Over the past few years, leaning and loafing at your ease, as Walt Whitman would say, when you pondered the coming of the year 2001, what came to mind? Did you imagine yourself strapping on your personal jet pack, à la George Jetson, and zooming off to a high-tech job in some space pad? Or did you

Once a month in the late afternoon, I take the subway uptown to Spanish Harlem. There, I celebrate Mass for a small community of sisters—the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The subway leaves me at East 116th Street, and I walk on for several blocks through a world very different from m

WHEN ROBERT KENNEDY was attorney general of the United States, he and his family frequently attended Sunday Mass in the auditorium of a large public high school in Arlington, Va. The local parish was newly created, and Virginia saw no problems in renting the auditorium to the parish while its new ch

A silver anniversary is evocative of endurance along (one hopes) with bearing fruit, bonding and blessings. Such evocations and reminiscences came to mind this year on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the National Association for Lay Ministry, a Catholic organization in which I was active for

The Most Rev. Thomas V. Daily, bishop of Brooklyn, N.Y., recently wrote a lengthy pastoral letter on the current shortage of priests and the decline in the number of vocations. Under the title, Pray the Lord of the Harvest, the letter was published in the Nov. 11, 2000, issue of The Tablet, Brooklyn

The buses in Dublin these days are displaying advertisements from the pro-life movement demanding a new constitutional referendum on abortion. The Taoiseach (prime minister), Bertie Ahern, has promised to meet that demand, but short of a political crisis that would force his hand, the odds in favor

Consistory of Cardinals Meets with PopeIn the largest meeting of its kind ever held at the Vatican, more than 150 cardinals joined Pope John Paul II to discuss questions of collegiality, dialogue and evangelization in the church. The pope opened the consistory, which met from May 21 to 24, with a pr