2026
Easter: God, Love, Life – The Catholic Thing
During the first half of the 20th century, there emerged an extraordinary constellation of English Catholic writers, many of them converts, who had the great gift of being able to explicate the Catholic faith on a popular level without watering…
The Lord’s Descent into Hell
What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were…
The Seven Last Words of Christ
It seems to be a fact of human psychology that when death approaches, the human heart speaks its words of love to those whom it holds closest and dearest. There is no reason to suspect that it is otherwise in the case of the Heart of hearts. If…
St. John Paul II, Priest
Beginning in 1979, Pope John Paul II took up the habit of writing an annual letter to priests which would be published on, or just before, Holy Thursday. These letters allowed John Paul II an outlet for repeated meditation on the nature of the…
The Week of Holy and High Ambition
This is the week when we contemplate, more than any other week, how much we are loved. This is the week when the words of John’s Gospel, that we are “given power to become children of God,” are brought to fulfillment. This is the week when we…
Our Untouchables – The Catholic Thing
We pride ourselves on the fact that we don’t have a “caste system” in America, with higher and lower castes and those at the bottom who are “untouchables.” I sometimes wonder, though, whether we have something analogous in the way we distinguish…
Holy Work: Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà’ – The Catholic Thing
“The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous.”– Michelangelo to Benedetto Varchi, 1549 The greatest artist of the Renaissance is famous for something he may never have said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until…
Blessed Is He Who Mourns
All of Lent is an exercise in holy sorrow. We don’t know how to mourn as we ought – especially not our sins. So, we need these 40 days of penitence, to train us how to be sorrowful in the proper way. We need to learn genuine contrition. How not…
Scott Hahn and His Happy Band of Convert Brothers
The feast day of the newest Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman, is not his dies natalis (death) but 9th October, the day of his conversion in 1845. That date was definitive for the shape of the Catholic Church in England. So much good for…
The Nine Billion Names of God
Science is an odd theme to choose on the brink of Holy Week. Or maybe not so odd. In a way, science is miraculous. It’s an expression of man’s dignity and genius. It offers our species two deep satisfactions: the joy of discovering how the…