The Franciscan order was founded at the height of the Crusading era. Political and religious leaders were consumed with a noble cause: to recover the Holy Land that had been taken centuries earlier by Muslim forces. St. Francis, however, had a different obsession: to convert the Muslims to the one true faith, Catholicism. In 1219,…
By a Homeschooling Catholic Mom It is a dreadful feeling when the world shifts and what you thought you knew is thrown into doubt. Such an event can make one question all the other things that seemed so certain. A seismic change of this sort has shaken me to the core over these past few…
Latin Mass Companion – A New, Easy To Follow Missal Biretta Books 152 Pages $15 individual; Discounts applied to bulk orders A few weeks back, I was offered a review copy of the new Latin Mass Companion from Biretta Books – the publishing arm of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius. I accepted gratefully…
In a recent article I critiqued what I called “bad psychology” which “says that suffering is a result of outmoded rules which hamper sexual and emotional desires.” This psychology was a “false gospel” in the 1960s and 70s, blooming into the Human Potential Movement which has had a massive impact on the Church and the…
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain Suffering is an inescapable reality of life. Man or woman, rich…
How is your spiritual life working these days? What’s your sense of the Church? Is it crippled? Is it humming along? Are we flourishing? Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been 8 months since I read my last TAN book. I haven’t been able to stream mass with any degree of regularity.…
One recent evening, my wife and I received a tornado warning alert on our phones. Normally, I give such warnings due consideration, but I typically don’t get too worried because of the rarity of touchdowns where we live. In the back of my mind, however, was the fact that just a few days prior, another…
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…
