Religion

What does it mean that the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators, the only comprehensive compilation of statistics regarding trends in the American Church before and after Vatican II, gets mentioned only 32 times on the web, mostly in connection with a WorldNetDaily column Pat Buchanan wrote last December? I suppose the answer is that … More ...

There’s no substitute for seeing what’s there: Cardinal Arinze’s comment at Georgetown sparks protest. Mention that homosexuality mocks the family, and a theologian can’t bear to share the stage with you and 70 of her colleagues sign a letter of protest. In a way it’s all to the good—the more direct personal experience those … More ...

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.