The movie mogul Sam Goldwyn once rightly growled through his cigar to a screenwriter, “If you want to send a message use a telegram.” Didacticism in storytelling is always a disaster because the audience sniffs out a sermon and switches off. They do so not because they disagree with the point of the sermon, but [...]
Someone once cracked wise by saying, “Everyone has a book in them…and for most people that’s where it should stay.” Therefore when someone sends me the manuscript, the book, the outline for a book, or a book idea, I usually shrink. When a friend sends me a copy of his book I shrink into my [...]
In June I had the joy to spend a week in Italy. One reason for my pilgrimage was to venerate the Shroud of Turin. I had been intrigued by the supposed burial cloth of Christ since I was in college, and as I was in England leading a pilgrimage with Joseph Pearce, I did not [...]
In American society today, everywhere you look we are apportioning blame and seeking scapegoats. And even being a victim is fashionable—ironically, becoming bullied is now the best way to bully others. Where is there an end to the cycle of violence and victimization? One of Christianity’s contributions to civilization has been a startling compassion for [...]
Considering the time we spend in our cars, there must be nothing wrong with a decent sound system, especially if this gift of modern technology can be used to counter the stress of the modern commute—the inevitable impatience, the tiresome finger tapping, and sometimes the snarling of the inner beast, cornered as he is by [...]
Americans are guaranteed happiness, right? It’s in the Declaration of Independence, right? Well, not quite. We’re guaranteed “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Given that we all would like to be happy, and happiness is something to be pursued, how do we give chase? In a recent book, Finding True Happiness, Robert Spitzer outlines [...]
As a Catholic priest, who is also a graduate of Bob Jones University (BJU), I caught with interest Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s question when oral arguments about same-sex marriage were being heard in May. Justice Alito referred to the 1983 case in which the Supreme Court decided that Bob Jones University’s ban on inter-racial [...]
It is ironic that people who believe in heaven are sometimes blamed for wishful thinking. Isn’t it more likely that it is those who disbelieve in hell who are the wishful thinkers? Someone once asked the famous mystic Padre Pio, what he thought of modern people who didn’t believe in hell. His blunt reply was, [...]
One of the frustrating things about a visit to England is the persistence of Protestant propaganda about King Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I. During our recent pilgrimage with Joseph Pearce our fellow pilgrims noticed time and again how information boards and brochures portrayed Henry and Elizabeth in a positive light. Their splendid portraits [...]
To be deep in Rome is to cease to be Protestant. That is because to be deep in Rome is to be deep in history, and to be deep in history, as John Henry Newman wrote, is to cease to be Protestant. Visiting Rome this month I was plunged once more “deep into history.” Everywhere [...]
In popular culture men are consistently portrayed as monsters—pestilent patriarchs intent on dominating women, abusing children, corrupting the innocent and messing up everything they touch with their grubby, power hungry plans and aggressive macho manipulation. The sixties men of the television show Mad Men are typical—part of an suited insider’s club, they smoke and drink [...]
Stalin famously asked how many battalions had the Pope. Today, with the Catholic faithful numbering over a billion, the answer might be, “Not battalions but billions.” In every age the secular power has known the sacred power to be its real enemy. When church and state conspire together the state ultimately wins, for the church’s [...]
From American Atheistic Materialism…Good Lord Deliver Us. And the plea is appropriate because prayers for deliverance are a kind of exorcism, and if any society needs exorcism it is the American Atheistic Materialistic society. Pope St. John Paul II said there were two atheistic materialistic societies: Communist Russia and the Unrestrained Capitalism of America. The [...]
In the musical Oklahoma! Ado Annie and Will Parker sing, “With Me It’s All or Nuthin’ is it All or Nuthin’ With You?” I like to imagine the duet being sung by Thérèse of Lisieux and Friedrich Nietzsche. I can just see the sweet little French girl and the skinny German with his big moustache, [...]