Beauty will save the world… The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Month: June 2019
The Purpose of Beauty
Like many people, I have a love affair with old churches. I lived in Rome a few years ago, and I am surprised I was at all coherent during that period. The wealth of churches—small ones down little cobblestoned side streets, gloriously gaudy ones at the end of large piazzas, and sparse haunting ones with[…]
St. Augustine
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
The Persistence of China’s Underground Church
On this solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul – and a blessed one to all our readers – it is good to know that there are still principles for which the Church is willing to stand, even unto death: Last year’s agreement between the Vatican and the Chinese Communist government – details of which are[…]
The Lasting Legacies of Peter and Paul
Keeper of the Keys Most readers are familiar with the various Gospel accounts of St. Peter as the Apostle specially chosen by Christ to “feed my sheep” (John 21:17). Jesus gave to Peter (not to the other apostles) the keys to the “kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19). His name was changed by Jesus from Simon[…]
Cool Heads and Heat Waves
We should all feel some empathy at the drowning of the father and his 23-month daughter in the Rio Grande. I have not for one seen the photograph of them face down in the murky water, but it is apparently making its appointed rounds, evoking worldwide ‘condemnation’. The Holy Father has his own take: The[…]
World Day of Prayer for Priests
Today, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, is the World Day of Prayer for Priests, instituted by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2002, a reminder that Christ came in true human nature, with a human body, flesh and ‘heart’, and all that means, the emotions and affections proper to being a man. Christ could[…]
Adoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus
As part of the humanity of the Incarnate Word, the Sacred Heart is a creature. Should, then, Jesus’s Sacred Heart be accorded the adoration of latria which is reserved for God alone? The answer is, yes. And this adoration involves no idolatry whatsoever. In his profound and beautiful encyclical, Haurietis aquas (published in 1956), Pope[…]
Saint Cyril and Our Lady
Today is the traditional feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, signified in one of the most famous ‘icons’ of the Virgin Mother, which, by tradition – legend, some might say – goes back to Saint Luke himself, who besides being a physician was also by the same tradition an artist of sorts, who ‘wrote’[…]
Hunchbacks and Hate Crimes
Disturbing, and all-too ironic, that younger humans have ‘horns’ growing out of the back of their skulls, to compensate for bent necks hunching over phones: New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which[…]