While attempting with integrity to preserve a memoria fidelis (“a memory faithful to the truth of the past”), the following tale proposes to help us guard against self-deception and presumption. The latter, we should fittingly recall, is both a form … Continue reading
Author Archives: Dr. Robert Hickson
Conversation and Expectant Silence
After recently re-reading Albert Jay Nock’s 1928 collection of essays entitled On Doing the Right Thing, I had the thought to counterpoint his insights about conversation and civilization with my mentor Josef Pieper’s insights about silence and hope and the … Continue reading
Evelyn Waugh in East Africa
By considering the refreshingly candid insights to be found in A Tourist in Africa (1960) — Evelyn Waugh’s last book of travel — we may also thereby shed valuable light on the current challenges and limits to be faced by … Continue reading
Diplomats Without Honor
The momentous theme of “honor in foreign policy” presented by James Burnham in his incisive book, Containment or Liberation? (1953), will also be found pervading Geoffrey D.T. Shaw’s recent book of excellence, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal … Continue reading
Memories of a Combatant Marine Officer
As a result of recently reviewing The Lost Mandate of Heaven, Geoffrey D.T. Shaw’s well-documented book on the Vietnam War and the manifold cumulative betrayals of South Vietnam’s Catholic President Diem (d. 1963), I came to know of Andrew R. … Continue reading
The Catholic Strategic Response to “Undo 1492!”
The following essay by Dr. Robert Hickson appeared in APROPOS magazine in the Christmas issue 2004 # 23. The publisher of APROPOS was the late Anthony Fraser, son of Hamish Fraser. Dr. Hickson gave us permission to publish it on … Continue reading
The Wisdom of Good Mentors
More than once down the years I have been told by wise men that a good leader knows how to praise you not so much for what you have done nor for what you are, but, rather, for what he … Continue reading
Fr. John Hardon: On Doctrinal & Moral Disorders, Part II
In this second and final portion of Jesuit Father John Hardon’s confidential June 1990 Commentaries to Archbishop Schotte and Father von Schönborn concerning the “Revised Draft” of the proposed new Catechism of the Catholic Church, we propose to present in … Continue reading
Fr. John Hardon: On Doctrinal & Moral Disorders
Almost a decade after first meeting Father John A. Hardon, S.J. in 1980 at Christendom College, I had the fruitful occasion of introducing him to then-Archbishop Jan Schotte, C.I.C.M.—the Secretary of the Synod of Bishops—and to Father Christoph von Schönborn, … Continue reading
The Natural Law and Religious Liberty
The extent to which, if at all, the Natural Law — i.e., the natural moral law — logically entails (requires or implies) religious liberty, and how so, will provide a decisive test of our proper and adequate understanding of Natural … Continue reading
Applying Democratic Centralism to the Catholic Church
Josef Pieper once memorably said to me in a conversation in the library of his home: “You find the most precious truths in unlikely places.” (And he often manifested the implications of that insight, in his attentive receptivity and buoyant … Continue reading
The Challenge of Tradition
Tradition as Challenge is the title of Josef Pieper’s recently published and long awaited English translation of Tradition als Herausforderung — his deeply reflective and engagingly varied book of collected essays and speeches first published as a whole in Munich, … Continue reading
Saint Helena’s Belated Mission as a Late-Comer to Christ
(This Article is dedicated to the memory of Anthony Fraser on the anniversary of his death by Dr. Robert Hickson. Requiescat in pace.) Two years after Evelyn Waugh had published his long-incubating, and especially moving, historical novel on Saint Helena, … 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
Allowing Polyandry in China: A Development of Doctrine and of Mercy
At a recent unashamedly Catholic Traditionalist Conference in New Hampshire (a part of which was held concurrently with the 5-19 October 2014 Synod in Rome on Marriage and the Family), I began to write my own Retractationes (Retractations), in imitation … Continue reading