Each of us, in the face of an atrocity, can only pray to the Madonna with the Sword-Pierced Heart, seeking the mercy of her Son for sinful humanity and seeking to share in her sorrow for those innocent victims of man’s inhumanity to man. And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and [...]
Five-hundred years on from the Protestant revolution and Christendom is not just dismantled, but in full apostasy. Can it be revived, and if so, how? St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only [...]
By and large the educated elites in the Western world today are without religious belief and often animated by a “culture of repudiation,” keen to banish old ideas of the sacred from public life and to remake the institutions and structures of civil society so as to reflect their own liberated lifestyle. In America and [...]
There was a time, a far healthier time, when the heroism of those who defended Malta from the Islamic onslaught was lauded by the whole Christian world. Jean Parisot de Valette All saints are heroes, but not all heroes are saints. There are some who have made great sacrifices for Christendom while not [...]
The seven pillars of Western Civilization are the edifying edifices which tower over the landscape of the centuries as a fortress of faith and a beacon of reason. Islam has served throughout the centuries as an outside force which has repeatedly laid siege to the fortress, seeking its overthrow. Several weeks ago I wrote an [...]
Paul T. Mascia's novella, "Nazar’s Journey," is full of hope, and yet it is set in the midst of one of the grimmest and deadliest episodes in recent history, in which it would have been very easy for people to lose all hope. Nazar's Journey, by Paul T. Mascia (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2024, 141 pages) [...]
What the faith of the Catholic Church can offer is a framework—intellectual, imaginative, and moral—for the pursuit of all the good that pertains to human destiny, and its effective bestowal in the grace of conversion. The Church civilizes while she evangelizes. But she evangelizes first. Secularisation is far more of a challenge to Christianity in [...]
Pope Pius, who had done more than anyone to make the Christian victory at Lepanto possible, is said to have burst into tears when news of it reached him. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has [...]
The essence of Rome, by being conscious of one’s cultural debts, is the refusal to make a definitive synthesis or mediation. Only in Rome are there Athens and Jerusalem. Only because of Rome are there “two cities because one remains silently present.” Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is [...]
The reliance on religion, family, and tradition in Middle Eastern culture reveals the ephemeral, individualistic entertainment culture of the United States for the Vanity Fair that it is. Being on sabbatical in Jerusalem for two months has brought about two important perspectives shedding light on Middle Eastern culture and therefore on the culture in the [...]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary links the persecution of Christians in other parts of the globe to the increasing hostility towards mainstream Christianity in Europe. A “mysterious force seals the lips,” he asserts, not only of politicians in the West to this persecution, but also of most of those in the media. Is there, [...]
The moral imagination of E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology discerned great value in the cultures he studied, and he spoke out against the destruction of that value. By doing so he exhibited the finest elements of his own particular Western cultural inheritance, as a Christian, English gentleman, who was later, and appropriately, knighted. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of [...]
The attack against Western civilization is, in some way, an attack against the Body of Christ. And Christians need to understand that... What is civilization and why is it important? Civilization is many things, but at its heart, it is both the inheritance of societal ideas, customs, and traditions which inform the body, and it is [...]
Given the events of the past several years and the current geopolitical rivalries within Iraq, it is easy to imagine Christians, Yazidis, and others being caught once again in the crosshairs of malevolent powers… Several months after the defeat of ISIS in northern Iraq, the ethnic and religious minorities who were driven from their homes [...]