Defending the Faith

When a priest is ordained, his hands are anointed with oil. They are then wiped clean with a white linen cloth -- it’s called a maniturgium. There is a custom, hundreds of years old, in which each new priest presents that cloth to his mother. She’s usually buried with it. People say... Read more

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” These words from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” were first published one hundred years ago, in a time not wholly dissimilar to ours. The 1918-1919 flu epidemic had ravaged much of Europe, tearing through communities and families... Read more

Archbishop Karol Wojtyla’s newly discovered 1965 reflections on St. Paul’s discourse at the Areopagus (Acts 17: 16-32), Mars Hill, is the starting point for Wojtyla’s cycle of catecheses in this book, Teachings for an Unbelieving World (Ave Maria Press, 2020). In my judgment, this... Read more

When I was still a university professor, I often asked my students to play an intellectual “what if” game. I asked them to imagine what our world would be like if Jesus Christ had never existed and, therefore, Christianity had never come into being. I did this to subvert the hostility of... Read more

A top Polish historian has questioned claims by German researchers that newly opened Vatican archives contain information damning the role played by Pope Pius XII during World War II. “This team has the advantage of having been to these archives, and we must face the truth calmly if some... Read more

Last week, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, made a rather interesting theological observation. Commenting on the progress that his state has made in fighting the coronavirus, and praising the concrete efforts of medical personnel and ordinary citizens, he said, “The number is down... Read more

Every time Christians recite the Apostles’ Creed, they affirm their belief in what will happen to them after death: “'I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” The belief in the resurrection of one’s physical body at the end of time is central to Christian... Read more

There is no document issued by a pope in the last 50 years that has been met with as much conflict as Humanae Vitae. Countless couples have bought into the lie told by the culture—along with the erroneous teaching handed onto them by some members of the clergy, religious, and the laity—who... Read more

The French Catholic bishops’ conference permanent council has approved a recommendation to remove references to the sex of parents on baptismal registry forms. “The increasingly complex situation of families in France makes it extremely difficult to draft Catholic acts, especially... Read more

ONE OF THE FIRST SHOWS about Christmas I watched as a kid was A Charlie Brown Christmas. I haven’t watched it in years, but I haven’t forgotten the culminating scene where Charlie Brown shouts above the noise to demand an answer to a question he’s struggling with: What is Christmas... Read more