Blessed Otto Neururer would be the first priest to be martyred by the Nazis but by no means the last. Caesar, like the poor, is always with us. So is Judas. And so are the disciples of Christ. The Tyrant, the Traitor, and the Martyr. These three types of men form the very threads from [...]
Few remember Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson, who is neither lionized by the poets nor canonized by the Church. Yet he was a warrior king who is perhaps equal in greatness to Alfred and possibly rivals Edmund and Edward in piety. See you the windy levels spread About the gates of Rye? O that was where the [...]
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 [...]
Hugh Ross Williamson would be no stranger to controversy. It might even be said that he positively courted it, somewhat like Hilaire Belloc in whose footsteps he walked. What do T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Hugh Ross Williamson have in common? The answer is that they were all commissioned to write plays for [...]
Malcolm Muggeridge and Marshall McLuhan are two now-mostly-forgotten TV stars who converted to Catholicism. In the current issue of the St. Austin Review, Daniel J. Mahoney writes of Malcolm Muggeridge, describing him in the title of his essay as a “vendor of words, scourge of ideology, Catholic convert, and witness to the truth.” In introducing Muggeridge [...]
The Catholic people of the Vendée, aware of the horrors being unleashed by the stormtroopers of the French Revolution, responded courageously to the threat to their Faith and their way of life. Many people will have heard of the French Resistance, the name given to the various underground organizations that fought against the Nazis during [...]
Let us look at some holy women of the early centuries of the Church who are not well known. Whenever the Roman Canon of the Mass is celebrated, there is also a celebration of the saints, dozens of whom are invoked by the priest at the altar. Among these saints are seven women: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, [...]
Malachy G. Carroll might have had only one novel in him, and he might have only one novel to his largely unknown name, but it’s a minor classic that every Catholic should read. It's 1952, and John Wayne’s latest film, The Quiet Man, is a huge hit at the box office. It is about a [...]
The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the [...]
Dom Prosper Guéranger's tireless promotion of Gregorian chant bore great cultural fruit and helped with the Catholic revival in France. In an earlier essay in this series, we remarked how dispassionate or despondent observers at the beginning of the 19th century might have considered that the Catholic Church was terminally ill and on its deathbed. The [...]
Pioneering priests such as Frs. Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf are unsung heroes of Christendom, but deserve to be recognized. From Nebraska, from Arkansas, Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d, All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, Pioneers! O pioneers! —Walt Whitman [...]
Why, one wonders, should one of the most famous people in history be featured as one of the unsung heroes of Christendom? This would seem to be a good question until we realize that most people do not perceive Shakespeare as a hero of Christendom. He is sung, to be sure. He is sung more widely [...]
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 [...]
Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie ;;;fot. The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales were canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970. Although they laid down their lives for the Faith over a period of almost 150 years, the first being executed under Henry VIII in 1535 and the last under Charles II in 1679, very [...]