My dear younger brothers and sisters: I write, as an older brother, to encourage you. Last month more than a million young Catholics gathered with Pope Benedict XVI in Cologne for World Youth Day. Twenty-five thousand of them were from the United States. The Lord entrusts the future of the
In these pages in the spring of 2004, John C. Haughey, S.J., noted that many of his non-Catholic students are not shy about making personal faith statements, both in the classroom and outside. Catholic students, on the other hand, seldom do so (“Church-ianity and Christ-ianty,” 5/24/04).
The movie fades up to the hushed tones of violins, the camera moving dreamlike through long hallways in an enormous, darkened museum. A guard walks in the distance. We pause; the camera pans left. Before us, next to a sign written in French, is the “Mona Lisa.” She looks down on us with
"We’ve lost everything, and I mean everything. We’ve lost contact with some family members." Kenneth Cain, a New Orleans construction worker, was describing the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina to The Los Angeles Times. When I read about Mr. Cain, I thought of a friend I k
Legacy
James Ross should be commended for placing a spotlight on prison abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantnamo Bay in Bush, Torture, and Lincoln’s Legacy (8/15). But he loses credibility when he extols our 16th president as a model of restraint and humanistic principles. Has he
As a new academic year begins, generalizations about American Catholic elementary and secondary education are risky, because there are signs both of losses and gains. Losses because with the closing of many financially strapped schools the system is smaller than it once was. Forty years ago, the pop
The citizens of the United States must insist that our leaders confront with uncompromising honesty the fault lines of American society revealed by the damage wrought by Katrina.