Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
The death of Christopher Tolkien as a nonagenarian ends a legacy, for it was this youngest son of the great J.R.R. that took – pardonnez le pun – good care of his father’s inimitable work. And imitated it has been, many, many times over, all to paler effect. For unlike the fantasy genre to which[…]
Pope Emeritus Benedict and Cardinal Sarah have just released a book in defence of clerical celibacy, just as Pope Francis is pondering relaxing the discipline, one that goes back to the origins of the priesthood, contrary to Protestant and Modernist revisionism (after all, Christ was a celibate). The underlying, central issue is continence, or the[…]
With the feast of Christ’s Baptism yesterday, we enter back into what we now call ‘Ordinary Time’, a term not opposed to ‘extraordinary’ – for all time is such from out eschatological Catholic perspective – but rather from the ‘ordinal’ numbers after which the Sundays are now named, with yesterday being the ‘First’, next Sunday[…]
A blessed and joyous feast of the Baptism of the Lord, commemorating the beginning of Christ’s public ministry which, as more than exegete has put it, was a prelude to His Passion and Death. For the water of baptism signify not just rebirth, but also a plunging into that very mystery of death, necessary to[…]
January 7th was the fifth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, when the offices of the satirical magazine – which made fun of Catholicism as well as Islam – were stormed by two gunmen, who killed 12 people, cartoonists and editors, with head shots at close range, for the ‘crime’ of drawing mocking[…]
Today is the feast of the one of Canada’s most beloved saints, her own home-grown Andre Bessette (1845-1937), a humble and obscure lay-brother who founded Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. A sickly boy, brought up in a difficult impecunious childhood in rural Quebec – his lumberjack father was killed by a falling tree, leaving his wife[…]
There is a principle in theology – which applies to other sciences as well – that we interpret the less authoritative, the less precise and the less clear, in light of what is more authoritative, the more precise, and what is more clearly stated. Humanae Vitae trumps the Winnipeg Statement of the Canadian episcopacy, any[…]
A blessed Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, known more commonly in the secular world, if that is not tautological, as New Year’s Day – and a happy one to one and all – here are some musical selections which may delight the mind and heart: A musical litany by Father Domenico Zipoli (+1726), as[…]
Saint Adelaide, whose memorial was yesterday in that broad calendar of the blessed, was the first, and as far as I know only, Empress of the Holy Catholic Empire. As a young girl, in 947, she had been married to King Lothair II of Italy, who was likely poisoned. She ran for her life, escaping[…]
What are we to say of the German bishop’s conference – now well traversed on its own path of ‘synodality’ – which just proclaimed homosexuality, by which we may presume they mean the sin of sodomy, to be ‘normal’, devoid of any objective sinfulness. There is not much to add, for the proclamation speaks for[…]
