Criminal justice is on the agenda of the U.S. bishops at their annual fall gathering in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13-16. They will be discussing the draft of a pastoral statement entitled Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice. Their comm

Do Americans think their public schools are in what Gov. George W. Bush has been calling an education recession? It depends. Which Americans and which schools? Parents in Scarsdale, Grosse Pointe, New Trier Township and Beverly Hills do not seem to think their local public schools need radical overh

The Vatican document Dominus Iesus has been poorly received by Christians and non-Christians with whom Catholics have been in dialogue for the last 35 years. Although experts will debate its theological arguments in the months to come, it was the general tone of the document that upset most of our d

We all saw the newspaper photos, and some of us caught it live on television: a father desperately calling out The child! The child! and the terrified 12-year-old Muhammed al-Durrah dying on the spot. That is not the only thing that has died in Gaza and Nablus and Jerusalem. It is hard to believe th

Pro-life Americans suffered a serious defeat with the approval of the RU-486 pill by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pill, which has been used for several years in Europe, allows a woman, under a doctor’s supervision, to abort a fetus up to 49 days after the beginning of her last me

The United Nations Millennium Summit last month aroused no enthusiasm at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, The New York Post. The paper’s pundits were heavily sarcastic. In a Sunday roundup of the events of the first week in September, Linda Stasi claimed that environmental scientists had discov