The working document for next October’s international synod of bishops is now being circulated. The text, titled The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World, runs to 120 pages and has 229 footnotes. Significantly, the pope’s groundbreaking encyclical on Ch
In 1985 James Froemsdorf, a Missouri state trooper, a husband and the father of three young daughters, was shot three times and killed by a wanted felon who had been stopped for speeding. Although the criminal was handcuffed, he was able to free one of his hands, grab the officer’s gun and kil
The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College. Sponsored jointly by the college a
Cardinal Danneels, did you plan this intervention at the May consistory beforehand? No. At synods, I usually wait about a week before I speak. First I listen. I feel the temperature. I listen to what has been said, what has not been said, and what I think needs to be said at that point. Some bi
When I began to think about psychiatry as a medical specialty in 1963, I was vaguely aware of a tension between the church and psychiatry. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen suggested on his weekly television show that Catholics would not need a psychiatrist if they made a good confession. G. K. Chesterton had
The issues confronting the church in our time are many. I have chosen three of them, well aware that this choice is doubtless both biased and incomplete. And I am also certainly under the influence of the situation in northern Europe, where the churches are exposed to the eroding influence of secula
How did it happen that Christianity—which prided itself on its expansive love, extended even to enemies—should itself resort to violence? “More Christians,” writes Paula Fredriksen in a recent review (The New Republic, 6/18) of H. A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops: