TFP website: Vaticanist Andrea Tornielli has published on the Vatican Insider site a serious testimony about Padre Pio’s bilocation to the Hungarian dungeon where Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty was imprisoned in the fifties.The Hungarian anticommunist cardinal was a fierce adversary of … Continue reading
Category: History
The Seven Churches of the Apocalypse
One dominant feature that is pervasive in holy scripture, testifying to its divine inspiration, is that there is no exaggerating the good nor whitewashing the evil in God’s people. Beginning with Adam and Eve actually trying to hide themselves from … Continue reading
Missionaries and Laotian Martyrs Soon to Be Beatified
Vatican Insider: The small communist south-east Asian nation of Laos will have its very own martyrs, possibly within just a few months. Two parallel processes have begun for a group of religious, missionaries and lay people which have been split down … Continue reading
Prolific Pope Leo XIII Published Riddles Anonymously — in Latin
Catholic News Service: Going by the pseudonym “X,” Pope Leo XIII anonymously crafted poetic puzzles in Latin for a Roman periodical at the turn of the 19th century. The pope created lengthy riddles, known as “charades,” in Latin in which readers … Continue reading
An Unexpected Request for Alms in a Southern Harbor: Hilaire Belloc Under Sail in Palma of Majorca
While recently on the ocean-seacoast island of my boyhood home, I decided to read again amidst the inspiring cool sea breezes my own fragile first edition of Hilaire Belloc’s 1908 collection of essays, entitled On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, which … Continue reading
God Prevented Apostate Emperor’s Attempt to Rebuild Temple
Stephen Beale, Catholic Exchange: After Constantine the Great, there were emperors who were heretics and emperors who adhered to Christian orthodoxy. Then there was Julian the Apostate. From the time of Constantine to the French Revolution, he is the only … Continue reading
The Passion of Spain Comes to an End
(Rorate Caeli) Exactly 75 years ago, the arms silenced in Spain at the end of almost three years of war, and almost a decade of intermittent grave persecution of the Church which reached its zenith in 1936. The greatest persecution … Continue reading
1989: 1000 ‘Russian Orthodox’ Priests Surfaced as Ukrainian Catholics?
This information, incredible as it seems, was revealed this past week by Father Andriy Chirovsky, pastor of St. Michael Ukrainian Catholic Church in Tucson and founder of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at St. Paul University … Continue reading
What Is Christendom?
The question posed by the title of this article was asked several of us by our august editor. Its immediacy is reinforced by the season of Christmas – which, despite being under sporadic attack by “holiday” partisans, centers on the … Continue reading
More on the Battle of Warsaw / General Fuller’s Insights
While recently reading some of G.K. Chesterton’s written reflections in 19271 shortly after his return from his invited April-May visit to Poland, and then also some of his more abiding insights about the plight and character of Poland almost a … Continue reading
Hope of the Half-Defeated
Especially after witnessing my German wife’s unlooked-for response very late the other night while (and moreso after) I read aloud to her for the first time G.K. Chesterton’s short essay, “Two Words from Poland,”1 I am now even more confident … Continue reading
Maniacal Tyrant and Genocidal Murderer Mao ZeDong
AsiaNews; The 20th century saw three great political myths. The myths of Hitler and Stalin have been annihilated, but the myth of Mao Zedong still haunts China today. It won’t be hard to give a comprehensive evaluation of Mao Zedong, so … Continue reading
Clearing the Mind of Cant
G.K. Chesterton’s concluding words in his earnest 1936 essay “About Voltaire” were forcefully compact and sudden and yet, at first, a little too compressed for my immediate understanding, even though I had read those words more than once before: namely, … Continue reading
Jerusalem, Jerusalem
Virtually the instant I saw that Spain’s Queen Isabella the Catholic was the subject of an excellent article by Eleonore Villarrubia recently posted on the SBC website, I thought of Christopher Columbus. This was natural. Though history is largely unknown … Continue reading