Issue: November 2023
Letter from the District Superior
Just before Our Lord ascended into Heaven, He gave the Apostles a mission: “Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mk. 16:15). This was a mission to conquer the world for Christ...
The Bible, the Bush, and Salvation: Can All Be Saved?
The greatest concern for a follower of Christ must be the salvation of souls. On the cross a cry of anguish issued from the parched mouth of Our Blessed Lord: “I thirst!” This thirst was a thirst, not for water or wine, but for human souls which He longed to save by the merits of His passion. It was a thirst which was only quenched by the chalice of His bitter sufferings on the Cross...
The Forgotten World: The Failure of the Catholic Mission to Aotearoa
Legends of a long-ago sunken land, Atlantis, have persisted in Western mythology from the time of Plato even to the present. Ironically, though, the last major inhabitable land mass to be colonized, New Zealand—known to its discoverers, the Māori, as Aotearoa—turns out to be part of a massive sunken eighth continent, Zealandia. Polynesian settlers arrived on the shores of Aotearoa, which is the size of the state of Colorado, sometime between A.D. 1250–1300.
The Paris Foreign Missions Society and Catholic Evangelization in Southeast Asia
Founded in response to the atmosphere of general reform of the Church after the Council of Trent, the MEP (Paris Foreign Missions) was one group whose only apostolate would be the foreign missions. MEP missionaries notably labored for the salvation of souls in many parts of the Far East and in Canada.
The Splendors and Miseries of the Spanish American Missions
As is so often the case with respect to their boasting in other realms, liberal and modernist apologists often talk about “missiology”—the “science” of missionary activity—as though they invented it ex nihilo. This pretension is definitively refuted by even a cursory glance at the history of Spanish missionary work in America...
The Miraculous Features of the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe
The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe contains some details clearly derived from Aztec culture and others from traditional Christian culture—and amongst these, some not normally associated with the Spanish Christian culture of the day. What is remarkable is how these disparate aspects are combined so as to form a unified image that has great appeal throughout the centuries.
Discovering the Wonders of Femininity with Fr. Karl Stehlin’s “The Dignity, Mission and Vocation of Women”
If you told me when I was a young woman that I would be sitting in an SSPX chapel early on a First Saturday morning with my husband and six children, wearing a modest dress and crowned by a gorgeous chapel veil, bone-tired but grateful for my life of homeschooling and homemaking, I would have never believed you—and I mean never...
My Path to Tradition
I grew up in a town of 1200 in western Oregon, a logging town. My exposure to Catholicism came from the few Catholic kids in school and the stories my father would tell about his time in a Catholic hospital in the late 1940’s. A young nun smuggled a watermelon to his room under her habit for him and his roommate. That kindness stuck with me. My strongest connection to Catholicism came through Tolkien and Shakespeare during my long Protestant winter that lasted into my thirties...
Why Does the Church Have Missionaries?
If you were to read the literature put out by some modern missionary organizations, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Church exists to provide housing, health care, and clean water for all. This is the error for which Romano Amerio, in his superb work Iota Unum, coined the phrase “secondary Christianity"...
Thematic Unity in the Final Sundays after Pentecost and its Disappearance in the Liturgical Reforms
An in-depth comparison of the prayers for the final Sundays after Pentecost of the New Mass vs. those of the Tridentine Rite sheds further light on the thinking of the Vatican's liturgical revolutionaries.
The Problematic Nature of the Schemata of Vatican II
The Truth of the Church has evident implications which embarrass Protestants and, alas! a number of Catholics imbued with liberalism. From now on the new dogma that will take the place of the Truth of the Church will be the dignity of the human person and the supreme benefit of liberty, two concepts which it has avoided defining clearly...
The Last Word
An atheist was visiting the west of Ireland and endeavoring to make himself understood in the local tongue. When it came to saying “hopefully,” he bridled, for the only way to express that adverb in the native language is to say “with the help of God.” No, he was a conscientious atheist, he couldn’t do it. “This isn’t fair,” he complained to a local, “I shouldn’t have to mention God if I’m an atheist and I just want to say ‘hopefully'"...