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Last fall, the Archdiocese of Boston released an ambitious plan designed to stem the decline it has experienced—in priests, Mass attendance, and treasure—since the 2002 wave of sexual-abuse scandals.
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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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Is capitalism an enemy of the good life? Marxists and other radicals think so.
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As I begin what will be my seventh (!) decade as a Catholic, I find that I am less and less sure of what Catholics believe.
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When was the last time you saw dozens of people lining up for a philosopher’s autograph? That’s what happened in the sprawling basement of a Marietta, Georgia, megachurch after Alvin Plantinga spoke there during a 2010 “Apologetics Conference.” And...
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Is religious conscience special? And what kinds of claims (if any) does conscience warrant? These are two of the many questions Brian Leiter raises in his provocative book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 192 pp.).
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Catholics have been arguing about the Second Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a century.
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The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive...
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“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” So asked the psalmist three thousand years ago. The question is still with us and as urgent as ever: What are we?
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In 1949, Karl Jaspers introduced the notion of an “axial age” to describe a few centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C. when great spiritual masters planted the seeds of the great world faiths.
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St. Pius X, in his encyclical Vehementer (1902), wrote: “By its very nature the church is a society of unequals; it is composed of two categories of persons: the pastors and the flocks.
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Pope Benedict's resignation shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did. As an institutionalist who believes in the Roman Catholic Church as the carrier of truth in a sinful world, he would worry a great deal about the impact of his own...
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Broadway’s most recent foray into Catholicism has come to an abrupt halt: The Broadway testimony of the mother of Jesus—as written by the award-winning Irish writer and onetime altar boy Colm Tóibín and spit out with furious anger by the formidable...
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Richard Linklater’s bittersweet 2008 film Me and Orson Welles tells of an impressionable teenager who gets the chance to work with his idol, Orson Welles, in the famed Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar, and in the process learns a great...
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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Photo: © eugene
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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A Latin-American pope! From Chile to Mexico—and among U.S. Latinos—there was a collective gasp of surprise and excitement over the news of the conclave’s election of Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis.
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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The recent reports of Mother Teresa’s long dark night made more news than they should have, I thought. Then I had second thoughts: this might lead to a serious discussion of faith and certainty, which are not at all the same thing. There were a few...
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Condemnation of religion has become the fashion of the day. Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris, David Dennett, and, most lately, the elegantly irascible Christopher Hitchens have hit the bestseller lists with screeds against faith.
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Around these parts, the “Year of the Priest” has been as much of a nonevent as the opening of Al Capone’s vault or spending New Year’s Eve with the Y2K bug. Although Pope Benedict XVI officially began the observance last June, it wasn’t until eight...
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We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress...
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The Catholic Church is strenuously—some would say obsessively—opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. How persuasively is the church making its case? Is the church right to emphasize the issue in the uncompromising way some of its most...
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Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. There are few women in the pantheon of great jazz instrumentalists, and even fewer jazz performers in the pantheon of great...
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John Wilson, Mary C. Boys, Peter Jeffery, Richard R. Gaillardetz, William L. Portier
[Editor's note: William L. Portier's and Richard R. Gaillardetz's are the final in a special series of stories we are posting as the cardinals gather for the conclave. All of the previous articles in this series appear below.]
William L...
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In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
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Anyone who followed media coverage of the papal conclave that elected the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, couldn’t help noticing that the same breathless questions were raised again and again by commentators assessing the future...
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Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism?
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In 2007 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, a guide for American Catholics seeking to discern their political responsibilities in view of the upcoming 2008 national elections.
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In the April 23, 2004, issue of Commonweal, Leslie Woodcock Tentler wrote on American Catholics and contraception:
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There has been an interesting recent debate about faith and doubt, religious belief and atheism.
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For years now, Christian culture warriors such as Richard John Neuhaus and James Dobson have been railing against the secularists who want to repress religion and eradicate the effect of religious beliefs on public morality and law.
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While many Americans know Oxford professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for The Selfish Gene, the 1976 science bestseller that portrayed all life as a struggle to propagate DNA, they may be less familiar with his other identity as a...
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Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a World of Strangers Kwame Anthony Appiah Norton, $23.95, 196 pp.
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In a recent speech commemorating the end of World War II, President George W. Bush dusted off a shopworn bit of far-right GOP dogma. He accused President Franklin D. Roosevelt of making a corrupt deal with Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945,...
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Charles Taylor’s remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something quite different from what other writers on secularization have accomplished.
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Over the past two decades, few writers have charmed as many critics and readers as the British novelist Ian McEwan.
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On the Wednesday after Easter, nine hundred Notre Dame students serenely walked into the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center to see a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. “Is Religion the Problem?” was the question. About two hours...
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Stanley Hauerwas is the most immediately likable bombthrower I have ever met. I first encountered him and his essays during that part of the 1970s I spent in the newly hatched field of bioethics.
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If you work in bioethics, are of a certain age, and have a degree from the University of Virginia, colleagues are likely to assume you studied with James Childress, the legendary teacher who co-authored Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a...
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While I took Lent and Easter more seriously than ever this year—in terms of prayer, Scriptural reading, reflection, and discipline—I didn’t go to Mass. In fact, I haven’t been since Christmas.
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I’ve changed my mind about the outcry against sex-selective abortion. Since the 1980s, when the issue emerged here in India and neighboring China, I’ve been skeptical of feminist objections to aborting baby girls on the basis of their sex.
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I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic and pink, and it cost a dime. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived...
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The democratic uprising that brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt stands as one of the most dramatic expressions of “people power” in history. The people’s victory in Egypt was preceded by the downfall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and...
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Confronting the twentieth century, Catholicism stood fast. This was its mission: church as bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age.
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A specter is haunting the affluent societies of the West. Across the rich countries, and across the political spectrum, there is an unstated but palpable longing for a return to the 1950s.
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A few years ago, my husband Raviand I walked to our local police station at one in the morning to complain about blaring music from a jaagran being conducted a few blocks away. A jaagran is a Hindu all-night prayer service held at top volume (...
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What do the Roman Catholic Church and the American political system have in common? Both are divided into factions that neither trust nor understand each other, and both confront a crisis of governance.
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First of all, I think we might imagine today’s event as a three-hour rebuttal to Governor Jesse Ventura and his claim that participants in organized religion are weak-minded. I wish he were here with us today. I think he might come to realize that...
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I have been working for MTV Networks for fifteen years and have written several books about rock ’n’ roll. I never expected to find the church trampling in my vineyard.
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One of Barack Obama's great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of...
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In the past nine years, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been invoked, distorted, and exploited to serve a variety of political and ideological agendas. But no such effort has been quite as shameful as the current campaign against...
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With the advent of a new millennium, what some have called “The American Century” officially came to an end seven years ago.
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In the riots that swept Islamic society last winter, reaction to the publication of cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed, the world glimpsed evidence of a clash between cultures—but not in the sense of the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel...
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In September 1960, John F. Kennedy gave one of the most memorable speeches of his political career to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy addressed this group because Protestants, especially evangelical Protestants, were deeply...
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What follows is an edited version of remarks by political philosopher William Galston made to a colloquium sponsored by Commonweal on "Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Pluralism." The colloquium is part of a project, titled "American Catholics...
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The best-selling atheistic manifestoes by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are now in the paperback phase of their remarkable cultural tour.
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This summer witnessed the publication of Caritas in veritate, Pope Benedict XVI's long-awaited encyclical on economics.
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Twenty-one years after German reunification, Communist East Germany—or the German Democratic Republic, as it officially and inaccurately called itself—has receded like a bad dream.
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A close friend’s son recently began a prison sentence. When he entered the “correctional institution,” he told the authorities he was a Presbyterian. The following Sunday he asked to be allowed to attend church services. He was told there were no...
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In current battles between church and state about health care and health insurance, it is often the poor and uninsured who end up as unintended casualties. A recent episode in Kentucky demonstrates how this happens—and just how much is at stake.
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In the fall of 1965, I worked in the final session of the Second Vatican Council. A young priest and doctoral candidate, I was tasked with distributing documents and collecting votes and amendments from my assigned section of bishops.
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The Jewish tradition holds that the Lord directly ordered Abraham to perform circumcision (Genesis 17:11). The order applied to Moses (Lev. 12:3), and was continued by Joshua for the freed slaves of the Exodus (Joshua 5:2). Centuries later, Ezekiel...
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On October 11, 1963, Bishop Luigi Bettazzi addressed the Second Vatican Council on the need for collegiality. He was the newest bishop participant, having been consecrated only a week before, and, at thirty-nine, he was also one of the youngest.
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Of the many virtues associated with St. Francis of Assisi, humility was the first to occur to me as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio stood before the multitude for the first time as Pope Francis. Popes are expected to be larger-than-life figures, but...
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Books by people who see religion as a profound misunderstanding or dangerous delusion have proliferated recently. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has been on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith...
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I’d like to begin with the proposition error has no rights. That is a proposition I take to be indisputable. It’s the beginning of a major syllogism. And it is the major syllogism that sustained religious persecution from about 320 a.d. into the...
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Let’s not waste a minute: What is a crisis? What is liberal Catholicism?
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Introduction
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John Rawls is widely recognized as the most important American political philosopher since the mid-century. His book A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) redefined its discipline and, in so doing, aroused controversy on every side.
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Catholic social teaching, whether promulgated by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century or Benedict XVI in the twenty-first, has always been contextual. The themes emphasized, although consistent in their fundamental doctrinal commitments, have...
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It’s in vogue to ask what the Internet is doing to our brains. Will constant exposure to technology destroy human memory and attention span? Will it turn us into machines who can take in massive amounts of information over the course of a day but...
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When the German journalist Peter Sewald recently asked Pope Benedict XVI whether the Catholic Church was “opposed in principle to the use of condoms,” the pope replied that under some circumstances the use of a condom could be a “first step” toward...
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Badminton doesn’t usually garner much attention at the Olympics, but it did last summer, when millions across the globe watched the curious spectacle of world-class players purposefully hitting shots long or into the net in order to lose a matc
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By resigning, Pope Benedict served the church well. He has spared it another prolonged period of mounting disarray. He has "humanized" the papacy, as Joseph Komonchak and others have pointed out.
