Religion

Some reasons I prefer the kind of Church the traditional Latin Mass suggests to the kind of Church that—to my eye—appears to have come out of Vatican II:

• In general, the LM Church accepts the limitations of this world and orients itself toward transcendence. The post-V2 Church strives for God—the unlimited—in this world, and in

On a whim, I stuck “dream of a church” into Google. What came up, it seemed to me, was rah-rah stuff from people who want the community spirit of the church to substitute for God. It’s a kind of bootstraps approach to religion that doesn’t make much sense, because the whole point of religion … More ...

Looking back on protestantism, the thing that strikes me most is its collective nothingness. There are admirable individual believers and small groups, but in the absence of a principle of concrete authority larger groups become utterly mindless. There’s really nothing there. For evidence, consider the newsclips from the mainline protestant denominations at The Institute on … More ...

40 years after the Church threw open the windows, the better to reach out to Modern Man, a poll shows Catholicism is all but dead among young Romans and the Spaniards seem not far behind. The only encouraging point in the picture is the rather startling absence of happy talk in the first story.

This account in First Things of Radical Orthodoxy is interesting for a couple of reasons:

• It makes clear that postmodernism and Naziism are deeply related, since both say that order is nothing more or less than a violent act of the will. The two are the same.
• It describes the slightness of modern theology, which

If the gender deconstructors do succeed, what then? A clue may be provided by The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde. If the institutions and attitudes that make ordinary life possible are abolished then the alternative to beastliness will be sanctity, and many will choose it. Remember that the battle is never lost.

Why has the Church taken such a turn toward engagement with the world on the world’s own terms? The idea of opening the windows of the Church to the world is an odd one. You open your windows to life and reality. Which has life and reality, the Church or the world? When I compare … More ...

The worst thing about Archbishop Martino’s comments on the current impossibility of just war is the secular utopianism they suggest. They imply that the most fundamental issues of social life are now securely under man’s control. To the contrary, though, the reason we need God is that basic things are not under our control.

Secular … More ...