It’s Time to Clean Up the Mess
Pope Francis recommended that we “make a mess.” Well, a mess we have – perhaps it’s time to clean things up?
The Infrequency of Infallibility
The pope exercises no authority on his own, all authority having come from Christ. He is not, therefore, above the Church’s Doctrine of the Faith, but rather he is its custodian and protector.
What Price Redemption?
God takes our suffering entirely upon Himself, bearing it away in the fire of an infinite love. Who else but a God of love would dare to take on the world’s dereliction?
Everything Is Worse on Biden’s Watch
Could the incompetency on such a scale as the Biden Administration have happened by sheer accident? Or has it been going on all this time by design?
Have We Lost Our Hunger for the Bread of Life?
Countless people no longer adhere to the truth of the Catholic Thing. Their numbers appear to have become like the sands of the sea—whole families fractured, as it were, by the defection of so great a number of their children.
Hijackers of the Word
Too many Catholic biblical scholars live off the substance of a faith they no longer believe in, a faith every detail of which they despise.
Letting Go, Letting God
In striving for sanctity, the ancients had an advantage over us. They had something that many of us appear to have lost: they actually believed in an objective order.
Take and Read
There is a great divide in this country, one which has gone largely unnoticed, between those who read and those who won’t.
Can Anyone Choose Hell?
Is it really true, as Pope Francis said, that “No one can exclude themselves from the Church?”
Why Do I Teach?
Teachers are called to urging their students to climb onto those ancestral shoulders and see the distant shore where truth and beauty beckon, the very things that so animated the lives of those who came before us.
Even Peter Nods
Whatever power Christ conferred upon Peter, and all his successors down through the centuries, is not about this or that pope’s own private preferences, but rather the clear and public defense of a common faith.
A Crisis of Truth
Issues of social justice are not at the forefront of the problems we confront. It is, rather, for want of truth that the world suffers.
On Knowing Things That Truly Matter
Whenever I come across Groucho Marx’s advice about never wanting to join a club that would have someone like him as a member, I immediately think of the Roman Catholic Church, whose admission standards are considerably more relaxed. In fact, so wildly promiscuous is Old Mother Church that even Groucho Marx would be welcome. She … Read more
Yes, Virginia, There Is Sin…Only It’s Not Racial
The other night, Glenn Youngkin was on Tucker Carlson (which has long been my drug of choice) talking about his recent, stunning upset of Terry McAuliffe in the race to become Virginia’s next Governor. Here is a guy who, despite being 6’ 7” tall, had hardly been noticed by anyone until he decided to enter … Read more
On Prayer and Politics
Someone once told me about a priest he knew who, for all the apparent pointlessness of the exercise, continued to pray for the conversion of St. Augustine. When it was suggested that perhaps his prayers might be more usefully deployed in helping sinners, the priest would insist that it was perfectly plausible for God, existing … Read more
Where Else Are We to Go, If Not to Rome?
If I were a convert, which I am not, I think I’d rather resent hearing the Pope tell me that I’d made a mistake in becoming one. It seems rather off-putting, don’t you think, to go ahead and pope, only to have the real one in Rome suddenly announce that maybe you shouldn’t have? What’s … Read more
From Me to We: On Membership in the Mystical Body
A great sea change came over my life when, quite by accident, I first stumbled upon a copy of Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. Based on a set of lectures, given in the summer of 1967, that captivated large numbers of German university students, it appeared in English two years later. I discovered it several … Read more
On Faith and Martyrdom
O martyrs of God, your race is run, All thanks to his redeeming Son. You’ve vanquished every foe, Eternal joys are yours to know. “What is uniquely Christian,” declared Hans Urs von Balthasar near the end of the Second Vatican Council—widespread forgetfulness of that fact having seeped into the soul of Christendom—“begins and ends with … Read more
A Time for Truth About Afghanistan
It wasn’t long after I’d left South Vietnam for good—my year-long tour of duty having abruptly ended two weeks early, owing to growing enemy encirclement of the country—that the news broke that Saigon had finally fallen. This was in April of 1975, and by then America’s appetite for war had pretty much been exhausted. I … Read more
Conformed to the Blessed Cross
On the 14th of May in 1940, following a massive invasion four days earlier by the German High Command, Holland was forced to surrender, along with Luxembourg and Belgium, each fated to spend the next five years in a state of brutal subjugation under the heel of the Third Reich. Wholesale deportations soon began, especially … Read more