Let’s start with several obvious facts. Abortion isn’t the only issue in the health care debate — de facto, it isn’t even the central issue, whatever anyone makes of that. But to proceed as if abortion weren’t an issue at…

Ten days before the May 17 Notre Dame University commencement at which President Barack Obama was to speak and receive an honorary degree, I told an archbishop who’s a friend that I thought this was a watershed. One reason for…

Lately I’ve been observing the spread of a disease. No, not swine flu. I mean a condition that I call apology aversion. Its distinctive symptom is an apparently permanent inability to speak the words “I’m sorry” and mean them.

Years ago…

Sitting down to write on no fault divorce, I thought I’d start with an Internet search on the subject. Good idea. I didn’t need to go beyond the first page to find evidence confirming something I’d suspected.

There was this: “One-week…

Surprise! Surprise! The Pope said something about sex and the secular culture went bonkers. This has happened periodically for 40-plus years — Pope speaks about sex, secularists gnash their teeth — and chances are good it will go on happening…

Back in January, with fanfare, the Vatican announced that it was launching a site on YouTube. I confess to wondering just how many YouTube people will frequent a site featuring papal events — but give the Vatican communicators credit for…

The decline of religious faith occurring in Western Europe has been a favorite subject of theologians and social scientists for years. Nearly all speak of what the University of Chicago’s Jean Bethke Elshtain calls the “signs of cultural slackness and…

It would be hard to imagine an issue that sets the worldviews of religious faith and radical secularism in sharper contrast than human cloning. On one side — the cloning side — the supremacy of human will. On the other…

As expected, President Obama has begun his campaign to promote abortion from the White House. Instead of simply reacting angrily, prolifers need to breathe deeply and think seriously about what’s going on and what’s likely to happen next.

In particular, the…

As I’ve perhaps recalled here before, a joke making the rounds a while back had it that certain people supposed “Vatican II” to be the nickname of the Pope’s summer residence. Apocryphal or not, that was a valid point.

Many Catholics,…