National Review recently ran an absurd article entitled “Querida Amazonia Reveals Francis’s Conservatism,” an unlikely piece of hagiography that will prove in time to be as risibly misguided as another National Review article, one authored by George Weigel on the day of Amoris Laetitia’s release in 2016: “Pope Francis on Love, Marriage, and the Family.”…
As a Catholic and a man raised in the institutions of the U.S. military, I have always discerned a possible vocation to the military chaplaincy. Initially, the discernment took place out of a sense of duty that all men of the faith should seek, but eventually, a profound love of Our Lord Jesus Christ and…
Dictatorships are not all bad. At least dictatorships from the past. For instance, few people know this, but Joseph Stalin cured malaria. While reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, I was shocked to learn that Stalin totally eradicated malaria from Russia. It wasn’t so much science as his power to make declarations. In the Book of…
If someone asked you to explain why Our Lord instituted the Mass, what would you say? Could you tell him why it’s necessary for our right relationship with God [i]? As a result of the cosmic tragedy of Adam and Eve, the human race is plunged in darkness, misery, and guilt. Each one of us…
As we discussed in our first part, Protestantism removed the cult of the Virgin Mary and with it the living authority of the Church. The reason that Protestantism was able to gain such ground was due to the power it gave to kings to overturn the authority of the Church. With no check on their…
Young men and women who enter religious formation today bring vital refreshment to a parched and weary Church. However, there are some who enter religion only to find that God has not equipped them with the necessary faculties to persevere. What about them? They longed to join their lives to that river of grace that…
I could write at considerable length about the value and the glory of the Latin language. I spend some of my time teaching Latin. You may imagine how I feel when somebody says to me that “Latin is a dead language” or “What, after all, is the use of Latin, these days?” There are two…
It all started with a text from my sister. I had just gotten off work and walked out to my car. There, waiting on my phone, was the news that my mom hadn’t shown up for work that morning, that there had been an accident with a fatality on her commute, that she wasn’t answering…
It’s Valentine’s Day, which means all the drugstores are festooned in red and pink; the secular advice columns are out in force; and the really, really bad movies jockey for position on screens around the world. Secular Valentine’s day is overly indulgent and kind of weird. This article, on the contrary, is about how to…
On this episode of the podcast, Steve and Tim Gordon of Rules for Retrogrades break down the initial reactions to Querida Amazonia, the just-released post-synodal apostolic exhortation from the Amazon synod. If you enjoy this show, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel or the audio-only version of our podcast on iTunes or Stitcher,…
If he lived today, would Mozart have composed a cantata like Davide penitente (The Penitent David), K. 469? Performed successfully for the first time on March 13, 1785 in Vienna’s Burgtheater, it was soon forgotten. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was asked by the Vienna Musicians’ Society (Wiener Tonkünstler-Societät), a pension fund founded in 1771 to…
