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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

Over at DotCommonweal, the estimable Grant Gallicho takes up a cudgel on behalf of the doctrine of scandal. Yes it’s true, he allows, that the doctrine has been abused by bishops to protect their own. But it is within the teaching itself that Catholics might find a way through this slough. Because scandalizers are required…

Sheesh. You tell Donohue he’s right and defend his bud Dolan, and what do you get? A smack across the chops for having the chutzpah to suggest that the doctrine of scandal, used time and again to rationalize the shielding of pedophile priests, has not served the Church well and ought to be jettisoned. Now,…

It’s no surprise that Barna’s new survey of the Republican presidential horse race (h/t David Gibson) shows Mike Huckebee doing well among Protestants, the more conservative the better. What’s striking to me is that he’s running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney in the Catholic favorability sweepstakes: 45-32 as opposed to 46-29. Meanwhile, the unfavorables outweigh the…

Last week, Jeff Anderson, the preeminent plaintiffs lawyer in Catholic sex abuse cases, released a letter from then Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asking that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) do everything necessary to laicize an incorrigible pedophile priest named Franklyn W. Becker. In the letter, Dolan…

OK, OK, I really do appreciate Pope Benedict’s hermeneutical exoneration of the Jews in re: the case against Jesus. Never mind that Vatican II settled this half a century ago with Nostra Aetate. As Jim Martin and Michael Sean Winters among others contend, there are good reasons for the pope–this pope–to re-articulate the position in…

To say that Peter Gomes was one of a kind hardly conveys his uniqueness. His mother came from Boston’s African-American aristocracy, a type once known to blacks, not unpejoratively, as “dicty.” That she ran off and married an immigrant from the Cape Verdean Island of Brava, a foreman in the cranberry bogs of Plymouth and…

Is it possible that Mike Huckabee, currently testing the presidential waters by way of a book tour, just made a mistake when he suggested to a radio audience that President Obama was not to be trusted because he grew up in Kenya? If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with…

The Maryland Catholic Conference, summoning its flock to keep America’s original Catholic colony from adopting same-sex marriage, thanked “the thousands of Maryland Catholics who have raised their voices in recent weeks in support of our society’s foundational institution – the union of one man and one woman in marriage.” The problem for the bishops in…

That’s what the tide of revolt in the Arab world signifies, at least according to Scott Shane’s news analysis in today’s NYT: For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders…

That’s pretty much the bottom line in Nate Silver’s regression analysis of the impact of 23 demographic factors on partisan voting in the 2008 election. His object was to see how much of a difference union membership makes to the likelihood of voting Democratic. The answer is: in the same ballpark as evangelicals and weekly…
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