Recent News

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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Popes and POTUS

Written by Brad Miner

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Before he leaves office, Joe Biden will not be meeting with Pope Francis as planned. The Los Angeles wildfires put an end to that – or so we’re told. But the original plan got me curious about such meetings and what they mean. It’s a complex but, at least sometimes, significant history.

If you were to do an Internet search, you’d likely read that the first president to visit a pope was Woodrow Wilson in 1919. That’s not true, not even close, unless you add the modifier sitting. Then, yes, Wilson, who was in Europe after World War I for the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920), was the first “current occupant of the White House” to visit the Apostolic Palace.

A further distinction: some former presidents met with popes (or tried to), and sitting presidents have met with men who would become popes. In this latter category, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli at the president’s Hyde Park home during the future Pius XII’s 1936 visit to the United States. A similar meeting happened in Rome when George W. Bush met with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger at the funeral of John Paul II.

But before the 20^th century, official meetings with a pope in the U.S. would have been unwelcome had they been possible. No pope had ever crossed the Atlantic until Paul VI’s historic visit to America in 1965. Pope Paul would eventually visit twenty countries and was the first ever to travel outside of Europe. In New York, he met with Lyndon Johnson at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

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Cardinal McElroy and the God of Surprises

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

don’t make any great claim to virtue, but one vice that I’ve (mostly) avoided is the itch to predict the future. Especially around the New Year, when people – even Catholics – despite warnings from Scripture and Jesus Himself (“sufficient to the day”), often offer themselves as prophets, sometimes even something closer to soothsayers. Not only do we make predictions for the next twelve months, lament or exult over what we think is coming, but we recommend new books or diets or exercise programs or spiritual practices. As if human life is – or should be – a rationally manageable, wholly predictable thing.

Life’s a pilgrimage. An adventure. And often, under God, deeply and happily unpredictable.

Item: Practitioners of the dismal science, which is to say economists, often hedge their bets by saying such and such will happen to the economy “all things remaining equal.” Which of course, they never are.

Item: Lately, “The Science” does things like predict that even small amounts of alcohol may give you cancer in some far-off future, unless a meta-analysis this year or the next questions those findings and may even recommend a drink or two.

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