I knew that Betty Smith had Brooklyn roots, but until recently I didn’t know that she grew up a German Catholic in Williamsburg. Born Elizabeth Wehner in 1896, she describes her home parish in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (still a great book, by the way): “Francie thought it was the most beautiful church in [...]

If you study Church History long enough, you find a lot of interesting trivia that never fits into books or lectures. One of them is the history of clerical garb. Many young priests today tend to be more traditional, and it’s not unusual to find some sporting a cassock, a biretta, or even the old [...]

It was twenty years ago in June that Pope John Paul II canonized 117 Vietnamese Martyrs. My interest in the Vietnamese Martyrs started about that time when I read a book on St. Theophane Venard (left), a French missionary executed in Vietnam in 1861. I still remember one of the lines I read in that [...]