“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Nothing salutes the historian’s task more cogently than that lapidary first sentence of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go Between. In fairness to Filippo Lippi, there is more to say. And the honor of history demands it—not to clear a path through the thicket of present concerns or to shake a finger at either past or present. But simply to understand our world without—as best we can—an ulterior motive. Despite Vasari’s known bent for embellishment, his spirited account of Fra Filippo’s elopement with Lucrezia Buti has been accepted in its essentials. Continue Reading

Toppled Statues, Romantic Primitivism & Cultures Against Civilization

Maureen Mullarkey

June 26, 2023

Cultures proliferate. But as Roger Scruton reminded us, the thing called civilization is something altogether different. It is a commanding inheritance—a dynamic, comprehensive order that defends against dissolution into bedlam. The peril of our historical moment lies in the denigration of civilization by a multiplicity of parochial cultures. From feminism, gay culture, LBGTQ+ Nation (with its own flag), and transgenderism, to aggressive assertions of racial and ethnic primacy, we are re-tribalizing. Passion for multiculturalism is little more than an inversion of the barbarian’s jealous hatred for civilization. Continue Reading

Archbishop Cordileone: Dancing With Restorative Justice

Maureen Mullarkey

June 13, 2023

“The Archbishop is on fire to defend the faith!” So began Maggie Gallagher’s June 3rd broadcast email touting Archbishop Cordileone’s “stinging rebuke” to Marin County’s DA for having dropped felony charges against vandals on the grounds of Mission San Rafael. As executive director of the Benedict XVI Institute in San Francisco, Ms. Gallagher publicizes the activities of the institute. She also promotes the public persona of the archbishop, advisor-in-chief on the institute’s board. Acting as publicist, her first objective is a spring board for the second. Continue Reading

Earth Day: Compost & Microbiome Extinction

Maureen Mullarkey

April 22, 2023

Today is Earth Day. This annual feast of eco-spirituality has been with us for a half century. It gains more converts every year. Its official patron saint is Gaylord Nelson, then-senator from Wisconsin. He stirred crowds on the first Earth Day with calls for new national policies that will “interfere with what many have considered their right to use and abuse the air, the water, the land.”

Campaign nationwide to elect an “Ecology Congress” as the 92nd Congress – a Congress that will build bridges between our citizens and between man and nature’s systems, instead of building more highways and dams and new weapons systems .

Our Culture War Is A Holy War, part 1

Maureen Mullarkey

April 14, 2023

What we call culture war is a holy war. Sadly, clerical bureaucracy would rather lose it than make a fuss. Or so it appears from too many instances of clerical capture by the zeitgeist. Recent commotion over anti-Christian sentiment posing as feminist art on show in Mendoza, Argentina, illustrates the state of things. Justice Potter Stewart knew pornography when he saw it. Ordained shepherds of the archdiocese of Mendoza prefer not to notice. Art is all. Back to that later. But first, some useful history. Continue Reading