I can’t believe I am about to defend Mother’s Day – I who dislike being fussed over and think of the occasion mainly as the day I’m going to be forced to stand and feel conspicuous in the middle of Mass.
Nevertheless, I’ve seen some attacks on Mother’s Day from strange quarters over the years, beginning about 20 years ago when I went to greet a priest friend after Mass and overheard him being reamed out by some lady telling him he had no business speaking about mothers in...
In January the Sundance Film festival “canonized” the work of late term abortionists in the United States, and gushed unbounded praise and admiration for their heroic “care of women.” The centerpiece of this hagiographic exercise was the documentary film “After Tiller,” by directors Lana Wilson and Martha Shane. The movie uncritically portrays the lethal practice of four late term abortionists: Warren Hern, who performs late-term abortions in Boulder, Colo.,...
On May 13, 1917, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared for the first time to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. She shone radiantly before those whom the world initially took no notice – as the Mother of God tends to do – during a year that also saw the rise of Soviet communism and the horrors of World War I. Brutalities inflicted by Russian Bolsheviks and trench warfare, however, only further underscored the Fatima message – the need to pray the Rosary daily and for the...
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a Catholic Frenchman and a reputable historian, visited America in order to study its political, judicial and educational institutions. In the years to follow he wrote a book called, Democracy in America. What he found was that the early Americans took it for granted that a free society depends on an education system which was inspired and managed by local communities. They instinctively knew the dangers of a State-run school system and its effects on...
In 2008 everyone was talking about Barack Obama’s history as a community organizer. Those on the political right wrongly assumed all community organizers were Marxist agitators who simply wanted the government to give people “stuff.” Those on the political left, on the other hand, defended Senator Obama’s former profession by linking it to Jesus Christ, proudly proclaiming that “Jesus was a community organizer” and that Barack Obama was simply following in his footsteps. ...
This has been a custom in the Church dating back many centuries. And it is beautiful to associate Mary with the coming of Spring and the new birth of flowers and plants and crops in the field.
In this special month, in which we will celebrate Christ’s Ascension into Heaven and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, I encourage you to deepen your devotion to Mary.
In the Acts of the Apostles, we see the beautiful image of the early Church united in prayer around “Mary, the mother of...
Gustave Reese, the pre-eminent Medieval and Renaissance musicologist of his day (d 1977), was also famous for striking fear in his students if they came to class unprepared. A simple composition demanded historical and textual analysis with biographical information about its composer. An even closer probe was required into its musical setting and its variants in regional manuscripts. Reese’s students would master the art of interdisciplinary scholarship, or withdraw from his...
One of the most significant fault lines in Western culture opened up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when what we now know as the “modern” world separated itself from the classical and medieval world. The thinking of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Newton, Jefferson, and many others represented a sea change in the way Western people looked at practically everything. In almost every telling of the story, this development is presented as an unmitigated good. I rather...
You can tell from the title that this column will border on the frivolous, but given the tragedies our nation experienced last month, which still leave open wounds, I thought that a brief treatment of a light topic may be appropriate.
If you’re a person of a certain age who listened to radio in the ‘70s, or are younger but have heard your parents play those “oldies,” you may be familiar with the group Captain & Tennille. The star was Toni Tennille, a tall, thin, perky singer whose...
The following post is written for those working parents who have the option of having one parent stay home with their children. There are, however, countless parents who do not enjoy this luxury. Due to financial necessity, there are many households where both parents need to work in order to pay the bills. Yet, there is a real temptation nowadays to define luxuries as “needs” in order to justify two incomes. Whether or not married couples have to finance real or perceived needs, there...
