Christopher Shannon is too modest. In his introduction to American Pilgrimage, he concedes that his telling of the American Catholic story is “selective” and that “many comprehensive histories of the material I cover already exist […]
Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, while not the first social encyclical, was still a revolutionary document, albeit within the bounds of natural law and the Magisterium. Previous social encyclicals, beginning with Mirari Vos […]
In the late 1530s, a Castilian priest recently arrived in New Spain encountered two indigenous students from the Franciscan College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, founded in 1536 near Mexico City, which locals still called […]
From the pontificate of Gregory XVI down to the present day, there has been an ongoing crisis precipitated by the advent of the “New Things” (rerum novarum) of socialism and modernism. Since 1832 and the […]
The year 1968 was a dramatic one, all over the world. In 1968, the president of Peru was deposed in a military coup. His successor lasted several years until he was also deposed during a […]
1. In the early modern and modern periods of Western history, the religious establishment comprised of the various churches and the political establishments with which they were affiliated or which they supported feared liberal philosophies […]
When G.K. Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church one hundred years ago, on Sunday, July 30, 1922, it was big news. Except it wasn’t. It didn’t quite qualify as “news” because nobody knew about […]
Researching land-ownership patterns in early seventeenth-century England, antiquarian Sir Henry Spelman discovered within a twenty-four-mile circle on the map of Norfolk the sites of no less than twenty-four monasteries, dissolved by Henry VIII seventy-odd years […]
July 22nd marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian Augustinian friar known as the father of genetics. While the dominant narrative in the West since the Enlightenment has been that […]
In 1832, responding to drastic social, political, and economic changes spreading chaos throughout society, Pope Gregory XVI issued Mirari Vos, “On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism” — the first social encyclical. Previous encyclicals (letters by popes […]
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