A sub-category of News.
Each U.S. election year since at least 2016, a piece of sage advice from C.S. Lewis’ celebrated 1942 epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters has resurfaced online, in which the book’s narrator, a Senior Devil in Hell named Screwtape, pens instructions to his equally demonic nephew, a Junior Tempter named Wormwood, upon the general subject of…
Imagine receiving this message from a priest on a Sunday night: How would you respond to Father’s message? Before you answer, let me offer you some common but inadequate replies and explain why they are inadequate: So, what are some of the more serious, less easy-to-dismiss explanations for why these manifestly unhappy and resentful people…
Last October, a disturbing headline caught my eye. A 14-year-old student discovered that she and several other female classmates at her New Jersey high school were the victims of explicit images created and circulated by a male classmate. What disturbed me most was that this wasn’t the abhorrent practice of “revenge porn,” a phenomenon that…
When I first started exploring Catholicism as a Protestant in the early 1990’s, I was taken aback by the fact that many of the Catholics I knew believed the Blessed Virgin Mary was appearing in a small village in then-Yugoslavia. The seemingly outlandish tale conflicted with my stereotype of Catholics as more interested in rituals…
Editor’s note: adults can sign up for the summer adult Credo Catechism course at the Avila Institute. The high school program starts again next spring semester. -TSF Catholics of a certain age know things about their religion that many — if not most — Catholics today have never been taught. We now have a resource,…
The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF)—in what has been described as a “crackdown”—recently released new norms for discerning apparitions. Revising a 1978 document on the topic, the updated norms, as a general rule, suspend judgment on the miraculous nature of alleged apparitions—arguably reflecting a neo-Modernist discomfort with the supernatural. Under the…
Writing this column in early May, I am aware of three very ancient feasts that are not being celebrated this year even in most Latin Mass communities: the Finding or Invention of the Holy Cross on May 3, St. John Before the Latin Gate on May 6, and the Apparition of St. Michael (at Italy’s…
Why does the pope think so poorly of us? Conservative Catholics, that is, whom he maligns on a regular basis, accusing us, as he did most recently in an interview on 60 Minutes, of being “closed up inside a dogmatic box.” We’ve got this “suicidal attitude,” he tells us, the result of forever clinging to…
In her October 1936 diary entry, Saint Faustina described the chilling behaviors she witnessed in her glimpse of the Netherworld. She was aghast, as were the shepherd children at Fatima when they were granted a vision of Hell in July 1917. The scenes were horrible, monstrous, terrifying. Fatima’s Sister Lucia later described the “shrieks and…
Don’t laugh. Over the past sixty years, such questions were taken quite seriously. In the 1970s, Christ was depicted as a clown in a runaway-hit Broadway musical, Godspell, and as a hippy guru in Jesus Christ Superstar. These strange renderings became de rigueur in not a few Catholic parishes. All these enormities were not to…
