A sub-category of News.
On June 27, 1574, in Florence, one of the greatest figures of the Italian Renaissance passed away: Giorgio Vasari, an architect, painter, and Italian art historian. Born in 1511 in Arezzo, Giorgio Vasari was deeply influenced by the works of Michelangelo († 1564), Andrea del Sarto († 1531), and the early manifestations of Mannerism. In…
Why did the most successful authors of detective stories opt for chaste sleuths? In the analogous literary genre of espionage, after all (to say nothing of political thrillers), spies rely on promiscuity to extract information, don’t they? Would one ever imagine James Bond altogether chaste, successful, and popular?1 And yet, such are precisely the recurrent…
Fifty years ago, confusion appeared to reign supreme in the Catholic Church. Infected, so it seemed, by the radical relativism and “hippydom” of the 1960s, many powerful figures in the Church seemed to have replaced the Holy Spirit with the Spirit of the Age. One manifestation of this modernist madness was the abandonment of beauty….
Credible rumors shared by Rorate Caeli about a renewed crackdown on the Roman Rite, coinciding with the third anniversary of Traditionis Custodes, have prompted an interesting debate on what sort of trick the Vatican may have up its sleeve and how, in turn, individual dioceses and Traditional Latin Mass communities will play their hand. In…
When I was seven, my parents brought home a painting and hung it above the fireplace. They summoned my brother and me into the living room, and we looked at the painting up close. In front of us was a collection of squares in muted and faint purples, pinks, blues, and grays. My parents then…
In undertaking to live an authentically Christian life today, we often feel helpless. Many obstacles stand between us and renewal—whether that is renewal in our own lives, in our families’ lives, or in the lives of our communities. Helplessness is a nearly constant theme throughout Scripture. What Moses says to the children of Israel can…
“You are welcome!” This “pat” phrase is delightfully warm when uttered with a somewhat lilting cadence, a beautiful broad smile, and direct, sparkling eye contact—as it regularly is in Uganda, the home of a most hospitable and open people. I heard it often on my visit to Uganda. In previous columns, I wrote about the…
In 1755, the papacy undertook to reform the liturgy of the Byzantine Rite for Byzantine Christians in communion with Rome. But when they did so, a critic made a startling accusation against the Vatican officials responsible for such efforts. He noted that “the popes with timely wisdom have had new editions of the missals of…
The American Church is often at the center of ridicule and criticism from those at the top (see Cardinal Pierre’s interview with America magazine). But on the feast of St. Anthony, Cardinal Sarah highly praised the American Church in his lecture titled “The Catholic Church’s Enduring Answer To The Practical Atheism Of Our Age.” Practical…
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his famous essay “Self-Reliance” that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I suspect that the Holy Father would not like the full implications of the remark, but I wonder that he doesn’t realize that some people might see in…
