When Evelyn Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss the film rights for Brideshead Revisited, he visited a graveyard: Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He had heard it praised as a place unsurpassed in beauty, taste, and sensitivity; a place where “faith and consolation, religion and art had been brought to their highest possible association.” … Read more
I have had an uncanny and revealing experience this week. There are three elements to it. Let me describe the first two, as a preface for drawing out a moral imperative for Catholics in these bad times. Every semester at Thomas More College, we set a few Fridays aside for what we call traditio. No … Read more
How do we recognize what is right? In history, systems of laws have almost always been based on religion: decisions regarding what was to be lawful among men were taken from reference to the divinity. Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the state and to society, that is to … Read more
I am now three days into a wild and woolly debate, of sorts, on Twitter about the creation of homosexuality as a new category of being. When last I checked, there are almost 1,000 comments, many of them vulgar, some of them threatening, and hardly any demonstrating real knowledge about the issue, only Tourette’s-like grunts, … Read more
In my previous article I expressed some disagreement with people who said that the now disgraced Theodore McCarrick must never have had more than a “notional” faith, because otherwise he never would have done the wicked things he did. In the meantime, one of my acquaintances described her encounters with McCarrick, who was invariably nice … Read more
Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II declaration on religious liberty, appeals to what it says is a growing awareness of human dignity. More recent Vatican pronouncements, including the new language in the Catechism on the death penalty, have done the same. In some ways, it’s easy to see why. The Church holds that God created man … Read more
A recent article in Washington Lawyer magazine, which is sent to members of the District of Columbia Bar, discussed what it said was ongoing segregation in public schools six decades after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown declared de jure racial segregation in public schools an unconstitutional violation of equal … Read more
Instead of helping faithful Catholics put things into perspective on the predatory priest crisis, several Catholic college leaders have made things worse. Buffalo’s Canisius College president, John Hurley, issued a letter to the campus community decrying the male leadership of the Church. Claiming that “for centuries, the institutional Church has marginalized women in so many … Read more
I have not written about the recent barrage of accusations regarding the scandal of Catholic priests who could not keep their hands and other things to themselves, and the prelates who did the same, encouraged them, or shuffled them here and there to hide them. I am not a private investigator or a lawyer, so … Read more
When Theodore McCarrick was spooning and fondling seminarians, quite obviously he did not consider how far his enormities would reverberate. At the General Judgement, he will be shown how far his despicable actions have reverberated through society and how they harmed the lives of people he has never met. At the General Judgement, he will … Read more
“Strauss embraced classical philosophy over religious faith, not as a system of set doctrines, but as a ‘way of life’ following the model of Socrates, featuring a Socratic ignorance and a searching (zetetic) or erotic skepticism. In this view, the philosopher lives happily with merely human wisdom, not because he has refuted divine wisdom, but … Read more
In Dickens’ novels the problems of suffering in the form of poverty, tragedy, and injustice receive their greatest relief from simple, humble, lowly characters with kind, compassionate, and charitable hearts—not from wealthy benefactors, social agencies, or doles from government welfare. Portraying the hardheartedness of the powerful, the avaricious, and the callous in the cold and … Read more
I became casual friends with Rod Dreher when he lived in Brooklyn with the beautiful Julie, and I lived in Manhattan alone. Newly married and not yet a father, he was writing movie reviews for the New York Post; this was before his move to National Review and ever-increasing fame. We talked back then about … Read more
The Title IX world turned upside down when Avital Ronell, a “world renowned” lesbian New York University professor, was “found responsible” for ongoing physical and verbal sexual harassment of Nimrod Reitman, her male graduate student. Reitman, who identifies as gay and is now married to a man, claims that Ronell, age 66, refused to work … Read more
I recently commented on the signs of the times, and noted that they tell us to pay more attention to eternity. The topic deserves further discussion. In the 1960s, it became common for Catholics to look to the world for guidance. This attitude inspired the widespread false belief that Saint John XXIII said the Second Vatican … Read more
My father was not an easy man to categorize when it came to politics. He was, like almost everybody else where I grew up, a registered Democrat. Republicans in New England and the middle Atlantic states were not fond of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Poland, and the immigrants were not fond of the … Read more
I always recall the statement by the renowned international anti-euthanasia activist Rita Marker that “verbal engineering precedes social engineering.” Even a quick examination of current controversies in the socio-political arena provides abundant confirmation of this. One obvious current example is how the defenders of virtually uninhibited immigration or open borders choose readily to ignore that … Read more
One century ago, as the shadows of World War I were fading away, shadows were closing in on Beatrix. After nearly two decades of writing and illustrating an extraordinary series of children’s books, Beatrix Potter was losing her eyesight. This, compounded with her labors on Hill Top Farm growing increasingly engrossing and with her publisher … Read more
The gaying of the Church is perhaps the most diabolical attack the Devil has ever launched against the Catholic Faith. First, there is the massive damage done to the Church: the thousands of victims, the hundreds of millions in payouts, the bankruptcy of dioceses, and the cratering of ecclesial credibility. And yet, in our society … Read more
The back page of The New York Times Sunday Section for July 29, 2018, in the section devoted to children, listed, in large bold print, 19 statements about “kids.” Each statement began with the phrase “The truth is kids….” Nothing else appeared on the page except the words The New York Times. No one was … Read more