Note: a longer follow-up to this article’s critique of Sebastian Morello can be read here. In his new book Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries, Catholic philosopher Sebastian Morello promotes so-called “Hermetic magic”* as an important part of the spiritual revival of Western...

Let me propose a way to instantly improve the liturgy at your parish. Fear not, beleaguered pastors: it won’t require developing a new skill, arguing with a choir director, or getting in trouble with your bishop. Probably no one will complain, though if someone does, it’ll be a...

Erika Kirk’s statement of forgiveness for her husband’s assassin has to be the most God-glorifying act by an American public figure in a long while. I pray that this will be the pleasing offering to God that helps to turn our country around. Aside from Erika’s heroic...

I recently returned home from the longest trip I’ve taken in a decade. I was blessed to be able to spend the whole month of September in Rome, working while there, and then a couple of weeks of traveling around on pilgrimage/vacation. Other than getting to spend a month in the eternal...

This is the first article in a four-part series. In 2018, five years after his resignation from the papal office, Benedict XVI wrote an essay for Communio about the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people. In it, he assessed certain aspects of the modern Catholic consensus on this...

This is the second installment of a four-part essay responding to an article by the Catholic public intellectual Robert George, published in the Jewish journal Sapir. (Read Part 1) I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and...

Phil Lawler and Peter Wolfgang have written about President Trump’s attack on the Pope and its political implications. I want to focus on the issue of blasphemy, especially with regard to the image Trump posted of himself as Jesus. This is, in fact, the...

These days it’s impossible to say that celibacy is higher than marriage without some Catholics taking offense. Even if you make the right qualifications—what is objectively better may not be subjectively better for a given individual, marriage is still good, married people can be...

In the first installment of my series on the great encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, I discussed Aeterni Patris, his encyclical on the restoration of Christian philosophy. Now it is time to get into the specific philosophical principles undergirding Leo’s social magisterium, beginning with his...

This is part of a series of articles and podcast episodes surveying the most important encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. It has been almost three hundred years since the Catholic Church first condemned Freemasonry—when on April 28, 1738, Pope Clement XII published a bull forbidding all...