The recent controversy over the termination of a pregnancy at Phoenix’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, which Phoenix bishop Thomas Olmsted determined to have been a direct abortion and thus a grave moral evil, has generated a secondary controversy over the meaning of the Church’s traditional moral principle of “double effect.” Some have argued — mistakenly, in … Read more
For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, … Read more
Where can you find a Catholic chaplaincy at an institution of higher learning that’s looking to expand its church to seat 1,400, because the current 850 seats just aren’t enough? South Bend, Indiana, perhaps? Well, no, actually: College Station, Texas, where the Catholic chaplaincy at Texas A&M, St. Mary’s Catholic Center, is setting a new … Read more
The otherwise inexplicable cure of a French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease was accepted in early January by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and Pope Benedict XVI as the confirming miracle that clears the way for the beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1, Divine Mercy Sunday. John Paul II’s life … Read more
Catholics once had an intuitive understanding of sacred space: To enter a church, especially in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, was to enter a different kind of environment, one of the hallmarks of which was a reverent silence. Some of that intuition remains. But much of it has been lost. Thus, within the past … Read more
Since the time of the Second Vatican Council, an almost obsessive focus on the Catholic Church as institution has preoccupied many Catholics in North America and western Europe. That obsession with the institutional dimension of the Church helps to explain why so much of the contemporary Catholic debate is framed in terms borrowed from politics: … Read more
On the evening of October 16, 1978, when Pericle Cardinal Fellici announced that the Church had a Polish pope, an astonished world expected that it might take some time for the newly-elected successor of St. Peter to learn his job. For Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow had had none of the preparation usually considered necessary … Read more
At the height of Hollywood’s infatuation with things Catholic, no screenwriter would have dared propose such a storyline: Months after his country regains its independence, a son is born to Polish parents in the small provincial town of Wadowice. His mother dies before he makes his First Communion. Raised by his father, a gentleman of … Read more
“Before he got here I was worried,” a Polish friend confessed during Pope John Paul II ‘s homecoming pilgrimage this past June. “I thought the people might be tired of him. But he’s done it again. It’s like 1979.” The comparison to those eight days in June 1979 on which the history of the twentieth … Read more
Although it is not often recognized as such, a momentous ecclesiological argument has erupted in the Church in the United States. Archbishop John Quinn’s Oxford lecture on the papacy and the curia, the Catholic Common Ground project, the controversies these two initiatives provoked, speculations and agitations about major appointments to the American hierarchy and about … Read more
The debate on the future of the papacy and the Roman Curia launched this past June 29 by the retired archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, in a lecture at Campion Hall, the Jesuit residence at Oxford, is unlikely to simmer down anytime soon. For the argument that Archbishop Quinn was making and the debate … Read more
Dignitatis Humanae—the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom—is frequently described as an expression of Christian personalism, because of its teaching that every human being has an inalienable right to immunity from state coercion in matters of religious conviction. As the declaration puts it, “the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very … Read more
Over the past four years, Pope John Paul II has developed what is arguably the most sophisticated moral, philosophical, and theological analysis of democracy on offer in the world today. In a triptych of encyclicals — Centesimus annus (1991), Veritatis splendor (1993), and Evangelium vitae (1995) — the Holy Father has both secured the teaching … Read more
An aura of unreality thickened by a fog of bitterness hung over the 1995 major league baseball season. The unreality had to do with the fact that 144 games do not a season make. Amputating April from the 1995 major league agenda not only distorted the pastime’s normal rhythms; it also rendered this year’s statistics … Read more
A week after Tad Szulc’s biography of Pope John Paul II appeared in the bookstores, David Shaw, the media critic of the Los Angeles Times, wrote a remarkable four-part series arguing that the American press — obsessed with issues of sexual morality and incapable of understanding the Church in terms other than those drawn from … Read more
Everyone who cares about freedom owes a great debt of gratitude to the people of Poland. That Poland was the trigger for the Revolution of 1989 in east central Europe is widely recognized throughout the world; and thus Poland gets (and deserves) high marks for its essential, even unique, role in the collapse of European … Read more
In the fall of 1989, David Hollenbach, S.J., the prominent Catholic social ethicist who in the early 1980s had vigorously defended the theological and political acuity of the bishops’ controversial pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace” (TCOP), noted that the document seemed “already dated.” Father Hollenbach attributed TCOP’S brief shelf-life to the extraordinary pace of … Read more
In The Habit of Being, Flannery O’Connor provides three lessons for modern Catholics. The First Lesson One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation…. For me a dogma is … Read more
Arguments over nuclear weapons and strategy often use the conceit of a “scenario” — an imaginary congeries of circumstances — to test out hypotheses, weigh alternative policies, and draw prescriptive conclusions. Consider this scenario: A book addresses the morality of deterrence. The book’s authors are Catholic scholars specializing in constitutional law, philosophical ethics, and theological … Read more
Over the past ninety years or so the testing of the American experiment has involved the great question of the right role for the United States in world affairs. We are, by geography, history, and cultural inclination, a people perennially disposed toward isolationism. It is by no means a publicly settled issue whether the United … Read more