In Rome I stayed at the Raphael, a fairly plush hotel that caters to Socialists, and one day Bettino Craxi, the secretary of the PSI, burst from the elevator, flashing the very smile that one sees on posters all over Rome. There is yet another election going on. I was on my way to see … Read more
It is coming onto a year since we first began to talk of founding Catholicism in Crisis. The thought originated with Michael Novak, he circulated it among a number of people, and quite early on we began to explore the possibility of a dual base for the journal. On the one hand, the Washington-New York … Read more
Our March issue was devoted in its entirety to Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age, a letter drafted by Michael Novak, commented on by many and signed by more than 90. On a later page will be found some additional signatures. Readers of Catholicism in Crisis might have been surprised to see that the April … Read more
The Christian dismayed by the workaday anti-Americanism of many of his more active coreligionists is often invited to consider that there is an enmity between religious faith and the world and that belief inevitably puts one on a collision course with the society in which one lives. And there is something right in this reminder. … Read more
This issue together with the previous two should give the reader a sense of what we are trying to do in Catholicism in Crisis. It is both difficult and all too easy to say what you are going to do before you do it. This journal had its origin in a sense of a crisis … Read more
The Case of John Knasas is symptomatic of the real threat to academic freedom (and religious orthodoxy) in our seminaries and colleges. It is often said that academic freedom in American colleges, universities and seminaries is threatened if a bishop has the right to judge whether those who claim to be teaching Catholic doctrine are … Read more
In 1968, at midpoint in the Nuclear Age, Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, reiterating the Church’s historic opposition to contraceptives. One is frequently reminded that some who rose up in wrath against the encyclical, now embrace to the letter mere drafts of a proposed pastoral on war and peace from the bishops of … Read more
ALTHOUGH THE FATHERS of Vatican II, particularly in the Constitution on the Laity, spoke of an enlarged role for lay people in the areas where they have special competence, the post-conciliar scene has involved an odd crisscrossing. Not a few clergy have moved into the world, assuming the tasks (and clothing) usually associated with the laity, while some lay people look … Read more
The last refuge of the relativist is: You may do anything you wish so long as you don’t interfere with the rights of others to do whatever they wish. This statement is empty since it doesn’t tell us to do anything in particular. That is why it is sometimes thought to be equivalent to the … Read more