Tag: Pope St. John Paul II

Chimes of Freedom – The Catholic Thing

This summer I got a new favorite song – Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It’s not a new song; it dates from the early 1960s. It remained entirely unknown to me until a few months back at Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen used it as…

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.”)…

Polish Prelates: Four Cardinals Form a Pope

Kraków, Poland – Poland is a nation that has endured by memory, a land therefore where anniversaries are marked with extra care. It’s where I learned how to observe anniversaries as a means of keeping vital the lessons of history. The…

Of the Ecclesial Crisis and Winter Bread

The excommunications issued to the six bishops involved in the Society of St. Pius X’s consecrations are easy to defend. Pope Leo told the SSPX not to consecrate more bishops. They did it. He’s the supreme authority in the Church. They are not.…

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…

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…

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…