Last Word

For Lent, Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley announced an initiative to bring Catholics back to the sacrament of reconciliation. He asked all pastors of the archdiocese to arrange for confessions every Wednesday evening between 6:30 and […]

Five years ago, following the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I wrote the column below, reflecting on how the papal election would affect Catholic liberals. When my column first appeared, a friendly reader commented: Let’s […]

The official, authorized, expert studies of the sex-abuse crisis in the US have discerned “no clear pattern of homosexual behavior.” Odd, then, that the latest statistics continue to show that more than 80 percent of […]

Back in the 1980s, when Coca-Cola executives made the colossal blunder of changing their secret formula without adequately testing the market, the maladroit pairing of “new” and “classic” Coke prompted some whimsical musings from a […]

If you read all the mainstream-media coverage of the August decision by Judge Royce Lamberth to stop US taxpayer funding for embryonic stemcell research, you probably noticed that two consistent themes emerged. Neither theme is […]

Everyone agreed that they were embarrassing. The only question was whether they were “excruciatingly embarrassing” or “cringe-making.” The subject was the pamphlets that were prepared by organizers of the Pope’s visit to the United Kingdom. […]

A year-long investigation conducted by foxes has determined that poultry farmers devote excessive attention to security measures for chicken coops. Details on this important study will be available later. For now, consider a similarly stunning […]

He thought he saw an argument That proved he was the Pope: He looked again, and found it was A Bar of Mottled Soap. “A fact so dread,” he faintly said, “Extinguishes all hope!” -from […]

Former Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh, that venerable fraud, gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in late September in which he expressed himself on questions of topical import. Addressing the “leadership” issue, […]

Ernest Hemingway said that a successful journalist must have a built-in, shock-proof nonsensedetector. (He didn’t actually use the word “nonsense” in his formulation. But then Hemingway didn’t write for a Catholic magazine.) During the last […]