It is said that the knowledge of Church history is a consolation. Most often this is meant in the sense that, for those who are troubled about the Church in the present age, all you have to do is look back at the history of the Church and you are sure to find an era…
Want to listen to this post instead? Check out our audio recording of this essay. Musical accompaniment by Frank LaRocca, “Miserere,” taken from the album “In This Place“: The sky was overcast, steel-gray clouds admitting only a few rays of light as I ascended the hill. It looked like rain, but none had yet broken…
Editor’s note: Today we are pleased to reprint, with the author’s permission, the following essay from Prof. Roberto de Mattei, an eminent scholar of Church history and one of the most notable thought leaders of European traditional Catholicism. Herein he offers helpful guidance on the matters of both the moral liceity and the questionable efficacy…
Of sexual immorality and impurity, St. Paul says, “Let them be not so much as named among you” (Eph. 5:3). He further counsels that we think on those things that are noble, pure, lovely, and admirable (Phil. 4:8); but there comes a time to look into the Abyss and call it by name. The specific…
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.…
“The teaching of Saint John Damascene thus finds its place in the tradition of the universal Church, whose sacramental doctrine foresees that material elements taken from nature can become vehicles of grace by virtue of the invocation (epiclesis) of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by the confession of the true faith.” (General Audience, 6 May, 2009,…
By William Po In 2013, Francis, the first Jesuit pope, canonized the Jesuit Peter Faber (1506-1546) who, with founder St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552) and four others, vowed poverty, chastity and obedience on Montmartre in 1534 in forming the Compañía de Jesús (which was Latinized into Societas Jesu) – the Jesuit order.…
In a hole in the ground there lived a Catholic. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with liturgical dancing and felt banners, nor yet a dry, bare, ungodly hole with modern Jesuits and new pathways: it was a Catholic-hole, which means the comfort of timeless faith and beauty. It had a perfectly placed round…
Strength without leverage is nothing. Even Samson at his power’s peak could not have budged a massive object in a vacuum: he’d simply push himself backwards into empty space. Likewise, an intellect ungrounded in history can only bounce aimlessly off the ineluctable marble of facts (“stubborn things,” John Adams said). I recently remarked, by way…
And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. —Apocalypse 12:7,8 And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness.…
As the Vatican continues its bizarre feud with the venerable Roman Rite, going so far as to prohibit the offering of the Ancient Mass in St. Peter’s upper basilica (the very Mass for which that basilica was built), it is delightful to be able to share some very good news. Benedictus, the “Traditional Catholic Companion,”…
