I’ve never been to Norcia, but before the seemingly-endless series of earthquakes that ravaged the town and destroyed the Basilica of St. Benedict, I would imagine it as my friend Hilary White described it, or as it was captured so beautifully in the photographs and descriptions (like the one above) offered by Julian Kwasniewski. Just the other…
One sunny autumn day, as I was taking a walk throughout my neighborhood, I spotted a man whom I had never met before, and who I knew did not live in the neighborhood. After briefly talking, he reached into his pocket and handed me something. It was a dollar bill with a picture of Benjamin…
(Image: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at an ordination of FSSP priests in Wigratzbad, Germany, 1990.) The usually cautious and reserved Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) has now given its current opinion concerning the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and on its possible formal re-integration into the structures of the Catholic Church. Father Bernhard Gerstle – the…
Yesterday, 22 April, there took place the important lay conference in Rome which was organized by the Italian publications La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana and Il Timone and which was dedicated to a public critique of the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Already today, there have been several articles about this event published, among them by Dr. Sandro Magister,…
I seem to be developing a particular love and admiration for our corvid friends lately, with a pair of clever and beautiful magpies visiting my garden in Norcia quite regularly and huge numbers of crows and ravens in that ancient valley. It struck me a while ago just how frequently they appear in Christian history…
It’s hard to believe that it’s almost May. 2017 is speeding by, and it seems like it’s all we can do to just keep up. Every day, a little voice in the back of my head reminds me: “Hey! Say thank you to all the people who make this possible!” I even have a reminder email…
Over the past few months, we’ve covered the saga of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta rather extensively. If you’re unfamiliar with the main events surrounding this thousand-year-old chivalric Catholic order toppled by Pope Francis, this summary is probably the best place to start. To recap: since that summary was written, several additional events of…
Several Catholic outlets around the world – including Infovaticana and Chiesa e postconsilio – have reported that Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, coordinator of the pope’s “council of nine“, has made some condescending and disrespectful remarks about the four dubia cardinals. The moderate and characteristically gentle Italian journalist and Vatican specialist Marco Tosatti went so far as to say that…
On March 20, I wrote a post about my growing suspicion that the Anonimi della Croce blog — purportedly run by a pseudonymous Italian priest called “Fra Cristoforo” who claimed sources within the pope’s inner circle — was in fact a form of disinformation, used by those who would seek to discredit any who shared the many…
In the wake of a recent critical overview of the four years of Pope Francis’ papacy as presented by the German Catholic journalist Matthias Matussek, another German journalist (who is not a Catholic) has now raised his voice of resistance with respect to Pope Francis. We speak here about Jan Fleischhauer, who is an editor…
While the wicked are confounded, Doomed to flames of woe unbounded, Call me, with Thy saints surrounded. – from the Dies Irae, sequence of the Requiem Mass One of the most profound moments of religious experience in my life was the first time I attended a Requiem Mass. For those unfamiliar with the term, the Requiem is the…
