Archive

Early Sunday morning, July 28, 2002, things were looking grim for the closing papal Mass of World Youth Day in Toronto. The previous four days had been a tremendous...

Forty-seven years ago, Pope John Paul II issued his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man). The first letter in the centuries-old encyclical tradition devoted to the Christian...

Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Vatican secretary of state from 1979 to 1990—and before that, the architect and chief diplomatic agent of the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI—initially played hard to...

Those who remember the epic pontificate of St. John Paul II may recall a tall, handsome layman with well-combed, iron-gray hair, dressed in a black business suit, white shirt,...

The “Melian Dialogue,” from Thucydides’s classic History of the Peloponnesian War, is the foundational text of the realist school of international relations theory. It’s 416 b.c., and the island-statelet of...

There’s a steakhouse on East 50th Street in midtown Manhattan, to which Cardinal Timothy Dolan and I would sometimes walk for dinner after a preprandial or two in his...

P D. James’s detective novels, featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, are every bit as gripping as those penned by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edith Pargeter...

Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American journals, writers were driven to distraction by the fanatical fact-checking characteristic of...

In a 1974 address to a group of lay Catholics, Pope Paul VI noted that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does...

Having recently lamented in this space that book reading is on life support in these United States, I find myself in the awkward position of recommending a made-for-television series...

Twenty years ago, I published a small book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God. It enjoyed a fair sale, got translated into French, Spanish,...

The Roman Missal provides four distinct Mass texts for the celebration of the Nativity of the Lord: the “Vigil Mass,” the “Mass During the Night,” the “Mass at Dawn,”...

When it was first published in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, dealt a severe blow to the pride...

Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste for shocking people via undiplomatic language. In a conversation with the great...

Surveys indicate that reading books is dropping precipitously across all age groups. This is a tragedy in itself; it’s also a social disaster, as a post-literate society risks becoming...