Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, Thomistic theologian, liturgical scholar, and choral composer, is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and The Catholic University of America. He has taught at the International Theological Institute in Austria, the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austria Program, and Wyoming Catholic College, which he helped establish in 2006. He writes regularly for Catholic blogs and has authored six books, the most recent being Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Angelico, 2017).
Author: pkwasniewski
No Matter How Bad You Think the Corruption Is, It’s Worse
A long-time observer of the modern ecclesiastical scene wrote to me to share his perspective on the broader significance of the McCarrick scandal. With his permission, I here publish his thoughts, which have been slightly edited for publication. Most commentators …
Lessons from Church History: A Brief Review of Papal Lapses
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article was first published at OnePeterFive in October 2015 under the pen name “Benedict Constable.” Due to some controversy (the nature of which need not be gone into here), the article was taken …
The Cult of Change and Christian Changelessness
The modern age glamorizes constant change. It romanticizes variety, development, progress, newness. It exalts evolution as a paradigm of knowledge and of all reality. Those who hold tightly to perennial wisdom and permanent truths, traditional morals, inherited culture, artistic monuments, …
Spiritual Works of Mercy: A Contemporary Retelling of Matthew 25:31–46
The twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew is surely one of the most rousing of all chapters in the New Testament. It has shocked into spiritual wakefulness unnumbered Christians down through the centuries; it has inspired the art of church doors and …
Are Faithful Catholics Allowed to Question the Liturgical Reform?—A Dialogue
William: My good fellow, I simply can’t go along with your position that the Novus Ordo is inherently defective. A pope could never promulgate a liturgy that was harmful to the faithful. Terence: Bill, you amaze me! What prevents you from …
Unambiguous Theocentricity: Church Architecture and the Traditional Mass
Shortly after my wife and I were married in 1998, we were able to spend some time in Venice. Visiting the churches there was a particular delight, as there was so much to discover. I recall especially the church of …
Eating Fire and Spirit: The Most Wondrous of All God’s Gifts
Imagine eating the sun—and imagine you could do it without perishing. What would happen? You would receive into your body the source of light and warmth. You would have within you all the light and heat that you could possibly …
The New Synthesis of All Heresies: On Nietzschean Catholicism
Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the “transvaluation of all values”: the inversion of our conceptions of good and evil in this post-Christian era. What had been regarded as good—humility, self-denial, obedience, love of the poor and of poverty, looking towards a …
Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone
Far too often, people will hear fallen-away Catholics say something like this: “I stopped going to church because I just wasn’t being fed.” What do they mean by this statement? What might the metaphor of hunger and lack of nourishment …
Are We God’s “Sons and Daughters”?
When contemporary clergy preach about our relationship to the Father in Christ, they will refer to Christians, almost without exception, as “God’s sons and daughters.” The new document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Placuit Deo, falls …
