Crisis Magazine | A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity

The Ultimate Ballfield

Major League Baseball has retired the number 42, in honor of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color line and opened up that institution to all Americans. Justly has the league set aside the anniversary of this event as Jackie Robinson Day, when all players on all teams wear his number. Much has been written about Jackie’s courage, enduring…

Also on Crisis

POPE PAUL VI PRESIDES OVER MEETING OF SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL IN 1963

Assessing Vatican II: A Response to My Critics

It’s ironic to me that my recent article, “Fifty Years Later—Vatican II’s Unfinished Business,” has provoked anger among many traditionalists, because for most of my priesthood I have angered liberals who consider me an arch traditionalist. Nevertheless I want to…

Evangelizing the Evangelicals

by R. J. Snell

In his new book, George Weigel explicates the historical development of Evangelical Catholicism, a reform begun by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), developed by the renewals of the early twentieth-century, formalized by Vatican II, and authoritatively interpreted by John Paul II…

The Religion of Liberalism & the New Heretics

by James Hitchcock

The most astonishing fact about contemporary American politics—that there is not a single Protestant on the Supreme Court, while there are six Catholics—goes largely unremarked, even though on the surface it seems to fulfill the most dire predictions made at…

IRS Targets Catholic Critics of Obama Regime

by Stephen M. Krason

The revelations of the scandals within the Obama administration in the past couple of weeks make those of us who are old enough recall 1973, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative reporting and then the hearings of a special…

Ignatius of Loyola: Lycurgus of the Jesuits

by Tom Riley

People who read the classical authors either love or hate Plutarch. I love him—and am in good company, since Shakespeare loved him, too. People who love Plutarch either love or hate his fondness for parallels between the Greeks and Romans. …

The Coming Christian Renaissance

by David Byrne

The linear conception of history is so seductive, even antagonistic groups like Enlightenment philosophers and Marxists adopt it. It pervades their attitude toward religion. Both believe society matures as it sheds its religious heritage. Infantile societies practice religion, but progressive…

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The womb and the tomb—one of the most striking mirror images that our lives have to offer. Babies are buried alive in their warm mothers’girth. Bodies are dead and buried in their cold mother earth. For one, there is the…

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Politics

Saving the Uncommon Core of Catholic Education

by Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins

As Catholic institutions have come under unprecedented pressure from government to trim their religious and social mission, it seems incredible that Catholic educators would consider voluntarily placing their schools under an onerous federal yoke. But that incongruous prospect may be…

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Economics

Faith and the Employer

by Bruce Frohnen

The diocese of Lansing, where I currently attend mass, is a pretty good one, as such things go in the contemporary United States. Our parish has a very good priest and I’m confident we won’t soon be joining in on…

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Church

Abbé Edgeworth: King Louis’ Irish Confessor

by Rev. George W. Rutler

Among the singularities of the French monarchy was the tradition of having Scottish bodyguards. Scottish history has not been riddled with pacifism, and the Scots along with the fiery Castilians, were used as mercenaries as early as Charlemagne. An “Auld…

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Culture

#RealityIsReality

by Scott P. Richert

On May 2, 2013, Rhode Island, the most Catholic of these United States, joined the rest of New England in declaring that the sky is green and the grass is blue—or, rather, that a man can marry a man, and…

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Catholic Living

Remembering Fritz Wilhelmsen

by Regis Martin

I first met Fritz Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) in the summer of 1970, falling at once under the spell of his magic. Such a long time ago it all was, too. Yet I remember it all as if it were but yesterday. …

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