Fides ex Auditu

In 1908, The Times of London asked notable authors to respond to the following question: “What is wrong with the world?” In these heavy and somber days following the school massacre in Uvalde, yet still on the heels of the racially motivated shooting in Buffalo not two weeks ago, our entire country is asking the very same question: “What is wrong with the world?” Of those attempted answers put forward by the secular news media, I have admittedly read only a few, in part, because I suspect that I already know what they are going to say––or rather, what they are not going to say. And what I expect is that they will not answer the question in the way that G.K. Chesterton did over a century ago, which––to me, at least––seems to be the only answer to the question worth listening to.  To the editor of The Times , Chesterton wrote this: “Dear Sir, Regarding your question ‘What is wrong with the world?,’ I am. Yours truly, G.K. Chesterton.” While in the wake of great tragedy people today...

Nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, in the middle of the 19th century, one would not have expected anything great to happen in the small village of Lourdes. Even less would anything remarkable have been expected of the sickly eldest daughter of the town’s miller, lazy and drunk, whose vices forced his family to live in the foul poverty of a disused prison and at least one of his children to eat the church’s candle wax in lieu of proper food. Yet the God who prefers the weak of the world to the shame of the strong (cf. 1 Cor. 1:27) chose this humble town and this poor family – the Soubirous – to cast down the mighty from their thrones and to lift up the lowly (cf. Lk. 1:52) by sending she, whose words they are, to visit Lourdes by appearing eighteen times in 1858 to the simple and illiterate peasant girl named Bernadette.  Bernadette bears testimony, like all the saints before and after her, to the truth of Paul and Barnabas’s words recorded in the Book of Acts: “It is...

Last Sunday’s Gospel concluded with Jesus’ revelation to Peter that when he grows old, “you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” John the Evangelist explains, “He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.” Peter would indeed be crucified in 64AD at the command of Nero in his circus on the Vatican Hill outside the City of Rome.  That Gospel passage and the person of Saint Peter have always been close to my heart. But in the past two weeks, I have stopped to wonder, as I never have before, who exactly Jesus meant when he told Peter someone else will dress him and lead him where he would not want to go. Did he mean Nero or the Roman soldiers who would crucify him? Or did Jesus mean no one in particular but rather that Peter would simply no longer be the master of his own fate?  To my mind, today’s Second Reading proposes a different reading of this “someone else”. In the Book of Revelation, ...