Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options

Most relevant
Papal Envoy Meets BushA papal envoy met with U. S. President George W. Bush and reiterated the Vatican’s opposition to a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, saying a war without U.N. approval would be “immoral, illegal, unjust.” Italian Cardinal Pio Laghi, who delivered a personal message f
The clergy sexual abuse scandal has left us stunned and confused. But crisis in the church is not a new phenomenon. One of the most important spiritual resources in times of crisis in the church has been Scripture. Two items in this year’s roundup of books on the Bible deal explicitly with Cat

Credit Where Due

The prodigious Father Andrew M. Greeley, who observed his 75th birthday this month, used to direct his ire at incompetent bishops, faulty practitioners of sociology and resigned priests who wrote about the psychosexual problems of the clergy. In The Times and Sexual Abuse by Priests (2/10), he finds The New York Times guilty of atavistic no-popery.

Thereby he resembles, perhaps more than he would like, the 76-year-old Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the diviner of one’s innermost thoughts, who recently apodictically attributed the media’s coverage of clergy abuse to an intentional desire to discredit the church.

E. Leo McMannus

A mansion of 87 rooms, built on Long Island in the 1920’s, surrounded by spacious grounds—hardly the kind of setting in which you might expect to find a gathering of mostly middle-aged Hispanic men and women spending a weekend in prayerful silence. And yet there we were, a group of 14 ma
My first memory of hearing the Angelus prayed was on a hillside in Mexico. We were in a country place not far from Puebla. American college students were wandering around to get a sense of the culture and to see the sights. I was not a Catholic then, and was only gradually learning how religion had
A few years ago the late Lou Bannan, S.J. was presiding at the noontime Mass on a first Friday of the month at Santa Clara University. In his homily he told us about ferrying a group of older retreatants to the San Jose airport and hearing them rave about a fellow Jesuit who’d wowed them with
Pope Says No to War; Church Opposition to Iraq Attack MountsIn a private audience with one of the staunchest supporters of possible military action against Iraq, Pope John Paul II urged British Prime Minister Tony Blair to make every effort to avoid war and spare the world new divisions. The encount
Jim Sawyer
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the end of the policy of containment that had guided American foreign policy during the cold war Some commentators declared the Soviet demise to be the end of history and faulted presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton as bunglers They missed an e
Vatican Backs Efforts to Prevent Iraq War, Disarm SaddamWith diplomatic moves and moral encouragement, the Vatican backed international efforts in mid-February to prevent a new war in Iraq and promote the country’s peaceful disarmament. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders and organizations joined a gr

Accurate

The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley’s conclusion that The New York Times’s coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the church constitutes virulent anti-Catholicism is irresponsible (The Times and Sexual Abuse by Priests 2/10). The Times, like most major newspapers that covered the scandal, never implied that most priests were predators. And this is especially true of Laurie Goodstein, whom Father Greeley attacks. Never have I found her to be anything but professional and accurate in her reporting.

It does no good to blame the messenger for bringing bad news.

William A. Donohue,President, Catholic League for