Jesus Christ, “given unto us” (Isa 9.6): This true Man has been the subject of the mostsublime contemplation, worship, and love imaginable for over two thousand years. Even agnostics marvel over his Person and teachings. And His enemies, of whatever variety, obsess over Him to this very day. For in that crib, the Church attests,… Read More Jesus Christ, Light of the World
Extra Ecclesiam nulla Salus Dear Dr… Thank you very much for the revised version of your article on the theological understanding of the efficacy of the “baptisms” of desire and blood* for salvation [absent water baptism]—in certain circumstances. As you’ll see by the enclosed letter which I wrote to a friend, I am on the… Read More On Fr. Leonard Feeney
I do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to have been perfect. Which pope in history was? Even Pius XII allowed the infamous Teilhard de Chardin to remain a priest and teacher in the Church. Why he did so I will never know. And he ordained or consecrated many of the leading luminaries who went on… Read More Benedict XVI by Joseph Pearce
America… “not in any sense Christian” “….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain o f scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57 The fatal mischief in the U.S. Constitution was in the purposeful ambiguity embedded in the Enlightenment concept “liberty”. This is what logically led us… Read More America and Seductive False ‘Liberty’.
Apropos of everything: Because Heidegger forsook his early roots in Thomistic [objective] Christian philosophy, the unapologetic Nazi who enjoyed philosophy was forced to create a new and eccentric philosophical superstructure [undecipherable and irrelevant to most human beings] to dodge the consequent existential void. It was necessary because his system toppled the Holy Trinity and so… Read More Being and Bunk.
Why Catholic Critique? To confess the Faith to any who wish to hear or see. “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9)…” “If you continue in my word, then you are my disciples…” (Jn. 8:31) This website is a small,… Read More Catholic Critique
The other side of the Eucharist is friendship. It often happens that week after week, year after year, Christians sit and kneel next to practical strangers in church on Sundays. They leave Mass as they entered, nodding and saying hello to people they do not ever really come to know. And in our time it… Read More The Deep Truths in Fritz Eichenberg’s ‘The Lord’s Supper’
First, the Problem. The famous Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson writes, surely accurately, in his Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, “… at the very place where the Summa of Alexander and the Commentary of St. Bonaventure undertake to show that the existence of God is evident, St. Thomas devotes an article to proving that it… Read More Gilson, Saint Thomas and The Self-Attesting God
Are Catholic prelates really moving in on Francis with a view to ousting him as a report indicates? …or is it all so much Progressivist paranoia and guilt, knowing how much they have deformed the Faith since putting Francis on the Chair of Peter? “Vatican plot to force Pope Francis to resign: Conservatives wage ‘secret… Read More Moving in on Francis?
You are creating a new world, soldier!Isn’t that what you signed up to do,to kill and die for, soldier? You will…ridicule enemy cultureswreck economiesmock traditionsterrorize their“moral absolutes” You willcut off their ballsthrow their titsinto cold tin basinsturn boys into girlsgirls into boysmothers into MILFSfathers into jokeschurches into effeminate echoschildren into pin-ups! You will teach themthat… Read More You Will Bring Liberation, Soldier!
When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Avant-garde were given powerful platforms to announce that traditional art forms were passé, and art galleries exchanged space for the mystic likes of Picasso, Surrealism, and in some degree Andy Warhol, etc., they arguably prepared the way for the denial of natural gender distinctions and the binary… Read More From Rembrandt to Picasso
Tolkien Mourned the Decline of the Shire* …the real shire of his youth which he ever remembered and sought to salvage to the extent that he could; the simplicity and beauty of the land and villages which he grew up in, the countryside, the mountains and streams, the beauty of the day and the night… Read More Tolkien’s Battle for the Shire. And for Us All.
Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. [‘Nonage’ is the immature inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance]. He continues: “This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know!… Read More Immanuel Kant, Philosopher of the New Light
…he seems to express a kind of anxiety or apprehension here about the obvious problem of the magisterium as he “comes out of the closet” and reveals himself to be an eschatological “universalist”. Dear Dr. Chapp: A point towards the clarification of thought from a layman and obvious non-theologian: Despite making many interesting —even profound—… Read More A Note to the Always Interesting Dr. Larry Chapp on Hell
UPDATED. Jeremy had a very hard summer and Autumn. Sepsis, pneumonia, UTIs… He has been totally disabled since 2006 due to a brain trauma. Today Jeremy cannot eat anything by mouth due to an inability to swallow foods or liquids, extreme Dysphagia, which developed in late July. Yet his Faith in Christ remains profound and… Read More Our Disabled Son Jeremy Has Been on a Feeding Tube Since the Summer
Existentialist philosophy and analysis, to the extent that it measures “the predicament of man and his world in the state of estrangement” (Paul Tillich) corroborates what Christian theology has always referred to as Original Sin. As a school of philosophy it seems pretty well dead now, but important insights of the original existentialists remain valid… Read More Existence and the Word
I dreamed I was walking through a desolate Night. I had come a greatdistance from the barren lands of Acedia. It was pitch dark except for thelantern loaned to me by the old man; there were also curious twinklings oflight which I followed in uneven, confusing patterns across the splattered glass and smoking ruins of… Read More Apocalypse Nights
On March 21, 1960, at approximately 2 PM, Ricardo Klement got off the bus in the San Fernando section of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his hands was a bouquet of flowers. He was greeted at the door of 16 Garibaldi Street by his wife and children who appeared dressed for a special occasion. Little did… Read More Authority After Adolph Eichmann
A little girl, a wreck of a mother, an absent father, a vicious madman, and a hermit priest who bears it all and pays the price. Gifts Unexpected. By Stephen Hand. (HC, PB & Kindle). Reviewed by Matthew Anger (c) TCRNews. “In Gifts Unexpected, Mr. Hand traces the lives of a young girl and her… Read More Gifts Unexpected by Stephen Hand
Is A Personal God Improbable? Or is it we who are improbable?Atheism has traditionally scoffed at belief in a God who is Personal or SupraPersonal. I’ve always found their position to be a counterintuitive curiosity. One of the reasons why is that I find myself, a personal being, to exist. I am here. You are… Read More I Am Therefore I Think
“The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism.” — Stuart Walton It is a sad fact… Read More Aesthetics, Relativism and the Enlightenment
Day after day a million confused emotions ebbed and flowed and sometimes clashed within him. After a time, when he had come to feel particularly ill, and knew that he would soon be placing himself into Hospice, he wondered what he should do at last. It is said that there are two kinds of people:… Read More Seeing The First time
When Scripture’s creation-based, antropocentric revelation is rejected, and an evolutionary animal continuum (from amoeba to man) is presupposed as the only reality, then human beings begin taking their cues for behavior from the animal world. This rationalization has reached tragically absurd levels today as witness postmodernist writer Steven Shaviro’s longing for the sexual autonomy of… Read More From Creation and Family to the Petri Dish
It cannot be seriously doubted in our time that since the Second Vatican Council not a little of what has been called “Catholic ecumenism” has in fact gone off the Church’s traditional dogmatic rails. But for all that the principle cannot be doubted. It was doubtless the seemingly radical abruptness of the Church’s turnaround regarding… Read More Traditional Catholic Ecumenism
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 Marchmain’s idiosyncratic, drunkard, but… Read More Lord Marchmain’s Long Hate
Reviewed by Matthew Anger “In Gifts Unexpected, Mr. Hand traces the lives of a young girl and her divorced parents. We are immediately confronted with people are who are morally ambivalent. Stock “good” and “evil” characters might do for a fantasy piece or detective story, but a serious novel must deal by and large with… Read More Gifts Unexpected By Stephen Hand.
…who kindly blesses each one us from the sidewalk when we come out of Church. Or when we pass on the street. Once when I needed to Confess my sins only to find it was one of those rare days when the church was closed and there would be no Confessions, he happened to be… Read More I know a priest
John Paul II: “To do penance means, above all, to re-establish the balance and harmony broken by sin, to change directions at the cost of sacrifice” (Reconciliation and Penance, 26, emphasis added) Looking back, it seems to me I was only somewhat converted (if one can say that) to my Catholic Faith when I was… Read More Late A Disciple
“God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. — Frederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109. For the Neo-modernist or Progressivist Catholic today, the Traditional understanding of God is… Read More Progressivist Theology. What it is.
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him: or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels: thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over the works of thy hands: Thou hast subjected all things under his feet”—Heb 2:5-7… Read More The Image of God Beyond Darwin’s Reductionist Myths
Good Fences, Shared Bounty Can it ever be wise to separate compassion, reasonable limits and common sense? If you have seen the movie Syriana you will have gotten a glimpse of the fears, greed and fanaticism which, often enough, make many peoples both in the West and the Middle East more than a little uneasy of… Read More Immigration, Birds of a Feather and Trojan Horses
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