Center

Editor’s Note: At a recent faculty meeting day, a lunch conversation about how to divide and name different periods of history led to Lucas Lopes, Freshman Core teacher, inviting Lionel Yaceczko to give the following talk to his class as they were studying the period between the Roman Empire and Medieval Christendom. In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved ...

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio – articles – email ) | Jan 23, 2020 Catholic parishes, dioceses, and the entire Church are pro-life. We love life, or so we say. Yet it is common for some (priests and laity) to warn priests to avoid preaching about abortion because “the people already know what the Church teaches” and “you’re preaching to the choir.” So in evading this hot-button issue, what should priests emphasize? “The love of God” is the most common reply. But don’t Catholics also know that God loves them? Others argue that abortion is a political issue and priests have no business dabbling in politics. Of course, wise churchmen respect the rights of the laity to make their own prudential judgments in the political arena. After all, beyond their citizen status, the clergy usuall...

For various reasons, people we know and love will either walk away from the Catholic faith, or have never been given the fullness of the truth in the first place. In either case, our hearts might ache that this person has not embraced the saving power of Jesus’ love and compassion. While we should do all that we can to provide an inspiring example for them to follow, sometimes all we can do is pray and hope that God will lead them home. Here is a prayer from a manual of prayers published in 1851 that beautifully represents our desires and cries out to God for help. O divine and adorable Savior, thou who art the way, the truth, and the life, I beseech thee to have mercy upon N., and bring him [or her] to the knowledge and love of thy truth. Thou, O Lord, knowest all his darkness, his weakne...

In these early weeks of “ordinary” time, we are being introduced to Jesus and the beginnings of His public ministry. Matthew’s Gospel today describes how Jesus began His public ministry in the wake of the arrest of John the Baptist. Matthew tells us four things about Jesus’ ministry: its context, its content, its call, and its comprehensiveness. Let’s look at each in turn. The CONTEXT – When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what had been said through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwel...

“This is it for me,” she declared in the pages of New York magazine just seven years ago. “I am a free spirit. I do not know any other way to be. No one else seems to live as I do. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.” Elizabeth Wurtzel died last week, of cancer. She was only 52. She’d come to fame at 27, writing the story of her struggles with depression in the big best-seller Prozac Nation. She continued writing confessional articles and books. She spoke openly about her problems, but in a way that revealed she didn’t really know what her problems were. Chief among them was her idea, her silly, cheap, foolish idea, that she was a free spirit with a pure heart, and that made everything all right. A One-Night Stand of a Life Hers was a typical delusion of our age. One few...

When Joseph Heinrichs fled Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Germany, he thought he was escaping persecution. He didn’t know that shortly after being ordained a Franciscan priest and taking the religious name Leo, he would be shot because of one man’s hatred for the Catholic faith. Fr. Leo Heinrichs initially served at various places in New York and New Jersey, but in 1907 he was assigned to St. Elizabeth’s parish in Denver, Colorado. According to the parish website, “When Fr. Leo Heinrichs, O.F.M., became pastor of St. Elizabeth’s on September 23rd, 1907, Denver’s poor learned they had a friend in the pastor of St. Elizabeth’s, and every morning a line formed at the friary gate.” He was a holy priest, a shepherd who cared deeply about the people he served, especially the poor and working...

A small but intense drama unfolded last week in the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, Virginia. Thanks largely to the graciousness of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia, the matter was resolved in the least painful way possible. Even so, it warrants a few words of reflection. The Episcopal diocese was seeking a large, convenient venue for the upcoming consecration of Rev. Susan Haynes as bishop. The diocese asked for permission to use the spacious parish of St. Bede Catholic Church in Williamsburg for the rites. The parish pastor and the Catholic bishop of Richmond, Barry Knestout, granted permission. This sparked a backlash from many lay Catholics, who were distraught by the news that a Catholic parish planned to host the consecration of an Episcopalian bishop (a woman, as it happened...

California has been at the vanguard of family change in America. Culturally and legally—from the Human Potential Movement to the passage of no-fault divorce under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, from Hollywood movies and shows like “The Graduate” and “Friends”—the Golden State has played a central role in pioneering and representing the cultural attitudes that have transformed marriage and family life across the nation. Indeed, because of Hollywood’s, and now Silicon Valley’s, outsized influence on the global stage, California has amplified values and virtues like expressive individualism, personal fulfillment, and tolerance across the world. These liberal values and virtues can be valuable in the public square, yet they often stand in tension with stable, married family life. In fact, scholars h...

Washington D.C., Jan 22, 2020 / 04:53 pm (CNA).- U.S. President Donald Trump will address the national March for Life in person on Friday, making him the first president in the event’s 47-year history to do so, organizers announced. “See you on Friday…Big Crowd!” the president said Wednesday in a retweet of a video from last year’s march, posted by the national March for Life account. Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, said in a statement that the organizers of the Washington, D.C., event are “deeply honored” to welcome Trump to the march. “He will be the first president in history to attend and we are so excited for him to experience in person how passionate our marchers are about life and protecting the unborn,” she said. She also praised the efforts Trump and his adminis...

My family spent Christmas back in my hometown, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Some of us took a pilgrimage of sorts to visit ancient and medieval art in New York City and Yale University’s Art Gallery in New Haven. Connecticut may seem an odd location, but a team from Yale helped to excavate the Roman colony of Dura-Europos in Syria in the 1930s. They discovered the oldest extant church in the world, including frescoes that date back to around the 230s AD. At the Dura-Europos exhibit at Yale We know the location of other ancient house churches, but many of them gave way for larger construction after the legalization of the Church. Dura-Europos, however, was abandoned in 256 during a siege from the Persians. The house church, near a tower along the city walls, was back filled to bolster the fort...

During my recent bout with the flu I had the chance to re-read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy. One of the criticisms of the books is that they are uneven, dull at times, confusing and disjointed. On re-reading I realize much of that was intentional. Waugh was showing the reality of war. I’ve also been reading more church history–both George Weigel’s’ recent book The Irony of Modern Catholic History and Tom Holland’s Dominion-How the Christian Revolution Changed the World. Both books on church history are a reminder of one of my main punching points–that crisis in the church is what church history is all about. From the beginning the church has been engaged in a knock down, knuckle to chin battle. That’s the default setting. From the start and in every a...

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Jan 17, 2020 When my children were young and played games together, my younger daughter sometimes infuriated the others when, after she had lost a game, she would declare: “In my mind, I won.” She wasn’t completely serious, but she certainly frustrated the winners. But wait: We live in a society in which a great many people do the same thing and believe it. This frustrates me, too. I am referring not to games but to life. We live in an era in which people seem to think that reality is whatever the make up in their own heads, and that they are really winning when they make extraordinarily bad choices. Willfulness—even if it often arises from a herd mentality—is rampant. It seems that we may believe whatever we want (at least as long...