Biblical scholars generally agree that Luke’s Gospel was written at least a generation later than Paul’s first letter to the Christians...

We American Catholics are, in the main, notoriously uninterested in our own history. So it likely escaped the notice of many that...

It’s been a good reading year and I highly recommend the following to the readers on your Christmas (not “holiday”) shopping list: God or...

As I write, just before Thanksgiving, it’s been over a month since Synod-2015 finished its work. Yet there is still no official...

TRIGGER WARNING: This column will speak well of Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and compare him favorably to...

ROME. During Synod-2015, I’ve been reading John Martin Robinson’s Cardinal Consalvi: 1757-1824, a biography of Pope Pius VII’s secretary...

ROME. The great Piazza San Pietro is a five minute walk from where I’m living during Synod-2015. About three-quarters of the Square is...

ROME. Since Pope Francis announced that two Synods would examine the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family and work to devise...

The XIV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family begins with Mass in St. Peter’s on October 4. No synod in modern...

Sitting at a writing-desk in the White House on December 11, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt was an unhappy camper. In previous...

The history of popes in these United States is full of surprises. And one of them, to begin at the beginning, includes the little-known...

Seventy-five years ago, on Sunday, September 15, 1940, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine were driven from the prime minister’s...

In 2003, Elizabeth Maguire, publisher of Basic Books, made a proposal: I should write Letters to a Young Catholic as part of a series she...

At Christmas 1969, Professor Joseph Ratzinger gave a radio talk with the provocative title, “What Will the Future Church Look Like?” (You...

Looking back on the controversy that preceded Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, I get the impression that there was an even...