Senator Joe McCarthy’s controversial Catholic faith...

Why is there a special sink in the sacristy?
Philip Kosloski
If you have ever been in the sacristy — the room set aside for preparing for liturgy — inside a Catholic church, you may have noticed two sinks. One sink looks normal and has a faucet with normal plumbing. Then next to it, or in the same room, is a secondary sink. It often has a metal top that covers it and usually does not have a faucet. The technical term for this special sink is the “sacrarium,” sometimes called a “piscina”...

Pope’s Sunday Angelus: “If we want, we can become good soil”...

“As nothing compared with the glory”...
Fr. Victor Feltes
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the current archbishop of New York, tells a story from his first Lent as a newly ordained associate priest in a small Missouri parish. The president of their church’s men’s group told him unenthusiastically, “Father, you’re supposed to give us an evening of recollection in Lent.” So Fr. Tim, on fire to share the treasures of our Faith, worked earnestly for weeks preparing spiritual reflections about characters appearing in the Stations of the Cross.

Joining a Church in the midst of scandal — Kevin Stephenson...

San Gabriel, California mission founded by St. Junípero Serra, burns in overnight fire...

On race, COVID and just about everything else...
Msgr. Charles Pope
Here is a recent interview I did with Simone Rizkallah of Endow, a Denver-based group that “unites the Catholic intellectual tradition with intentional community by creating study guides and organizing women into small groups.” It began as a discussion on race and COVID and expanded from there. I really enjoyed our conversation which was wide-ranging and personal...

The Parable of the Sower shows just what a great risk Jesus took, and how much depends on us...
Tom Hoopes
This Sunday, the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A, Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower, one of those Gospel stories that we feel like we know. After all, Jesus himself explains the parable in the long form of the Gospel — meaning that to interpret it in any other way is foolhardy. But the application of the parable is another matter. The Parable of the Sower shows just what a great risk Jesus took, and how much depends on us.

Notre Dame Cathedral’s spire will be restored to 19th-century design, French President Macron announces...

Robert George: Stand up to the woke bullying in America...

Why Catholic voters in four states could again decide the presidential election...
Clemente Lisi
The first six months of this year has produced a pandemic that has killed thousands of Americans followed by high rates of unemployment triggered by the coronavirus lockdowns. Add to that the fight for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd and the protests and civil unrest that followed and you can see how 2020 will be forever remembered as one of the toughest years in American history.

To understand this papacy, forget Rome — head to Lampedusa...

What makes ships mysteriously slow down or even stop as they travel? It’s called the “dead-water phenomenon,” and here’s how it works...

We need Julia Greeley — a former slave in Missouri, and now a saint in the making...
R. Jared Staudt
Almost exactly 100 years ago, on the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1918, a woman, a former slave, died in Denver. This apostle of the Sacred Heart, spreading devotion across the city, was the first lay Catholic to lie in state as hundreds visited her body to honor her works of charity. Friends had to help bury her, because she had given away her burial plot to a poor man.

Why didn’t the Spanish colonies in America become a single country like the United States did?

4 kinds of slavery the Civil War didn’t end: Slavery to passion, fashion, custom, and error...
Mark Langley
The bad news is that the Civil War did not put an end to slavery. Sure, the Civil War did end the apparent and visible slavery that made legal the ownership of human beings by other human beings, whereby the owners could wring their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. And whatever one thinks about the causes of the North and the South, and the means employed, and the tremendous and appalling loss of life that ensued...

Cancel the liberal cancel culture, say 130 liberal intellectuals in a liberal magazine...

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