The apogee of collaborationist Catholicism, alongside its more radical co-religionists, was undoubtedly the day of my birth: November 8, 1960. It was the day John F. Kennedy was elected president. He had already paid the price of admission to the Oval Office with a speech before the Houston Ministerial Association the previous September 12, in … Read more
Memory is a tricky thing, and historical memory can be trickier. For example, to many Catholic Americans, the 1950s look like a golden age of innocence, when life—especially church life—looked like a series of Norman Rockwell and Harold Anderson illustrations. As with all such reminiscences, it is not entirely inaccurate. Certainly America’s Catholics benefited alongside … Read more
“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” ∼ G. K. Chesterton “When I hear the word culture,” Herman Goering boasted, “I reach for my revolver.” Since he was, after Adolf Hitler, the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich, attention was paid. And while he may have stolen the line from Nazi playwright … Read more
It has been clear for quite some time that a new and different public order is taking shape in America in which Catholics (or at least Catholics faithful to the magisterium of the Church) will have serious difficulty finding a comfortable place. The recent election does nothing to change this fact because it does not … Read more
The trouble with atheists, some wag once wrote, is that they are always talking about God. How endlessly they obsess about him! And what strikes one straightaway about the sheer mind-numbing attention they pay to God, including especially the problems posed by us benighted folk who persist in believing in him, is that it so … Read more
For the most part, American Catholics have wanted to be like other people. They arrived in America as immigrants from places where they had a definite (if sometimes lowly) position. They left that for a country where social positions were fluid, they would be held in contempt if they stayed as they were, and they … Read more
Voting patterns of this last election give ample support to the notion of the divided country, and it is now virtually obligatory to bemoan polarization while calling for unity in our fragmented polis. As obvious as our polarization seems, perhaps disunity is not the real problem; instead, perhaps we already have a unity, just of … Read more
You may know the name of John Courtney Murray. He’s worth remembering. Father Murray was the American Jesuit who helped craft the Second Vatican Council’s landmark Declaration on Religious Liberty. A year after World War II ended, with millions dead and Europe and Japan in ruins, Murray wrote that “those who deny the sovereignty of … Read more
Exactly 70 years ago, in 1940, Rev. John Courtney Murray gave a series of three college talks. For his theme, he chose the “concept of a Christian culture.” After his death, his Jesuit brothers fused the talks into a single essay called “The Construction of a Christian Culture.” It’s a modest word change. But that … Read more