Anonymous

At noon I have to be at the local Catholic school—let’s call it St. Dismas—to train altar servers. I will arrive a few minutes early, and by 12:05 most of the kids will have trickled in. We are in Southern California, so most of the boys at St. Dismas wear short pants year-round. Students are required to attend one Mass per month with the school, but it has never occurred to anyone, not their parents, not the pastor, not the teachers, and certainly not the students, that they should wear pants to Mass. The girls wear skirts that in 1966 would have been described as “micro-minis.” When I told the boys’ parents that I expected them to wear their uniform pants to Mass when they become servers, the school principal—a genial thirty-something man who insists on the rigorous use of the title “Dr.” but often wears sweatpants and flip-flops to work—cornered me outside his office for a talk. He warned me that I might get some pushback from parents on the pants requirement. “We are only a medium-Catholic school,” he informed me. “We’re not really that Catholic.” Continue Reading »

Silicon Valley is in an uproar. Angry blog posts have been written, resignations tendered, and boycotts organized, with no sign that the furor is likely to abate. Seeing such ruckus, a casual observer might assume that some fallout had finally resulted from the shocking revelation that several of . . . . Continue Reading »

On March 6 in the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, a decision came down that could provoke a national battle greater than anything since the infamous Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. On the other hand, in relentlessly extending the fatal logic of Roe, the decision could be an . . . . Continue Reading »

Talk to those who know about such things and they’ll tell you that Daniel Patrick Moynihan has read more and thought more about welfare policy than just about anyone alive. Certainly more than any other politician. In books such as Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding and The Politics of a Guaranteed . . . . Continue Reading »

“Blatant untruths” are among the sins perpetrated by the Catholic Alliance, according to Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, N.Y., who addressed a closed executive session of the U.S. bishops last November. The Alliance, a division of the Christian Coalition, “will create massive confusion” . . . . Continue Reading »