The highest purpose of art is to make the transcendent perceptible. Long after the artistic detritus of the twentieth-century has been swept away, people still will be listening to the music of English composer Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986), and wondering why we were complaining about the spiritual aridity of our times. By then, it will have … 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
Four years ago this month, as I was paging my way through the morning paper, I happened to glance at the obituaries. The paper almost fell from my hands when I saw the name of my friend, composer Stephen Albert, dead at fifty-one, cut down in an auto accident. Steve and I had just had … 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
The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.” One might modify that insight and say that, since the first Christmas, the major poetic idea has been the Incarnation. Either way, one would think that this situation would have created an … Read more
Among some clippings, I came across the following letter from Brian Tubbs in The Washington Times. The letter began: What happened to Merry Christmas? For the past few years, America has drifted away not only from the original meaning of Christmas, but also away from the name of “Christmas.” Already, Santa Claus, Rudolph, and the … Read more
The debate on the future of the papacy and the Roman Curia launched this past June 29 by the retired archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, in a lecture at Campion Hall, the Jesuit residence at Oxford, is unlikely to simmer down anytime soon. For the argument that Archbishop Quinn was making and the debate … Read more
In 1785, seven-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel went with his father to the Schikaneder Theater in Vienna, where his father was the conductor of the orchestra. There Mozart had occasion to hear young Johann play one of Mozart’s new piano concertos from memory. So impressed was Mozart, who had some personal experience with wunderkinder, that he … 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
A priest friend told me that he gave a sermon at Mass in which he explained that in Christian teaching, God has an internal life, a life that manifests itself in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To his surprise, days later a parishioner accused this priest before his pastor of … 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
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died 205 years ago. In 1991, the bicentennial of his death was the occasion for massive Mozart festivals and grand recording projects, as well as reappraisals of his genius and meaning. Five years later, the reappraisals continue. Unfortunately, they tell us more about ourselves than they do about Mozart. Here is an … Read more
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche tells us that both “Jesuitism” and “democratic enlightenment” reduce the pressure for living according to the “truth”—the truth that Nietzsche himself wanted to reject. Jesuits, by their casuistry, and democratic enlightenment, mainly by inventing newspapers, made people comfortable and distracted in their moral slavery. Instead of teaching people to … Read more
Have you ever looked up over the proscenium arches or along the upper walls of still-existing nineteenth-century concert halls and observed the medallion bas-reliefs of the composers considered immortal at the time? There you will recognize the visages of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. You will also most likely encounter the profile and name … 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
One of most compelling sights of Holy Week is that of Mary standing beneath the cross on which her son hangs dying. There were, after all, two innocents at Calvary—her son, innocence itself, nailed to the Cross; and Mary herself, innocently suffering from sin, her heart pierced. Yet Mary is our intercessor. She asks for … Read more