The Narthex

Sr. Ardeth Platte, OP, was my first, and best, academic boss. I was teaching part-time at St. Joseph Elementary School in Saginaw, Michigan. (Have you heard the song about Saginaw?) My wife Elizabeth and I were living Saginaw’s public housing project, across from a railroad switching yard. As a conscientious…

Monuments to St. Junípero Serra have been destroyed throughout California. His statues were toppled in Golden Gate Park (San Francisco), Capitol Park (Sacramento), and Serra Park (Los Angeles). Meanwhile, cities and school districts have rebranded buildings named after him and removed his statues from their grounds in an attempt to…

The homeless count in Los Angeles keeps going up. We’re now north of 60,000. About a week ago the Los Angeles Times (Oct. 18) ran a heartbreaking piece on “Suzanna,” a woman who was disoriented, often naked, and sometimes crawled across our famous Sunset Boulevard. Agonizing as the story was,…

In August San Francisco’s Department of Public Health limited the number of attendees at outdoor religious celebrations to 12 people. No indoor gatherings were permitted. This order stood in stark contrast to the city’s guidelines for indoor retail establishments, which were allowed to operate at 25% capacity, and…

In 1970, I arrived in San Marcos, California, on a donated bike -- the end of my ten years on the road in a cross-country penniless ministry. I found a minimum-wage job as an electrical construction estimator at a local company. After working three years, living frugally in a barn…

In California, where bad things often begin, the papers tell us that we are facing a climate apocalypse. The fires are, indeed, horrific. But there’s no turning back from a true apocalypse. Something closer to a true apocalypse awaits us, and we are currently planning to hasten its arrival. Our…

I have written about the “COVID Crisis” before, earning the approval of some and disagreement of others. I remain convinced that the extraordinary measures being taken by governments to deal with it are excessively out of proportion to the real miseries – social, cultural, economic and medical – that they…

Do you have friends who claim to be against abortion but vote for pro-abortion politicians because abortion is “just one issue among many”? Perhaps solid teaching from our shepherds can help convince them otherwise. John Gerard Lewis, author of Catholic Voting and Mortal Sin: How You Vote Can Endanger Your…

I recently heard of giant rats invading city parks. They have thick brown fur, yellow incisors, and flat tails, looking enough like beavers to attract folks who then feed them. These rodents each year bear 12 or more litters that will reproduce after 3 months. They proliferate at…

For many years, when urged to vote for a US president, I’d push back hard. My favorite riposte? “Don’t vote; it just encourages them.” Still, there’s a season for (almost) everything. And who says that a bloke can’t change after he turns 39? Not I, and here’s why. Note: As…

In sorting through the L.A. Times the other day, I came upon an eight-page supplement titled CHINA WATCH. The insert promises “ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.” Caveat Lector: this publication is a product of China Daily, a news vehicle of China’s Communist Party. Indeed, cards on the table, at the…

I cannot confirm this story, try as I might, but I recall that decades ago there occurred one of those sex scandals in the Australian Federal Parliament in which the alleged offender was turned on and savaged from all sides by his virtuous fellows. Until a venerable senior politician (I think…

We are urged to have serious conversations about race, and we should. In this post, gentle reader, I push a bit to make them more serious. Let’s bypass the cant of the major political parties. And let’s be on watch both for numbing inertia and for hijacked populism. Objectivity helps,…

During a Sunday morning walk in my lower middle-class neighborhood, I came across a City employee matching paint for a sidewalk wall which had been marked with graffiti. I asked him, not expecting an answer, “Why do kids do this?” “Maybe to feel important, to mark their territory like a…

The destruction of Edward Colston's statue in the English city of Bristol is perfectly understandable in one sense: slavery is a disgusting institution and the involvement and enrichment of Englishmen in that vile trade was utterly reprehensible. To their credit the British later led the world in the virtual eradication…