Cuban President Fidel Castro used the Jan. 21–25 papal visit to burnish his self-image as champion of the wretched of the earth, welcoming Pope John Paul II in a speech laced with anti-imperialist rhetoric and stock Marxist critiques of the Catholic Church.
The crowd in the war-memorial coliseum was a slung hash of the premillennial middle-class — gaunt-looking slackers in Doc Martens and consignment-store flannel shirts; black, clean-cut kids in white T’s and lettermen’s jackets; suburban moms with frizzy perms, and little kids eating cotton candy.
Since precious metals were first found there earlier in this century, Silver City, New Mexico, has been a site of struggle—at times bloody—between mine owners and the people they hired to haul ore out of the ground. Today those struggles have ended. The earth is scarred and exhausted, stripped of its buried treasure, and the mine owners have pulled up…
It was a sunny day in New York City in 1955. Strutting down the sidewalk in his pompadour, the collar on his leather jacket turned up, Dion DiMucci was feeling like the king of the streets. “Rebel Without a Cause” had just come out on the silver screen and every boy in the Bronx wanted to be James Dean—the tough…
Two images underscored the paradox and pain of Polish Cardinal Jozef Glemp’s controversial visit to the United States. On Sept. 25, under a gray sky and persistent drizzle, Cardinal Glemp, escorted by Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard and ringed by a dozen reporters, approached the cathedral for what would be a terse ceremony with local Jewish leaders. 5A moment of confusion…
The world of childrens’ toys teems with mutated reptiles in sewers, strong men bent on mastering the universe, and helpless, vain women with expensive tastes in fashions. Toyland today is a post-modern and post-Cold War world, where GI-Joe battle Third World terrorists and the heavens are besieged by weird, quasi-human “Mosquitors” whose translucent stomachs glow with the blood they’ve sucked…
Inspired by her parents’ commitment to sacrificial giving, when 10-year-old Lucy Menard of Albany, New York, made her first Communion, she asked her family and friends to donate money to the needy in Latin America instead of buying gifts for her. The first check that John Ricci writes each month doesn’t go to pay his mortgage or electric bills. Before…
At the height of the U.S.-led war in the Persian Gulf a year ago, a pop-radio station in Erie, Pennsylvania decided to take a poll. Who is the greater monster, the station wondered, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein or the Benedictine nuns who run Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace group based in Erie? It was a tight race, but…
A half-century later, Archbishop Joseph T. Ryan cannot forget that bloody September day in the South Pacific, 1944: “It was a Friday, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows,” the recently retired head of the nation’s Catholic military archdiocese remembers. And it turned out to be a grimly appropriate memorial. That day thousands of American and Japanese were killed in…
When Steven Lennon was in first grade he used to wake up early before school. His family lived a stone’s throw away from Annunciation Church in Ilion, N.Y., and Steven would run over each morning—hoping the altar boy hadn’t shown up so that he’d be able to help the priest serve Mass. Now 31, Steven worships these days in Auburn…