Someone asked me the other day which saint to turn to when one is struck by a migraine. Since I’ve never had one, I didn’t know. So, I suggested we do a Google search so that we’d both know. Turns out there are two intercessory experts, Gemma Galgani and Teresa of Avila, both of whom … Read more
So, Joe Biden did not, after all, interrupt his preparations for the planned Super Summit with Vladimir Putin the other day in order to fly down to Rome and see the pope. It is just as well, perhaps, inasmuch as the Vatican having nixed the notion of allowing Biden to attend morning Mass with His … Read more
I had an epiphany the other evening while flying from one airport to another in a world whose contours have grown less and less familiar to me. Far less friendly, too. It may be worth sharing since others, I suspect, may have been similarly struck. Actually, it hit me long before boarding the plane; in … Read more
It will soon be thirty years since the implosion of the Soviet Union. That liberating event took place on the last day of August in 1991, exactly twenty-one months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Will there be celebrations to mark the anniversary? Not if Europe and the West have grown so forgetful of … Read more
There is an unforgettable moment near the end of A Man for All Seasons (a perfectly fabulous film, which won a busload of awards—including Best Picture of the Year in 1966, starring Paul Scofield as the saintly Thomas More). It is the courtroom scene where More, following his betrayal by Master Richard Rich, whose perjured … Read more
More than a half century has elapsed since the murder of Martin Luther King. How did the nation react to his killing? The answer is easy. There was an immediate outpouring of near universal grief and outrage. And it was not limited to any particular race or political persuasion. Americans everywhere were horrified by what … Read more
I was away for a few days recently, an experience I cannot recommend enough. Few pleasures can compare with those that come undistracted by news media. What wonders it does for the soul! Of course, sooner or later, you’ve got to resurface and, in my case, that was at the airport where, amid a sea … Read more
There was once a thriving little town in Central Europe where almost everyone was Jewish and they all had a job. The single exception, it seems, was the Village Idiot who, when offered work, refused to take it. What was the job? It was to wait at the outskirts of the village for the arrival … Read more
One of the earliest memories I have of Franciscan University, which is the school in Steubenville, Ohio where I teach, took place one evening years ago while leaving my office to go home. Fr. Benedict Groeschel, a wise and holy priest who founded the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, and who himself went home (to … Read more
When I first heard the story of a silly nun who’d gotten herself ordained as a Protestant priestess while teaching theology at a major Catholic University, I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised to learn of the subsequent lawsuit she filed to prevent her being fired. What did surprise me, however, was the fact … Read more
There is a section in Monsignor Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense in which he identifies various ways of escape people choose when confronted with questions of unwelcome ultimacy. For instance, the meaning of one’s own existence, about which a great many people appear to be strangely incurious. The section is called “Emptying the Question,” and in … Read more
It was only after I had begun Basic Training, courtesy of an offer from the U.S. Army I could not refuse, that I met my first black man. Well, maybe a dozen of them, actually. I felt an immediate rapport with them, owing to a sense of shared suffering. For those of you whom God … Read more
In an essay written in 1927 on the British philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley—whom hardly anyone bothers to read, much less remember, anymore—T.S. Eliot, who wrote his Harvard dissertation on Bradley, sought to identify the secret of his excellence, tracing it to what he called “his great gift of style.” And while it is true that … Read more
It is not likely that anyone will have heard of Heywood Broun, but he was a once very well known, well-connected newspaper columnist. His take on the world was fairly cynical, especially on the subject of organized religion, which he held in some contempt. But everyone will have heard of Fulton Sheen, the world’s first … Read more
Unless you had the good fortune to have slept right through the 1960s, you’ll probably remember the Yippies, a movement begun back then by a couple of buffoons named Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, which sought to undermine the existing order by revolutionary means. They would later go to prison for inciting a riot at … Read more
We’ve been hearing a great deal of noise lately from Democrat politicians about Judge Amy Coney Barret, in whose dark soul they are horrified to find that “the dogma lives loudly…” So intolerable is the threat she poses, they tell us, that in thwarting her nomination to the Supreme Court they are engaged in the … Read more
In the long march of the Church’s history, stretching all the way back to a certain failed fisherman called Peter—whom Christ himself caught with the bait of eternal life—few occupants of the papal chair have evinced as lofty a level of erudition, existing in happy combination with ardent and uncomplicated piety, as the Bavarian Pope … Read more
Hamlet. O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Hamlet, Act I, Scene II In his groundbreaking study of … Read more
My grandfather—who loved telling stories and who, in his last years, would endlessly retell the same stories—was particularly partial to the story of the fellow who, condemned to hang for his crimes, was nevertheless permitted a bit of exercise the day before. “In that case,” the prisoner asks the judge, “may I just skip the … Read more
I have known only two women named Agnes in my life. One of them was my grandmother who, having died two years after I was born, I could hardly be expected to remember. But since I was often told things about her—for instance, that she was beautiful and pious and went to Mass every morning—I … Read more