When he was elected as Paul VI just 50 years ago, Giovanni Battista Montini seemed the perfectly prepared pope. He was the son of a middle-class family of Italian professionals with good Vatican ties. A competent linguist who had enjoyed…
Vatican II
In the course of preparing “The End and the Beginning,” the second volume of my biography of John Paul II, I was struck by a historical coincidence that isn’t much remarked these days: the opening of the Second Vatican Council…
Lay people, it’s up to you.
That’s the conclusion of Russell Shaw’s alarming but slightly hopeful new book, American Church.
After cataloging exactly how bad things are in the American Church (“dismal,” says Shaw, who does not mince words), and…
Make no mistake about it: The Church in our day is in the midst of a terrible, and in many ways unprecedented, crisis of faith. This objective reality, however, is largely lost on the overwhelming majority of Catholics, both clerical…
