Confronting Truth
Remembering Václav Havel
Posted: Monday, December 19, 2011
Václav Havel (1936-2011)  [Full Story]

The Cardinal Down Under

Posted: Friday, December 16, 2011
George Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, will be regarded by historians as the man who set the pattern for Australian Catholic prelates of the twenty-first century. In doing so, he has saved Catholicism in Australia and set it on course toward a vibrant future, evangelically and publicly.  [Full Story]

Coercing Consciences

Posted: Friday, December 9, 2011
Some Catholics argued that, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger's warnings about the "dictatorship of relativism" were too over-the-top. Others thought the formula an accurate summary of a grave threat to freedom. Recent events throughout the western world have fully vindicated the latter.  [Full Story]

Books for Christmas

Posted: Tuesday, December 6, 2011
In a world of Kindles and iPads, real books still make wonderful Christmas gifts. Here are some recently published (and read) titles EPPC's George Weigel recommends with enthusiasm.  [Full Story]

Catholics and Freedom
What do “social-justice Catholics” find just about the assault on religious freedom?
Posted: Monday, November 28, 2011
"Progressive Catholics" and "social-justice Catholics" do both the Church and American democracy a disservice by suggesting that the bishops' recent alarms about threats to religious freedom are self-serving, as if the bishops were simply playing institutional defense and battling for the right to indulge the Catholic Church's idiosyncrasies.  [Full Story]

Downsizing-to-grow in Ireland

Posted: Friday, November 25, 2011
While there has been no one cause of Ireland's radical secularization, the Church in Ireland had best look to itself, its sins, its errors, and its unbecoming alliance with political power as it considers how to begin anew.  [Full Story]

Remembering Bill Doherty

Posted: Friday, November 18, 2011
Bill Doherty, who died on August 28, 2011, was one of the great Catholic laymen of twentieth century America. A bear of a man who had been a defensive lineman at Catholic University during his student days, Bill dedicated his professional life to trade unionism as an instrument of democracy-building (and hence peace-making) in Latin America.  [Full Story]

Must the Roman Curia be Italian?

Posted: Friday, November 11, 2011
The universal ministry of the pope in the Evangelical Catholicism to which Vatican II and the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI are giving birth is going to require a different kind of central administration, a different kind of Roman Curia.  [Full Story]

Breaking Bad Liturgical Habits

Posted: Tuesday, November 8, 2011
The long-awaited introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal on November 27, the First Sunday of Advent, offers the Church in the Anglosphere an opportunity to reflect on the riches of the liturgy, its biblical vocabulary, and its virtually inexhaustible storehouse of images.  [Full Story]

The Emerging Crisis in Ukraine

Posted: Tuesday, November 1, 2011
That the Ukrainian government would conduct, publicly, a trial on trumped up and politically motivated charges, and that the court would return a guilty verdict with a heavy penalty (including a $190 million fine on top of the prison sentence) - as it has in the recent trial of Yulia Tymoshenko - makes quite clear that the current authorities have little regard for justice or democratic norms of governance; an especially troubling prospect with revanchist Russia looming to the east.  [Full Story]