Over one century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote a masterpiece poem titled The Ballad of the White Horse. Today, more than ever, it strikes chords in the hearts of all who love the Catholic Church and her traditions. In soul-stirring rhymes, Chesterton tells the story of ragged King Alfred, who mournfully wanders through his once Catholic…
Author’s note: there are many legends and stories of St. Patrick. In an attempt to view the saint from a different perspective, I offer a reflection on one of the most significant events in the life of the “Apostle to the Irish” as a creative non-fiction short story. The following is based on actual accounts…
Eighty years ago this week, on January 12, 1941, James Joyce (Dublin 1882 — Zurich 1941), a great wordsmith, an Irish writer counted among the greatest of the twentieth century, fell into a coma following an operation for an ulcer performed the previous day. On January 13th, he died. He was less than a month…
Few men have ever hated Christ as much as I have, before turning to love Him. Before I was a Catholic, I was an atheist, and not an atheist who kept his opinions to himself, but a vituperative, proselytizing, aggressive, evangelist of atheism who sought at every opportunity to spread the Bad News that God…
Decades ago, when I was just getting started in my legal career, I was a law clerk for a six-foot, four-inch, immensely imposing judge. Everyone called him “Your Honor.” I was a very junior law clerk, but even the most senior of his clerks, a man who had been with the judge for over a…
When a maverick journalist opposes popular opinion, at least as promoted by prominent media, what happens next? For rock critic turned cultural commentator John Waters, it’s condemnation followed by self-imposed exile from Dublin’s left-liberal, bien-pensant paper-of-record, The Irish Times. This unrepentant dissident, not to be confused by Americans with Baltimore’s cult icon and iconoclastic filmmaker,…
On January 24, the National Catholic Register published an article titled “Catholics Reflect on 10 Years of the Good, Bad, and Ugly of Social Media.” Within the article were a number of quotes from Bishop Robert Barron, auxiliary of Los Angeles. Bishop Barron, who interacts with online ministry and social media extensively through the Word…
I will never forget what it was like to watch the Lord of the Rings films for the first time, when I was eleven or so. I had always devoured books, but the story of Frodo and the ring was in another class than anything I had yet experienced in my young life. I remember…
There was a time before my own married and family life that a friend of mine slyly described this vocation as “a beautiful bed of roses … only that somebody forgot to de-thorn the roses.” I am told that much like married and family life, clerical life also frequently gives a dose of prickling reality…
Perhaps the most prolific living Catholic author in the English language, Michael O’Brien has been thrilling us with theologically rich and emotionally poignant works of fiction for over twenty years. He recently returned to finish one of his most popular tales – Fr. Elijah – with the sequel, Fr. Elijah in Jerusalem. The short (by…
