In an earlier Crisis essay, I recalled the dismay at a social gathering when the host, a graduate of a Jesuit university, learned that his guest was a “bead counter.” Liberal Christians approve, and are even known to practice, the social gospel; however, they suspect a conflict between corporal works and spiritual devotions such as [...]

Anyone who wonders why the Catholic Church is in its present crisis need only read Dr. Scott Bruce’s “Do We Still Need to Believe in Hell?” The Wall Street Journal article (9/15-16/2018) recently appeared in its popular weekend review section. It was a rather typical yet brutal appraisal of the notion of Hell. The author [...]

The past 100 years from 1917 to 2017 have been an encapsulation of the protoevangelium, when God told the serpent "I will put enmity between you and the woman." This 100-years-war has signified a most pronounced phase in the enmity. It began in 1917 with both (what are the odds?) the revelation of Our Lady [...]

The devotion to Mary within the Christian DNA, could properly be said to derive in the first instance from the high esteem shown to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel, who brings to Mary the announcement of her vocation of mother of the Savior of the world. In his greeting he says that this simple handmaiden [...]

The harrowing visions of Lucia de Jesus dos Santos and her two cousins in Fatima in 1917, and the famous secrets entrusted to the three seers by the Blessed Virgin Mary, have long been the subject of speculation and controversy, which in recent years seem to have reached a fever pitch. Following the revelation of [...]

It was June 6, 1987. Ronald Reagan was on his way to Rome to meet with Pope John Paul II. Their first meeting at the Vatican had taken place five years earlier, June 7, 1982, whereupon the two men shared their mutual convictions that they believed God had spared their lives from assassination attempts the [...]

It has been reported that Sister Lucia of Fatima wrote a letter to Cardinal Caffarra predicting that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family.” Not long after, Pope John Paul II was in the midst of his famous “Theology of the Body” talks on [...]

In 1952 Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote that Mary, Our Lady of Fatima, was the key to converting Muslims. Bishop Sheen believed that the devotion Muslims already had toward Mary would eventually lead them to her divine Son. Moreover, our Lady of Fatima would have a special appeal to Muslims because she appeared in a town [...]

For much of the twentieth century, Catholics around the world prayed after every Low Mass for the conversion of Russia. Called the Leonine Prayers, originally they were conceived as a protection of the sovereignty of the Papal States, which were then under attack. This intention ended with the Lateran Treaty of 1929 but the prayers [...]

October is the month of the Most Holy Rosary, a devotion associated in modern times with the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917, during the First World War. Mary asked for prayer and penance, which she always requests in these private revelations that echo the public revelation in the Gospel: “Repent, [...]

Last week I received a mailing from Caritas of Birmingham, in Sterret, Alabama. It was an invitation to come to the four-storey Tabernacle of our Lady’s Messages at Caritas, where a visionary, Marija Pavlovic Lunetti, is slated to receive five messages and apparitions during the 2012 gathering from July 1 to July 5. Caritas is [...]

God did not become man in order that men might become theologians, as the saint said, nor did God choose to save his people by means of dialectic. Presumably, too, being in constant dispute with other Catholics is not of the essence of being a Catholic. But it sure is hard to avoid. It was [...]

John Paul II says the rosary is his favorite prayer, his coat of arms affirms his devotion to Mary, and he flew off to Fatima after the attempt on his life. At Fatima, pilgrims approach the place of the apparitions on their knees, advancing on a paved path that stretches for several hundred yards. All [...]