Your Eminence, your Excellencies, my brother priests, beautiful religious who are here with us, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I feel like the luckiest man in the world. I was so scared to get up here and give this talk. I've been really nervous about it for the 20th anniversary of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, with all of you amazing people...

Lovingly correcting someone who is in moral or religious error is a good thing to do. As St. James writes in his New Testament Letter, “If anyone among you should stray from the truth and someone bring him back, he should know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.” Like a father who disciplines every son he acknowledges and delights in...

In the past week, two important reports have called attention to the lingering, devastating fallout from the sex-abuse scandal. The fundamental problem today is the same problem that gave rise to the scandal in the first place: too many bishops are not acting like bishops. First let me call your attention to an essay in First Things by Michael Mazza, with the provocative title...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The celebrity death-match nature of the never-ending reality TV show that is our daily news and national politics had become so chaotic that I thought that was no longer true. That is, until a papal deathwatch united us — just as John Paul II’s last days once had. It doesn’t seem as crass an observation now that Pope Francis is rallying. Regardless of one’s politics or opinion of him specifically...

What is distinctive about her? Two things. Sister Wanda was said to have had mystical visions, which she wrote down. She also was said to have borne for some period of her life (at least in the 1930s) stigmata — wounds in her hands, feet and side, and marks of scourging. They manifested themselves irregularly, but usually on Thursdays and Fridays, and particularly during Lent.

Carl James Joseph was born in Detroit. But for the past 17 years he has lived in the Holy Land. He is not a typical expat. He didn’t go to Jerusalem for work, and he doesn’t live among other expats in a tony Tel Aviv neighborhood. Instead, James Joseph, 64, has spent most of the past decade living in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, built in the place where Jesus was laid to rest after the crucifixion, and where he rose form the dead.

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture mourns the passing of its founding director, W. David Solomon, associate professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, on February 26, 2025. He was 81. Solomon received his B.A. from Baylor University and his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas before joining the Notre Dame faculty in 1968, where his teaching and research focused on virtue ethics, ethical theory, and medical ethics...

How many books are in the Bible? Well, it depends on who you ask! While Protestants and Catholics agree on the 27 books of the New Testament, there is disagreement over the canon of the Old Testament. During the Reformation, the Protestant reformers removed seven books from the Old Testament — Wisdom, Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus), Tobit, Judith, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees...

When I was in sixth grade, my parents told me that I would be switching from Catholic school to public junior high the following year. In preparation, I went one day to visit the junior high school. The principal assigned a student to be my guide, and I went with that student to all her classes...

Pope Francis is feeling better, so we are told by the Vatican press office. That is good news, obviously. I wrote here last week about the need and right of the pope for some measure of privacy and dignity as he wrestles with his mortality, and our obligation to pray for him. I am grateful the prayers of so many have been answered with what seems to be real, if guarded, progress in his recovery since then.