Speaking on NPR s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon on the need for penance and some of the causes of the sexual abuse crisis nbsp Weekend Edition is one of the sanest places to discuss these issues I think nbsp The link to NPR is here

Normally the charge of lunacy is a bit ad hominem for these pages But what if the charge of lunacy is actually exculpatory like a plea of temporary insanity at a murder trial I raise the issue because a large number of Tea Party folk who descended upon Washington yesterday to commemorate tax d

Pope Benedict XVI - Catholics like me have been insisting these past weeks on TV and radio - is a key part of the solution to the clerical sexual abuse crisis which is why the media attempt to scapegoat him is so misguided Indeed what has surfaced from the recent firestorm is how providential it

President Obama amplifying remarks of former Secretaty of State Condolezza Rice during the Bush administration and more recently by Vice President Biden and CENTCOM s General David Petreaus said something out loud that appears radical but is actually rather obvious resolving the long-running Mid

Why did the U S bishops fight the health care bill until the end even when President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion The bill may now be law but questions still linger In this Web-only article Nicholas P Cafardi of Duquesne University School o

I m always up for something new and fun especially if it s just down the street nbsp Anyway when the good people at Bigthink a hip new website nbsp called me up for series of interviews in their way-cool downtown studio I was game nbsp They ask all sorts of experts sitting in front of

Cambridge MA You may recall from Jim Martin rsquo s kind notice in January that on July 1 I will become director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard I haven rsquo t done a thing yet but the Center moves along steadily and indeed has become venerable this week marking it

Tea Party activists are marking the deadline for filing federal income taxes with a protest hear in Washington D C Yesterday Sarah Palin was in Boston site of the original Boston Tea Party giving her fair and balanced interpretation of American history and its current political circumstance I

When we launched The Good Word a few years ago we hoped it would be a place to meditate on events in the news in light of Scripture For Catholics the news these days focuses largely on the church itself so it seems fitting to take up the issue of the sexual abuse crisis on this blog as John W

According to Jake Martin SJ one of our television critics Showtime s The Tudors has finally hit its stride this season More often than not episodes of ldquo The Tudors rdquo jumped from plot point to plot point with all the subtlety of crashing cymbals Dialogue was a fusion of a ninth-g

Last Saturday in Nevada Senate majority leader and candidate for reelection Harry Reid told an ebullient crowd that the Senate Democrats and the President had not forgotten immigration reform From the New York Times ldquo We rsquo re going to come back we rsquo re going to have comprehensive im

The general secretary of the Catholic bishops conference of England and Wales issued the following statement this morning in response to Cardinal Bertone s attempt to link sex abuse of minors to homosexuality To the best of my knowledge there is no empirical data which concludes that sexual orien

My colleague Father Martin has pointed out the ridiculousness of Cardinal Bertone rsquo s comments linking pedophilia with homosexuality I find the Cardinal Secretary of State rsquo s remarks not only offensive but completely inexplicable Why would he cite studies that do not exist or which were f

The comments yesterday from a high-ranking Vatican official linking homosexuality with pedophilia essentially blaming homosexual priests for the abuse crisis are all the more surprising when you consider a few salient points First of all nearly every reputable mainstream psychologist and psychia

I was recently asked to write a ldquo white paper rdquo draft for the California Catholic Bishops for possible voting on the issue of life-sentence without parole for juveniles The United States Supreme Court currently is adjudicating two petitions from incarcerated prisoners from the State of

Acts of the Apostles is our only canonical version of the early growth of the Jesus-believing community cf the Gospels where we have four accounts and so it is immensely formative in the tradition of what we assume happened That we count on the reliability of these events does not preclude our

Whom should President Obama nominate to replace Justice John Paul Stevens The question is today Washington rsquo s favorite parlor game Last year I somewhat mischievously suggested Obama nominate Al Gore to the Court and lo and behold tonight on MSNBC rsquo s The Ed Show my suggestion was t

The second part of Jason Berry s gruesomely compelling expose of the sordid life of Maciel Degollado pictured founder of the Legionaries of Christ has been published by NCR Part 1 is here It contains more evidence of how Maciel suborned his opponents through lavish funds What is sad is how c

The misinterpretation and misreporting of the 1985 Ratzinger letter in the Kiesle case -- my points in this BBC TV interview over the weekend are similar to those in MSW s excellent analysis -- indicate not just poor quality coverage but something altogether nastier It was the great theorist Ren ea