During my senior year of college, I took a class on the French Revolution — my first real academic exposure to that seminal period since a brief survey in high school. Going into the class, I was confident in my understanding of the Revolution, a narrative more or less predicated on the traditional historiography: the…
It was a video that brought so many of us to tears: a crowd kneeling and singing “Ave Maria” while Notre Dame burned. “Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,” they beautifully sang as the camera panned to a shot of raw fire. The juxtaposition between the two images was surreal: at the very moment when devastating…
I was driving to attend a 9:00 A.M. traditional Latin Mass with my family recently. Ordinarily, the trip is exciting for us. My wife and I love the anticipation of attending a prayerful Mass. My boys like that they can listen to audio books during the trip, and then be sprinkled with holy water during…
Image via @princess_redd / Twitter Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has been burning for hours. It appears there will not be much left of France’s most iconic Catholic church by tomorrow morning. The blaze, which has already consumed the cathedral’s spire and collapsed the roof, was reported to have begun with a small fire, possibly…
As we go through the present crisis in the Church, there are some who criticize the revealers of truth, claiming that it is better to live a good Catholic life as best as you can and ignore all the news. “It is better we don’t know,” they may say. “After all, curiosity killed the cat.”…
Yesterday, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI broke his post-pontificate “silence” yet again in a 6,000-word essay about the crisis of clerical sex abuse in the Church, and his perspective on its origins. The letter was, he says, written in response to the February summit in Rome in which the heads of the world’s episcopal conferences came…
Near the end of the last academic year, the school I teach at was perplexed. Datasets, and even the general feel of the school, revealed that our students were struggling. Academic success was decreasing. Anxiety was rising. Administrators and teachers alike were puzzled as to why this was happening. As a grade five teacher, I…
For the last seven years, I’ve been involved in the organization of conferences focusing on the importance of sacred liturgy and music in the life of the Church. This journey began with my own longing for the sacred, which led me to form Schola Cantus Angelorum in 2007 as a response to Pope Benedict XVI‘s…
Martha Alegria Reichman is the widow of the late Alejandro Vallardes, who served as the Honduran ambassador to the Holy See for over two decades. She recently published a book about Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the leader of the pope’s council of cardinal-advisers and a figure increasingly associated with scandal. The book, entitled Sacred…
It’s been interesting to observe the evolution in the way people have responded to my conversion to the Catholic faith. One year ago, upon public announcement of my plan to be received into the Church, I was met with near universal support if not outright encouragement by people of various belief systems. The longer I…
From an April 6 letter, written by Cardinal Blase Cupich, posted at the Archdiocese of Chicago’s website: Dear Parishioners of San José Luis Sánchez del Río, Last August, I informed you of the accusation against your pastor, Fr. Gary Graf, and that, in keeping with our procedures, he was asked to step aside from his…
