A sub-category of News.
“As every man is a philosopher of sorts,” writes Mark Van Doren in a wise little book written more than eighty years ago called Liberal Education—a work which beautifully embodies the education it extols—“so every man is a theologian if he can see beyond his own nose.” Van Doren certainly had a lapidary way of…
I’ve been meeting for lunch with a Lutheran friend of mine who is contemplating a conversion to Catholicism. We talk through his frustrations with Protestantism, as well as his lingering objections to Catholic doctrines, such as Purgatory. I, in turn, share from my own conversion experience and explain how I worked through similar objections fifteen…
Editor’s note: today is the feast day of our patron, Blessed Emperor Karl. When Pope St. John Paul II beatified Emperor Karl (Karol Wojtyła’s own namesake, in fact), he chose October 21st as his feast day, which is the anniversary of Karl and Zita’s wedding. Here we publish an excerpt from the biography written by…
With the light glistening off the mirrors in Louis XIV’s fabulous palace of Versailles and the ink still drying on the treaty, Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States and victor over the Central Powers in the Great War, thought he had created a freer, more progressive world out of the ashes of…
Having lived in Austria for seven years, I have perhaps a keener appreciation of my native land than ever before, much as I have come to love the lands of the Habsburg monarchy. Another presidential election looms ever closer, with perhaps the bitterest atmosphere of any in my 63 years of experience. Whatever the result,…
NB: I tried to post this on Friday: On 17 October, as I write, it is the anniversary of John Paul II’s election as Vicar of Christ, Bishop of Rome, Supreme Pontiff. As a young priest and bishop then-Bishop Karol Wojtyła participated in the Second Vatican II and, indeed, as part of the group which…
Above: pope Pius XI with Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri, circa 1920. Exactly a century ago tomorrow, on October 20, 1924, Pope Pius XI issued the Motu Proprio Latinarum litterarum, establishing a special chair of Latin literature at the Pontifical Gregorian University. This initiative aimed not only to revive the study of Latin but also to underscore…
All saints are heroes, but not all heroes are saints. There are some who have made great sacrifices for Christendom while not necessarily leading particularly virtuous lives. In our own times, marked by the cult of celebrity, we might think of Mel Gibson, whose The Passion of the Christ, released twenty years ago, is not…
What are we to make of Thomas Merton’s affair? The nurse? No, not the affair with “M,” but his affair with “A”—alcohol. Merton was restless and fearful the summer evening in 1966 when he wrote, “Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer?” The careful…
One comes away from reading Gareth Gore’s new book, snidely titled Opus, in need of a shower. And not because of the supposed revelations in the book, but rather because of the malevolence that Gore ladles out on every page. Equal dollops of malevolence and duplicity. First, consider duplicity. The touchstone of most of the…
