A sub-category of News.
Five centuries ago, on a day perhaps much like today, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born, a figure whom Giuseppe Verdi hailed as “the true prince of sacred music and the eternal father of Italian music.”[1] At just eleven years old, Giovanni was already a choirboy at Rome’s Basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, studying under…
I bet no one predicted that electing Donald Trump as President would lead to a vigorous national discussion involve St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and fundamental Catholic teachings about charity and our duties to others. Yet here we are. Last week Vice President J.D. Vance brought to the forefront a concept that should be common…
I was reading Peter Kwasniewski‘s Substack and he alerted me to the following important announcement. —- The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter has asked clergy and laity to join them in a novena from February 2 to 10. The Communiqué from the Fribourg HQ reads as follows: The recommended prayers may be found here. Source…
Despite all the jabbering about “diversity” and “inclusivity” in the Church and world, Catholics in the United States (and especially Catholic theologians) have become somewhat insular and provincial. When I began studying theology in the 1970s and 1980s, translations of works by European theologians were commonplace and common stock of Catholic publishers. Today, they rarely…
A few weeks ago two men were shot and killed in broad daylight at the busiest intersection of the town in which I was raised. This follows another daytime shooting at that corner a few months ago, and a number of shootings in the area in the past few years. I drove through that intersection…
The Feast we celebrate this Sunday is called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On this day we definitively close out the Advent/Christmas cycle. It is forty days since Christmas. According to Mosaic Law, women who had given birth were required to offer a sacrifice for ritual purification. Of course, Our Lady was not…
Despite all the steps people will insist on taking to create union with God, clearing away whole lumberyards of spiritual debris along the way, intimacy with God has never really been about us to begin with. Having a relationship with God is not something we do but rather Someone we receive. And it is He…
In Two Families: A Memoir of English Life During and After the Council, Joseph Bevan peels back the curtain on one family’s devastating encounter with liturgical revolution, and another’s inspiring emergence from the ruins. Both of these families are his own, considered in each direction of the family tree: he begins by recounting life with…
The close of the synod a few months ago created a media buzz around the discussion of increasing women’s ministerial roles within the Church hierarchy, including ordination to the diaconate. There was a worldly clamor for “inclusiveness” and to “enlarge the spiritual motherhood” of women. The question of a female diaconate was seemingly punted down…
His breadth of knowledge and experience is so vast that it is nearly impossible to write a headline about Michael Walsh. Pianist, to be sure; fancy music school, recitals in Budapest, foreign correspondent during the Cold War, opera critic, literary critic, screenwriter, book author. Walsh has a new book out this week—his 20th—called A Rage…
