At Millennial, Daniel Petri raises some important points about the continued significance of just war theory and why nonviolent alternatives have little to say about crises such as the one in Syria.
At CatholicPhilly, a report on St. John's University's "Solidarity Festival." Kudos to Professor Meghan Clark and her colleagues at St. John's
At the Boston Pilot, George Weigel explains why he think the now departed Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano was "the best nuncio ever." Needless to say, many of us have a different opinion of the nuncio's tenure, but one line of Weigel's is especially obnoxious. He writes: "He knew that Catholic Lite wasn't going to advance the New Evangelization, and he quickly grasped that the great project of converting a wounded culture in America was being threatened by an unprecedented assault on the Church's capacity to be itself. And he knew that the threat came, not from old-fashioned nativist bigots of Protestant persuasion, but from militant secularists allied with the federal government." Every part of that is questionable, but the bit about "militant secularists" displays both a kind of clinical paranoia and an astonishing ignorance of the how secularism has been fermenting in Western culture for a long time. By the way, Mssr. Weigel, there is nothing "unprecedented" about the Church's friction with the culture: It is just your understanding of the Church that may be under assault, and not so much from Mr. Obama as from Pope Francis! I again raise the question to the editors and publishers of diocesan newspapers: Why do you publish this man's columns in your papers?
