Reader, behold your hand. Sometimes I watch my own as I write; or as I hold it up, fingers spread, so that it gleams like a pale star against the dark background of books piled on my table. The human hand this bundle of bones, flesh, and nerves think of all it can do. It can bless or curse.
Pope John Paul II is leading the Church from the cross. With pain and difficulty, but without embarrassment or complaint, Karol Wojtyla is spending out his life in witness to the truth on which he has staked his life.
The troop ship glided across the icy waters of the North Atlantic, headed for Greenland. On board, nine hundred soldiers enjoyed an amateur night program organized by the ship's four chaplains.
It is the beginning of the week America buried Ronald Reagan. Peggy Noonan is in Washington to attend his funeral, to visit with old friends and colleagues, to wander among the notable and the unknown.
A bishop and a professor told me that in separate audiences, the first thing John Paul II said when they mentioned Oxford was: "Do you know Professor Anscombe?"
"Who left the door open?" asked the Popes secretary to the few monsignori who accompanied John Paul II on his trip to Ireland in September 1979.
In November 2003, Raymond Burke, then the bishop of LaCrosse, Wis., instructed priests in his diocese to deny Communion to three politicians unless they publicly recanted their pro-abortion rights positions. Since then, Burke's supporters have increasingly pointed to what they see as parallels with another case, and another moral hero, from 40 years ago.
If Martha Stewart had poisoned her husband or drowned her children, she would have received more sympathy.
Reagan's embrace of Catholics began at home, with his father, Jack Reagan. Jack was an apathetic Catholic who left the religious rearing of his two children to his wife, Nelle, a deeply Christian woman, and a Protestant.
