The Narthex

As we enter the third year of pandemic-driven fear, we need to take stock of the whole range of its consequences: deaths and hospitalizations certainly, but also lives broken by business failures, the cruelty of forcing isolation on dying people, abuse of authority, absurd and scientifically unfounded regulations, the craven…

When I was a 6th-grader walking home with friends from elementary school in the 50s, we would talk about all the interesting things heard in the news, like the Boston Braves leaving Boston or the first man to conquer Mt. Everest. We wondered what it was like to be Castro,…

As coverage of the March for Life 2022 winds down, I reflect that the mood in the pro-life movement seems very different now than ever before. I never attended the March for Life in Washington. But one year I did attend the smaller March for Life in Chicago. I remember…

Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME) missionaries run a news website called AsiaNews, which provides news briefs from Asia and around the world. A recent article called "Asia in 2022" (Jan. 1) offers a round-up of important events on the horizon for the enormous continent and its dominant player, China.…

Reporters at The New York Times have made public hundreds of confidential reports by the Pentagon on civilian casualties from U.S. air-strikes in Iraq and Syria, covering September 2014 through January 2018. The journalists describe the air-strikes as "marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the…

Ten days ago a student group, Women in Politics, hosted a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of America. Loyola Marymount University (LMU) provided the venue. The University did so despite a nationwide protest and Los Angeles Archbishop Gomez’s expression of deep disappointment. In the sponsoring group’s estimation, the event—a semi-formal party…

A new article by Aleisha R. Brock and Simon Thornley, published at Science, Public Health Policy, & the Law (at publichealthpolicyjournal.com), re-analyzes data used in a CDC report and finds a high risk of miscarriage (also called spontaneous abortion) in early pregnancy after use of a COVID mRNA vaccine. A…

I recently returned from a visit to Perth. Western Australia and Tasmania are COVID-free “bubbles” and one is able to travel fairly freely between them (freely, that is to say, if you except the necessity of obtaining what amounts to a visa to pass from one state of the Commonwealth…

On Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living show of February 2, 1953 -- the episode entitled "The Death of Stalin" -- Sheen enacted Mark Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar, substituting Malenkov and Stalin as the two characters. “And now Malenkov speaks: ‘Friends, Soviets, countrymen, lend me your ears;…

Pope Francis meets and greets Nancy Pelosi. So it went last week. Then followed a practiced exchange of smiles. Since the devil is no respecter of persons, he was doubtless there as well. But our angels love us far more than the devil hates us, so we can hope that…

Chris Arnade is a photographer and writer whose bestseller Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (2019) shone a light on the people left behind by globalist technocrats, on the people "who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class." Back Row Americans…

To my mind the greatest challenge of human education is the building and maintaining of historical awareness. How can we have even an inkling of where we stand and where we’re heading if our grasp of the past is feeble or non-existent? Human memory is so short, and deliberate bias…

On September 30, 2021, the United States Senate confirmed Tracy Stone-Manning as the new director of the Bureau of Land Management (WashingtonTimes.com, Sept. 30). Choosing someone to fill the Bureau of Land Management director position is not normally cause for a national furor, but this time was different. In a…

I have now had both vaccine doses; I’m neither an “anti-vaxxer” nor a conspiracy theorist. But I have good, intelligent, well-informed, and rational friends who strongly oppose the vaccine, and I do not like to see them punished by the infliction of civil disabilities or verbal abuse. Some Christians and…

In our everyday decisions we use hearsay reputations to decide, say, for or against a dentist or doctor. Reliable references from former patients are helpful, and as social animals we are inclined to run with the herd to survive. Hearsay statements are used to prove truth or falsehood but are…