A sub-category of News.
The 4th-5th century Donatists of ancient Christian North Africa wanted a church of the pure only. Donatists and their kind were the followers and of (inter alii) the rigorous heretical schismatic Donatus Magnus. During Diocletian’s persecution (303 onward) priests and bishops under threat sometimes of death had caved in and had handed over sacred texts…
Above: The Refectory by Theophile Gide. “Religious life is a continual exercise of mortification, by which we die daily to ourselves and live only for God” (St. John Bosco). While we may occasionally think of the spiritual warriors who continually raise their hearts and minds in prayer within the cloister, we often overlook the voluntary…
A U.N. human rights committee has surprisingly criticized some Western countries for their high rate of Down syndrome abortions. The criticism came during a session of the committee that oversees compliance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, one of the U.N.’s core human rights treaties. The session concluded in September, and…
Not since the heady days of George McGovern, whose capture of the Democratic Party in 1972 ended in utter ignominy with the Nixon landslide, have two political parties been as deeply and bitterly divided as they were in this latest election, which ended on a clear if unexpected note of triumph for Donald J. Trump….
The Vatican’s decision to adopt cartoonish, trivialized symbols, such as the blue-haired ‘Luce’ mascot, is a symptom of a disturbing shift within the Church. The current trend moving the Church away from Her treasury of glorious art to commercialized trinkets is a mere triviality to many, but the history of this move is darker than…
The rise of advanced technologies like AI and Elon Musk’s Neuralink present a provocative challenge to a view of the human person that has been central to Catholic theology since its inception but which was profoundly articulated by St. John Paul II in his Theology of the Body. In this series of talks, the late…
I went to see the movie Conclave because someone who came to my Sunday Mass said that she was wondering how much was “real” about it. She had been to the Sistine Chapel and loved the fact that some of the movie’s scenes were presented in a nice mock-up of the place. She said her…
Trump has won. Now is the time for Christians to love their enemies. It’s time to show Democrats and Republicans both that the only way forward for America is the Christian way. For too long, Americans have been locked in a “cold civil war” in which both sides have been at each other’s throats, without…
In spite of facing the most unhinged and vicious opposition from a plethora of powerful figures in government, media, academia, and other influential institutions in this country, Donald Trump has been elected to a second term as President of the United States. From the moment he declared his initial run for the presidency in 2015,…
Last year, a school at which I had taught, Saint Joseph Prep in Brighton, Massachusetts, was one of a number of Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Boston to close permanently. The problem of failing Catholic schools in the region has become egregious enough to concern even secular publications. I have spent much time trying…
