A rainy November evening finds three dozen people gathered for prayer at the Cabrini Center for Nursing in Manhattan’s East Village. They include Anthony Frarracci, who arrives early to help arrange the chairs in a circle, and Vita Santangelo, a wheelchair-bound native of Sicily whose recent 9
The refugee camp at Dbayeh, founded in the early 1950s north of Beirut--once housed thousands of Palestinian refugees, most of whom lived in Christian villages in Galilee. This week, the camp has become home to a new influx of refugees from the south: 58 Lebanese families, most of them Shiite Muslim
One of the strongest and most distinctive features of U.S. Catholicism is the central place parishes play in the church’s life. In recent years we have heard a lot about the closing of some parishes and reconfigurations of others, especially in parts of the country like the Rust Belt. But the
It is hazardous to write about current events in the Holy Land, since they change rapidly and publication dates are distant. I write in the midst of the invasion of the Gaza Strip launched by Israeli forces under the name Operation Summer Rains. The stated goals of the invasion are the release of th
The political aspects of the present war in Lebanon seem to be the focus of much reporting. The moral implications, however, are just as important. Should all of Lebanon and its citizens have to sustain being pounded each day for the behavior of some of its citizens? Likewise, should the Lebanese go
Now I get it. Or at least part of it. The prospect of not raising children was not a big deal for me when I entered the Jesuits. It wasn’t a deal at all, really. And, over time, while I calculated (almost daily) the difficulty of going through life without one special person to stand by my sid