Yesterday's Vatican document on the obligation of Catholic politicians to oppose legal recognition of homosexual unions can be summarized in one sentence: You can't believe two contradictory things at the same time.

I want to talk today about two qualities of George Washington's character.

The EU is the single best hope in reviving the plummeting European economy. Unfortunately, it may do so at the expense of Catholicism. Mary Jo Anderson looks at why the EU has become the Churchs greatest enemy in Europe.

The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.

This past November, in an interview with a leading Italian daily, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that he would not exclude the possibility of the Holy See becoming a full member of the United Nations, where it presently is a permanent observer.

Orestes Brownson is not, at first sight, a philosopher of liberty. He was, to put it paradoxically, more attentive to the many ways in which freedom goes wrong than in the ways in which it goes right. Or, to put it another way, liberty never just "goes right" by itself. It is the truth that makes us free, not the freedom that makes the truth.

Conscience for St. Thomas More was the right to be right, not the right to be wrong.

We have all heard it said that the war on terrorism pits liberal democracy against religious fanaticism. There is a measure of truth in that. Others say the conflict is between a secular understanding of society and a society defined by religiously based morality. That, I suggest, is both untrue and dangerous.

Two hundred years ago this New Year's Day, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut in which he said the First Amendment built "a wall of separation between church and state."

In his latest book, "Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State", Daniel Dreisbach exposes the history of the wall metaphor and argues that the wall is rooted in anti-Catholicism and the fear of religious influence on public life.