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I claim no expertise in climate science. I do claim a certain competence in detecting spin in the media; for I’m a card-carrying member of that clan, as I’ve committed print journalism for more than 40 years and worked in television for over 20.

Let me adapt to recent circumstances a thought-experiment theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar proposed decades ago: Imagine that a friend contracts a severe case of COVID-19 and medicine can do no more for him.

On Feb. 25, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives could have addressed any number of pressing issues.

As the names Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, and John Chrysostom suggest, the middle centuries of the first millennium, the era of the Church Fathers, were the golden age of the Catholic episcopate.

According to the movie “Love Story” “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

All lives are consequential, for every human being is an idea of God’s, and everyone is a someone for whom the Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, entered history, suffered, died – and was raised from the dead to display within history a new, glorified humanity.

Ten years ago, I began a most extraordinary Lent by walking up the Aventine Hill to the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the first day of the Roman station church pilgrimage – an eight-week journey that led to the book “Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches,” co-authored with my friend Elizabeth Lev and my son, Stephen.

Thirty years ago, on Jan. 22, 1991, Pope John Paul II’s eighth encyclical, “Redemptoris Missio” (“The Mission of the Redeemer”), was published. In a pontificate so rich in ideas that its teaching has only begun to be digested, “Redemptoris Missio” stands out as a blueprint for the Catholic future.

In his encyclical, “Ecclesia de Eucharistia,” St. John Paul II invited Catholics to “rekindle” our sense of “eucharistic amazement,” for “the church draws her life from the Eucharist,” which “recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the church” – Christ’s glorified, abiding presence with, in, and through his people, fulfilling his promise to remain with us “to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

The list of grave issues that must be addressed during a future papal interregnum, and by the cardinal-electors in a conclave, continues to grow.

In 2007, the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean completed their fifth general conference with a final report, known from the Brazilian city where they met as the Aparecida Document.  Its principal authors included Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Dominican Father Maciej Zięba died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on Dec. 31.

One of Dr. LeRoy Carhart’s “Clinics for Abortion & Reproductive Excellence” – named to yield the Orwellian acronym CARE – is located about a mile away from my parish in Bethesda, Maryland.

Among the tenured professorial skeptics, few Gospel episodes have been sliced, diced, and tossed to the dissecting room floor as “mythology” more often than the story of the Magi:.

From 1991 until 2005, Cardinal Camillo Ruini served Pope John Paul II as the papal Vicar for Rome – the man who handled the daily affairs of the diocese of which the Pope was, of course, bishop.

Joshua Wong is a young Chinese human rights activist, recently sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison on the Orwellian charge of “incitement to knowingly take part in an unauthorized assembly” – meaning, in Chinese Newspeak, urging others to protest peacefully the tyranny now throttling Hong Kong.

How bad a year has it been? Let me not count the ways. Good books can hearten us in 2021 and beyond, though. Herewith, then, some suggestions for Christmastide book-giving: 

  The juxtaposition of Thanksgiving with the church’s annual month of prayer for the dead hadn’t previously struck me with force; that it did this year has something to do, I expect, with my late sister-in-law, Linda Bauer Weigel. Linda died in January after a heroic battle with ovarian cancer – a dreadful diagnosis she received just before Thanksgiving 2019.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ: There are many exemplars of the cardinal virtue of courage in the Catholic Church today: Catholics in Hong Kong who risk their lives and livelihoods in defense of religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of association.

The pandemic of 2020 has been hard on every Catholic. Eucharistic fasting for this length of time may remind us what 20th century heroes of the faith in underground churches endured, and what 21st century confessors in China and elsewhere endure today; and that is no bad thing.