Kenneth L. Woodward

Reverend Pat Robertson, who died yesterday at age 93, had a penchant for prophesying that made him unique among the figures of the Religious Right. Continue Reading »

If more of the old canonization system had been in place, the McCarrick Report would certainly have delayed John Paul II’s canonization.
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Faith and family were twin pillars of George H. W. Bush’s life. Continue Reading »

John T. Noonan, Jr.’s life provides a robust affirmation that yes, there is always space in secular America for truly gifted practitioners of a humanism that finds it center in the Incarnation. Continue Reading »

Douthat's critics smack of PhDeism, the worship of credentials. Why should a well-read Catholic writer need a degree in theology to write about Catholicism?

The first time I met Mario Cuomo, the first words out of his mouth were “Teilhard de Chardin.” It was early September 1984 and Newsweek’s editors had invited the governor of New York over for an off-the-record lunch. Cuomo’s rousing keynote address to that year’s . . . . Continue Reading »

My memory of Fr. Benedict Groeschel goes back to 1964, when he was the Catholic chaplain at Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York where my wife and I lived for a year right after I was appointed Religion Editor of Newsweek. Friends told us we should attend his masses there if we wanted to hear good preaching. The children, orphans all, loved him, of course. But what I remember are the times when Benedict would clear the altar of its Catholic liturgical artifacts and preach the Protestant service as well whenever the Protestant chaplain was unable to do it himself. When our new house was finished, Benedict spent a day helping us move our furniture. Continue Reading »

The sturdiest storyline in the coverage of the canonization of two popes last Sunday was a narrative that claimed that Pope Francis yoked the two in a single ceremony because he wanted to unite the conservative and progressing wings of the Catholic Church—as represented by John XXIII (favored by progressives) and John Paul II (ditto by conservatives). That was the narrative in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and among several Catholic pundits who really should have known better. . . . Continue Reading»

As mediated by the journalists, the story of the Second Vatican Council was framed as a battle between traditionalists centered in the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy, and a core of progressive bishops, mostly from northern Europe. It was a facile political trope but one that did in fact . . . . Continue Reading »

On the wall of my Newsweek office, I kept a large map, in a mosaic of colors, of the United States. When you are a writer working in New York City, you need something to remind you of what the rest of the country is like: This was mine. There are no place names on the map, only the boundaries of . . . . Continue Reading »