What does it take to get a young family to a traditional Latin Mass (TLM) where I live? Since the only Mass is at 8am on Sunday morning, it often takes a 2.5 hour drive the day before, a hotel room, a meal out, and a planned activity to keep the kids occupied. And for…
“Corruptio optimi pessima.” Saint Gregory the Great Seeking to find any coherence of the recent action of the Society of Jesus with the original intentions of Saint Ignatius of Loyola is an arduous if not impossible task, to the point that in hindsight one considers the reconstitution of the Order in 1814 after its…
Very few priests have been willing to publicly oppose the champions of the unborn holocaust. Long gone are the days of St. Ambrose, who refused Emperor Theodosius Holy Communion and forced him to do penance for the massacre of the Thessalonians. In our day, the massacre is on the level of the Nazi holocaust multiplied…
My pastor was trying to write a parish mission statement when, forsaking all modesty, I blurted out, “Father, you can write our mission statement in six words: Glorify God, Save Souls, Make Saints. He liked it and promptly had it emblazoned on—the collection envelopes! About a week later, trying (as writers do, to revise, and,…
“There seems to be a new normal where sin has become almost inevitable for most of us … For some reason — which in part due to us, in part due to the wisdom of God — the new normal for our generation seems to be that we keep on falling, we keep on sinning,…
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,…
By Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Peter Kwasniewski’s recent commentary, titled “Why Viganò’s critique of the Council must be taken seriously”, impressed me greatly. It appeared (here) on OnePeterFive, on June 29, and is one of the articles on which I have been meaning to comment: I do so now, with gratitude to the author and…
I’ve got to be honest, I absolutely agonized over writing my piece, No More Platitudes: It’s Time to Take a Hard Look at the Crisis of Catholicism. I started writing it weeks ago. Well, I should say, I wrote the first draft of a piece that never saw the light of day weeks ago. I wrote it,…
By an Anonymous Protestant Convert Struggling to hang in there… At one point in my youth, I gave up on Christianity altogether. It happened after I walked away from a Protestant Church that had become cult-like in its adherence to its pastor. I went looking for answers, and sought solace in things like the turgid…
A few years ago, my wife looked at me, after one of my rants about how bad things were getting in the Church, and asked me a simple question: “If this makes you so miserable, why are you still doing it?” I understood her question to be about my work, in particular, but also about…
It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it… ― Flannery O’Connor, “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor” At mid-life, I have absolutely no patience or charity for eunuch huckster priests who sell the LGBT lie like patent medicine. At 16, I bought…
