John Burger

BY JOHN BURGER Celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich grew up in northeastern Italy, in an area that became part of Yugoslavia after World War II. Her family was desperate to escape life under communism. “We had no one. They found a home for us.…

By John Burger Joan Sheen Cunningham is the niece of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, the pioneering television priest whose body was recently moved from New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the cathedral of Peoria, Illinois. As the Catholic…

It’s the difference 30 years make. At the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, the Soviet Union disintegrated. People living behind the Iron Curtain began to reclaim their God-given freedom. There was a widespread feeling of…

I was 9 years old when Apollo 11 made history. Throughout the 1960s, it was nearly impossible to miss the excitement of America’s program of space exploration. Not all of it was triumphant. I remember looking at the front page of the New…

There was no reason why Thomas would become a Christian. Although he knew of a famous Catholic church in town — a holdover from a much earlier age when foreign missionaries were free to evangelize China — he lived in a society where the…

Fr. Thomas Berg had just finished celebrating morning Mass. The faithful had left the church, and Fr. Berg was locking up. As he made his way back to the sacristy, he glanced up at a stained glass window depicting the Resurrection. It was…

German filmmaker Wim Wenders might never have imagined that he would be invited to make a film about a pope. But in the second year of Pope Francis’ pontificate, Wenders received a letter from the Vatican. Wenders is a cradle Catholic who…