A sub-category of News.
When the world gets quarrelsome, many turn to prayer—which is fortunate; but not many turn to poetry—which is unfortunate. Prayer and poetry are mysteriously similar, though: words seeking wisdom, spiritual interaction, and renewal; both springing from man’s desire to live forever. There is an old proverb that says a man who doesn’t love poetry when…
When I was a senior in college, one of my professors told me, “If you want to find a good translation of the Bible in English, you can find it in one that contains the word ‘verily.’” Of course, that was back in 1982, when it would have taken a fair bit of legwork on…
How can anyone be against frequent access of the faithful to the Lord of Life, the Panis Angelicus, the medicine of immortality? That’s the very opposite reaction, you say, that one should have to the marvelous availability of Eucharistic Communion with the Risen Lord that the Church in the last century or so has made…
When Karol Wojtyła stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in 1978 as John Paul II, he was only 58. Though that seemed unusual at the time, the previous century saw Pius IX elected at 54. Although we aren’t likely to see a pope as young as 20-year-old Benedict IX, elected in 1031, it’s…
This is a reflection on two books published this year: Catherine Pakaluk Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024) Paul Morland No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children (Forum, 2024) Over the last decade or two, we have become used to the fact that we are facing a demographic…
Above: photograph of a woman holding a baby and doing laundry, c. 1919. National archives. The following reflection is for my sisters in Christ called to the married state. The magnanimous man in Aristotle’s Ethics is the man who “deems himself worthy of great things and is worthy of them.”[1] In other words, he knows…
The Florida Mall stands as a glowing symbol of all that American culture has become—glowing not with the golden hue of man’s greatest achievement but, rather, with radioactive decay. I’ve been in malls before, of course, but somehow, wading through the sea of people, lights, signs, and sounds, the tableaux of top American brands coaxing…
Like many Americans, my heart swelled with pride as I watched the astronauts land safely in the Gulf of America. The SpaceX rescue of the stranded astronauts ended wonderfully, but it also highlighted an important lesson: why a relatively small company was able to succeed where a governmental bureaucracy (NASA) and its go-to military-industrial-complex contractor…
Welcome to the second part of Lent. As Pius Parsch puts it in The Church’s Year of Grace, in the first two weeks we put ourselves on guard against attacks by the Prince of this world, the Devil and fallen angels, with the weapon of mortifications. On this Sunday we move from defense against the…
In October of every year, my diocese, the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, conducts a “head count” in order to determine average Mass attendance. The results of the 2024 count were published in the diocesan newspaper, The Arlington Catholic Herald, in the Jan. 30 – Feb. 12, 2025 edition. Out of an estimated 433,000 registered Catholics…
