A sub-category of News.
One thing is certain so far under the new pontificate of Leo XIV: the canons of liturgical warfare haven’t fallen silent. The rubrical battles, no doubt, will continue until our new pope issues a decree entirely lifting (or greatly liberalizing) the restrictions imposed by Pope Francis. It’s somewhat of a sad commentary on the state…
Imagine, for a moment, that the ghosts of Shakespeare’s plays—Banquo, Hamlet’s father, Julius Caesar—were to step across the boundary of fiction into the halls of Congress or the modern news cycle. These spectral figures were never meant to take action themselves; they hovered, hinted, warned—but they never engaged the living world directly. Ghosts, by their…
The 5th Sunday after Pentecost according to the calendar of the Traditional Latin Mass prompts us to examine the inmost dispositions of the Christian heart and the heights to which the Lord calls His followers. It is not a Sunday of spectacle. There is no miracle of fishes bursting the nets nor a parable about…
In the previous essay in this series, we focused on two heroic Australian Catholics who witnessed to the Faith in their defense of the dignity of the human person. In this chapter, we will celebrate four other Australians whose heroism was made manifest in multifarious ways. Each is radically different in the gifts they received…
Advisor-advisee, counselor-counselee, mentor-mentee: the dynamics in such senior-subordinate relationships are practically impossible to determine in advance and difficult to analyze even in retrospect. Consider the rapport (or subsequent friction) between, say, Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson, or between Harry Hopkins and Franklin Roosevelt, or between Sherman Adams and Dwight Eisenhower… Source Read More
There has always been a peculiar fascination with those born between 1946 and 1964. All along, you have been obsessed with what we wear, the music we listen to, our political opinions, and what we think about, practically anything and everything. There is a funny scene in the movie A Hard Day’s Night where hip…
Clownishness reached new depths several months ago in the Philippines. Not the Bozo kind, the Catholic kind. Cardinal Antonio Tagle took to the stage, donning a chorus line outfit, microphone in hand, bobbing and swaying as he crooned John Lennon’s “Imagine.” For those fortunate to have escaped the cultural junk-littered demi-monde of the ’60s and…
Through all the years of Pope Francis, I have to believe that there were many good men in Rome who tried to do what they could. For example, Cardinal Pell’s anonymous memo to the Cardinalate denouncing Francis’s pontificate. Like I’ve said before, a bishop told me at the Eucharistic Congress in Indy, USA that the…
Day by day, the times seem to grow more alarming. Wars and rumors of wars, geopolitical instability, the increasing presence of artificial intelligence and its unknown consequences, and a pervasive godlessness that necessitates divine justice all loom over our heads like an impending storm. A grim sense that things are going from bad to worse…
The Vatican, on July 3, approved a new votive Mass “for care of creation” which Pope Leo XIV celebrated for the first time on July 9. A follow-on from the Francis pontificate promulgated to mark the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’, the new votive Mass has elicited a variety of contradictory responses. I’ll weigh in:…
