January puts one in mind of Saint Januarius, the liquefaction of whose blood is a marvel difficult for the skeptic to dismiss, though dismiss it of course he will. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. Popular devotions often bring out incredulity even in the faithful. How often has one heard the jocular remark that … Read more
Oedipus married his mother, Jocasta. Did he commit incest? Did she? He did not know that she was his mother; she did not know that he was her son. If we say that incest occurred, or happened, we are not making a moral remark. Moral action is something the human person knowingly sets out to … Read more
Letter Written to a Provincial Gentleman by one of His Friends on the Subject of the Present Debates How wrong we were! I only had my eyes opened yesterday. Those who have looked to Archbishop Rembert Weakland for leadership were wonderfully vindicated by his op-ed piece in the New York Times of December 6 (the … Read more
There was a phrase in the thirties: ‘It is later than you think,’ which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.” Evelyn Waugh’s fictional author might well have felt uneasy at the thought of becoming the late Gilbert Pinfold and thus prey to a biographer’s attention. My now … Read more
What satire is to the writer, the reductio ad absurdum is to the logician. Confronted by the abuses of Jesuit moralists, Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters. Appalled by the antics of his time, Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels. These were literary devices used in the hope that their addressees would easily grasp their relevance. When Aristotle … Read more
Recently we honored John FitzGerald, the senior member of the Philosophy Department at Notre Dame on his eightieth birthday. He said a few words in response to the tribute and spoke of various past events with vigor, wit, and clarity. While far from as venerable in years as he, I lived through some of the … Read more
In any list of heroes of the post-conciliar Church in the United States, the name of Monsignor George A. Kelly would figure prominently. By disposition and acquired character he is the quintessential insider, a man at home in his vocation who for over 50 years as a priest has not only worked in parishes but … Read more
Janet E. Smith is one of the most remarkable young Catholic women in this country. I have a vivid image of Janet addressing a roomful of bishops in Dallas some years ago. She was three decades younger than the youngest among them, yet her tone was that of a mother or of a very authoritative … Read more
It is difficult to get a clear view of the times in which we live. Our interest in the present is far more practical than theoretical, of course — we are living in it, not looking at it. For all that, living presupposes at least some looking, and there are two major ways of gaining … Read more
Richard McBrien, one of the avatars of rebellion in the American church, seems to have passed definitively into a farcical phase. For decades now he has been a vigorous exponent of the view that Vatican II set out to dismantle the Church. A new ecclesiology had been put over on the Council Fathers by the … Read more
Nothing puzzles Catholics more than the attitude of our separated brethren toward the Blessed Virgin Mary—and vice versa, of course. For that matter, many converts tell cradle Catholics that the greatest obstacle to their conversion was the Church’s teaching on Mary. Or at least what they conceived that teaching to be. In the newspapers the … Read more
I learned of his death when at Mass someone invited our prayers for the repose of the soul of “the Catholic novelist, Graham Greene.” Would he have accepted that description? He seems to have spent the decades since his best novels, those which established him as a Catholic writer, trying to distance himself from the … Read more
In spring, when the hearts of young and old turn to thoughts of collapse, disaster, and the end times, lucky are they who take up Lord of the World again, but luckier still are they who read the book for the first time. Not many futuristic novels published in 1907 can interest readers in this … Read more
To protest the wearing of furs by marching, not barefoot, but shod in the skin of animals may be taken as a symbol of our time. Cultists of nature are in full cry, and if they are unable to see the people for the trees, they have, as the mad often do, their reasons. Indeed, … Read more
If God created whiskey so the Irish wouldn’t rule the world, He didn’t let drink prevent F. Scott Fitzgerald from attaining the very first rank of American writers. When Fitzgerald died, half a century ago, on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, he was at work on The Last Tycoon, to which he … Read more
In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh says of his main character, with reference to a phrase popular at the time, it is later than you think: “It was never later than Gilbert Pinfold thought.” A Catholic could envy Pinfold’s capacity to anticipate any outrage. I confess I am mightily bothered by the massive … Read more
Robert Hugh Benson wrote Lord of the World in 1903. It is quite literally an apocalyptic novel about the end of the world, Armageddon, the second coming. Hooked as a boy on Benson’s recusant novels, I found this one more fascinating still, a theological thriller. Images of giant helicopters moving silently over London linger in … Read more
The spectacle of theologians presuming to interpose themselves between the magisterium and the rest of us is so familiar it has almost lost its power to shock. The condescension and insolence with which dissenting theologians examine documents of the ordinary magisterium remind us of nothing so much as an exasperated teacher correcting the essays of … Read more
When Leo XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879, counseling Catholics to return to the philosophical tradition in which St. Thomas Aquinas stood, Christianity looked as if it were about to be swamped by modernity. The Enlightenment Project, the exuberant belief that scientific progress and the absence of priests—to say nothing of popes—from social … Read more
I see in an essay by Michael Novak that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., holds religion in high regard, apparently because it keeps the rabble down, but adds that he sympathizes with Tocqueville “who went to his death an unbeliever.” Tocqueville, God bless him, is beyond caring about such courtiers as Schlesinger, but the notion that he … Read more