Above: Plaza Mayor de México (today Plaza del Zócalo), 1830 by Theubet de Beauchamp, showing the Mexico City Cathedral where San Felipe was baptised. On May 13, 1524, twelve Franciscan friars from Spain set foot on Mexican soil for the first time. The evangelization of Mexico had begun! According to Robert Ricard in The Spiritual Conquest…
Above: the old and new basilicas of Our Lady of Guadalupe. All photos by the author. In the year 1527 King Charles V of Spain spent Holy Week at the Franciscan Monastery of Barajo near the city of Burgos in northern Spain. Friar Juan de Zumarraga was the prior of the monastery at this time.…
Above: the abandoned pagan pyramid of Kukulcán, in Yucatán, Mexico, photographed in 1860. Public domain. The year was 1632. Padre Nicolas de Zamora was heartsick. Disconsolate. He was the pastor of the parish of El Pueblito, a small hamlet 6 miles north of the city of Querataro in central Mexico. The city of Queretaro was…
Above: Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Conca. The Franciscan presence in Mexico is enormous. Visit any city or town in the country and you are sure to see a Franciscan monastery; in many cases these are massive edifices which are pretty hard to miss. The one in Izamal, Yucatan, for example, is so…
“We will not do it!” declared Carmelite priest Fr. Titus Brandsma, the spiritual director of the Catholic press during Nazi-occupied Holland. “Our limit has been reached! We cannot serve them!” He was reacting to the latest Nazi edict insisting that Catholic newspapers publish Nazi propaganda. This was not the first time that Fr. Brandsma had…
August 13, 1807, was a night to remember in the Dominican convent of Jesus Maria in Guadalajara, the second largest city in Mexico. The church of Jesus Maria is a five minute walk from the mammoth Guadalajara Cathedral and the zocalo (the central plaza of the city). Guadalajara is in the western part of the country in…
Father Miguel Pro could have said “No.” His Jesuit superior ordered him back to Mexico for his health. After three unsuccessful stomach operations the superior thought that a return to his homeland would aid in his recovery. It is likely that the Superior was not aware of the perilous state of the country at that…
Recently, the head of France’s Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop de Moulins-Beaufort, said that the Seal of Confession should not take precedence over French law (dealing with sex crimes against children). This scandalous statement was the exact opposite of what he had said earlier. What made him change his mind? Well, could it be because he had been summoned…
“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” a chant familiar to every school-aged child in the United States. Well, let us hope that this is still the case! It marks the event, of course, in which the Italian-born navigator, Christopher Columbus, departed from Spain and discovered the Americas. An event of enormous…
“Ground zero.” Such haunting words. They bring to mind, of course, the hideous images from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Unforgettable in their horror. And, ever since, the words “Ground Zero” have become embedded in our collective vocabulary. The words “Ground Zero” became embedded in another generation’s vocabulary as well. Almost eight decades…
Jacques Fesch was living the American dream. Except he wasn’t living in America. He was living in France. His Belgian-born father was a bank president. The family was wealthy and lived in an exclusive district of Paris. Fancy vacations, private schools, luxury goods. That was his life. “He was living the perfect life!” said his…
