The Narthex

As I wrote previously, the EU's liberticidal Chat Control law seemed to have been definitively shelved in October. Strong opposition from Germany and other member states led to the belief that Brussels' Orwellian project had finally foundered. But anyone familiar with the mechanisms of the European Union knows well that…

Advent comes with a repertoire of hymnody unique to the season, such as “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” Among traditional Advent hymns now sung in English-speaking Catholic churches is Englishwoman Eleanor Farjeon’s “People, Look East,” which was sung in my parish last Sunday. I had to wonder whether some dioceses…

What’s happened to the cheap, sensational booklets called “penny dreadfuls,” and to detective fiction? Penny dreadfuls, for a start, have evolved, big time. How so? G. K. Chesterton, we recall, champions them. His “In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” (1901) calls them “The center of a million flaming imaginations.” He presents…

I recently read a profile of Duncan Stroik, professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. What caught my eye was the description the professor gave of one of two key moments in his path to becoming an architect who would design sacred architecture. When he was in graduate…

“Textualism” and “originalism” emerged as approaches to interpreting the Constitution in order to reconnect American judicial decisions with the document they were supposedly applying. The “living Constitution,” so in vogue from roughly the 1950s through 2000 (though not really firmly buried until Anthony Kennedy finally left the Supreme Court), unfettered…

On November 23, Slovenia said no to euthanasia. With 53% of voters voting against and 46% in favor, Slovenians rejected a law that would have allowed terminally ill patients to receive assistance in ending their lives. This was not a narrow margin due to abstentions: Turnout reached nearly 41%, with…

Three international experts, interviewed for La Verità (Nov. 24) by journalist Francesco Borgonovo, denounced surrogacy as a form of violence against women and children. From the United Nations to clinical psychology, a unanimous chorus is speaking out against a practice that normalizes the commodification of bodies and selects life according…

Time magazine fulminated this month about the rise of the trillionaires. In October, the Brookings Institute deep-dived into the rise of stablecoins. The Economist gave us their thoughts on the rise of singlehood. Straight Arrow News had a think piece on the rise of “Kirkifying” in the wake of the…

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has always benefitted from certain strange coincidences redounding to its benefit. The first IVF baby was born in 1978, five years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion-on-demand in the U.S. People who fought abortion because they said it took the life of an unborn baby vacillated…

Some Western European clerics are again singing the praises of secularization. The latest, according to Stefano Fontana, is Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Italy. (His November 17 opening address to the bishops’ meeting in Assisi is linked below.) That song, however, is hardly…

United in life and dance—that's how we all remember them—Alice and Ellen Kessler were also united in their final farewell, with a double assisted suicide. Alice and Ellen Kessler, the famous German artistic duo the Kessler Twins, beloved in Italy since the 1960s, have died at the age of 89.…

“Pleasure is what makes us human,” or so a bold new TV advert tells us. Well, then, AI doesn’t make the cut. Isn’t Fido, though, still a candidate? Not so. While the dog may be man’s best friend, anyone whose best friend is a dog needs help, and from a…

COP30, the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, opens today. The meetings will begin in Belém, a Brazilian port city located on the edge of the Amazon, and will end on November 21. Expectations are high among large sectors of the establishment, lobbies, and environmental movements, but there's also a…

Catholics have traditionally dedicated November to prayer for the souls in Purgatory, especially on All Souls' Day. To encourage efficacious prayer for the departed, the Church grants a plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions, to Catholics who visit a cemetery from November 1-8 and pray for the dead. The indulgence…

Reports, officially unconfirmed, are circulating that some dioceses in the United States have prohibited celebration of the Novus Ordo Missae (NO) with a versus orientem posture. I offer some theological reflections: Since introduction of the NO in 1969, the usual posture for celebration of Mass has been versus populum, “towards…