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The Seed Beneath the Snow

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, May 5, 2025

I have a confession to make: the past dozen years ruined Rome for me. And it’s my own fault. I suppose it was inevitable that someone who got drawn into the multitudinous labors of the Papal Posse would begin to feel that Rome itself had become an unpleasant task. All the controversy and confusion started to eclipse “the grandeur and the glory.” But Rome has a way of surviving everything that threatens to obliterate it. And I expect that this week’s Conclave will demonstrate once again, above and beyond all personal and passing episodes, that indestructible, historical truth.

Rome is a city that doesn’t so much see history pass through as it accumulates much of what’s important to our race. As Chesterton noticed when he visited here in 1929, people talk about the City founded on seven hills but forget that it, therefore, also has seven valleys that have become an “inexhaustible store of superimposed cultures and closely packed secrets of the past ; the sense of a place being mined for all the gold of human and divine glories ; brought up for ever out of an abyss of abundance, the depth and the richness of Rome.”

This makes it the scene of both endless endings and boundless beginnings. The prospect of what may come after the dozen Francis years and in the years and centuries to come has gotten me thinking about my own long (humanly speaking) relationship to this city. In 1978, I spent a year – mostly idling, though with intent – on scholarship in Florence. But it was also the year that Pope Paul VI died, and we saw his funeral – as well as the election of two subsequent popes, John Paul I and, more consequentially, John Paul II. It was also the year that Ignazio Silone, a forgotten but seminal and internationally award-winning Italian writer, passed on to his own reward.

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Mercy, Mercy, Mercy

Written by Robert Royal

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Yes, even the title of the popular song said it three times. But that’s virtually nothing compared to the repetitions of the word, over and over, during and after the papal funeral in Rome these days, by commentators, lay and clerical alike, as if it were a recent and novel discovery by Pope Francis. And as if the day after the funeral (Divine Mercy Sunday) had not been instituted by St. John Paul II in 2000, a full quarter century previously. Or his encyclical Dives in Misericordia (“Rich in Mercy”) had not been issued in 1980, two decades before that.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re used the term multiple times in his homily for the Requiem Mass. The Cardinal also preemptively canonized the just departed pope by asking him to pray for us: “May you bless the Church, bless Rome, and bless the whole world from heaven.” Not even a brief stop in Purgatory.

Of course, discussions are already underway as to what the next pope will need to be and do. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, for instance, the Vatican Secretary of State under Pope Francis – to some observers a strong contender to succeed Francis – is saying, very publicly, that the Church needs to continue Francis’ legacy of “mercy.” (I myself believe that Cardinal Parolin will have a steep climb to the papacy, though he’s trying very hard, after his disastrous, still “secret” accord with Communist China, which has been anything but a mercy to Chinese Catholics.)

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Francis, Mercy, and Truth

Written by Robert Royal

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Scientists say that, when a strong earthquake occurs, it sometimes causes the rotation of the earth to shift slightly, even minutely changing the shape of the planet and the length of a day. By contrast, it often seems that the Catholic Church and the papacy in these latter days have a weak and not always helpful influence around the globe. But when Pope Francis died yesterday, it was impossible not to notice that, over and beyond all the journalistic chatter, the passing of a pope still shakes up the world. Even the deeply secular, often anti-Catholic news outlets see that.

This papal interregnum is a special time for Catholics to think and act, like Catholics. In the next days, it would be an exceptionally good spiritual discipline, for example, to ignore what most of the secular media have to say in praise or criticism of the pope and to reflect deeply on God’s presence in his Church through time and the particular role he has assigned to the successors of Peter. Not all of them were admirable men. Some were not even very Christian. A few were wise. Fewer truly great. But all of them belong to a spiritual order of reality that transcends the usual categories by which we measure world leaders.

Yes, you can, of course, try to apply political criteria to a pope. But it mostly leads to superficiality and foolishness. The notion, for instance, that conservatives opposed Francis while progressives loved him for his critiques of capitalism and advocacy of migrants and the environment – by the way, also major concerns of the “conservative” pope John Paul II (see Centesimus Annus) and Benedict XVI (in particular Ratzinger’s beautiful book In the Beginning) – is preposterous. That’s the kind of characterization that lazy journalists who see everything through simplistic political lenses use to fill up empty space.

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Highway to Heaven: ‘Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality’

Written by Brad Miner

Monday, April 21, 2025

Why the God-Man?

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, April 14, 2025

Most Christians – though far from all, in the current decay of education of all kinds, including religious education – know that the events we commemorate this week have had the most wide-ranging effects of anything that has happened in the entire history of the human race. And beyond, into the next world. Anyone, Christian or not, who looks back in time without a jaundiced eye, has to recognize that the Christian revolution has touched virtually everything. And that this has been a blessing as well as – not a curse, but an obstacle, in more recent times to appreciating just how great a change God-become-man introduced into the world.

Because when people assume they know the plot and the outcome of the Christian story, they take it for granted, as something that’s just the everyday background. They believe that it has existed always and everywhere. And that whatever is good in it has already been integrated into human life and doesn’t need particular attention any longer. Tom Holland, a “cultural Christian” and (probably, though he seems to be wavering) not a believer, traces this whole process in his remarkable book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Without Christ: no acknowledgment of human freedom or dignity, no transcendence of the merely political, no spread of Jewish monotheism (nor the Christian heresy we call Islam), no end to slavery, no respect towards women, ad infinitum.

By the end, Holland identifies so many things in our world with origins in Christianity that you almost want to pull him up short and ask, “Wait a minute, friend, aren’t there things we value that have come from outside the Christian tradition?”

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Lessons from the Garden

Written by Brad Miner

Monday, April 7, 2025

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

My journey into the Roman Catholic faith began in Rome a long time ago. I was a 20-year-old college student, in Europe for the first time in the summer of 1968. I took the overnight train from Paris, found a room in a small pensione, and began wandering.

At Ponte Sant’Angelo I crossed the Tiber. (As a Methodist kid from Ohio, I did not then know that expression of Catholic conversion.) I turned west to the Piazza Pia and shortly came to the Via della Conciliazione and glanced to the right to see St. Peter’s.

That was not the moment I decided to enter the Catholic Church, but I did enter the basilica. Inside, I turned right and saw Michelangelo’s Pietà. This was four years before a Hungarian kook named Laszlo Toth took a geologist’s hammer to the sculpture, specifically to Our Lady’s nose. I found the Pietà beautiful, luminously so. But I found the interior of the basilica overwhelming and, frankly, garish. After all, I was a Methodist.

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The Leopard, the Mafia, and Us

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, March 24, 2025

“NUNC et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death. . .”

So begins the celebrated modern Italian novel, Il Gattopardo – in English, The Leopard, though the animal in question is, accurately translated, the “ocelot.” But that name wouldn’t have adequately conveyed the grandeur of the protagonist, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an imposing Sicilian nobleman, as the island is being invaded in the 1860s and absorbed into the emerging nation of Italy.

That the author, himself the Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, thought to place the passing of the old monarchic order and birth of a new one amid those large realities in the Ave, however, is noteworthy. I know of no other significant work of fiction that starts in a similar way. And it’s even more surprising in that Lampedusa wasn’t an especially Catholic writer, though he was an admirer of novelists like Graham Greene and, in complex ways, several Christian currents in history.

The greatest Italian Catholic novel, and perhaps the greatest Catholic novel ever, is Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, a book on the order of War and Peace.

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You Will Be Hated by All Nations

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, March 10, 2025

In just the past few days, hundreds of Christians have been murdered, raped, and tortured in Syria. When news outlets even notice what’s happening – yesterday’s New York Times only carried an “update” of a previous article and the Washington Post’s latest story on the massacres appeared Friday – they usually only mention the attacks on “civilians” or Alawites, the Islamic sect followed by the al-Assad family, the former rulers of Syria. It’s true that Syrian Christians are caught up in the larger political turmoil in their homeland. But like Christians around the world, it’s also true that they are being killed and persecuted specifically because of their faith.

I’m more than a little sensitive to injustices like these because my book The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century will be published in a few weeks. Anyone who looks systematically at what’s been happening to Christians in the first quarter of our century – and not only in the Middle East, Africa, China, and the Far East, but even in our once Christian “West” – cannot help but be shocked. By quite sober estimates, something like 300 million Christians worldwide are under threat.

This book is something of a sequel to my Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, which responded to Pope John Paul II’s request that, as part of the celebrations of the 2000 Jubilee Year, the Church remember the martyrs of the previous century. He organized an inspiring event at the Colosseum on May 7, 2000, where representatives of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox, and Protestants told their martyrs’ stories. I gave the pope a copy of my book that morning.

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Can Art Save the Artist?

Written by Brad Miiner

Saturday, March 8, 2025

say, “Yes!”

The better question may be, however: Can a bad person make it to Heaven? The Lord alone knows that answer. One suspects, however, that this is why Purgatory exists.

There is the matter of repentance, of course: the notion, as expressed by Lord Illingworth in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance: “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

I want to explore this in what we know about the lives of two great Catholic painters: Duccio and Caravaggio.

I would jump for joy were it possible to know that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio(1571-1610) rests in the bosom of Abraham. Despite his many sins, which included murder, Caravaggio left a legacy of sacred art that puts him in the company of the more famous Michelangelo, Rubens, and a few other Catholic artists, none of whom has been canonized, declared venerable, or become blessed – except for Fra Angelico.

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Lent and the Back of Beyond

Written by Robert Royal

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

The Cloud of Unknowing is probably the most popular mystical treatise in English, a sort of bestseller when it was written in the 1300s (when England was still Catholic), often republished over centuries, and a favorite of recent, highly discerning figures like C.S. Lewis. It’s also unique (in my estimation) in that its author (an unknown monk) discourages people from taking up his book: “nor allow another to do so, unless you really believe that he is a person deeply committed to following Christ perfectly.”

So as Lent begins today, if you’re finding your prayers and spiritual practices in need of a fresh injection of life, here’s a great place to start – with the author’s own caution.

I often hear these days that Lent is not about “giving something up.” I’m no one’s idea of a spiritual guide, but absent other considerations it’s clear that this is a half-truth. The Christian life is about giving up many things – not as an end in itself, as if created goods are bad – but in order to make room, as it were, for greater goods and a different order in body, mind, and spirit. There are many resources in the tradition to guide us through both concrete penances and deeper practices.

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