Image: Pontifical High Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington DC. Photo by Steve Skojec. Last weekend, I got together for dinner with one of my best friends from college. We now live together in the same city, and our kids are as close as cousins. As the children…
I recall many months ago, in happier times, a television commercial of a bride getting married in the middle of a forest. Her mother, seemingly confined to a nursing home, was unable to attend. Now it is evidently not right that a girl should forgo a dream wedding in a forest just to have her…
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…
In a recent column for America magazine, Mike Lewis, editor of the papal positivist website Where Peter Is, writes to condemn “extreme” voices critical of Pope Francis, who in his view are causing a deep and bitter divide in the Church. This is a tired (if predictable) explanation that seeks to place blame for issues that…
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.…
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…
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…
In his latest column, “Bishop Barron Takes on the Rad Trads,” Fr. Dwight Longenecker manages to insult nearly all traditionalists (“they’re not all nut jobs”: gee, thanks!), while at the same time, to his credit, says something important that probably 95% of the bishops and 80% of the rest of the clergy wouldn’t dream 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…
Over at The Catholic Thing this morning, Randall Smith has an delightfully scathing piece entitled “The Artificial Jesuit” (a reference to one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories). Smith tackles the decision made by Fr. Brian F. Linnane, S.J., president of Loyola University Maryland, to strike the late (but widely beloved) Southern Catholic writer’s name from one one…
