Four Society of St. Pius X priests were consecrated as bishops without papal mandate yesterday, and this morning it was announced that they (along with the two SSPX bishops who consecrated them) are excommunicated. Further, all priests of the Society were declared “schismatic,” and the lay faithful who “formally adhere to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X are to be considered schismatics and…

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When Venerable Emil Kapaun’s earthly remains were returned home to his native Kansas in 2021, Sgt. 1st Class Herbert Miller, at attention from his wheelchair, extolled him: “You don’t have ’em like that anymore.” Perhaps. But the raw material is there. Kapauns don’t spring fully formed out of the earth; they’re cultivated by hard work and difficult circumstances. Emil Kapaun grew up in a bare…

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“It takes a village,” declared then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1996, asserting that child-rearing could not be left in the hands of families but required state intervention. Along the same lines, I suggest it takes a collective effort—consisting of local and state authorities, joined to cultural norms and aided by the Church—to destroy a village. Let’s call it “Hillary’s Village,” and let’s see…

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If I had a tattoo for every time I have told my students to read “Parker’s Back,” which is one of my absolute favorite Flannery O’Conner stories, I’d probably look just like O.E. Parker, the lead character in the story, whose body, by the time it’s over, is completely covered with them. But my students remain strangely resistant—at least until I’ve walked them through the story…

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When I was dating my now-wife, she attended a parish whose priest decided to begin celebrating Mass ad orientem, meaning that for much of the Eucharistic Rite he faced away from Mass attendees and toward the high altar. (The church, built in the 1920s, was in the traditional cruciform shape and had such an altar.) Having only returned to the Catholic Church of my youth less than two years before…

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Recently, a Roman Catholic priest shared with me a link discussing the Virgin Mary in Islam. The article clearly states that Our Lady, the Mother of Christ, is regarded not as the Mother of the Word Incarnate but rather as the mother of a mere prophet. This is due to the fact that Muslims reject the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Nevertheless, Muslims hold the Virgin Mary in high esteem…

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One sometimes encounters Catholic writings that introduce a distinction between the institutional Church and the true Catholic Church. One will find terms like “the conciliar church,” “the official church,” “the hierarchy,” “the institutional church,” or simply “Rome” that are set in opposition to terms like “the true Church,” “the Catholic Church,” “Eternal Rome,” or “the Church of Tradition.”…

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Father’s Day, which we recently celebrated, is a dangerous day. It’s dangerous because fatherhood itself is controverted in contemporary society. Consider how The New York Times marked the observance: with a cartoon disguised as an op-ed on the wonders of being a “trans-male” (i.e., female) “father”—because “to my daughter, my gender was never complicated.” In the wake of Father’s Day…

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Five centuries before the arrival of the One whose coming among us would change everything, there lived a wily old Greek by the name of Heraclitus, a philosopher so fixated on the idea of change that it became for him the one constant in a universe where nothing will ever be constant. “No man may step into the same river twice,” he famously said, “for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same…

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The White House cage fights, the military flyover, and the bald eagle were quite remarkable spectacles on the South Lawn the other day, especially as they laid down a working-class marker on America 250. Various fancy-pants tut-tutted, and all the better they did. Remember, Abe Lincoln went in for ear-biting-eye-gouging rasslin’. These are our roots. There are more spectacles coming…

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