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A mystifying irony of the moment is that amid the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War, and as Trumpian conspiracy theories reach levels that in any other [...]

A disturbing symbiosis exists between the disruptive, norm-trashing far right in our national politics and a similar force that has become prominent within the Catholic hierarchy in the United States. [...]

Jeannine Gramick just had a friendly meeting with the pope. In the not-too-long-ago, that might have been the punch line to a bad joke or a way of emphasizing that [...]

The attempts to arrive at a moral calculus on the Israel-Hamas war that would calm the conscience, meet the 'rules of war' requirements, and satisfy the demands for justice all [...]

Martha Ligas learned about the Community of St. Peter in Cleveland six months before she ventured into a worship service. She hesitated because she did not want to step over [...]

Editor's note: A year ago, after the murder of George Floyd, the U.S. exploded with protests bringing attention to the scourge of police violence against African Americans. Initial calls to [...]

It was in late spring, 1985, when I received a call from NCR's then-editor Tom Fox. I think he said he hoped I was sitting down. Fox and I often [...]

Ukraine's war with Russia, unlike so many other conflicts of recent decades, has stood up to justifications thick with moral content. U.S. involvement, likewise, was not a delusional rush into [...]

Forty years ago this May, the United States bishops approved a landmark pastoral letter that opened with a line taken from the Second Vatican Council's 1965 document on modern warfare: [...]

Patricia Scharber Lefevere, a contributor to National Catholic Reporter for more than 40 years whose stories bore datelines from around the globe, died March 30. She was 79. The cause [...]

Benedictine Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki, a major force behind the ministries and outreach that shaped the Erie Benedictines in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, died Jan. 6 at [...]

The essay 'Hate is not welcome aqui' that begins on Page 1 and was jointly submitted by the four writers who normally take turns producing the column Theology en la [...]

WASHINGTON -- The Irish Catholics who poured into the United States by the hundreds of thousands in the mid-19th century, hoping to escape famine and professing a faith that was [...]

The recent vote by this country's Catholic bishops, the equivalent of a corporate tantrum, was cringe-inducing but should not have been a surprise. The move to produce a document designed [...]

For the Biden administration, taking a new direction on immigration--as is the case with turning away from most Trump initiatives--is fairly easy at the start. A basic humanity and empathy, [...]

WASHINGTON * In early March, Timothy Busch stepped to a lectern in the sanctuary of the Crypt Church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in [...]

A drama played out recently in Maryland that holds significance for the next presidential election cycle while also highlighting the evershrinking role of Catholic witness in the public square as [...]

Fr. Donald Cozzens turned the tables on conventional ideas about priest and prophet. He showed that priests of the modern era need not play the role of serfs to the [...]

During a meeting with William Kelly decades ago in his studio at a small college in Pennsylvania, he held up a large canvas, fully the size from top to bottom [...]

Colman McCarthy has a standup bit that he regularly uses to make his case. He takes a crisp $100 bill out of his wallet and folds it in the middle [...]

Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche, an organization of communities dedicated to caring for people with intellectual disabilities, engaged in sexually abusive relationships with at least six adult women, according to [...]

Jason Berry loves character-driven narrative. He's good at writing it, sending wonderfully drawn figures, whether wretches of the clerical sort or zany colorful Louisianans, on journeys along a tight weave [...]

Editor's note: To mark the anniversary of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, we asked Tom Roberts, who was NCR's editor at that time, to offer his memories of how [...]

THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA By Robert P. Jones Published by Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $28 Robert P. Jones could not have asked for a more convincing, real-time [...]

Peace. Mention of it is everywhere one turns in the Catholic universe: It is invoked, prayed for, yearned for, counseled and envisioned as a condition of the reign of God. [...]

Part 1 of 2 GUATEMALA CITY * Julia Esquivel, internationally known poet and longtime activist, lives quietly in a pleasant home, her front yard filled with blooms, in the heart [...]

Sean Fieler was once asked to name 'the thinkers or donors' who have influenced how he practices his considerable philanthropy 'There's a good network I've gotten to know over the [...]

CLEVELAND * There's no steeple. No big stained-glass windows or rectory, no signs along Euclid Street announcing service times or the pastor's name. The big space where liturgy is held, [...]

Eighteen months ago, I started out on a reporting project that soon became a series and took the name 'In Search of the Emerging Church.' Twenty-six reports later, looking back [...]

WASHINGTON * The Catholic Church has reached a crossroads. Its leaders can either change, become open and accountable, or maintain the status quo: an institution lacking transparency, wrapped in secrecy [...]

WASHINGTON If there were a compass mark for a true-north Catholic, John Carr could well be the setting. He defies the divisions within the Catholic community because he's not divided [...]

Holy Cross Fr. Theodore Hesburgh knew for some time that among the appreciations and reflections following his death would surface one quite different from all the rest. It appears here, [...]

For decades, environmental concerns existed on the outskirts of religious life, an addendum to the more familiar business of salvation. With the growing awareness of the enormous adverse effect that [...]

The serf-described Islamic jihadist sat across from Army Specialist Joshua Casteel in an interrogation room in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. He was not like so many others Casteel had [...]

The Obama presidency will provoke 'a church in resistance'--with the U.S. bishops and priests in the pulpit battling the new administration's pro-abortion rights agenda at every turn. Or, alternatively, 'the [...]

In the first note I ever received from Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko, there was a hint that the terrain I was being invited into would present no easy travels, no [...]

At one level, it almost borders on cruelty to hand on to someone you highly regard as a friend and colleague the leadership of a small, non-profit news organization in [...]

Perhaps it is something about being sequestered that makes wildly imprudent and potentially destructive ideas take hold, like a parallel plague, among some on the religious right, a batch of [...]

In a matter of a few weeks, the world has shrunk. We've become our neighborhoods in a microscopic sense. We've become the last surface touched, the last person we've passed, [...]

No event planner could have orchestrated a scene that better explains the state of the church in the United States at this moment them the recent tableau that unfolded in [...]

Some years ago, I was interviewing the young evangelical phenom and author Shane Claiborne in his home in the Kensington and Allegheny section of Philadelphia and couldn't help notice circus [...]

After all the campaigning and debating and town halls have ended, Catholics who head for the voting booth will have to choose a candidate. They'll have to select a person [...]

I told the story in this space years ago, about a conversation with a Catholic prelate during the mid-1990s, early in the Clinton administration. It occurred at a bishops' meeting [...]

It apparently isn't enough that Russian hackers interfered in the 2016 elections and have even more sophisticated means aimed at 2020. Or that Republicans have taken brazen steps to suppress [...]

Jesuit Fr. James Keenan really wants to turn the whole deal on its head. The highly regarded theologian, taking in the endless discussion of the priest sex abuse crisis, had [...]

I have thought recently that one way to understand the revived interest in the priest sexual abuse scandal, post-Theodore McCarrick and the Pennsylvania grand jury report of little more than [...]

'Light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.' With gratitude to Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr for that beautiful line from his [...]

MELBOURNE and SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Sacred Heart Mission in the St. Kilda section of Melbourne, an inner-city refuge for mainly homeless and troubled men, the highest percentage of whom are dealing [...]

SAN DIEGO * When the U.S. bishops gathered Nov. 13-15 in Baltimore for their annual meeting, they observed the 100th anniversary of the founding of their organization amid the crisis [...]

CAMDEN, NJ. * While the nation has turned its attention to the question of gun violence in the wake of the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., residents of the [...]