Veritas et Sapientia

Mandeville, LA - [Editor's note: I did not discover the identity of the author of the following, only their online pen-name: The Zippy Catholic. - MC] A fairly typical comment in casual conversation: “He was considering becoming a priest, but chose to pursue a career in medicine instead.” The vocational alternatives to vowed religious life are not careers. The vocational alternatives to vowed religious life are family life and bachelorhood/spinsterhood. […]

Mandeville, LA - The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange […]

Mandeville, LA - [Editor's note- Today on Maundy Thursday, I chose this passage from the Gospel of the Beloved Apostle, John, in the spirit of grasping the unfathomable Humility Our Lord displays through His love for His chosen, commanding them and by extension, Us. "For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also. - Exemplum enim dedi vobis, ut quemadmodum ego feci vobis, […]

Mandeville, LA - [Editor's note- on the advice of Brad Birzer, I downloaded and read Christopher Dawson's essay on Christianity and Sex, I am not disappointed that I did.] "The institution of the family inevitably creates a vital tension which is creative as well as painful. For human culture is not instinctive. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort, which involves the repression of natural instinct and […]

Mandeville, LA - [Editor's note: In today's Pile of prep I mused about the popularity of Donald Trump as a "Hail Mary" pass by American voters to save American and by extension, "Democracy". But as Chesterton explains, it is Democracy that is the ill plaguing modern man, but he cannot see it.] - "In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it. The French Revolution was […]

Mandeville, LA  - "In 1797 our government concluded a “Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary,” now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words: As the Government of the United States…is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion–as it has in itself no character of enmity against […]