Recently a future King of England, dressed in an open-collared shirt and without a jacket, slid behind the steering wheel of a car and drove his wife, new-born son and himself away from a maternity hospital in London. He drove, … Continue reading
Category: Articles
Just Being a Good Sport? Or Blasphemy? You Decide
We are now entering the 2013 football season. During the games of this season two seemingly innocuous, but nevertheless sacrilegious, puns are directed toward our Blessed Mother, the “heart” of the Holy Family. These commonly used little insults, namely the … Continue reading
Mary Our Queen
In the 1970 calendar, the feast of Immaculate Heart of Mary was moved from August 22 to June in order to show its alignment with the Sacred Heart of Jesus; the feast of the Queenship of Mary was transferred from … Continue reading
September/October 2013 Mancipia
The September/October 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 … Continue reading
The Disadvantages of Comfort
When an inspiring Scottish friend recently teased me with a trenchant quote from John Henry Newman’s sermon, entitled “Religious Cowardice,” I deployed my resourcefulness promptly to find, if I could, the entire homily and to read it. Gratefully, I did. … Continue reading
Chronic Pain
Chronic Pain: ‘They Also Serve Who Only Stand And Wait’ Part I This article is about chronic pain — pain that hangs around the sufferer like an obnoxious intruder that doesn’t know when he is not wanted. Chronic pain has … Continue reading
Beyond Liturgy
I want to begin these lines by setting a positive tone. As a journalist who has written for most of the nation’s conservative or Traditional Catholic publications, during the past half century I have dealt close-up with more high-ranking Churchmen … Continue reading
Neither Communism Nor Capitalism — a Christian Society
Review of Solzhenitzyn, A Soul in Exile, by Joseph Pearce. Ignatius Press, 2012. Having recently been in a Russian kind of mood after my review of Dr. Warren Carroll’s 1917, Red Banners, White Mantle, when I saw this book in … Continue reading
Mourning as an Act of Affirmation
In an unexpected way, my husband and I were recently led to a rather deep and deepening reflection on mourning (or mournfulness), and on its seeming incompatibility with human superficiality and human lukewarmness. We thereby also came to appreciate a … Continue reading
Ignatius: The Life Of Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei
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
‘The Penalties of Truth’ and Belloc’s Traveller
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
Act of Evil: A Psychologist on the Newtown Massacre
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, Beauty, Transformation
“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
A New Road for Scouting?
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
Belloc’s Verse on Our Lady and the Challenge of Faith
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
