Christopher Dawson greatly admired John Henry Newman, for he understood more clearly than any of his contemporaries the coming war of the Church against the ideologues bred by the French Revolution, utilitarianism, and secularization. As Christopher Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to the [...]
The shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham attracts 250,000 pilgrims every year. Truly it can be said, in the heavenly light of the shrine’s resurrection, that the Queen has returned. One of the most exciting fruits of the spirit of Walsingham is the new and dynamic Community of Our Lady of Walsingham. Bitter, bitter oh [...]
What service and work has God entrusted to you? You have your mission: It’s to assist in the Church’s mission of soul-saving and cultivating the earth, just one house and one day at a time. Through your service and your mission, you are given a share in the Church’s work and, for that matter, God’s. [...]
For many of us, Saint John Henry Newman, his teachings, and his example constitute our North Star. For many years he has been our doctor. And now he becomes the doctor of us all. Introduction: Newman as Our North Star On July 31, Pope Leo XIV announced that Cardinal Newman would formally be declared a [...]
After the Second Vatican Council, not only were mystics and saints all but absent, but so also were the sort of new and vital religious orders to help spread and disseminate the teachings of the Council. However, as history has shown, pendulums do swing. St John Henry Newman’s “New Spring” is at last on the [...]
What marks Newman’s preaching? A concern for the everyday life of holiness. We are made for an eternal destiny: the resurrection of the body, the communion of saints, the beatific vision. And yet, those things are sought not only after this life, but among, during, and throughout all that life throws at us here and [...]
What John Henry Newman says about conscience shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the “socially constructed” result of any number of cultural influences. The conscience is a messenger from God: giving saints courage to resist tyranny, even unto death. by Emmeline Deane, oil on canvas, 1889 The [...]
Newman’s conversion in 1845, sixteen years after Catholic Emancipation and five years before the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England, heralded the birth of a Revival which would see the resurrection of the Faith in the English-speaking world. In September 2010, I was honoured to be invited to serve as an official commentator on [...]
The Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker [...]
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 [...]
Christopher Dawson held that the Christian religion created a distinctive culture that not only preceded, but has continued long after, the thirteenth century. It is only by examining this cultural dynamism that one can appreciate why modern society is a mutilated, or a “secularized,” version of Christendom. Soren Kierkegaard observed that a distinguishing mark of [...]
Like St. John Henry Newman, of whom he was the greatest living scholar, Fr. Ian Ker possessed a wicked wit, which he was certainly not afraid to deploy in public or private. He could also be fierce in defending the honor of Newman and Christ’s Church against unfair or dishonest critics. Though the pictures accompanying [...]
Customs and outward forms signal that one’s duty is greater than one’s self, and neglect of them is an exercise in egotism. Accounts vary, and a few say that the story about our civil Founders is apocryphal, but it would seem that the story is true. As one of the more jovial national patriarchs, Gouverneur Morris, [...]
St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but [...]