Tag: Catholicism

The Dream Cities: Vienna and New Orleans

Vienna and New Orleans, despite everything, have remained themselves in the face of larger cultures, consciously or otherwise, attempting (with some success) to reduce them to mere sameness.

A Light Out of the Prisons of Atheist Albania

It is almost as if Don Simon Jubani was prepared to be a political prisoner. His collaborators and admirers describe him as “a nut with a hard shell,” “tough,” “passionate for the truth,” “uncompromising,” “provocative and justice-seeking,” and “highly intelligent though impatient.” He was an athletic priest (a former soccer star) who ministered to five mountainous rural parishes in the Mirdita region before he was arrested in 1963. The toughness comes across in print.

The Last Imperial Christmas

In peace or war, the Church Year was a large factor in the home life of the Imperial family, as it was for many of their subjects from Tyrol to Transylvania. Charles and Zita loved Christmas; during Advent Charles taught his children to make small sacrifices. For each of these they could put a straw into the empty manger of the Nativity scene. By the time the Christ Child would be installed on Christmas Eve, there was generally a good supply of straw!

France: Catholic Procession Honoring Virgin Mary Attacked by Islamists

A group of Catholics were attacked and subjected to vicious, anti-Christian verbal abuse in a Parisian suburb last Wednesday during a torchlit procession that had been organized to celebrate the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception. The Marian procession, which took place in Nanterre and saw a group of thirty Catholics walk from the chapel of Saint-Joseph-des-Fontenelles […]

Give Us Back Our Lady!

The terrible incident of the Notre Dame fire should have been the occasion to renovate a church so damaged by the ravages of time, to make it even more beautiful. Instead, the sorcerer’s apprentices in charge of its destiny have preferred to indulge in their dreams of experimentation, as if a centuries-old cathedral were a creative laboratory subsidized by the Ministry of Culture.

Dutch Parishes in Downward Spiral

While the Roman Catholic Church, numbering about 3.7 million, is still the largest denomination in the country, aging membership and secularization are now making themselves felt. Catholics actively involved in parish life are few—about 150,000, a mere 4% of all registered Catholics.

Papal Tyranny and the Order of St. John

The picture that has been emerging of today’s papacy is one of a pope, with little or no regard for law and due process, governing a Church that has made disregard for law and tradition part of its ecclesiastical culture.