Word has come down that Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, one of the great figures of the Catholic Church, certainly in the United States, died this morning at the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University in The Bronx. He was 90 and had until the past year or so had been very active, but the effects of…

In an Op-Ed in today’s Boston Globe, the current head of the National Review Board, the blue-ribbon, lay-led group that is supposed to keep the bishops following their own policies on child protection, says Catholics have nothing to worry about–all is fine, and the scandal is history. The hook for Michael Merz’s piece, “No Doubt…

Sound like an odd couple? Not the way the new TV czar for my own Brooklyn diocese does it. Deacon Greg Kandra, a longtime CBS News and “60 Minutes” writer–and author of The Deacon’s Bench blog–was recently hired by Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio to help revamp and rebrand the diocesan network. Once called “The Prayer Channel,”…

1968 was a true annus horribilis, as the Queen (upending Dryden) might have said, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the social upheavals surrounding the Vietnam War ramping up. Then, on Dec. 10, 1968, came the bizarre death of Thomas Merton, the Catholic convert, Trappist monk and enormously influential spiritual…

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