Without the root of prayer, Europe is like a drowning museum and a place of cynical intrigue, but at prayer Europe is in the fight of her life—where darkness and collapse beckon the annihilation of identity. In such times, civilisations require saints.
Though kitsch wears the costume of reality’s vocabulary, it does not describe things as they are. You could only call it good without qualms of conscience after downing a Dionysian dose of expired boxed wine.
The police have become an alien presence in our society. Gone is “the historic tradition,” as Peel put it, “that the police are the public and the public are the police.”
The survival of any traditional institution requires that, during historically critical moments, it remembers its reason for being, renewing its covenant with those it represents. Otherwise, it risks vacuity.
Those who are contemptuous of Christian civilisation continue their assault on our spiritual heritage. Defending it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify to those for whom erasing its traces from the public sphere has become a point of honour.
The victory this week of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni fits into this story as well. Her words—and perhaps, in the future, by the grace of God, her party’s actions—are nothing less than a full-throated disavowal of the West’s Chronos Complex.
Evil leadership is no leadership at all. Nor is insane nor stupid leadership either. So let us look at their opposite qualities, which in fact define real, true leadership.
There are inordinately excitable Catholics who believe that only a Catholic sovereign is owed their loyalty and devotion. I remind them of the commandment of St. Peter: “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the Emperor.”
The theft of the “Just Judges” panel of the Ghent Altarpiece is still unsolved. In the first of a series of essays, the story begins.
The Golden Bull of 1222 is a unique charter, as it was issued as a result of popular movements of the common nobility to defend and restore supposedly old customs and liberties, in the face of activities of the king and barons they perceived as harmful.
The fundamental tragedy of progressive and media malfeasance is that the very real plight of millions of Ukrainians is being lost in the social media roar.
The term ‘goblin mode’ has recently entered Internet-parlance, describing an apparently quarantine-inspired attitude of slovenliness and near-abject embrace of circadian-pattern irregularity, novelty-addicted internet scrolling, and abnegation of hygiene, countering Instagram-curated photography with a defeated, devil-may-care nihilism.
