On the Saturday of the Easter Triduum, Virginia governor Ralph Northam signed Senate Bill 868, called the Virginia Values Act, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, public or private employment, public spaces and credit transactions,” according to the Washington Post. It also provides “causes of action,” allowing … Read more
Eastertime rejoices in life, when even things as old as the world are made new again. It is at this time of resurrection that Catholics may also remember those who have passed away in the hope of rising again, and especially those whose memory might be seasoned with the brightness they brought to life by … Read more
The Muslim world’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic helps to highlight some important aspects of the Islamic faith. It also reveals some important differences between Islam and Christianity. Of course, there are similarities as well. The main one is that Muslims, like Christians, are praying to God to spare them and their loved ones from … Read more
As we all struggle with our confinement during this holiest of seasons, I busy myself with two endless activities: making repairs to a home battered by having barracked my eight sons over the years and revisiting favorite authors, especially poets. For the first time in a long while, I have picked up a book of … Read more
“Truth, what is that?” Pilate’s question is answered in the Good Friday liturgy: Ecce Lignum Crucis! “Behold the wood of the cross!” Sadly, however, Pilate is the biblical forefather of the relativism that is the salient feature of post-Christian society in the Western world. In post-Christian Australia, “freedom” is defined as doing what you want: … Read more
On the evening of Good Friday, as on the evening of every Good Friday as far back as I can remember, I was reading from Saint John Henry Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons, published by Ignatius Press. (I was surprised and disappointed to learn recently that Baron Friedrich von Hugel, the Catholic spiritual writer of … Read more
Mercy and justice are difficult to balance in human affairs, and even more difficult can be the belief in their balance in the God from Whom we beg for the one while trembling in fear of the other. These are days when it is not difficult to believe we are feeling the heavy hand of … Read more
The coronavirus crisis has certainly put a lot of things into perspective —and not just the value of relationships with our family or how much money we really need to get by. What counts as essential medical service has also become a topic of national conversation. This is most salient in regard to abortion, though … Read more
Last week, President Donald Trump wished the country “Happy Good Friday,” and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, everyone was an expert on Catholic theology—or, at least, the emotional rubrics going along with Holy Week. Sure, most religious folk would not use the phrase “Happy Good Friday.” But most religious folk understood what he was trying … Read more
Anyone with faith in God could easily conclude that the current crisis has all the hallmarks of divine punishment, especially here in Australia given the recent drought, fires, smoke, floods, and now plague. It is beginning to sound all a bit biblical, like the book of Exodus, especially having just been through Lent. If we … Read more
Death, decries the novelist Alan Harrington, is “an imposition on the human race” from which we will be saved by “medical engineering and nothing else.” Though the dark hearse of death drives fear of that moment when “everything will go black . . . our messiahs will be wearing white coats.” In Pale Horse, Pale … Read more
George Cardinal Pell has walked out of solitary confinement a free man. Accordingly, we Australian Catholics might be said to have won a battle. But we have not won the war. We are not within a million miles of winning the war. On present indications, we lack, humanly speaking, the slightest capacity not just to … Read more
For those who know what they are looking for, the journey to the twelfth-century Norman church of St. Mary the Virgin is still something of an adventure. Others—hikers, tourists, or just people who take a wrong turning—come upon the deserted church by accident. The winding country lanes of that part of Kent—the county where St. … Read more
“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to … Read more
Trading in a sober view of our final ends for raw power has almost certainly been the Faustian transaction of our time. Then again, it truly is baked into the human experience, terminating with that infamous serpent who hoodwinked our first parents with his somatic wager to recast us as gods. The payout was anything … Read more
On March 31, The Atlantic published an important essay by Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, entitled “Beyond Originalism,” igniting a firestorm of controversy within the internet world of legal and political theory. That a secular magazine like The Atlantic would publish an article of such unflinchingly Catholic convictions is … Read more
One of the distinguishing factors of a faithful Catholic college is its vibrant community life. Students spend four years immersed in a truly Catholic culture, where faith and virtue are promoted and students, faculty and staff make friendships to last a lifetime. Now faithful Catholic colleges have closed their campuses to curb the spread of … Read more
“Behold! I tell you a mystery.” — Corinthians 15:51 How many of us have been energized by that line from Handel’s “Messiah”, which leads into the magnificent trumpet flourish and aria, announcing the resurrection of the dead? But what is a mystery? Let us say what it is not: it is not a story akin … Read more
St. Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation is a classic of prison literature. Arrested in 1534, More wrote his Dialogue while in the Tower of London during that same year, as he awaited his trial and execution the following summer. More’s book deserves attention this Holy Week as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to … Read more
“I have sowed sackcloth upon my skin, and have covered my flesh with ashes. — Book of Job 16:16) “I hereby release everyone from fasting and abstinence. I think we’ve suffered enough already.” — Bishop Luke Warm, Diocese of Acedia “Whatever…” — Book of None These three responses pretty much encapsulate the three broad ways … Read more