Placide Tapsoba, a 53-year-old physician, was born at home in the village of Satte outside of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the landlocked West African country that until 1960 was the French protectorate of Upper Volta. He received his medical education at the University of Padua in Ital
On the bright morning of April 24, in a packed St. Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict XVI solemnly inaugurated his ministry as universal shepherd in a ceremony filled with symbolic gestures. For hundreds of years, the centerpiece of papal installations had been a coronation, in which the pope was c
Last August marked the 25th anniversary of the birth of the Polish nonviolent revolution known as Solidarity. On the morning of Aug. 14, 1980, a strike in the Gdansk shipyard began what eventually caused the demise of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The whole world watched as ordinary peopl
Robert Meza is a 40-year-old Arizona state legislator. The district he represents covers portions of central Phoenix, including both middle-class areas of old Phoenix and poor ones populated by Mexican-Americans. During his first term, he heard complaints from those Mexican-American constituents abo
Open to God
John A. Coleman, S.J., is rightly concerned by a theory of civil law that is excessively entangled with theological doctrine (Religious Liberty, 11/28). The official Catholic position on the numerous moral issues to which he refers certainly is theological doctrine.
Before the passage, on Nov. 15, of the new document from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on lay ecclesial ministry, there was debate in the bishops’ meetings over whether the term ministry should be used to refer to laypersons working on behalf of the church. The debate endeddramatical
This year rsquo s hurricanes floods and earthquakes produced such unforgettable apocalyptic scenes of devastation that they may well have altered at least temporarily the imaginative context within which we read Wendell Berry rsquo s new collection of poems many of which celebrate the serene n