The story is told of the Irish woman, 40 years married and the mother of seven, who left church after hearing a sermon from a young priest on marriage and motherhood and remarked, "Sure and I wish I knew as little about it as he does." Having spent the last 17 years working on Bible transl

"Here Comes the..."As I read the article by Thomas Sweetser, S.J., (7/2) on behalf of his 50 fatigued pastors, I couldn’t help but feel sad that this group apparently can no longer differentiate between a job and a vocation. A job can be quantified by the hours, but a vocation—

Continuing Archival ControversyA group of Catholic and Jewish scholars established to study World War II archival material already published by the Vatican has suspended its work. In a letter dated July 20, the scholars said that in order to continue working together they would need "access in

Archbishop Weakland Says He’s Not Disobeying PopeArchbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee declared, in a message read in all parishes on July 15, that he is not disobeying the pope by going ahead with the renovation of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The archbishop expanded on tha

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

Maybe the devil made me do it, but after reading Bishop (now Cardinal) Walter Kasper's essay "On the Church" (reprinted in America, 4/23) for the second or third time, I went back through the text and conducted a little test.

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

Human Saints and AngelsThe art portfolio by Michael O’Neill McGrath, O.S.F.S., “The Saints and Me” (7/2), is a delight. McGrath brings out through his art one of the best aspects of Catholicism, our fellowship with the saints and their very humanness. We see Peter eating fish, Doro

The New York Times has as much enthusiasm for President Bush as Mr. Creakle, the headmaster of Salem House, had for that wholly unpromising schoolboy, David Copperfield. The Times’s editorials regularly register their disfavor with Mr. Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. What about the

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