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“In the culture, if you stand for virtues and principles and morals, you are far right,” went a Facebook post I stumbled upon. “In the Church, if you are devout and follow ‘all’ of the teachings of the Church, you are rigid. Got that?” Not untrue, though I’d want to qualify both claims. The second sentence is the one that interests me here. It may be meant for encouragement or for virtue-signaling. In either case, the question to be answered is what “follow the teachings” means. It has more possible meanings than we might think, and some of those deceive us into thinking we’re doing better than we are. A Catholic can follow without following. Does it mean follow as in following a legal commitment? The kind of thing almost everyone does when they hit “agree” to the pages and pages-long lega...

Listen to this story: ROME – Security around the Vatican is on high alert after a renegade vehicle sped erratically towards St. Peter’s Square and broke through police barricades just before the pope’s noontime Angelus address on Sunday. At around 10 a.m., just two hours before Pope Francis was scheduled to appear for the weekly Angelus, a gray BMW was seen swerving at high speed down the Via della Conciliazione, the main street leading up to St. Peter’s Square. Police stationed near the square shouted and motioned to the car in an attempt to get it to stop. However, the car continued veering up the street and then turned and drove along the lefthand colonnade, eventually turning into the Piazza Sant’Uffizio, where tourists were lined up doing security checks and stopping at cafés prior to...

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Jun 21, 2022 Sadly for Catholics today, most of us have friends or family members who have chosen to leave the Catholic Church and worship instead at a Protestant church of some sort, or no church at all. By far the most common cause of this is marriage issues. Catholics may marry outside the Church to escape a failed marriage which has not been annulled, and so they need either a “Christian” church which permits divorce, or a Justice of the Peace. Alternatively, a Catholic who marries a non-Catholic may think it important to worship together as a family, but finds that this must be done at the non-Catholic’s church because the non-Catholic is not willing to worship as a Catholic. Alternatively, the cause could be moral, as someone...

In St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the training manual of authentic Jesuit spirituality and the most influential retreat program in the history of the Church, the founder of the Society of Jesus has us meditate on “Two Standards” — two flags or military banners — under one of which we must choose to march and fight. One flag is Lucifer’s, the other Christ’s.  Lucifer offers a life of riches, worldly honor and pride, as a prelude to other vices. Christ promises, in respective contrast, spiritual poverty, being hated and humility, which induce to other virtues. St. Ignatius instructs us to make the meditation four times and to beg Our Lady to intercede with Jesus for the grace to be received under his standard and to live in communion with his virtues.  The purpose of...

Whale skeletons stand guard around the coastline of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, a stark reminder of the damaging effects of military sonar. Sonar from ships and submarines is thought to be one of the contributing factors to whale strandings, confusing the whales’ own sonar and casuing them to beach themselves on the shore. This whale-unfriendly technology, however, may soon have a rival. Lori Adornato, a project manager at US military research agency Darpa, believes we could detect submarines by paying more attention to natural sound than blasting out pulses of sonar. “At the moment we treat all this natural sound as background noise, or interference, which we try to remove,” says Adornato. “Why don’t we take advantage of these sounds, see if we can f...

Hey everybody, The U.S. Church’s Eucharistic Revival has officially begun, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post. I hope your parish had a cool Eucharistic procession on the feast of Corpus Christi this weekend, and that you got to be a part of it. But whatever that procession looked like, it was probably not as cool as this procession in the Archdiocese of Mobile: Credit: The Catholic Week, Archdiocese of Mobile. The Eucharistic Revival is a three-year process aimed at renewing Eucharistic faith among American Catholics, which began Sunday with a year-long diocesan phase of the project. We’ll have a lot of coverage of revival related stuff in the weeks – and even years – to come. Meanwhile, if your parish is anything like mine, programs like VBS or Totus Tuus might also b...

After World War II, religion in Europe was declining, and the Catholic Church turned to architecture for a fresh start: Out with the gilt and the traditional symbology, in with the concrete and glass. advertisement advertisement In an upcoming book, British photographer Jamie McGregor Smith tells the story of these little-known modernist churches, which were built in the 1960s and ’70s. Titled Sacred Modernity, the book, which is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, features striking images of over 50 Catholic churches in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and England. The collection is an ode to concrete and modernist architecture, but it also nods to the important role that architecture played in the Catholic Church’s mission to bring people back to the church. Church of Santa Maria Imm...