Fr. George W. Rutler

Fr. George W. Rutler is a contributing editor to Crisis and pastor of St. Michael's church in New York City. A four-volume anthology of his best spiritual writings, A Year with Fr. Rutler, is available now from the Sophia Institute Press.

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A Great Catch: The 153 Fish

“I welcome you on the eve of a great battle.” So began General Dwight D. Eisenhower on May 15, 1944, solemnly addressing the admirals and generals and officers of the Allied Expeditionary Force, announcing the proposed strategy for Operation Overlord, codename for the Normandy invasion. Underestimated as an orator, Eisenhower’s speech riveted the attention of … Read more

What Newman Can Tell Us About the Cardinal Pell Verdict

The scene in the London courtroom in 1852 might have been out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, with the defendant in simple clerical black standing in the dock before the bewigged representatives of ancient justice. But one of the judges, John Coleridge, a great-nephew of the poet, saw behind the stooped figure of John … Read more

Comfort My People

The name of the stepbrother of William the Conqueror was a palindrome, and the ladies who made the Bayeux Tapestry must have enjoyed embroidering it along with the caption under the scene of Odo at the Battle of Hastings. A year after the Norman Conquest, he became Duke of Kent, assuming vast lands and power, … Read more

Governor Cuomo’s Bridge

There was a literary symbiosis between G.K. Chesterton and Henri Ghéon somewhat like the musical one between Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky. Ghéon’s biography of Saint John Vianney, The Secret of the Curé d’Ars, is enhanced by the brief commentary that Chesterton added to it. Chesterton mentions a mayor of some French town who not only commissioned … Read more

Infamous Scribblers: Virtue Signalers on the Warpath

From October 22 to November 30, in 1878, a large fair was held in the Cathedral of Saint Patrick in New York City before its dedication. It took advantage of the magnificent open space before pews were installed to the distress of the architect, James Renwick, who objected that Protestant furniture had no place in … Read more

A Nursery Rhyme Pope Francis Would Do Well to Read

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly, “’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy; The way into my parlour is up a winding stair, And I’ve a many curious things to show when you are there.” Mary Howitt wrote 180 books with her husband, and was a … Read more

Music for the Holy Souls

The biographies of classical composers could give the impression that irregular behavior has been almost a necessary attribute of great talent. A particularly rank example is the uniquely inventive Renaissance composer of sacred music and madrigals, Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who murdered his wife and her lover, mutilated their corpses, and exposed them naked … Read more

The Great Emergency

That every five hundred years the Church passes through a crisis is not a novel insight. It may be something of a contrived schematic, since there have been other crises as well, but each of those periods of crisis has influenced the Church to an extraordinary and radical degree: The Fall of the Roman Empire, … Read more

The Morality of Tattooing

There was a time, not in the hoary past, when tattoos were an indulgence of louche members of the demi-monde, as observed by Alexandre Dumas. They seem to have become respectable as our culture erases the borderline between the demi-monde and the monde entier. Priests have become somewhat accustomed to pious communicants with arms totally … Read more

A Woman of Science: Maria Gaetana Agnesi

A cavalcade of women whose scientific achievements have had an important impact on the way we live and do things, challenges any attempt to stereotype these geniuses as colorless drones or “nerds,” which is merely a neologism of Dr. Seuss from 1950. For instance, the mathematician Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil was an elegant … Read more

Bare-Knuckle Religion

The recent pardon of the late world heavy weight champion Jack Johnson by our president was a gracious act long overdue. A previous motion had passed the House but died in the Senate in 2008. Johnson’s racially motivated conviction for violating the Mann Act after he had married a white woman resulted in his beginning … Read more

When C.S. Lewis Befriended a Living Catholic Saint

When Luigi Calabria, a shoemaker married to a housemaid, died in Verona, Italy in 1882, the youngest of his seven sons, Giovanni, nine years old, had to quit school and take a job as an apprentice. A local parish priest, Don Pietro Scapini, privately tutored him for the minor seminary, from which he took a … Read more

A Faithful Pope of the Enlightenment

In the early 1950s, children watched a puppet show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie broadcast from Chicago all the way to the Eastern seaboard through the innovative marvel of television. It was more of a children’s show for adults, for how else could the sophisticated puns make sense, or what child could understand how Ollie the … Read more

The Mathematical Innovations of Father Antonio Spadaro

Nearly fifty years go, my parish secretary, who was elderly even then, kept the parish accounts using an abacus. I gave her the latest kind of electric adding machine, which she used dutifully, but I noticed that she then checked the results with her abacus, an instrument that has been reliable since long before the … Read more

The Clarity of Cardinal Cupich

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago is all for clarity. It has been a consistent theme, as when in September of 2017 he issued a decree banning guns in all parishes, schools and other facilities across the archdiocese “so there would be absolute clarity on our position.” His official statement put “clarity” in italics. When he … Read more

Where Are the Churchmen With Chests?

To have been the proverbial fly on the wall during a conversation, one good time would have been during dinner in the White House on September 2, 1943 when Franklin Roosevelt was hosting Winston and Clementine Churchill with their daughter Mary and the newly appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averill Harriman. The other dinner … Read more

On the Blithe Ignorance about the National Anthem

The current Neo-Puritanical mania for tearing down statues and stifling free speech by cultural ingénues ignorant of history and logic, has reached a stellar absurdity in demands to censure “The Star Spangled Banner” on lame claims that it is racist and advertises bigotry. Given the low level of contemporary culture, and the remarkable fact that … Read more

On Praising Famous Men

With sonorous tones on the annual Founder’s Day in my school, the Reverend Sub-Dean clad in his academicals would slowly recite the long list of those who had contributed of their substance over the years. The Very Reverend Dean kept sober vigil from his stall. The roster was long because the annals were long, and the … Read more

The Mindless Iconoclasm of Our Age

Galla Placida, the regent for her young son, the emperor Valentinian III, was shocked when Saint Augustine died in 430 on August 28, three months into the siege of his city Hippo by the Vandals. He may have died of malnutrition, if not stress, because the wheat crop had not been harvested. As destroyers go, … Read more

Advice to a Young Priest

The illusion of one being perpetually young was shattered in my case recently when a publishing firm asked me to write some advice to a young priest from the perspective of an elder. For me, youth was a permanent state. I was the very youngest in my college class and, in my Anglican years, at … Read more

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