Weekly Roundup, August 1, 2025

Sackings in Detroit; Hyperpapalism Blues; Doctor Newman; 4 Years of Prison Guards; Ratzinger on Lefebvre; Liturgical Lessons; Philosophical Ponderings; Political Pronunciamentos; and more

Just returned from a wonderful (though inhumanly demanding) lecture tour and pilgrimage in Spain and still reeling from jet lag, I am happy to resume the Weekly Roundup here at Tradition & Sanity. This one will be longer than usual, as I’m looking back over the past three weeks!

I am happy to say that all the lectures I gave in Spain are now available as PDF downloads thanks to Una Voce Seville. The text is given in parallel columns of English and Spanish.

I thank all of my readers and subscribers for their ongoing support of this Substack!

Sackings in Detroit

I imagine everyone has heard by now of the peremptory firing of three of the finest and most long-standing faculty members of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit: canonist Edward Peters and theologians Ralph Martin and Eduardo Echeverria.

I think this is a watershed moment. It’s the exact inverse of the refusal of schools to fire progressives and modernists after the Council; indeed, in most “catholic” institutions they still rule the roost. Bishops don’t seem to care about that. But let there be staunch defenders of the orthodox Faith (using the very words of the Church, no less!) and reasonable critics of dangerous trends, and they are threatened or removed. As trads have been saying for years now, after they finish with us, they’re coming for YOU.

You can get the basic facts from many places, e.g., Fr. Z here, or from Rorate.

Several insightful analyses of this purge:

• Eric Sammons, “The Purging of Faithful Catholics Continues”

• Ed Feser, “Suffering for the truth”

• Phil Lawler, “Archbishop Weisenburger and the episcopal double standard”

• Greg Schlueter, “Ralph Martin and the Crisis of Clarity”

Some readers may be familiar with the name Mike Lewis, proprietor of the blog Where Peter Is. Predictably, Lewis attacked the three fired professors as “heretics,” a claim Feser correctly identifies as both nonsense and calumny.

But as ridiculous as Lewis’s position is, he — together with Michael Lofton and a few other public figures — represents a disturbing online trend that I have labeled “hyperpapalism,” and it is well for us to know how to refute this dangerous distortion of ecclesiology. Happily, Fr. Edward Hauschild has just published a remarkably lucid essay on what the Magisterium actually is (and is not). Fr. Hauschild summarizes his view as follows:

To spare those who (like me) have a short attention span, the one-line summary of my argument is this: the Magisterium is the servant of a perennial truth given to the Church by Christ which we call the ‘Deposit of the Faith’ — it can explain, teach, and interpret the truth, but it cannot contradict the contents of that deposit. To Lewis’ argument I say Sed Contra: “This teaching office (Magisterium) is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully.” For those with time, and a long attention span, I commend the following article as my full and considered response.

Readers with a serious interest in ecclesiology should bookmark Fr. Hauschild’s piece and be sure to read it. Also relevant is an older piece of mine that continues to be relevant:

Hyperpapalism & Luther: Strange Bedfellows

Hyperpapalism is a mental disease. I’ve been saying this for years and will say it till my last breath. The pope is not the ultimate measure; he is a measured measure. He is measured by Divine Revelation; by the prior Magisterium, whether the extraordinary Magisterium or the universal ordinary Magisterium (both are infallible, but the pope’s ordinary Magisterium is not, nor has anyone ever seriously proposed that it is); by the consensus of the Fathers; by the witness of apostolic liturgies; by Natural Law and Eternal Law; by the principles of reason.

Good News

John Henry Newman

It was announced that Saint John Henry Newman, lifelong foe of Liberalism, will be declared a Doctor of the Church (the 38th, to be precise). Newman is often misunderstood or brought in to support progressivist points. Any serious reading of him shows this to be poppycock. If you simply READ Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, you can see that he opposes any sort of evolutionism of new beliefs (that is, the core principle of Modernism). He insists that any new formulation must not conflict with or contradict what has been taught before.

A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption… A developed doctrine which reverses the course of development which has preceded it, is no true development but a corruption. (Essay, ch. 5)

Unfortunately, even conservatives are trying to seize him as a patron for the “middle ground” (see this tendentious piece by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza), when in fact Newman was a traditionalist avant la lettre. Indeed, Newman was skeptical of the trend of an ecumenical council (Vatican I), hoped for a different pope (disliking and distrusting Pius IX), and repeatedly insisted on the centrality of tradition. Put simply: if Newman were on faculty at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, he’d be fired.

I will write more soon about Newman, as it is important not to let him be co-opted by either the progressivists or the conservatives.

Magnificent hand-built monastery

The Fairfield Carmelites are building what has to be the most beautiful monastery since the Second Vatican Council (and possibly for some decades prior!). But more importantly, their communal life and interior life are founded on the solid rock of tradition. To feel your spirit lifted, read “A Garden Enclosed: The Fairfield Carmelites.”

New TLM Retreat Center

Wonderful, even incredible news from the Institute of Christ the King:

With gratitude to Almighty God, I am pleased to announce the completion of phase one of our renovation plans, and, consequently, the opening of Sacred Heart Retreat Center in Burlington, Wisconsin in September of 2025…. The Sacred Heart Retreat Center website is now active and ready to receive registrations for our calendar of upcoming retreats. Our programming for the coming months will consist of silent guided retreats for men or for women, following either a week-long schedule (Sunday evening through Saturday morning) or a long weekend (Friday evening through Monday morning). These retreats are interspersed among retreats for the canons of the Institute of Christ the King and other events for lay people which will be announced to you in the coming weeks.

Read more, and see additional pictures, here.

Exquisite Arts

My son Julian, one of the writers here at Tradition & Sanity, primarily works as a graphic designer who has created most of the covers of Os Justi Press’s books. He also designs websites, including those of Exquisite Arts, the San Damiano College for the Trades, Terra Bona Landscaping, The Cenacle Press, and his own site.

It’s about the first one that I’d like to write for a moment. Exquisite Arts sells gorgeous hand-painted sacred images from Peru. The owner invests a lot of his time promoting the TLM throughout the USA. Thus, the business helps its owner, the artists in Peru, and the traditional movement all at the same time. I highly recommend visiting the site and perusing the artworks there.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Camp

The FSSP in Mexico provides a 4-day summer camp for hundreds of girls aged 6 to 16 who travel from across the land to take part in daily traditional Masses and reflections, workshops and formative activities, wholesome fun, camaraderie for lasting friendships, and vocational inspiration. Fr. Heenan is asking Catholics to consider making an $85 donation to sponsor girls from an orphanage who cannot afford this cost. More information here.

Eternal Christendom

I am blessed and honored to serve on the Board of Eternal Christendom, a multi-media venture to promote the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith, with a special outreach to non-Catholics to lead them to the Church. Recently, the EC website has completed a massive upgrade of the “Quote Archives,” an incredible resource that has to be seen to be believed. Check it out!

From kitchen to chapel

A parish kitchen was transformed into an adoration chapel. I think the pastor must have realized that more prayer and fewer pastries was the key to a holier parish. Just kidding; it turns out this space was not in use and therefore he found the best use for it:

Four Years Under “Prison-Guards of Betrayal”

As of the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, July 16, we hit the four-year mark of Pope Francis’s wicked motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, a title best translated as given above. Stuart Chessman of the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny offers an extremely fine analysis of the ecclesiastical landscape four years after TC. I can’t recommend this too highly!

Dom Alcuin Reid, OSB, preached an apposite homily on the 7th Sunday after Pentecost:

At Lauds we recalled the stark warning: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” And at Vespers this evening we shall be confronted anew with the fact that “A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

These are unpleasant reminders. But as a good mother, our Mother the Church, does not hide them from us. Rather, today, she insists that we consider them very carefully and beware, lest the realities about which she is deeply concerned overtake us and destroy the life of grace in our souls, to our eternal ruin and damnation. This is not some form of paranoia or an attempt at manipulation by fear: it is prudence. False prophets exist. Bad trees grow and produce their poisonous fruit. If our Mother maintained silence and allowed us to be duped and led astray by the former and poisoned by the latter she would be gravely negligent.

It is very difficult to contemplate these realities today without recalling the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes promulgated four years ago this month. For it has recently emerged with very great clarity that its stated motivations were nothing other than a tissue of lies fabricated in an attempt to give credence to the political positions of particular prelates who sought at all costs to uproot and burn and any and all new growth of a particular tree they long since thought had been felled and that, thanks be to the clarity of vision and teaching of Pope Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum (2007), was growing up anew in the otherwise somewhat arid fields of the post-conciliar Church, and bearing very much good fruit indeed.

For the past four years, from Grenoble to Quimper, from Chicago to Washington DC, and recently from Valence to Detroit, urged on by those prelatic perpetuators of lies whose pathetic power-plays mirror those of the Father of Lies himself, instead of generously opening their hearts and making room for everything that the faith itself allows (cf. Benedict XVI, Letter, 7 July 2007) wolves in shepherds’ clothing have, incredibly, been putting their energy into cutting down and burning the fruitful green shoots of the usus antiquior—the older form of the Roman rite—in a vain, positivistic attempt to kill-off a reality so deeply rooted in the Church’s Tradition that is, and shall always, be immune to any and all positivistic decrees that attack it and that shall survive whatever wars they generate.

Dom Alcuin alluds to the secret documents published by Diane Montagna. For those interested in a deep dive, Andrew Vargas, in “When the Church Buries Its Head—Traditiones Custodes: An Autopsy,” consolidates all the information Montagna provided while also steelmanning the opposition. It documents the sympathies of the CDF committee members, considers which courses of action would have been psychologically most plausible, examines papal audience dates and what documents Pope Francis likely saw, and compares the protocols of the two reports sent to bishops.

Also pertinent is a rousing interview with Christian Marquant of Paix Liturgique in France, an organization that has done extensive research for decades on the topic of the persistence within the Church of a desire for traditional worship. This desire has never gone away and has only grown stronger with time.

Phil Lawler explains why TC must be rescinded, not merely ignored.

Ratzinger on Lefebvre

It appears that in the summer of 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger told two priests, one of whom wrote up the account:

“It is hard to see what [how much?] the Church owes to Archbishop Lefebvre, not just for his ‘African period,’ but also later for the Church as a whole.… I consider him to be the most important bishop of the 20th century with regard to the universal Church.”

“Had the French episcopate at that time shown even a little more Christian charity and fraternity towards Archbishop Lefebvre, things might have taken a different course…”

“From my current point of view, I have to agree with Archbishop Lefebvre in retrospect about having his own bishops. Today after the experience of ’15 years of Ecclesia Dei’, it is clear that such a work as that of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X cannot simply be handed over to the diocesan bishops.”

#1 is a bit hard to believe, though Ratzinger could have said something like it; #2 and #3 make perfect sense in light of Benedict XVI’s subsequent actions.

Vatican II Was the Turning-point

Traditionalists have always known that, whatever ups and downs the Church was experiencing prior to the last Council, it was decisively and definitely that Council that occasioned a mass exodus from the Faith. But it’s always nice to see the experiences and intuitions confirmed with empirical studies.

In a major new paper, “Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries,” just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, authored by Dr. Barro of Harvard University, Dr. Dewitte of the University of Oxford, and Dr. Iannaccone of Chapman University, we learn, among other things:

Using an event-study design, we find that rates of religious-service attendance in predominantly Catholic countries started to decrease relative to those of all other countries and to those of other Christian countries precisely in the aftermath of Vatican II. This result holds for adult and child religious-service attendance and also holds when using the share of a country’s catholic adherents as a continuous measure of a country’s exposure. Overall, the Catholic relative attendance rate fell by four percentage points per decade between 1965 and 2015. This pattern is consistent with religion modeled as a club good (Iannaccone [1992]) and with the view that Vatican II shattered the perception of an immovable, truthholding Church (Greeley [2004], MacCulloch [2010]).

Meanwhile, in Germany things have become so bad with the progressivist hierarchy that a retired priest, Fr. Abel, has publicly declared he can no longer in good conscience identify himself as a priest of the diocese of Fulda, but will say henceforth he is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church — since the promise of Christ about the gates of hell apply to the Church, but not to any particular diocese. While ecclesiologically this is dicey, since a priest must belong to some particular place and not be a free-floating agent, one nevertheless can’t help sympathizing with Fr. Abel. If he were younger, perhaps he could seek incardination in a diocese that is faithful to Christ and the Church.

The corruption of the German Church reminds me of the poignant words of Leila Marie Lawler, commenting on an essay of Phil Lawler’s (alongside which one might also read Matthew Walther’s thundering denunciation “No Matter”):

This abuse of the word mercy is having a bad effect on the moral character of the people. The facile dismissal of crimes that cry out for vengeance and break God’s Commandments harm our life together and weaken the Gospel’s message. People have an innate knowledge of justice; they tend, eventually, not to respect those who trivialize evil; they reject Christianity because of this effeminacy that overlooks victims and ignores scandal. Does our hierarchy not understand what the purchase price for mercy was, on Christ’s holy cross? They sprinkle about His blood pretty freely, seems to me.

But the reason is, they don’t really believe in Christ’s blood. If they did, they would not get rid of the feast of the Precious Blood, they would adore and defend the Holy Eucharist from all profanation, and they would work tirelessly for the salvation of souls redeemed by His Blood, by (inter alia) promoting everything that wins souls, such as Catholic liturgical tradition. As Our Lord reminded us in the Gospel last Sunday, we know the tree by its fruits.

Liturgical Lessons

What is culture, and why does restoring Christian culture matter for the future of the Church? My keynote address from the Securing Sacred Ground Fundraising Gala on June 21, 2025, responding to these questions, may now be viewed on YouTube:

In this lecture, I explain how authentic Catholic culture flows from the Holy Mass and why the traditional liturgy is the beating heart of Western civilization. From Gothic cathedrals down to hearth and home, everything in Christian society exists to “foster and protect the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” The devastating impact of post-Vatican II reforms and the scourge of modern iconoclasm has set us back, but we should embrace the Benedictine motto “succisa virescit” (cut down, it flourishes again) as we strive to rebuild. A rallying cry for Catholics who refuse to surrender their patrimony and are building the institutions needed for cultural restoration.

Stuart Chessman, mentioned earlier, has written a positive review of my latest book, Close the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed.

Kwasniewski acknowledges that the TLM and the Novus Ordo stand in direct contrast to each other and spells it out in great detail. And Kwasniewski frankly argues for the superiority of the TLM over the Novus Ordo. Further, he disputes any need for ‘mutual enrichment’ of the two liturgies. The TLM does not need enrichment from the Novus Ordo; the importation into the Novus Ordo of elements of a prior liturgical tradition contradicts the liturgical principles of the new rite....

As for active participation, the intensity of the devotion of a congregation at a Solemn TLM has always amazed and inspired me. And that devotion rests on a solid understanding of the texts and participation in the music, where appropriate. These are real achievements — and Peter Kwasniewski’s book is an invaluable resource for deepening that devotion and understanding.

James Baresel, too, reviews the book over at OnePeterFive. He says with quiet precision just what he appreciates about my arguments as well as where he finds them exaggerated or open to challenge. I like this kind of thoughtful engagement; it’s too rare in our sound-bite world.

John Grondelski, whose name seems to be showing up everywhere these days, is a non-trad who nevertheless compellingly argues many of the same points we do. His article “Two Immediate Threats to Contemporary Liturgics” is well worth reading. It’s the kind of piece you could readily share with a broad spectrum of people, to help them see what’s at stake in the debate over the liturgy.

While I was in Spain, two articles of mine appeared at New Liturgical Movement.

The first, “Why the Church’s Religious Should Return to the Traditional Liturgy,” is my reply to a letter I once received from a religious superior who explained that his community had been quietly integrating the traditional Latin Mass into its life, with several younger members learning the Mass and beginning to delve into the breviary. All were benefiting from it, but they felt they had so much more to learn. He asked me for advice and reading recommendations. He also noted that while some prelates had encouraged them to learn the TLM, others had strongly discouraged them, and asked me why I thought there was such a sharp division among prelates.

The second, “The Life Teen Phenomenon: A Guide to Resources,” is a critique of the “new paradigm” of liturgy: somewhat informal, upbeat, contemporary, like the evangelical Protestants, but with some Catholic flavoring added: devotion to the Virgin Mary, Adoration, Stations. Of course, such Catholic elements are good, but they have been ripped from their proper theological and liturgical context and are now free-floating items at a devotional buffet. We should not be quick to think that a priest has the right idea about what he’s doing just because he follows the Catechism and wants to encourage “good things.”

Case in point: “Surf, Sand, and Sacrament: Hundreds Attend Long Island’s ‘Beach Catholic’ Summer Mass.” I’m sure the priest has good intentions (that seems clear from what the article says). But it’s still wrong to celebrate Holy Mass on the beach, if it is not required by wartime or persecution or some other extraordinary circumstance, as opposed to “folks just like it out there on the beach.” I’m disappointed that the National Catholic Register would feature this in a positive way. You can talk all you want about “going out to meet people where they’re at,” but this just ends up driving the process of desacralization, which is the last thing moderns need.

Robert Lazu Kmita, in “The Mystery of Transubstantiation,” helps us to see why the Holy Eucharist should not be devalued and trivialized:

The Holy Eucharist is God’s remedy for the post-lapsarian state of man. If by consuming the forbidden fruit from the tree in the midst of Eden, the proto-parents Adam and Eve fell from grace and were exiled from Paradise, by consuming the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, believers are re-admitted to the heavenly Jerusalem represented by the Church. Thus, a reckless act of eating, committed under the temptation of the devil, is corrected by another act of eating, with profound meanings and salvific effects. For by eating God, we enter into the deepest possible communion, very concrete, very real, both bodily and spiritually, with our Creator, of all.

Michael Foley continues to offer his marvelous commentaries on the Mass at NLM. Here are the latest (since the time of my last roundup):

• The Sanctus

• Where the Action Is

• The “T” in Te Igitur

• The Te igitur

Philosophical Ponderings

For those who are unfamiliar with the thought and legacy of Wolfgang Smith, Scott Ventureyra’s short introduction is most helpful. I believe Smith is one of the unsung heroes of modern Catholic philosophy and that his work will, over time, be recognized as a major resource of the sapiential tradition, the philosophia perennis.

The eccentric lifelong traditionalist Monsignor Alfrey Gilbey (1901-1998) wrote:

Egalitarianism is that philosophy which believes that all men … are born equal. Well, that, of course, is balderdash. They’re not! It’s all part of the entirely erroneous theory that presumes that we come out on a belt, from a sort of producer! … Everything in creation, right down to you and me sitting here now, is unique, and not ‘equal’—a cruel word, has no meaning. There’s no way in which you and I are equal to one another.... Egalitarianism goes round with this mad idea that we’re all square pegs—or round, as the case may be—and that we can be put from one hole into another.

You can read Joseph Shaw’s appreciation of Msgr. Gilbey in “A Nasty Man Like Me.”

If you’ve ever wondered why the date of Easter is set as it is, you should read Robert Lazu Kmita’s “Astronomy and Liturgy: The Symbolic Meanings of the Date of Easter.”

Why did late medieval humanism arise, and what makes it different from modern humanism? Aaron Pattee has answers.

Modernity corrupts and shrinks our linguistic universe even before we’re aware of it, and this affects our capacity for meaningful conversations. So argues Ross Arlen Tieken in “The World Shut by Tongues.”

Robert Keim argues that a loss of metaphor and a mechanistic view of mind go together, and that we must learn from Christ the real use to which “facts” are to be put:

The mind…is not primarily a calculator, or a mechanistic problem solver, or a repository for raw information. In other words, it is not—does not need to be, should not be, was not designed to be—a computer. If you spend enough time reading old literature, you may even start to wonder about how exactly the minds of the past understood the seemingly objective realities that we call “facts.” This is not to say that they denied factual occurrences, but it would seem that their attitude toward facts was not one of appetition, or reverence, or submission. They weren’t constrained by facts in the way that we are. Rather, facts were a resource for communicating the higher truths, deeper experiences, and general laws of human life. In other words, facts were the stuff of which metaphors—and stories, and images, and allegories—were made.

Christian culture has been weighed down by literalistic, rationalistic, pragmatistic tendencies for a long time. Though some progress (or “regress”?) toward premodern modes of thought has been made, those tendencies, to my great dismay, still permeate Catholic education. Such a state of affairs is, in my view, completely unjustifiable; various arguments against it could be made, but one of the most compelling comes from the divine Teacher Himself. A careful reading of one short Gospel passage shows that the Founder of the Christian religion had a very high opinion of metaphor.

Ross Arlen Tieken’s essay “The Greening Power of God” is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve read in years. Please make time for it:

When I finally began to notice that all the seemingly scattered, stunted pieces of my life were cohering into a living Self, a Son of God, I was struck dumb with awe and gratitude. None of the mechanistic metaphors I’d inherited from psychology, medicine, or anthropology fit this new vital awareness of God’s operation in my life….

Materialist language is a language of analysis, dissection, and disintegration. A diabolical grammar (from dia-ballein, “to split apart”). It takes apart and throws away. It is efficient. Machine-like. “Health” in this language is conceptualized as maximized operation capacity, if a defective part is found, it is replaced. But in the presence of my Creator, I felt no parts being replaced…. I began to think of myself not as a broken machine, or a buggy computer, but rather a garden. A Green Man in the process of shedding his black and raggy leaves.

Political Pronunciamentos

“Caught between Israel’s military and Muslim persecution, it’s unclear if and how Christianity can survive the raging conflict in the Middle East,” an article at Crisis tells us. As far as I can see, there’s absolutely no reason to support or even tolerate either the Palestinian Muslims or the Israelis. Both are monstrous, both are reprehensible, both are at war with the law of God and humanity. The Christian is opposed to both.

It’s unbelievable what’s going on in Western Europe. Civilization is collapsing in real time, in front of our eyes. David Betz’s predictions of “dirty civil war” become more credible by the day. See Lauren Smith’s “The West Won’t Survive Its Own Cowardice.”

Jerzy Kwaśniewski (a possibly very very distant relative in the old country) is doing superb work defending the order of law and the principle of sovereignty. The disrespect for nationhood is absolutely insane in the EU at this time, on the governing level. And there’s mounting evidence that people are sick and tired of it. European Conservative interviews him in “No Community Without Borders.”

Over the decades many conservatives and traditionalists have lamented our seeming inability to band together against the common threat of liberalism (or progressivism or modernism, call it what you will, it’s the same set of errors morphing into different configurations and contexts). I was struck by Colin Redemer’s formulation of the problem:

Survival is complicated by the circular firing squad of conservative politics. According to Land, no matter how bad the left may seem to a given conservative, there is always someone in the conservative camp whom the conservative fears more than the left. The religious traditionalist fears the nationalists (“Racists!”). The nationalist fears the capitalists (“Globalists!”). The capitalist fears the religious conservatives (“Collectivists!”). Conservative disunity contributes to the degenerative ratchet, with the result that, as a popular meme puts it, Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he only swims left.

Aaron Pattee reflects back on one year of his Substack Maintaining the Realm. If you are at all interested in political philosophy and history, you will not want to overlook it. He tells us, among other things, that he will be turning to the following topics: the imperial abbeys; the medieval universities; the Crusades; everyday life in the Holy Roman Empire. Delicious!

Other Favorite Articles

• Eric Sammons, “My Advice to Catholic Young Men”

• Kennedy Hall explains why “The Screens Are Killing Your Children.” A positive counterpart is Robert Lazu Kmita’s “An Illusory Virtual World: Joyful Children and Discerning Parents.”

• Fr. Robert McTeigue, “What If ‘Synodality’ Means Nothing?”

• Fr. John Perricone, “Beware the Priest as Clown”

• Robert Lazu Kmita, “The Hidden Meaning of Miracles: Why did our Lord Jesus Christ Walk on Water? Plato, Saint Maximus the Confessor, and Pinocchio on the Meaning of Drowning”

• Hilary White,“Math and Mysticism: Sacred Art Can Change the Way You Think About God, Man and the Cosmos.”

• If things are bad and getting worse in the world (and possibly in the Church), what is your reaction: Despair? Evasion? Worldly concern? Or sacrificial love? Patrick Giroux’s “Take Courage and Show Thyself a Man” helps us to orient ourselves in a difficult time.