Blaine Amendments are state constitutional provisions rooted in 19th-century anti-Catholic bigotry, designed with the purpose of preventing the government from funding religious schools. Fortunately, challenges to the Blaine Amendment’s constitutionality are being heard with increasing frequency by the Supreme Court. This legal…
A few years back, my wife heard a young woman share that she had felt guilty for being able to go out to dinner with friends in Chicago because she knew her mother in South Africa was struggling to scrape…
Shortly after his elevation to archbishop of Washington, D.C., Wilton Gregory made a great show of promising to listen to a “wounded” laity. It was total BS. Gregory is notorious for freezing out lay Catholics and priests who dare to…
A Church insider approached me last year and asked if I knew about Monsignor Walter Rossi’s “hit-and-run” incident. In the mid-1980s, not long after his ordination to the priesthood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and long before his rise to power as…
Cardinal Donald Wuerl “lies shamelessly” and “prevails upon” his chief of staff, Monsignor Charles Antonicelli, to “lie as well,” wrote Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in his bombshell memo last year. Where is Antonicelli today? He is serving the relatively new…
Last Monday I reported that Monsignor Walter Rossi, the rector of D.C.’s Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, had me expelled from the property on Corpus Christi Sunday. His director of security, the ironically named Valencia Camp, escorted…
Social standards of our day are changing with great rapidity and are enforced with a zeal that would impress Senator Joe McCarthy. So, in the spirit of the modern, I thought it would be interesting to judge some of history’s…
The language we choose tells others a great deal about us. For example, my wife jokes that I’m one of the few living speakers of American English who visibly suffers real pain when he accidentally dangles a preposition, or says,…
Father Wilson D. (“Bill”) Miscamble has authored a 400-page biography, American Priest: The Ambitious Life And Conflicted Legacy of Notre Dame’s Father Ted Hesburgh. Catholic Hesburgh, born in 1917 a few days apart from Catholic John F. Kennedy, had the…