Blessed Feast of All Saints! Earth is so near to Heaven today that the one thought which fills all hearts is happiness. –Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year What a glorious day this is! From sunrise to sundown will be remembering and celebrating the eternal joy that our big brothers and sisters, the saints, are enjoying in…
I have a small ambition: I really want to change the world. I want to save it–or at least, the souls in it. I want to help rebuild and restore Christian culture. Are you with me? Of course, it’s an immense undertaking that will likely take millions of people, generations of effort, and a constant outpouring of God’s abundant…
Oh, it’s so good to be home! I’m just back from a wonderful, multi-state trip that involved going to Sunday Mass (Ordinary Form) in a little parish church in western North Carolina. Modern (built recently in the 2000s) on the outside, and modern in many ways on the inside, there were yet many statues and holy images prominently placed…
In pursuit of a writing project I have recently started, the other day I decided to read the Book of Acts in one afternoon. And then, since I just happened to have it sitting around, the next day I read Marigold Hunt’s The First Christians: The Acts of the Apostles for Children, just to be…
This beautiful, strikingly emotional prayer is so long that it might more fittingly be called a “meditation.” The source in which I found this prayer surprisingly gives no information about it other than the title, so I don’t know if it really is by St. Augustine–but I think that as such an important and holy figure in…
For Christmas last year my husband bought me the huge (684 pages, weighs 3 lbs!) and beautiful book A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages by James Monti. I had wanted it badly. This book is somewhat like an encyclopedia, only one that provides a live, guided tour of the rites…
Almost nothing has brought greater happiness and inspiration into my life in the last five years than my discovery of the continuous tradition of Sacred Music within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church built the Western Civilization of the last 2,000 years, and Sacred Music is the soundtrack for all this history! To connect to this artistic glory through modern…
Oh, how skeptical and dismissive I was—and oh, how many slices of humble pie I get to eat, while my mother watches! When she started praying the Divine Office years ago, I thought that she must: 1) have too much free time, 2) think that “normal” Catholic devotions aren’t good enough for her, or 3)…
On the day I got married, I did not expect or understand that the future happiness my new husband and I looked forward to would come from the very small things. Naively, I believed that it took the “big things” to keep us connected and make us happy: big things like frequently affirming out loud that we…
All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle. –St. Francis of Assisi Lately I’ve had to go on a media fast (again)–the darkness out in the world just seems too oppressive at this moment, and the evil on every front seems poised to swallow us all up. But–now is when…
St. Catherine Catholic Culture Center 