How the mighty are fallen! Or falling, anyway. Tony Blair is finished. George W. Bush is being deserted by the party he has wrecked, the submerging Republican majority. And Rudy Giuliani, only recently the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, looks like a goner. Thanks to Pope Benedict, he probably has no hope of... Read More

Thomas Jefferson was a great man, but not necessarily a great president. In the same way, I’m not sure that John Paul II has been a great pope; but I have no doubt that he is a very great man. He’s still proving it. Writing of Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton remarked that the term great... Read More

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, archbishop of Genoa, has called Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code “rotten food” and evidence of “anti-Catholic” attitudes. He laments that even Catholic bookstores are carrying “stacks” of it. He wants to “unmask the lies” the book propagates. Cardinal Bertone’s words have gotten a lot of attention because, for one... Read More

Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Vatican would say nothing about same-sex “marriage.” It’s beneath its dignity to enter into debate with a sick joke, and when it does so it only allows progressive-minded fools to change the subject. Such fools, some of them nominal Catholics, argue that the Church is a bunch of... Read More

Nearly every day for nearly 2,000 years, Catholics have celebrated Mass, the sacrificial reenactment of the Last Supper. They have built thousands of churches, monasteries, convents, hospitals, schools, and other religious and charitable institutions. They have prayed, fasted, said rosaries, made novenas, and performed innumerable good deeds. They have developed great theologies and created towering... Read More

A few weeks ago I tried, in my feeble way, to express why I fell in love with the Catholic Church. I received many gracious and grateful responses from others who felt the same way, some of them converts like me. Inevitably, there were also a few jeers, directed not so much against me as... Read More

As expected, Pope John Paul II, in his sweeping apologies for the mistreatment of Jews by Christians through the ages, said nothing about the “silence” of his predecessor, Pius XII, about the Holocaust of the Jews during World War II. Many commentators, Jewish and gentile, are therefore calling the new apologies insufficient. Even the New... Read More

A new book, Hitler’s Pope, by John Cornwell, just published by Viking and excerpted in Vanity Fair, renews the old charge that Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and did little or nothing to save Jews from Adolf Hitler during World War II. Mr. Cornwell, a Catholic, says he started out to defend Pius from the... Read More