It’s hard to be a Catholic today. Every time you turn on the news it seems that there’s another statue being defaced or a crucifix being vandalized or a church being set ablaze. Just the other day, a statue of …
Category: History
What Language Did Jesus Speak?
You’ll see it in the headlines from time to time. It’s usually some variant of “which language did Jesus speak?” or “is ISIS exterminating the language of Jesus?” Scholars – well educated scholars – will make reference to the destruction …
In Musical Memoriam: St. Louis IX, King of France
Today, August 25, 2020, marks the 750th anniversary of the death in Tunis of a man who “summarizes the entire Middle Ages”, who “was a legislator, a hero and a saint”, who embodied “power united with holiness, and it is …
Abbess Caritas Pirckheimer: A Crucial Witness In Times of Persecution
If religious differences are discussed at all today, they tend to be elided or celebrated. Ecumenism has been the watchword among Catholics in recent decades; the Second Vatican Council’s On Ecumenism was one of the most-frequently mentioned documents in American …
The Catholic Origins of Modern International Relations Theory
When teaching the history of the field of International Relations (IR), scholars tend to start with the classical author of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, then skip immediately to the early modern political theorists Machiavelli and Hobbes. In the process, they …
Maybe Turkey Should Make Hagia Sophia a Church Again
I set off a year ago from London in a 20-foot racing sloop declaring — half jokingly — that I would reach Constantinople and liberate it from the Saracen. I am now sitting in a bar in Catalonia, and my …
Shall We Forget All the Confederate Catholics?
“We now see movements to remove statues and names given to monuments and schools of southern figures — Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others,” observed one of the last few real Jesuits a few years before his …
Napoleon’s Revolution Resurrected in Our Age
At dawn on July 6, 1809, French soldiers under the command of General Radet stormed the papal palace on the Quiniral Hill to arrest and take prisoner Pope Pius VII. The soldiers rapidly overran the palace and reached the pope’s …
Saint Louis Stands Against the New World Order
At the top of a grassy hill in St. Louis, Missouri, a bronze apotheosis of the city’s patron sits erect on a giant steed, keeping watch over the city. Recently, this work of art, which has inspired St. Louisans for …
The Dates and Years of the Birth and Death of Christ
It is common to hear some people propose that Our Lord was crucified as early as 30 A.D. and born as early as 4 B.C. They also claim He was not born in December and have proposed all sorts of …