Secularism tries to turn this world into a atheistic heaven. Our only defense against this lie is the Ascended Christ.

A New Idea of Lent has invaded the entire Church. A gauzy altruism has taken the place of a rigorous program of penance and prayer.

Our Faith is about swords, not hand-holding. Those swords are first directed at our sins, and then directed at the evils in the world and in our Church.

What is absent in enthusiasm is a humility before the example of the saints, who never prayed with external display or manic delirium but always with a calm and chastened manner.

The traditional Latin Mass held at the U.S. Capitol last week was a Jericho-Walls-crumbling moment.

Last year's Synod on Synodality was a moment of Magical Thinking, bearing no resemblance to historic Christianity.

I am not much for panegyrics, but this one is long overdue.

From The Administrator’s Desk, November 9, 2003

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When men want religion without God, they enclose themselves in a claustrophobic world. Things are left with gaping metaphysical holes. They are not what they are supposed to be. And since nature abhors a vacuum, that metaphysical hole is filled by the whims of men. Those whims are the stuff of terror.

Easter is the unleashing of the Revolution of the Cross. It should be unsettling, like an earthquake. Wondrous, as the explosion of galaxies. Penetrating, as the sound of a thousand marching armies.

For the poor are like the rest of us, the same as us—not a class apart. Our Lord does not see rich or poor, privileged or unfortunate, low class or high. He sees only fallen men and women whom He loves.

Christ’s only preference is for poor sinners. Who dares improve upon that?

Indeed, it must seem to the decent Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass that a kind of Berlin Wall is closing in upon them. Yet, though bewildered and downtrodden, they are not petulant; confused, but not vitriolic; sorrowful, but not inflamed. Their reaction to The Suppression is serene, but not unintelligent. Terribly bright, they appreciate the theological/canonical dynamic at work, and they respond intelligently but never disobediently.

So thorough was this transformation of Eucharistic theology that well-meaning Catholics now confidently call the Mass “a meal” and the Holy Eucharist “bread of fellowship.” Under this logic, it is quite hostile, to say nothing of actionable, to refuse any man or woman access to the Holy Eucharist. Not a few bishops growl at a priest even publicly repeating the traditional requirements for reception of Holy Communion. So very “unwelcoming,” you see. This alarming doctrinal breakdown entrenched itself so deeply that it even dictated new architectural forms for churches, confirming the Marshall McLuhan principle: the medium is the message.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Malcolm Muggeridge undoubtedly read this text when he wrote about the “inhumanity of the humane” in a 1978 New York Times editorial. Humanism without truth does indeed become inhuman because truth has ceased to be its compass. Today’s young guerillas call for love as an answer to the “rigidities” of the moral law.

It is always a defeat to steadily gaze at the chaos, for gradually our souls turn to salt. Even a doctrinaire Nihilist like Friedrich Nietzsche possessed the genius to recognize the ugly powers of evil, "Do not look long into the abyss, for you will find it looking back."

Clearly, Catholics have the obligation to know perfectly the evil they face, but not to obsess about it. Such rot does not deserve our attention. We look enough so as to conquer. No more; no less.