This Ad Rem is a “teaser.” It’s a section of the talk I will give in a couple of days at the Saint Benedict Center Conference. (If you are not coming, feel free to pre-order the CD’s and DVD’s of … Continue reading
Category: «Ad Rem» A Weekly Email Message from the Prior
Weathering Sodom’s Brimstone Storm
The news keeps coming fast and furious. Some recent samples: While a prominent and highly favored pro-homosexual Jesuit attacks faithful Catholics as “unorthodox” for opposing the sodomite agenda, a priest who opposes that same agenda is hounded by his Archbishop … Continue reading
A Season of Sorrows
The recent revelations of depraved deeds committed by bishops and priests are evocative of different appropriate emotions. Anger would be the first of these. It is the irascible passion we experience in the presence of an evil we strive to … Continue reading
A Brief Primer on the Virtue of Justice
Justice, in its most foundational meaning, is “rendering to the other what is his due.” When the “other” is a fellow man or the State, there are three specific parts of justice that pertain: commutative justice, distributive justice, and legal … Continue reading
Lessons to Learn from Clerical Scandals
It is not my custom to write about the latest scandal. There are good reasons for this. The world is fallen and scandals abound, even in the best of times. To dwell on them risks losing sight of the good … Continue reading
Modernism as a Thought Crime
Plato said that God is thought thinking thought. As Father Leonard Feeney wrote, this is about as close as a philosopher can get to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity with his unaided intellect, and it is a loose approximation … Continue reading
Have Confidence!
In the film For Greater Glory, there is a dialogue between Mexico’s Freemasonic head of state, Plutarco Calles and the American Ambassador, Dwight Morrow. Morrow is diplomatically attempting to convince Calles of the wisdom of ending the persecution of the … Continue reading
Science, Technology, and God
One of the two major reasons that people become atheists is that secondary causality is, so they think, sufficient to explain all that exists without any reference to God. This and the existence of evil are the two objections to … Continue reading
Fatherhood, Beauty, and Discipline
This is a speech I gave at IHM School’s recent graduation. Besides being the auspicious occasion of Juliana’s graduation from IHM School, today is also Father’s Day. This is a secular observance that, here in the United States, began in … Continue reading
The Irish Abortion Referendum: But How?
What Oliver Cromwell could not do, what an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger) could not do, what hundreds of years of Anglo-Protestant persecution could not do to the Irish Catholic people — namely, rob them of their faith and morals … Continue reading
A Remedy for Young Turks and Old Fools
There is an excellent fourteen-minute sermon called “The Error of Juvenilism” available online for the hearing. It is much worth a careful listen. The observations of the preacher, and the questions that arise in his wake, provide us with a … Continue reading
To God’s Image and Likeness
The internal counsels of the Blessed Trinity when He deigned to create man have been mercifully revealed to us in the book of Genesis: “Let us make man to our image and likeness” (1:26). The passage, frequently cited, is not … Continue reading
To Honour and be Honoured
Our culture is one that enshrines the dishonorable. In the place of statesmen, we honor stooges and scoundrels; in the place of religious and philosophical truth, moral goodness, and genuine artistic beauty, we exalt overpaid athletes, morally bankrupt Hollywood celebrities, … Continue reading
Heaven is for Ladies, Hell for Men?
“My wife does that stuff.” How disheartening it is to hear those words from a man when the question is whether or not he practices his Catholic Faith or imparts its dogma and morals to his children. Given the necessity … Continue reading
He Descended into Hell
We have entered into the drama of Holy Week. As the events of these days are each momentous, there is too little time, especially during the Triduum, to confront each of them as they are presented to us by Holy … Continue reading
