Category: News

You don’t see it as much anymore, but many good Catholic Examinations of Conscience used to refer to a “fear of Hell” as an acceptable, albeit imperfect, means of contrition when confessing one’s sins. Perhaps it’s our modern desensitization to the reality of Hell and the demonic, or the failure of Church leadership to adequately…

Two vignettes: Both matters came to mind recently while reading “The Ethicist.” In case you don’t know, “The Ethicist” is a New York Times help column written by Kwame Appiah, who teaches ethics at New York University. The ethical dilemmas his correspondents pose are hardly those of my childhood, which focused on whether to bring…

Exactly 750 years ago on this date—December 6, 1273—Friar Thomas Aquinas received his supreme mystical experience that led to what Josef Pieper called “the silence of St. Thomas.” I maintain that more than coincidence unites this divine crowning of Thomas’s life with the devotional cultus of St. Nicholas, whose feast has always been celebrated in…