A tall, gray building stands against a gray sky, smoke and spire alike reaching towards Heaven. Thousands of ornate details confess a Gothic ancestry, this sacred place a child of stone born by the toil of generations. The face of the church remains stoic as her stained glass windows burst in the heat, hundreds of…
Twenty years ago, I was happy to enroll my six-year-old son in Cub Scouts. No organization held a higher image in terms of instilling values in boys. The Boy Scouts were never political. They honored God and were strongly patriotic. Organized through our parish, the troop was a fun and active way for boys to…
While California officials applaud public protests involving tens of thousands of not exactly COVID-mindful individuals, the same officials have informed “houses of worship” that due to the risk of spreading the virus their members are banned from singing or chanting. With masks? Without masks? With no-contact thermometer checkpoints in place or without? Are we still…
UPDATE – July 9, 2020: The United States Navy has issued a new, clarified policy statement on the question of service members attending indoor religious services, which states that nothing about their guidance “should be construed to restrict attendance at places of worship where attendees are able to appropriately apply COVID-19 transmission mitigation measures, specifically social…
“Unite the clans!” frequently urges Michael Matt of the Remnant Newspaper. After months of shambolic infighting amongst faithful Catholics over the status of the SSPX, with one small tweet, Bishop Robert Barron, an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles and former rector at Mundelein seminary, has gone where no traditional Catholic has been able to go…
The year 2020 is half-finished. The remnants of civilization continue to burn, the enemies of Christ push the Overton window ever wider, and Christians are reminded more and more frequently of our uncomfortable call to crucifixion. Things tend to accelerate as they near the abyss. Comrades! Shall we destroy a statue of a slave-owner or…
When Garces Memorial High School sacked theology teacher Tim Gordon for telling the truth about Black Lives Matter, the school divulged a dirty little secret about the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Just as ruling-class elites in both political parties in the United States despise the deplorables who voted for President Trump, the ruling-class elites…
The very first heresy that threatened the Church had to do with race. This was known as “Judaizing.” The baptized Christian who had been born a Jew and observed all the commandments of the Law of Moses (besides others of the rabbis) sought to impose also the Law of Moses onto Gentile converts to the…
“Naïve and immature people have a great passion to ‘serve humanity,’ but they cannot bear to serve a human being standing right in front of them.” This adage was given to me by a wise man who pithily summed up the pervasive folly of our age, and indeed several centuries of modernity. The bloodshed wrought…
There is no question that Jacques Maritain has had a profound impact upon Catholic intellectual life. Notre Dame sports its Jacques Maritain Center; then-senator Kennedy quoted Maritain during an address to Assumption College; Pope Paul VI described Maritain as a “master.” Along with Etienne Gilson, Josef Pieper, G.K. Chesterton, and others, Maritain served Saint Pius…
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…
