Tag: catholic church

Good Questions – The Catholic Thing

Soon-to-be-Blessed Fulton Sheen once quipped, “The questions of God are more satisfying than the answers of man.” (That’s a variation on his friend G.K. Chesterton’s line, “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”)…

Beauty: A True Human Need

As I write, on the day celebrated by some Orthodox as the feast of the Transfiguration on the Julian calendar, I’ve had several experiences of beauty just this morning. The sunrise through the West Virginia trees, the sunlight streaming into an…

Star Gazing – The Catholic Thing

I remember a moonless summer night at a campsite in North Dakota, almost forty years ago now, when the stars were so innumerable and bright, it was difficult to pick out the familiar constellations. The night was so black that I could barely see…

Restless and at Home in America

We recently reached the 250th anniversary (a quarter-millennium) of the dominant nation and culture of our time – and of one of the greatest countries in world history. Yet just a few weeks later, you’d hardly know it. And only a month ago,…

‘I Want to Believe’ – The Catholic Thing

I sometimes hear people say something like this: “I want to believe, but I just can’t,” or “I would like to believe, but I just don’t.”  I don’t wish to be critical of such people. I assume their reserve about “faith” comes out of a good-willed…

Religious Life is the Higher Calling

A wave of egalitarianism, swelling for over two centuries, has broken over every corner of the West, including the Church. In its backwash, among other aspects of Catholic life, the approach to vocations in the Church has slowed. Older Catholics…

What Is Beautiful? What Is Ugly?

In the Mile End Road, opposite to the London Hospital, there was . . . a vacant greengrocer’s which was to let. The whole of the front of the shop, with the exception of the door, was hidden by a hanging sheet of canvas on which was the…