Each year, as Maundy Thursday comes around, the Catholic Church celebrates three mysteries tightly bound together: the institution of the Most Holy Eucharist, the institution of the Christian priesthood, and the great commandment of charity that the Lord left with His disciples. They are bound together for many reasons, but this one above all: God…
In my updated post about the Notre Dame fire, I mentioned Fr. Jean-Marc Fournier, the French priest (and chaplain to the Paris Fire Dept.) who went into the burning cathedral to rescue both the Crown of Thorns, which was housed there, and the Blessed Sacrament. He gave a television interview (see the video) in French,…
Last night, I was having a chat with a Catholic friend. We were discussing something I had tweeted a couple of days ago: I still can’t figure out how they haven’t figured out how problematic these optics are. https://t.co/4IEVLCfzDb — Steve Skojec (@SteveSkojec) April 15, 2019 “It honestly baffles me,” my friend says. “I am…
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…
