Celebrating Mass was wonderful the first time I did it 63 years ago. It is, if possible, even more wonderful today.

Discovering a tradition as it changed

John Lukacs' 'Last Rites,' reviewed

Michael Novak's 'No One Sees God,' reviewed

"All of us long for a pentecostal church: a church in which the Spirit rules, and not the letter; a church in which understanding breaks down the fences we erect against each other. We are impatient with a church which seems so unpentecostal, so unspiritual, so narrow and fearful. Joseph Ratzinger s

Visiting Rome in early 1959, while still an Anglican priest, I asked a learned Benedictine from Belgium who was prior of the monastery where I was staying, whether he had attended the funeral of Pope Pius XII six months earlier. His reply, an apt comment on the style of papal liturgies of that era:

In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV proposed terms of peace to the nations engaged in the First World War. Though so close in content and formulation to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 that Benedict’s most recent biographer, John F. Pollard, charges the Calvinist and notorio

Born in Berlin in 1923 to affluent Jewish parents Gregory Baum was sent for safety to England as a young teenager With the outbreak of war the refugee became an enemy alien and was interned in Canada Befriended there by a Catholic family he discovered Augustine rsquo s Confessions Like Edith S

ldquo Those who live for a time in Rome experience the church rsquo s age but also its youth They experience the church rsquo s breadth and diversity its religious and human wealth but also the limits and weaknesses of its representatives and members rdquo So writes the widely respected Germa

Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world This sentence in Fr Andrew Greeley rsquo s review of The First Five Years of Priesthood by Dean R Hoge lifted me out of my chair when I read it in these pages Am 9 30 02 I sent him an e-mail message You rsquo re right I