The Roman Catholic Church is still struggling to meet the challenges of responding to Vatican II. The Church has overcome some of the difficulties that the council sought to address, but it has also inherited a new set of problems: a confused religious identity, an uncertain sense of mission, a precipitate decline in traditional morality, … Read more
Victim Status Since the platform for the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley’s famous Sproul Plaza is now a veritable ethnic smorgasbord, with many students speaking to each other in Spanish, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Tagalog. It is apparent to visitors that the 1960s have not really left Berkeley. There is a thriving street trade in tie-dyed shirts. … Read more
Less than forty years ago, American society began a laborious and painful project to eliminate all vestiges of racial segregation from public life. On May 17, 1954, flanked by eight colleagues at a press conference, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren read from the momentous Brown v. Board of Education decision: “Does segregation . . . … Read more
During the tempestuous time of the rise of Protestantism following the Reformation, the Catholic Church needed advocates who would defend the faith against calumnies and distortions, while at the same time militating for needed reform. One of the most formidable Jesuit polemicists for Catholicism was Robert Bellarmine, whose Controversies profoundly influenced Church thinking for more … Read more
The apparent collapse of the Soviet and communist threat around the world raises the important question of what principles should guide U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s and beyond. Since World War II, American policy is most consistently characterized by anti-communism or resistance to Soviet (and for a time, Chinese) expansionism. Although U.S. leaders pursued … Read more
Public opinion surveys consistently show the American public opposed to greater immigration. There are several reasons for this. First, immigrants are suspected of taking away jobs from American citizens. Second, many Americans fear that immigrant families will end up on welfare or public dependency, thus costing taxpayers more and reducing government services to the general … Read more
The stunning election victory by Violeta Chamorro and her U.S. backed UNO party over the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua has created a crisis of conscience for the American political and religious left. Few have appreciated how central is the fate of the Sandinistas to the activist community in the United States. A generation weaned on … Read more
Thomas Quigley, the American bishops’ advisor on Latin and Caribbean affairs, has the reputation of being a True Believer in radical causes, a partisan of liberation theology, a sort of inside-the-Beltway Sandinista. He hardly looks the part of a Latin revolutionary. No bandanna, or bullets across his chest. Quigley is a quiet, soft-spoken man. He … Read more
Father Charles Curran has done the Catholic Church a great service. He has made himself the test case for the validation of the principle of religious freedom in the American university. In a landmark decision, Judge Frederick Weisberg of Washington, D.C., upheld Catholic University’s right to refuse to rehire Father Curran as a tenured professor. … Read more
Boston College May Have Been Caught with Its Pants Down. What Are the Implications? Recently Frank McLaughlin, a junior at Boston College and editor of the independent conservative Boston Observer, decided to test the policies of the Jesuits who administer that Catholic university. On three separate occasions, he sent student reporters to the Boston College … Read more
In their recent letter, “Partners in the Mystery of Redemption,” the American Catholic bishops attempt to reach out to the feminist movement. Perhaps somewhat strangely, the bishops endorse the angry and alienated sentiments of women who have little or no sympathy for Catholic teaching on a range of issues: divorce, contraception, abortion, to name a … Read more
What’s at Stake with a Bush Supreme Court Perhaps the most dramatic way in which the new Bush administration will affect the lives of Americans is through appointees to the Supreme Court. The reason is that, on a scale unparalleled in American history, the Court now adjudicates issues that govern the daily rhythm of people’s … Read more
Asked if he was disappointed recently at not winning the Nobel Prize, Graham Greene said no, he was waiting for an even bigger prize. Asked what that was, he replied, “Death.” The notion of death as a reward is strange to most modern literature, which confines itself within the parameters of womb and grave, paying … Read more
The recent Vatican document calling for moral restraints on birth technology has generated animated debate and controversy in the United States and abroad. This debate has been generally welcomed in Rome, because it was one of the main objectives in issuing the “Instruction On Respect for Human Life In Its Origin.” Many countries, including this … Read more
More than any single person, John Henry Newman is responsible for legitimizing Catholicism in Britain. Before the publication of his classic, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (an account of his religious conversion and beliefs), it was still fashionable to espouse anti-Catholic and antipapist sentiments in England. Certainly prejudice against Catholics was not entirely obliterated after Newman’s … Read more
While the American church ponders economic in- equities and nuclear conflagration, Catholics in the Third World haggle over a different agenda. The issue being debated by the hierarchy and laity in much of Africa and Asia is “inculturation” — the question of how to fuse Roman Catholicism with predominantly pagan cultures eager to forget their … Read more
After several decades of issuing ecclesiastical proclamations such as “Field Education in the Catholic Seminary,” “The Homily and the Sunday Assembly,” and “Liturgical Music Today,” the American Catholic bishops have chosen to enter the public policy arena, with two pastoral letters which challenge the basic tenets of U.S. defense and economic policy. The letter on … Read more
The recent meeting of the American Catholic bishops at the Capital Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., was a contest of progressive proclamation. The auxiliaries and most reverends reveled in the press attention, trying to outdo each other in the hyperbole of their accusations against their counÂtry. “Where is the social justice in America?” “Flow can … Read more
Malcolm Muggeridge once distrusted all systems. Now one has met the rigors of his doubt. Last December Malcolm Muggeridge — iconoclast, womanizer, and professional cynic — stunned his native England by converting to Catholicism. Muggeridge took Holy Communion in a small steepled chapel in Hurst Green, Sussex, and when the service was over he … Read more
Chaplains at campuses across the country report a renewed interest in religion among students, which suggests that the secular monopoly of the sixties may finally have ended. New Church groups are springing up at colleges, and existing organizations are swelling in membership and prestige. Says the Rev. Peter Gomes, minister of Harvard’s non-denominational chapel, “No … Read more