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
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 …
Living through the Meltdown: An Imaginary Biography
You were born in 1938. You grew up in a parish where multiple Sunday Masses were packed with Catholics. Some of your earliest memories are of the hats and veils the ladies wore as the final touch on their Sunday …
An Anti-Traditionalist Rants—and a Traditionalist Responds
I once received a humdinger of a piece of anti-fan mail from a lady in Europe who was quite incensed by the lecture at Steubenville that became chapter 1 of my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness. Recently re-reading it, I …
Sorting Out Difficulties in Liturgical Allegiance
A young adult of strong faith and an admirable family piety sent a letter to me last summer with certain questions and concerns that I believe will resonate with many other readers of OnePeterFive. I will share first the letter, …
The Kingship of Christ and the Anti-Kingdom of Modernity
Right after the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision was announced, the media quickly reported on the “conciliatory” and “moderate” language of Donald Cardinal Wuerl: “The law of the land is the law of the land,” says Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Donald …
The Reality of Hell and the Fear of God: Banished from a Church Near You
In my article “The Fifty-Year Descent to Footnote 351: Our Progressive Desensitization to the Most Holy Eucharist,” I spoke of how the liturgical reform’s many sudden and drastic changes in ritual and ceremonial have contributed to a continual erosion of …
