A sub-category of News.
The first day of a new year is time to take store of where our life is and where our mission will be. We often review the year past and consider resolutions of the year ahead. Perhaps the healthiest practice is to reflect on what we know will attempt to steal our peace so we…
St. Philip Neri (+1595) was praying one night, as he often did, in the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. A ball of light came down from above and entered his mouth. He was so overwhelmed by the love of God that he cried out, “Enough, Lord! I cannot take anymore” and passed out. When he awoke,…
Of the seven letters sent by Ignatius on his way to Rome—where death and triumph in equal measure await him—surely the most intimate and impassioned is the one written and dispatched to the church of Rome herself. It is an intensely personal account, having little if anything to say about either shoring up the Office…
In the first part of this essay, I traced the outline of the life and career of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and I detailed how he pursued his struggle with modern ideas through the creation of his novels—in particular, how he created characters seemingly trapped by powerful but false beliefs that doomed them. In this second installment,…
Above: Jacques Maritain added his name to a long list of non-Catholics who attempted to save the Latin Mass. Last month I launched a new book, The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007. Many, if by no means all, readers will have heard of the “Agatha…
Several years ago, I visited the church and convent of Santo Domingo in Lima, where St. Rose of Lima (1586-1617) once lived and prayed. Beautiful Sevillian azulejos—a form of Portuguese and Spanish painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework—covered the walls of the main cloister. On one such azulejo, passersby can spy a date: 1606, one year before…
In his magisterial history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon identified the loss of civic virtue as the “secret poison” that undermined this sprawling global empire and inevitably led to its demise. The Catholic Church is not about to disintegrate in the same fashion as the Roman Empire, but its unity,…
I am absolutely amazed that we have come so far in our fundraising campaign, but we’re still short. 1P5 is the website for Catholics, built by Catholics. Whether it’s analysis of current events or theological explorations of the teachings of our faith, we’re providing a perspective on the Church that is unique in today’s world. But the only way we…
For the ancient Greeks, on whom we depend for the life and inheritance of the classical world, the goddess Mnemosyne, daughter of the earth-goddess Gaia and the sky-god Uranus, was designated Mother of all the Muses, from whom the charisms of art and poetry, science and song, draw their inspiration. And while her name literally…
St. Paul was wrong! His first Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle not hiding his anger and frustration, is loaded with corrections to the neophyte Christian community. And here is Paul’s first complaint against them: Two thousand years later, according to a peculiar “development of doctrine,” the man expelled by Paul, and his mistress/stepmother, far…
