One of the reasons I appreciate the Catholic Church is that its lifeblood is apostolic tradition, which ensures against running around after The Latest Thing. However, I am also aware of the long history of Catholics trying to bind God to contracts He has never signed. Many times people leave the Catholic Church, not because … Read more
For the past three decades, I’ve been blessed to travel to almost every continent. But particularly, I have always felt a pull to visit Egypt and to see—with my own eyes—its ancient history and impressive ruins, and to visit the people who continue this 3,500-year-old civilization. My longing became a reality recently when I made … Read more
If you know the name Huckabee, it’s probably from the popular movie or the highly publicized weight-loss campaign of the Arkansas governor. My wife is politically astute and very knowledgeable. When I told her I was meeting with Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, she quickly replied, "Oh, he’s the guy who lost all the … Read more
The record shows that as the need for medical experiments grew, many physicians and others treated institutionalized infants, dying patients, and mentally impaired individuals as not quite persons in the moral sense. Moreover, indigent patients in hospitals were often treated in a similar fashion. . . . Clearly, these ‘vulnerable’ individuals were thought of as … Read more
It happens that in the various Slavic tongues the name Novak means new man, newcomer, stranger. Novak was a name often given to wanderers to a town, who might be of Jewish or of Christian background. Those of us whose name is Novak (or Novick, or Nowak, or Novakoff, or Novacek, or other variants) — … Read more
A recent New York Times article reported a Pew Forum poll showing that significantly fewer people view the Republican Party as "friendly" to religion. "The survey found that the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion fell 8 percentage points in the last year, to 47 percent from … Read more
Except for a few saints and possibly a handful of bishops, Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker were the two most interesting American Catholics of the 19th century. They were certainly the most intellectually interesting and, in the long run, the most influential. The matters they agreed on, and especially those they disagreed on, are crucial … Read more
Subjectivism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, multiculturalism—there is a blight on scholarly research today, cast by the epistemic “isms.” No field is safe. Even in physics, the “isms” are attempting to spin every idea as nothing more than one person’s opinion or the accidental product of historical evolution. Physicist Alan Sobel exposed this effort when he sent a … Read more
At an international conference on liturgical music sponsored by the Vatican on December 5, 2005, Monsignor Valentino Miserachs Grau dropped a bomb. Being the head of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, and the leading voice for the Catholic Faith in all matters of music, his topic was not merely of academic interest, nor was … Read more
In his first book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru fills a gap, providing the first general overview of life issues written for a popular audience in the last 20 years. It’s a badly needed effort, for the situation has … Read more
Every ten seconds, a man, woman, or child in Africa dies from an AIDS-related disease. According to the USAIDS/World Health Organization (WHO), 40.3 million people now live with HIV infections, two-thirds of them in sub-Saharan Africa. In Swaziland, 42.6 percent of pregnant women test positive for HIV. There’s no cure for this killer, and no … Read more
Scenario 1: You’re discussing Divine Providence with your friends over a bottle of wine and mention that, in a strict sense, the Holocaust was “God’s will.” Your Jewish friend stuffs the cork up your nose. Scenario 2: An unchurched fellow wanders into the local revival meeting where he hears the preacher say, “You could have … Read more
There’s big money to be made in undermining traditional Christianity. We saw it first in the phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code, the film version of which will be in theaters later this month. You’re already no doubt familiar with the book’s unrelenting attack on the Church. And the movie looks to be no … Read more
When Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical came out, the media were a bit confused. They, along with eager conservatives, were expecting the new pope to line up the ecclesiastical howitzers and mow down dissenters in crisp, staccato prose. Instead, they got Deus Caritas Est, “God Is Love.” Had the pope gone soft? Even daft? Too … Read more
I have just returned from Rome, where a senior member of the Curia asked me to tell readers of The Window the following story. You may have already heard its beginning, but in all likelihood not its end. On Sunday, February 5, 2006, while praying in his church, an Italian priest by the name of … Read more
I never saw James Charles Risk (1913–2005) in a plain business suit. A dinner jacket without decorations was to him tantamount to aboriginal nudity. Lifelong interest in numismatics led to the study of royal orders and decorations, plenty of which garnished his wiry frame. Like all civilized men who find time for high things … Read more
In June 2000, the Los Angeles Times released a poll that found Americans “evenly split” regarding Roe v. Wade, one of the two 1973 Supreme Court rulings that created a constitutional right to abortion. Forty-three percent of respondents indicated that they approved of the decision, while 42 percent disapproved. At the time, the Times’s poll … Read more
Pro-lifers fumed during the 2004 presidential race when John Kerry attacked opponents of embryonic stem-cell (ESC) research as “anti-science” ideologues who sought to block life-saving cures “right at our fingertips.” “This is not the way we do things in America. Here in America, we don’t sacrifice science for ideology,” Kerry argued in an August … Read more
The intense battle to prevent Terri Schiavo’s husband from removing her feeding tube was horrible enough. To think that some American Catholic universities — and their ethics, theology, law, and medical professors — bear some responsibility for Schiavo’s slow death is almost too much to imagine. Yet prior to Schiavo’s death, professors from top Catholic … Read more
Faced with the lurid, tragic landscape of the Catholic Church’s child sex-abuse scandal, some of the laity have posed the question: Where were the nuns when this was going on? Playwright John Patrick Shanley offers a rich, multi-layered response to this and many other related matters — theological, psychological, and moral — in Doubt, a … Read more