Reluctant as I am to fiddle with the U.S. Constitution, I’m willing to consider an amendment banning any elementary school from opening before Labor Day.

Fiction can often convey the human texture of a time and place better than scholarly works of history. Herewith, and in honor of the national semiquincentennial, some novels that help tell the Catholic story in these United States through a fictional lens.

From his current station in the Communion of Saints, I hope Raymond Berry is interceding for all those men without work – men who are being denied, or who are denying themselves, the chance to become more, to be more, through honest labor.

Herewith, some suggestions for your own reading pleasure this summer, which I hope you’ll pass along to friends:

Russian strikes are deliberately aimed at civilian sites, and while Ukrainian air defenses shoot down some of the missiles and drones, others get through. Innocents are killed and families lose their homes because of this campaign to intentionally inflict civilian casualties.

As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?”

The Holy See has declared that, if the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) proceeds with the ordination of bishops in July without a papal mandate, those involved in these illicit ordinations are automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated – that is, excommunicated by their own acts.

What can his fellow Catholics do for Jimmy Lai at the moment? We can hold him in prayer every day. We can urge the Administration to continue to press for Jimmy’s release and we can urge our representatives and senators to press the Administration to keep pressing the Chinese regime.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, it would do well to remember that the emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century had such high hopes for us: hopes that now seem a call to a national examination of conscience.

Participation in the “communion of saints” is one of the great gifts conferred in baptism. As I give thanks for the gift of my baptism seventy-five years ago, it is incorporation into this “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) for which I am particularly grateful.