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 am here at the Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome, waiting for my (delayed) flight back to Toronto and, well, back to life as it was. Or perhaps not. Bilbo was not quite the same hobbit after his journey, whose tale Tolkein subtitled ‘There and Back Again’, with the implicit emphasis that the hobbit[…]
A blessed feast of Saint Lawrence to all our readers, the third century martyr whose quite literally legendary life echoes through the ages, his generosity, his sense of humour (bringing the ‘poor’ to the Magistrate when he demanded the Church’s ‘treasures’); his cheerfulness, even in the midst great agony. As the legend goes, while being[…]
Norfolk, in south-eastern England, remained staunchly Catholic during the ‘reformatory’ troubles begun by Henry VIII. The Dukes of Norfolk held fast to the Faith through the travails the the Tudors, Henry and his daughter Elizabeth and son Edward, along with their successors. The 15th Duke of Norfolk, Henry Fitzalan-Howard, provided much of the funds to[…]
There have been two tragic and public suicides in the news of late, which I have picked up on these pilgrimage travels, praying for the souls of the departed: Oksana Shochka, a member both of ‘Pussy Riot’, a musical band, of sorts, as well as ‘Femin’, a feminine group, again, of sorts. The former were[…]
I begin this reflection from the beautiful and prayerful grounds of Buckfast Abbey, not far from the coast at Brixham, where I have been staying, and where, as I wrote the other day, William of Orange landed from Holland on that fateful November 5, 1688 (which also, ironically, is Guy Fawkes day, commemorating the foiled[…]
As I begin this reflection, I am on my way to the Devon coast, having just passed through Bath, set up by the Romans for those seeking the curative properties of the region’s hot springs. This morning, the train departed from the small station at ‘Monks Risborough’, the oldest ‘parish’ in England, founded in 903.[…]
On the way to the Highlands, about thirty or so miles north of Dumbarton, one passes through a valley of sombre beauty and history, Glhinne Cunhamm, Glencoe, made infamous on February 13, 1692, when members of the clan MacDonald, numbers vary, but about two to three dozen, were massacred in cold blood, in the middle of[…]
When one first arrives in Scotland, everything seems a wee bit, well, smaller or, as they might put it, ‘wee-er’. The streets are narrow, even cramped at times, the houses built close together, the cars and trucks -sorry, lorries- are more compact, even on the ‘highways’, if such they can be called, cars and buses[…]
On an intersection in Scotland’s largest city, at Glasgow Cross, the Jesuit priest Saint John Ogilvie, after brutal tortures by the ‘King’s Men’ in 1615 (one of which was keeping him awake for nine days in a row, in mockery of Catholic novenas) was hung, drawn and quartered; the charge brought against him was ‘high[…]
Paula Adamick in her article today, in her usual vivid way, connects the cultural trajectory from the ‘long, hot summer’ of 1968 to the one we are experiencing now a half-century in 2018, which would have a year of science-fiction to those back then. Things have turned out more fiction than science, and more dystopia[…]
