Left

There is an old spiritual that says, “My God is so high you can’t get over Him. He’s so low you can’t get under Him. He’s so wide you can’t get around Him. You must come in, by and through the Lamb.” It’s not a bad way of saying that God is “other.” He is beyond what human words can describe, beyond what human thoughts can conjure. On the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity we do well to remember that we are pondering a mystery that cannot fit in our minds. A mystery, though, is not something wholly unknown. In the Christian tradition, the word “mystery” refers to (among other things) something that is partially revealed, something much more of which remains hidden. As we ponder the Trinity, consider that although there are some things we can know by revelation, much more is beyond our understa...

Hadley Jo Lange and her faithful service dog, Ariel, are the best of friends. (Courtesy of Heather Lange) A 7-year-old and her service dog were featured side by side in the yearbook of St. Patrick Catholic School in Louisville, Kentucky, highlighting a message of kindness and inclusion. A sweet story recently got my attention — maybe you saw it, too: A 7-year-old and her service dog were featured side by side in the yearbook of St. Patrick Catholic School in Louisville, Kentucky. I spoke this week with Hadley Jo Lange’s mother, Heather, about the special bond her daughter has with her faithful labradoodle, Ariel, who has assisted Hadley, who has epilepsy, for the past four years. Ariel is always on guard to alert Heather and the Lange family when Hadley experiences a seizure. Heather says ...

Most famous outside the Church for his line “and always keep ahold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse,” Hilaire Belloc wrote dozens of books of history, memoir, theology, travel and pilgrimage, and politics, as well as many novels and poems. He briefly served in Parliament as well. He was born in France in 1870 (his newly widowed mother moved the family to England when he was five) and died in 1953.  With his friend G. K. Chesterton, he was one of the major public intellectuals of his day. Among his greatest accomplishments was his demolition of H. G. Wells’ progressive fantasy, the best-selling Outline of History. With Chesterton, he developed a distinctive political and economic system they called Distributism, which was neither socialist nor capitalist, and desired ...

Vatican Officials Arrest London Property Broker for Extortion and Money Laundering Gianluigi Torzi is being charged by Vatican prosecutors with several counts of “extortion, embezzlement, aggravated fraud and money laundering,” the Holy See said, noting that the crimes Vatican Law provides for sentences of up to twelve years imprisonment for such crimes. VATICAN CITY — The Holy See press office announced Friday that Italian businessman Gianluigi Torzi has been arrested after he was interrogated as part of a Vatican financial investigation. Torzi played a crucial role in the controversial purchase of a London property development by the Secretariat of State. “Today the Office of the Promoter of Justice of the Vatican Court, at the end of the interrogation of Mr. Gianluigi Torzi, who was ass...

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Jun 02, 2020 | In Scripture Series By a “remarkable coincidence”, I am taking up the Book of Revelation as the final topic in my series on the books of the Bible. The coincidence is that this book, also called The Apocalypse, is of course the last book written that is the revealed Word of God. Penned by St. John near the end of his life, it is the final piece of Divine Revelation, which closed with the death of this last of the apostles. As the name suggests, this revelation to St. John for the Church concerns itself with the consummation of all things, including the end of the world. It is therefore a prolonged exhortation to prepare for God’s judgment. The book is written in the striking symbolic imagery of the apocalyptic genre,...

Six or seven centuries “are like an evening gone” when tracing the course of common sense, and so James Madison found no anachronism in conjuring the shades of Juvenal and Cleon, more than six centuries apart, to make a point about the perils of the right and wrong manipulation of human will. He asked with Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The dilemma—“Who will guard the guardians?”—was the same dilemma that conflicted the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war when their better instincts for peace were compromised back in the fifth century B.C. by the seductive propaganda of Cleon. In this thesis, Madison was joined by Hamilton and Jay in The Federalist Papers, which were not expected to be the daily reading of farmers and merchants, but which could easily be understood by them...

A person holds an anti-racism poster in Washington in 2018. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn) The son of two professors, his father a minister and himself a professor, Matthew Hawkins was as respectable a man as you could find. He’d finished teaching one nice spring evening and decided to walk to a store a couple miles away. On the walk back, he wrote, “A police car pulled up, and the officer ordered me to spread eagle across the trunk of his car because, he said, a burglary had just been committed in the area.” The policeman’s aggression so startled him that he froze. “I can’t do this,” he thought. Some of his students might see him lying there like a suspect. Word would get out, and he wouldn’t be able to stop the rumors that he’d been arrested. “So, I froze. The officer reached for his gun, bec...

Two priests walk by National Guard Soldiers stationed in downtown Boston on Wednesday. (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images) With Cries That Pierce Me to the Heart: A Priestly Testimony of Grief in These Times COMMENTARY: This moment of shared outrage and unified demands for action has so quickly devolved into partisan hatred, venomous blame-game accusations, racial strife and bitter division. Msgr. Charles Pope The death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minnesota police officers is an event that united us all in shock and anger. As a video recording shows, Floyd’s pleas, and those of bystanders, went unheeded by an unmerciful and reckless officer, abetted by three other officers who didn’t intervene. Outrage and sorrow were the universal reaction by people of all political p...

In mid-May, Chinese leader Xi Jinping unveiled a plan to bypass Hong Kong’s legislature and impose draconian new “national security” laws on the former British colony. Putatively intended to defend Hong Kong from “secessionists,” “terrorists,” and “foreign influence,” these new measures are in fact designed to curb the brave men and women of Hong Kong’s vibrant pro-democracy movement, who have been aggravating the Beijing totalitarians for a long time. With the world distracted by the Wuhan virus (which the Chinese government’s clumsiness and prevarication did much to globalize), the ever-more-brutal Xi Jinping regime evidently thinks that this is the moment to crack down even harder on those in Hong Kong who cherish freedom and try to defend it. This latest display of Beijing’s intent to ...

Wow! What a brave nun! A nun in Cincinnati, Ohio made a bold statement in a recent viral video. The video shows the Discalced Carmelite Nun of the Daughters of St. Elias climbing a ladder and spray-painting windows covered in cardboard with two inspiring slogans: “God is love” and “the world will change when hearts change.” She painted while protesters passed the building, which belongs to the sisters who are starting a new community in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati. As of this writing, the video generated almost 360,000 views and more than 5,000 shares. How beautiful! Here’s the video below: Click here if you cannot see the post above.  “The protest was passing and everyone was covering their windows with wood as some had been broken into,” one of the nuns told Church...

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launches on the Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard at Launch Complex 39A May 30 at the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida. (SpaceX via Getty Images) COMMENTARY: Apollo 11 was a much-needed respite amid a time of social and political chaos. “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” That was precisely where three U.S. astronauts went in July 1969, when, for the first time, a human being touched foot on the moon. But this “giant leap for mankind” wasn’t just a great technical triumph. It was a much-needed respite amid a time of social and political chaos. America was already beset by Vietnam and civil-rights struggles. That summer of...