Author: Manuel Xavier

By Deacon James H. Toner Deacon James H. Toner, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Leadership and Ethics at the U.S. Air War College, a former U.S. Army officer, and author of Morals Under the Gun and other books. He has also taught at Notre Dame, Norwich, Auburn, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and Holy Apostles College & Seminary. He serves in the Diocese of Charlotte. In the past few decades, a number of people contend, we have made great progress in no longer being stuffy and pompous. We have, for example, finally scrapped many of those old-fashioned titles. A cardinal may still be …

By Sean Fitzpatrick Sean Fitzpatrick is a senior contributor to Crisis and serves on the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy, a Catholic boarding school for boys in Pennsylvania. A death-dealing industry and a death-dealing illness are the horns of a dilemma that many Catholics feel caught up in, and the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine has brought new heat to the debate. Of course, as Catholics, we heed the battle cry, “death before sin,” and refuse to participate in the evil of abortion (i.e., murder), an evil from which the Johnson & Johnson vaccine derives its existence. And it would be a very good …

By Regis Nicoll Regis Nicoll is a retired nuclear engineer and a fellow of the Colson Center who writes commentary on faith and culture. He is the author of Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters. If you’ve scratched your head over the latest of the ever-growing number of things (like algebra and Beethoven) that has “become” racist, you can blame your confusion on radical leftist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky once said, “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Today, the masses are being played by some novel concepts derived neither from Webster nor Scripture but straight from the lexicon of …

Paul Kengor Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. His books include A Pope and a President, The Divine Plan and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism, The Devil, and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration. COMMENTARY: What is being done to try to change the hostile public perception being fomented by St. Junipero Serra’s posthumous persecutors? I recently wrote a piece for the National Catholic Register on the angry attacks on memorials to St. Junipero Serra throughout California, from San Francisco down the coast to Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, and more. St. Junipero was a …

Michael Warsaw Michael Warsaw is the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the EWTN Global Catholic Network, and the Publisher of the National Catholic Register. In the midst of a painful and challenging cultural moment, a series of attacks on Catholic churches and religious symbols around our country is cause for grave concern.  As our nation grapples with issues of racism in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, an impulse to remove lingering Confederate imagery from places of honor has, in some quarters, escalated to mob violence and wanton vandalism — but this vandalism didn’t stop …

Anthony Esolen Anthony Esolen, Ph.D., is a faculty member and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire. COMMENTARY: Should Americans Memorialize this Moment, the Statue Erected Wouldn’t Be a Man of the State, or of Letters or of the Cloth, But Ambiguous at Best. Begin in revolution; end in farce. I have a vision of a new monument, befitting what my beloved country has become. It will not be a statue of a statesman. Tucked into a green triangle between Massachusetts Avenue, L Street and 11th Street, in Washington, D.C., there stands a fine …

Lauretta Brown Lauretta Brown is the Register’s Washington-based staff writer. The Senate’s arcane rules regarding the reconciliation process provided the mechanism whereby the narrow Democratic majority was able to circumvent a potential GOP filibuster. The House is poised to vote Wednesday on the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021 which will fund stimulus checks, vaccine distribution, and — to the dismay of the pro-life movement — potentially abortion.  The bill did not contain the longstanding, 44-year-old Hyde Amendment restriction on taxpayer-funded abortion. As Democrats increasingly take aim at such abortion restrictions in spending bills, the passage of the relief package …

Celeste McGovern writes from Nova Scotia, Canada. MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Doctors who perform genital-mutilating surgeries or prescribe off-label puberty-blocking drugs or cross-sex hormones to minors for “transgender therapy” in the state of Alabama may face up to 10 years in prison or a $15,000 fine, according to a bill that passed the state Senate last week. Bill SB10, the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, sponsored by state Sen. Shay Shelnutt, R-Trussville, sailed through the Senate by a 23-4 vote. It will now move to the Alabama House of Representatives, where a committee has already approved almost identical legislation. It’s a …

GEORGE WEIGEL is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. His 27th book, THE NEXT POPE: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission, has just been published by Ignatius Press. A mile or so from my home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the county is completing work on a handsome new middle school, currently surrounded by plastic fences. Landscaping is underway, and I sympathize with the landscapers’ desire to keep the public from trampling over newly laid sod. Moreover, there are still construction crews …

By Anthony Esolen Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor at Crisis, is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He is the author, most recently, of Sex and the Unreal City (Ignatius Press, 2020). One of the ironic things about my diploma from Princeton is that it is written in a language that almost none of the graduates understand: Latin. It confers upon me the degree of Artium baccalaureus, literally, crowned with bay leaves for knowledge of the arts. Since most college graduates write badly, if they write at all, and know very little about the literature of their own language, let alone the fine arts, …