This year, we celebrate the 250th year of our nation’s birth. Over all those years, we have lived, suffered and triumphed together. We have known good times and bad. Overall, we have much to show for our efforts. Never has a more prosperous nation existed in history. It helps that God gave us a richly … Read more
On December 10, 1925, Our Lady made a formal request to observe the Five First Saturdays as a path to conversion and world peace. Yet, most Catholics are still not doing the devotion properly, if at all. For more than a century, human solutions have kept failing while we ignore the very remedy God gave … Read more
This article is the fourth part of a series about Purgatory, a topic that is rarely discussed today. A knowledge of Purgatory is essential if souls are to avoid the pains of this place of expiation. The first article can be found here. In Chapter Five of Purgatory by Father F.X. Schouppe, S.J., readers encounter … Read more
Serving a beer without foam is a mild tragedy, akin to handing someone an espresso stripped of its crema. Not everyone understands why suds matter. In fact, many drinkers view foam as an enemy—a cynical trick bartenders use to shortchange them on the actual liquid. Yet this fluffy, protein-rich network of bubbles is the unsung … Read more
The following article is the second of a four-part series that features the life of Augustus Pugin, the renown English Catholic architect of the nineteenth century. The first article is found here. Long before Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin accepted the tenets of Catholicism, he absorbed its culture. Like many young men, Pugin was both his … Read more
When considering sublime things, Saint Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle naturally comes to mind. Indeed, the definition of the sublime is “that which overawes us by its grandeur and beauty.” When most people go to see this gem of civilization in Paris, they oftentimes see a reflection of this chapel before they even step through the grandiose … Read more
There is something profoundly unacceptable in the Notre-Dame stained-glass window affair: an appalling alliance to impose the ideological mark of modernity on the historic cathedral in Paris that was recently restored. The powers that be want to change a sector of windows from the nineteenth century with modernistic ones. On one side stands the political … Read more
On March 8th feminists around the world, in an egalitarian spirit, will celebrate “International Woman’s Day.” Their goal: A “gender equal world (…) free of bias and discrimination” to “forge gender equality.” On the other side of the moral battle, Catholic ladies reply to this egalitarian stance by celebrating March 8th as a day of Christian … Read more
The industrialized world often mistreats the consumer. With so many mass-produced and standardized products, I sometimes feel standardized myself. There are limits to standardization. Some products present no problems since we benefit from their uniformity. Others cause us to lose our personality since we have to adapt to them. For example, I have no problem … Read more
The pontificate of Saint Gregory VII (1073-1085) (born Hildebrand of Soana) constitutes one of the high points of the Christian Middle Ages. The pinnacle of his pontificate is the Dictatus Papae, a collection of twenty-seven statements defining the pope’s prerogatives and his relationship with temporal authority. In it, Gregory proclaimed the pontiff’s superiority over the emperor in … Read more
