Category: Catholicism

Life in the United States of Amnesia

So we plod along, more or less in the dark, more or less humiliated by the dreary quality of our prayer, our worship  by turns inane and trivial, our sense of the holy vitiated, distracted,…

Good News

The meaning of order is there, but it is precisely its presence that determines the vestigial character of the treatment of it. The reason lies in the fact that the violence of the cultural order…

The Way of Microscopic Actions

I applied myself to practicing little virtues, not having the capability of practicing the great. For instance, I loved to fold up the mantles forgotten by the Sisters, and to render them all sorts of…

A Jesuit’s Advice

Part of the trouble is that so few who walked out landed anywhere. Frying pan to fire; they left the church and the culture swallowed them whole. It seems better, as a rule, to hang…

Today’s One-Liner (#143)

Rigid reactionaries and rigid innovators…have constantly fed on each other, each serving as a bogey which gives the other a certain credibility. –James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, 1972

The Log in My Own Eye

Too conscious and calculating an awareness of all that the “scapegoat” connotes in modem usage eliminates the essential point that the persecutors believe in the guilt of their victim; they are imprisoned in the illusion…

Today’s One-Liner (#142)

For us, the Church is mater et magistra; for dissenters, she is a source of jobs, or Marty Haugen music, or chances for self-display, or political soapboxes, or hiding places, or access to important people,…

Today’s One-Liner (#140)

If we had more genuine religion, we would have less violence. –Rene Girard, in Conversations with Rene Girard: Prophet of Envy, edited by Cynthia L. Haven