By Thomas Merton. ONE of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders… Read More A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann
by Michael Davies.From Catholic, October 1996. The Catholic Church was founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son made Man. He has promised His Church that She will continue to exist exactly as He constituted her until He comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The Catholic Church is the Church that is indefectible. The… Read More Michael Davies on the Indefectibility of the Mass of Paul VI.
“The living magisterium makes extensive use of documents of the past, but it does so while judging and interpreting, gladly finding in them its present thought, but likewise, when needful, distinguishing its present thought from what is traditional only in appearance. “It is revealed truth always living in the mind of the Church, or, if it is preferred, the… Read More Tradition and the Living Magisterium.
Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, proportionality and preemptive strikes. Fr. Charles McCarthy, a Melkite Catholic priest in Massachusetts, argues that it might be a “mortal sin” to vote for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in this 2024 Presidential election, since each, he says, are in various ways complicit in “grave evil” by supporting and enabling… Read More A Melkite Catholic Priest Bound to Infuriate Many.
Victor Gaetan is senior international correspondent for the National Catholic Register 8/21. The closer we look at decisions to deploy a second atomic weapon against Japan on August 9, [1945…] the more morally audacious the tactic appears. Step outside the American explanatory cloud—we bombed military installations to force unconditional imperial surrender—defining public understanding to see:… Read More Nagasaki Was A Strike Against Japan And The Catholic Church
Dave DeCampMarch 12, 2024antiwar.com President Biden has requested a record $895 billion in military spending for the 2025 fiscal year. Of that amount, about $850 billion will go to the Pentagon, and the remaining funds will go to other US federal agencies for military programs, including the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program. While a massive… Read More Endless Warfare. Biden Requests $895 Billion For Military Spending For 2025
Truth does not change with the changes in political parties, current philosophies or trends. ” a thing cannot be and not be at the same time”— St. Thomas (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1, chap. 84) “…reason’s first principle is the principle of contradiction. He who denies this principle affirms a self-destructive sentence. To deny this principle… Read More Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange on Reason and The Law of Non-Contradiction.
Hear Davies’ talk: What Happened at Vatican II? +++ Michael Treharne Davies (13 March 1936 – 25 September 2004[1]) was a British teacher and traditionalist Catholic writer of many books about the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council… Although Davies opposed French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s canonically-illicit consecration of four SSPX bishops in 1988 against the wishes of Pope John Paul II,… Read More Michael Davies. What Happened at Vatican II?
“A cluster munition is a form of air-dropped or ground-launched explosive weapon that releases or ejects smaller submunitions. Commonly, this is a cluster bomb that ejects explosive bomblets that are designed to kill personnel and destroy vehicles. Other cluster munitions are designed to destroy runways or electric power transmission lines.”— Wikipedia “The use of cluster bombs, banned by 123 countries, has not helped the Russians… Read More Cluster Bomb Orgy of Death
The Imaginative Conservative.Victor Orban interview excerpt. “… the Hungarian position was that there was hardly any chance that there could be a winner in this war. It will have losers, but it won’t have winners. “Russia is coming up against a brick wall, and as NATO is supplying Ukraine with weapons and money, it’s simply… Read More The Ukraine War, the Pope, & the West
Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register wrote, “The former cardinal-archbishop of Milan [Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini], a favorite of those pushing for heterodox reforms in the Church, had envisioned a permanent synodal Church in which the idea of collegial governance introduced at the Second Vatican Council could be better realized. The Jesuit biblical… Read More Martini’s Endless Dream
Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy,Jan. 20, 2023. Fr. McCarthy, born October 9, 1940, is a priest of one of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine- Melkite, in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. He has been a Catholic priest for forty years, ordained on August 9, 1981, in Damascus, Syria. He received his Bachelor of… Read More Modern Industrial War and Abortion. Updated.
Even if it may have caused more problems than it solved, Vatican II for the future Pope was in no small part about reintegrating loose and undisciplined elements of immutable Catholic doctrine with Christological and Eucharistic teaching. George Weigel writes, “In the years immediately after the Council, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), who… Read More Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on Reasons for Vatican II
Thomas Merton on Moral Chaos, and “the worst insanity” (below). Thomas Merton: Nuclear Weapons and Sanity: “The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who… Read More Tucker Carlson and Thomas Merton on the Nuclear Option
No Conceivable…Justification” for aerial warfare, “dreadful weapons”. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII and John XXIII, wrote in 1947: “The extent of the damage done to national assets by aerial warfare, and the dreadful weapons that have been introduced of late, is so great that it leaves both vanquished… Read More What Could These Men Possibly Have Had in Common?
Thomas Reeves, the author of “America’s Bishop,” a biography of Fulton J. Sheen, tells of Sheen’s concerns regarding what he saw as the accelerated secularization occuring during WWII. Reeves mentions in particular the bishop’s 1944 book Seven Pillars of Peace where the subject is treated. This secularization involved the breakdown of the family which Sheen… Read More Bishop Sheen, Rosie the Riveter, and the War’s Greatest Casualty
First Things. Despite his humble origins as a baker’s son from Trastevere, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, longtime curial head of the Holy Office (“successor to the Inquisition,” in journalese) and scourge of the nouvelle théologie of the 1950s, was a formidable figure in pre-conciliar Catholicism. Ottaviani’s approach to theology was neatly summarized in the Latin motto of his… Read More George Weigel on The Last Laugh of Alfredo Ottaviani
Just and Unjust Wars The Catholic Church distinguishes between two types of justice concerning war: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Most of the time, when people discuss just-war theory, they mean jus ad bellum (justice before the war). Jus ad bellum refers to those four conditions described by Saint Augustine through which we determine whether a war is just before… Read More Justice and War
Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII and John XXIII, wrote in 1947: “The extent of the damage done to national assets by aerial warfare, and the dreadful weapons that have been introduced of late, is so great that it leaves both vanquished and victor the poorer for years after. Innocent… Read More “No Conceivable…Justification”. Aerial warfare’s “dreadful weapons”.
Catechism of the Catholic Church Avoiding war 2307 The fifth commandment forbids the intentional destruction of human life. Because of the evils and injustices that accompany all war, the Church insistently urges everyone to prayer and to action so that the divine Goodness may free us from the ancient bondage of war. 105 2308 All citizens… Read More Traditional Just War Teaching
Catholic Critique 