Having a bad conscience is one of the most unpleasant feelings one can experience. We dread it and understandably try to escape its sting. Anything that assuages a bad conscience will be welcome. In the meantime, the wily one—the devil—calculates what advantage he can win from it. He begins to benefit as soon as a … Read more
One of the reasons I appreciate the Catholic Church is that its lifeblood is apostolic tradition, which ensures against running around after The Latest Thing. However, I am also aware of the long history of Catholics trying to bind God to contracts He has never signed. Many times people leave the Catholic Church, not because … Read more
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Kraków, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Beth-salem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders … Read more
“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in … Read more
His baby had seemed real to him from the moment when Rosemary spoke of abortion; but it had been a reality without visual shape-something that happened in the dark and was only important after it happened. But here was the actual process taking place. Here was the poor ugly thing, no bigger than a gooseberry, … Read more
Many like to pretend that abortion is a matter of no grave consequence to a woman. Abortion simply removes an obstacle to the real purpose of a woman’s life, whatever she takes that purpose to be. Yet as my friend’s experience suggests, women rarely take the experience of having an abortion lightly. For most, the … Read more
Caveat lector: Domestic Tranquility is anything but a tranquil book. F. Carolyn Graglia may celebrate the virtues, satisfactions, and substantial rewards of women’s domestic roles as wife and mother, but her brief for the softer, gentler female persona is fueled by an impressively sharp lawyer’s mind that makes no concessions to the traditional womanly qualities … Read more