Note: One need not care for Hollywood and its often amoral actors in the slightest to have sympathy for victims of addictions in general. Many of us know or love persons who have suffered—and made others suffer— from addictions. Christians are no more immune to it than their enemies. Some jump into it. Other slide.… Read More Johnny Depp and Substance Abuse. What we can learn.
And the order of creation: “The cradle of society is the family. A nation’s unity starts in the family too.” That extends into the community of citizens of the different regions, social classes and religions, she said. The Government policy therefore is focused on encouraging family formation, the Hungarian President explained. “Let us protect the… Read More Hungarian President on the Family
History: “In the idyllic pastoral setting of East Anglia, in the county of Norfolk, and located just over one mile from Walsingham, stands the little Slipper Chapel, a shrine dating back to the mid 14th century. Within this tiny shrine is kept the familiar Catholic statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. At this point, pilgrims… Read More Daily Mass at The Slipper Chapel, Walsingham
I admire much that Jordan Peterson has done and said. Very much. But I cannot accept his thought entirely regarding the question of Meaning in our lives and times, which he and others have publicly discussed, and which many admire. To the contrary, it is Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8),… Read More Jordan Peterson on Meaning
Paul Kingsnorth. “Do not be conformed to this world“— St. Paul Welcome to the Abbey. ‘Instead of thought there is a vast, inhuman void, full of words, formulas, slogans, declarations, echoes, ideologies … If we do not think, we cannot act freely; we are at the mercy of forces which we never understand, forces that… Read More The Abbey of Misrule
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.”— Prov.… Read More Through darkness and light
An important discussion on our perilous technological time. Orthodox Christian Jonathan Pageau, Ph.D, writes, “This is my second conversation with Paul Kingsnorth. We talk about his brilliant substack, called The Abbey of Misrule, civilization and control, the power of the state and our technological systems, the matrix, politics, what it takes for communities to survive,… Read More Civilization and Control. Jonathan Pageau
The gifted Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, by any standard, was a most extraordinary person. Donald DeMarcoNational Catholic Register February 23, 2022 Sigrid Undset walked into the manager’s office of the Aschehoug publishing company, one of the largest in Norway, and tossed G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) onto his desk, exclaiming that “this is the… Read More Sigrid Undset — A Catholic Woman for Our Time
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
— As witness, “In Roe v. Wade Comments, Biden Rows Without Both Oars in the Water, Wades Into Error” (National Catholic Register) — Cardinal Robert Sarah: Warning to Europe
Note: Most of us understand I think that it is important to distinguish homosexual persons from the elite ideological movements which, flouting the objective Natural Law, serve as the vehicle of the totalitarian transformation of language, law, history, culture, institutions and nations in the West. This is repugnant to the moral and natural laws. God alone will judge persons.… Read More A Bridge to Our Children. Hollywood and the Infiltrator – Fr. James Martin.
By Katie Yoder, (CNA) Washington, D.C. Newsroom, May 2, 2022 / 21:25 pm Pro-life leaders had mixed reactions Monday night to the news of a purported U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion signaling that justices will overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. While many declined to comment on the reported leak, all of them… Read More Pro-life leaders, hopes raised, react cautiously to leaked abortion decision draft
(CNA) Pope Francis has said that he will not visit Ukraine right now, but he would like to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow if the Russian president is willing. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, published May 3, the pope said that he asked Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin about 20 days… Read More Pope Francis wants to meet Putin in Moscow. Blames NATO For Starting The War
The Weston Institute for International and Public Affairs The Watson Institute, Brown University, R.I., is a community of scholars, practitioners, and students whose work aims to help us understand and address these critical challenges. It is dedicated to meaningful social science research and teaching, and animated by the conviction that informed policy can change systems… Read More Ukraine: A Terrifying Scenario
St. Catherine of Siena Love from ‘Eternal Goodness’. Eternal Goodness, you want me to gaze into you and see that you love me gratuitously,so that I may love everyone with the very same love. You want me, then, to love and serve my neighbors gratuitously, by helping them spiritually and materially as much as I… Read More St. Catherine of Siena. Feast Day April 29.
“Social Justice: you keep on using that term. It does not mean what you think it means.” In 2021, Baucham published his new book, ‘Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.’ He spoke out against the social justice movement and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the book. CRT is an academic concept,… Read More Other Voices. Voddie Bauckham on “Social Justice.”
James M. Patterson, April 2020First Things Magazine C-Span: The important lecture of Thomas Reeves on America’s Bishop (including an the account of his many sufferings and persecutions). Watch it here. Fulton J. Sheen is defined in popular imagination by the persona he adopted on Life Is Worth Living, his Emmy-winning television program. During each episode, the… Read More Taking Sheen Seriously
by John Waters 4.29.22.First Things Magazine Elon Musk is typically the object of considerable masculine envy, and so, in the interests of avoiding accusations of green-eye, it would be nice to be able to declare him unequivocally as on the side of the angels. But, for all his legendary space-adventuring, this is by no means clear.… Read More Elon Musk And the Post Humanist Threat — First Things Magazine
A Synod “filled with the usual modern technocratic, therapeutic linguistics of faux egalitarian tyranny”. Will the Church still be a “listening” Church in ten years or will the “Spirit” go mute once the Germans have given the final definitive word on the Spirit’s intentions? Larry ChappCatholic World Report April 22, 2022 I am not opposed… Read More The quintessentially modern approach to “synodality” is empty and artificial
This documentary shows only one tragic instance of the proficient use of propaganda in the 20th century. Of course, the Communists did the same, even if a little more clumsily. But what about us today in the 21st century? Western people today live, move and think in a 24×7 media hall of mirrors. George Orwell,… Read More The Propaganda Machines of Yesterday Should Give Us Pause Today
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons. And he is called by grace to… Read More The Image of God in Our Turning Techno-logical Moment
He purchased Twitter, the largest “Public Square” in the entire world. And coterminous with it . Elon Musk is also making implants to link the brain with computers and Smartphones — and very much more. There will be “many applications” in time for all, he insists. Spiritual Derangement, Specious Rationalizations, toying with improving the Imago… Read More Elon Musk? What’s Everybody So Happy About?
Jerry D. Salyer,Crisis Magazine. American conservatism has certainly come a long way since the days of Richard Weaver, the Southern philosopher who identified “contempt for natural order” as the underlying ailment of the modern mind. Back in the 1960s, when he was known and celebrated as a conservative intellectual icon, Weaver saw “the foolish and… Read More Are Women in the Workplace a Good Thing?
It’s not about personalities, he insists. “We have stupid people running our country now” and if we don’t change, he says, “you’re going to have no world.” [Full disclosure: I am Politically Independent. I will vote for Right or Left candidates, or not vote at all, depending on the truth of the issues and the… Read More Trump: Change or “The World is Going to Blow Itself Up”
Excerpted from “Debunking Howard Zinn“: by scholar Mary Grabar. “Howard Zinn rode to fame and fortune on the “untold story” of Christopher Columbus—a shocking tale of severed hands, raped women, and gentle, enslaved people worked to death to slake the white Europeans’ lust for gold. Today, that story is anything but untold. Zinn’s narrative about the… Read More On Howard Zinn and Christopher Columbus
“Your care for me is greater than all the care I can take of myself… If You wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless You. And if You wish me to be in light, again I shall bless You. If You stoop down to comfort me, I shall bless You, and if You… Read More The Meaning of the Cross
Venerable Fulton J. Sheen: the Meaning of the Cross of Jesus Christ. By Way of The Cross He leads us through both light and darkness. “Your care for me is greater than all the care I can take of myself… If You wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless You. And if You… Read More The Meaning of the Cross
Matt Taibbi writes at his TK News site, “News2Share and Ford Fischer recap the history of “Progressive Anti Abortion Uprising,” or “PAUU,” a group mentioned in this space during anti-abortion demonstrations last December. The group’s director of activism, Lauren Handy, was arrested along with eight other group members in connection with an incident in 2020 when they allegedly blocked access… Read More Progressivist Prolifers on Trial
“Tucked at the end of a hotly debated passage in Lumen Gentium about the Church’s role in salvation comes one sentence that has not received as much attention. What follows the statement that “all the Church’s children” have received their holy Catholic faith not from merit, but from “the special grace of Christ,” is the… Read More The Most Harrowing Text of Vatican II
… every worker-bee stuffed into housing pods … Permanent capital is buying up single family housing stock.
By John Waters 3 . 23 . 20 /First Things Magazine. Recently [2020], while speaking in the Italian city of Bari, Pope Francis mentioned contemporary “populist” politicians—specifically, those who describe recent waves of migrants traveling from Africa to Europe as an “invasion.” “I grow fearful when I hear certain speeches by some leaders of the new… Read More ON LOVING THY NEIGHBOR
by Hilton Kramer A reprinting of Mr. Kramer’s 1976 article published in The New York Times. I. Introduction. “Few among the intellectuals in the Party realized at the time that their mentality was a caricature of the revolutionary spirit; that within the short span of three generations the Communist movement had travelled from the era of… Read More The Blacklist & the Cold War Revisited
Why Were Authorities so Quick to Rule out Arson in the Notre Dame Conflagration? BY Roger Kimball, Apr. 17, 2019 I feel I must hand it to those stalwart souls investigating the devastating conflagration at the Cathedral of Notre Dame… The flames were not quenched at the 12th-century masterpiece of Gothic architecture when the authorities… Read More An Old Flame We Do Not Forget. Notre Dame.
Originally published as (curiously enough) In Defense of Cigarettes. by Matt Labash, National Correspondent | The Weekly Standard, August 08, 2017 Dear Matt, I had this thought that America was more civil when everyone smoked. You learned from an early age that people will do something you don’t like but there wasn’t much you could… Read More A Pipe Dream
John E. Fagan “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women can come… Read More John Paul II on Faith, Reason and Nihilism
Ireland’s John Waters writes, “As things stand, it appears that artificial intelligence, while capable of outperforming humans in certain tasks and reckonings, still requires human supervision. Being neither sentient nor self-aware, AI cannot reflect on its own processes. It gets things wrong, mainly due to insufficient, poor, or confusing inputs, albeit less so than before.… Read More Morality in the Age of Machines.
Statement on the Ukraine conflict – A Call to Peace and End to War. Los Angeles Catholic Worker. “We are anti-war. We believe war is a moral failure stemming from our unwillingness to actively work for peace. From the individual to the collective national level, the prioritizing of shortsighted self-interest has created this crisis. Victims… Read More The Russia – Ukraine Tragedy
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
Marxism and CRT are no answer to racism. Marxism and CRT only exploit it for Marxist ends and so cynically disregard the great progress we had all made —until 2020. — Thomas Di’Lorenzo on Abraham Lincoln (C-Span) … More: Lincoln scholar H. Jaffa… — The Popes and Slavery: Setting the record straight — National Review:… Read More C-Span. The Dark Side of Abraham Lincoln
Jackson at a confirmation hearing said she cannot define what a woman is. Suggests the science is unclear. Embryonic Democracy: “Pilate, wishing to please the crowd, released for them Barabbas; and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.” — Mark 15:15. And so a New World is coming into view, “After decades of… Read More Supreme Ct. Nominee Jackson Cannot Define What a Woman is
Catholic Critique 