ROME—The old Mass can now be heard in at least seven of Rome’s places of worship, five of which offer it on Sundays, including three where it is said daily.  This is besides St Peter’s itself where it is being said publicly on an increasing number of special occasions.

Significantly, one Roman church is now dedicated to the entire Latin liturgy.  It was on 23 March 2008 that Cardinal Ruini, at the behest of Benedict XVI, created this personal parish in the ancient pilgrims’ church which displays Reni’s magnificent painting of the Trinity (1625) above the high altar.  Starting there, the seven Mass-centres are as follows:...More>>>

CAI

CYC is a computer "knowledge base" in an artificial "knowledge-representation language" called CYCL. CYC comes from the word "enCYClopedia". The original idea of CYC was to encode a single-volume English desk encyclopedia into a language of symbolic logic so that the semantic content or meaning could be more easily manipulated by computers. By "manipulated" I mean to include things like making logical deductions from premises in a manner analogous to the third operation of the intellect studied at least up until the 1960s by every Catholic seminarian in his foundation in scholastic/Thomistic/Aristotelian logic...More>>>

Marriage: It’s Natural

Natural Law Arguments in Defense of Marriage

As the institution of marriage is now under near constant attack, with several additional states gearing up to redefine it altogether, it is appropriate to consider the arguments in support of the divinely ordained nature of this institution.  It is imperative to do so at this time in particular as the organs of power in our society are bent on denying that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman for the purpose of begetting, rearing and educating children.

We have a president and media Gestapo who propagate the falsehood that marriage is whatever they declare it to be.  Interestingly, in a public debate in which I participated over California Proposition 8 last November, my challenger began his remarks by stating that he believed the State had no business defining what constituted a marriage.  He concluded therefore that the law should let anything be accepted as a marriage that is claimed to be such by individuals, regardless of its form....More>>>

Consecration of Christ the King Church

(First diocesan church in Florida to

exclusively offer the Tridentine Mass)

by Michael J. Matt

On the Feast of the Epiphany, 1996, my wife and I were married at the Church of St. William in Naples, Florida. The late, great Father H. Marchosky offered our Traditional Latin Nuptial Mass for the first time in Naples since Vatican II.  In those days it was no simple matter to obtain the needed permissions to have the “outlawed” old Mass. In fact, after we’d just barely secured ours (thanks to the efforts of my wife’s family—faithful Catholics and residents of Naples for decades), it was rumored that our Nuptial Mass would be the first and last Traditional Mass allowed in Naples....More>>>

Forty Years of Novus Dis-Ordo

(But what about the Code of Canon Law of 1917?)

Anniversaries are a time for reflection. 2009 Marked the 40^th anniversary of the revolutionary introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae by the command of Pope Paul VI, an act which has inflicted much damage, pain, scandal and confusion on the Church.  As a reflection on this anniversary we will consider a topic which, to my knowledge, has rarely been considered as a contributing factor to this unprecedented liturgical novelty, the imposition on the Church of the Codex Juris Canonici of 1917...More>>>

Ludwig von Mises versus Christ,

 the Gospel and the Church

(An Open Letter to Tom Woods)

Dear Tom:

When we wrote The Great Façade together back in 2002, I was one of the most ardent supporters of your work. Indeed, I saw you as a big part of the future of the “traditionalist” movement in America. But I did not anticipate your public dissent from the Church’s social teaching in favor of the radically laissez faire “Austrian school” of economics, whose pretensions range far beyond economics to a comprehensive “philosophy of liberty” that cannot be reconciled with the teaching of the Magisterium on the duties of men and societies toward Christ and His Church, or even the duties of men toward each other on the level of natural justice. Nor did I anticipate that you would become a “scholar in residence” for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a radical libertarian cult dedicated to the thought of von Mises and his “anarcho-capitalist” disciple, Murray Rothbard, both agnostic liberals who utterly rejected the role of the Church and the Gospel in the constitution of social order....More>>>

A Liberated Christian

in Another 'Tolerant' Society
Old Christendom has long since abandoned the City of God in a vain attempt to build the City of Man, a soulless Potemkin village on a grand scale. Like all the hubristic, grandiose and narcissistic extravaganzas beginning with the Tower of Babel, it was foreordained to failure. We have on this earth no lasting home, in the mournful lyric of Brahms’s A German Requiem.

The towers of the modern day City of Man are beginning to show cracks in their showy but shoddy façades. Their shallow foundations tremble. Cities show increasing signs of strain, and there are those who believe they are soon to come apart at the seams. So it shall always be so long as societies worship themselves...More>>>

Church Arian, Church Evolutionist

As St. Jerome put it, “The Church wakened to find itself Arian”. Today the Church has wakened to find itself Evolutionist. And today’s heresy — or body of heresies — is a much more radical thing than the adherence to the single Arian heresy; for the present error, though it is presented as Theistic Evolution, draws upon the fundamental atheistic or pantheistic explanation of the universe: the universe creating itself by its own processes....More>>>

A Visit to Konnersreuth

When I was a child, a frequent guest in my father’s home was the late Trappist priest, Father Urban Snyder. One of the original “men in black”, Fr. Snyder had refused to offer the New Mass after Vatican II, determining instead to travel the world offering the old Mass and spreading the traditionalist doctrine.  He was a close friend of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and, for a time, served as the Archbishop’s confessor....More>>>

From the Pill, to Catholic “Divorce” to the Apocalypse

Chaos in the Church

Nobody who wants to see can ignore that the Church is going through moments of great confusion. The Spirit of Darkness has worked so adroitly and efficiently that he has succeeded in spreading a dark cloak over the minds of multitudes of the Faithful.

Consequently, many Christians feel themselves confused about what they must do. It can be said straightforwardly that they are divided. On the one hand, we have the clear, categorical, and still in force norm. On the other, there is the daily, absolutely contrary practice: Shepherds tolerating ways of behavior – sometimes, even advising them – which are foreign and even totally opposite to the norm. It is not surprising that many sheep of the Flock of Christ feel themselves disoriented; worse yet, they have ended up abandoning the norm and consigning it to oblivion....More>>>

I hadn’t heard from Fr. Rueda in at least two months when an email message, forwarded multiple times, showed up in my inbox last month indicating he’d died.  In time, I would learn there was some rather bizarre news associated with that of Father’s passing...More>>>

A Catholic Declaration Is Desperately Needed

Pope Benedict XV

by Christopher A. Ferrara

Two months after World War I began, with Christmas approaching, Pope Benedict XV, in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum (1914), echoed the judgment of both of his immediate predecessors on the state of what the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has rather mordantly described as “the new world of human liberty.” And Pope Benedict wanted to be clear that “it was not the present sanguinary strife alone” that had prompted him to continue in the line of papal pessimism about political modernity. “There is another evil raging in the very inmost heart of human society,” he wrote, “a source of dread to all who really think, inasmuch as it has already brought, and will bring, many misfortunes upon nations, and may rightly be considered to be the root cause of the present awful war.”...More>>>