Author’s note: there are many legends and stories of St. Patrick. In an attempt to view the saint from a different perspective, I offer a reflection on one of the most significant events in the life of the “Apostle to the Irish” as a creative non-fiction short story. The following is based on actual accounts…
Who doesn’t love a circus? The acrobats. The clowns. The trapeze artists. And the inhabitants of San Juan de los Lagos in the state of Jalisco were no exception. They were abuzz with excitement. The circus was coming to town! The year was 1623. A family of trapeze artists had just arrived in town, en…
The Statio Radiophonica Vaticana — better known in the English-speaking world as Vatican Radio –which reaches all continents with its news and programs in 32 languages, turns 90 today. The broadcasting entity of the Holy See, legally recognized by international courts, is an instrument of communication and of evangelization at the service of the Papacy.…
One of the greatest musicians in the history of mankind, and certainly among the greatest composers of the Western European tradition, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), was baptized 250 years ago on December 17, 1770. It is fitting on such a momentous anniversary to offer readers a brief overview of his life and work, highlighting several…
Tomorrow marks 250 years since the baptism of the great German composer, considered the last of the Classics and the first of the Romantics: Ludwig van Beethoven (Bonn 1770 – Vienna 1827). Retracing his life as a man and artist, through his family, economic and character problems, the seriousness of his training and his artistic…
In my study of history, I’ve noticed a few patterns. One of these is the cycle of impossible situations. It seems that about every ten generations—250 years, sometimes less—the Church is faced with one of these. It is some crisis which threatens to the destroy the whole Church and prove God false. At the time,…
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 Our Lady of Guadalupe was smashed to the ground in broad daylight in a Brooklyn,…
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 of Jesus’ native language in modern Near Eastern communities or perhaps examine the relevance of…
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 just the latter that goes to the foreground for him” (F.R. Chateaubriand, Études historiques, in…
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 newspapers. For the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian…
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 ignore the entire medieval period and, therefore, the rich history of Catholic international thought that…
