Yes, the Boy Wizard apparently strikes again. His latest spell: enchanting young people (at least here in New York) with his Latin-ish spells to take up the “dead” language. “Dead” being a relative term (pardon the pun), as Pope Benedict XVI et al are busy doing all they can to resuscitate the Vulgar Tongue. Check…

Speaking of English saints (or would-be saints, as in the case of Newman, below)…In today’s NYtimes, reviewer Ben Brantley broaches the unspeakable: Is it heresy to whisper that the sainted Thomas More is a bit of a bore? Even Frank Langella, an actor who can be counted on to put the pepper in mashed-potato parts,…

Was Cardinal Newman gay? Or (as the joke has it) simply divine? That was the controversy that dominated the dust-up over exhuming John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English convert to Rome, in order to move his body to a more suitable location for veneration–that in anticipation of his beatification (the penultimate step to canonization)…

“The first Jew to address a Vatican synod said on Monday that wartime Pope Pius XII should have done more to help Jews during the Holocaust.” That’s the lead on the incisive Reuters story about Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen of Haifa, in Israel, who told Reuters he might have stayed away if he had known the…

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