Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times:

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Joseph Pearce offers a 101 appreciation oped today in the Miami Herald.

Pearce also did an excellent job this weekend as a papal color commentator on EWTN.

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This had to be annoying to more than a few people in the Church of England (again to the bishops):

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We have the courage—we pray for the courage—to be Catholic, as our friend George Weigel might paraphrase it. More from the Holy Father today in his bishops’ meeting:

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The pope really doesn’t miss a beat. In his meeting with the bishops Sunday he said:

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Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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Let us begin with the sacrifice of the Cross. The outpouring of Christ’s blood is the source of the Church’s life. Saint John, as we know, sees in the water and blood which flowed from our Lord’s body the wellspring of that divine life which is bestowed by the Holy Spirit and communicated to us in the sacraments (Jn 19:34; cf. 1 Jn 1:7; 5:6-7). The Letter to the Hebrews draws out, we might say, the liturgical implications of this mystery. Jesus, by his suffering and death, his self-oblation in the eternal Spirit, has become our high priest and “the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 9:15). These words echo our Lord’s own words at the Last Supper, when he instituted the Eucharist as the sacrament of his body, given up for us, and his blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant shed for the forgiveness of sins (cf. Mk 14:24; Mt 26:28; Lk 22:20).

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Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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If nothing else, if this is true, it makes the papal visit a success.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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It was such an experience of the universal Church, being united through a common faith and baptism. The excitement of being part of something so wonderful and so much bigger than yourself brings great hope, for the message that he brings is none other than Christ, our hope and our reconciliation; so much needed in our world today.

And it includes this neat photo:

Sr Julie, Sr Margarita, Sr Mary Benedicta with Sr Veronica behind-1

The world needs more happy sister photos. So many of them are. But we rarely hear about them.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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I hosted a series of programs on the life and works for EWTN on Cardinal Newman in the year 2000.

At the end of one of his programs, while interviewing Fr. Ian Ker, the renowned Newman biographer from Oxford, I put a message on the television screen that read: “If you receive any favours from Cardinal Newman, please contact the Birmingham Oratory in England.” This is where Newman had lived and died and where the postulator of his Cause of beatification, Fr Paul Chavasse, resided.

Jack Sullivan happened to be watching this program. Jack Sullivan is a lawyer and ordained deacon from the greater Boston area who prayed the prayer card and was miraculously cured of a excruciating painful back ailment that left him unable to walk. He said that if there had been no notice at the program’s end, he probably would not have prayed to Cardinal Newman, whom he previously knew very little about. On Sunday in what is truly a first in the church, Deacon Jack Sullivan will proclaim the Gospel and assist Pope Benedict in the Mass honoring the man who cured him, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman!

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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I have a question for one of the protest’s main organisers, namely Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society. He announced earlier: “The days of popes are over.”

He added: “This is a secular country, we are a secular nation. The pope should take his religion home with him and leave us to arrange our society as we want it.”

My question is this: who exactly do he mean by “we”? Does “we” include religious believers or are they excluded from this mysterious “we”?

Do religious believers in Britain not get to have any say at all over how “we” should “arrange our society”?

If this is the view of Sanderson then he has more than proven the point both the pope and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury were making yesterday, namely that aggressive secularism is attempting to marginalize religion and silence its voice in public life.

This protest today is really about that. Sanderson does not believe that religious believers belong to “we.” “We” are something other. “We” are to be excluded and left out in the cold by these self-appointed guardians of the public square.

It may be an imperfect comparison, but this is a question folks were asking this week as they were watching the Delaware Republican primary coverage and backlash as people attacked nominee Christine O’Donnell for being a Christian girl saying Christian things in her youth. Is there no place for that in the public square?

Oh how I wish for Father Neuhaus’ thoughts on all of this! All of it.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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Listening to the Holy Father speak about the respect we owe the elderly, how can you not flash back to beauty of how John Paul II suffered the pain of his final days?

I remember in her celebration of the late Holy Father, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father, Peggy Noonan wrote of those end days, which George Weigel calls his “last encyclical”:

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The pope and the tea party—these are not unrelated things. They shouldn’t be, anyway. My thoughts, inspired by the pope’s first homily from this visit to the United Kingdom, in Glasgow, are here.

This pope and another: George Weigel and I talked about his new book and got into Benedict here.

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We might just radiate Christ!

Dear Jesus, help me to spread Thy fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with Thy spirit and life. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of Thine. Shine through me, and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel Thy presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me but only Jesus! Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as Thou shinest, so to shine as to be a light to others; the light, O Jesus, will be all from Thee; none of it will be mine; it will be Thou shining on others through me. Let me thus praise Thee in the way Thou dost love best by shining on those around me. Let me preach Thee without preaching, not by words but by my example, by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do, the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to Thee.
Amen.

Let it begin with me.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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But she also emailed:

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There are the controversial topics, the security threats, the celebrities, the history, the politics, but the heart of Pope Benedict’s trip to the United Kingdom is not his or anyone else’s agenda. It is Christ. It is praying for the desire to never stray from Him, who is truth. As England—and I only point fingers to help keep us straight!—surely does its share of straying.

From the Hyde Park vigil service (full text here):

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