Recent News

Reading Augustine’s ‘City of God’. . .and More

Written by Robert Royal

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

In 410 A.D., the Visigoths invaded and sacked Rome, causing great destruction and widespread loss of life. Foreign armies had not entered the city of Rome in almost 700 years, and people began looking for someone to blame. And as has often happened in varying circumstances throughout history, they tried to blame Christians for having replaced the worship of the pagan gods – who allegedly had protected the city – with the Christian God. Christians were also criticized for promoting the softer virtues, like forgiveness and charity, rather than the military power that had made Rome the greatest empire in the world.

St. Augustine was the bishop of Hippo in North Africa at the time and was greatly shaken by the news. It’s hard for us to appreciate the shock people felt at an event so many centuries ago, but it was something like what many Americans experienced at the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Like those more recent attacks, the sack of Rome not only changed life for people at the time, but gave rise to large-scale historical consequences – and new ideas.

St. Augustine was not only deeply shocked by the destruction in the city; he was also greatly moved to respond to the slanders against the Faith and to lay out the Christian view of history. It took him sixteen years to write, but the result is a massive, wide-ranging, and profound work of Christian apologetics – The City of God – which is not only about the sack of Rome, but about the relationship between the sacred and the secular, the Church and the Empire, the two “Cities” – the City of God spread out between Heaven and Earth, and the City of Man which tries to live without God. And much more.

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A New Sign of Our Times

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, September 26, 2022

If exit polls hold, yesterday Italy elected its first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The usual liberal voices will not be celebrating. Normally, Italian elections are of little interest. Since 1945, there have been seventy Italian governments – almost one a year, which might suggest instability. But Italians often say that the system is too stable. General elections just reshuffle members of the political class, which rarely change very much. Except maybe this time. A populist Italian prime minister (“extreme right,” “neo-fascist” in the mainstream media, of course) will have significant repercussions for Europe and America, and even the Catholic Church.

A prominent Italian theologian, now living in the United States has argued recently that Meloni’s election may “hurt Francis”: “The campaign has been vulgar and trashy, and all of the substantial issues – from the war in Ukraine to climate change – have been ignored.”

This account of “all the substantial issues,” like much political analysis these days, leaves out a lot. Namely, questions that daily concern most Italians – like crime, out-of-control inflation, and illegal immigration – in a country struggling economically and bewildered, as many Western nations are, by radical social changes, making their country unrecognizable to many citizens.

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On the great Good Way

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, September 19, 2022

I’ve been a pilgrim for the past two weeks in Portugal and Spain – and that place of prophetic miracle, Fatima – on the via Portuguesa. The Devil likes to play his little tricks when something good is about to happen. So before our Camino even started, the airline lost my luggage – with most of my walking gear and all my formal wear – in Rome, where I was covering the recent consistory. (The bag re-appeared at my home a few days ago, the night before I returned – infernal mockery.) One of our group discovered an expired passport right before departure, miraculously replaced in time by the interventions of several canny Catholics. But on pilgrimage, you commit yourself to dealing with whatever arises for the sake of the ultimate goal. Under the Mercy, we did.

I intended to write en route – and appreciate the messages from those of you worried over my absence. But writing about a pilgrimage – especially for someone whose everyday business is words – is not to be on pilgrimage. Even now, I’m a bit reluctant writing about the experience. Someday I may resurrect my notes here, or save them for – ahem – my Confessions. For now, though, a few reflections.

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Hidden Art

Written by Brad Miner

Thursday, September 15, 2022

There are several reasons why a work of art owned by a museum is not on display: there is no room for it in already crowded galleries; the work is in some way too fragile to display; the artist or the subject are judged not of appeal in the moment; the work itself requires so much display space that it may be shown only very occasionally.

An example of this last reason is the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ by James Tissot. The 350 watercolor paintings are somewhere in the bowels of the Brooklyn Museum and, to my knowledge, have rarely been brought together in their entirety. For a couple of months in 2009 and 2010, the museum did put on a show of 124 of the paintings, but now Tissot’s great series is in storage.

I wasn’t aware of this when my younger son and I went to the Museum in 2017, and, as I bought our tickets, I asked the woman at the desk where we could find the Tissot paintings.

“Oh, we don’t have that here,” she said.

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‘Mother Teresa: No Greater Love’: a Review

Written by Brad Miner

Saturday, September 3, 2022

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton relates an encounter with his friend and fellow Columbia University student, Bob Lax. Merton had recently converted to Catholicism and told  Lax he wanted to be a good Catholic. Lax shook his head. “What you should say is that you want to be a saint.”

True, but easier said than done – evidence of which might be Fr. Merton himself – assuming he really wanted to be a saint.

Better is Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu’s way: abandonment to the will of God. That’s why she’s Saint Mother Teresa. It’s not what you say, but what you do.

Her life, with its successes and struggles, is the subject of a new docudrama directed by David Naglieri, Mother Teresa: No Greater Love, which will premiere with screenings by Fathom Events on October 3^rd and 4^th

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

Late August Stirrings in Rome

Written by Robert Royal

Saturday, August 27, 2022

This morning, Deo volente and despite United Airlines, your correspondent is more or less standing, jetlagged but alert, in Rome. It’s an odd time to be here. Ferragosto(named after the August Feast of the Assumption) is Italian vacation time. Virtually everyone is away and many shops, pharmacies, and even restaurants are closed or on reduced schedules.

But this year, Pope Francis – who doesn’t take vacations – has decided that over the next five days he will hold an “ordinary consistory” to make 20 new Cardinals, visit L’Aquila (the burial place of Celestine V, the last pope prior to Benedict XVI to abdicate), and preside over a couple of days of discussions by the world’s Cardinals – an “extraordinary consistory” – about the future of the Church and the world.

The Vatican almost never schedules large events at this time of year. The oddness of the scheduling alone has given rise to all sorts of dark Roman rumors.

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What’s Happening to Civil Society?

Written by Robert Royal

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

The Marxist government of Nicaragua placed a Catholic bishop and several priests under house arrest last week and closed a half-dozen Catholic radio stations. It previously banned hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – groups we used to talk about as constituting “civil society,” i.e., the human networks where life, in normal circumstances, can take place in real face-to-face community, free of political interference. All Marxist or totalitarian regimes – from Nicaragua to China, Cuba to Russia – try to suppress and replace these natural formations, especially religion and the family (the basic cell of society in Catholic social thought) because they have real potential to resist encroachments by the State.

Banana republics can arise almost anywhere, as we’re seeing even in America these days. And we usually think of these sorts of problems as “violations of religious liberty.” But the deeper problem has remained mostly out of sight: the modern State’s efforts, almost everywhere, to usurp functions that properly belong elsewhere – particularly the shaping of moral and social behavior best left to parents, churches, (independent) schools, local communities, etc.

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On Not Losing Heart

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, August 8, 2022

The editor of a Catholic publication anno Domini 2022 often receives insightful messages from readers, friends, even enemies – some inspiriting, some quite dispiriting. There’s much more good going on in the Church and the world than any one person knows. And there’s also much – we tend to hear a lot more about it – so appalling that it leaves you all but speechless.

Lately, there’s been (for this writer) a noticeable and growing trend: generalized fatigue. More and more people write that they simply “have had enough.” Typically, something like, “I can’t take the controversies (in the Vatican, the American Church, American politics, American society) anymore. I just want to live a peaceful life, practicing the faith and caring for the family, free from all that.”

If you don’t recognize this tendency – sometimes a temptation – in yourself, blessèd are you.

St. Paul countered Christian fatigue with appropriate wisdom: “let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.” (Gal. 6:9) That sounds great, big harvests and all that. Someday. Maybe not too far off.

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The Saint, the Book, and the Lily

Written by Brad Miner

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Much of the world’s great art is part of the patrimony of our Church. Every Leonardo; every Michelangelo; every Caravaggio belongs to all of us.

Without Catholic artists, there would be art, but there would likely be no art periods. No Romanesque; no Gothic; no Renaissance; no Mannerism; no Baroque. I could list other periods up to the 20^th century, though Catholic art diminishes. It does not disappear.

Not every Catholic artist created Catholic art – and few restricted themselves exclusively to Catholic themes. Da Vinci painted the astonishingly beautiful Virgin of the Rocks, and he painted the enigmatic Mona Lisa: the first is religious, the second is not. Michelangelo: Sistine Chapel ceiling, sì! His sculpture of Bacchus, no! Caravaggio: Supper at Emmaus, definitely! The Musicians, definitely not.

Many of the Catholic painters, sculptors, and architects who worked between 1000 and 1900 made a part of their living fulfilling commissions from Church leaders and institutions and from wealthy, often princely patrons. Leonardo da Vinci lived well but eccentrically and peripatetically. He died at 67, still touching up the Mona Lisa. One has the sense that Michelangelo had trouble enjoying his success: he never retired and died at 88, working on another Pietà. Caravaggio is the exception. He died at 38, probably from wounds suffered in a vendetta attack.

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A (Possibly) Immodest Proposal

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, July 25, 2022

Anyone paying attention to American society today can’t help but notice that the public space afforded to religion has shrunk – and is continuing to shrink, day by day. The Supreme Court may issue decisions protecting the rights of churches and church schools to hire and fire whomever they want. And it may even, as in the most recent session, level the playing field a bit so that religious schools can receive the same state support as other non-public schools. But these are victories at the margins.

The main culture-forming institutions – colleges and universities, media, Hollywood, the arts, even corporations – sharply limit open expressions of religion, which is to say primarily traditional Christianity, anywhere they can. We can still worship privately, but we can do less publicly than ever before in our history.

And, sadly, many of our religious institutions have just passively gone along with it all.

So I want to make a possibly immodest proposal, partly inspired by the good summer weather: Let’s take it outside.

Today is the feast of St. James the Apostle, little-known even to most Catholics these days, but once – and in many places, still – a central figure in religious pilgrimages. Santiago de Compostela, the famous endpoint of the Camino, literally means Saint James of Compostela.

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