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 … Read more
When the attacks—legal and otherwise—on Confederate monuments and heritage began to ramp up, I warned in various venues that it would not stop there. And, of course, such disparate characters as Kate Smith and Columbus followed in that train. But ever since the eruption of riots across the nation and the rest of the Western … Read more
The third Monday in February—latterly called “Presidents’ Day” because of Lincoln’s birthday on the 12th—is legally Washington’s birthday. Of course, his actual birthday is February 22, and I am old enough to remember getting off from school on that day, whenever it fell. But in 1971 Congress’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act took effect, banishing this … Read more
What would Newman say about the Pachamamas? That’s not actually a question which anyone who studied Newman carefully would ask. It reflects a lack of understanding of the workings of practical intelligence, which Newman took great pains to delineate—as if one could take a proof text out of Newman, and that would give you the … Read more
Euphemisms are de rigeur for revolutionaries. Communist states call themselves “people’s republics.” When they instigate conflicts, they are called “wars of liberation.” Abortionists call their abattoirs “pregnancy centers” and their executions “terminations.” Most currently, surgeons call sexual mutilation “gender reassignment.” All of this a clever strategy to stave off natural human revulsion so that after … Read more
Recently, some American activists have ignited a movement to usher in an urgent iconoclasm of vile symbols of culture and history, such as the removal of statues bearing the likeness of General Robert E. Lee, inter alia. Whether these symbols ought to fall is an important question, and more astute thinkers have written on the … Read more
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
“You will know them by their fruit.” Thus says Our Lord, in a guarantee as concise and direct as it is sobering. Catholics today, it seems, hear fairly constant talk of the new evangelization. The word “new” can sometimes be a source of confusion, but it really isn’t so much something new and different, as … Read more
My earliest recollections of anything pertaining to faith are not of words or instruction, but of primal sensory experiences of holy things within the built environment. From long before I learned how to read, and probably not so long after I learned how to walk, I recall momentary mental glimpses of the simple state of … Read more