Like the Irish before them, today's immigrants are willing to work hard for a better life.

For parents and students in struggling Catholic schools, winter surely is the cruelest season. For it is now, in the first quarter of the year, that many parents and children learn that their school - for so many, their refuge - will not reopen its doors in September. Actually, this is a best-case s

Just after Christmas, and just before James Frey became the most discussed writer of fiction in American letters today, I was playing a Harry Potter board game with my kids. Now, I know very little about Harry and his friends, which is my loss. But playing along at least allowed the kids to believe

Christmas was still a couple of weeks away on this December evening in New Jersey. Those intrepid reporters employed by the Weather Channel were deployed in various stormy locales, warning folks in the Northeast to batten down the hatches, or whatever one does when a snowstorm is imminent. This sort

The question of how the United States is treating, or mistreating, prisoners captured in the war on terror has been simmering for some time. Indeed, it has been an issue ever since George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speech, when he committed the United States to a global fight against terrorism, a fig

While searching recently for a colorful quote about relations between church and state, I turned to a man who knew a thing or two about the subject: John Hughes, known to critics and admirers alike as Dagger John. Hughes, as most readers will know, was the bishop and then archbishop of New York from

Perspective is not among the virtues generally associated with youth. Like aching joints and sagging midsections, perspective is what you get when, like St. Paul, you at last put away the things of childhood. If, however, you paid close attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (and who didn&r

The Irish Republican Army’s recent announcement that it would dump arms and end its decades-long campaign against the British seemed oddly anticlimactic. Save for a brief episode in the mid-1990’s, the I.R.A. has been on a cease-fire since 1994. So its dump-arms order received only passi

During his seven-and-a-half years as pastor of St. John’s Church in downtown Newark, Msgr. Jim Finnerty has met more than his fair share of unforgettable characters. For starters, there was a fellow who called himself Tony Baloney, an 80-year-old man with no known address. Then there was Mama,

On a fine sunny Sunday in May, the priest in the pulpit was talking about the everyday beauty that may have escaped the attention of some of the busier people in the pews, but clearly not his. With the precision of an amateur botanist, he described the magnificence of the dogwoods, lilacs and cherry