2026
Foolproof against Nothingness – The Catholic Thing
Last Sunday, at the small parish in the mountain village where I was on vacation, they sang – remarkably – all nine stanzas of Isaac Watts’s famous hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” It was sung as the closing hymn, putting to the test those…
Hard Lessons from a Priest Who Stayed in Gaza
In the interest of diplomacy and personal relations, it’s normally a good idea to follow the adage, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.” But when it comes to assessing challenging and complex situations,…
The Anthropological Unity of Magnifica Humanitas
Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural encyclical, is largely understood by the public as addressing artificial intelligence. The general public’s view is that, like his namesake 135 years ago in Rerum Novarum, Pope Prevost intends to…
The TLM and the Four Last Things
I recently attended the funeral of a young man who died tragically. It happened to be a solemn high Traditional Latin Mass, entirely licit and even affirmed by the presence of our local bishop, his retired predecessor, and a couple dozen…
Focused on Eternity – The Catholic Thing
As a young man of around fourteen or fifteen, it was an amusement, late at night in my bedroom in England, gently to move the dial on the shortwave section of my radio until it picked up the faint crackling broadcasts of Radio Tirana. It was the…
American Heroism and Our Lady of Walsingham
This summer, as in so many summers past, I will be making a pilgrimage to Walsingham. This Norfolk village is the home of England’s national shrine to Our Lady, and I’ll be on a coach from London, and telling the story of the shrine along the…
The Bifurcated Brain – The Catholic Thing
One of the best ways to keep everybody angry, and thus to let us share in the modern experience, is to use words in a left-brained sort of way. I refer, of course, to Iain McGilchrist, the writer who has given us the most thorough and accessible…
In Praise of Imperfect Heroes
I am in Poland, as I am every July, for the Tertio Millennio Seminar, a three-week meeting on Catholic social teaching and the thought of John Paul II. As we often do, we began our seminar with Mass in the St. Leonard’s chapel. It was there that…
The SSPX and the French Revolution
As everyone knows by now, the ordination of bishops carried out by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has resulted in the automatic excommunication of the six bishops involved. No matter how it may spin its canonical status, the Society is now…
Pope Leo and Catholic Education
Magnifica humanitas has been widely discussed for its approach to artificial intelligence. Pope Leo emphasizes the importance of the schools for training people to retain their humanity in the face of these challenges. If we took the encyclical…