It is odd in war-time to have vicarious suffering regarded as the single biggest obstacle to accepting Christianity. Christopher Hitchens made this claim in last issue’s “Christianity From the Outside”: “The largest problem [with Christianity] is a simple one. The doctrine of vicarious redemption—of the casting of our sins upon a scape-goat—is positively immoral and … Read more
Bishops are the successors of the apostles—several times removed,in most cases. Listening to official statements prompted by the outing of priestly pedophiles has been a lot like hearing Lent described in terms of dieting rather than fasting. New guidelines are in place, we are told; past mistakes will not be repeated. One would have thought … Read more
Revelations about the pedophilia of a disturbing number of Catholic priests reached a critical point in Boston recently. The spectacle of a cardinal archbishop brought to the bar of secular public opinion and required to answer questions from the hostile media sent a frisson of shame down the spine of Catholics throughout the country. Priests … Read more
It was a mark of the most influential thinkers of the late millennium that they are said not to mean what they seem it to say but something almost the opposite. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche, we are told, is not the champion of the antinomianism that he superficially appears to embrace, but rather someone who laments … Read more
One of the sources of the atheism that plagues modern society is, according to Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, our alleged sense of being in control of things. But surely this is a mood, not a conviction. A stroll to the corner is usually sufficient reminder of one’s contingency. When are we not open to … Read more
One of the sources of the atheism that plagues modern society is, according to Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, our alleged sense of being in control of things. But surely this is a mood, not a conviction. A stroll to the corner is usually sufficient reminder of one’s contingency. When are we not open to … Read more
Mark Twain said that, contrary to the usual rule, his memory had improved with age. When he was younger, he remembered only things that had actually happened. I was reminded of this while reading the lectures T.S. Eliot gave in 1926 on the subject of metaphysical poetry. Attempting to define his subject, Eliot puts before … Read more
Brideshead Revisited enjoyed enormous success as a television series and deservedly so. Its faults are those of the novel, but its virtues are inadequate to convey why Evelyn Waugh is increasingly recognized as the most accomplished Catholic novelist of the 20th century. Waugh himself came to have misgivings about Brideshead. Written in wartime, it was … Read more
“Daniel Maguire, a Roman Catholic theologian at a Jesuit university, has spent the last three decades defying the church.” Thus begins an Associated Press article on the new mandatum—the mandate set forth in Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990) that those teaching theology in Catholic institutions must seek from their bishops. Of course Maguire, a professor of … Read more
Orson Welles once told the possibly apocryphal story of getting a pass for Citizen Kane from the Legion of Decency by ostentatiously spilling a rosary onto the floor while taking something from his pocket. The ultimate prop. But even boy geniuses would be better advised to see the rosary as a means to get past … Read more
It is difficult to derive spiritual profit from a public execution when the condemned is given the kind of media attention usually reserved for rock stars and presidential concubines. Popular sentiment reacts to the death sentence as if the courts and the justice system had invented mortality. A man executed for incredible crimes should function … Read more
The town of Rappallo is just south of Genoa on the western coast of Italy, on the old Roman road built during the time of Marcus Aurelius. Americans know it as the place where Ezra Pound lived before and after the 13 years he spent in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. He had made … Read more
Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (Counterpoint Press, 2000) got a rave review from Charlotte Hays in the April 2001 issue of Crisis, and rightly so. While Hays laid before the reader the major merits of Fitzgerald’s biography of her father, Edmund Knox, and her uncles Dillwyn, Wilfred, and the Catholic convert Ronald Knox, I want … Read more
Jean McCall Oesterle was 90 years old when she died March 7, on the old-calendar feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose name she added to her own when she entered the Church more than 60 years ago. She and her husband, John, who died in 1977, belonged to that generation of converts who came into … Read more
For a quarter of a century, my imaginative companion has been Father Roger Dowling, pastor of St. Hilary’s Parish in Fox River, Illinois. During this time, he has remained 50 years of age while I have become considerably more than that. But in the beginning, I was younger than the good father. We met quite … Read more
Reading other people’s letters has its joys, but how much more intriguing to read their diaries or journals. Perhaps I should explain. Once upon a time, people wrote letters to one another by putting pen to paper—often after having first written a rough draft—folding the page, putting it in an envelope, and entrusting it to … Read more
When I was in graduate school, a fellow student confided in me that his great ambition was to become a Thomistic poet. Something of the alarm I felt then returned when I came upon a recent book by Dominique Millet-Gerard titled Claudel thomiste? (Was [French poet Paul] Claudel a Thomist Philosopher?). My reaction was not … Read more
Listening to others talk is enough to make you drop an eave. But what marvels they are, the urgent, the playful, the wistful, the countless purposes with which we visit what Hamlet called the porches of another’s ear. The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges says that words are symbols for shared memories, nicely capturing … Read more
Among the pleasures of a prolonged life, as I have had occasion to mention before, is the rereading of books whose memory lingers on. Sometimes the renewal of acquaintance dispels the pleasure, but certainly not always. When I go back to Henry James, my preference is for the earlier novels, those that came before the … Read more
I see by the papers that a Lutheran theologian at Boston College is publicly criticizing the appointment of an atheist Unitarian to an administrative post in the theology department of that Catholic institution. Her argument—if stating the obvious can be called an argument—is that it makes no sense to put the teaching of Catholic theology … Read more