The Narthex

On September 30, 2021, the United States Senate confirmed Tracy Stone-Manning as the new director of the Bureau of Land Management (WashingtonTimes.com, Sept. 30). Choosing someone to fill the Bureau of Land Management director position is not normally cause for a national furor, but this time was different. In a…

I have now had both vaccine doses; I’m neither an “anti-vaxxer” nor a conspiracy theorist. But I have good, intelligent, well-informed, and rational friends who strongly oppose the vaccine, and I do not like to see them punished by the infliction of civil disabilities or verbal abuse. Some Christians and…

Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco continues his bold leadership on issues of national importance with a Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post (September 5). In "Our duty to challenge Catholic politicians who support abortion rights," Cordileone says bishops must call out the "self-professed" Catholic politicians who are "on the wrong…

In the last week or so I’ve had two friends ask me the same hard question about evangelizing, though in different ways. What follows is how I answered them. If nothing else, I got some practice in answering questions that Catholics, as strangers in a strange land, need to address.…

On Sunday the U.S. conducted airstrikes in the Iraq-Syria border region. Judging from U.S. media coverage of it on Monday, the country had already yawned and moved on. By lunchtime both the Apple News and Google News aggregators showed one short news item each, way down in the scroll. One…

From time to time, I’ve told people that outrage is the proper response to the outrageous. After all, ignoring the outrageous would be an outrage, wouldn’t? And it’s outrageous that we so often ignore the outrages of the day. Sounds plausible, or at least it did to me. But I…

Archbishop Cordileone’s May 1st letter, "Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life" (https://sfarchdiocese.org/inthewomb), is pastoral in the truest sense of the word: the archbishop is tending his flock,…

Frank Sheed, of Sheed & Ward, was a publisher, theologian, and Hyde Park Catholic apologist. When critics debated with him, citing the wrongs of the Inquisition, he would reply, “It was worse than that.” Then he would fill in the gaps. The Church was and is the home of sinners…

In the late 1940s, when I was a kid living in predominantly Irish and Italian East Boston, people practiced silence on Good Friday from noon to 3pm, respecting the three hours that Christ hung dying on the Cross. Business traffic slowed way down and cobblestone streets were silent of auto…

The mainstream media are overwhelmingly liberal; this is well known. Their all-out effort to portray Joe Biden as simply a good-natured older man -- the nation's Uncle Joe -- is obvious and predictable. Still, there are corners of the liberal media where one can find solid reporting that rejects simple…

When the FDA recently paused rollout of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine, several articles in the mainstream press compared the risk of blood clots from the J&J shot to the clot risk from taking birth-control pills. The comparison was driven by the fact that all six vaccine clotting cases,…

On my usual walk around the neighborhood park I saw two young guys sitting and chatting on the grass. It was mid-day, sun shining, the first warm day we’ve had in a while. At night I would have shied away, but I headed straight for them. As I passed by,…

Pope Francis calls for the wide use and distribution of the new anti-COVID vaccines, as do our bishops. They do so in the name of the common good. But they do not teach that everyone has an obligation to use the vaccines. Much less do they argue against ongoing reflection…

On February 9th Australia’s SBS TV News ran a short segment that purported to allay some people’s concerns about the COVID vaccine.  I cannot find a recording of the broadcast, but an SBS News article called "The most common myths about the coronavirus vaccine - and why they aren’t true"…

A COVID vaccine soon will be available to me, as I’m nearly 79. My married brother and I recently discussed this. He is 77, has grandkids, and must business travel on commercial airplanes, so he would have to get the shot. I live like a hermit, and the only traveling…