The Obama White House just doesn’t get the Catholic Church in the United States these days. That blunt fact of public life was demonstrated once again by an anonymous “administration official close to the negotiations” over the Health…
Author Archives:
The Battle Continues, Beyond Rush
Despite the White House’s rather successful efforts to reframe the media and congressional debate over the HHS “contraceptive mandate” as a right-wing jihad against “women’s health” — a cynical ploy aided and a…
Divide and Conquer?
In 1849 and then again in 1852, the Catholic bishops of the United States petitioned the Holy See to grant the archbishops of Baltimore the title of “primate” of the Catholic Church in the United States: an honorific, to be sure, but one th…
The Libertine Police State
Shortly after Prep-Comm III, the Third Preparatory Commission meeting in anticipation of the 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development, one of those “Senior Vatican Officials” who like to remain nameless told me an enlighten…
Gehry’s Ghastly Eisenhower Memorial
Introducing his two-volume biography of the 34th president of the United States, Stephen Ambrose offered a simple, and accurate, judgment: “Dwight Eisenhower was a great and good man. He was one of the outstanding leaders of the Western world of …
Catholics and Freedom
Fifty-one years ago, John Courtney Murray, whose scholarly work on the history and political theory of religious liberty shaped the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Freedom, published We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflectio…
Desperate Churchmice
It’s been a bad three and a half decades for self-styled “progressive” Catholics.
First, there was John Paul II, whom many in that camp habitually labeled a charismatic reactionary. Yet the Polish pope was a hero all over the world du…
Pope Benedict Speaks Truth to Power
Americans exhausted by adolescent chants of “Pass this bill!” and the rest of the rhetorical detritus of the 2012 pre-campaign might go to the Vatican web site, click on Pope Benedict XVI, and spend a half-hour reading through the texts of …