Avoiding the Hard Work Needed
While the world was being overwhelmed by the Sexual Revolution, too many Church leaders decided to ignore the hard work of opposing it while appearing busy by meddling in affairs which needed no fixing.
Evangelizing Our Reality-Denying Nonculture
How does the Church evangelize men and women of the West, who don’t even recognize basic reality?
The Anti-Language of Modernist Art
The winners of the recent Pontifical Academies Sacred Architecture Award speak in a thing I shall call The Language of No.
Overschooled and Undereducated
The purpose of schooling—which is not the same as education—is to encourage people to express confident platitudes, which they are pleased to call their opinions, about things they know nothing of.
Catholic Social Teaching and the Destruction of Societies
One of the demands of Catholic social teaching is that there should be societies, and one of the most obvious features of contemporary life is that it is destructive of societies.Â
The Terror of Tenderness
Kindness, American style, detached from the Man upon the cross, has turned sour and sickly. It can justify anything.
When Love Isn’t Love
We sometimes do not love those people or those things we think we love. We may also love and not be aware of it. But the human heart, without grace, hardly beats at all. It is a tangle of vipers, and when it beats, it squeezes out its poison.
The Loss of the Heart of a Human Community
Every closing of a church is a knife to the heart of a real human community. In Canada the people feel it more keenly perhaps than in America. You did more than meet your neighbors at Mass; you met fellow travelers on the way to the four last things.
The Temptations of the Intellectual
Intellectuals often suffer from a deep vanity, the emptiest of all manifestations of envy or pride. But their intellect often leads them to accept the most stupid of ideas.
The Skies Are Darkening
As the storm approaches, I have a strange kind of calm. I know that my wife and my children love me, so that’s all right; and I do trust that they know I love them. But a man wants something other than that. We need to be needed.Â
Restoring the Rules of a Healthy Society
What we want are all the habits and customs that teach boys and girls from the beginning that they are meant for one another and that bring them together in merriment. Which means rules.
Archbishop Weakland Stole More Than Money, He Stole the Faith
Archbishop Weakland, sworn by his office to teach what the Church teaches, did his best to undermine it, to sow indifference or contempt whenever the teachings touched upon his own most precious field of sin.
Get With the Times
The pope has not bothered to call upon those faithful who love the old rite to speak with them. He has spent less time critiquing the old rite than he has spent belittling that small portion of the faithful who will not go along with his disdain.Â
A Conciliar Church on a Path to Schism With the Council Itself
The Holy Spirit at Vatican II protected the Church from casting its lot with what has been a colossal failure. But now it appears that that connection is going to be made, nearly sixty years later.
The Lost Symbolism of the Liturgy
The pope warns against aestheticism. Rightly so. Aestheticism is to a full experience of beauty as sentimentality is to profound and genuine feeling. But it is not aestheticism to long for beauty, as it is not sentimental to long for love.
Celebrating Abnormal Behavior
There is a good reason why things get worse and not better for them who celebrate the abnormal.
I Am a Restorationist
I have read too much, I have beheld too much, I have heard and sung too much. I am a restorationist. I am like someone who knows there are riches around a corner, and I want everyone to come and see. I can’t help it anymore.
Behind the Motives of Mass Shooters
Most politicians are looking at the means or the opportunity behind mass shootings. Instead we need to change a culture that motivates such shootings.
Let the Beautiful Creature Live
The unborn child is strange and familiar at once. Set aside all the muddle of your fears and desires, your resentment, your self-opinion, your politics, whatever. Look at that child. That was you, that was me.
We Need a Separation of Home and State
The cancerous growth of the State has come at the expense of the home, and the unholy has grown at the expense of the holy.