Poetry, often called the thinking man's meme, has faded from popular culture. Still, Catholics could greatly benefit from exploring the works of poets who lived heroic, faith-filled lives. Were one to conduct a survey of modern-day Americans, taken at random, it is likely that not one in a hundred would have heard of the poet Richard [...]
Once Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, there was a target on all Catholics, especially priests. The Catholic gentry of England put everything on the line to give shelter to the priests, particularly by the construction of hiding places in their large country houses. Here is the story of my trip to some [...]
Hilaire Belloc’s “The Contrast” is a neglected study of America and Europe after the Great War. His sadness over the utter failure of Europeans to embrace their cultural patrimony and stand independently explains his later sympathy for Franco and Salazar, and his initial interest in Mussolini. The unimaginative always place a wall of separation between [...]
The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty’s remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future. It is hope. I went for a long walk in Oxford the other night. The city, of course, is always enchanting, but in early summer and at night, it is so the most. When summer [...]
St. Withburga Over the centuries, the English have been something of a curse to the Irish. English rulers, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Oliver Cromwell, have sought to impose their will on the people of Ireland, often through the tyrannical use of terror on a defenseless population. There is, however, one [...]
Classical music comes to us from a very long and very human tradition. The concert hall thus should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: It should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted. Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris [...]
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party government is presenting a bill to abolish the hereditary lords from the upper chamber of Parliament. Hereditary lords are those House of Lords’ members who inherit the right to sit in the upper House based on services rendered to the realm. Many storied families have retained this right for generations. [...]
Michael Kurek's English Symphony is his third symphony and perhaps his best, surpassing even the magic and majesty of his second and, as its name suggests, taking the primary world of England as its creative wellspring. When Britain had an Empire The sun would never set, But the sun set over England And Englishmen forget [...]
The recent publication of a private letter written by King Charles III in 1998, when he was Prince of Wales, is causing quite a stir. Written to a friend, Dudley Poplak, it expresses King Charles’ disdain for the imposition of scientism on agriculture, which is itself of interest, but also expresses his scorn for the [...]
Can we fail to see the significance of Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence,” uttered immediately before Horatio’s prayer from the Requiem Mass? Since "requiem" means “rest” in Latin, can we avoid the suspicion that Shakespeare is alluding to the “something rotten” in the state of England which has silenced the Requiem Mass and [...]
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 [...]
One of the most egregious examples of the dissemination of the false narrative of fake history is the bias and inaccuracy of the “official” history of England since the time of the Reformation. William Cobbett We live in an age when fake news is rampant. Yet fake news is nothing new. It’s been [...]
Perhaps, when we survey the splendour of the literary legacy of the British Isles, we should remind ourselves that the one golden rule is that there was not one golden age. Instead, and glory of glories, from the time of the Anglo-Saxons until the most recent of times, one golden age has simply made way [...]
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 [...]