There were lots of unfamiliar faces at Mass that morningvisitors invited to share the day with their friends from the parish. Some of them were not Catholic, though that was hardly a surprise. In my part of the country, the polyglot Northeast, such family-church celebrations rarely are for Catholics

In the days just before Easter, when few people were paying attention, Great Britain’s police commissioner admitted that members of Northern Ireland’s security forces had worked with Loyalist paramilitaries to murder Catholics in the 1980’s. The most prominent victim was Pat Finuca

St. Patrick’s Day in New York this year was about short-sleeved shirts hauled out of storage and men and women sweating while blowing into bagpipes. In some places along Fifth Avenue, young men and women were inspired to talk of summer plans, filled with promise. The women wore sleeveless shir

Of the many epithets flung at the French in recent weeks, one particularly colorful phrase found its way into the vernacular: “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” This delightful slander first appeared in an episode of “The Simpsons,” where it was meant as a joke, and then was

Writing about television in a magazine that already publishes the elegant thoughts of James Martin, S.J., on the subject is fraught with peril, but I will proceed apace. From my perspective, comparison can inspire only humility, and that is not such a bad thing.   Humiliation, on the other hand

Have you seen the nation’s latest status symbol on wheels? You may have, but you perhaps didn’t recognize its significance. You simply may have thought, as I did, how odd it is to see a military vehicle painted yellow, operated by a civilian and patrolling your local mall’s parking

Talk of war faded from the American conversation as midterm elections approached, but now that the campaign is over and Republicans are in firm control of Congress, we can expect a return to all war, all the time on the news networks and political talk shows. The producers and hosts, of course, will

Parents make no end of compromises to accommodate the dubious wishes and tastes of their children (despite any number of memoirs that insist otherwise), and I am no exception. Long car rides invariably lead to pleas from the back seat for a musical distraction from the dreaded are-we-there-yet syndr

Nearly six months ago, when each day’s front page brought more terrible news for the Catholic Church in the United States, I had a series of telephone conversations with several anguished Catholics in the Boston area. We talked about their anger, but we talked in equal measure about their fait

I wonder if Jim Florio, the former Governor of New Jersey who became famous because he raised taxes, feels any better about his fate now that he has been included in Caroline Kennedy’s new book of modern profiles in courage. Florio took office in 1990 and found himself staring at a recession-b