The National Catholic Reporter recently saw fit to mark Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s 75th birthday by perpetuating two myths—falsehoods, really—about events in contemporary Church history in which the cardinal was involved. As it happens, I was, too. So I’m […]
On December 20, 2002, I was at lunch in the papal apartment when the wide-ranging conversation John Paul II always encouraged took an unexpected turn, with the pope asking me how President Ronald Reagan was […]
The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the nation’s capital is a magnificent Neo-Gothic structure, based on 14th-century English models, that calls itself “Washington National Cathedral”: a non-sequitur repeated by many others. […]
Browsing Footprints in Time, the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a tale from eighty years ago with a lesson for American public life today. The idiosyncrasies of the British government being […]
I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; his daughter, my mother, was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law, a nurse. My brother is a physician; […]
Four years ago, this column praised the courage of Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for his Inauguration Day letter to President Joe Biden. In an entirely respectful […]
Ralph Fiennes is a remarkable actor. And if he wins an Academy Award for his brilliant performance in Conclave, this section of his masterfully delivered homily to the College of Cardinals, of which he plays the Dean, […]
Various cultures—English, Turkish, Chinese—claim to have invented the maxim, “The fish rots from the head down” (a favorite in Your Nation’s Capital during the unhappy years when the Redskins/Commanders were owned by Daniel Snyder). Applied […]
Jubilee 2025 began on Christmas Eve 2024, with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s in Rome, and will conclude on January 6, 2026, when that door of the Vatican basilica is closed. […]
The post-Christmas liturgical calendar may seem a bit Scrooge-like, as the child-centered, innocent joy of the Nativity is quickly followed by three feasts of a different, even sobering, character. First, on December 26: St. Stephen […]
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