History

On Antonin Scalia’s first day of Catholic education, an expatriate of the New York City public-school system arriving as a freshman at Xavier High School in Manhattan in September 1949, he beheld a most unusual […]

Editor’s note: Part One of this essay can be read here. The First Apocalypse: The Blessings of Anarchy In the fifth century, the Western Church suffered its First Apocalypse, losing its demographic race to revive […]

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part essay. Most diagnoses of our current cultural malaise have focused on either of two narrower causes: the ideological and idealistic, or the organizational and materialistic. […]

Editor’s note: The following piece is the first part of a two-part essay.  I In 1846, John Henry Newman traveled to Rome to see if he could arrange to undertake seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood. […]

As Catholics, we celebrate the saints for their heroic witness to our Christian Faith. Each saint has a day on the Church calendar, which typically falls on the date of death, known as their dies […]

Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was not the first Protestant who decided to become a Catholic after reading the Fathers of the Church. And he’s not alone. The Coming Home Network, a group established to […]

Few coal miners wanted anything to do with the stranger in the black cassock who arrived in town in 1933. It was the Great Depression in West Virginia—food was scarce and shifts were irregular. So […]

This year marks the centenary of the death of Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier of Belgium, who died on January 23, 1926. Priest, Archbishop, Cardinal Born in 1851 in the French-speaking region of Brabant, Belgium, Mercier entered the diocesan […]

Editor’s note: You can read Part 1 of this column here. In 2014, the newly elected Pope Francis decided to improve the state of the Vatican’s finances. He appointed the Australian cardinal George Pell (1941-2023) […]