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 [...]
By Russell Shaw In the last several years the culture war against the Catholic Church has been extended to a new battleground—the writing of history. It is not the first time this has happened, since it has long been known that he who gets to tell the story of the past his way can reasonably hope [...]
The government of the United States, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport in 1790, "gives to bigotry no sanction." But now The New Republic does. "The anti-Semitism of the intellectuals," Peter Vierek once shrewdly remarked, "is anti-Catholicism." In its January 21 issue, The New Republic has sunk into the swamp of bigotry as low as [...]
by Ronald J. Rychlak A couple of years ago, when critics charged that Pope Pius XII had shown a callous indifference to the plight of the Jews, the common refrain was that if only he had been more outspoken on behalf of the Jews, like his predecessors, thousands of more lives might have been saved. The [...]
By William A. Donohue The war on Pius XII hit a new low when Commentary magazine published a piece by Kevin Madigan in its October issue. In the article, "What the Vatican Knew About the Holocaust, and When," Madigan argues, "The Vicar of Christ knew enough, but did not care enough, to speak more forcefully or to act more [...]
By Robert P. Lockwood She was one of the most famous imposters in the history of the United States, yet her story can still be found in the bookstores and is widely available on the Internet. Maria Monk was the 19th century woman who claimed to be a nun that finally escaped after years of torture [...]
by Ronald J. Rychlak The self-destruction of the Catholic-Jewish Pope Pius XII study group came as little surprise to those who had been following its progress closely. From the very beginning, several members of that group rejected their mandate and instead sought to force a change in Vatican archival policy. When the Vatican stood its ground [...]
By Robert P. Lockwood Mention the Crusades and the assumption is of a ruthless Church driving Europe into a barbaric war of aggression and plunder against a peaceful Islamic population in the Holy Land. As the common portrait paints it, led by mad preachers and manipulating power-hungry popes, the Crusades were a Church-sponsored invasion and slaughter [...]
By Robert P. Lockwood The public debate over abortion was critical in a resurgent anti-Catholicism in the mid-1960s. With the cooperation of media, abortion became an ongoing battle waged with a war of words mired in anti-Catholicism. Why did Catholicism become the issue in the abortion debate? It was in many ways a planned effort by [...]
