See if this story sounds familiar: A happily married couple—she is a pianist; he a rising scientist—have their love suddenly tested by a decline in the wife’s health. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she falls victim to a steady loss of muscle control and paralysis. The desperate husband uses all his professional skills to save her. … Read more
In 1981, I collected the addresses that John Paul II had to that time given to university students and faculties. Each fall, the Holy Father addresses students of ecclesiastical universities and later of state universities in Rome. In the January 8, 1997, English edition of L’ Osservatore Romano, I noticed that the Mass for Italian … Read more
“Before he got here I was worried,” a Polish friend confessed during Pope John Paul II ‘s homecoming pilgrimage this past June. “I thought the people might be tired of him. But he’s done it again. It’s like 1979.” The comparison to those eight days in June 1979 on which the history of the twentieth … Read more
This year is the bicentennial of Franz Schubert’s birth in 1797. In terms of his achievement there is only one other composer to whom he can be compared: Mozart. Perhaps not as precocious as Mozart, Schubert was nonetheless already an accomplished composer as a teenager. In his brief thirty-one years, he created a life’s work … Read more
Writing on environmental aberrations in the Washington Times, Alston Chase, a good writer in this thorny field, proposes that the hostility of environmental advocates to human progress goes back to the Garden of Eden, to its suggestion that in the beginning man was good and in complete harmony with nature. To cure subsequent pollution and … Read more
In his recently published diary, Polish poet and novelist Czeslaw Milosz bemoaned “the hideous music of the second half of the nineteenth century,” and wondered why composers ever abandoned “that heavenly sculpting in sound as in Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and not only in them; lesser composers, too, partook of that beautiful style.” I have often … Read more
David Diamond (b. 1915) is the last of several generations of great American symphonists who flourished mid-century. This list—beginning with Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, Aaron Copeland, and Walter Piston—continues with William Schuman and Diamond himself. Of them all, Diamond has created the most substantial body of symphonies, which now number eleven, in addition to ballets, … Read more
All sin consists in willing a disorder into some existing good. Only individual persons can sin. Institutions, be they economic, ecclesial, familial, voluntary, academic, or civil, as such, cannot sin. They are not persons who bear reality in the world. Institutions are patterns or ways of acting toward ourselves or others. As such, persons do … Read more
When a void is created through negligence or fear, something is bound to rush in and fill it. For too long the Church and her members have been stone silent as a pernicious, decadent rot has overtaken the consciences of the young. Where morality and decency once governed, chaos now reigns. Catechesis has all but … Read more
The Principality of Liechtenstein is hardly larger than the postage stamps it issues. It is a two-ski-run country tucked into the eastern Alps between Switzerland and the Tyrol. I once had the pleasure of  visiting Liechtenstein in an official capacity in the midst of the Cold War. I was there to explain U.S. foreign policy … Read more
Chesterton remarked that, logically, the “survival of the fittest” the survival of those who survived. Thus, all that exist, are, by definition, “fit,” no matter how decrepit. Sometimes while shaving in the morning there is a certain consolation in this observation. Two days before receiving a copy of the Holy Father’s remarks on evolution, I … Read more
In October, in Spokane, Washington, I baptized my new little grandnephew, one Sean Michael Jones. This young gentleman was born the day the Senate upheld the partial-birth abortion veto. The irony of these two events did not escape me. I recall being very careful not to splash a lot of water on the children while … Read more
We are to speak well of one another, even of those who hate us. We are also to speak truthfully, sometimes even bluntly, when necessary. Strictly speaking, an insult is rude or contemptuous speech designed to hurt someone’s feelings or arouse his anger. The insult is deliberate, intended to hurt. No doubt it can be … Read more
One evening, during my retreat at an old Jesuit novitiate, I read an unforgettable letter in L’Osservatore Romano, English, June 12, 1996. In it, Dom Bernardo Olivera, the Abbot-General of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, or Trappists, writes about the brutal, wholly arbitrary murder of seven Trappist monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria … Read more
The distinguished English critic and specialist in Scandinavian music, Robert Layton calls Franz Berwald “the most commanding composer Sweden has thus far produced, and the leading Scandinavian symphonist before Sibelius.” This is the bicentennial of his birth in 1796, but few know his name. When Franz Liszt met the sixty-one-year old Franz Berwald in 1857, … Read more
Suppose you were Bach, and no one noticed? Welcome to the early eighteenth-century world of Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Catholic composer at the court of Dresden, who lived in relative obscurity from 1679 until his death in 1745. Buried on Christmas Eve in the Old Catholic Cemetery in Dresden, he suffered the same fate as … Read more
Dignitatis Humanae—the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom—is frequently described as an expression of Christian personalism, because of its teaching that every human being has an inalienable right to immunity from state coercion in matters of religious conviction. As the declaration puts it, “the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very … Read more
St. Thomas often cites the famous phrase, “sapientis est ordinare“—the function of the wise man is to order. We human beings have the added burden, if I can call it that—for it is also a glory—of ordering ourselves. To order means that we properly place ourselves amidst the other things, including human things, that are … Read more
Picture fin de siecle Vienna in the 1890s, a cosmopolitan capital of empire that was about to shake the world with its new ideas. Sigmund Freud was already in practice. Walter Gropius would soon launch his revolutionary architecture. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were splashing their canvases with images of angst. Gustav Mahler was directing … Read more
The asthma was back. The heavy coughing that convulses her body beneath the habit, the tightening of the chest, the drowning struggle to pull in another gasp of air—still Mother Mary Angelica was determined to make her show. With potentially forty-one million households counting on her, she couldn’t stay in bed. As host of the … Read more
