Recent News

The Frontline is Everywhere Now

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, August 5, 2024

Anja Hoffmann, whom I met with last week in Vienna, is the director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDAC). In the English-speaking world, the word “observatory” is usually reserved for the science of astronomy. But elsewhere – as is the case for Vienna-based OIDAC and several similar organizations in other countries  – it denotes a kind of permanent and systematic observer, an institution that watches very carefully, and reports about what’s going on. And what OIDAC has observed lately should be shocking, not only to Christians concerned about fellow believers, but for all persons of good will who sense that the tolerant and pluralistic societies that we once inhabited in the West are swiftly slipping away.

OIDAC has recorded noteworthy events, especially in Europe, the historic heartland of Christianity, that are occurring for a couple of reasons.

First, as anyone even vaguely paying attention knows, the large influx of Muslims from Africa and the Middle East has brought the traditional Islamic antagonism towards Christians to the very heart of formerly Christian nations. For instance, we just “celebrated” the martyrdom in July of 2016, of Fr. Jacques Hamel, a French priest who was beheaded by two 19-year-old Muslims radicalized by ISIS propaganda.

Fr. Hamel had a friendly relationship with the local imam who headed the regional Muslim council and it’s unclear why the two teenagers decided to attack him in particular.  He was in his eighties and formally retired, and just happened to be helping out that morning in a small parish in Normandy.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

Built with Faith, Renovated with Doubt: Notre-Dame de Paris

Written by Brad Miner

Saturday, August 3, 2024

If you haven’t been to Paris, you haven’t been to Notre-Dame de Paris, which means you haven’t seen the north Rose Window. That’s it, further down this page.

It was placed in the cathedral in around 1250 A.D. Amazingly and ever-so fortunately, the window survived the fire of April 15, 2019.

As you may know, the great cathedral church of Paris is set to reopen in November – a remarkable turnaround and a testament to modern technology and the generosity of donors from around the world.

Formerly known as the “first daughter of the Church,” France has lately become known for its “zombie Catholics”: nominally of the faith but not truly faithful. And President Emmanuel Macron is Zombie-in-Chief.

His baptism notwithstanding, Monsieur le Président has a right to go his own way, just as Joe Biden has. Kultural Katholicism is a kancer, but that’s a subject for another kolumn.

The European Union was founded in 1993; it’s anti-religious bias has grown year after year and shown no sign of withering away. Then again, neither does the traditional Catholic faith of so many Europeans. Secularism, of course, is the official policy of France, and more-or-less has been ever since Jacobins began lopping off heads in 1789. Many French pride themselves on the nation’s laïcité, which became official in 1905, and constitutional in the Constitution of 1946.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

A Cathedral ot Text and Gesture

Written by Brad Miner

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

One of the axioms of contemporary publicity, religious as well as secular, is that modern man in general, and intellectuals in particular, have become intolerant of all forms of tradition and are anxious to suppress them and put something else in their place. But, like many other affirmations of our publicity machines, this axiom is false.

– from the so-called Agatha Christie Letter sent to Pope Paul VI in 1971

That letter, to which 57 notable English names were appended (the mystery novelist’s name being just one), bears Christie’s name because it is reported (reliably) that when the pope saw her name on the list he exclaimed, “Ah, Agatha Christie!”

The letter was a plea to the Holy Father not to “obliterate” the Latin Mass, as rumor had it, he intended to do. Some of the signatories were Catholic; most were not. But all of them admired the Tridentine Mass because “in its magnificent Latin text, [it] has. . .inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts – not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians.”

Among the notable Catholics who signed the letter were Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the non-Catholics included Christie, musicians Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yehudi Menuhin, and Joan Sutherland, art historian Kenneth Clark, writers Robert Graves and Iris Murdoch, poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and included two Anglican bishops to boot. It was a distinguished list. No punches were pulled: “[We] wish to call to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the Traditional Mass to survive, even though this survival took place side by side with other liturgical forms.”

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

If It’s not the Apocalypse

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, July 22, 2024

Let’s begin with a simple point, so simple that many otherwise intelligent people deny it. Any country – however many and great its virtues – that sacrifices 1 million children yearly to demonic idols (under fashionable euphemisms like “reproductive health”), deserves, if Scripture and right reason are to be believed, chastisement.

Or if the Biblical term is too strong for us today, call it: nemesis, karma, cosmic justice.

That’s us now.

With perhaps even worse to come, over time, given that the Republicans have dropped their longstanding call for a national abortion ban.

But our situation is serious, so let us not just react but reflect.

This week, the Faith and Reason Institute is holding the Twenty-Fourth Free Society Seminar in the Slovak Republic, a yearly event for American and European university students and young professionals founded by the late Michael Novak. We discuss the things – political, economic, moral/cultural (in Novak’s tripartite scheme) – needed for a society that is both free and good.

Classic questions, but sometimes something surprising turns up.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

A Revolution of Tradition

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, July 15, 2024

“Take care. It is easy to break eggs without making omelets.” Thus, the great and wise C. S. Lewis sixty years ago as his Anglican communion was making jarring changes to the liturgy. It’s a principle that goes far beyond forms of worship and prayer, though, to most of what constitutes a good life for beings like us who straddle eternity and time. Especially in a radically unstable time like ours, the stability rooted in what never changes is often the only immediate recourse amidst much that, in the short run, cannot be fixed.

That can be a hard saying to follow, even for Christians. Students of the classics will recall the famous passage in the ancient Roman historian Livy who, writing while Jesus still walked the earth, lamented “these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” God ultimately had a bright path prepared for Rome, but it took centuries – and the suffering and death of many believers – before it fully showed itself.

There are moments, to be sure, when radical change is necessary – especially the kind of radical change that the Scriptures call metanoia, a whole-hearted “turning back” to God Himself. But for the most part, it’s better for most of us, at most times, in most places – if we are already on a steady way – to change slowly, with caution, deeply aware of how little we know about ourselves or the world, unseduced by the secular and ecclesial politicians of every age who campaign on “change.”

Ironically, it was Karl Marx who may have first recognized what was coming about in the modern age. As he wrote in the Communist Manifesto:  “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Marx thought a sober materialist revolution would lead to human liberation. We know how that turned out.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

‘Non possumus’ (Thoughts about ‘Kidnapped’)

Written by Brad Miner

Thursday, July 11, 2024

Some years ago, Steven Spielberg speculated about making a film about Edgardo Mortara, a Catholic priest who as a boy in 1858 – a 6-year-old Jewish boy – was forcibly taken from his loving parents in Bologna and raised as a Catholic in Rome.

In the 21st century, it is difficult to understand why a pope – in this case, Pius IX – would have tolerated the seizure of a Jewish child for any reason, let alone on the flimsy assertion made by the Mortara’s illiterate, teenage Catholic housekeeper that, when she overheard the infant Edgardo’s parents praying in Hebrew over his crib, she feared for the infant’s imminent death and secretly baptized him.

Mr. Spielberg decided not to make the film, so we cannot know what sort of movie he might have produced, but it would almost certainly have been superior to (and likely more even-handed than) Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped (Rapito in Italian), which is, generally, anti-Catholic and, specifically, slanderous about Pio Nono, as Pius IX was affectionately known.

To quickly summarize the story’s outline (historical and cinematic): It was years after the surreptitious baptism that the housekeeper – by now dismissed by the Mortaras – confessed what she’d done, and word of it reached Bologna’s ecclesiastical inquisitor. The law then in force in the Papal States stipulated that all Catholic children must have a Catholic education, so the inquisitor sent the civil police (carabinieri) to the Mortara home. They seized the boy, and he was spirited off to Rome and, quite literally, into the loving arms of the pope.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

On Judging Others – Wrongly, and Rightly

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, July 1, 2024

Jesus said (Matthew 7:1): “Judge not lest ye be judged.” And many people since, including many Christians catechized by modern culture, have translated this to mean that the whole law and the prophets – indeed, the whole teaching of Christianity, is that Christians should simply refrain from assessing what others are and do. Especially, it seems, if what they are and do contradicts Christianity. It’s devilish madness, of course. And even as a matter of sheer logic, so obviously impossible and self-contradictory, that it’s hard to believe such nonsense has become so widely accepted as the very essence of what it means to be Christian.

And yet it has. And has been reinforced – intentionally or not – even within the Church. It’s become tiresome to have to point out how even the current pope and others close to him feed these confusions. But let us gird up our loins and, once again, try to make sense about this crucial matter.

The root of the recent problem began, of course, with the pope’s infamous remark – “Who am I to judge?” – on a plane back from Brazil early in his pontificate. A reporter asked about Battista Ricca, a prelate with a notoriously homosexual past in Uruguay, whom Francis had just appointed as director of the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guest house where the pope has chosen to live. (Francis’s remark actually wasn’t a judgment about homosexuality in general. It was – properly – conditional: “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?”)

The smart-aleck response to “Who am I to judge?,” however, has been given for all time: “Who do you need to be?” And anyway, the reporter hadn’t asked what Francis thought about homosexuality. If you’re the pope, you’re the one who has to decide who is suitable, and not, for many sensitive positions serving God’s faithful people in the Church – like the place where you and many of your colleagues will be living. You’re not, at the moment, being asked about someone’s eternal destiny. So why pivot to a current cliché?

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

An Insufficient Truth

Written by Brad Miner

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was the Swiss psychoanalyst and founder of Analytical Psychology whose contributions to the field may end up being more lasting (and closer to the truth) than those of his mentor, friend, and antagonist Sigmund Freud. Both men believed sexual development is important, but Jung thought human personality was notdriven by the libido to the extent Freud insisted it was. Jung saw a spiritual purpose in human life.

His work was influenced by his Christian upbringing, and he was among the few Christians in the first generation of psychologists.

I am fascinated by what Jung said about the “death of God” in modern culture, which he believed was at the heart of the modernist/nihilist project: it means not that God is rejected entirely but that He has descended into the subconscious. Maybe that’s a recapitulation of the Crucifixion and entombment of Christ. So, if Jung was right, we may suppose what happens next: a resurrection.

Yet when a friend converted to Catholicism, Jung wrote to him, “I am for those who are out of the Church.” I have the sense that this may have also been true – so far anyway – of the contemporary Jungian psychologist, Jordan Peterson (author of 12 Rules for Life), whose wife, Tammy, entered the Catholic Church this past Easter. Whether or not Jordan will follow remains an open question, but he should.

I believe Dr. Peterson may be a transitional figure. At the very least, he is – through his enormously popular books and lectures – leading many young men to reconsider the role the Bible can play in helping them improve their lives. But Peterson is also transitional because he is (or certainly seems to be) a man in transition, and to get where he is headed may require a break with Jung.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

About that ‘Personal Relationship with Jesus’

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, June 17, 2024

It’s a good idea, of course, that “personal relationship” with Jesus. It works itself around any number of contemporary roadblocks to the faith. Which is unusual for Christian truths in current conditions. But without some other, very good, ideas, the personal relationship turns into a very bad idea.

Because if, as in most of the “relationships” we have these days, we limit what transpires between us and Him only to what we’re willing to agree to, we’re not in a personal relationship with Jesus. We’re in a toxic relationship with our own egos, a cocoon we create for our own comfort, but which, ironically, is one of the deepest reasons for our current unease.

The whole problem can be seen by asking a simple question: Which Jesus are we supposed to have that relationship with, anyway?

• The Jesus of the Scriptures and Early Church Fathers
• The Byzantine Pantocrator
• The Mystic Lamb of the Ghent Altarpiece
• The Da Vinci Salvator Mundi
• The Reformation Christ of sola fide and sola Scriptura
• The Enlightenment rationalist Jesus (miracles optional)
• The early modern, liberal Protestant, or Social Gospel Jesus
• The countercultural hippie Jesus of the 1960s
• The Marxist guerilla Jesus of liberation theology
• The Cosmic Christ of Teilhard
• The Rahnerian Jesus of “anonymous Christians”
• The prosperity gospel Jesus
• The uncertain, terminally debatable, and mutually contradictory figures conjured up by the historical/critical scripture scholars?

If these seem too tied to other times and places, we’ve now gotten the todos, todos, todos Jesus, who loves us all just the way we are – well, not exactly all, equally, more LGBT+ and other “irregulars” than the rigid, the backwardist, the Latin-lovers. This Jesus doesn’t (formally) change His teachings, but can swiftly turn previously unchallenged Catholic practicesby 180° – with far-reaching implications about the teaching at some future date.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

Snippets: Ethan Hawke’s Biopic about Flannery O’Connor

Written by Brad Miner

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

In Wildcat, the recent film by Ethan Hawke based on the life and work of Flannery O’Connor, one hopes to see, you know, Flannery O’Connor’s life. But Mr. Hawke mostly gives us her writing instead – and only snippets at that – dramatizations from her novels or short stories that come across as scenes students might perform in classes at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City.

It’s mostly talk with little action.

Hawke might have given us more of Wildcat’s best scene in which Flannery (played by Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter) is surrounded by intellectuals, including poet Robert Lowell (Philip Ettinger) and writer Elizabeth Hardwick (Willa Fitzgerald). The subject of the Eucharist comes up and Hardwick inanely says it’s a lovely symbol, to which O’Connor replies, “If it’s a symbol, then the hell with it.” And she evangelizes the highbrows, eviscerating their dismissal of the Real Presence.

Innovative creativity is always risky, and Mr. Hawke has taken a big risk in choosing notto make a classic biopic. In Wildcat, a subtle mention of an O’Connor story title in a biographical scene morphs into a dramatic “excerpt” from the story itself, sometimes effectively, as in an interracial confrontation from “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” or less effectively in “Parker’s Back,” when Miss Hawke provides voiceover narration for the absentminded Parker’s tractor collision with a tree, which has the effect of being the audio equivalent of title cards in a silent movie.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .