…who kindly blesses each one of us with the Sign of the Cross + from the sidewalk when we come out of Church. Or when we pass on the street. O blessed Sign! Once when I needed to Confess my sins only to find it was one of those rare days when the church was… Read More I know a priest
Mass. June 2025. Now You See Him. Now You Don’t. Who or what here is front and Center at Mass the whole time? And Who is casually picked up – with one hand! – put back down and de-emphasized quickly, then passed around in what appears to be the real climax of the present liturgical… Read More Dismal Liturgies
by Stephen Hand In Evelyn Waugh’s stunning classic, Brideshead Revisited, there is a scene which presses on my mind these days as I ponder so many forces gathering against a Church weakened greatly by the sins of her own children, both clerical and lay. All of us. It is the time when Sebastian, Lord Alex… Read More Lord Marchmain’s Long Hate
Carlo Carretto1910-1988 “How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and… Read More Love Letter to the Church. Carlo Carreto.
Reginald Garrigou Lagrange and St. Alphonsus Ligouri. The New Oxford Review has been interested in this important subject recently and so I thought the following might assist those likewise interested and / or baffled by it all. See also other essays by following links regarding predestination, grace, free will, etc at this website. 1. Catholic… Read More Harmony and Differences on Predestination in Catholic Theology
Charles Lewis. Review of The Priest Barracks: Dachau 1938-1945 by By Guillaume Zeller. National Catholic Register . Updated. “On July 20, 1933, six months after Hitler rose to power, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, and the German vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, signed a concordat — a sort of peace treaty between the… Read More Enduring Faith Amid Horror: The Priests of Dachau
… in Liberalism. And why I can never see the Crucifixion of Our Lord in the same way after Holland’s momentous book Dominion. SH “Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of… Read More Historian Tom Holland on Losing His Faith
Damian Thompson associate editor of The Spectator writes, “Ludwig van Beethoven had a profound faith in God. He was born and raised a Catholic and on his deathbed he asked to receive the Last Rites. He told the priest, ‘I thank you, ghostly sir – you have brought me comfort.’ One of his closest friends,… Read More Why didn’t Beethoven Go to Mass?
Patience in Penance. Fourteen Years the Abbot spent on Overcoming One Fault. “Love demands a complete inner transformation – for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother… And this involves a death of selfishness In the Verba Seniorum [Words of the Elders] we read of Abbot Ammonas, who spent fourteen… Read More Perseverance, Patience, Penance.
A stoneis not an individual.You can make little onesout of big ones. A treeis an individual.It comesfrom a germ.“Only Godcan make a tree,”says the poet. A horseis an individual.The horse is notan individualthe way the treeis an individual.It has animal life. Man is an individualand has animal lifelike the horse.Man has also reason.which the horse… Read More On Personalism. Peter Maurin.
“Master, do you not care that we perish?” — Mark iv. 38. “… we bear in mind what was promised about the holy church and him who said that the gates of hell will not prevail against it (by these we understand the death-dealing tongues of heretics); we also bear in mind what was prophesied… Read More The Gates of Hell — (Formal Heresies within and without) — Do Not Prevail
By Michael Brendan Dougherty.National Review, 10/12/22. And six decades of pseudo-theologyYears ago, during a very brief meeting at New York University with the eminent English conservative Roger Scruton, I shared with him — an Anglican by tradition — my reservations about the Second Vatican Council and my interest in the old liturgy. He had no… Read More 60 Years Since Vatican II
Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges.… Read More The Church Will Become Small
By a.d. 1200, Europe was in the process of changing from a medieval agricultural economy to one based upon interregional trade, which contributed to the growth of large urban centers. Many of these cities evolved from successful trade fairs established along busy trade routes. In turn, they engendered a commercial revolution that would eventually change… Read More Medieval Fun and Commerce: Trade Fairs and the Commercial Revolution
Catholic Critique 