A sub-category of News.
What would cause a man (and in almost every case it is a man) to burn himself alive? Two men in recent months have publicly done so: one protesting the Israeli assault on Hamas, the other’s motive somewhat unclear but somehow connected to the trial of Donald Trump. In the Roman Martyrology, we often read…
If[1] ever there was a term that was used as a kind of epithet about Latin Theology during the pre-conciliar period, it could be stated in one word, “Manualism.” No doubt, you my reader may have heard some version of this spoken of. The implication is always rather clear: simplistic, ahistorical, and rationalistic. Often as…
“I once thought it would be amusing,” writes Albert Jay Nock, “to attempt an essay on how to go about discovering that one is living in a dark age.” His answer, which is not at all amusing, is simply to watch all the lights go out and see if anyone noticed. And, of course, no…
In a recent essay, I argued that Americans—both secular and, increasingly, Catholic ones—experience a “flattened” sense of time. Time just simply “passes by” with little to distinguish it, with our increasingly attenuated civil holidays (including those shorn of their religious and/or historical content) trying to contend against a brutally “immanentized” approach to time. To remedy…
You know how I like to bang on and on about context. This Sunday, the 3rd after Easter in the traditional reckoning (the 4th of Easter in the Novus Ordo calendar), we shift to a new phase in the seven Sunday Season of Easter. The first Sundays looked back to Easter and its main themes…
It is hard to say which have been the lowest points in the history of the Church. The fourteenth century was pretty wretched. The papacy, exiled from Rome to Avignon, was largely in the pocket of the French monarchy. Then, after the pope finally returned to Rome, the French cardinals set up a rival pope,…
One thousand years ago, on April 19, 1024, Romano of the counts of Tusculum, brother of Pope Benedict VIII (†1024), was elected Pope with the name of John XIX. At the time of his election, he was still a layman, holding the positions of “consul, duke and senator of all the Romans.” During his pontificate,…
Our daughter Lucy is about to graduate high school and, in the fall, begin classes at the University of Dallas. Let me tell you her story, the beginning part anyway. My wife and I are late vocations to marriage. I was 47. Cathy was 39. Our first date was on the Feast of Joachim and…
HBO’s Real Time host and longtime leftist Bill Maher made headlines this past weekend when he chastised Republicans’ ever-shifting stance on abortion in a panel discussion on the Arizona Supreme Court’s recent landmark ruling upholding a near-total abortion ban. The Arizona Court took up the case in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade,…
Editor’s note: this investigative report was written by our contributing editor, Kennedy Hall, who published it first on his Substack here. Recently it has been revealed that Father Rostand, a priest ordained by the Society of Saint Pius X, has been convicted of numerous counts of child abuse — pedophilia — by a French court….
