What occasionally keeps me up at night, besides the yappy dog a few houses over, is wondering how to raise my children to become saints. There are so many questions my wife and I ponder. How do we get our children to a reverent Mass? Will homeschooling shelter them too much? Where will they find…
G.K. Chesterton once remarked, “the Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of wine, and a good cigar.” When most secular people think about the Catholic Church – or, more often, some mischaracterization of it – I doubt anyone would list such a delightful series of sensory metaphors. Rather than dignifying the tired,…
This article was first published at OnePeterFive on March 31, 2015, under the pen name Benedict Constable. It is here republished under the name of its author. Catholics striving to be loyal to “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) are rightly and reasonably concerned about the state of the Church today. Things are…
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…
All of mankind is trying to solve the problem of suffering. Throughout time, no less than in our day, a multitude of false religions and false gospels have arisen to solve the problem. In our day, the false gospel of Marxism says that revolution—violent or otherwise—will end suffering. This false gospel gained great power especially…
The religious impact of the discovery of the New World in the late 15th century cannot be overestimated. Although Catholic Europeans were aware of areas of the world that were not Christian (they had been involved in centuries of crusades against the Muslims), the assumption of most Catholics was that the Gospel had reached the…
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…
About ten years ago, I was a confused, libertarian, atheist college freshman, and I was about to embark on a revolution – first downward towards Hell and then upwards towards Heaven. As a complacent atheist who grew up in New England and was surrounded by other complacent atheists, I had never had the existence of…
Over at his blog at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher shares a couple of emails from readers about their experiences in the Catholic Church in both Canada and the United States. The stories are awful, but they’re not surprising. The gist of it is that almost nobody at the Catholic schools these people have experienced…
I have a love-hate relationship with confession. I hate it because it’s never very comfortable to admit the stupid, shameful, ridiculous things I do. I wait in the line with a head full of exaggeration, thinking of myself like a man on death row, waiting for the needle. In my desire to make a good…
Catholic News Agency published an article stating that in the wake of monasteries closing left and right in Spain, Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, the head of the Vatican’s congregation on consecrated life, insists that contemplative life will not go away: “we need contemplative life as we need food and water to live.” While I…
