The Torments of Hell
Summon up before the eye of your mind, therefore, a horrible and swirling chaos, or a lightless and sinister subterranean cavern, fuming with every kind of unspeakable foulness and swarming with hideous phantasms, or a burning and bottomless pit, completely suffused with scorching, acrid, and inextinguishable fires. Alternatively, you may imagine a great and immense…
Defending the Real Presence: Two True Stories
It happened once in the Netherlands that two ladies, a Catholic and a Protestant, were disputing on the subject of the Real Presence. The Protestant asserted that the Real Presence was impossible. The Catholic asked her: “Have you Protestants any creed in your religion?” “Oh, to be sure,” said the Protestant; and she began to…
Escape from Communism: the Bella Dodd Conversion Story
Meeting Sheen: Recovery and Reconciliation In her June 1953 public testimony, Bella Dodd informed counselor Robert Kunzig and the congressmen on his committee, “I only got out of the Communist Party completely, emotionally, when I found my way back to my own church.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bella’s life was in chaos—a…
The Devil’s Powerlessness
Since Our Lord lived, the enemy is fallen, and his powers have lost their strength. Therefore, though he can do nothing, nevertheless, like a fallen tyrant, he does not rest, but threatens, though it be but words. Let each of you think of that, and he can despise the demons. If they were tied to…
Mystical Combat Is the Answer to the Coming Storm
Practice: How to Save Society The Blessed Virgin Mary leads us to Jesus not so much by her words but by her mystical action. Our Lady’s last recorded words in Holy Scripture are, “Whatsoever he shall say to you do ye.” Imagine her with Our Lord at some of the events during His three years…
Inspiration from St. Stephen of Hungary and His Crown
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with Pope Francis by phone on Friday and thanked him for his prayers. The phone call came the day after the funeral at St. Peter’s Basilica for Cardinal Jozef Tomko, who at age 98 had been the Catholic Church’s oldest living cardinal, and the last of the great Cold War…
Remembering Leo XIII’s Arcanum—On Christian Marriage
Few popes in the history of the Church had the impact of Pope Leo XIII. Born Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci on March 2, 1810, he was the sixth of seven sons born to Count Lodovico Pecci and Anna Prosperi-Buzi. At age eight, Lodovico and Anna sent their son to study at a Catholic school…
The Assault on the Holy Eucharist
“I am not allowed in these columns to discuss politics or religion, which is inconvenient; as they are the only two subjects which seem to me to have the slightest element of interest for a sane man.” That was the English convert to Catholicism GK Chesterton writing in the Illustrated LondonNews in 1908. Chesterton became…
