I found the many comments on my recent essay “What Is Sacred Music?” extremely interesting, and am grateful to the commenters who contributed such divers points of view on what for all Catholics is a vital subject. Unfortunately, among those I found most striking is exactly the one I’m now unable to find. Among the [...]

I have sung regularly every Sunday at Mass for nearly thirty years now, two years more than I’ve lived as a baptized and confirmed Catholic. As I’m not much use serving on councils or committees (although I did teach CCD for several years after being received into the Church), I decided at the start of [...]

The first Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum of Pope Benedict XVI was promulgated when I was a friar in religious formation. As young friars, we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity the pope was extending to experience the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), and we quickly fell in love with everything about it. Learning and celebrating [...]

The unprecedented message of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI regarding the crisis of the clergy contained a surprising illumination that is so incisive it will probably be ignored for years: All problems connected to Holy Orders are related in some way to the Eucharist. Benedict wrote: Our handling of the Eucharist can only arouse concern… What [...]

The outcry against bad liturgical music has been growing in volume and numbers. Crisis author and professor Anthony Esolen has provided deeply insightful explanations of why many modern hymns are aesthetically and theologically shoddy compared to older, more traditional ones. Podcasts such as “The Catholic Talk Show” devote episodes to mocking the worst church music [...]

“This is why respect for truth is ultimately inseparable from what we call worship. Truth and cult are inextricably united—one cannot exist without the other, however often history may have separated them.”  ∼ Joseph Ratzinger (1982) Liturgical thought today seems to downplay the importance of doctrine while elevating the significance of practice. The harmony of lex orandi [...]

Pope Francis and his pontificate go on trial February 21-24 when the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences gather for a summit on “The Protection of Minors in the Church” after the fallout from clergy sexual abuse and its episcopal cover-up. Catholics worldwide are demanding real, structural reform that will prevent such scandals from ever [...]

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of life. Their verbal construction of a perfectly just regime is not motivated by idealism, real or feigned, but by genuine perplexity about the one thing human beings cannot help desiring: happiness. Glaucon, Adeimantus, and their companions [...]

This may sound like the start of a “shaggy-dog” story: So … there are these three Western Canadian bishops at a Catholic youth conference called “One Rock 2.0.” The bishops are prepping for a Town Hall, a “Q and A” session with a tough audience, 620 millennials aged 18-35, and the episcopi are steeling themselves for [...]

The words of this ancient maxim are akin to the quintessence, the crystalline solid that was thought to move the planets in perfect orbits in pre-modern cosmology: The words are a succinct, nearly perfect encapsulation of the whole of the Catholic (and not only of the Catholic) religion. They name, and tell the relation of, [...]

Last Sunday I was away from home; this normally means trouble. It means I do not attend Mass at the chapel of Saint Thomas More College, which is where I teach, nor at Northeast Catholic College, which is in the town where we live. It means I must hear Mass, or have Mass drummed into my [...]

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything.  ∼ G.K. Chesterton In the digital age of LED lighting, we risk losing all sense of the uncanny. Of course, in the age of science in general, we tend to grow numb to the mystery that calls us [...]

Our youngest daughter and I recently found ourselves at a Latin High Mass at the beautiful Oratory of St. Francis de Sales in St. Louis. It had been a few years since I had been there; while my attraction to Mass in the old “extraordinary” form has been strong, and opportunities abound in St. Louis, [...]

Architecture speaks, and, like a homily or proclamation of scripture, it can change us profoundly. It preaches and teaches every time we enter a church building. When it speaks truth it reminds us that God is central, and that we are broken and in need of a savior who offers us a place of eternal [...]

Allow me to touch a liturgical third rail: Communion in the hand. Before I do, look at the July 4th edition of La Croix International. It reports that of the 96 dioceses in the country of France, 58 produced not a single ordination to the Priesthood. Truth be told, this crisis is not restricted to [...]

Imagine the scene, if you dare—for some readers this might be triggering or flat-out traumatic. There he is, a once-young, now-aging priest celebrating Mass, arriving at the homily, with Britney Spears headset microphone in place, center “stage” (er … Sanctuary), ready to “share” (not a homily, God forbid!), dripping and gushing with vacuous platitudes and, [...]

I have attended the Novus Ordo Mass all my life. I do not believe it was necessarily a mistake to have the Mass translated into the vernacular so that people could more readily understand the words and actions. Yet I have great sympathy for people who flock to, or flee to, the traditional rite, and [...]

When I lived in the northeast I had an embarrassment of riches in terms of the availability of Masses. There were 27 options for daily Mass within five miles of my northern home. At our new home on the border of the Carolinas there are only two or three options within 15 miles. Visiting different [...]

“For God, For Country, and for Yale.” This phrase is etched into the stone arches that dot the landscape of Yale University. Yale, though founded by the Puritans for the purpose of missionary training, Christian education, and familiarity with the humanities and Biblical languages, has fallen far away from its original mission. This is nothing [...]