Jesus Christ
My Hope for Christian Europe
French existentialist Gabriel Marcel called hope “the stuff of which the soul is made.” Dante marked the entrance to Hell by its absence: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”) Civilizations are not…
Found and Finding, Bought and Buying
Two of the parables set before us today are traditionally understood as lessons in the cost of discipleship. The treasure buried in the field and the pearl of great price signify the Kingdom of God. (See Matthew 13:44-46) They are worth spending…
Kids These Days – The Catholic Thing
I’m old enough now to be the sort of person who will occasionally observe, in all apparent earnestness, that being around young people makes me feel young at heart. This is a concession to the realities of middle age which I am loath to make,…
No Salvation Outside the Church
How many of these can you identify? Marcionites, Montanists, Sabellians, Donatists, Quartodecimans, Pneumatomachians, Apollonarians, Monophysites, Nestorians, Waldensians. These are all groups that broke from the Church, insisting that they…
Thoughts from the Memory Hole
Americans don’t suffer from amnesia. We prefer it. Memory shapes who we are as individuals, a nation, and a culture. But we define ourselves as a “new order of ages.” Those words are stamped directly on America’s Great Seal. Thus, Americans…
Thoughts from the Memory Hole
Americans don’t suffer from amnesia. We prefer it. Memory shapes who we are as individuals, a nation, and a culture. But we define ourselves as a “new order of ages.” Those words are stamped directly on America’s Great Seal. Thus, Americans…
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 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…
Hillbilly with a Rosary – The Catholic Thing
When J.D. Vance’s memoir of his path back to Christianity, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is described at a high level of generality, we see immediately that it is a book of the highest importance. Here is a leader on the world stage…