Brother André Marie’s Theology Weblog

A Review of The Church at the Turning Points of History, by Godfrey Kurth.

Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: IHS Press (September 1, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1932528091
ISBN-13: 978-1932528091

History is the laboratory of wisdom, says my mentor. But for all the truth of that statement, historians are not men untainted by their share of folly.

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The Edict of Nantes was a pragmatic, political solution to the civil strife that existed in a sixteenth-century France ravaged by wars of religion. Though the edict itself was not trusted, appreciated, or liked by most Frenchmen at the time, its implementation (and enforcement by Henri of Navarre) succeeded in securing a measure of domestic […]

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I have finished reading the wonderful volume of Godfrey Kurth, The Church at the Turning Points of History, now happily brought back into print by my friends at IHS Press. This accomplished author is not so well known as he should be. For that reason, I’m posting the biographical information on him furnished in the […]

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Catholic Family News has just published an informative article in the form of a book review. The review, by Paul Zarowny, Ph.D., delves into the phenomenological method of the Council Fathers, as studied by the Passionist priest, Father John F Kobler (Vatican II, Theophany and the Phenomenon of Man: The Council’s Pastoral Servant Leader Theology […]

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The importance of the Council of Trent lies in its being two things at the same time: 1) the heart and soul of the Catholic Reformation (the authentic reform of the Church); and 2) the definitive moment of the Counter Reformation (the reaction against the Protestant Revolt): “By almost universal agreement, the counter-attack of the […]

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St. Maximus, the monastic mystic and eminent controversialist of orthodoxy against the Monothelites, earned his title “the Confessor” because he died in exile for his heroic confession. In his defense of the orthodox faith against an heretical emperor and supine ecclesiastics, he continued the work of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, St. Sophronius (whom he considered […]

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The contents of this posting are taken exclusively from a page located here: http://fatherleonardfeeney.googlepages.com/ .Of especial value to this page is the series of links that appears at the bottom of this posting.
Leonard Feeney was born in Lynn, Massachusetts on February 15, 1897. On the eve of Our Lady’s Nativity, September 7, 1914, he entered […]

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The headline of this posting may strike readers as comical. It is, of course, a fact. It seems so obvious as to be like asserting that the New England Patriots are a football team. However, there are Protestant polemicists who attempt to detract from Nicæa’s Romishness by the use of various ahistorical machinations.
I was going […]

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Venerable Emmanuel d’Alzon first caught my attention when I came upon the following paragraph from an address he gave to his religious congregation.
“We love Christ with the same kind of love as the early Christians because He still faces the same kind of enemies that he faced then. We love Him with the love that […]

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The eighteenth-century Enlightenment mounted a severe offensive against the Church, one which combined various malignant cultural and intellectual trends that had gradually come into ascendancy since the Renaissance. “For the most part, the Church did not respond to this attack very well.”[1] However, the nineteenth century saw a change in this, “an immense religious revival, […]

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It would be a gross oversimplification to put an equal sign between the words “Americanism” and “Modernism,” as if the former were merely the American embodiment of the latter. However, while we must avoid this facile identification of the two, so too must we appreciate the points of agreement between them. Not only were there […]

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This phrase - “the synthesis of all heresies” - shows up toward the end of the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, placed in the context of a rhetorical question.[1] After an apology for taking so long to explore the entire scope of the Modernist doctrines, even disclosing “certain uncouth terms in use among the Modernists,”[2] the […]

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The Catholic historian, A. Dufourcq, called the papacy of 1447 to 1527, la papauté princière, “the papacy of princes.”[1] This trenchant appellation conveys Fr. Maurice Sheehan’s meaning when he says “these popes were more men of culture or rulers than popes.”[2] Regardless of the scandalous particulars of their military extravagances, personal profligacy, or political […]

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