The three boys have joined forces to run away from home and pillage their enemy towns on the banks of the great river. After they filch some of the necessities for a life of piracy—a side of bacon, some tobacco, hooks and lines, and a raft—and spend an afternoon enjoying the glory of spreading the … Read more
You must go visit the good sisters in Starrucca,” said my friend, Father Check. So there I was with my wife and son in the car, sliding along a slippery highway in rural Pennsylvania, wondering what I would find when I arrived. I’d been told by the mother prioress, Sister Therese, that if we got … Read more
“If any man,” says the preacher, “can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.” At that the door is flung open, and in strides anybody from a dozen old movies. The screenÂwriters knew their trade. The one marriage service from … Read more
Into the face that most resembles Christ now look: for by her radiance only she can render you prepared for seeing Christ. (Paradiso 32.85-87) So says St. Bernard to the pilgrim Dante, urging him to gaze into the countenance of Mary, as they stand at the threshold of the Beatific Vision. They are words I have … Read more
What wonders we American Catholics have seen. Schools, whose joists were sawn and spiked by the hands of men who would send their children there, now empty, crumbling; whole orders of nuns doffing their habits, then their faith and reason too, worthy societies dwindling into a few old men with beers and a shuffleboard table, … Read more
In the old days when Italians still had children, the mother of any large family, if she was devout, would single out one of her sons and pray that someday he would become a priest. In this tradition, my grandmother chose the gentlest and most intelligent of her four sons and encouraged him to be … Read more
Our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, reminds us always that the Church is something we receive as a gift. It is not a human work but God’s work, and only insofar as we unite ourselves to it can it be said, through God’s grace, to be our work, too. Only then can we claim that our … Read more
“How much shall we put you down for, sir?” asks the philanthropist on Christmas Eve, standing in the dingy countinghouse where Ebenezer Scrooge plies his lawful trade in misery. “Nothing.” “You wish to remain anonymous?” “I wish,” says Scrooge, “to be left alone!” Mine is a land of loneliness. We may not be as miserly … Read more
Our family has finally called it quits. We’ve folded our tents and abandoned the strip mall and peep show known as American television. We still have the machine in the living room, whereon we can watch Going My Way, with Bing Crosby as the “progressive” Father O’Malley, back when progressive meant that he took the … Read more
On a dead-end stretch of what was once U.S. 11 Route 22, in a small village with tacky-friendly billboards boasting “Genuine Dutch Cooking,” where old folks and even some of the young still scold their children or go a-courting or order scrapple and beer in Low German—in a veritable little oxbow lake cut off from … Read more
On a wintry day in Boston stood a man “devoid of genius, and with only an ordinary education,” eulogizing an insurrectionist hanged hundreds of miles away. He had too much integrity and too little imagination to compromise the single great principle of his life. “What is it,” he cried to the crowds gathered to hear … Read more
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Kraków, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Beth-salem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders … Read more
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Krakow, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Bethsalem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders … Read more