Pope St. John Paul II
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…
Coherence in Continuity – The Catholic Thing
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, was released earlier this week. It is long for an encyclical, and unexpected in some ways. It is worth reading, worth sitting with. What follows is not a summary, still less a “review” of the…
The Perennial Question: “Who Is Man?”
Modern philosophy flatters itself by claiming it was responsible for the “turn to the subject,” i.e., the human (and, usually, a very subjective understanding of the human). But focus on the human is hardly a modern discovery. St. Irenaeus, a…
The Replacements or Coming Soon: Mel Gibson’s ‘The Resurrection of the Christ’
About this time next year, Mel Gibson will release the 2-part sequel to The Passion of the Christ. Better late than never, some will say, although not, perhaps, Jim Caviezel, who so memorably played Jesus, and who has, over the two decades…
Ever Ancient, Ever New – The Catholic Thing
St. Augustine famously wrote of having come late to the Beauty that is God: tam antiqua, tam nova (“So ancient, so new”). It’s a brilliant and profound way of expressing the truth that the deepest Good is not in the past or in the future, but by…
If I Were Created a Cardinal
If I were created a Cardinal and dispensed from the canonical requirement to be ordained a deacon or priest – my vocation is as a layperson – this is how I would counsel the Holy Father on the first anniversary of his pontificate. “Holy Father,…
St. Isidore Runs the Numbers
It’s easy to get lost in Biblical numerological speculation, as even a cursory study of the Church Fathers proves. St. Irenaeus attempted to explain the number of the beast from Revelation 13:17–18 by adding the numerical value of the Greek…