While Benedict XVI may not himself have made great contributions to the natural sciences, he made what is much more important: a contribution to understanding a world in which the truth is one, is God’s, and, from atoms to archangels, is capable of being seen as connected. A great deal has been written about the [...]
Benedict XVI left us with countless theological insights. But he also left us with an important lesson about the very foundations of democratic society and culture that we often take for granted. The recent death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI reminds us of an essential and historic connection between religion and Western civilization. Religious belief and [...]
Work is given to man principally as a gift, as a particular way to commune, so to speak, with God, by imitating his own absolute creativity, his perfect work. In an address to the “ministers of the world of culture,” given in 2008, Benedict XVI recalled the central role monasteries played in the development of Europe: [...]
The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the [...]
We certainly value the great Catholic art of past generations, but we believe the greatest art, the greatest liturgy the Catholic Church has ever produced is yet to come, and we are pro-active in commissioning new liturgical music, poetry, and writing. Founded in 2013 by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the Benedict XVI Institute works [...]
St. Benedict’s life was steeped in an atmosphere of prayer, the foundation of his existence. Without prayer there is no experience of God. In the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God’s gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his [...]
Mary Ann Glendon has written a very diplomatic account of her service in the courts of three popes. It seems that nothing that she encountered necessarily surprised her, but she felt like a “stranger in a strange land,” at a time in history that Bishop Fulton Sheen not all that long ago labeled the “end [...]
In one of his last writings, Pope Benedict XVI afforded a key insight into the conservative ideal. Though he was writing as a Catholic about Catholic problems, the late pope’s reflections are truly universal. Speaking directly to the sexual abuse crisis that reached fever pitch during his pontificate, Benedict observes: “The crisis caused by the [...]
Hans Urs von Balthasar wanted to see the Church as missionary, and to reassert the beauty of the mystery at the heart of the Christian message. He sought to reinvigorate religious life and the role of the laity by reintegrating beauty and mysticism in theology. Born on 12 August 1905 in Lucerne, Switzerland, to an [...]
Every being is good because it is created. To be created is to be loved into existence by God. Every creature is thus good in itself, both because it is loved by God and because, as a participant in this love of God for it, each creature also loves itself. Because all creatures share in [...]
“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either. In his masterful book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI defended the beauty and [...]
Modernity, by God’s grace, may be the site of a new synthesis, the transcending of stale categories of thought and practice, in which a new Christendom can emerge, one in which the reign of God in His glory and love emerges side-by-side with the full dignity and flourishing of man. The Immanent Frame and Great [...]
It is a bright note of hope, set against the present daunting darkness, that shines throughout Samuel Gregg’s “Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization,” both illuminating the past and shedding much-needed light on the present situation. Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, by Samuel Gregg (256 pages, Gateway Editions, 2019) “The [...]
Joseph Ratzinger was aware of the central event of modernity, namely the transferal of basic Christian categories from the transcendent order to the political order of this world. Like many classically trained German scholars, Joseph Ratzinger was learned in many spheres of knowledge. He displayed a considerable familiarity with those areas in which he did [...]