An Opportunity to help Catholic Education

John Paul the Great Academy

There are very few more prudent cultural investments than excellent primary education. See John Senior's books The Death of Christian Culture, and The Restoration of Christian Culture. See also Pope Pius XI's "Divini Illius Magistri," and his "Rappresentanti in terra, both on the subject of Christian education.

I learned this week that a traditional Catholic K-12 school, John Paul the Great Academy in Lafayette, Louisiana, is facing a dire financial crisis, and could be forced to close. If you would like to help out the school, please visit their website and click on the "Support JPG" tab.

Archbishop Burke on being a Catholic patriot in America

The Most Reverend Raymond Leo Burke, who is the Archbishop-Emeritus of Saint Louis, and is also the Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome, delivered the keynote address this morning at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. In this address he explained what it means to live out the virtue of patriotism, as a Catholic in present-day America. The address can be found here. I highly recommend it.

H/T: Whispers

Happy Feast of St. Benedict

Monte Cassino

St. Benedict helped save Christian culture. Alasdair MacIntyre, at the end of his 1981 book After Virtue writes:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict.

Read Fulgens Radiatur. Part of those "new forms of community" must be the reunion of Christians, in the face of surrounding darkness and decay.