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, time-honored rites and customs, are criticized as backward, stunted, regressive, old-fashioned, stuck in their ways.…
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 altar pieces from one end of Christendom to the other; it has prompted a never-ending…
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 seeing what seems an obvious fact to me and so many other Catholics? Of course…
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 St. George with its spacious choir and sanctuary, and Santa Maria dei Miracoli with its…
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 ever need or want. No more heating bills, no more lightbulbs, no more winter trips…
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 world to come—was, in his system, to be seen as evil, and what had been…
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 be able to teach us? Those who dwell in the ambit of traditional Catholicism will…
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 in line: The Christian faith has illustrated, throughout its centuries-long history, by means of multiple…
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 best, the men’s dapper suits and polished shoes. You learned your catechism in Q&A form—and…
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 thought it might be interesting to share what she wrote, and then my response to…
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, and then my response (with all identifying details removed). * * * Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,…
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