The Narthex

Ideas for essays are sometimes like grace: they come from the most unexpected places. Today’s comes from Facebook, in a post by Scott Hahn about failure. Hahn posted a passage from St. Josemaría Escrivà’s rich book of spiritual aphorisms, The Way. The excerpt (no. 405) deals specifically with failure. “So you…

We see occasional reports that attempt to quantify the number of species that have become extinct over a certain period of years or centuries or millennia. And we see occasional reports identifying various species at risk of extinction. We go to great lengths to save species. Think of the bald…

As we mark the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, I present two thoughts on why Our Lady under the title of the “Immaculate Conception” is the fitting patroness for the United States. First, we Americans continue to fail to reckon with the reality of “conception.” Notwithstanding the reversal of Roe…

“When all things were in quiet silence and night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne” (Wisdom 18, 14-15). Of all the images of Christmas, this is the one that has always thrilled me the…

In a recent post here, I reminisced about the “Committee of Ten Million,” Gil Durand’s 1973 lay initiative to amass ten million petition signatures to be delivered publicly to Congress demanding a Human Life Amendment. Ten million signatures in 1973 would have been about five percent of the U.S. population,…

Fr. Gilligan was a wily American priest who served in the Vatican Diplomatic Corps and saved many lives during the Communist takeover in China. As mentioned previously in this blog series, I must here reply to claims made by Ms. Bibiani Yee-Wing Wong in a past issue of U.S. Catholic…

If you are reading this on Friday, December 1, you have until midnight to act on a pro-life matter. On October 2, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule to change regulations on what can be funded under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)…

I grasped my keys in my coat pocket. Good thing I bought a Honda: their ignition key is nice and long. Among moves that I learned in self-defense was that keys held between one’s index and middle finger can be effectively jabbed into somebody’s eyes, usually long enough to stop…

Last Sunday’s Gospel for the Solemnity of Christ the King is Matthew’s Last Judgment account. I have to admit I’m partial to that text because, prior to the 1969 Calendar Reform that inserted Christ the King as the last Sunday of the liturgical year, there was a kind of eschatological…

The L.A. Times, a newspaper that I love to lambaste, seems to have a crack in its “wokeness wall.” A fresh editorial headline announces that “Students lose when colleges trade humanities for STEM” (Nov. 26). But wait! Science, tech, engineering, and math programs (STEM) now rule the academic roost. Is…

As we marked Thanksgiving last week, my memories reached back 50 years to Thanksgiving 1973. I remember the day well: sunny but chilly. The memory is an opportunity for me to salute a man I never met, Gil Durand. (I think it’s Durand. It might be Durant. He doesn’t come…

Readers will recall that in Part 1 of this series I quoted from Msgr. Breslin’s funeral eulogy for Father Gilligan, telling two short stories about this wily priest-diplomat. His first story concerned foreign missionaries, as related in Part 2. His second story concerned native Chinese. During the Communist takeover of…

Thanksgiving is, for most Americans, a long weekend. Almost all children get out of school on Wednesday and don't return until Monday. Most institutions other than stores and commercial enterprises all take the long weekend. At some point Thanksgiving became something of a segue into the "Christmas season" and --…

It all started in mid-2013 when the archbishop-elect of Hobart, Julian Porteous, asked me if I would help him “raise the profile of the Catholic intellectual tradition” in his new diocese. The cynic might say that raising the profile of something that was below the radar of public awareness wasn’t…

Stage One: The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in Plymouth Colony in 1621. The Pilgrims set out for North America in September 1620. Storms put them off-course during their Atlantic crossing, to land farther north -- off present-day Massachusetts -- than they planned. Finding themselves in a wilderness at the start…