The National Catholic Review

Opinion

  • August 18-25, 2014

    Across the street from the otherwise thoroughly middle-class Havana home of Che Guevara, about an eighth of a mile from the enshrined debris of a downed American U-2 flight, stands the Cristo de La Habana, a 66-foot-high statue of Jesus Christ carved out of 320 tons of marble.

  • August 18-25, 2014

    Last October in America, Pope Francis warned the church against being “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. Washington, especially the religious right and secular left, shares this obsession.

  • August 18-25, 2014

    Gaza is being reduced to rubble while the world watches on YouTube and CNN. It has been as dispiriting a display of inhumanity and failure as one can imagine, yet it has not been enough to compel either side to accept a halt to the carnage. Each night new images of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “telegenically dead Palestinians” are paraded across television and computer screens.

  • August 18-25, 2014

    It’s 7 a.m., and I miss the bells.

  • August 18-25, 2014

    Assisted Suicide Split

  • August 4-11, 2014

    It must be said.

  • August 4-11, 2014

    There is an old chestnut, still circulating among agnostics, secularists and even a few believers, that goes something like this: “I don’t believe in God/organized religion. Look at all the violence religion has caused. Take the Middle East; those people have been killing each other for years.”

  • August 4-11, 2014

    Israel is at it again. Given political orthodoxy in the United States, I should probably say Israel and the Palestinians are at it again, or, more precisely, Israel and Hamas are at it again, yet the disproportion between the two sides is such that there is no equivalence. One side is offering ineffectual resistance with rockets that are striking chiefly for their inaccuracy; the other is using the most sophisticated weapons of war to terrorize a population...

  • August 4-11, 2014

    Revamping God’s Bank

    Ridding the beleaguered Vatican Bank of the occasional scandal is not enough for Cardinal George Pell, the new prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy appointed by Pope Francis to lead the reform efforts. “Our ambition is to become something of a model for financial management,” the Australian prelate told a packed press conference held on July 9 to unveil the latest measures in the...

  • August 4-11, 2014

    The evidence is piling up that too many Americans are wasting away in prison. The National Academy of Sciences, for example, recently concluded in a major two-year study that the United States “has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by the social benefits.” Other groups, like Human Rights Watch, the Brennan Center for Corrections, Corrections Today and the University of Chicago Crime Lab, have also raised their...