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October 09, 2019

Taking up the charge

It is quite an honor to communicate with you in this space that my dear friend, former boss and trusted mentor Msgr. Mike Boland has occupied for so many years.

February 20, 2019

Significance of pope’s visit to UAE

When Pope Francis disembarked from the plane in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on Feb. 3, it marked the first time in the history of the Catholic Church that the successor of Peter visited the Arabian Peninsula. To focus too much on this marker of papal history, however, is to risk missing the present and future significance of this trip for interreligious relations, particularly Muslim-Catholic dialogue.

February 06, 2019

Oscars 2019: The year it got weird

It’s been a strange year for the Oscars. In August the Academy announced the creation of a new category, “Outstanding Popular Film,” which was almost immediately shouted into oblivion by Oscar voters and critics who would prefer the movies that make the money that actually allows modern-day cinema to survive be happy with their cash and People’s Choice Award nominations.

June 06, 2018

When post-Vatican II Catholics wondered, ‘What’s a church?'

Like most Americans who live in major East Coast and Midwestern cities, I have always belonged to parishes with century-old church buildings that fit a certain style: tall, long, ornate, likely gothic. When I first began researching the more modern-looking Catholic churches that began cropping up in the postwar boom, I was drawn to the major buildings which, like St. Norbert’s Abbey in De Pere, Wisconsin, (dedicated 1959) were intended by their builders to last for a millennium.

April 25, 2018

Reclaiming Mary Magdalene in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’

NBC’s live broadcast of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on the night of Easter, April 1, may very well have been “live TV at its best,” as Rob Weinert-Kendt argued in his review for America magazine. The stage play opened April 27 at the Lyric Opera here in Chicago.

April 11, 2018

I remember Cardinal George

The first time I met Cardinal Francis George, it was in a meeting with a group of rabbis in the first months after he came to Chicago. I asked him, “You have come to a city with a robust Catholic-Jewish relationship, established and cultivated by your predecessor, Cardinal Bernardin. Do you have any concerns about the Catholic-Jewish relationship?”

April 11, 2018

Pope Francis: Pathways for holiness today

At the very end of “Gaudete et Exsultate,” Pope Francis’ new apostolic exhortation, the pope describes his purpose in writing: “It is my hope that these pages will prove helpful by enabling the whole church to devote herself anew to promoting the desire for holiness. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to pour out upon us a fervent longing to be saints for God’s greater glory, and let us encourage one another in this effort. In this way, we will share a happiness that the world will not be able to take from us.”

March 07, 2018

The Francis papacy turns 5

“The people are sovereign.” No one noticed when he said it, and no one who reported on it initially caught its revolutionary meaning. After all, Pope Francis was talking about a Colombian referendum in one of his free-wheeling, airborne press conferences on the way home from Azerbaijan in October 2016. What he said was not an infallible statement, and it did not come in the context of any other official church teaching. This was just a conversation with some reporters. All he really told us was what the man, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, thinks.

February 21, 2018

U.S. Catholic bishops stand up for unions

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has sent a strongly worded brief to the Supreme Court that urges justices to reject so-called right-to-work measures that church leaders argue decimate unions, undermine workers’ rights and clash with centuries of Catholic social teaching.

August 09, 2017

Illinois has a budget! Now what?

I moved away from Illinois in 1995 when the state pension deficit was a trifling $20 billion. Moving back to Illinois in 2017, a $105 billion deficit now confronts me and those of you who never left. Our state’s unmet pension obligations are crippling.
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