The Narthex

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Colonel Pyncheon, a Puritan, covets a piece of land that a poor farmer owns. He has him hanged as a wizard so he can seize the old man’s property and build his seven-gabled mansion. At the gallows, Matthew Maule casts a generational…

On Sunday the U.S. conducted airstrikes in the Iraq-Syria border region. Judging from U.S. media coverage of it on Monday, the country had already yawned and moved on. By lunchtime both the Apple News and Google News aggregators showed one short news item each, way down in the scroll. One…

In the late sixties, I stayed a weekend at a Bruderhof and then hoped to experience the Shaker version of Heaven on Earth that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Ralph Waldo Emerson had much admired. But I was late by about 100 years, for in 1968 their numbers had dwindled…

What to say about California? During the Gold Rush, it was “California or bust.” Later Horace Greeley upped the ante: “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” Greeley thought that the nation’s capital only offered high rents, lousy food, and bad morals. And wasn’t California…

The early Church fathers were a tough and uncompromising lot. They had to be. Sharp-tongued St. Jerome wouldn’t have done well in the diplomatic service, or even made it past the interview; he bitterly attacked heretical enemies and wasn’t always very nice to his friends. St. Ignatius of Antioch was…

As the pandemic crisis wanes for wealthy nations, the unintended consequences of worldwide economic shutdowns will continue to unfold for years in poorer parts of the globe. Two examples of this are found in two Church-affiliated news outlets. The first is a LiCAS News article, "Child labor rises to 160…

In 1944, my father worked as an apprentice electrician at Bethlehem Steel’s East Boston facility, one of eighteen American shipyards that built 2,710 Liberty Ships as supply transports for WWII. Between 1941 and 1945 the facility cranked out three ships every two days. By the next year my father was…

From time to time, I’ve told people that outrage is the proper response to the outrageous. After all, ignoring the outrageous would be an outrage, wouldn’t? And it’s outrageous that we so often ignore the outrages of the day. Sounds plausible, or at least it did to me. But I…

Catholics and other Christians have had enormous influence on the life of the mind and the creative arts of poetry, art, and music. Poetry has always been a strong ally of our Faith and our civilization. The tricky thing, though, is that it’s hard to define; not everything that rhymes…

Everyone -- whether priest, bishop, or layperson -- has ideas on how to change the liturgy. If I had my druthers, I would make the following changes, but these changes are neither mine to make nor a priest's to make: the congregation would kneel for the penitential moments of the…

Archbishop Cordileone’s May 1st letter, "Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life" (https://sfarchdiocese.org/inthewomb), is pastoral in the truest sense of the word: the archbishop is tending his flock,…

Christians don’t believe in Hell as much as they did 50 years ago. The number of Americans who believe in it has dropped, whereas Heaven has fared much better. People can’t accept that God would be so cruel as to condemn souls to eternal punishment just for behaving badly. They…

Nineteen Sixty-four is a research blog for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University. The blog periodically posts research findings which are often accompanied by helpful graphs and charts. A pre-COVID post at Nineteen Sixty-four offers data on U.S. Catholic parish closures and openings, and…

The post-conciliar period saw liturgical abuses. One alleged abuse is moving altars away from the back walls of churches to allow, or require, the celebrant to face the people. Let us look at Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2003 foreword to U.M. Lang's Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer (2d ed.…

The Novus Ordo brought a number of reforms besides celebrating in the vernacular. In his Apostolic Constitution of 1969, Pope St. Paul VI approvingly referred to Pius XII’s restoration in 1951 and 1955 of the Easter Vigil and the Rite of Holy Week, respectively. He also cited the desire of…