The following is from Alessandro Manzoni’s Observations on Catholic Moral Teaching (1819). The translation is my own. If we followed its wisdom, our politicians would have more freedom to attend to their business, social media might become social, and our churches might become hotbeds of charity. What is the main and common motive that makes [...]

It is hard to write about the victims of gender ideology, radical feminism, and the sexual revolution. After all, they are victims. But sometimes these victims take public positions that will lead others into the same type of tragic victimhood. And so today I write about two victims. It is also challenging to write about [...]

I know what you’re thinking. It’s not that at all. Black Power is, of course, priests in their cassocks. Can there be any greater power than that? They present the great drama of the Holy Gospel. A priest merely in a black suit is prosaic; in the cassock, he is poetry. Perhaps this is why [...]

Progressives eagerly remind America of its past of slavery and racism. So much so that The New York Times’ 1619 Project literally dates America that way, defining the country’s start by the year 1619 (rather than 1620 or 1776), with the arrival of the first Africans to Virginia that year. Mobs target statues of everyone [...]

Over the last few years, some unjust blue-on-black killings have led to a growing consensus that racism is systemic, pervading every institution and social structure of shared life in America. It is a conclusion unmoored from fact. I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the Rosa Parks era, when signs reading “Colored” and “White” hung [...]

“The use of Fashions in thought,” says Uncle Screwtape the astute, “is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers.” So, for example: We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which [...]

Never in the world’s history have economic problems played such a large part in human life or had such a direct influence on human thought as at present. Economics have come to overshadow politics, to absorb into their sphere the entire social question. Even the man in the street has learnt that his personal welfare [...]

Considering a title for this essay, I rather facetiously suggested to my friend, Father Edward Tomlinson, who assisted me with many of the facts for the piece, that I should call it either “Newman’s bums” or “Sacred bottoms.” Father Tomlinson, a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, as am I, is the [...]

Before nine o’clock on July 6, 1535, the Lord Chancellor of England was conducted to Tower Hill, London, where he lost his head for the crime of keeping his head. As Joseph Addison said, “He did not look upon the severing of his head from his body as a circumstance that ought to produce any [...]

Pope Francis has condemned racism, and what Catholic could possibly disagree? Responding to the killing of George Floyd, the Holy Father said: “My friends, we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life.” I have to think he [...]

Across the developed world, ignorant mobs and anarchists are tearing down statues of saints, defacing church monuments, and setting the churches on fire. Not to mention that in the developing world many Christians continue to suffer martyrdom by the thousands at the hands of secular and religious extremists. This has caused many people to finally [...]

In order for women to embrace our proper role in sanctifying the priesthood, we must be willing to abandon the adversarial position we often place ourselves in with men. Great damage has been done in the dynamic between men and women, thanks to radical forms of feminism that seek to pit men and women against [...]

As the initial panic of the coronavirus crisis subsides, those who fostered fear as a means to assume powers previously unimagined now find themselves scrambling to maintain leadership among the many who did not experience either the death of someone close to them or even an acquaintance with someone mildly infected. Even now those unwilling [...]

“But looking at the fuller picture, I clearly see that a number of situations and individuals had a positive influence on me, and that God was using them to make his voice heard.” — Pope Saint John Paul II Think of everything that Karol Wojtyła brought with him to Rome: his teachings, his knowledge, his [...]

That the Church continues to canonize men, women, and children of “heroic virtue,” and to encourage their public veneration by the faithful, is not, however it may seem, the secular equivalent of The X Factor. They are not, in that sense, winners of a spiritual talent show, although we could say with Saint Paul that [...]

“Waiting for the Barbarians,” Constantine Cavafy’s poem about civilizational collapse, describes a geriatric Rome so desiccated and demoralized that it is almost entirely without hope. It has roused itself on one failing elbow to grasp at a last chance for regeneration—the barbarian hordes rumored to be approaching, doubtless to sack and burn, but perhaps also [...]

In the United States on the seventh day of the week, trade and industry seem suspended throughout the nation; all noise ceases. A deep peace, or rather a sort of solemn contemplation, takes its place. The soul regains its own domain and devotes itself to meditation. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote these words in his 1835 [...]

Recently Le Figaro printed an essay (“Le Christianisme est le coeur de l’Europe: n’oublions pas la leçon de Jean-Paul II !”) by Mateusz Morawiecki, the Prime Minister of Poland, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Pope Saint John Paul II and the battle of Warsaw, which saved Poland and Europe from invasion by Bolshevik [...]

Almost twenty years ago, as a zealous evangelical Young Life leader at the University of Virginia, I sat on the trunk of my car with a high school senior at Charlottesville High School. He, an intelligent secular Jew, had taken my Gospel-sharing bait, and was willing to converse on God and Christianity. There we sat, [...]

There is no question that the death of George Floyd is highly questionable. The shocking and shameful insurgencies erupting in cities across the country propose that the answer is rooted in an engrained American racism. That response, too, is highly questionable. In a sense, the reaction is as disturbing as the incident itself. As fire [...]