What can one say of Ludwig van Beethoven, about whom everything seems to have already been said? How about, “Beethoven lives!”? This fall, I saw that announcement inscribed on baseball hats and T-shirts to promote the National Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven concert series. Later the same day, I received further evidence of his existence at Sunday … Read more
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
Drunkard watching is a dangerous sport. One is never quite sure whether to guffaw at the poor soul, or cry for help. Any audience attending Christopher Plummer’s brilliant star turn in Barrymore at the Music Box Theatre will have a similar reaction. The piece itself, if the truth be known is uneven—but so is the … 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
L’osservatore Romano, English edition, (29 January—5 March 1997), ran five essays on “satanism.” Reference was made there to an earlier study written by an unnamed French theologian entitled “Faith and Demonology,” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in 1975. The latter document covers the history of papal and Church thinking on … 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
It took a half-century after the death of Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) for his music to emerge before a worldwide audience. Much of the credit for its current esteem goes to the advocacy of Sir Charles Mackerras, the British conductor who studied in Czechoslovakia and returned bearing treasures. His superb London opera and orchestral … Read more
John Paul II issued his encyclical, Centesimus Annus, six years ago, on the feast of St. Joseph, May 1, 1991. Thus, the year 1997 is 106 years after Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, sixty-six years after Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, forty-six years after John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra, and twenty-six years after Paul VI’s Octogesima Adveniens, … Read more
An exclusive interview with Robert R. Reilly In June 1995, the eyes of the world turned toward China when a naturalized American was arrested, detained, then tried and convicted for crimes against the Communist state. As the world prepared for the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing, suddenly, one man was able to put a face … Read more
Although it is not often recognized as such, a momentous ecclesiological argument has erupted in the Church in the United States. Archbishop John Quinn’s Oxford lecture on the papacy and the curia, the Catholic Common Ground project, the controversies these two initiatives provoked, speculations and agitations about major appointments to the American hierarchy and about … 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
Henryk Gorecki in Poland, Arvo Part in Estonia, Peteris Vasks in Latvia, Rodion Shchedrin in Russia (at least in his extraordinary work, The Sealed Angel) and Giya Kancheli in Ukraine—all are composers musically meeting the spiritual needs of their countries for mourning over, and recovering from, having been on the ideological rack of the twentieth … Read more
In 1997, Easter fell early on march 30. On Easter Thursday, 1966 (April 14), Margaret Waugh wrote to Lady Diana Cooper recounting the death at home of her father, Evelyn Waugh, on Easter Sunday. “Don’t be too upset about Papa,” Margaret wrote. “I think it was kind of a wonderful miracle. You know how he … 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