Above: French street sign in Maisons-Alfort. One hundred and fifty years ago today, on January 7, 1873, “a unique man of letters, and unclassifiable writer” was born in Orléans, north-central France: Charles Péguy. This is how Bernard Guyon († 1975) defines him at the conclusion of a careful study of the French poet; and he…
In 1944 the singing group the Mills Brothers recorded You always hurt the one you love The one you shouldn’t hurt at all You always take the sweetest rose And crush it till the petals fall You always break the kindest heart With a hasty word you can’t recall So, if I broke your heart…
Never underestimate the American Empire. The Mixture with Evil A wise man once told me that the greatest enemy of the summum bonum is not actually manifest evil. No. The greatest enemy of the good is that which is almost good. It is that which has a convincing mixture of good and bad, truth and…
Above: La Adoracion de los Reyes Magos by Peter Paul Rubens of Spanish Flanders (1577-1640). The Feast of the Epiphany is the continuation of the mystery of Christmas; but it appears on the Calendar of the Church with its own special character. Its very name, which signifies Manifestation, implies that it celebrates the apparition of God to…
Above: the west doors of Salamanca’s Catedral Nueva photographed by Fr. Lawrence, OP. During the Bergoglian captivity, one hears of Catholics losing or questioning their faith because they think: “If a pope can be so wrong, then the Catholic religion mustn’t be true.” Surely we ought to be made of sterner stuff than that. Why…
“I’m sorry about Benedict.” I turned from my dog to my daughter. “Did he die?” I asked my daughter. “Yeah,” she said. “Who died?” said my six-year-old son. “Pope Benedict, the former pope.” I was taking it in. It wasn’t hitting me yet. I said to my son: “Now he goes to judgment. We pray…
Rise thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead: and Christ shall enlighten thee. –Ephesians v. 14 We Catholics live in a world that is weary of itself and awaits liberation. A new calendar year dawns, and yet the same old thing is true. Indeed, the Apostle writes, Every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain,…
Merry Christmas to you all on this Octave of the Nativity of Our Lord. In her wisdom Holy Church knows that we need time to rest within the liturgical celebration of awesome mysteries of our salvation: the Lord’s Birth, His future Sacrifice, and the Divine Motherhood of Mary. We have this pause as the liturgical…
“I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged,” writes C. S. Lewis’s infamous demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters. Set in the early 1940s, the book presents the correspondence of…
There was such a dramatic change in the social and theological dispositions towards Freemasonry amongst many European, Argentinian, and North American Catholics immediately following the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, that, at minimum, should have provoked a reasonable and rational concern amongst the faithful. Some have argued that this divergence from the…
Dear Dr. Kwasniewski, Watching Mass of the Ages Episode 2 and your interview with Raymond Arroyo brought up some questions I’ve been struggling with. First, doesn’t it seem like the Novus Ordo was close to what the Council Fathers intended? I say this because (a) we know that Bugnini was secretary of the committee that…
