A plenary council or regional synod may not have been good ideas anyway. But more and more, the attitude appears to be that the church’s business is the bishops’ business and no one else’s; openness and a desire to involve others in church affairs seem to have become passé. It is worth considering why.

At his 80th birthday party last year, celebrated with dozens of friends in the garden of his home in northwestern Connecticut, Isaac Stern asked me to sit next to him at dinner. Rarely have I felt so honored. His luminous personality represented to me the perfect combination of a monumentally succes

Convergence 2000 began appropriately with a meal at the guest house and ended with the reading of "The Madeleva Manifesto: A Message of Hope and Courage." The warm welcome and hospitality of Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind., surrounded us during the entire weekend of April 27