Posts
The Feast of St. Andrew
While our minds should rightly turn towards the First Sunday of Advent, don’t forget the Feast of St. Andrew (November 30). The brother of St. Peter and one of Our Lord’s Apostles. Fr. Reginald Foster, OCD, former Papal Latinist gives us a perspective on one of the great relics of Christendom–Andrew’s head! (I’ve written about an aspect…
What? Moscow helps Paris fund Notre Dame Christmas tree?
Yesterday, Russia Today released a story that is probably lost on Americans, most of whom have only dim faint lines of history. Catholics, however, particularly anyone with a mild knowledge of Fatima, are keenly aware of Russia’s role in the 20th century. Back in the 1700’s, France and Russia got into a knock-down drag out…
Book review: My Battle Against Hitler
My Battle Against Hitler, a posthumously published memoir and collection of essays by “20th century Doctor of the Church” Dietrich von Hildebrand, is a timely cautionary for a world that is again on the cusp of momentous world events. It is sobering to read, for example, a Provincial of the German Dominicans remark, in the…
On Meetings of Bishops (This should be shared and Tweeted far and wide!)
If I should write the truth, I believe that I ought to flee all meetings of bishops, because I have never seen any happy or satisfactory outcome from any council, nor one that has deterred evils more than it has occasioned their acceptance and growth. (St Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 131 from 382 AD; cf….
Magazine: Choosing Life…or Death? Fall 2014, Vol. IV No. 3
What you don’t know can kill you! ‘Tis a troubling time we live in. Humans are called vegetables and vegetables, trees, and even rocks have rights. A person can get in legal trouble for not watering or otherwise taking care of vegetation on his property, but a human in a medically invented “permanent vegetative state”…
Truth in Advertising: Promoting the Catholic Campaign for Human Development in Chicago
One long-standing complaint about the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), an annual Catholic “poverty” appeal, is that it has consistently misrepresented its work to the people from whom it solicits donations. CCHD exists to create progressive social change. An analysis of CCHD’s nation-wide 2013-2014 grants – using the most recent information available 1 –…
What the Catechism said on voting 100 years ago
Today is the mid-term election in the United States. At stake are state governorships and the representative positions. I’m sure many readers are painfully aware of the debates and nonsense of politics. There’s often a lot of debate over the role of Catholics in elections, and particularly what to do when you are faced with bad choices, no…
Make some friends in high places. Poor Souls: Who will pray for you?
While there is a bit of calendar hijinks that happen due to the way Sundays translate some feasts to adjacent days, but at the same time feasts on other days are made optional (such as All Saints’ Day yesterday), it can be confusing as to when you ought to pray for the Poor Souls in…
Gamaliel in Ferguson (CCHD Dollars at Work?)
Rev. Tracey Blackman, speaking on “webinar video” about the Gamaliel Foundations’s activism in Ferguson,i said that the Gamaliel-involved clergy must be “protectors of the narrative” and that they would be the ones to tell what really happened in Ferguson. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgGE3gfJwcM In an era when media regularly “shape” the news for their own political ends, we…
St. John Paul II and a Caution against the Age of Fraud
Fifty or a hundred years from now, the sociologists that write books to describe our time will have only one term to discuss today: fraud. It’s everywhere, and people think nothing of it. I think that’s because they don’t realize that the ancient Greeks long before the time of Christ, determined that there would be a time…
