This question is not an either or; it is a both/and. Parents and society are responsible for the health care of children. Their good health is a requirement of the common good. The fact that so many children in this country at this moment have no health insurance and no ready access to the health care they need is, in my view, an assault on the common good.

It is simplistic and simply false to say that government-sponsored or subsidized health insurance for children is socialism or socialized medicine. Those who propose a single-payer solution are not suggesting that hospitals be owned by government, nor are they saying that physicians, nurses, and other health care providers would be employees of the state. Government involvement in the provision of health insurance is not the same as government ownership and control of healthcare facilities and providers.

Parents have a right to expect assistance from their government in meeting their responsibilities to provide for the health of their children.

Doubt does not disqualify one from the community of believers; it simply serves to certify a person's membership in the human race. All humans, including all believers, have doubts.

Christians do well from time to time to recall the man who said to Jesus (Mark 24:9), "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief." This might be called the most Christian of all prayers. Jesus had just assured this man that his son, who was ill, would be alright if he, the father, just had faith. I have faith, I do believe, he replied, but I'm carrying with my faith a good measure of unbelief. I need help. As do we all.

Mother Teresa's experience was not what you would call classic atheism. She didn't deny the existence of God. It seems to me that her question, shared by many of us at different times, was not: does God exist? She struggled with a different question: does God exist right here with me at this time? It is an experience of darkness. It can be unimaginably frightening; it can lead to despair.

Doubt is an ongoing dimension of religious faith. Grace, another word for God's love, is stronger than the deepest doubt.

I think it is a false dichotomy to ask whether a physician's primary relationship is to the patient or the patient's religion. Of course, there is a primary relationship is to the patient, but the patient is a person, composed of body and soul, and that unique person's religion must not be ignored in the physician-patient relationship.

I recall asking a psychiatrist one time about religious differences between a patient and his or her psychiatrist and, indeed, whether the religion of the psychiatrist should be a consideration when a religious person sought psychiatric help. The answer I received impressed me. "It is not the religion of the psychiatrist that is key here; it is the religion of the patient. Any good (and ethical) psychiatrist will respect the religion of the patient under treatment."

There may be rare cases where a competent physician will decline to treat a person because behavior in connection to that person's religious commitment may be prompting the person to do unhealthy or dangerous things. Better to choose not to have that person as a patient. But once a physician-patient relationship is established, the primary responsibility is to the whole person, body and soul, whose faith and religious convictions are part of who he or she is.

If you take the word apart, "religion" means re-connect, or tie back.The Latin verb "ligare" means to tie; that's where we get the English word "ligament."

The Bible tells the story of the first break--the cutaway, so to speak--whereby Adam and Eve and their descendants were separated from God through Original Sin. We needed a reconnection; we had to be tied back. They call it redemption (buying back), and this, of course, is God's work. We Christians see it as God's gift to us in Christ, our Redeemer--our buyer back.

Christ had to become man in order to do this. As God, he had nothing whereby he could die; as man, we had nothing whereby we could live, observed St. Augustine. But when God became man in Christ it was possible to get the re-ligging (the work of re-ligion) underway.

So religion is man-made to the extent that the God man redeemed us and established a Church through which the work of redemption can continue down through the ages.

This is a particularly personal question for me since I'll turn 80 on May 25th.

Am I satisfied? Yes, but not completely. I doubt that I'll ever be (or should be) completely satisfied.

Am I grateful? Most assuredly so. I'm grateful for the gift of life, faith, family, friends, health, the opportunities I had to develop intellectually and spiritually. I'm grateful for so many opportunities to serve, especially service to others in need. I'm grateful for the gift of priesthood in the Jesuit order.

I believe that the good life--the really good life--is a live lived generously in the service of others. I fall short of that goal, but keep trying to move toward it (a goal without a goal line) and that motion forward is, in a sense, a measure of satisfaction.

A revolution is a turnaround. Any social turnaround involves a change in shared attitudes and corresponding group behavior.

When Jesus. a social revolutionary, proclaimed that "the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:14), he added, "repent, therefore, and believe the Gospel." Repentance here--metanoia in Greek--means an attitudinal turnaround, a change of heart and mind. The fact that the kingdom has been "at hand" and not yet fully grasped for more than twenty centuries suggests the absence of the desired turnaround; the revolution is still ongoing.

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I remember saying, "Sorry" once on a tennis court when I unintentionally put the ball well out of reach of my opponent during a pre-game warm up, and he replied: "Okay, but how about your purpose of amendment?" He was putting an irreverent spin on a familiar phrase that Catholics associate with the practice of confession, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You have to be sorry for your sins, of course, but you also have to incorporate into your confession a "firm purpose" to amend your ways in the future.

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St. Paul answered that question many centuries ago in his First Letter to the Corinthians: ""[I]f Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain" (1 Cor. 15:17).

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As a Catholic, I’ve experienced discrimination, but I’ve also received what I would acknowledge to be special favorable consideration at times precisely because I’m a Catholic. Add priesthood to my Catholicism and you would find a similar mix of noticeable discrimination at times and special consideration at other times.

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Can you be critical of Israel without being anti-Semitic? Sure. It is a question of both substance and style.

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I think of prayer as privileged conversations and communications with God. It is an opening up before God of what is on my mind and in my heart.

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I'm not a woman, so I can't speak from personal experience. Nor have I lived "down through the ages," so that puts another limit on my experience.

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There is more than a little discussion these days over whether a just war is possible, given the developments in weapons technology and the enormous potential nations now have to destroy other nations—not just enemy combatants, but innocent civilians, including children.

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My most formative religious experience took place at age 23 within the framework of
the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. This is a guided retreat of 30 days intended to help one understand how to discover God's will, and to be given the freedom to follow that will wherever it leads.

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To the extent that atheism is in vogue right now (I wouldn't know how to measure that), the explanation may lie in a certain mental numbness that is a function of both speed and violence in our world.

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Here's what I mean when I say I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. Let me preface this, however, with a word about belief.

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America is a nation populated for the most part by Christians, but that is not to say America is a Christian nation. Values like love, peace, and justice--Christian values all--are not exclusively Christian values.

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To the extent that parents in a mixed-faith marriage are joined at the heart, and to the extent that that the love of their parents, in cooperation with the love of God, brought these children into existence, why can't we talk about God to them in terms of love?

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I've often remarked that every pope needs a good editor. Most papal encyclicals are too long and the typical papal message is often too wordy and sometimes short on clarity.

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Officially, Thanksgiving Day in the United States is not a religious holiday. However, those who give thanks on that holiday are, in my opinion, engaging in a religious act.

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