Unless you have been living under a rock, I am sure you are aware that the Church is experiencing a vocation crisis. The numbers are bleak, and they have been for decades. Sure, there are bright spots here and there, mainly with traditional orders and societies of priests who often ordain more priests in a single seminary than the entire nation of Ireland did last year. Nonetheless… Source ..read more

That Robert Louis Stevenson had a not-so-secret sympathy with Catholicism is evident in his book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, where he describes a visit to the Trappist monastery Notre-Dame des Neiges (Our Lady of the Snows). I recall the white-washed chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded and revealed, the strong manly singing… Source ..read more

No morning passes these days when a Catholic does not wake up to the unsettling presence of that two-headed beast that roams about our society: secularism. One of its heads is atheism—modern man’s passion to be god, and the other is utopianism—man’s other obsession to turn this world into some kind of heaven. These are twin evils, feeding off one another. Seldom can a culture survive their terrors. Source ..read more

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Ascension, although in many U.S. dioceses it will not be celebrated until Sunday. The feast evokes many thoughts and feelings. It tells us we’re near the end of the Easter season. We may wonder where the time went. We might be looking forward to Pentecost and anticipating the newness of the Holy Spirit. Or, we might be remembering ham dinner and… Source ..read more

Once whispered in hushed tones and brushed aside as mere tales for the tinfoil-hatted, the narrative of vaccine injuries has pirouetted into the spotlight of undeniable existence. It is uncommon to encounter individuals without at least one acquaintance who has experienced vaccine-related side effects. But Big Pharma and the WHO are not stopping anytime soon. Instead, they’ve upped the ante. Source ..read more

I began a daily journal on March 15, 2020, when everything solid turned liquid. I had just written a letter to Bishop Burns of Dallas, begging him, for pity’s sake, not to close the churches like Boston and Newark had done. I naïvely hoped such foolishness would never take hold in Texas. So, my journal is, at least, a record of what we were like before our credulity and goodwill were abused. Source ..read more

On April 25, EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo did an exclusive, hour-long interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kudos to both Arroyo and Kennedy for sitting down to dialogue in a civil, thoughtful manner that’s too rare nowadays for people on separate sides of the political aisle. For Kennedy, that side of the aisle has been the Democratic side, given his family’s roots as an iconic Democrat family… Source ..read more

It’s funny to be writing this on a typewriter; but truly, I think there is a great deal to be said for the slogan “be different.” Pope Francis infamously told a World Youth Day audience to “make a mess,” and that is exactly what I’ve been doing with this typewriter for the past thirty minutes. Spurred on by an editorial in the latest issue of The European Conservative, I have been marveling… Source ..read more

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives, in a 320-91 vote, approved the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (ASAA), requiring the Department of Education to expand the definition of anti-Semitism as demanded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This bipartisan measure, expected to be adopted by the Senate, comes at a time when police authorities are seeking to suppress anti… Source ..read more

In “Veni Creator,” his lyric address to the Holy Spirit, Czeslaw Milosz reminds God of a couple of things, basic facts which, of course, God already knows: I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. It probably never occurred to one of Poland’s premier poets of the last century that his hunger for concrete connection might work both… Source ..read more