The Narthex

Rumor has it that the annual Diocesan Priest Retreat features a lottery. The winner, and only the winner, is allowed to discuss his physical maladies. Such a limitation is not the case for late-septuagenarian bloggers. But I’ll not regale you, gentle reader, with physical maladies. Instead, I beg your indulgence…

Do you remember being nine? As it happens, I don’t much remember being nine. But ten was a big year for me. Golly, I had a Schwinn bike. I weighed 76 pounds. We put up a basketball hoop. The downside of that year was coming down, precociously, with “mono.” Cuidado,…

A respected, and now suspected, newspaper once pledged to give subscribers “All the news that’s fit to print.” Today, that same paper violates its pledge both by commission and omission. Time for a new slogan? Here’s a suggestion: “All the propaganda that will fit.” And yet I read the rag,…

Hannah Arendt contended, and controversially, that the source of what she called “the banality of evil” is that people simply don’t, and won’t, think. The resultant evil is endemic under totalitarian and autocratic regimes. It’s only commonplace under liberal and quasi-democratic and bureaucrat institutions! But this sorry state of affairs…

Though I’d seen billboards for tattoo conventions, I’d never been to one. Then, of a sudden, I was in the middle of one. There it was, in the lobby of the hotel where the American Maritain Association was holding its annual conference. Every day we’re all seeing more tattoos. Pew…

If I were to run the Big City Standard Zoo, it would become a whole lot smaller. Snakes and turtles, birds and bugs would stay. But there’d be no mammals except for “rescues,” and they’d be temporary guests only. Pleased with my zoological reform, I’m emboldened to think big. What…

Some of my best friends are grumpy old men. So the question arises: Can they be saints? Let’s hope so. Keep in mind, gentle reader, that not so long ago a concerned lady, a scholar of note, asked me whether the NOR itself had fallen into the hands of grumpy…

My parish owes heartfelt thanks to visiting priests from Africa. Not long ago, my pastor visited two of them in their home diocese in Uganda. While he was there, a controversy flared up. From what I could tell by parsing the news report, a government official there was levying a…

Last week I had an epistolary exchange with Thomas Aquinas College. It was instructive. It was not, however, inspiring. First came a phone call. I chatted with Mary Block, the Executive Assistant to the Dean, John Goyette. I explained that Peter Sonski, the American Solidarity Party’s presidential candidate, would like…

Speaking in Trieste at a recent event exploring Catholic Social Teaching, Pope Francis remarked, “It is evident that democracy is not in good health in today's world.” He’s right, of course. But it’s not even clear what “democracy” means. As a matter of etymology, democracy is the rule of the…

What happens when you google “spiritual director near me”? You’ll instantly find an assortment of spiritualists and their handy contact information. Not what you are looking for? Better keep looking and look elsewhere. Take your time. A priest friend who is a spiritual director at a Benedictine Abbey says that…

We’re told that it’s for “religious reasons” that someone opposes abortion. And it’s for “religious reasons” that someone opposes euthanasia. So we read in, for example, newspapers of record like the L.A. Times. What we don’t read, of course, is that someone opposes the policy of nuclear deterrence for religious…

The Blaine Amendment of 1875 sought to add the following language to the federal Constitution: “No money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any…

A feisty fellow I knew liked to ask Protestants just what they were protesting. A wise Protestant might answer in terms of a positive protestation, for example, the rule of sola scriptura. A bellicose Protestant, in contrast, might reply “No popery!” Note well: the word “protest” can have either a…

Even Alasdair MacIntyre, among the greatest of living Thomists, thinks that believers might do better to argue from justice rather than to appeal to human dignity. And Harvard’s Steven Pinker writes derisively of the “stupidity of dignity.” Critics admit that the rhetoric of dignity surfaces in the United Nations Universal…