Commonweal

“Taut” is not an adjective one usually associates with Charles Dickens. The great English writer composed novels that brim with expansive observations and leisurely turns of phrase.

Sixty-plus years after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the Catholic Church in that country remains split between what is generally called an “underground” church, loyal to Rome, and a “patriotic” church that, though it may respect the pope as spiritual leader, submits to the institutional leadership of the regime and the Communist Party.

Marcel Breuer would have been proud. So would Baldwin Dworschak. And maybe even St. Benedict as well.

A crisis of capitalism is supposed to create an opening for the political left. But in Europe, the place where the concept of left and right was born, political conservatives have won the bulk of the elections held since economic catastrophe struck in 2008. Is that about to change?

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel was an important Orthodox theologian with a particular interest in the place of women in the Orthodox Church. She also showed what it means to live in a truly ecumenical way. She died in 2005 at the age of ninety-eight. Her personal journey encompassed two world wars and major changes in every Christian church.

The parable of the sower in St. Luke’s Gospel concludes with Jesus explaining that the seed that fell on good ground and yielded a hundred fold represents “those who, hearing the word [of God], hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience” (8:15).

I remember the day five years ago when the head of a conservative Catholic congregation of women religious asked me what I taught. “Catholic studies,” I replied.  “Oh,” she said, in a fairly good but probably unintentional impression of Lady Bracknell, “and what exactly is that?”

“I’m you,” I told my father when I was a toddler, and then spent the rest of my childhood and early adulthood trying to figure out how he did everything. So it’s odd that I never discovered how he managed to hold on to his faith despite a life filled with doubt.

Interference

In the decades following World War II, an impressive collection of American Catholic intellectuals joined together to ponder what they believed was an urgent question: “What is an intellectual apostle?” These prominent scientists, linguists, historians, philosophers, and literary scholars—some of them clerics, but most laypeople—taught at Georgetown, Fordham, Notre Dame,

Not a Reset Button

Thomas L. Kuhlman

Standing still watching

A great blue heron

Standing still watching

Getting no richer

Getting no poorer

Getting no fatter

Getting no dinner

What are we doing

On a sweltering afternoon in Port-au-Prince, I walked with a group of visiting U.S. human-rights lawyers up to a dusty lot filled with shacks, tents, and broken-down buses and cars. These are the makeshift shelters of families who lost their homes in the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010. One family was using a dirty blanket as one wall of its shack.

Near the stone ledge

where I sleep

the lion paces.

All night

he walks back and forth above me,

then leaps to the ledge,

settles in close.

I feel the heat of his flanks,

In a March 14 statement (“United for Religious Freedom”), the Administrative Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly reaffirmed its opposition to the contraception mandate in the Affordable C

The plight of the middle class is shaping up to be a focus of the 2012 presidential campaign. This is as it should be, given the struggles of working families during the Great Recession, with its continuing high unemployment rates and depressed housing market.

It is often said that facts are revolutionary. With their power to burn off the ideological mists that obscure our political vision, and to remind us of the unanticipated and sometimes negative consequences of our most well-meaning actions, facts can shake our views on matters great and small, dishing out intellectual therapy to the benighted and the bemused.

When the encyclical Humanae vitae was promulgated in 1968, its teachings were widely contested—and notably belated. The question of birth control was supposed to have been decided at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), for inclusion in Gaudium et spes.

The United States has been at war for more than a decade. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and others have been killed. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been maimed or crippled.

“Character is a fine autumnal word, with echoes of Protestant gentility and sherry in the afternoon.” Perhaps surprisingly, those are the words of someone who worked in political science, a discipline whose practitioners, along with many in the social sciences, tend to write in flat, desiccated prose.