Miss Sylvia Cotton is our latest guest blogger. Miss Cotton is Founder and Headmistress of St Felicity and Perpetua School for Girls in Upper Gusset, Rhode Island. With a Bachelor’s Degree in Home Economics, Miss Cotton is an avid sportswoman, sailor and world traveler. Author of several books on how to raise Catholic young ladies–among them Seven Veils and Severed Heads and Leave Room for the Holy Spirit!  she collects Civil War memorabilia and sings bass in the Sweet Adelines woman’s barbershop quartet group.... Read more

The other day I was asked what was the most difficult thing about being a priest and I said I thought it was the fact that people don’t really want you to be a real person. They want you to be Jesus Mary and Joseph. I was exaggerating. However. There is sometimes some pretty weird stuff going on in the minds of priests and in the minds of the people and in their relationships. The job of being a priest... Read more

Now that Pope Francis has spoken out clearly against artificial contraception and same sex marriage we can hear the sighs of dismay from the disappointed secular humanists. Oh, how they latched on to this new hope from Argentina! It didn’t matter if they were Catholics or not. They wanted to love him. They wanted to adopt him as their own. Oh, how they twisted every ambiguous word of his, how  they idolized him by putting him on the cover of... Read more

View image | gettyimages.com Pope Francis’ record breaking visit to the Philippines reminds the world of the sheer power of numbers when it comes to debates about religion. Let the Oxford intellectuals like Dawkins squawk all they want about the evils of religion and the goodness of atheism. They are a fly not even worth swatting when you consider the crowds in Brazil for World  Youth Day and the phenomenal crowd that turned out in Manila yesterday. Between six and... Read more

These week two amazing guys did the first free climb of the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite. Kevin J0rgeson and Tommy Cauldwell spent nineteen days on the cliff face ascending a granite wall twice the height of the Empire State Building. Read about it and see the interview here. One of the climber said afterward that it was “a spiritual experience.” It made me think that if we considered the spiritual life to be more like free climbing El... Read more

  An article in the Daily Telegraph reports on a new film being made about the man who televised the trial of Nazi death camp criminal Adolph Eichmann. Eichmann was the chief organizer of Hitler’s “final solution” to exterminate the Jews. As the Nazis began the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, their Jewish policy changed from emigration to extermination. To co-ordinate planning for the genocide, Heydrich hosted the regime’s administrative leaders at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. Eichmann collected information... Read more

View image | gettyimages.com The Daily Telegraph has a great photo gallery of the Pope in the Phillipines. Go here What I love about these big papal visits hit me when I learned that they are called “Apostolic Visits” This is the successor of Peter and Paul doing what Peter and Paul did. They travelled. They were missionaries. They lived on the gospel. They spread the gospel They were on a mission from God. When the pope travels and greets... Read more

Not long ago I was engaged in an email conversation with an atheist. He wrote to me out of the blue responding to a blog post I had written. He seemed friendly enough so I went along with the conversation, first assuring him that I don’t argue with anybody online. Arguments are out. Discussions are in. So we exchanged about a dozen email each before signing off in a friendly way. The conversation revealed the usual situation: I didn’t believe... Read more

In attempting to collect a pantheon of bald headed saints we have come across the difficulty of the tonsure. Was the saint really bald headed or was his head shaved? A reader sent me this splendid photo of St Bruno–the founder of the Carthusian order, but we are uncertain if he is really bald or this is the effect of the monastic tonsure. Same with the photos of soon to be canonized Bl Junipero Serra. My conclusion is that it... Read more