It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And it's starting to bug me just a little bit.

Lots of news from the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints today Pope John Paul II has been declared Venerable which nbsp had nbsp been nbsp expected for some time nbsp So has Pope Pius XII which was not expected though is not nbsp terribly surprising given the comments coming from the V

As a companion piece to the Of Many Things nbsp this week here s a nbsp briefer and more business-oriented op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today called Merry Marketing which takes aim at corporations who use and abuse religious themes in their Christmas sorry holiday campaigns nbsp Happi

It s funny how much a movie can influence your spiritual life nbsp Jennifer Jones who died yesterday at 90 won an Academy Award for her performance as St Bernadette Soubirous in the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette nbsp At the time of its release Catholic schoolchildren were taken

Michael Sandel the wildly popular Harvard professor whose courses on justice have drawn SRO crowds for two decades is the subject of a PBS series called Justice What s the Right Thing to Do which is also available for online viewing nbsp His book of the same title has just been published

The Seattle Times nbsp has picked up the story of the Rev Michael Ryan s piece on the new Mass translations What If We Just Said Wait which appeared in last week s edition of the magazine and generated a raft of responses both here 133 comments and counting and on other websites A new t

From Robert Mickens at The London Tablet Pope Benedict XVI has said that a Marxist-driven liberation theology is continuing to cause great harm to the Church in Brazil 25 years after he first tried to crack down on its proliferation ldquo Its consequences more or less visible in the form of rebe

nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp Call it Schadenfreude if you must but this is pretty funny nbsp And if you ve ever have a complaint against America which is close to impossible but nbsp hey even we admit we re not perfect you have to admit

In our Culture section we re very lucky to have as one of our newest film reviewers John McCarthy the editor of Cineman Syndicate and the media correspondent for Catholic Digest He also reviews films for Catholic News Service and Boxoffice Magazine nbsp He joins our longtime reviewer Richard A

Talking about The Holy Family way back in October with American Catholic Radio in Cincinnati nbsp This was before recording an audio book which explains the--ahem--casual wear nbsp