Dear All, The fact of creation and the fact of the Triune life of God certainly have their effects on the life of the Church. But there is another that is just as important, even as it is harder to discern and describe: The Church does not believe in ‘trickle-down’ anything – economy, power, wisdom or anything else.

Dear All, With one foot planted firmly in the very eternity of God and a shrewd eye turned to the various cultures that are the matrix of her temporal existence, the Catholic Church, in a very clear way, practices that double commandment to ‘love God and the neighbor’.

Dear All, Catholicism is not the ‘religion of choice’ for one political or economic claque or another. Long before the United States of America or the Enlightenment or the Renaissance or the Holy Roman Empire, Catholicism was alive and thriving and living a life of its own in the midst of communities and cultures that were somewhere between tolerant of its presence or openly hostile to it.

Dear All, I have noticed something over the last few months that really concerns me. I can pretty well tell whether a person votes ‘red’ or ‘blue’ by his or her comments about the Pope. As if Catholicism and the Papacy were all of a piece with the electioneering business in the US. To be fair, this same correlation has been noticed in Europe, as well.