Allow me, if you will, a discursive break in a Friday blog post from my normal policy of not writing about other writers. Sometimes, a person generating enough bizarre commentary warrants a response. I am referring to Massimo Faggioli. Faggioli, whose name translates roughly to something like “Maximum Beans,” (a popular observation that apparently really bothers…
“I support 1P5 because of your original, authentically Catholic content. 1P5 is my favorite site, hands down, for Catholic commentary.” – Julie I have a story to tell you, and I hope you’ll stick with me, because it gets way more interesting than I expected. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but…
Four years ago this week, in an America that could not have predicted the election of Donald Trump, I wrote a column about the failing American experiment. The title, “A Republic Not Kept Is Lost,” referred to the words of Benjamin Franklin, who, when asked by a group of people waiting outside the 1787 Constitutional…
“On March 16,” writes a modern-day Jesuit of his forebear in faith, the missionary martyr St. Jean de Brébeuf, “the Iroquois attacked the village and took the Hurons, who were mainly Christians, along with Jean and another Jesuit, Gabriel Lalement, prisoner. He knew that the possibility of martyrdom was imminent.” What happened next is the kind…
Looking out across the Catholic landscape, things are pretty grim. We are losing this war. I talked to someone yesterday who is close to one of the American seminary abuse scandals and helped bring it to light. “It can’t hold together much longer,” he said, then rephrased it as a question. “Can it?” “I don’t…
The “Instrumentum Laboris” (working document) for the upcoming Amazon Synod was released today. Currently available only in Italian and Spanish, the 45,000-word document — as expected — contains indications that like the two family synods that came before it, this October’s synod on issues facing the Church in the Amazon river basin will not remain…
Every time I post about social media, I get a predictable barrage of negative responses. Here are a few real ones: “Stay the heck off Facebook. It is the devil.” “So-called social media like Facebook and Twitter are the scourge of humanity.” “Facebook destroys families.” The merits of these assessments are open for debate. What…
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 5 years since I started 1P5. It was about this time of the year back in 2014 that the idea for a website that would help anchor the faithful against the coming storm was constantly on my mind. At the time, I was praying Compline from the…
The International Una Voce Federation (FIUV) is an organization that seeks “to foster the cultural heritage of the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church upon which so much of European culture, music, art, literature and architecture has been built and nourished.” Their “principal aims are to ensure that the traditional Roman rite of the…
We have written at considerable length about the tragic saga of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in these pages over the past two years. In my most recent piece, I discussed how the recent election has highlighted how fully the German faction has now taken over the Knights of Malta. This was evidenced in…
Last night, I watched the interview that the now laicized Fr. Jonathan Morris gave to Martha MacCallum on Fox News, where he’s been a contributor for many years. A lot of folks are very unhappy with Morris, and I can understand why. But I think there’s a good reason to reserve judgment in this particular…
