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That is the title of Michael Sean Winters’ fascinating essay at NCR on Cardinal Gibbons’ 1887 sermon delivered in Rome at Santa Maria in Trastevere (my old neighborhood church, alas). The ocassion was the consistory elevating Gibbons, of Baltimore, to cardinal, just the second American so honored. This was the era of the Americanist debates…

The current president has cited the late cardinal before, most recently in his speech at Notre Dame: “He was a kind and good and wise man,” Barack Obama said then of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. “A saintly man.” And the “Common Ground” approach of Chicago’s Bernardin and Chicago’s Obama have great resonances. At a meeting this morning with [mainly] Catholic…

Like too many people, I suspect, I never watched “On the Waterfront” straight through until well into adulthood. And probably just as well, because I could appreciate it–and the labor priest and activist Fr. Pete Barry, played by Karl Malden, who passed away July 1 at the age of 97. Part of what made the…

Benedict XVI’s rather pious letter opening the Year for Priests is beginning to elicit some reactions–diplomatic but also clearly stating that the pontiff’s invocation of the Cure’ d’Ars as a model priest may not be terribly relevant for working priests today. The Cure’, a.k.a. St. Jean Marie Vianney, was a nineteenth-century French priest whose quasi-monastic existence hardly…
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