People used to sing together–on pilgrimage, on Crusade, on the way to battle. It kept up the marchers’ morale for the cause, shared beauty of melody and lyric, handed down and passed on noble ideas. The songs were really love songs: proclaiming love for Christ, and His mother, the saints, the Church, and the good…
This photo is a page from a delightful book called An Alphabet of Saints, by Fr. Robert Hugh Benson, Reginald Balfour, S.C. Ritchie, and illustrated by L. D. Symington. I made this happy discovery when searching for available scanned versions of Msgr. Benson’s fiction books (Lord of the World is probably his best-known work). Immediately…
The fundamental fact about the liturgical year is that it is a sanctification of time. Certain key events in the history of salvation, and certain key elements of faith, have become attached to certain dates of the calendar like gems on a bracelet. This bracelet is like a magnificent rosary. We cannot handle it without…
Ever since I reviewed the fantastic exposé of modern ways of presenting “the Middle Ages”, Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths by French historian and archivist Regine Pernoud, I have wished for more. Where could I find a history of this most glorious era of human civilization that got it right, from the beginning? …
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…
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…
It has been a while since we had any poetry around here. At the library last week, I found a book of Irish religious poetry, and on a whim took it home. Religious poetry is a somewhat rare sub-genre, I would think: that’s why I had to check out the book. One of the poems…
The Middle Ages is privileged material: one can say what one wants about it with the quasi-certitude of never being contradicted. –Régine Pernoud Now the center of my studies on Catholic liturgical tradition, under my magnifying glass to determine what the phrase “Christian Culture” really means, the Age of Faith (a.k.a. Middle Ages) has become my obsession and object…
Have you ever heard of the local Catholic evangelization groups springing up in cities and towns all over the U.S. (and beyond!), each of them a part of the wonderful St. Paul Street Evangelization effort? Literally standing on street corners with signs offering their prayers, answers to questions, and help finding the true joy, teams all over the country have…
(Today’s post comes from the pen/keyboard of reader and commenter Rannygazoo.) — † — I bought a lovely Catholic planner this year instead of an ordinary secular one. Usefully, it has both the traditional calendar of the Roman Rite and the current calendar that has been in use since 1969. I have greatly enjoyed having saints’ memorials and holy days…
St. Catherine Catholic Culture Center 