On November 17, 1942, the Catholic publisher Wilfred Meynell celebrated his 90th birthday in Greatham, southwest of London. He would live another six years and, with the noise of RAF fighter planes a familiar sound daily, he could boast that he was born the year the Duke of Wellington died. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning … Read more
In the House of Commons, Earl Winterton remarked that Muslims did not like the Allies calling the war a “Christian Crusade,” as both terms were odious to them. This was a sensitive matter, since, while there was no significant Islamic population in Great Britain or the United States, they made up a third of the … Read more
In the second week of October 1942, Stalingrad was still standing, if cruelly battered after 80 days of siege and starvation. Ottawa announced that U-boats had torpedoed eleven vessels in the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Polish newspaper Nowy Swiat noted that the Germans had forbidden priests to wear crucifixes, since such was “not in harmony … Read more
A September article in De Misthoorn, a Dutch Nazi Journal, scorned plutocracy as an enemy of National Socialism. The Nazi Party, representing the socialism of the masses, declared itself more hostile to capitalism than to Marxism, because the latter was based on “sounder principles.” Nonetheless, Bolshevism in the Soviet Union was collapsing under the hammer … Read more
Marking the end of the third year of war, Italy seemed fated to lose, whichever side won. Germany began to view Mussolini as, in the words of Churchill, “a lackey and a serf, the merest utensil of his master’s will.” Italian aspirations for “spazio vitale” were not mentioned when Joseph Goebbels was in Venice to … Read more
If our present existence were not sufficient proof, the irrefutable platitude that life goes on was evident in the summer months of 1942 in England when, coincident with the bombings and lengthening list of war casualties and stricter food rationing, Aloysius Roche published a preview of his study of the Egyptian Desert Fathers, and … Read more
My files from 1942 have some obituaries of English Catholics, beginning with the death on July 10 of Lieutenant-General Sir George Macdonogh, G.B.E., K.C.B., K.C.M.G. At the age of 77, his life spanned the Second Afghan War, the Zulu War, the Boer War, and two World Wars. As the chief architect of modern military … Read more
On July 29, 1997, a representative philosophe of our abortion culture, retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, was lavishly eulogized in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where the Requiem Mass for President Kennedy had been sung in 1963. Richard Cardinal Cushing was relatively constrained back then, because liturgical depredations had not yet switched into … Read more
As I begin to rummage through the files I have from 1942, I notice a pastoral letter of Msgr. Sigismund Waitz, prince archbishop of Salzburg, read in all his churches on October 19, 1941, but only published in London in July 1942. Archbishop Waitz, along with other prominent Austrian clerics such as the Jesuit Rev. … Read more
During the persecution of Christians during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman prefect Rusticus was frustrated by the serene equanimity of the Christian convert Justin, a Platonic philosopher. The Romans considered Christianity a supserstitio parva (perverse superstition) and classified its morality as immodica (immoderate) for, among other things, refusing to abort the unborn … Read more
Every day in the Great Hall of one of my schools I ate, or tried to dine, before a large fireplace carved with William of Wykeham’s motto, "Manners Makyth Man." In another of my colleges, a Victorian alumnus had endowed a "Manners Makyth Man Award" for that member of the senior class who … Read more
The first impression really was the lasting one in my instance with the Rev. Stanley L. Jaki (1924-2009). More than 20 years later, I vividly see him sitting me down on the porch of a house in Princeton and telling me that religious freedom was the most important teaching of Vatican II and that, in … Read more
Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that "God is in the details" fit the moral architecture of Avery Dulles. While his physical architecture was likened to Lincoln, the man was discerned in the details: from his conversion to the Faith when noticing the first spring blossom on a tree, to his intimate regard for all … Read more
After his Vigil Mass, the body of Msgr. William B. Smith was carried out the main doors of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, for the last time, and I wondered how many thousands of entrances and exits he had made through those same doors since he had first arrived as a seminarian. It was not … Read more
About 25 years ago, I had the first of many dinners with the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, when he was still a Lutheran. He objected to the term "converting" for a baptized Christian who became Catholic: Rather, such a one "embraced" Catholicism. I demurred, as I thought I had converted, albeit not from … Read more
It was astonishing to see thousands thronging the Jai Alai arena in West Palm Beach a few years before the death of Rev. Patrick Peyton (1909-1992) when I helped him with a Rosary Crusade, but I should have known that by his standard it was an unexceptional number, even smallish. No priest, unless he … Read more
Ordinarily this column is devoted to people I have known. Our current national crisis is an excuse for me to mention three exceptions. I cannot say I really knew Winston Churchill, but once my father took me to see him when he was visiting Bernard Baruch in Manhattan. He had no idea who I was … Read more
Toward the end of the 1880s, Francis Marchese, publisher of the New York Italian newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano, wrote about his fellow countrymen in New York: "The Italian colony are exploited economically and morally by other Italians and by Protestants. The Italians are hated, treated like animals, persecuted worse than the Negro." In … Read more
In dire days of the last dark world war, one man said after a papal audience: "Pius XII judges everything from a perspective that surpasses human beings, their undertakings and their quarrels. . . . Pious, compassionate, political — such does this pontiff and sovereign appear to me because of the respect that he inspires … Read more
