To a degree not yet as widely recognized as it should be, Pope Francis – Jorge Bergoglio, S.J. – is showing himself to be an admirable disciple of his Jesuit forerunner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955), the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, who exercised an enormous influence on the young Jesuit Turks of…
My article “Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo” was greeted with a barrage of snide remarks, flustered dismissals, relativistic claims about “tastes,” and soberly framed objections. As a philosopher and theologian, I care little for empty rhetoric, but I care very much about rational objections, which deserve a response. I have seen every…
Fr. Longenecker has written some fine books and articles. Years ago, I enjoyed and benefited from his book on St. Benedict and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and his recent book on the historical veracity of the Magi is interesting. It would appear that in matters liturgical, however, Fr. Longenecker is out of his depth. Each…
Part of the problem with Pope Francis’s change to the Catechism on the legitimacy of the death penalty – a decision on which he is doubling down in the face of worldwide opposition from theologically literate Catholics – is that it fundamentally misconstrues the role of a catechism. A catechism is not, and has never been…
It never ceases to amaze me just how dark the world becomes in the month of December, as we approach the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. I wake up in darkness, thinking it’s the middle of the night, when it’s already almost breakfast time. I look around at a dismal sky at…
Children change everything. This is a truth we ponder many times in our lives. First, if we are believing Christians, we celebrate each year the coming of a child – the Child, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made flesh – the infant, the boy, the youth, the man, on Whom all of reality hinges,…
I’ve been asked many times for practical advice on how one should go about building up a library of classical music at home. (For the purposes of this article, we will use the term “classical music” to refer broadly to the great Western tradition of music of the past 1,000 years prior to the rise…
All Catholics will sooner or later be asked a question like this: “So, what do you think of the charismatic movement?” It may come from a Catholic heavily involved in the “renewal”; it may come from a hardened skeptic; it may arise out of a simple desire to understand a fairly widespread phenomenon that appears…
In a wonderful article from years ago that I only recently discovered, “The Mass and the Four Most Important Lessons of Childhood,” Michael P. Foley argues that the four basic responses that parents teach their children from an early age map onto the four basic purposes of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Implicit, then,…
One of the many things that has disturbed me in this ecclesial turmoil through which we are living is the simple thought: what are the abusive priests thinking? What do they think of themselves and of their victims? How can they live with themselves? Do they believe anything of the Catholic Faith? The same question…
Many who have studied the life and pontificate of Pope Paul VI are convinced that he was far from exemplary in his conduct as pastor; that he not only did not possess heroic virtue, but lacked certain key virtues; that his promulgation of a titanic liturgical reform was incompatible with his papal office of handing on that…
