By William A. Donohue The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is being used by state lawmakers to crack the wall of separation of church and state. Unless this is resisted by the hierarchy of the Church, state meddling in the internal workings of the Church will grow. One of the more conspicuous examples is [...]
By Joseph A. P. De Feo Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.” The foregoing lines represent an apt condensation of Professor Daniel L. Dreisbach’s thesis [...]
By Bronwen Catherine McShea Daniel J. Goldhagen’s latest book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, purports to be a much-needed “moral philosophical” contribution to a troubled field of scholarship. Standing on the shoulders of other critics of Pope Pius XII’s wartime Church—James Carroll, Garry Wills, [...]
By Kenneth D. Whitehead When a scholarly journal, The Political Science Reviewer, asked me to do an in-depth review-article on the major books that have recently come out about the Pope Pius XII controversy, I was at first not too eager to get involved. The Pius XII controversy seems to go on and on, with no resolution [...]
Philip Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State By Joseph A.P. DeFeo In defending school choice or God in the Pledge of Allegiance, it is too easy to find oneself on the wrong side of the “wall of separation” between church and state. But as Professor Philip Hamburger reveals in his timely and well-researched tome, Separation of [...]
By Bronwen Catherine McShea Garry Wills is devoted to the so-called “spirit of Vatican II,” which he claims was hijacked by a backward-looking papacy. He wrote Why I Am A Catholic (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) to flesh out his differences with Rome, and to offer hope to “conscientious” Catholics that “reformation” is in the wings, that the true spirit [...]
By Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D. Today, institutions of higher education are major generators of socially dominant ideas, images, and fashions. As sociologists might say, they are major "agents of socialization." Empirically speaking, public higher education is almost exclusively—at least in the humanities and social sciences—an agent for the promotion of politically left-wing secular thought. It should [...]
by Dr. Richard C. Lukas Nowhere is the politicization of history and its practitioners more evident than in the recent writings of a number of historians of the Holocaust era. The temptations of glitz, glamour and money seem to have influenced some historians to sensationalize their subjects to get noticed by the media. Instead of writing [...]
by Thomas C. Reeves When American history textbooks mention Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at all, it is briefly and in connection with the allegedly "feel good" Christianity of the 1950s. To some Americans, Sheen was merely a glib, superficial television performer and pop writer who blossomed briefly on the national scene and rapidly disappeared. Many orthodox [...]
BY DAVID REINHARD I think the Roman Catholic Church has turned the corner on its priest sexual abuse scandal. Yes, turned the corner. True, the stories about pedophile priests—the crimes and cover-ups—will fill the news and fuel the outrage of Catholics, non-Catholics and anti-Catholics for some time to come. The courts, civil and criminal, will continue [...]
