You Can't Pass on Faith...But You Can Pass on Tradition

It is common to speak of "handing on the faith" to one's children, "raising our children in the faith," and analagous comments which denote transplanting the Catholic religion from ourselves into our kids.

Praise His Goodness in 2025

Another twelve months has come and gone, another year in the valley of tears. Though it is cliche to say, I will never cease to marvel at the swiftness with which the days pass. "Time, like an ever-flowing stream, bears all its sons away." It was, however, an incredibly fruitful year for myself and for this blog, with several new professional relationships forged, new projects embarked upon, and a prolific amount of material written that I am very proud of.

Between the Unam Sanctam Catholicam blog and website, I published 62 essays in 2024. I've also been publishing a monthly history column at Catholic Exchange (which is more normie friendly) and have recently become a fairly regular contributor to Catholic Family News, a relationship I am deeply grateful for. Last year also saw the publication of the first three installaments in series of essays at New Liturgical Movement delving into (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Further installments in the series will be coming in 2025. 

While I am happy with everything I've produced this year, below are some of my favorite articles from the USC treasury. These are from both the blog and website:

• The Four Griefs of Wisdom
• The Lord Weighs the Heart
• Segregated Catholic Schools in New Orleans
• Why I'm Not Orthodox
• Two Deaths and Two Masses: The Healing Power of the Requiem (guest post)
• The Pax Tablet
• Gratitude: It is Good for Us to Be Here 
• My English Tour
• Liturgical Handwarmers
• Supporting the Church in Anglo-Saxon England
• Our Barren Garden of Symbols
• Walking to Church
• "Sunday Christ" Images
• Crises of Faith: Letting Go to Hold On
• Make Your Devotion Attractive
• The Justinian Code and the Emergence of Clerical Marriage in Byzantium
• Sister Blandina vs. the Public School
• The Context of Cajetan's Comments on Praying for a Pope's Death
• The Real Apparitions are the Friends You Made Along the Way

I also want to mention the tremendous success the Unam Sanctam Catholicam YouTube channel had in 2024. The last twelve months saw the channel double in size, with 2,300 new subscribers and over 10,000 hours of viewing with 4,566 subs to date. The USC Facebook page continues to grow steadily as well, with around 13,100 followers. 

Another major enterprise in 2024 was the successful publication of The Latin Mass and the Youth, which was first announced on this blog back in the spring. The Latin Mass and the Youth is a collection of 42 essays by young Catholics ages 12 to 24 explaining what the Traditional Latin Mass means to them.

I should also mention The St. John Ogilvie Prayerbook, which is a compilation of prayers, rituals, rites, seasons and events that reflect a Celtic and Catholic spiritual vision. With an original introduction by His Excellency Athanasius Schneider, this is a great resource for Catholics who want to reconnect with the authentic Gaelic tradition. It's a really beautiful book—344 pages on 39 gsm "Bible”

like thin paper, with soft imitation leather, ribbon, and gold foiling. The best part is, if you use the code UNAM at the link above, you can get it for 15% off : )

Thank you kindly to everyone who has supported this blog or interacted with any of my content. It means a lot to me. Special thanks are due to Greg DiPippo, Peter Kwasniewski, Matt Gaspers, Konstantin Staebler, Murray Rundus, Brian McCall, Reyers Brusoe, Athanasius Schneider, Joe Johnson, Alex Barbas, Chris Lewis, Joseph Lipa, Michael Schrauzer, and all the other friends, supporters, and patrons of this blog and website. 

Let us praise His goodness in 2025!

Gratitude: "It Is Good for Us to Be Here"

If you've never watched the lectures of Dr. Iain MacGilchrist on YouTube, do yourself a favor and look him up. I first came across his work in an interview he did with Jordan Peterson, which you can view here (if you have two hours and can deal with Peterson's rabbit-hole brain farts he periodically interjects). Dr. MacGilchrist is a neuroscientist who one of the foremost authorities on brain lateralization (i.e., the hemispheric nature of the brain, the tendency for some neural processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other). 

Stripper Prefers the Traditional Latin Mass

Back in October, I caught up with an old buddy of mine from high school that I haven't seen since before the pandemic. We grabbed a movie, went to dinner, and drove around our old hometown reminiscing and talking about how the place had changed. My friend is Catholic but...well, his faith has been hot and cold through most of his life—periods of intense zeal punctuated by episodes of falling away and years of non-practice; emotional reconversions and pledges to "get serious about the faith," followed by another inevitable fall, occasioned either by some serious sin or just sheer laziness.

Responding to the Predictable Schlock About the "Mayan Rite"

The big news this week is the Vatican approval of what is being referred to as the "Mayan rite" of the Mass. Traditionalists reacted with dismay, while the usual suspects were quick to leap into action with their "nothing to see here" takes. Where Peter Is, for example, published a piece entitled "Traditionalist Lies: Addressing Malicious 'Mayan Rite' Rumors" (Nov. 17, 2024) fawning over the new adaptations and accusing Traditionalists of "lying" about the new rite.

The 1552 Institution of Anglican Communion in the Hand

I am still working through Nicholas Orme's magnum opus Going to Church in Medieval England (which I intend on doing a review on in the near future once I wrap it up) and I am nearing the end of the book where he talks about how the changes of the Tudor era altered the churchgoing experience of the English. In Orme's description of Cranmer's communion service of 1552, something caught my eye. In explaining the details of early Anglican communion and the conceptual framework behind it, Orme says:

Our Barren Garden of Symbols

It is becoming increasingly clear to me how vehemently our modern culture loaths symbolism. Our society is so ridiculously analytical, so bull-headedly rationalistic, that we can have no patience for the subtle communication of the economy of symbolism. That's not to say we don't like visual representations; we love those, but only if they are rationalized, corporatized, and utilitarian. We are a society obsessed with logos and mascots but cannot abide signs and symbols. 

Happy Feast of Christ the King

Hey everyone! Blessed Feast of Christ the King in the traditional calendar. I hope you all are well. I've been very busy and have had less time to write than I would like, so I don't have much new for you this Sunday. I do have several essays in the works though, which I hope to be getting out shortly.

Walking to Church

One thing that’s so nice about Europe is the walking culture. Because the vast majority of European cities emerged before the invention of the automobile, they are built to a human scale, with the expectation that the average person will be able to get around town by simply walking from Point A to Point B.

Crises of Faith: Letting Go to Hold On

A lot of Catholics ask me for advice on how to process what is unfolding these days. Events are really challenging people's paradigms of how they understand the Church, the papacy, and even the faith itself. They want desperately to understand how everything fits together—how can we process what we've witnessed within the framework of our beliefs? This causes people considerable anxiety, even agony; sometimes it consumes their spiritual lives entirely. They feel profound unease at not being able to account for every jot and tittle within their understanding.

If I Were Kidnapped by ISIS...(but it's actually about the Church)

Don't ask me why, but sometimes I imagine myself in the Middle East—in somewhere like Erbil or Mosul—and I imagine getting kidnapped by terrorists. I imagine being held in some secret ISIS detention center, bound and malnourished, maybe bloodied by mistreatment, tortured, and awaiting certain death. I imagine the swell of emotions I would feel trying to steady my resolve in the face of imminent doom, dealing with regrets of things left undone, sadness at leaving those I love so prematurely, and preparing my soul for judgment. I imagine the simple but fervent prayers I would likely make in such a harrowing ordeal.

The Nuance Required Reading Historical Texts

Peter Kwasniewski recently kicked up a hornet's nest with two articles on his substack Tradition and Sanity lauding well-ordered social dances as a wholesome past time for Catholic youth (see "Why Catholics Should Learn to Dance" and "The Great Good of Social Dancing"). This innocuous suggestion was met with fierce pushback from people who insisted that dancing is sinful.

I am not particularly interested in weighing in on the argument about dancing, which Dr. Kwasniewski has discussed thoroughly in his two articles quoted above and which I concur with. I am more concerned with the hermeneutics of the contrarians arguing against dancing, because I think it illustrates an important lesson about how not to read Church documents. In following the discussion on social media, I noticed the contrarians typically argued their point by posting a slur of quotations from popes and saints, insisting that "the Magisterium has condemned dances." Now, I personally learned long ago that strings of quotations mean little without supporting context; many statements that seem to say one thing actually say something different when read in historical context. Or a statement that seems absolute turns out to not be as universal as initially assumed. Context is everything; as Scott Hahn says, a text without a context is a pretext.

Two Deaths and Two Masses: The Healing Power of the Requiem

The following is a guest post submitted by a friend of this blog who wishes his reflections to remain anonymous.

Let's Talk About Married Priests

Let's talk about married priests. Well, not married priests per se, but our attitudes toward married priests. I had a very unpleasant interaction with a reader the other day that has left me sort of fuming and feeling like there's some issues that need to be cleared up. So, be warned, I'm a bit saucy.

Belloc: How Status Protects Labor

In his classic 1937 work The Crisis of Civilization, Hilaire Belloc convincing argues that the rejection of the Catholic Church at the time of the Protestant Revolt is directly responsible for the social and economic troubles of modernity. According to Belloc, the most pressing economic problem is that the vast majority of people are wage-earners to a small owner class who have a disproportionate control of the means of production. This situation Belloc calls 'Proletarianism.' While modern wage-earners have political rights, full economic freedom eludes them because they are too dependent upon those who pay their wages. Unlike the Communists who assert that private ownership of property is the fundamental evil, Belloc states the problem is not that capital is owned and utilized by so few, but that so many are proletarian wage-earners.