When St. John Henry Newman is proclaimed a doctor of the church on Saturday, staff and students at his old university will be counting on a boost of confidence for Oxford’s once-excluded Catholics. Lord Neil Mendoza, provost of Oriel College,…
Can the boundary between this life and the afterlife ever blur in ways the Church has not fully defined? Each year, All Souls’ Day and the Month of All Souls renew age-old questions about life, death, and the mystery that unites both. In popular…
Readers of books, and specifically fantastic books by Charles Williams and other Inklings, are summoned. I do not like them as much as I should, for I have never been a fan of fantasy literature, and I note that among the Inklings, only J.R.R.…
In June of 1577, an Englishman by the name of Cuthbert Mayne was taken under arrest by the High Sheriff of Cornwall and imprisoned in Launceston Castle to await trial for high treason. Mayne was born in Devon, in southwest England, and had been…
The night of drunken carousing that now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old. Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace…
When it was announced that the next archbishop of Canterbury would be a woman (Sarah Mullally) with progressive views on homosexuality and abortion, social media erupted with a combination of outrage, congratulations, derision, and triumph. A…
The recent historic Vatican visit by King Charles III coincided with a deepening division in the worldwide Anglican Communion. “The Church of England has clearly decided to go the way of liberal Protestant denominations, abandoning any claims to…
December 8, 2025, is quickly approaching, a date marking the sixtieth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. “A budding teenager at the time, I paid scant attention to the event, not realizing that it would dominate most…
It’s a common today to lament the widespread loss of faith in institutions: governments, schools, colleges and universities, courts, medical authorities, religions, and (not least) the Catholic Church. There are many reasons, good and bad, for…
“Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee!” Now, if that’s your response to today’s Gospel (Luke 18:9-14), then you probably missed the point. Because there’s more than a bit of the Pharisee in each of us, and not enough of the tax collector. Our…
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