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“The anti-Catholic tradition could not be kept alive, would die of exhaustion, without a continual supply of fable.”  -    St. John Henry NewmanNearly a century ago, the Catholic author, historian, and politician Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) wrote an intriguing examination of the Church and the modern world in his 1929 book Survivals and New Arrivals. Belloc was gravely concerned that the English Catholics of his time were not aware fully of the anti-Cath …

Pope Benedict XVI shocked the Church and the world at the Consistory on February 11, 2013, when he told the assembled cardinals, “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.” Benedict believed that his age and health had led to an inability to “adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me” and stated that &ld …

Misconceptions about the past can persist for centuries, despite the diligent work of historians, either because vested interests benefit from the distortions or because the fanciful version is more fun.  - Piers Paul ReadPope Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903) was annoyed. The Church was under attack by intellectuals seeking to limit its influence in society and by Italian nationalists and revolutionaries who intensely disliked the papacy. Leo was also concerned because when surveying the metho …

“She was the victim of a vicious, shrewdly sustained process of character assassination from the moment she set foot in France, a sinister, carefully orchestrated campaign of calumny, which tried in particular to destroy her moral reputation. An intellectual climate fanatically hostile to traditional monarchy, and sheer human jealously, exploited the xenophobic hatred of her as an Austrian and her own aloofness to make her the scapegoat for all French ills."Perhaps the most damning p …

From the beginning of the Church, people have wondered what it is. A big part of St. Paul’s work, as reflected in his letters to the early churches, is clarifying what the Church is and is not. To the Galatians, Paul had to explain that belonging to the Church does not require first becoming Jewish. But he also needed to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with coming into Christianity from Judaism! To the Philippians, he explained that the Church is not a place of self-fulfil …