This is the third installment of a multi-part series. You may find each part here: Part I – Part II – Part III A Book of Hours was the essential guide to devotion for a literate Catholic layman of the late Middle Ages, from the late 14th century to the early 16th. Its content was essentially liturgical, but selected with…
I arrive at the Mission, having driven past the casino and its glittering billboard, stucco and neon mixing garishly among the saguaro. I’ve come to take pictures of this beautiful but challenging monument, indulging my photographic interest in a place rich in Catholic tradition that I have somehow never heard of before coming to this…
By now you’ve probably seen the video. Simple text overlaid on sweeping and beautiful natural vistas set to a serene — but determined — instrumental soundtrack. Subtle stylistic choices: the use of lens flare, vintage film effects, and mirroring; the use of just enough motion graphics to make a point without being distracting. Beneath it all,…
“Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky / Imagine all the people / Living for today… Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too / Imagine all…
“Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light.” -Archbishop Fulton Sheen Over ten years later it is easy to forget just how consumed America was…
Several years ago my Pastor, Fr. Dennis Gordon, FSSP, asked me if I would build him a portable altar to house an altar stone from the Cristeros era. He had seen some of my carpentry skills through work I had done at a relative’s house, so he thought I might be up for the challenge. I first…
This is the second installment of a multi-part series. You may find each part here: Part I – Part II – Part III The printing press reduced the cost of book production in late medieval Europe enormously. But printed books did not altogether replace illuminated manuscripts, at least not in the years before the rise of Protestantism. To judge by…
This is the first installment of a multi-part series. You may find each part here: Part I – Part II – Part III The Cathedral at Aachen is home to one of Christendom’s most impressive treasuries of relics, including four of particular distinction that were gifted to Charlemagne by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 799: the dress worn by the…
With the release of another predictably vapid World Youth Day “hymn”, the time may be ripe to once again address the problem of “kitsch” in the Catholic Church. The age of glowing artifice has successfully blinded even some of the most faithful, and it’s high time that somebody shot the elephant in the room (poaching…
Many Catholics have witnessed or read about Masses gone wild: polka Masses, life-size scary puppet Masses, and probably worst of all, Los Angeles Religious Education Congress closing Masses. In these extreme cases, it is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with how the organizers understand the Mass. Yet even some sincere, faithful Catholics wish…
If you build something truly beautiful, the people will come of their own accord. So it was for the tenth annual Festival of Lessons and Carols at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago, which – in the presence of Most Reverend Joseph N. Perry, Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago – saw an enthusiastic and capacity crowd.…
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