The third Monday in February—latterly called “Presidents’ Day” because of Lincoln’s birthday on the 12th—is legally Washington’s birthday. Of course, his actual birthday is February 22, and I am old enough to remember getting off from school on that day, whenever it fell. But in 1971 Congress’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act took effect, banishing this … Read more
What do G.K. Chesterton, Joe Rogan, and Saint John Paul II have in common? G.K. Chesterton thought deeply about the world. He wrote on everything under the sun, sprinkling his interesting vocabulary and witty aphorisms throughout his works. Saint John Paul II was a formidable man, hardened by wars and sensitive to the major philosophical … Read more
To read or not to read? That is the question facing faithful Catholics as we emerge from yet another year of massive Church crisis and revelations of corruption now being reported by “establishment” Catholic media and “independent” Catholic media alike. Some Catholic pundits urge us to avoid entirely those Catholic media sources that were the … Read more
On a very chilly Sunday in October of 2018, I attended Mass at St. Hedwig’s in Holdingford with my wife. I’ll carry forever with me the image of the last moment when Fr. Gregory Mastey—with neither fanfare nor introduction—suddenly started reciting the Prayer to St. Michael. Fr. Gregory has ended Mass this way ever since, … Read more
I’m sure we’ve all heard by now about the death of Father Harkins, a young priest from Kansas City who committed suicide. The news deeply shook our Catholic community in St. Louis, particularly since Fr. Harkins had attended seminary here and was friends with priests in the area. There’s something shocking about a priest dying … Read more
The sordid life of Jeffrey Epstein serves to highlight the decadence of the deplorable epoch in which we find ourselves, as do the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. The web of vice and viciousness that he had spun was widespread, serving to entrap not only underage girls but also the rich and famous who preyed … Read more
Back in 2014, I wrote a book called Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity. I spoke not as an interpreter of Scripture or of the teachings of the Church. My arguments were based on observation, logic, history, anthropology, and culture. As far as I know, no Catholic on the left has taken them up. My … Read more
Etienne Gilson was one of the clearest thinking philosophers of the 20th century. As a good philosopher, naturally, he fully understood the importance of reason, a power that is often downgraded or even dismissed in the modern world. In an address he gave at Harvard’s Tercentenary Celebration (1936), he made the following statement: “Realism always … Read more
Modern Catholicism needs to re-examine its uneasy relationship with feminism, and there’s no better time than this year’s tragic anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As it turns out, January 22 follows hard on the heels of a new landmark—January 15—for Catholic feminists, namely, the Pope’s unprecedented appointment of a woman, Francesca Di Giovanni, to a … Read more
Recently the nonagenarian environmentalist, Sir David Attenborough, familiar to viewers of BBC America over many years for his nature shows, warned in bloodcurdling terms that it was almost too late to save the world from the horrors of the “climate crisis.” I remember as a child watching similar warnings during the early 1970s, of the … Read more
There is no arguing that we are facing a crisis of immense proportions in the Church. We most likely wince at the daily headlines of scandal, accusations, cover-ups, doublespeak, and unfaithfulness to vows, teaching, and immorality within the hierarchy of the Church—all of which leave her vulnerable and disreputable at exactly the time when the … Read more
This year’s theme for the March for Life, “Pro-Life is Pro-Woman,” is likely to resonate with the thousands of college students who will travel to Washington, D.C.—especially those from America’s most faithful Catholic colleges. For decades, radical pro-abortion feminism has dominated higher education. But at the colleges recommended in The Newman Guide for their strong … Read more
Editor’s note: this article first appeared in the March 1998 edition of Crisis Magazine. It seems a bit strange that a well-worn former government employee and sometime philosopher like myself should be asked to address this assemblage on matters of ethics and honor, right and wrong, on the question, “Does Honor Have a Future?” But as … Read more
The Catholic Church lost a great ally on January 12 when conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton died at the age of 75 from cancer. Scruton was not Catholic but Anglican—the author of Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England. Yet he was a friend of Rome, telling the Catholic Herald in 2015, … Read more
“Children are the future of the Church.” How often are such truisms used to explain the extensive focus on a single demographic group within a parish? From youth ministry to religious education to Catholic schools, most Catholic parishes direct a large amount of their limited resources toward young people. After all, if our children fall … Read more
It was Friday the 13th of December, and nothing unlucky had happened yet. Or so I thought, idly scrolling through the Catholic news—until my eyes landed on a startling headline from Crux. “Pope calls idea of declaring Mary co-redemptrix ‘foolishness’ ” ran the title of the piece. On closer inspection, it turned out that in his Spanish-language homily for … Read more
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. I thought often of these first lines from Genesis while crossing the North Atlantic two weeks … Read more
If the Church is a body, as St. Paul describes it in 1st Corinthians, then the heart of Catholicism here on earth must be the monastery. Its prayers to God for the world are pumped, like blood, throughout the body of Christ giving Christianity life. If by analogy the monastery serves as our heart, what … Read more
During and after the grim martial law period in the early 1980s, many freedom-minded Poles would greet each other on January 1 with a sardonic wish: “May the new year be better than you know it’s going to be!” As 2020 opens, that salutation might well be adopted by Catholics concerned about the future of … Read more
As Time cries, “Advance!”, we look back on a year that might fill the mouth of Time with lamentation. The Syrian civil war, the Christchurch mosque massacre, economic collapse in Venezuela, Hong Kong protests, the El Paso Walmart shooting, the Sri Lanka Easter terror attack, the Notre-Dame fire, and political upheaval in America. What is … Read more