In 1817, Lord Byron is said to have challenged an Italian cardinal to a multilingual cursing contest. The English poet reputedly opened the contest by uttering as many different imprecations as he could in the languages he had studied. Byron recalled later that he swore “in all the tongues in which I knew a single Read more
Just hours after the announcement that a top official for the U.S. bishops’ conference had suddenly resigned on July 20 citing “possible improper behaviour,” a newly launched Catholic media venture, The Pillar, published a nearly 3,000-word article alleging that the priest, Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, had engaged in “serial sexual misconduct” by frequenting gay bars and Read more
Even during a period when the bombs dropping on American Catholics fall with escalating and increasingly destructive frequency, the publication of an “investigation” of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the now-former general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, blasts a crater worth crawling down into for a forensic examination. There are reasons to think Read more