The Ember Days are special days for prayer and fasting during the liturgical year. They correspond to the four seasons, and they focus our attention especially on the blessings of nature. On the Ember Days, we give thanks for blessings we’ve received, but also remind ourselves of our need for penance and grace.

The young curé of Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest (1937) ruminates about monks (Carthusian and Trappist): What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!

It was a July night in 2003. We, the college-aged men and women lodging in two Georgetown townhouses, were sitting in our cozy circle in a small living room. My friends and I were all interning that summer, we were a formal group of Muslim interns in Washington D.C. Living in a swanky neighborhood was […]

For centuries, the Catholic Church was the last bulwark standing against the tidal wave of secularism, atheism, and moral decay that was sweeping the world. As converts like G.K. Chesterton gave witness, the Catholic faith was a fighting faith—fighting against the destructive ideas and moral rot plaguing society. Yet, something happened. The Church suddenly faced […]

  Those claiming the Catholic Church is dead are many. Secularists can’t wait to put the last nail in the coffin of their greatest enemy and publish the obituary. Anti-Catholic protestants can’t wait for the day when they can claim definitively that Rome has failed and fallen into apostasy. “See,” they hope to say with glee, […]

“Flog your enemies with the Name of Jesus, for there is no weapon more powerful in heaven or on earth.” – St. John Climacus “Blessed be the Name of Jesus.” – The Divine Praises Among the spiritual weapons in our arsenal, there are none as powerful as the Holy Name of Jesus. The saints have […]

The year is 1147. Knights and soldiers from around Europe are gathered at the gates of the great city of Lisbon on the eve of a monumental battle with the Muslim occupants. They have erected a giant moveable engine to scale the gates (like the kind in Lord of the Rings). Their enemy is merciless, and they know […]