The Global Pseudo-Religion: How the Secular System Replaced God
Modern, secular man imagines himself awakened. He looks back with a certain hauteur on the centuries of religious ‘darkness,’ in which the masses let themselves be led by priests, holy books, dogmas, and the fear of divine judgment. Today, we tell ourselves, we live in the age of Reason. But anyone who looks more sharply…
Confess or Burst
What man does not show in voluntary vulnerability, reality will eventually expose by force. This is no theological theory; it is a natural law of the spiritual life. In an age that idolizes autonomy and trivializes sin, we have lost sight of the fundamental dangers of pride. Our inner vessel must release its pressure. If…
Sin: Seeking God in the Wrong Place
The words “I have sinned” have acquired in our modern speech a bitter, almost poisonous aftertaste. For most people, these words are simply equivalent to the destructive conviction: I am bad. Yet this is a tragic, life-threatening misunderstanding of what consciousness of sin truly is. The true Christian, and specifically Catholic, sense of sin is,…
Why the Church Is Always Under Fire: From External Persecution to Internal Trenches
Whoever studies the course of Western history cannot avoid one fundamental, bewildering fact: the Catholic Church stands in a permanent state of siege. From the bloody arenas of the Roman Empire, through the guillotines of the French Revolution and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, to the refined psychological warfare of the modern secular…
The Idol of Success: Why Our Career-Religion Claims Lives
Yesterday I heard the tragic news of a suicide inside a ministry in The Hague. What is shocking is that this was not the first time such a thing had happened. It compels us to a fundamental question: how can a system that promises to lift us to the top simultaneously hurl us into a…
In the Depth of Sin Burns the Fire of the Holy
Leonard Cohen sang it with the voice of a man who had spent a hundred years in a monastery and a hundred years in a brothel and had found the same truth in both houses. We are obsessed with perfection, with the unblemished, with the spotless escutcheon. But it is the crack that lets the…
Discernment, Deception, and the Decline of Stefano Gobbi’s Marian Movement
In the chaotic aftermath of the Second Vatican Council the Catholic priesthood found itself in a deep identity crisis. Into this vacuum stepped Don Stefano Gobbi (1930–2011), an Italian priest who claimed to have received “interior locutions” from the Virgin Mary beginning in 1972. His movement, the Marian Movement of Priests (MMP), and its central…
Forgiveness as an Act of the Will: The Way Out of the Emotional Quagmire of Modernity
Millions of believers around the world pray about forgiving ‘trespasses’ or ‘offenses.’ In French it goes “Pardonne-nous nos offenses,” and in the English tradition we hear the familiar “Forgive us our trespasses.” Devout as this sounds, behind it lies, in my view, a flawed translational choice that clouds our understanding of forgiveness. The original Greek…
The Temptation of the Serpent: Voluntary Servitude in the Western World
We live in a time of existential confusion. Whoever reads the signs of the times sees no world merely beset by geopolitical tensions or economic crises. The real siege is invisible, creeping, and at the deepest level spiritual. It is a war that is not waged on battlefields but in the meeting halls of the…
Breath and the Crisis of the Masculine Spirit
To observe the contemporary man in the arena of public life is to see a creature suffering from a chronic spiritual shortage of oxygen. We live in an age in which human existence is reduced almost entirely to its functional output. The man of the twenty-first century seems to exist only in the ‘exhalation’: in…
In Veritatem
A search for truth
