This is the first of two related articles on whether doctrine can change. In the first, we examine doctrine from the strict point of view, side by side with dogma. What does the Church really teach? Since Pope John Paul II, media and laity alike have been interested in and sometimes confused by the pope’s…
The prospect of using aborted fetal tissue in the massively funded project to develop a COVID-19 vaccine — a particularly gruesome sign of the techno-barbarism of our age — makes when human life begins (and with it, human personhood), and how much we can know about it for sure, once again a pressing scientific and…
I have been fortunate, during this COVID-19 lockdown, in that my pastor has continued to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass per our regular schedule. Ten people have been allowed in the church. The rest of us who attend sit in our cars and watch the Mass on our cell phones. The pastor or…
As I write this, I have two boys outside pretending to repair a tree. For those who do not know boy-speak, to repair a tree is simply an excuse to hook a rope on a branch and pully the younger boy upward as high as can be attained. The older son informs me all is…
When introducing the instrumental works of a composer to a musically untrained audience, a bit of trepidation naturally sets in. Tastes in music are often entrenched and become even more so where instrumental music is concerned. People are naturally more responsive to the sound of the human voice in music, while the modern era of…
It’s sad to think of Chinese-Americans feeling stigmatized as a result of the coronavirus. One survey shows a majority of Americans have lost respect and trust for China in recent months. Of course Chinese Americans had nothing to do with the virus or its spread, and no one finds fault with individual Chinese people living…
In the writings of the Second Vatican Council, and those of the post-conciliar popes, it’s hard not to detect a certain drift toward an increasing obscurity of language. When one goes back and reads older enyclicals, or papal bulls from prior councils, what is striking by contrast is the clarity and precision of the texts.…
A late romantic, restless, and sentimental Russian composer, was born 180 years ago, on May 7, 1840, at Votkinsk, a town in Russia’s Ural Mountains: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). He studied composition, we read in the biography, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein, pianist and composer attached to German Romanticism. After earning his…
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,…
For readers of One Peter Five, the crisis in the Church is no secret, but an open wound fifty years old and more. And after the summer of shame and the continuing saga of Viganò, speculation was raised at the onset of January 2020 as to what could possibly go still worse in the Church.…
Having devoured many spiritual classics from the desert fathers to St. Augustine during my two and half years as a Benedictine monk before discerning out, one idea struck me above the rest. An author, whose name escapes me, prophetically proclaimed that the Catholic Church must undergo everything our Lord has gone through. On a personal…
