committee which issued the pastoral letter on war and peace, we should … Read more
Imagine yourself as a German citizen some I decades back, one who knows what is being done to the Jews. Say you live in Dachau and are perfectly well aware of what is taking place on the edge of town. If you had a chance to destroy the ovens, of course you would seize upon … Read more
An imagined logical continuum connecting band-aids and artificial hearts serves to silence our objections to the current spate of medical experimentation. Organ transplants, suggestive though they are of body-snatchers and other Transylvanian types, have survived our first timid demurs. Interspecies transplants expand the spare parts image and invest “meaner than a junkyard dog” with new … Read more
Not long ago, on television, a woman speaking on behalf of Catholics for a Free Choice, made use of the following argument to justify her claim that there is no monolithic Catholic position on abortion. “I think that abortions are sometimes morally all right; I am a Catholic; therefore, some Catholics hold that abortions are … Read more
It is as if A Man For All Seasons were being rewritten with Cromwell in the role of hero, the triumph of the trimmer being presented as a model of Catholic behavior. Thomas More, a pitiable figure, imagines that his conscience should dictate actions and omissions in the public order. He would actually prefer saving … Read more
I see by the papers that Mario Cuomo has been invited to Notre Dame to speak on religion and politics and I for one am delighted. He seems as knowledgeable as most other professional theologians I know and he shows the tendency of the tribe to lash out at any bishop who tries to tie … Read more
Most Catholics would simply stop being Catholics if they accepted the liberal consensus as true. Thomas Sheehan takes the occasion of a review of Hans Kung’s Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical and Theological Problem in The New York Review of Books (June 14) to give a thumbnail sketch of how the … Read more
Maritain published this book in 1965, toward the end of his long life, though eight years and several books would intervene before he died. Still to come were On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus (1967) and Of Christ’s Church (1968), neither of which had the enormous effect of The Peasant of the Garonne, published … Read more
Aristotle remarks that anyone who wonders whether he should honor his parents requires punishment, not instruction. This is a vivid expression of the self-evidence of the debt of gratitude we owe those on whom our existence depends. Piety begins at home, so to say, and is extended to the ultimate source of our being. Isn’t … Read more
The other day I drove to Chicago to be interviewed by Mike Wallace for a prospective 60 MINUTES segment on women in the Church. In a hotel suite turned into an ad hoc studio, we recorded three reels of film. Since out of that extended conversation little more than a sentence or two is likely … Read more
The issue of prayer in the public schools is one on which a Catholic can easily find himself in company he would much rather not keep. On the one hand, it is difficult to be in favor of a set prayer at the beginning of the day in public schools. Some of us remember our … Read more
My first glimpse of Bishop O’Connor after his appointment as successor to Cardinal Cooke was on the Cable News Network’s Goodman Report and the eye was quickly drawn to the Right to Life rose on his lapel. It proved to be a good index to the bishop’s forthright, calm and unwavering Catholicism. Here clearly we … Read more
There seems little doubt left that the KGB was behind the attempted assassination of John Paul II and the question arises as to what should follow from this certainty. Pontiff, by two British journalists stationed in Rome, can be described as a novelization of the shooting of the Pope by Mehmet Ali Agca on May … Read more
In Paris on Armistice Day, I went to Mass at Notre Dame where the Leaders of the nation, the diplomatic corps and assorted faithful had gathered around the archbishop, Cardinal Lustiger, to offer thanks to God for the end of a war the French at least will never forget and to pray for peace. There … Read more
With this issue we complete the first volume of Catholicism in Crisis, and I use the ordinal adjective in the conviction that there will be many more. Terry Hall will be moving his family to Notre Dame and take over as managing editor toward the beginning of December. Terry has been involved with the journal … Read more
Ten years ago I wrote a novel called The Priest which grew out of asking myself what it would be like to be a young priest in the Church today. A later novel, Gate of Heaven, asked what it would be like to be an old priest in the Church today. Lately I have been … Read more
If you had been elsewhere in the galaxy until recently, you might suppose that when the president of the U. S. Catholic Conference issues a statement on Nicaragua he would allude to the welcome given the Holy Father in Managua, the campaign of vilification against members of the hierarchy in that benighted country and the … Read more
Kierkegaard took it to be a mark of genius that a relatively insignificant event could occasion a wholly disproportionate result. That an obiter dictum in a newsmagazine and a Canadian theologian’s animadversions on Laborem Exercens should have been the prelude to the remarkable florilegium of short essays which follows is a tribute to the genius … Read more