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
We celebrate today the memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, an ancient title of the Virgin, which was formally instituted into the Holy Mass and the Litany of Loreto by Paul VI during the Second Vatican Council, with a subsequent official votive Mass in 1975. Pope Francis, through Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation[…]
If it ’twere not Pentecost Sunday – the second highest liturgical celebration in the Church’s calendar (see Pater Ignotus’ reflection), and a blessed one indeed to all our readers – we would ordinarily celebrate in our particular diocese today the feast of Saint Columbkille (521-597), an Irish monk from Donegal on the wild west coast[…]
This is the milestone of 75 years since so-called D-Day landings at Normandy, when 150,000 soldiers – many of them young and untested – of various nations on the Allied side stormed the beaches of the north of France, then occupied and fortified by the Nazi German forces. The losses were heavy, with an estimated[…]
Saint Boniface, bishop and martyr, was hacked to death by a group of idol-worshippers on this day, June 5, 754. His life was one of tireless struggle to convert the Frisians, early inhabitants of Germania, steeped in paganism and idolatry. The famous story of his boldly chopping down the ‘Donar Oak’, which the pagan Frisians[…]
Saint Justin, who is called the ‘martyr’, was born around the time the last Apostle, John, departed this life for heaven. Justin was not raised in the Catholic faith – few were in those incipient days – but was rather a pagan convert to Christianity. He first investigated the various philosophies of the age, Platonism,[…]
A blessed feast of the Visitation, one that goes back to the Middle Ages, when it was originally celebrated on the octave after the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, July 2nd. The feast of the Messiah’s precursor is now la Fete Nationale in Quebec, whose people can now scarcely recall their Catholic roots. The[…]
In the universal Church, this is the feast of the Ascension, celebrated forty days after the Resurrection, on which we begin the most ancient novena in our tradition, the nine days to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In Canada and a number of other places – for ‘pastoral reasons’, not least that[…]
As providence would have it, on this memorial of Saint Augustine of Canterbury – the ‘other’ Saint Augustine – who evangelized and solidified the Faith in England, another article by William Kilpatrick warning of the de-Christianization of the British island. There are two primary, and reciprocal, factors at play in its degradation: The secularization, even[…]
There is no easy solution to the present crisis in the Catholic Church, which is a crisis of faith, of doctrine, of morals and metaphysics, of soteriology and eschatology, all of which transcend Pope Francis, along with his cardinals, confidants and counsellors. One need only look at the near-total rejection of Humanae Vitae and other[…]
I must confess that I had never heard of Father Jonathan Morris – perhaps for the simple reason that I don’t watch television – until the story of his request to be laicized made its way through the news. In general, we should leave a person’s vocational discernment private, but, then, so should the person[…]
