John M. DeJak
The First Sunday of Advent
During the next several weeks the Bellarmine Forum will be posting some prayers to cultivate devotions in the home for you and your families. We hope that these devotions will help you in your spiritual life as the Church prays with the rhythm of the seasons in her liturgical life. The beauty of these prayers…
Defensor Civitatis
I am going to be polemical. You are forewarned. There is a fundamental aspect of the debate over so-called same-sex marriage that needs to be understood: most people in the cities and towns of Minnesota and across the United States are not eager nor clamoring for the legal recognition of two homosexuals to form a…
Catholic Social Teaching and The American Detour
What Happened? Living and working in the world but not of it may have been the mantra of Catholic thought and education in the first half of the twentieth century, but the tsunami of societal revolution in the 1960s upended rationality in favor of action-oriented programs in the name of social justice. The wisdom of…
The First and Enduring Sin
This past Saturday–September 29, 2012–in Minneapolis, Minnesota was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the temperature was a warm 80 degrees, and the fall colors of the changing leaves were done as by a master painter. A perfect day for my 7-year-old daughter to play in the front yard. Indeed she was. Into this…
Happy Feast Day!
Collect from Today’s Mass: O God, who adorned the Bishop Saint Robert Bellarmine with wonderful learning and virtue to vindicate the faith of your Church, grant, through his intercession, that in the integrity of that same faith your people may always find joy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with…
St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J.
This article is taken from the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907). A distinguished Jesuit theologian, writer, and cardinal, born at Montepulciano, 4 October, 1542; died 17 September, 1621. His father was Vincenzo Bellarmino, his mother Cinthia Cervini, sister of Cardinal Marcello Cervini, afterwards Pope Marcellus II. He was brought up at the newly founded Jesuit college in…
Creating a Civics Course
This year I have the pleasure and honor of teaching a Civics course to a group of high school seniors at Saint Agnes School in St. Paul, MN. I suspect that most Civics courses around the country are taught in a way that overemphasizes modern political attitudes and delivers very little about what it means to…
We Have No King But Caesar
“Fundamental rights” seems to be a preoccupation with Americans and, increasingly, people all over the world. Sometimes the adjective “fundamental” is not appended to the term “rights,” but there is a preoccupation all the same. When asked to define in general what a “right” is, I’m not sure that those who wish to secure such for themselves…
Reasons to Pay Attention to Solzhenitsyn, Mindszenty, and Ciszek
The excellent Catholic blog Rorate Caeli has a piece on the 4th anniversary of the death of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The author of the piece takes the opportunity to praise Solzhenitsyn and others within the Soviet Union for their heroism in standing up to the godless Communist regime. Similarly, he takes to task the Fathers of the Second…
The State says in its heart, ‘There is no God’
I recently attended the third annual Canon Law Conference for Canonists and Civil Attorneys hosted by His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Truly, it was an excellent conference made all the more so by the opportunities for spiritual refreshment and prayer at arguably the…
