Category: Great Writers

In Medieval universities, the first three subjects a student was instructed in were grammar, logic, and rhetoric: what Aristotle called the Trivium of the seven liberal arts. Respectively, they are the arts of writing, thinking, and speaking well. They are called liberal, because they are skills that every man should acquire in some degree, in contrast with the fine arts, which specialize.

This section of our website is dedicated not to great books, although many are referenced, but to great articles, essays, and poems, composed by great Catholic writers. These masters of the pen were not all exceptionally gifted wordsmiths, but they were all gifted in the art of communicating important Catholic information in logical and lucid composition.

Cardinal Manning: Honour

While attempting to retrieve a memorable 1909 Hilaire Belloc essay (“The Missioner”) for a College student — to be then conveniently found in a 1926 Anthology entitled Representative Catholic Essays — I unexpectedly saw and read for the first time … Continue reading

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One

While recently re-reading—after almost forty-five years—Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, his piercing 1948 novel set in the United States—in Southern California, in and around Los Angeles and Hollywood—I gratefully came to realize for the first time the deep and purifying … Continue reading