There are many good arguments against quickly convening a Third Vatican Council—a notion beloved of Catholics who occupy the portside cabins on the Barque of Peter. Another ecumenical council would be a distraction from the evangelical mission to which Vatican II called the Church. As it is, bishops spend far too much of their time in meetings.

All believers are “seekers,” in that we obey the prophet’s injunction to “seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isaiah 55:6). Still, the point is not about the seeking, but about the finding.

Of the 208,541 pregnancies in New York City in 2010, 83,750 were terminated by abortion: four in ten. Among non-Hispanic blacks, there were 38,574 abortions and 26,635 live births: thus for every 1,000 African-American babies born, 1,448 were aborted. Those numbers were even more chilling among non-Hispanic black teenagers: for every 1,000 Africa-American babies born to teenagers, 2,630 were aborted. The overall teenage abortion rate was 63% in a city where 16% of all pregnancies were ten pregnancies.

There are as many reasons for “converting” as there are converts.

As I remarked late last year, the introduction of the third edition of the Roman Missal and the new translations of the liturgical texts offer the entire English-speaking Church an opportunity to correct some bad liturgical habits that have developed over the past four decades.

The memory of Dwight David Eisenhower deserves better than the travesty that has, to date, steamrollered through the federal bureaucracy. So does the country Eisenhower served so well, and the city where he lived as both soldier and statesman.

With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, it now seems clear that the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 was not an act of strength but one of weakness, by a regime so incapable of commanding the allegiance of those in whose name it claimed to rule that it could only compel obedience by violence.

Posit an all-powerful and infinite God, and most of us wouldn’t have too much trouble with the idea that such a God could do anything, including coming into the finite world he created. The real question is why such a God would want to do such a thing.

When his seminary faculty threatened to resign en masse because he insisted that the seminarians attend daily Mass, Pell called their bluff, accepted their resignations, filled the seminary with new faculty — and never looked back.

Václav Havel had a complicated relationship with Christianity and the Catholic Church, but I cannot get out of my mind the image of Blessed John Paul II showing the former president of the Czech Republic the ropes around the Throne of Grace.