Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? Was Shakespeare Catholic?

Francis Phillips dives into the ocean on conjecture about 1) whether the William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays, poems and sonnets attributed to William Shakespeare and 2) whether that William Shakespeare was Catholic in this post at The Catholic Herald.

Spoiler alert:

Phillips emerges from the waves with the answer to both questions--YES, based first upon James Shapiro's book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? and then upon the works of Peter Ackroyd, Father Peter Milward, SJ, and Clare Asquith. Paul Voss summarizes some of the evidence here.