C. C. Pecknold

Buried somewhere under all the debris, we saw the common good. Continue Reading »

On gratitude to God. Continue Reading »

The celebration of the Passion of the Lord is dramatic. It is the climax of all sacrifice. The curtain is torn. The temple is destroyed. On this day, when “Christ our passover was sacrificed,” the Christians fall prostrate in grief and sorrow. The whole range of human emotions experienced in the life of Christ are now on bended knee—sorrowful suffering, dripping blood, bloody flesh—the grief is palpable. Continue Reading »

Today Allen Tate is remembered—if at all—as a Southern Agrarian or New Critic. His name barely registers in discussions of “Catholic” writers. It was not always so. Tate’s 1950 conversion from atheism to Catholicism was so well celebrated that Marshall McLuhan would say that his was “the nearest American equivalent to Newman’s conversion.”Why do we hear so little of this American Newman? I started to wonder recently why do we not hear of his going to Mass with Ernest Hemingway in Paris, his pilgrimage to see T.S. Eliot in London, his correspondence with W.H. Auden? Why had I not heard of his time as poet-in-residence at Princeton where he spent countless hours discussing the Catholic faith with Jacques Maritain – who would eventually become his godfather? A friend who knows his work said to me, it is because he wrote the poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” and because we think he defended an old South that we are keen to expunge from our stained memory. Continue Reading »

A recent Pew study has found that instead of being at war with Christmas, Americans love it. Continue Reading »

While Cardinal Kasper has been busy lobbying for his long-sought proposal to change Church disciplines concerning the indissolubility of marriage, Benedict XVI has been, as he promised, cloistered in prayer and study. Continue Reading »

The Vatican is sponsoring this week (Nov 17–19) an international colloquium on the complementarity of man and woman in marriage called Humanum. It is sponsored by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith along with the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. The curial sponsors reflect the broad import the Vatican is giving this three-day event, as well as its significance for ecumenism and inter-religious cooperation. Continue Reading »

A response to my critics. Continue Reading »

There’s been a long conversation in America about the degree to which Catholic Christianity is compatible with liberalism. From the beginning of the American founding, bishops and theologians claimed that for all the flaws of liberal political philosophy, the American founders “built better than they knew.” And yet Pope Leo XIII could warn Cardinal Gibbons to avoid the errors of an “Americanism,” which would distort the teaching of the Church on the proper relationship between politics and the church. Continue Reading »