“It is not the torture, but the cause which makes the martyr.” – St. Augustine In reading Lian Xi’s Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr In Mao’s China, the aforementioned words of the great doctor of the Church raised the question for me: for what cause did Lin Zhao, the fervent…
Memento Mori is an ancient monastic expression that has had a bit of a gothy rebranding and promotion in the Catholic underground. Of course, the nomenclature is timeless and sound–we are all going to die, and we should live as if we understand that; to paraphrase St. Robert Bellarmine, those who live well, die well.…
For the past two years, our family has been attending Mass in the Extraordinary Form exclusively, save for a couple of times where I found myself at the Novus Ordo by necessity. Though we attend a Diocesean TLM, I have also had the opportunity to attend traditional masses with the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter…
In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich wrote a best-seller entitled, “The Population Bomb.” The premise: We have surpassed the ability of the earth to sustain life on Earth with our current rate of population growth. Ehrlich predicted that by 1990, half of Americans would die of starvation because there would be too many…
One recent evening, my wife and I received a tornado warning alert on our phones. Normally, I give such warnings due consideration, but I typically don’t get too worried because of the rarity of touchdowns where we live. In the back of my mind, however, was the fact that just a few days prior, another…
“I follow no leader but Christ and join in communion with none but your blessedness [Pope Damasus I], that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that this is the rock on which the Church has been built. Whoever eats the Lamb outside this house is profane. Anyone who is not in the ark…
I let out an audible groan when I came across an opinion piece in The New York Times a few weeks ago titled “Christianity Gets Weird.” The accompanying grainy graphic of a pair of praying hands and the label-maker tags “GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE! VEILS VEILS VEILS! WEIRD CATHOLIC TWITTER!” threw me back to the era of…
It wasn’t long after I became a Catholic at the age of eighteen, during my freshman year of college, that I began to discern religious life. I figured that if I was going “in,” I was going all in, and the monastic ideals of stability, fidelity, and obedience appealed to the desire for “something more”…
