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From the NOR Dossiers
Communism & Marxism
When the Secular Saints Go Marxing In
October 2022Some call on "the American way of life" as a bulwark. But the American way of life is whatever the latest and strongest revolutionary says it is.
VIEW ARTICLEBehemoth Goes Back to Bed
October 2022An enormous fat cat, reminiscent of a miniature hippopotamus, strolled the sidewalk. It had been decades since he’d been out. Some things were different...
VIEW ARTICLECan Government Solve Inequality?
December 2021A just economy is not the product of any ideology, capitalist or socialist or otherwise; it is a function of loving one’s neighbor.
VIEW ARTICLECommunist Ideology Roars Back
November 2021We live in an era of decadence, a fatal decline if we fail to defeat the most dangerous enemy of the West: communism and all its lies.
VIEW ARTICLEAre Catholicism & Socialism Compatible?
June 2021Unlike the ideologies of both socialism and capitalism, the Church promotes a society in which all of life functions as a harmonious whole leading to Heaven.
VIEW ARTICLENineteen Eighty-Four. By George Orwell.
May 2021The citizens of Oceania are not only stripped of human freedom and basic rights but so dehumanized that each individual lacks any semblance of human dignity.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Soviets’ Doomed Battle with Byt
April 2021Atheism never completely took the place of forbidden religion, and its failure was coterminous with the downfall of Russian communism.
VIEW ARTICLEBeyond Balkanization
May 2020Croatia's cardinal Stepinac faced opposition unimaginable to most prelates in the modern West. By all indications, he did not buckle.
VIEW ARTICLESocialism: A Christian Heresy?
April 2020Socialism rejects the salvation of Jesus Christ and insists that man can be “freed” through the destruction of Church, family, and community.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Communist Era: Golden Age of Catholicism in Poland?
September 2019While the Church across Western Europe suffered reform gone wild, Poland was isolated enough to preserve her identity and fidelity.
VIEW ARTICLEReligious Rebirth in the Black Mountains
May 2018A Montenegrin national census asked about religious affiliation. Seventy-two percent answered Orthodox, 3.5 percent Catholic, and 19 percent Muslim.
VIEW ARTICLEKindred Spirits, Fellow Victors
May 2018Paul Kengor is an accurate historian who recognizes all the atrocities the USSR committed and the blight it cast across the 20th century.
VIEW ARTICLEA Demon-Haunted Europe: Democracy's Totalitarian Impulse
October 2017Ryszard Legutko traces the twin developments of liberalism and democracy and shows how, at their precise intersection, the totalitarian impulse rises.
VIEW ARTICLEA Church Rises from the Ruins
January-February 2015Catholicism in 1980s Estonia amounted to one shunned priest living in a closet; his flock numbered fewer than a half dozen souls.
VIEW ARTICLECardinal Mindszenty & His Small, Honest Nation
April 2014Mindszenty was a Christian voice crying for freedom and liberation from behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. The West barely heard his voice.
VIEW ARTICLEInvading Russia with Christ's Love
November 2013Fr. Walter Ciszek had his mission in the bleakest and darkest pits of suffering humanity. This went on for fifteen years minus a few months.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Role of Dezinformatsiya in the Framing of Pius XII
October 2013The false charge that Pius was "Hitler's Pope" was designed to discredit not just a Pope, but the Church, Christianity, Western values, and even the very idea of religion.
VIEW ARTICLEA Faith Enshrined, A Nation Renewed
March 2013Hungary still bears the scars of four decades of communist misrule combined with three generations of atheistic indoctrination.
VIEW ARTICLEGod & Man in Kyiv
November 2012Monastery of the Caves was founded on the Dnieper River in A.D. 1015, when Kyiv was capital of the Russian state. The monastery is one of Orthodoxy's greatest.
VIEW ARTICLEWe're All Socialists Now
November 2011The traditional left and mainstream right are in the same camp, usually competing over the externals of governance, not the real substance of policy.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Role of 'Ramparts' Magazine in the Campaign Against Pius XII
October 2011The change in Pius XII's reputation was not an organic result of honest inquiry. Something else was at play.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Hidden Heroism of Witold Urbanowicz
September 2011This Polish family lived in such an unpretentious way that no one ever suspected they had lived such remarkable lives.
VIEW ARTICLEA Hero of History Is Beatified
May 2011In the final analysis, can any of the objections voiced against his beatification stand up to the proof that God Himself intervened in the temporal world in response to the heavenly intercession of Pope John Paul II?
VIEW ARTICLEA Mass in Latvia
April 2010Here Catholics can discover a Church tougher and more unashamed than their own, and perhaps can learn how to persevere against a cultural elite that despises them.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Conscience of Croatia
November 2009John Paul II called Archbishop Stepinac "one of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church," who endured "the atrocities of the Communist system."
VIEW ARTICLETravels in Europe's Once & Future Faith
April 2009From 2001 to 2008 this author traveled to 16 European countries for business, attending Mass in each. This is what I encountered.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Last Secret of Fatima
February 2009For anyone who still harbors doubts about the authenticity of the third Fatima secret as revealed by the Vatican, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone's book is a must read.
VIEW ARTICLEA Morally Squalid Man Besotted With Ideology?
June 2004Honest-to-goodness Communists are not all alike.
VIEW ARTICLEGraffiti in Warsaw, Mormons in Krakow, & Basements in Auschwitz
May 2004In Poland the presumption is that truth is one, and there is only the true Church. If it's not Catholic, it's not true. The spiritual maze is simple to navigate.
VIEW ARTICLEAn American Priest at the End of the Earth
July/August 2003Approximately 40 percent of all Russians are at least nominally Orthodox, compared to the less than one percent who are baptized Catholics.
VIEW ARTICLEAt Mass in Lenin's City
March 2003The Catholic Church is the only large institution left for effective resistance to Trotsky's enduring Culture of Death and its ruinous impact.
VIEW ARTICLEStuck Back in 1989
April 1993Review of The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism
VIEW ARTICLEMaintaining the Independence of the Church
October 1990Review of Nicaragua's Other Revolution: Religious Faith and Political Struggle
VIEW ARTICLEReflections on the Past & Future of Democratic Socialism
October 1990The democratization of economic and social life is at the heart of the socialist idea today. The idea is simple, the techniques necessarily complex and difficult.
VIEW ARTICLEIf Not Communism or Capitalism, What?
September 1990Any efficient democracy must operate on the principle of subsidiarity, and this holds true in the economic as well as the political sphere.
VIEW ARTICLELiberation Theology: Can It Shake Its Affinity for Marxism?
July-August 1990What saints and Doctors of the Church have written is far more useful than anything written by Karl Marx in persuading Christians to adopt a critical attitude toward capitalism.
VIEW ARTICLEIntellectual Opportunism & the Arteriosclerosis of the American Intelligentsia
April 1990 VIEW ARTICLEThe Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons?
January-February 1990Review of A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons
VIEW ARTICLEThe Crumbling of Communism: Good for the Catholic Church?
EDITORIAL
January-February 1990 VIEW ARTICLECentral America: Perspective & Judgment
November 1989Throughout Central America the Church is a voice of the simple people. Often it is hemmed in by at best suspicious regimes, of the Right or the Left.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Conspiratorial World View of Whittaker Chambers
November 1989The road from the Hiss-Chambers case to an American president’s advocacy of the idea of the Evil Empire was straight, though slow.
VIEW ARTICLEWhy Socialists Should Drop Marx
June 1989Marx should neither remain a dominant theorist of the worldwide democratic socialist movement, nor the source of ideas, strategy, or analysis.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Continuing Irony of American History
June 1989Our past is neither as virtuous as our optimists think nor as vicious as our pessimists think. It consists, rather, of a mixture of comic and tragic elements.
VIEW ARTICLEGorbachev & the Decomposition of Communism: The Chickens Come Home to Roost
January-February 1989 VIEW ARTICLENeither Trotskyism nor Neoconservatism
November 1987Review of American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39 by Eric Homberger, The Intellectual Follies by Lionel Abel, Out of Step by Sidney Hook, Will Herberg by Harry J. Ausmus, and The New York Intellectuals by Alan M. Wald
VIEW ARTICLESymposium on Humane Socialism & Traditional Conservatism
AN ALLIANCE AGAINST ECONOMIC & CULTURAL "ME-ISM"?
October 1987With contributions by Thomas Molnar, John B. Judis, John Lukacs, James G. Hanink, Sheldon Vanauken, Michael Lerner, Christopher Derrick, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Samuel Hux, Russell Kirk, John C. Cort, Juli Loesch, L. Brent Bozell, Robert Coles, and Christopher Lasch
VIEW ARTICLESlighting the Vatican’s ‘Ostpolitik’
January-February 1987Review of Moscow and the Vatican by Alexis Ulysses Floridi, S.J.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Soviet Union & Gorki’s God
October 1986A people, such as the Russians, who have produced and who still honor writers like Gorki, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy deserve to be regarded with respect.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Rough Edges of Socialism
October 1985Contemporary socialism of the democratic, Western European form hasn’t yet eliminated all its sharp edges.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Vatican Looks at Non-Marxist Socialism
July-August 1985In its universal concern, the Church cannot be a mouthpiece for the West, even if, as a result, the Pope is accused of “misunderstanding the free-market economy.”
VIEW ARTICLESilone’s Religious Humanism
May 1985The world is wolfish, devouring, full of evil, Silone knew — yet, good will and love are also constantly in evidence: God’s gift to us.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Truth About the A.C.T.U.
April 1985The resistance of American workers to communist domination of their trade unions was based on something far more solid than anti-communist hysteria.
VIEW ARTICLEPilgrimage to Poland & Byelorussia
March 1985The tradition of pilgrimage is so vibrant in Poland. My group of 600, heading to Czestochowa, walked almost 200 miles over ten days, beginning every morning at 4:00.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Vatican & Liberation Theology
January-February 1985Liberation theologians, Catholic and Protestant but mostly Catholic, have been a major factor in struggling against poverty in Latin America.
VIEW ARTICLEChurch & Society in Communist Hungary
November 1984In the post-war years, the peasantry and the proletariat have been the winners, while the old bourgeoisie has been the great loser.
VIEW ARTICLEWhat Will World War III Be About?
July-August 1984There are many ways to cut this world’s cake in half and take sides. A Christian should presumably think in terms of the Church vs. the world.
VIEW ARTICLESocrates on Communism & Capitalism
May 1984Socrates asks what would happen to a capitalist nation if everyone practiced the greedlessness of Jesus, or Buddha, or even Thoreau?
VIEW ARTICLEImpressions of Nicaragua — Part II
May 1984In the well-to-do sections of Managua, the Pope’s picture may be seen displayed proudly on the doors of houses, in any number of windows.
VIEW ARTICLEImpressions of Nicaragua — Part I
April 1984Recently I went with two of my sons to Nicaragua, where we spent time visiting schools, hospitals, clinics, a number of Managua’s barrio homes, and those of other cities.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Passing of the Old-Timers
December 1983With their old anti-Stalinism gone because of Stalin’s death, the anger of many New York intellectuals was turned against American society.
VIEW ARTICLERoman Catholics & Central America
December 1983The Church in North America is enriched by the example of the Church in Central America as it struggles for justice and human dignity.
VIEW ARTICLEThe Roman Catholic Church in Central Europe
November 1983The heavy-handed Russian attempt at easternization made central Europeans far more conscious of their Western heritage.
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