The U.S. bishops already saw this coming at the beginning of the year and said Catholics should attend separate Masses for the two days.

He prayed for people across the globe, and especially for the people of Aleppo.

Reformers might rail against sacred images, but, at Christmas, the world turns Catholic to gaze upon the Christ child.

The holiday special was the product of a Jewish producer from San Francisco and a Mexican-American Catholic whose mother brought him across the border in the 1920s.

Whatever else the virgin birth may be, it doesn’t represent the domestication of the divine.

We are afraid: afraid that our questioning will lead to spiritual cataclysm, that once the camel’s skeptical nose gets under the tent flap, the whole shabby edifice of our faith will collapse.