It has been said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I would add that perhaps vulgarity is the tribute ugliness pays to beauty: to take art and its various forms and to reduce them to the banal…
The Universal Experience of Death and Our Response In the experience of the average Parish Priest in the West, I suspect that after the Daily or Sunday Mass, the most common Mass celebrated by a Priest is that for a…
The following Homily was preached yesterday, April 22, 2018. Many people requested the text, which is placed below. Today you all may notice that the Intercessions of the Mass deal almost exclusively with the issue of Vocations, because today, ‘Good…
I was out a few weeks ago with a friend of mine when I ran into some of young guys who work at a major Catholic think tank in the Northeastern United States. We often run into each other because…
On April 5, we commemorated the 250th Anniversary of a Priest most people have never heard of, but in whose debt many lovers of history and Ancient Civilization remain: Egidio Forcellini (1688-1768), an Italian philologist and lexicographer, who was the…
Let me begin by apologizing to any readers. Between now and Easter, it’s a personal and professional crunch time, and it’s hard to get time to sit down and plan a quality blog post. Since the search for truth is…
For years now I have been listening to or reading the work of Terry Mattingly, who has been a teacher, journalist and public commentator for almost forty years. Yesterday on his GetReligion podcast with Lutheran Pastor Todd Wilken (an excellent weekly…
Today the Church reaches Mid-Lent, traditionally called “Laetare Sunday”, from the Introit of the Mass, Rejoice Jerusalem/Laetare Jerusalem. Having started the season of Lent largely reflecting on Biblical themes of temptation, penance, repentance, fasting, almsgiving and prayer, our attention will turn…
“We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” – 2 Corinthians 4:18 A few days ago…
Mary, Mother of the Church: A New Marian Memorial for Post-Pentecost The idea of Mary being the Mother of the Church is ancient in pedigree. It is as old arguably as St. Irenaeus and St. Augustine. It follows a certain…