Tag: Pope St. John Paul II

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…

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…