The Holy Spirit at Vatican II protected the Church from casting its lot with what has been a colossal failure. But now it appears that that connection is going to be made, nearly sixty years later.
The pope warns against aestheticism. Rightly so. Aestheticism is to a full experience of beauty as sentimentality is to profound and genuine feeling. But it is not aestheticism to long for beauty, as it is not sentimental to long for love.
There is a good reason why things get worse and not better for them who celebrate the abnormal.
I have read too much, I have beheld too much, I have heard and sung too much. I am a restorationist. I am like someone who knows there are riches around a corner, and I want everyone to come and see. I can’t help it anymore.
Most politicians are looking at the means or the opportunity behind mass shootings. Instead we need to change a culture that motivates such shootings.
The unborn child is strange and familiar at once. Set aside all the muddle of your fears and desires, your resentment, your self-opinion, your politics, whatever. Look at that child. That was you, that was me.
The cancerous growth of the State has come at the expense of the home, and the unholy has grown at the expense of the holy.
The Church’s strategy of evangelization has been to accommodate ourselves to the culture, reversing the words of St. Paul; we grow old and stale, conforming to the world.
Governments in general are very good at giving you the shirt off your neighbor’s back while causing the conditions that make you need the shirt in the first place.
“Men without chests” are those who lack any sense of the sublime, the beautiful, the homely, or the slovenly, the ugly, and the perverse. What is a Church without a chest?
The only way to approve of or even condone any form of mock-marriage, homosexual or otherwise, is to deny that we have access to objective reality outside of our feelings about it.
Since Gregorian chant has not been banned, and since most people actually enjoy dabbling in another language once in a while, we might well inject the germs of beauty into our Masses.
Modernism, as an ideological stance, is essentially iconoclastic. It exists principally by standing in judgment against what has existed, even when what has existed is profoundly and naturally human.
Restoring the Last Gospel (John 1:1-14) to the end of Mass would be a bulwark against the disturbing trends of our culture.
Modernism is not alive; it is, in fact, the opposite: the effort to bind us to a corpse.
We need to take our faith into the public square, and this includes bringing meaningful songs to a people starved for beauty.
How to respond to the anti-Christian pseudo-reasons, slogans, “memes,” historical fictions, and creatures of the imagination of our day.
In a recent article at The Pillar, the estimable J.D. Flynn interviews a family in the Cleveland archdiocese whose son was preyed upon—through two years of utterly demonic enticement, spiritual blackmail, and cruelty—by a priest now serving a life sentence in prison. It is an agony to read, as it should be. The young man … Read more
“Ye shall be as gods,” said the serpent. Whitaker Chambers called it the second oldest religion in the world. It has always proved popular. In his time, it took the form of communism. But the tempter is not so stupid as to appear in the same guise always; even human beings eventually get the idea … Read more
“From the beginning of creation,” said Jesus, when the Pharisees, seeking trouble, tried to pin Him down on the matter of divorce, “God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are … Read more