Immortal Irony
In his short story “The Ambitious Guest,” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a lot of irony. A lot might actually be an understatement. The story is...
True Mercy and False Sentimentality: An Address
We hear much of mercy, which in its Latin original is derived from miser (sad) and cordia (heart). In his one question in the...
The Upside-Down of Moral Relativism
Very often we hear it said that when tackling thorny questions, two heads are better than one. As for considering the many facets of...
Women and the State
Yet another female premier has been ousted from office after a single term. Is it too impolite, not to say politically incorrect, to ask...
The Real and Present Presence of Christ
Often, the simplest facts are the most important—and the most frequently unadverted to. Take the Last Supper, for instance. Obviously, the Apostles had to...
Providence and a Thief’s Goodness
Last year on Palm Sunday we heard the passion from Saint Mark’s Gospel, and next year it will be from Saint Matthew. Each is...
The Ratzinger Report Revisited
The Italian journalist and Catholic convert Vittorio Messori in 1985 published his two hundred page interview with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict...
A Letter to a Catholic School Teacher
(What follows is adapted from a letter of a parish priest, Father Scott Murray, to a Catholic school teacher, in the publicly-funded, separate system,...
The Layered Meaning of the Prodigal Son
In 1861, John William Burgon, the (Anglican) dean of Chichester cathedral, preached a sermon in Christ Church cathedral, Oxford, that...
Losing Canada
When the cross atop Mount
Royal was first erected in 1924, the Montreal
Gazette described it as “a memorial to the survival of the Canadian people,
whose...