Election Day. Nearly noon. Appropriately, the sky is dark and a heavy rain is falling. I’m in Brooklyn. Elections provoke my inner cynic to claw his way out and pronounce a pox on both major political parties (and on the plucky-but-perennially-irrelevant minor parties). The contagion of ideology has infected our politics and our Church with predictably necrotic results. Ideology is by its very nature the death of authentic religion. Catholic Christianity — which is to say authentic, historical Christianity —... Read more

December 1990: Asheville, North Carolina The priest has a German last name and a pump-pump handshake. “God bless you,” he says to me and Richard. “God bless you.” It’s nearing midnight. The three of us are standing in an alcove toward the rear of the basilica. Cinematic darkness drapes the nave. The cassocked priest – Father Carl – materialized from the shadows only moments ago and now points us toward the altar and two side chapels, one Marian, one eucharistic,... Read more