The lesson from Isaiah at Midnight Mass on Christmas reads, “Thou has increased their joy and given them great gladness.” I am often struck by the fact that in Christianity joy and gladness are not so much a product of our own activities but something much more, something that happens when all that the Greeks … Read more
My editor called up the other day from the deep recesses of downtown South Bend to remind me that my column for the present issue of Crisis was due. At first I thought of doing something on Nietzsche, or Allan Bloom, or Josef Pieper, if for no other reason than that their books were sitting … Read more
Over the past ninety years or so the testing of the American experiment has involved the great question of the right role for the United States in world affairs. We are, by geography, history, and cultural inclination, a people perennially disposed toward isolationism. It is by no means a publicly settled issue whether the United … Read more
Once I asked Scott Walter about where to find available books by Josef Pieper, who remains, I think, the best, certainly the clearest, of Christian philosophers. Scott told me to try Thomas and Karen Loome, Booksellers. “All you need to tell them is what you want.” This procedure was generous enough, of course, but what … Read more
My brother Jack in Reno has a television set with about 26 channels on it. After switching to all 26 channels in rapid succession a couple of times one evening, I just about decided that when it comes to what is worth watching on TV, 26 times zero still equalled zero. Indeed, my dear mother … Read more
In his Autobiography, G.K. Chesterton, who as he tells us was in despair as a young man, decided finally that he had had enough of this pessimistic thought and had decided to revolt against it. He found very little help from the standard sources, he recalled: But as I was still thinking the thing out by … Read more
Dennis Bartlett, in San Francisco, lent me his copy of A Spiritual Aeneid, which is Ronald Knox’s autobiography, first published in 1918. Dennis has a 1958 Sheed & Ward edition with a Preface by Evelyn Waugh. I actually intend to return this book someday. As I also have an edition of The Pastoral Sermons of … Read more
“For who will dare to say or believe that it was not in God’s power to prevent both angels and men from sinning? But God preferred to leave this in their power, and thus to show both what evil could be wrought by their pride, and what good by His grace.” —St. Augustine, City of … Read more
The question of the bourgeois involves a real issue which Christians cannot afford to shirk. For it is difficult to deny that there is a fundamental disharmony between bourgeois and Christian civilization and between the mind of the bourgeois and the mind of Christ. But first let us admit that it is no use hunting … Read more
Book III, Chapter 7 of St. Augustine’s Confessions is entitled, marvelously: He Deplores His Wretchedness, That Having Been Born Thirty-Two Years, He Had Not Yet Found Out The Truth. In a culture whose public (oftentimes even ecclesiastical) doctrine, is theoretical “pluralism” — that is, that there is no “truth” but one’s own private feelings — … Read more
In an interview this past April with Lucio Brunelli of the Italian Catholic magazine 30 Giorni, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described dissent among American Catholic moral theologians as the expression of a more pernicious disorder: a “bourgeois Christianity in which Christianity is no longer a spur toward new responses and new hope in the face of … Read more
My brother-in-law, Jerry Vertin, in Steven’s Point, Wisconsin, has a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan records. While I visited this summer, I was listening to the Yeoman of the Guard, which came with a printed libretto. In Act I, I came across the following passage of Jack Point: My masters, I pray you bear with … Read more
On Pentecost, 1986, John Paul II published a fundamental encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem, on the “Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World.” This encyclical is meant to be the third part of a series on the Trinity — still, as Frank Sheed used to remark, the most fascinating of topics to … Read more
“Baby Jesus Saved by Plastic Reindeer.” That should have been among the many headlines of March 6, 1984 heralding the Supreme Court’s most celebrated church-state ruling of the eighties. At least, that is precisely what the decision amounted to. The Court concluded that, were it not for the inclusion of such “secular” figures as Rudolph … Read more
For a course I gave recently on political philosophy and natural law, one of the books I had wanted to read, or reread, with my good class was C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, a book I realized I had not taken a look at for some time, though its powerful theme has almost … Read more
The other day I received from Terry Hall at Catholicism in Crisis something of an assignment. During Lent, it seems, Terry had been reading The Private Prayers of Lancelot Andrewes. A certain passage kept recurring in them which went, in the Morning Prayer, “A good answer at the dreadful and fearful judgment seat of Jesus … Read more
Eric Voegelin’s thesis that Gnostic ideology is dominant in the modern mind, including the religious mind, because of the weakness of Christian faith, has been much on my mind of late. In a sense, nothing is more curious than the susceptibility of apparently free, intelligent Christians to ideologies, which have parodied or replaced Christianity, even … Read more
The economic inequality between the northern and southern hemispheres is increasingly threatening the survival of the family of mankind; in the long run this may be no less a menace to the progress of history than are the arsenals of weapons with which East and West are already confronting one another. And thus new efforts … Read more
April 9, 1773, was Good Friday. For breakfast, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson had “tea and cross-buns.” From their morning repast they went to the lovely Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson had a “seat.” During the service, Boswell carefully observed Johnson and judged his demeanor to be “solemnly devout.” Boswell went on: “I … Read more
Managua, November 2-5. Peeling paint; warped plywood; shantytowns; rationed water; walls smeared with graffiti; unrelieved shabbiness. At night only a few streetlights poke themselves into the darkness; they too are rationed. Police kiosks, mounted on cement tripods, are falling over into street intersections they are meant to control — an engineering miscalculation. In response to … Read more
