The Narthex

The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, is poorly understood by contemporary Catholics. It doesn’t, in that regard, differ from many of our other holydays of obligation, the significance of only one of which -- Christmas -- is arguably at least somewhat well grasped. Consider the others. There are still…

Tomorrow, December 28, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs. I make that explicit because in the past few years there has been something like an ecclesiastical version of bait-and-switch in some quarters to change the focus of the feast. Today’s feast is about children: baby boys aged two…

Thanks to the Catholic Bishops of the United States’ Complementary Norms, January 1, 2024 -- the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God -- will not be a holyday of obligation. That’s because, under those Norms, certain holydays cease being holydays of obligation if they fall on Saturdays or Mondays. The…

The Declaration Fiducia Supplicans, signed by Pope Francis, calls for our close attention. Its overarching context is the Church’s wealth of blessings, each a gift of God’s love, and their place in the economy of grace. The most frequent, and liturgically grounded, blessing comes at the conclusion of the Mass.…

Regular readers know I am a harsh critic of cremation and of the Church’s misconceived 1963 decision to tolerate it. I have repeatedly argued that that 1963 rescission of the prohibition on cremation allowed the camel to poke its nose under the tent, upending the latter. The most cursory survey…

Rabbi David Ellenson died December 7 in New York. I read about it in The New York Times. I’ll admit to knowing nothing about the man before I read his obituary. The phenomenon of reading obituaries kicks in at a certain age. As a child, I was always puzzled by the…

Ideas for essays are sometimes like grace: they come from the most unexpected places. Today’s comes from Facebook, in a post by Scott Hahn about failure. Hahn posted a passage from St. Josemaría Escrivà’s rich book of spiritual aphorisms, The Way. The excerpt (no. 405) deals specifically with failure. “So you…

We see occasional reports that attempt to quantify the number of species that have become extinct over a certain period of years or centuries or millennia. And we see occasional reports identifying various species at risk of extinction. We go to great lengths to save species. Think of the bald…

As we mark the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, I present two thoughts on why Our Lady under the title of the “Immaculate Conception” is the fitting patroness for the United States. First, we Americans continue to fail to reckon with the reality of “conception.” Notwithstanding the reversal of Roe…

“When all things were in quiet silence and night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne” (Wisdom 18, 14-15). Of all the images of Christmas, this is the one that has always thrilled me the…

Fr. Gilligan was a wily American priest who served in the Vatican Diplomatic Corps and saved many lives during the Communist takeover in China. As mentioned previously in this blog series, I must here reply to claims made by Ms. Bibiani Yee-Wing Wong in a past issue of U.S. Catholic…

Readers will recall that in Part 1 of this series I quoted from Msgr. Breslin’s funeral eulogy for Father Gilligan, telling two short stories about this wily priest-diplomat. His first story concerned foreign missionaries, as related in Part 2. His second story concerned native Chinese. During the Communist takeover of…

Thanksgiving is, for most Americans, a long weekend. Almost all children get out of school on Wednesday and don't return until Monday. Most institutions other than stores and commercial enterprises all take the long weekend. At some point Thanksgiving became something of a segue into the "Christmas season" and --…

It all started in mid-2013 when the archbishop-elect of Hobart, Julian Porteous, asked me if I would help him “raise the profile of the Catholic intellectual tradition” in his new diocese. The cynic might say that raising the profile of something that was below the radar of public awareness wasn’t…

Ms. Wong disparages the credibility of Msgr. Breslin’s accounts in his funeral eulogy for Father Gilligan since Breslin did not hear of these events from Gilligan himself when he was living with him.[1] But Msgr. Breslin stated that, for both stories, he relied on multiple sources, “a stream”…