In his first restaurant review, Father Leo Patalinghug shares his dining experience at Baltimore's Tio Pepe's.Read More

Sixty-four years ago, on Aug. 14, 1947, Great Britain’s empire in the Indian subcontinent was divided into the independent, self-governing Dominions of India and Pakistan. The division of the subcontinent into two states was bitterly opposed by the Indian Congress Party and Winston Churchill, but supported by the Muslim League (with Congress, one of the...Read More

Implementing a Twitter firewall at home is a bit like asking a roommate to hide your Halloween candy.Read More

Judging by the impassioned commentary from some Catholic quarters during recent confrontations between unionized public-sector workers and state governments, you’d think we were back in 1919, with the church defending the rights of wage slaves laboring in sweat shops under draconian working conditions. That would hardly seem to be the circumstances of, say, unionized American...Read More

Exiting St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican just after midnight on Christmas, the young woman next to me hummed softly to her infant. The strains of “Silent Night” were not hard to discern, as she comforted her baby. It made me recall the Nativity scene we had just passed while exiting the Christmas Mass in...Read More

We Christians get a pretty good deal at Christmas time. We get two Christmas seasons! We get the retail Christmas, the time before Christmas, with all the lights and decorations and songs. This is the season to get people to buy things. It’s sort of a secular season of Advent, but, rather than focusing on...Read More

So where were you when the Aug. 23 earthquake hit? I was hearing confessions at Oak Crest in a room off the chapel. The whole room and chapel shook. After that, no one else came to confession! I guess people figured: “Don’t go in there! What kind of penance is Father Joe handing out?”Read More

Catholicism is in crisis all over Old Europe. Nowhere is that crisis more pronounced than in Ireland, where clerical corruption and disastrous episcopal leadership have collided with rank political expediency and a rabidly anticlerical media to produce a perfect storm of ecclesiastical meltdown. The country whose constitution begins “In the name of the Most Holy...Read More