A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zięba, OP, died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on December 31. The birthplace of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wrocław was also the home of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who grew up there as Edith Stein when the city was known as Breslau. Unlike those
Drawing on references in religious texts and relics, a team of Israeli archaeologists has recreated a panel of flooring of the Roman-period Jewish Temple. The work is being praised for its accuracy. It shows details that Jesus himself might have seen when he walked the
Mary Farrow ‘Tis the season to be jolly, and, perhaps, to have one’s social media inundated with memes about Christmas being nothing more than a co-opted pagan holiday – maybe a winter solstice celebration – repurposed and baptized by Christianity. “There are dozens of religions
Paul Kengor The opening lines of the Communist Manifesto could not have been more eerily apt: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism,” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
Fr. Leo Patalinghug Thanksgiving is a religious holiday. It’s also a very Catholic religious holiday. Celebrate it with gusto! But before historians, politicians and secularists get up in arms to blast my thesis, let me first explain what I mean by “religious” and “Catholic.” The
As the USS Indianapolis headed through the Philippine Sea, at approximately 12:14am July 30, 1945, she was hit by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine. The first took off her bow; the second blasted amidships. The disaster has become the Navy’s worst-ever loss of life at sea —
The beatification cause of a Polish religious sister who was tortured by Joseph Stalin’s secret police and reputedly bore the stigmata opened Monday. Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz inaugurated the diocesan phase of the cause of Sr. Wanda Boniszewska in the chapel of Archbishop’s House, Warsaw, Nov. 9. Boniszewska,
Editor’s note: For several years now, the many institutions of higher education in Kraków have jointly sponsored annual “John Paul II Days,” typically held in November: a series of lectures and symposia dedicated to a scholarly exploration of one or another facet of the Polish Pope’s
Sometimes it is hard to believe that saints were once flesh and blood: So often we see church statues of the blessed that look unreal. Harder still is it to recall that some of these saints had children and that today their descendants are living,
The Second Vatican Council, citing the words of Christ – “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you”
