The Narthex

As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you (Isaiah 62:5). The Church reads this passage twice -- every year at the Christmas Vigil Mass and early in Ordinary Time of Year…

If you own a home, how many guests do you have to welcome? Most normal people would say, “As many or as few a I want. There is no obligation to have guests.” If you asked those people, “And how many of those guests should be allowed to move in…

With the new year comes a new session of the Virginia Legislature, and job one of the Democrat-dominated chambers this week is writing a pro-abortion amendment into the state constitution. H.J. Res. 1 and S.J. Res. 247 will likely hit the floor in at least the lower chamber this week;…

The Second Sunday of Advent’s Second Reading makes an observation all too often lost (since homilists rarely preach on the Second Reading) about the Divine-human dynamic in the good men do. In the text, St. Paul expresses confidence “that the one who began a good work in you will continue…

During Advent, the Church uses two different Prefaces at Mass: one for most of Advent, the other for Advent’s last nine days. We have two because their foci are different: Advent Preface I looks forward to Christ’s Second Coming at the end of history, while Advent Preface II shifts back,…

Ten states recently voted on abortion referenda: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Six referenda legalizing abortion-on-demand passed; three failed (Florida, Nebraska, South Dakota). One (Nevada) passed but cannot go into effect unless passed in a second referendum. How shall we see the…

Germans are currently debating whether to lift their country's ban on donating female eggs. Germany and Luxembourg are the two EU countries that ban the practice. Can we donate the building blocks of human beings? If so, can we donate the humans themselves? Last April, The New York Times ran…

Following the Fall, the human reaction was to hide from God. When God calls to the man and the woman, the man announces he is hiding, ostensibly because of his nakedness -- which he also was before he sinned -- but really because of the guilt sin unleashed. It unleashed…

We need to change the subject in discussions about retirement from the economic (in)solvency of Social Security to the meaning and significance of retirement. My thoughts on this were sparked by a new book by Teresa Ghilarducci titled Work, Retire, Repeat. Her argument is that many people are working past…

Last Sunday’s readings focused on the unity of the moral life, the common thread connecting the readings. Because some clergy might have been inclined to focus on the “heart,” on the intention of the moral agent, let’s take a step back and see all the readings in one big picture.…

August 14 is the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe, martyr. Kolbe, a 47-year old Polish Franciscan, gave his life in substitution for another man in Auschwitz’s starvation bunker. To recap: Kolbe was arrested by the German occupiers of Poland in February 1941 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In…

Vatican II talked about the Church in dialogue with the modern world. Some of us have wondered whether that dialogue has been largely one-sided, i.e., modernity talking and the Church listening. One hopes the dialogue also would proceed in the other direction, to a world largely convinced of its rightness…

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his important book After Virtue, suggests what the world needs today is “another -- doubtless very different -- Saint Benedict.” Some might argue that Pope Benedict XVI was that new “Benedict” speaking to the modern world. I’d like to suggest what the world needs today is a…

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Celebrated in the midst of summer, it perhaps gets short shrift from many Catholics. Catholics more regularly are reminded of the Transfiguration each year on the Second Sunday of Lent, when we read of it in one of the three Synoptic Gospels. It’s…

Describing the “den of infamous resort” where Old Joe, Mrs. Dilber, and others haggled over things pilfered from the possessions of Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens called that “beetling shop” a place where “iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal were bought. Upon the floor within were piled up heaps…