Christ descended into hell to deliver His loved ones from their exile. He came to reward those who, from our first father, Adam, to His own foster-father, St. Joseph, had fought the good fight and had finished the race. The second reading from the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday is taken from an ancient homily on Christ’s [...]
Education follows the same law as the physical universe, which is sustained and carried on in dependence on certain centres of power and laws of operation. Education has its history in Christianity, and its doctors or masters in that history. A Benedictine Education, by John Henry Newman (160 pages, Cluny Media) As the physical universe [...]
Let us imitate St. Patrick’s single-minded love for Christ, which was made possible through his humility. By being humble like children, we can hope to one day be great in the kingdom of God, with Patrick and all the saints. Few people want to be described as “narrow-minded.” Narrow-minded people, neglecting key information, can miss [...]
With my own hand I have written and put together these words to be given and handed on and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus. I cannot say that they are my fellow-citizens, nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works. They are blood-stained: blood-stained with the [...]
Tomie DePaola may not have been a saint himself, but he recognized them, venerated the love of God in their lives, and drew them in such a way that we can see that love shining through his friendly folk art icons. Through the Year with Tomie DePaola, text by Catherine Harmon and John Herreid, illustrations [...]
If our hearts were truly not in this world but in heaven, all the torments that the world could devise would give us no pain. Let us therefore send our hearts to heaven by sending our wealth there. A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, by Thomas More (248 pages, Cluny Media) XIII. Concerning the wise [...]
For nearly two thousand years, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land has been the pinnacle of Christian religious experience and a byword for trust in divine providence. There is one place that captivates the pilgrim more than all the rest. Because in the most consequential of lands, it is the most consequential city this side [...]
Within the liturgy, within our academic life, within our hard work in serving the poor in a needy parish, we are seeking in our own small way to take the Benedict option. Like St Benedict we’re not trying to change the whole world. We’re simply doing what we can with what we have where we [...]
As did St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, J.R.R. Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of [...]
As the gulf between classical and postmodern notions of conscience and government grows ever wider and their clashes more explosive, it is high time for the jury to give renewed attention to the nuances of Thomas More’s understanding of the apparently competing, but ultimately harmonious, demands of divine, natural, and human law. In August of [...]
St. Thomas Aquinas has the rare quality of wanting to know all that can be said for the other side. He understands that you can’t find good answers. Before I discovered Shakespeare, the writer I most admired was St. Thomas Aquinas. Dazzling as Shakespeare is, I think I was right the first time. Apples and [...]
The question I should like at least to open is whether G.K. Chesterton had not both the deeper and greater mysticism, a mysticism closer to that of the saints, and a message far more valuable for the millions whose place is on the plains of daily effort and not on the mountains of asceticism and [...]
The reason for Walsingham’s importance is its association with the Marian apparitions to a pious English noblewoman in 1061. By the middle of the fourteenth century, people considered England to be “Our Lady’s dowry” and that she was, in some special sense, the protectress of the English people. Few people in today’s godless England have [...]
True saints never put their faith in the surety of other saints in an ultimate sense. They put it in the Lord Jesus himself. And that is an infallible truth that is truly ecumenical. One of the big worries of liberal and progressive Catholic theologians during the thirty-five years of the terms of office of [...]