Catholic Exchange

Beach Glass: An Argument

• Archives
• Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
• Patrick O'Hannigan

The ragtop was down, the radio played “Drift Away,” and the sky was baby blue over the raked edge of my windshield, but a sand-in-my-shoe comment I’d seen a few hours before kept me from singing backup for Dobie Gray.… Read More

Dragging Hay Bales and Agendas into Church

• Archives
• Friday, April 30th, 2010
• Patrick O'Hannigan

Peggy Noonan and Nicholas Kristof want to fix the Catholic Church. With Noonan writing for the Wall Street Journal and Kristof writing for the New York Times, neither columnist needs parchment on a door in a university town to float… Read More

The Pope, the Scandal, and the Crib Notes for Journalism 101

• Archives
• Thursday, April 8th, 2010
• Patrick O'Hannigan

Here we are among the calla lilies, many of us meditating on the eternal resonance of events in and around old Jerusalem, yet spring chores still need doing, and the crabgrass of ignorance is even more stubborn than the weeds… Read More

Some Are More Equal Than Others

• Archives
• Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
• Patrick O'Hannigan

With another in a series of executive orders, President Obama on March 11 created a "White House Council on Women and Girls."
Having been advised that female CEOs run only three percent of the Fortune 500 companies, and that women… Read More

Who and for Whom We Are

• Archives
• Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
• Patrick O'Hannigan

Understanding sometimes comes while I’m walking a tabby cat, a golden retriever and a Cavalier spaniel on a quiet street under a full moon, with the jingle of a collar to accompany the counting of my blessings.
Al Pacino and… Read More

Lost in Translation

• Archives
• Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
• Patrick O'Hannigan

Barack Obama using Christian and Jewish scriptures as mendaciously as Bill Clinton once did, when the former president took to choreographing his church visits so that photographers could see the huge gold cross on the cover of the bible that… Read More

It’s Daffy Among the Intellectualoids

• Media & Culture
• Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
• Patrick O'Hannigan

Being an American of Irish and Mexican heritage has certain advantages, and one of them is that I do not usually fret about the pronouncements of Anglican leaders. John Henry Newman had it indelicately but indubitably right some 120 years ago, I think, when he asserted, "There are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism," before adding that "Anglicanism is the halfway house on the one side, and Liberalism is the halfway house on the other."

Like Newman eventually did, I look to the Pope and the Catechism of the Catholic Church for theological guidance. Accordingly, I had promised myself that I was not going to write about Anglican troubles.

Anonymous Saints

• Archives
• Monday, October 30th, 2006
• Patrick O'Hannigan

I’m a semi-regular at a coffee kiosk owned by a bear of a man named Joe, but staffed on the days that I stop for a cup by a barista named Nicole.
Heroes All
Nicole doesn't know my name, but… Read More

Reclaiming Saint Paul

• Art
• Friday, July 1st, 2005
• Patrick O'Hannigan

If libraries in your town are anything like libraries in mine, they give more shelf space to secular than to religious subjects. Accordingly, I was surprised to find Fr. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor’s book, Paul: His Story (Oxford University Press, 2004) displayed… Read More

Lent and the Modern Mind

• Archives
• Thursday, March 10th, 2005
• Patrick O'Hannigan

Talk-radio host Michael Savage, who is something of an authority on political labels, said recently that Pope John Paul II “may be the last true liberal.” Like Avery Cardinal Dulles and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus before him, Savage offered that… Read More