Looking through my files, I see that I must have been suffering delusions of grandeur shortly before we came out here to Oregon in 2008. Must have been, since I asked to be put on the agenda to speak at the next meeting of the parish council at a beautiful parish in the far western…
For better or worse, there are palpable effects to any grave life decision. Ideas, words, omissions, and actions can have fateful consequences. Such a grave decision is being made by many in the Catholic Church. The choice is to believe that Benedict, a man who undeniably still lives in the Vatican, clad in ominous white,…
In this episode, Steve Skojec talks with Catholic attorney Joseph Dion about their shared experiences with the Legionaries of Christ & Regnum Christi, an investigation into their illicit activities in the early 2000s that may have contributed to the disciplinary actions taken against their disgraced founder, Marcial Maciel, in 2006, & the plight of those…
National Review recently ran an absurd article entitled “Querida Amazonia Reveals Francis’s Conservatism,” an unlikely piece of hagiography that will prove in time to be as risibly misguided as another National Review article, one authored by George Weigel on the day of Amoris Laetitia’s release in 2016: “Pope Francis on Love, Marriage, and the Family.”…
Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Gospel: Luke 18:31-43 Do Thou, we beseech Thee, O Lord mercifully hear our prayers, that we being loosed from the bonds of our sins, may by Thee be defended against all adversity. – From the Collect for the Quinquagesima Sunday The readings for Quinquagesima Sunday, the last Sunday before we begin…
As a Catholic and a man raised in the institutions of the U.S. military, I have always discerned a possible vocation to the military chaplaincy. Initially, the discernment took place out of a sense of duty that all men of the faith should seek, but eventually, a profound love of Our Lord Jesus Christ and…
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…
If someone asked you to explain why Our Lord instituted the Mass, what would you say? Could you tell him why it’s necessary for our right relationship with God [i]? As a result of the cosmic tragedy of Adam and Eve, the human race is plunged in darkness, misery, and guilt. Each one of us…
As we discussed in our first part, Protestantism removed the cult of the Virgin Mary and with it the living authority of the Church. The reason that Protestantism was able to gain such ground was due to the power it gave to kings to overturn the authority of the Church. With no check on their…
Young men and women who enter religious formation today bring vital refreshment to a parched and weary Church. However, there are some who enter religion only to find that God has not equipped them with the necessary faculties to persevere. What about them? They longed to join their lives to that river of grace that…
I could write at considerable length about the value and the glory of the Latin language. I spend some of my time teaching Latin. You may imagine how I feel when somebody says to me that “Latin is a dead language” or “What, after all, is the use of Latin, these days?” There are two…
