2018

St. Xavier's: From the Waterfront Priest to the Dancing Priest

There exists no sharper illustration of present-day enfeeblement of the Jesuit temper than the difference between the ministries of John Corridan, S.J., the “waterfront priest” of the 1940’s, and today’s Robert VerEecke, S.J., the “dancing priest.” Fr. Corridan earned a significant place in labor history. Fr. VerEecke earned removal from the Church of St. Francis Xavier for making sexual overtures to a male parishioner. The diminution is tragic. And telling. In the slide from Corridan, a morally serious man, to VerEecke, a flâneur on ideological boulevards, we witness the unsteadiness of a Church listing toward the conceits of the age. Continue Reading
Priesthood: From Uncle Fultie to Uncle Ted

This is no easy time for the priesthood. The culture that produced and celebrated Bing Crosby’s portrayal of Fr. Charles O’Malley in Going My Way (1944) and, two years later, The Bells of St. Mary is extinct. Decent, congenial “Fr. Chuck” was a blithe symbol of goodness, honor, and virtue that an entire nation could trust and embrace. Not any more. On both sides of the screen, the cultural landscape has changed. In the culture at large, and the eyes of many Catholics themselves, the priesthood has become a tainted profession. Continue Reading
Confusion of Tongues: Language of Sin vs Bureaucracy

To religious minds, the language of sin, its vocabulary and syntax, cuts closer to the heart of things than its secular replacement: the language of bureaucracy. In a religious lexicon, the word sin describes violation of the inalienable rights of the God Who commands. Bureauspeak, by contrast, is a secular rhetorical practice adept at describing violations of standard procedure. Or, if you prefer, offenses against decorum. The sinner says, “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.” The bureau-rhetor says whatever is needed to minimize negative reaction to slippage among personnel or, perhaps, one’s own. Continue Reading
McCarrick's Seminarians

Ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick interests me less than the seminarians who kept mum for so many years. The saga of this man is far larger than the story of one libertine prelate. The ugly dimensions of the scandal lie in the conspiracy of silence, a de facto collusion that permitted a known sexual predator—a sociopath—to rise through the ranks of Church nomenklatura. Set aside, if you can, McCarrick’s alleged abuse of an eleven year old boy. That is of a different order of magnitude than snuggling with grown seminarians. Continue Reading
Golden Age of Illustration/Frank C. Papé

Orthodox art appreciators make dogmatic distinctions between art and illustration. They omit from the established roster of prominent 19th century artists the names of those who put fine art between covers for ordinary people. The Golden Age of Illustration did not survive the Great War. It flamed into life in the interregnum between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, flourishing between the first Treaty of Versailles (1871) and the second (1919). Named in retrospect la Belle Époque, those decades of creative stability overlapped with England’s Pax Britannica and our own Gilded Age. Continue Reading