A Review of August Turak’s Brother John: A monk, a pilgrim and the purpose of life. Author August Turak, a successful entrepreneur in the software business, endured a personal crisis that led him to a Trappist Monastery in Charleston, South Carolina. While there, he began a decades-long journey to find the secrets to a life…
Lent is an invigorating time for truth. The Truth Himself spent forty days in the wilderness combatting the Prince of Lies. He did it as our “champion.” A champion is more than someone who gets his face on a cereal box for having won contests. Go back to the thirteenth century and you will see…
Two years after his death, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is missed for many reasons, not least among them his colorful writing style. In one notable opinion, Scalia said this: “Like some ghoul in a late night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed…
Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher who lived four centuries before Christ, proposed the scientific theory of horror vacui. Based on his observations, he concluded that nature fills every empty space with something, even if it is only air. In his works Gargantua and Pantagruel, the Renaissance priest, doctor and scientist Rabelais popularized this idea with…
The pilings on the east side of the Brooklyn Bridge are on the spot where the great Father of Our Country, having evacuated eight thousand Continental troops after their defeat in the Battle of Long Island, boarded the last small boat. In the mist, he did not seek safety until all his men had crossed…
Pat and I recently returned from the annual Legatus Summit in Dana Point, California. For those not familiar with Legatus it is an organization of leading Catholic business men and women from across America who are Ambassadors for Jesus Christ. At the Summit, you hear nationally recognized speakers and learn the current status of things…
In this 10th Anniversary Edition of No Turning Back: A Witness to Mercy, the Very Reverend Donald Calloway, MIC, provides a compelling account of his journey from darkness to light. His struggles with severe drug and alcohol abuse, “free” sex, gangs, deception and theft take him down a road that seemingly has no return. By…
In art, the Bible scholar Saint Jerome is often depicted as a cardinal, along with a lion that looks like a Cheshire cat because the artist had not seen a real lion. This portrayal alludes to the second-century legend of Androcles, who befriended a lion by extracting a thorn from its paw. Saint Jerome was…
“Let not your heart be troubled!” (John 14:1) In the face of growing confusion about the doctrine of the Faith, many bishops, priests, religious and lay people of the Catholic Church have requested that I make a public testimony about the truth of revelation. It is the shepherds’ very own task to guide those entrusted…
Like the optimist who sees a glass of water half-full and the pessimist who sees it half-empty, people assess the times in which they live by their personality. Each age has had its crises, but the time in which we live seems especially fit to the description with which Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities:…
Happily married for 40 years, a friend of mine from New York says that one of the (several) reasons his marriage has survived when so many others have crashed is a single, simple act of self-discipline. Every payday for more than three decades, he’s brought home six roses for his wife: sometimes three red, sometimes…
The stepbrother of William the Conqueror, Bishop Odo, was meticulous in observing canon law. Since a cleric was not allowed to “wield the sword,” he used a battle club. In the Bayeux Tapestry under the scene of him forcing his men into a hail of arrows, are the abbreviated Latin words: “Hic Odo Eps [Episcopus] Baculu[m] Tenens Confortat Pueros” which means: “Here,…
Can a one-day conference at a university breathe life into a cause that lately appears to have stalled: involving the Catholic laity in ending the crisis of authority and trust afflicting the Church in the wake of the sex abuse scandal? If not, here’s hoping that at least it points a way out of the…
CNA—In a rare new letter penned by Benedict XVI, the retired pontiff said he is in the last phase of his life, and while his physical strength might be waning, he is surrounded by a “love and goodness” that he never imagined. “I can only say that at the end of a slow decline in…
“Why isn’t God answering my prayers? Am I not praying right?” These are very serious questions and deserve honest answers. Many people who pray — including those who pray long and hard — ask these questions from time to time, as well they might. Jesus certainly told us to “pray always” (Mt 21:22, Lk 18:1-18,…
The mayor of a French town commissioned a statue of the rationalist Emile Zola and, intent on provocation, he ordered that the bronze for it be from the bells of a church. Similarly, Governor Andrew Cuomo chose to sign into law our nation’s most offensive abortion bill on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, to ecstatic applause in the…
Just days ago Bishop Thomas Daly wrote a clear, concise and thoughtful letter to his diocese regarding politicians who support abortion. It is so refreshing in its clarity that we repost it here in its entirety—as follows: Dear Friends, Each January as the nation commemorates the sad anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, marches…
This past Thursday was the feast of Saint Francis de Sales, whose intercession we need because he is the patron of journalists and there are those who say, with some claim to cogency, that journalism is dead because it is biased and predictable. Ironically, since he was a journalist himself, G.K. Chesterton said that writing…
What started as a modest effort to recruit has become a Collector’s item; a review of “The Vatican Cookbook: Presented by the Pontifical Swiss Guards.” My good friend, Andreas Widmer, a former Swiss Guard and now Director of the Entrepreneurship program at the Catholic University of America, provided my first behind-the-curtain glimpse of the Vatican’s…
statement released February 13, 2017 (and worth reprinting)—“The public policy issue of defunding Planned Parenthood was the subject of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations across the country this weekend, including here in the Capital Region. “Without question, Planned Parenthood provides some morally unobjectionable health services to women. However, this statement is not unlike saying that a man…
