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The Romans, as any first-year Latin student can tell you, were in the practice of ending their sentences with verbs. Regina agricolam amat, for example—literally, “The queen the farmer loves.” Unless you are Yoda, however, you would speak this sentence in English this way: “The queen loves the farmer.” (Something tells me this relationship is not going to work out.) In any case, Latin word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, object, verb. In English, word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, verb, object. Because Latin nouns are declined—that is, they are assigned distinct endings for how they function in a sentence—it is easy to identify the subject and the object. The Church preserves the practice of ending sentences and clauses with the predicate. I...

By Clement Harrold November 8, 2024 We know remarkably little about who the Antichrist will be and what his arrival on the earth will look like. The very word antichrist only appears in four verses of Scripture, all of them in the Johannine epistles: 1 John 2:18, 1 John 2:22, 1 John 4:3, and 2 John 7. The author of these epistles clearly expects his readers to already have some background knowledge of what kind of creature the Antichrist is supposed to be, since he presents the concept without introduction: “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour” (1 Jn 2:18). This fits with what we know about ancient Jewish theology more generally, which included an anti-messianic figure ...

Two blood covered hands were raised up in the dim light as Macbeth walked unsteadily from the chambers of Duncan. “This is a sorry sight,” he says to his wife. A few minutes later, after discussion and debate, Lady Macbeth goes into the chamber and then also emerges, having placed the bloody daggers in the hands of King Duncan’s guards. “My hands are of your colour; but I shame, To wear a heart so white” (2.2). Lady Macbeth, it seems, is ashamed to not have participated more fully in the murder of Duncan; in fact, she had said previously that she only failed to kill him because he reminded her of her own father. Nevertheless, she is co-guilty of this murder. She and her husband have pursued the inverse of what man and woman are called to in marriage. Rather than co-create, as man and woman...

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio – articles – email ) | Nov 02, 2024 Commonweal Magazine turned 100 years old this year! Can you believe it? Do you care? I don’t blame you if you don’t care. Those of us who read (or write for) Catholic Culture are not exactly Commonweal’s target audience. As the New York Times writes in its laudatory piece on Commonweal’s centennial: Commonweal Catholics were educated, liberal-minded and middle-class, and aspired to assimilate into elite culture while bringing their Roman Catholic faith, education and sensibility with them. I don’t know that many of us identify as liberal or aspire to “assimilate into elite culture.” And I’m guessing a lot of us might question to what extent the dissident writers of Commonweal actually did bring “their Roman Catholic fa...

VATICAN CITY — One of the persistent criticisms of the final assembly of the Synod on Synodality has been that, despite its frequent emphasis on listening and dialogue, several relevant and important voices went unheard. In his final assessment of the synod, George Weigel identified some of these voices as happily married couples, Catholic educators resisting today’s “woke” culture, and healthcare professionals living a culture of life. But another group conspicuous by its absence were those faithful who value the traditional liturgy and apostolic tradition — a small but flourishing group both in terms of vocations and Church attendance but currently the subject of sweeping Vatican restrictions since Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes. During the worldwide consultation ph...