Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem “From shadows and images into truth”1 Various translations are possible, since imagines can be translated: ideas, appearances, phantasms, likenesses, simulacra, symbols, etc. For Newman, the darkness from which he had emerged could be described, …
Category: Paganism
Child Sacrifice in the COVID-19 Era
“It’s very difficult for us to recapture people’s motivations for carrying out this practice[.] … Perhaps it was out of … a sense that the good the sacrifice could bring the family or community as a whole outweighed the life …
A Look at the ‘Inculturated’ Church in Chiapas, Mexico
You see a lot of strange words now in Catholic circles. Words that you would never before have associated with the word “Catholic,” like “shaman” and “cosmos” and “integral ecology.” All having to do with the recent Amazon Synod. You …
In Response to Outgrowing God by Richard Dawkins
Professor Richard Dawkins’s latest book is entitled Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. It is divided into two parts, the first being, after a fashion, theological, and the second claiming to be biological and scientific. In the theological section, the author …
The Three Boy Martyrs of Tlaxcala, Mexico
On May 13, 1524, twelve Spanish Franciscan friars set foot on Mexican soil for the first time. After walking barefoot from the coast of Veracruz, they finally arrived at Mexico City, a distance of 250 miles over two mountain ranges. …
Pachamama Proved It: At the Vatican, Truth Is Stranger than Fiction
Many Catholics are just now awaking from what seemed like a surreal dream, or rather a hellish nightmare. The Pan-Amazonian Synod mercifully stumbled past the finish line at the end of October, and now the revolutionary attack on the Church …
The Pachamama and the Nebuchadnezzar of Verdi
The news that in these days comes to us around the statuettes of the Pachamama, the mother goddess worshiped in the Inca religion, thrown into the Tiber from Ponte Sant’Angelo, at the foot of the castle dominated by St. Michael, …
The Spirit of Paganism Looms over the Amazon Synod
Something ancient — paganism — is “struggling to be born” again. It’s slouching toward birth, like Yeats’s “rough beast,” laboring to arrive for its hour. It’s emerging amid the rise of what exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger ominously describes as the …