In his Life of St. Augustine, the fifth-century bishop Possidius tells us that the greatest of the Latin doctors of the Church, knowing that his earthly end was near, had four penitential psalms copied and hung on the walls of his room.

On April 29, 1951, Father Thomas Love, SJ, baptized me in the Church of Sts. Philip and James, near Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Family legend has it that I raised such a furor during the proceedings that my cousin Judy hid in a confessional.

As Yale University’s Carlos Eire masterfully demonstrated in Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650, there was no one “Protestant Reformation” but rather several religious movements, often in disagreement with each other, that shattered Western C

I first met Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in June 1988. Since then, I’ve enjoyed many lengthy conversations and interviews with him, including a bracing discussion covering many topics last October.

One of the curiosities of the 21st-century Catholic debate is that many Catholic traditionalists (especially integralists) and a high percentage of Catholic progressives make the same mistake in analyzing the cause of today’s contentions within the Church

The eminent sociologist Peter Rossi was a world-class punster whose scholarly accomplishments fed a sometimes-whimsical view of the human condition — in which, Rossi memorably observed, “there are many ironies in the fire.”

In late June, I visited the concentration camp at Dachau, located in a wooded suburb a few miles from downtown Munich.

Throughout the 20th century — the greatest period of martyrdom in history — persecuted Christians used the dross of this world to make religious artifacts.