This month I must reflect on a phone call I received from an old and discerning friend who was extremely upset over the music used at the papal Mass in Washington on April 17, and on a note another friend sent saying, “It was as if the Washington, D.C., crowd were pleasing themselves and not … Read more
In Raymond Arroyo’s fascinating EWTN interview with President George W. Bush before Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, President Bush said some very revealing things about how he views the sources of terrorism and, in general, the world. In two instances, his basically sound instincts led him awry. Both involve issues central to the country’s security, … Read more
Pope Benedict XVI’s address to Catholic college presidents yesterday afternoon was brilliant. The pope built upon a generation of Vatican efforts to encourage the renewal of Catholic identity in Catholic education. But more than that, he laid out a vision and roadmap for renewal that are ultimately tied to the survival of the West. … Read more
Last week I was asked how to advise a twelve-year-old girl who has been asked to babysit for neighbors. The problem was that the neighbors are a lesbian couple who have had a child by artificial insemination. The girl was uncertain what to do, and uncomfortable at the prospect. The previous weekend, we were having … Read more
We in the pro-life community have been fed up for a long time with public servants who can’t seem to tell the difference between serving the public and killing the public. They want to mask the violence of abortion with the smooth language of “choice,” and they don’t want to lift a finger to extend the … Read more
December 10, 1948: Keep your eye on that date. It’s likely to have an important symbolic role in Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit to the United Nations and the United States. Religious and civic pageantry, teddy bears wearing T-shirts with papal-visit logos, and celebrity worship may be the visit’s most obvious features. But people … Read more
Pinning “feminism” to the board — as Dawn Eden attempts to do in her article “Eve of Deconstruction“ — is a collector’s task, not the capture of a single specimen. Eden misses the beauty, dignity, and continuing value of the feminist movement, distracted no doubt by the vehemently secular individualism of certain noisy modern feminists. … Read more
Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter on the Dignity and Vocation of Women, Mulieris Dignitatem, turns 20 this year, and in honor of its August 15 anniversary, Catholic women’s conferences around the world are celebrating the single instance in all John Paul II’s writings when he advocated “feminism” — or, as he qualified it, a … Read more
Well brought-up children are taught to say thank you, along with all of the other greetings and responses that attend polite life. Such responses must be imposed at first, of course, and learned by rote, but soon enough they become habitual, and virtually unconscious. This does not, however, mean that they are fraudulent. Somehow … Read more
My kids have been using their spare time to bone up on the Essential Marvel Comics. I know — this makes me a bad parent. Of course, when I was their age, I was poring over MAD Magazine. (I can still recall the cartoons — and the awe-inspiring sound effects — of Don Martin … Read more
Recent reporting has attempted to quell the fear that homeschooling has been banned in California, but the February 28 decision handed down by the California Court of Appeals has indeed done just that. The Court of Appeals ordered the original court to prohibit a California family from continuing to enroll their children in a homeschooling … Read more
As promised, I will end this trilogy on American classical music (see the previous January and February installments) by covering some of the recent releases of works by composers of whom you have probably never heard. I believe their music demonstrates what I have contended in my last two missives: that American music has recovered … Read more
In his 2008 World Day of Peace address, Pope Benedict XVI made clear that human beings “are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole.” He explained that respecting the environment does not mean considering “material or animal nature more important than man.” According to some early accounts, this amounted to a “surprise attack” on … Read more
Filmmaker Andrew Niccol, probably best known for his role as the writer of The Truman Show, likes to describe his stories as “films set about five minutes in the future.” And while some movies claim to have been snatched from today’s headlines, few would suggest that they are the headlines of tomorrow. Consider God’s … Read more
"And God created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them." I cite the Masoretic text of this famous passage from the first chapter in Genesis, for it is the more poetic, and it conveys something of the dance of complementary opposites — the … Read more
A few days ago, Osama bin Laden released a message threatening Benedict XVI for leading a “new Crusade” against Islam. Whether he meant to or not, the Holy Father issued a ringing answer to the architect of 9/11 by receiving into the Church Europe’s most vocal Muslim critic of bin Laden and Islamic terrorism. Magdi … Read more
In an article in the Washington Post last fall, Charlotte F. Allen offered her sneaking suspicions about American healthcare. Addressing the issue of the “living will,” she wrote: When I contemplate the concept of “dying well,” I can’t avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means “dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is … Read more
J. R. R. Tolkien spent nearly 20 pages defining fairy tales in his 1946 essay “On Fairy-Stories” (found in The Tolkien Reader). This essay, a favorite of his friend C. S. Lewis’s, summarizes many of the attitudes toward storytelling that guided his creation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien’s insights provide general … Read more
Such is the paranoid tendency of our hyperbolic Western media that one could be forgiven for thinking Russia is reverting to its Communist past. But if we ignore the hysteria of the press (in whose interest it is, after all, to have crises instead of stability) and actually dig beneath the surface, we might actually … Read more
Last week, media agencies around the world took an interview with Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti to mean that the Vatican had revised the seven classic deadly sins and added seven new deadly sins to the list. In particular, they focused on “pollution” as one of the new sins that the archbishop was apparently promulgating for the … Read more
