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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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The Next Pope? It’s Complicated

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, February 24, 2025

high-placed Cardinal complained this past week that some people – particularly some traditional Catholics – are hoping that Pope Francis will die. There are such Catholics, and their open disrespect for the successor of Peter, whatever his record, is simply wrong. But the way that they and the whole world take notice when the Pope of Rome may be exiting this mortal life to be replaced by another head of a Church that numbers nearly 1.4 billion members indicates that, despite all the problems and outright failures of Christianity in the modern world, its historic leader (in some ways even for many Protestants) still matters.

At this moment, when the pope is in critical condition, it’s only natural for people to look around and wonder: Who would be the best person to lead the Church as we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century?

It’s an impossible question to answer, and there’s great wisdom in the old Roman phrase Chi entra papa in conclave, esce cardinale (“Who enters a conclave as pope exits as a cardinal.”) There have been just too many “frontrunners” who were never chosen. But if you’re looking for information, the best place is The College of Cardinals Report.

Besides, it’s only seemly to wait until the current occupant of the Chair of Peter has passed on before speculating. But it’s useful – not only for those of us who will live under the next pope but for the next pope himself – to consider not who but what we will need in the next few years. And the simple answer to that question is: It’s complicated.

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Honor, Shame, and Death

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

COSTARD

O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.
I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.

– from Love’s Labours Lost, Act 5, Scene 2

I begin by drawing the reader’s attention to that nearly impossible-to-pronounce and unfamiliar word Shakespeare puts in the mouth of a country bumpkin. Costard is a go-between for swells at the court of Ferdinand, king of Navarre, who have sworn off the company of women. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy, so you can guess how honorably the gentlemen adhere to their oath of chastity.

Oh, and a flap-dragon: Samuel Johnson (in his Dictionary) explains: “a play [game] in which they catch raisins out of burning brandy and, extinguishing them by closing the mouth, eat them.” Great fun, I suppose, especially in a chilly parlor on Christmas Eve. Some fingers were burned; brandy dulled the pain.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus – to make linguistic matters worse – is a hapax legomenon, i.e. a word that appears just once. Hapax legomenon (italicized because it’s Greek) is defined in the Shorter Oxford dictionary this way: “A word, form, etc., of which only one recorded instance is known.” Honorificabilitudinitatibus (an English neologism, so not italicized) appeared originally in Shakespeare’s comedy making it also a coinage. And it means honorableness.

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Gordian Knots and Artful DOGERS

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, February 10, 2025

An ancient Greek legend tells of Alexander the Great confronting the Gordian Knot, which no one could untie. An oracle prophesied that whoever untied it would rule the East. Alexander drew his sword and cut it in half. In another version, the knot was tied around a chariot pole; Alexander slipped the pole out, and that did the trick. Either way, the lesson is: some things don’t yield to the usual approaches. They require a leap to unprecedented measures.

In Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” the archbishop of Canterbury, marveling at Prince Hal’s metamorphosis from youthful carouser to sage ruler says: “Turn him to any cause of policy, / The Gordian knot of it he will unloose.” Words that come spontaneously to mind, though further moves remain to be seen, about the second Trump administration.

Some of our knots required the swift Alexandrian sword: Boys and men in girls’ bathrooms (and sports), surgically disfiguring children, criminal illegals roaming American streets, open borders, DEI racism masquerading as anti-racism, support for gay comic books in Ecuador or LGBT plays in Ireland, and how many other absurdities? There’s no point in administrative or congressional “investigations” into such things. That would be a further waste of time and resources much needed elsewhere. You just stop them and those who did them.

So, Kudos to Trump and DOGE. But now begins the harder part, which calls for a certain finesse.

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‘All Are Punish’d!’ The history and import of ‘Romeo and Juliet’

Written by Brad Miner

Friday, January 31, 2025

The word “plagiarism” comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning “kidnapper.” I’ve known writers who’ve referred to a book or a poem or a play they’ve written as their “baby.” And if somebody had pilfered their text, they’d have considered it tantamount to child abduction.

The word, rendered as plagiary, didn’t find its way into English until the beginning of the 17^th century, specifically in 1601, when dramatist Ben Jonson (author of The Alchemist and Shakespeare’s acquaintance and rival) first used it.

It’s rather like this exchange in Lewis Carroll:

Alice: Well, I must say I’ve never heard it that way before. . .
Caterpillar: I know, I have improved it.

And it captures the attitude of writers in the 17^th and earlier centuries. It wasn’t so much that, say, William Shakespeare stole from Luigi da Porto (1485-1529), or Matteo Bandello (c. 1480–1562), or Arthur Brooke (d. 1563) – all of whom had written earlier versions of a tale of star-crossed lovers. It’s that the Bard of Avon improved them all in his Romeo and Juliet.

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The Angelic Doctor Today

Written by Robert Royal

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

sometimes wonder whether Thomas Aquinas, whose feast is today, hasn’t been ill-served by being so universally praised – and therefore less really read. Please don’t misunderstand. He’s the GOAT (“Greatest of All Time,” in sports parlance) among Christian thinkers. And – except for a few names like Plato and Aristotle – among all human thinkers, period. But in the general decline of culture and its many current perversions, to have once been thought great in that way is now to become a prime target.

When I was young and trying to find my way through the thickets of thought, I had a Catholic-schoolboy’s assumption that Aquinas was, at the very least, someone to be reckoned with. But then you might come across a passage like this in what many might think an authoritative source:

He [Aquinas] does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

That’s from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I wonder if anyone reads it anymore, except for those ensorcelled by Russell’s narrow, mid-20^th-century skepticism cum libertinism.

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A Work of Special Providence

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, January 20, 2025

This is a red-letter day for the United States of America. We come to the end of a deeply divided, often bad-tempered – someone might even say venomous – national contest. The Constitutional order held, the vote was clear, and today there will be yet another peaceful transfer of power between two parties, despite little love for one another.

“Democracy,” in short, did not die.

Anyone who believes that our Constitution is an outdated eighteenth-century document inadequate for dealing with modern conditions – as a recent former president has suggested – might be asked: What, in such contentious circumstances, might have worked better?

At the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, our bishops debated the pros and cons of America’s Constitutional order. But Archbishop James Gibbons, speaking on behalf of his fellow bishops, concluded:  “We consider the establishment of our country’s independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws, as a work of special Providence, its framers ‘building better than they knew,’ the Almighty’s hand guiding them.”

A just judgment, except that the framers – including Charles Carroll, the Maryland Catholic who signed the Constitution – knew quite a lot about how states had succeeded and failed in the past. They did their best in terms of institutional structure, designing a democratic republic, to avoid such disasters on these shores. For the rest, as Franklin famously remarked, it would depend on the people to keep it.

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