Few topics in the Catholic Church continue to generate as much debate as the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. More than fifty years after its conclusion, Vatican II remains central to discussions about liturgy, Church life, and the decline...
I keep coming back to the same question: Why the dishonesty? I genuinely do not understand how people who hold themselves out as traditional, orthodox, faithful Catholics can be so ruthless in distorting the truth about other Catholics. I cannot...
In 2025 a record forty-five percent of Americans told Gallup they belonged to neither party, the highest share since the pollster began asking in 1988; Democrats and Republicans drew twenty-seven percent apiece. Both major parties now draw unfavorable marks from...
After reading about Bishop Thomas Paprocki’s new funeral restrictions in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, I felt compelled to ask a question on X: “What is it about a certain type of Catholic who wants to strip everything human,...
We are all familiar with the passage from the Book of Habakkuk that seems to have been a favorite of St. Paul (he cites it in three different letters – or four, for anyone who credits the Letter to the...
Pope Leo XIV’s general audience on Wednesday clarified something that many conservative and traditionalist Catholics have been unwilling to face: the pope believes both that the liturgical reform is a good thing and that the reforms carried out following the...
We live in an age increasingly suspicious of objective truth and universal moral authority. In a culture shaped by postmodern thinking, truth can become intensely personal — something determined less by what is true than by what I believe to...
In the summer of 1889, a reporter for the New York Sun went looking for a story in the Italian quarter and found one he did not expect. “During the past few weeks,” he wrote, “dark-featured women, in the garb...
On May 19, 1977, Salvadoran security forces occupied the town of Aguilares, expelled the Jesuits who were ministering there, and took over the parish church — turning it into a barracks. They opened fire on the tabernacle and scattered the...
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenal wrote a phrase destined to outlive the empire that inspired it: panem et circenses — “bread and circuses.” In his Satire X, he denounced how a citizenry that had...
“At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes,...
One of the stranger developments surrounding the illicit Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) episcopal consecrations on July 1 was the sudden outbreak of agreement among Catholics across the spectrum that the Society had gone too far — they had...
