The big news in American Catholic circles is the Obama administration’s “contraceptive mandate.” This latest unethical intrusion of big governmnet stipulates that employers, including religious institutions, provide their employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations, and specific abortifacients such as Ella and Plan B.

Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle summarized the situation: “If this unprecedented aggression against the religious freedom rights of Catholics is allowed to stand, then virtually all Catholic institutions — colleges, universities, secondary schools, hospitals, charities, service providers, fraternal orders, and advocacy organizations — will be forced to pay for procedures, devices, and chemicals abhorrent to the consciences of Catholics.” Read More »

One of the most important things for a person to have is an identity. This is why names are so important to us. Adam was given power to name things in the Garden of Eden, showing that he had dominion over the rest of creation, including Eve, whom he named. When a child finds out that a large, strange-looking animal has a name, he finds comfort in the fact, knowing that, if it has a name, and if Daddy can identify it, the thing must not be all that terrifying. It is known.

Traditional Catholics, or traditionalists, name themselves thus because of their embrace of the traditions of the Church. Read More »

The true religion is not a book. It is a communion — a mystical body — by which man is united to God and therefore made holy, beginning in this life a relationship that is meant to continue for all eternity in beatitude. Yes, the true faith is a revelation from on high. Yes, a portion of that revelation has been transmitted to us in the inspired canonical scriptures. But what those scriptures and the rest of that revelation declare to us is how to enter into vital communion with the Holy Trinity through the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ.

We aspire to the direct vision of God in eternity, and we achieve that by seeing and hearing Him in time through faith and charity. Read More »

Dear Friends and Benefactors,

A Christmas letter is conventionally an opportunity to express gratitude for the past, good cheer for the present, and hope for the future. This is a good convention, for these are three very Christian things. In the present circumstances of our Republic, the world, and the Church, the necessity is to supernaturalize these sentiments, especially the last two; for, in all candor, it is impossible to be cheery about the present or hopeful for the future without a hefty dose of grace. Humanly speaking, things are going very badly. And everyone knows it. Read More »

The Mystery of the Immaculate Conception is not something on the borderlands of the Christian religion; rather, it stands front and center in the true Faith. This is because the Immaculate Herself is so wrapped up in the divine decree for the redemption of men, that her perpetual sinlessness and fulness of grace form a continuum with what the faith teaches about Jesus (Christology) and His Salvation (Soteriology).

Blessed Pius IX expressed this truth in Ineffabilis Deus, the encyclical wherein he defined the dogma: Read More »

The moral teachings of the Church are of a piece with her teachings on faith. Christ’s supernatural revelation to the Church, along with the natural law also entrusted to her, constitute a “seamless garment”¹ of truth about God, man, and the destiny of man in God. To abstract one or another of the constituent truths out of this totality, and reduce the rest to a status of lesser importance, is very dangerous. Doubtless, there is a hierarchy of truth, with some doctrines being higher in rank than others, the Trinity and the Incarnation taking the uppermost places. Read More »

Some months back, I received a telephone call from a sedevacantist madman who challenged me to a debate on whether Pope Benedict XVI is the pope. This individual should know that debates are not the way we do our apostolate. I have nothing against debating, but we engage in other apostolates that take up our time, I believe, more profitably: publishing, street evangelism, our school, night classes here at the Center, putting on conferences, various youth apostolates, public outreach to spread the traditional Mass, and giving talks on a Catholic America. Read More »

The Rorate Caeli web site posted this picture of a smashed statue of the Virgin of Lourdes. The statue lies in the Via Merulana, the lovely street that connects the Lateran Basilica to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, with several other churches between. Why has this act of outrageous anti-Marian iconoclasm been perpetuated within blocks of the Pope’s own Cathedral? Because among the “peaceful protesters” engaged in a common ritual of Italian politics, there were some violent scoundrels, who had no interest in peace or genuine social order. Their iconoclasm reveals their agenda, inasmuch as they have one at all. Read More »

The Saint Benedict Center Conference, on October seventh and eighth, drew a diverse multitude from as far away as Florida, Idaho, and California to the Center’s New-England campus. The theme of the conference was “Right and Freedom: Catholic Considerations on Misused Concepts.”

Below are summaries of all the presentations, with links to each speaker’s bio. All of the talks are available for purchase, either singly (CD or MP3), or as a complete set (CD or MP3).

Dr. Robert Hickson: Helping the Truth Along A Little: Some Nuanced Catholic Understandings of ‘Right’ and ‘Freedom’ Read More »

Monsignor Charles Pope has penned a concise summary of recent anti-Catholic and anti-natural law actions of the nanny state:  If You Find A Good Fight, Get In It! A similar clarion call for political action can be found on the Mass Resistance site, which cites an address of a British Pro-Family barrister to the effect that America is in the same place the U.K. was fourteen years ago vis-a-vis the homosexual agenda, and we need to fight while we still have time. (With the aggressive queering of the military, one wonders if it’s not a bit late for that.) Read More »