The Day I Was Interviewed by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre
It was in the month of April of 1975. At the age of 22 I had traveled to Switzerland, accompanied by my beloved mentor at the time, John Senior. We were going to visit the (in)famous seminary of Écône, seat of the controversial (but at the time canonically legitimate) Society of Priests of Saint Pius […]
First or Only? (the battle between the ordinal and the cardinal in the Reformation)
As this year marks 500 years since the excommunication of Martin Luther in 1521 – a declaration that still resonates today – I decided to reread the documents of that belated and belabored answer to Luther’s claims, the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent (1545-63). As I read, I was struck by a seldom-commented feature of […]
What “catholic” should also mean
καθ’ ὅλου — there it is in its original form, dolled up in those adorable Greek letters (romanized it would be kath’olou, meaning something like ‘in a general way’, or ‘according to the whole’). It inspired also the Latin rendering that gives us the English word ‘universal’ (adding its own etymological twist, suggesting a ‘turning’ – vertere – […]