to the only God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and for ever. Amen. (Jude 1:25)
Year: 2022
Vivaldi and Reali: Baroque Masters
Antonio Vivaldi (1678 – 1741) was a Catholic priest, but one who spent much of his time as a composer than a pastor due, as he confessed, to his own precarious health. This was also, likely, a result proclivity, for he was one of the most voluminous musicians of the baroque. Vivaldi wrote many of his[…]
Drifting Down the Stream
The saying has it that politics is downstream of culture, and I would only add that so is everything else. For what is a nation or a people but its culture, all that makes up its ‘life’ – customs, traditions, mores, entertainment, marriage, family, all that they do and don’t do. And culture, as its[…]
Dancing Away the Darkness
Saint Francis de Sales once quipped, if my fallible memory serves, that dances were a lot like mushrooms: Even the best weren’t worth that much. We might retort, that mushrooms do help bring out what is good in a meal, which would be all the less without them. I do think that what passes for[…]
Wherefore, Brazil?
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Ephesians 6: 12 This is the latest chapter in a movement that began in France three centuries ago with Voltaire and the Enlightenment and its seductive philosophy[…]
When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed, and by whom, one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived at all. (Hilaire Belloc)
Pope Benedict and Gertrude the Great
BENEDICT XVI GENERAL AUDIENCE Saint Peter’s Square Wednesday, 6 October 2010 Saint Gertrude the Great Dear Brothers and Sisters, St Gertrude the Great, of whom I would like to talk to you today, brings us once again this week to the Monastery of Helfta, where several of the Latin-German masterpieces of religious literature were written[…]
St Joseph Moscati, Holy Physician of the Poor
(We need examples and intercessors of saintly physicians, and here is a re-post of the life of one of the greats, Saint Joseph Moscati. We could use many more like him… Ed.) November 16th is the feast day of St Joseph Moscati, the holy doctor of Naples. I had the joy of visiting his relics[…]
The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature. (Saint Albert the Great, +1280)
The Fate of Unbaptized Babies: Matthew Plese…Please Distinguish
Over at OnePeterFive, columnist Matthew Plese, who, according to his by-line, is a Third Order Dominican and an official catechist, claims as Church dogma that unbaptized infants cannot enter heaven, and, hence, are doomed to hell. It may be not be the ‘hell’ of suffering, but rather the state of ‘limbo’, which, as its etymology[…]