When more than 400 Catholic moral theologians from around the world gathered in Padua, Italy, from July 8 to 11, the meeting evoked an awareness of God calling the church to deeper communion and generated among them a powerful desire to work for greater unity throughout the global human community. T

Forty years ago, on Dec. 7, 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued its “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” This conciliar text laid out the most challenging vision of the church’s social mission of the modern era. It proclaimed that the Catholic community sh

Over the past half-century, hopes that human rights could become truly effective standards of international behavior have risen and fallen like the tides. When the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed in 1948, many saw it as a genuine commitment to “never again&r

You will not find Kakuma on most world maps. It is a small town in northwestern Kenya, located in the desert where anthropologists hypothesize the human race began. Twelve years ago, the Kenyan government picked the area for use as a refugee camp. Today Kakuma has 80,000 refugees.The largest group a

How are we to envision the mission of the church in the aftermath of the horrifying events of Sept. 11? Equally challenging, how can we conceive of the church’s ministry in the midst of the clergy sexual abuse scandal that is tearing the fabric of church life in the United States?   Respo

Many in the religious community, including the Catholic community, have called attention to two dimensions of the background for the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11: the economic and the political. Their voices need to be listened to carefully if we are to avoid misguided responses to those tragic eve