The Catholic cybersphere has recently exploded, first with a video showing Pachamama statues being dumped into the Tiber, and then the video’s sequel, in which 26-year-old Alexander Tschugguel explained that he threw the statues in the river because he felt their presence in a Catholic church violated the First Commandment. It turns out Alexander and … Read more
Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in the April 2002 print edition of Crisis. It has been edited for brevity. Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the … Read more
“Considered in itself, idolatry is the greatest of mortal sins.” So begins the old Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on the topic. I was surprised to read that this is the greatest of all mortal sins. Was it worse than murder? Worse even than the sexual abuse of minors? “For it is, by definition,” the entry continues, … Read more
On the night of October 29, 2019, Meghan Murphy, a freelance writer, spoke at a Toronto library to an audience of roughly 100 people, mostly women. Her topic, entirely unwarranted just a few years ago, was “Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, The Law, and Women?” Her main point was that “allowing men … Read more
It was not the vision of the Risen Lord that nearly blinded me on the road to Damascus. It was the searing light and clouds of dust thrown up by the unusually hot October, and the fact that my driver believed in natural air conditioning: windows wide open. While it was romantic to imagine I … Read more
A few decades ago, I had lunch with Daniel Carroll in Howard County, Maryland, during which he used a pop-up toaster in his grand dining room, which was hung with ancestral portraits. There were many such portraits, for Dan was a direct descendant of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll … Read more
In 1577, St. John of the Cross was taken prisoner by a group of Carmelites from Toledo who were opposed to the reforms of the Order he was undertaking with St. Teresa of Ávila. For eight or nine months, he was held in a six-by-ten-foot cell. The ceiling was so low that John (not a … Read more
In the eighteenth-century comic poem Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (“The Midnight Court”), the narrator expresses frustration at her lack of marriage prospects, berating the young men of her day for their scheming, selfish ways. In spite of an abundance of attractive young women eager to marry and start families, these lazy men would rather chase … Read more
Ireland, particularly its government, is now in the strange position of being simultaneously hostile and indifferent to Catholicism. An indication of the seemingly indifferent attitude toward the Catholic Church by Irish officialdom occurred in connection with the recent canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Newman was the founding rector (or president) of University College Dublin. … Read more
This column is about selfish regret. In 1997, we founded C-Fam to lobby U.N. delegations on life issues. One of the first phone calls I made was to a man named George Marlin, who happened to be one of my proudest political votes ever. George lost to Rudy Giuliani on the Conservative Party line for … Read more
Several Sundays ago, our parish priest devoted his sermon to the subject of evil, which he argued has reached historic levels in the world today. A couple of weeks later, my local paper, The Laramie Boomerang, printed a front-page story about the forthcoming weeklong series of events preceding Hallowe’en (nowadays “Halloween” or “Holloween”) called “Scaramie,” … Read more
Have you ever dared to go inside one of those Halloween outlets that crop up a month before October 31? Besides high-priced trash, these shops offer an insight into what Dante might have conceived for our times in his Inferno, portraying the horrors and monstrosities that are housed in the heart of our society with … Read more
The Adam Smith Institute bills itself as a non-profit that “work[s] to promote free market, neoliberal ideas through research, publishing, media outreach, and education.” Fr. James Martin, SJ, bills himself as a Catholic priest. The Adam Smith Institute, or one of its chapters, recently issued a call to action, because a movement was mounting to … Read more
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón—called “Pedrito” by his supporters and “the Handsome” by himself—has gotten the Halloween season off to an early start by disentombing the body of former Spanish head of state Francisco Franco. Although traditionally a time to show respect for the dead in the Hispanic world, in this as in so … Read more
Nobody was under any illusions about the stakes at the Synod on the Amazon. Ostensibly, the synod was convened to help the Pope address concerns about the Amazon in consultation with Amazonian church authorities. It was evident from the very beginning, however, that the synod would serve instead as a staging-ground for progressively-minded bishops to … Read more
A recent film, All Is True, released this past May and starring Kenneth Branagh as Shakespeare and Ian McKellen as Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, purports to be a depiction of the Bard’s final years in Stratford-upon-Avon following his retirement from the London stage. Making no effort to remain true to the known facts … Read more
What would Newman say about the Pachamamas? That’s not actually a question which anyone who studied Newman carefully would ask. It reflects a lack of understanding of the workings of practical intelligence, which Newman took great pains to delineate—as if one could take a proof text out of Newman, and that would give you the … Read more
Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church is supposed to have said, “A Church that does not fast is not an apostolic Church.” These words, real or imagined, stand as an apt critique of the current Roman Catholic Church. Catholics no longer practice fasting or abstaining in a meaningful way. Over the past fifty … Read more
Canadian voters have re-elected Justin Trudeau as their Prime Minister. The October 21 election shows that the Liberal Party garnered 157 seats to 121 for the Conservatives. Four other parties gained 60 seats total, which means that a Liberal minority will be in power. The popular vote was much closer with the Conservatives getting 34.4 … Read more
Editor’s note: in this fascinating interview with Crisis Magazine, the acclaimed novelist Walker Percy discusses the vocations crisis, abortion, Vatican II, popes, and (of course) literature. The interview originally appeared in the July 1989 print edition of Crisis. It has been edited for brevity. CRISIS: There is tremendous intellectual opposition in the Church to Pope … Read more