In the following section of this article, Emily Sparks offers the following eyewitness testimony, with permission to use it, under her name. Looking back many years later, she regrets her well intentioned involvement in this panoply of abuses but wishes to share with readers a sense of “just how bad it is” at a typical…
The theme of my conversation is: The new scenarios in Italy and in Europe during and after the Coronavirus crisis. I will not speak about this theme from a medical or scientific point of view as I do not have this competence. I will instead consider the argument from three other points of view: the…
This week began with lots of new announcements on government restrictions and diocesan shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. In this special report, we take a look at what’s happening, and why, and try to get some perspective on what we’re facing with the Coronavirus pandemic. This one is particularly for the skeptics and those…
This year — traditionally, he was born on March 15, 270 — marks the 1,750th anniversary of the birth of the bishop of Myra in modern-day Turkey, whose relics have been resting in Bari since 1087, equally venerated for his holiness and his intercession to God both in the Greek and Slavic East and in…
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” —Saint Augustine of Hippo, City of God Two years ago, I was a prisoner. Sometimes, I looked up at…
Holy water is an important part of our family’s life. It is rare that someone goes to bed at night or starts his day in our house without holy water on his forehead. So this past summer, I had a priest bless water using the old rite formula for “The Blessing of Water.” To be…
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski argued in a recently republished article at 1P5 that it is not appropriate for women to be lectors at Mass because putting them in that position disrupts and contradicts the symbolism of the liturgy. While I agree with Dr. Kwasniewski’s argument, I would like to add some precisions regarding the biblical basis…
It wasn’t long after I became a Catholic at the age of eighteen, during my freshman year of college, that I began to discern religious life. I figured that if I was going “in,” I was going all in, and the monastic ideals of stability, fidelity, and obedience appealed to the desire for “something more”…
Children will learn many things from the traditional Latin Mass that they are not likely ever to learn from the modern Mass of Paul VI. 1. The Mass is a mystery of faith, a holy sacrifice. The ancient rite enshrines and expresses in the most perfect way that the Mass is the re-presentation of the…
Now Israel loved Joseph above all his sons, because he had him in his old age: and he made him a coat of divers colors. […] Now it fell out also that he told his brethren a dream, that he had dreamed: which occasioned them to hate him the more. —Genesis 37:1,5 Whereupon Joseph her…
This week, as I watch the issue of the COVID-19 coronavirus dominate the online conversation, sparking arguments left and right about what should be done, whether we should be concerned or totally unfazed, and so on, I find myself thinking about an anecdote from popular author and speaker Simon Sinek (whom I’ve referenced here before):…
