Of Many Things
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November 23, 2015
The conference room in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office suite on Capitol Hill can comfortably seat a dozen people. But on a Monday morning earlier this month, triple that number had crammed themselves into it. A few minutes past 11 o’clock, three Warren staffers squeezed their way into the crowd and, after brief introductions, a young man in jacket and tie rose to address them. “As people of faith,” he began, “we are motivated to work for...
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November 16, 2015
As a Jesuit scholastic, I spent one year at America . In the summer of 1994, I returned to the United States from a two-year stint with the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Africa, and my provincial superior told me I needed another year of regency before applying for admission to study theology. At the time I saw it as a punishment.
Now I see it as a grace. For I was missioned to the place that I returned to after...
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November 9, 2015
For people of a certain age the name Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama conjures an infamous image of his “stand in the schoolhouse door,” his failed attempt to literally block the entry of two African-American students to the University of Alabama. The stand-off marked the high-water mark of Mr. Wallace’s public campaign against integration, an effort he launched six months earlier in January 1963, when he promised Alabamans “segregation now, segregation...
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November 2, 2015
That cry of “Lazarus, come out” we heard north of our border on the evening of Oct. 19 was the Canadian electorate reviving the fortunes of the long-thought-moribund Liberal Party. In a stunning coast-to-coast triumph, the Liberals won 184 of the country’s 338 seats in the House of Commons—the largest increase in seats in a single election in Canadian history. Led by Justin Trudeau, the idealistic son of the late premier, Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals capitalized on a widespread...
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October 26, 2015
The largest copyrighted work of art on the planet is the “Rainbow Swash,” six giant streaks of brightly colored paint on an LNG gas tank, a 140-foot tall steel container located on the eastern side of Boston’s Southeast Expressway. Completed in 1971, “Rainbow Swash” is the biggest and most famous work of the artist-cum-activist Sister Mary Corita, the “rebel nun” who “broke new artistic ground during an era when opportunities were limited for women.” As...
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October 19, 2015
For the 63rd consecutive year, the nation’s political nobility assembled beneath the Romanesque dome of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., for the liturgical rite that marks the start of a new term for the U.S. Supreme Court. Sponsored by the John Carroll Society, the Red Mass (known as such because the priests wear red vestments), is a rare moment when leaders of church and state gather as one to invoke the blessing of God on those responsible for the...
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October 12, 2015
We’re a long way from the world of Charles Carroll, the wealthy landowner (and slave owner, sad to say) who has the distinction of being the only Catholic and the longest-lived and last surviving signatory to the Declaration of Independence. A member of the Continental Congress, the predecessor of the present 114th Congress, he was also the brother of John Carroll, who was a Jesuit before he became an archbishop, like Pope Francis, and became the founder...
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October 5, 2015
On a sweltering morning this past August, my husband and I sat in folding chairs in St. Peter’s Square hoping to meet Pope Francis. Surrounding us were about 100 other couples, almost everyone dressed in either wedding dresses or tuxedos, as part of the Sposi Novelli celebration. Italian for “new spouses,” the weekly ceremony allows newly married Catholic couples a brief meeting with the pope following his Wednesday audience....
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September 28, 2015
We were an NBC family, even during the heyday of Walter Cronkite. Every night at 7:00 we’d take our seats in the living room in order to learn what had happened that day in places far afield from Cape Cod. “Don’t you want to know what’s going on in the world?” my grandmother would ask on the rare occasion when I was watching a movie and didn’t want to change the channel. First it was John Chancellor, then Tom Brokaw. The CBS Evening News may have led the...
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September 21, 2015
‘Out of our memory of the Holocaust,” said President Jimmy Carter in 1979, “we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world...fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.” President Carter made those remarks as he received the official report of the presidential commission on the Holocaust, or Shoah, the deliberate and singularly horrific mass murder of millions...