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
I’ve been gone for a couple of days, on pilgrimage to Martyrs’ Shrine, in Midland, Ontario, of which I have written a number of times before, commemorating the eight Jesuits who were put to death in odium fidei by the Iroquois back in the mid-seventeenth century. The site of Saint-Ignace, where Saints Jean de Brebeuf[…]
Saint Bonaventure, whom we celebrate today, the day of his death in 1274 – a few months after his contemporary, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Both have been proclaimed Doctors of the Church – an elite company, with but 36 members – and both wrote ‘Summas’, or compendia, of theology, even if, for various reasons, it was[…]
There is no strict formula to being the parents of saints, but there are things one can do to ameliorate the process, as I tried to point out in some inchoate way in the reflection on the Benedict Option yesterday. All parents can really do is provide the example, the exhortation and the environment in[…]
Just after posting the announcement on the week-long showing of Unplanned in Canadian theatres, it was announced this morning that two of those theatres have cancelled due to ‘death threats’. One must wonder at who is doing the threatening, and why. You may recall the suspicious fire-bombing of Morgentaler’s abortion clinic, blamed on pro-lifers, but[…]
Today is the feast of the Chinese martyrs, Augustine Zhao Rang and his companions, hundreds of Catholics (along with many Orthodox and Protestants) put to death for their faith, often in brutal ways, from the 17th to 20th centuries. Ironically, the first official martyrdom, of the Dominican priest Father Francisco de Capillas, was on January[…]
It was a day much like today, a hot, humid and sweltering July 6th in the year of our Lord 1902, in a small farming town in the fetid area outside of Rome, when a young girl – she had not yet attained full womanhood – of not-yet twelve years old was viciously stabbed fourteen[…]
Saint Anthony Zaccaria (+1539), from noble lineage in late-renaissance Italy, first studied medicine, then for the priesthood, adopting a life of great discipline and zeal, founding the ‘Barnabites’, inspired by the teachings of Saint Paul the Apostle, dedicated to renewing the Church and rooting out abuses. Hmm. He also popularized the ‘Forty Hours Devotion’ of[…]
When the Church canonizes some of her faithful as ‘saints’, she is declaring that they lived a Christian life more perfectly, practising charity in an ‘heroic’ way, and this is done for two reasons: First, so that they may act as exemplars for the rest of us on how to live a Christian life more[…]
Abraham’s dialogue with God in yesterday’s Sunday reading still speaks to us four millennia onwards. Indeed, the principle is timeless, that God’s justice – the natural recompense for sin – is not only tempered by His mercy, but by the goodness of some in the midst of great evil of many others. Shine like sparks[…]
A blessed Dominion Day to all our readers, on which we celebrate the official founding of ‘Canada’ as a (mostly) independent part of the British Commonwealth since the signing into effect of such in 1867. Although we gained further sovereignty, of a sort, with Pierre Trudeau’s 1982 Constitutional Act – along with his bland, but[…]
