In a hollow just north of Bennington, Vermont, near the New York state line, nineteen monks at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration live and die in seclusion. It’s the only Carthusian site in North America, a remote spot in the shadow of Mt. Equinox, highest peak in the Taconic Range. In 2005 . . . . Continue Reading »
At first glance, it seems odd that a major academic publisher should commission a volume on, as it were, the phenomenology of religious life. Insofar as they are perceptible at all, religious have retreated to the margins of our imaginative universe, as defendants in court cases, amiable extras in . . . . Continue Reading »
Opera has traditionally had little interest in Christian orthodoxy. So when composer Francis Poulenc wrote his masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites, the work’s celebration of heroic piety defied the secular spirit of the art form. Continue Reading »
Face blank as absolution, from this back rowshe stares straight ahead to the small raised stageof touring musicians, lost in the rebel notes they soldtheir . . . . Continue Reading »
Sex sells, all the more if one throws in Vatican secrets and conspiracy. Long before Frédéric Martel’s In the Closet of the Vatican, the Church had problems with sexual indiscretions, not least in the era of Pope Pius IX (1846–1878). Hubert Wolf, the self-appointed dean of German church . . . . Continue Reading »
Because an anchoress could have a cat,We may assume she had one. That it satBeside her while the pilgrims came and went,Giving, like her, a lesson in content.That it was quiet when her visions cameAnd when they passed it slumbered just the same,But any mice who trespassed in the cellWere given . . . . Continue Reading »
The witness and work of the celibate supports a culture of life. Continue Reading »
When a nun is stopped on the street, it is often so that a person can work out their issues with the Church, not with her. And when Fr. Jacques Hamel is made to kneel and die, it is the Church that is attacked in his body. Continue Reading »
A new film, The Innocents, tells a moving story of healing and grace without downplaying the grief and trauma that preceded them. And it does this while addressing a moral blind spot of our popular culture. Continue Reading »
Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, a Catholic nun and the only woman in the history of television to found and a lead a cable network for twenty years, died yesterday, Easter Sunday, at age ninety-two.After entering the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, a Franciscan religious order, in . . . . Continue Reading »
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