Few words have suffered a worse fate than the word asceticism.

Ronald Knox once quipped that "the study of comparative religions is the best way to become comparatively religious."

I hold it as an impossible thing that anyone who is not interior can attain to the perfect accomplishment of this precept of love for our neighbor.

The popes whose stories you'll read here show us how Christ kept his promise to his bride, the Church, not only in her health but also in her sickness. That's why, even in its darkest moments, the story of the papacy is a story of triumph. And that's why it's worth knowing these twelve popes.

Not only do we become by means of the sacraments contemporaries of a past that is the very source of our salvation, but we become capable of recuperating the past, of retaking and reconstructing our life by giving it a new unity.

What more, you may ask, do we want?

If any one of you feels guilty and you know that you deserve it, fear not.

For starters, his arguments for Darwinism are not very scientific.

Francis Spufford was recently interviewed in the New York Times. One remark he made in passing cited a well-established historical myth, which I was not expecting to see revived, but there it was.

The poor are not only brothers and sisters to be loved in a brotherly way because they are our brothers and sisters, they are also "our lords the poor" because the poor man is Our Lord.