At an international symposium in honor of the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, held in Paris on Feb. 11, I offered closing remarks on what the Church might do to combat aggressive secularism in Europe. As the same prescriptions apply in…

Carolyn Gordon Tate, a major figure in the literary renaissance of the 20th century American South, once wrote Flannery O’Connor of the impact that her conversion to Catholicism had had on her writing. As Miss O’Connor recalled in a letter,…

In late February, Professor Marjorie Garber of Harvard came to the University of Notre Dame as the Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer for 2009-2010. Among other engagements, she spoke to a class on “Breaking the Code: Transvestism and Gay Identity,” the subject…

In late 2009, the Holy See and the Russian Federation agreed to full diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level, bringing the total of such exchanges to 178—a remarkable achievement, considering that, in 1978, the Holy See had full diplomatic relations…

Four days after my son-in-law, Rob Susil, re-entered Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he would die of an aggressive sarcoma on Feb. 5, the Church marked the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord and read the Gospel of Simeon’s prophecy…

Connoisseurs of political kamikaze runs will long debate what finished off Martha Coakley in the recent Massachusetts election to fill the seat Edward M. Kennedy held for 47 years.

The baseball fan in me likes to think it…

This past Dec. 28, I was jolted out of my morning fog at 8 a.m. Mass when the deacon offered this petition: “For those who are considering abortion: may our prayers and the intercession of the Holy Innocents whom…

The late Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston may or may not have described the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., as “our luxury gift to Mother”-a story I heard decades ago-but there’s no…

The New Testament reading that began this Advent season, from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, was filled with the tension between the “now” and the “not yet” of the two comings of the Messiah-a tension that was evidently…

The Catholic Church in the United States has done a public service during the recent health-care debate by keeping a crucial proposition in play: no reform should reverse the 32-year-old national consensus that keeps the federal government…