Any counsel to the stand out class of 2026 is rather simple: In the face of the wickedness of the times, stop, reflect and question. Have recourse to God and the Blessed Mother. One cannot be outstanding without grace, which makes up for shortcomings and leads to Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth [...]
John 17: 1-11 is one of the most mysterious, one of the most dazzling, passages in all of the New Testament. In it, we enter into the Sacred Heart, as into some vast cathedral where the soaring vaults carry both the thunder of the organ and the whisper of many prayers. It is hard to [...]
The Church owes a profound debt to Eusebius of Caesarea, for without him much of early Christian history and lore would have passed into oblivion, and we would be ignorant of a good deal of our early past. Most believers are probably unaware that the question of Jesus Christ’s divinity was once put up for [...]
The essential error of the modernist theologians is that they have fallen for the myth of the noble savage. But both the noble savage and the urban savage are simplistic generalities: They express a truth and a lie at the same time. The Amazonian synod of 2019 in Rome revealed what might be called “The [...]
Men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian. Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady [...]
Modernity and modernism, and all their fruits, are deeply opposed to the conservative vision. Conservatism seeks harmony, unity, justice, and dignity. Far from fragmenting life, it seeks to draw all together. As we wrestle with our present twenty-first century day—its successes and its foibles—we conservatives will throw around terms such as modernity, modernism, post-modernism, and [...]
What can our poor prayers—so broken like ourselves—do for if not echo constantly the very petition Jesus has made known to us? Nothing else will matter in eternity. John 17: 20-26 continues the priestly prayer of Jesus that we have been listening to throughout the week. Again, we hear its simple but sublime themes rehearsed: [...]
Most Christians, including Paul, would say the Resurrection is the basis of our entire faith, but without creation, there can be no Incarnation or Resurrection. If you were to randomly ask an average Christian, even one who does not routinely pray, pay, or obey, what is the greatest miracle of all, chances are that the answer [...]
When St. Peter was asked how to receive the outpouring of God’s love on the first Pentecost he answered, “repent,” just as Our Lady keeps asking us to keep repenting in prayer. For it is here alone that our acts of love enable us to receive God’s love in return. All good parents hope their [...]
Michel de la Tour D’Auvergne gave his horse to his servant. He watched the man take the two animals to the head of the bridge over the Grosne, and then with a sudden gesture of complete release he threw himself down on the river bank and gave himself up without reserve to the scene before [...]
Lovers of great children’s literature have probably read and enjoyed “The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde, which Wilde had originally written for his own children, reading it to them with tears in his eyes. In the story, the Giant is healed of his selfishness by the love of a child. Angered by his discovery that [...]
Listening is of the essence of obedience, the obedience of the Son to the Father and of the disciple to the Son. This is the first condition of joy: that it begins in an open obedience, an obedient openness to the Eternal Word, spoken in the communion of God’s love and shared with us through [...]
Tradition can be either oral or written. Never in the early Fathers do we get the sense that the written scriptures are in any way separate from tradition. St. Irenaeus makes it plain that the writing of the gospels grew out of the apostles’ oral preaching, which itself grew out of the personal experience of [...]
Anyone who has known moments of intense joy will know that these experiences would be diminished if they could not be shared with another. Surely this is why God created other beings to receive and return his love, to know and experience true joy on earth and the fullness of happiness in the world to [...]