Finally, we have a biography of one of the greatest confessors of the Faith of the twentieth century — the dry martyr, Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei. The author, Monsignor Stephen M. DiGiovanni, had been assigned in 2010 by William E. … Continue reading
It is often the case, well known to the close readers of Hilaire Belloc’s varied essays, that he surprises us with some of his profoundest reflections and most memorable formulations in those lighter essays of his so full of banter … Continue reading
It has been over six months since the Newtown, Connecticut massacre took place. It was on December 14, 2012 that Adam Lanza, a twenty year old disgruntled and deeply troubled young man, shot and murdered 26 people, including 20 children … Continue reading
“Death,” wrote poet Wallace Stevens, “is the mother of beauty.” Without putting his line in context, how might we interpret it? One interpretation could be that men make beautiful things, paintings, music, poems, to sweeten life in the face of … Continue reading
The Boy Scouts were a huge part of my personal formation. At the age of nine I joined the Cubs, becoming successively a Bear and Webelo, and doing the usual Cub activities. This culminated with my entrance into the Boy … Continue reading
As we ourselves gratefully remember Hilaire Belloc this year, especially on the 60th Anniversary of his death, let us first consider “Courtesy,” his brief and evocatively allusive poem of seven short, rhymed stanzas (six four-line ones, and a final three-line … Continue reading
Army? Why, one may ask, do we use military terms for anything associated with our gentle Queen, like army and legion? Military terms are not new in the Church. Indeed, as children in Catholic school, did we not learn to … Continue reading
Over the last fifty years, the Catholic faithful have become increasingly more presumptuous, believing that if one is judged to be a “good person” by his fellow human beings, his soul would immediately go to heaven. The notion that he … Continue reading
In teaching the history of the Church, Brother Francis had a simple system. Along with the many historical books from well-known Catholic authors that he required his students to read, he provided an expanding list of memory items that began … Continue reading
In 1927—some twenty-three years after the Menshevik Revolution and a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—Maurice Baring published an anthology of his earlier writings, entitled What I Saw in Russia. Lenin had died in 1924, and Stalin was on … Continue reading
The July/August 2013 Mancipia is now posted (scroll down for PDF). Back issues of this newsletter are linked from our downloads page. If you would like to receive our bi-monthly newsletter via U.S. mail, please sign up to get it regularly. … Continue reading
It was on April 1, 2013 (April Fool’s Day) that the following headline appeared on MSN News: Lego scraps Star Wars toy Jabba after ‘anti-Muslim’ complaints. A group called the Turkish Cultural Association of Austria complained that Jabba, a Star … Continue reading
This brief essay proposes to consider how two eloquent Catholic authors, Hilaire Belloc and Evelyn Waugh, describe and deal with the phenomenon of noise, an unmistakable mark of the intrusive modern world even in times of putative peace. The first … Continue reading
(NOTE: At a public dinner in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1816, Stephen Decatur, naval hero of the War of 1812, famously declared: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be right; but our country right or wrong.” … Continue reading
Thirty-two States currently support the death penalty as a punishment for heinous crimes. Although this is cited as a deterrent to such behavior, even the threat of death would not prevent many morally corrupted sociopaths from engaging in criminal activity. … Continue reading
Site development: Bonaventure
