Using personnel data from the Roman Catholic Church, I document the importance of social connections as a determinant of promotions. The data provide information on the careers of about 10,000 bishops appointed between 1930 and 2008. The range of the data, both in time and in space, makes it possible to infer some types of social connections between bishops (based on geography and careers), whi...

n their writings, the Second Vatican Council’s bishops demonstrated that the choice of communication style for handing on Catholic teaching is a significant, perhaps pivotal, pastoral decision. The bishops chose a persuasive style of language to shift the priority of their teaching away from that of winning arguments to that of building common ground. As a result, according to the eminent churc...

Fr. James Keenan, S.J. has recently written on the important issue of institutional cooperation and the 1994 Ethical and Religious Directives of the National Catholic Conference of Bishops. He observes that the subject of institutional cooperation has been the cause of substantial discussion among ethicists, bishops, and administrators of Catholic healthcare facilities. In an article for this j...

Recent research has questioned whether the European Black Death of 1347-1351 could possibly have been caused by the bubonic plague bacillus Yersinia pestis, as has been assumed for over a century. Central to the arguments both for and against involvement of Y. pestis has been a comparison of the temporal dynamics observed in confirmed outbreaks of bubonic plague in early-20th-century India, ver...

Using reasonableness, we examine the U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to provisions of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Weaving contributions from theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence, we emphasize the reasonable importance of mental health therapy for women within a relevant Catholic/Christian dialogue, particularly in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on healthcare. We princip...

Background: The objectives of the study were to Evaluation of isosorbide mononitrate for cervical ripening prior to induction of labor at term pregnancy in an outpatient. Methods: A randomized, placebo controlled prospective study was conducted with 120 women with term pregnancies and unfavorable cervices who self-administered vaginally either 2, 40-mg tablets of IMN or pyridoxine as placebo pr...