The Vatican tolerates the avowed enemies of Christ consecrating bishops without a papal mandate but not traditional Catholics.
22 October 2026
Leo Caves and Submits to the Chinese Communist Party Illicitly Consecrating Bishops
And the SSPX was excommunicated? But they're Catholic, not Commie.
Was I Wrong About Back Scabbards?
From Modern History TV
Jason Kingsley, CBE, the Modern Knight, investigates the historical value of the backscabbard, beloved of modern TV and movies like The Witcher or games like Dungeons and Dragons. Does it have any use in reality?
Modern History TV explores the practicality of carrying swords on the back while navigating dense woodland on horseback. This investigation tests if historical scenarios allowed for such transport methods by trying different sword types and using a cloak for concealment.
Traditional Catholic Morning Prayers in English | October
10 Differences Between Catholics and Protestants
From Dr Taylor Marshall, former protestant pastor.
In this video, Taylor Marshall compares and contrasts the teachings of the Catholic and Protestant religions. Topics covered include the history of the two faiths, the different sacraments, and the role of faith in daily life.
In this video, Taylor Marshall compares and contrasts the teachings of the Catholic and Protestant religions. Topics covered include the history of the two faiths, the different sacraments, and the role of faith in daily life.
These Saints Reportedly Slept for Over 300 Years
Today, in the Byzantine Rite, is the Feast of the Seven Holy Youths, the “Seven Sleepers” of Ephesus, Ss Maximilian, Iamblicus, Martinian, John, Dionysius, Exacustodianus (Constantine) and Antoninus. Their Feast is on 27 July in the West.
From Aleteia
By Philip Kosloski
Surprisingly, this legend is told by both Christians and Muslims and has some archaeological evidence.
There exist many legends in the history of the Church and one of them involves the legend of the “Seven Sleepers.” It is a tale from the early Church that was very popular in the Middle Ages, recorded in the collection of stories known as the Golden Legend.
According to tradition, there were seven young men who were living in Ephesus during the reign of Emperor Decius in the 3rd century. All Christians were rounded up and forced to worship the idols of the Roman gods.
When seven young men heard of the decree, they distributed their wealth and fled the city to live in a cave. The Emperor sent soldiers to try and find these young men in order to execute them for having defied his commands.
God put these young men into a deep sleep in the cave and walled up the entrance so that they couldn’t be found. Apparently two of their friends were on the outside and placed a note about these young men into the cracks of the entrance.
Then over 300 years later God inspired a Christian in Ephesus to go out to the cave and uncover the entrance. He found the young men waking up from their slumber and began to talk with them.
One of the men came down to the city and was astonished by what he saw.
When he came to the bread sellers, he heard people talking about Christ, and was more and more bewildered. “What’s going on?” he thought. “Yesterday no one dared to utter the name of Christ, and today everybody confesses him! I don’t think I’m in Ephesus at all, because the city looks different, but I don’t know any other city like this!”
He possessed an ancient coin and this soon became evidence that they were from a different time period. The men were taken to the Christian emperor, who had his doubts about Christianity. According to tradition, they proclaimed to the Emperor that they were “resurrected” and this confirmed the emperor’s faith.
“Believe us, it is for your sake that God has raised us before the day of the great resurrection, so that you may believe without the shadow of a doubt in the resurrection of the dead. We have truly risen and are alive, and as an infant is in his mother’s womb and lives feeling no pain, so were we, living, lying here asleep, feeling nothing!”
After that, the seven young men died and their story was spread throughout the land.
Muslims have a similar story that is mentioned in the Qur’an and is essentially the same. Many of the elements of the story are identical, including the fact that the Seven Sleepers were Christians.
While historians generally discredit the story as a legend, writer John Sanidopoulos states on his website that based on archaeological evidence, “Nevertheless there can be no doubt that, as we stated above, the report on the awakening of the seven youths must be based upon some historical fact.”
Whether it is true or not, the story reminds us of God’s loving protection upon his faithful children. His plan for us is mysterious and often miraculous. One never knows what will happen next!
Feria
Today's Holy Mass from Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Paris. You may follow the Mass at Divinum Officium.
21 October 2026
Protestant Pastor Mocks Priest Killed by Crucifix (My Response)
From The Counsel of Trent
In this episode, Trent responds to a pastor who smashes Catholic statues and mocks a Catholic priest killed by a crucifix.
Death by Crucifix
O Lord, we pray Thee that the soul of Thy Priest & servant Patricio Alfredo, which, while he abode in this world, Thou didst adorn with sacred gifts, may ever rejoice in a glorious place in heaven. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
From Crisis
By Sean Fitzpatrick
Moments after preaching that death comes for us all, an Ecuadorian priest was killed at the altar by a falling crucifix. The shocking tragedy invites us to contemplate the awful weight of the Cross and the swiftness of death.
It was as surreal a moment as any supposable. Redemptorist priest Fr. Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari, 53 years of age, was celebrating Mass in Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in the city of southern Guayaquil, Ecuador on Oct. 17, when, after his sermon, the large crucifix on the back wall of the sanctuary above the tabernacle fell forward and killed the priest at the altar.
The inconceivable moment was captured on livestream, and the people attending the Mass ran up flabbergasted and horrified to help the poor priest. Emergency responders arrived on the scene, but Fr. Sánchez Molinari was beyond mortal assistance—sent to his death’s judgment by a representation of the Judge in death. The Archdiocese of Guayaquil announced his untimely passing with words of consolation and solidarity for his loved ones—but no official explanation for how the crucifix came to fall in that manner has been released as of this writing.
The Catholic imagination leaps to find meaning when the peaceful ensign of our trust in deliverance from death delivers death itself in a painful paradox. It creates a scene where the ancient Greek principle of “divine madness” leaps into the Christian era like an enigma, when a label of apparent insanity is somehow the best way to deal with divine inscrutability.
For a priest to die instantly at the altar by a cross carries dreadful and irresistible suggestion for those who are open to witnessing the hand of God in things. It is St. Peter’s dome being struck by a bolt when Benedict XVI resigned. It is Notre-Dame de Paris in flames as France flees from her old faith. It is the lightning that blasted the keys from the statue of St. Peter in Argentina on Pope Francis’s birthday, a day before the release of Fiducia Supplicans. It’s hard not to be a signs-and-wonders person when faced with such pregnant improbabilities.
In this month when the season shifts into chilly darkness and the dead are remembered, with All Souls Day approaching fast, this shocking event bears the banner of life’s fleetingness and how death comes on swift feet. In the poetry of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, over Goldengrove unleaving, “It is the blight man was born for.” In fact, and to deepen the wonder of it all, Fr. Sánchez Molinari had just finished a homily in which he reminded his people that all of us will die, and urged them to give their time to God.
He reminded his congregation how quickly life passes and how death comes for all, often unexpectedly. “In our lives, sometimes we fail to give that time, that space, to God… God should come first: before money, before work, and before the activities of our family and our home,” he said, according to a transcript in a local Guayaquil newspaper.
This shocking event bears the banner of life’s fleetingness and how death comes on swift feet.“One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we have spent on certain things does not hold as much meaning as the time we have spent with God. The quality time we dedicate to God, to our brothers and sisters, to our spouse, to our children, and to our family, that is time spent in the best possible way.”
God may be mysterious in His ways, though there is an almost explicit quality to these circumstances—for God can be obvious as well. Man has an inclination for irony, and the great irony of the Cross is strangely and solemnly present in this strange and solemn story—how the mean and routine execution of a political and religious upstart was actually, unbeknownst to all, the sacrificial salvific act for all humanity past, present, and future. A wonderful and terrible irony.
Here was a priest of God, assisting in the ministry of the successors to the apostles, literally crushed by the cross he set his life toward hoisting on high. Here is something of the awful weight of the cross enacted in a moment of earthly horror—and, hopefully, heavenly homecoming. Here is not the graceful miracle of the cross that danced to dodge a cannonball at Lepanto. Here is the brutal impact of an incontestable fact. The cross is as hard to reconcile in itself as this nearly unimaginable occurrence. As Chesterton wrote for his character Professor Lucifer in his romping yet reflective novel, The Ball and the Cross, in an argument with a monk named Michael:
“…The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction. That silent thing up there is essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone. Pah! that sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each other and frustrated by each other, we say they are at cross-purposes. Away with the thing! The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms.”
So it is with the cross, and so it appears in this mysterious instance. It is weird, or perhaps more specifically in the Old English, it is wyrd: it is that which has come to pass, as peculiar and inevitable as a kind of fate. This is the cross with all its force, with all its hammers and its nails.
It may seem at best curious, and at worst morbid, to speculate and elaborate on this remarkable and repulsive tragedy, but it is one of those uncanny moments that invite contemplation of divine design or symbol. There are churchyard elegies that people hear in shifting suggestions without the aid of words before their own is written down indelibly in stone. Of course, it may be little better than a temptation to make grand meaning out of grim happenstance, like the gnomish Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.
But there is real purpose in paradox, no matter how outlandish or incidental it may be or appear to be. There is real and relevant—and even revelatory—truth to Hamlet’s musing that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” There’s a special and painful poignancy in witnessing such a stark reminder of the fragility of life set in the context of the liturgy of eternal life.
And though it may seem like one of those moments where God smites one off the face of the earth for incomprehensible reasons, or when He seemingly acts in opposition to the good of His own Church—as when He whipped up the winds to wreck the invincible armada of Philip II against the rocks en route to invade England and eradicate the rise of Protestantism in 1588—these are the tests that try our faith like a forge, just as the cross did on Golgotha.
Moments like these, from the destruction of a mighty army to the death of an obscure priest, push people to wonder what the meanings of such events could possibly be—and that push brings them closer to the work of the Lord in the world. Memento mori rustles in the leaves as they shudder against the creeping cold, as God leaves His writing on the wall of the whole world for all to read.
Pray for the repose of the soul of Fr. Patricio Alfredo Sánchez Molinari. Pray for his flock. Pray for all souls and for the signs that remind us, whether gently or violently, that we all have souls to save in the everlasting life of the Cross and in whatever form death may come for us.
Charity: The First Fruit of the Holy Ghost
A sermon for today. Please remember to say 3 Hail Marys for the Priest.
Collect of St Abercius of Hieropolis, Bishop & Confessor ~ Indulgenced on the Saint's Feast (See Note)
According to the Apostolic Penitentiary, a partial indulgence is granted to those who, on the feast of any Saint, recite in his honour the oration of the Missal or any other approved by legitimate Authority.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
R. And let my cry come unto thee.
Let us pray.
O Lord, we beseech Thee, hear the prayers which we offer Thee on the solemnity of Blessed Abercius, Thy Bishop & Confessor and by the interceding merits of him who worthily attained to serve Thee, absolve us from all our sins.
Let us pray.
O Lord, we beseech Thee, hear the prayers which we offer Thee on the solemnity of Blessed Abercius, Thy Bishop & Confessor and by the interceding merits of him who worthily attained to serve Thee, absolve us from all our sins.
Through Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
R. Amen.
Collect of St Donatus of Fiesole, Bishop & Confessor ~ Indulgenced on the Saint's Feast (See Note)
According to the Apostolic Penitentiary, a partial indulgence is granted to those who, on the feast of any Saint, recite in his honour the oration of the Missal or any other approved by legitimate Authority.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
R. And let my cry come unto thee.
Let us pray.
Grant Lord, we beseech Thee, Almighty God: that the reverend solemnity of Blessed Donatus, Thy Confessor and Bishop, may both increase our devotion and set forward our salvation.
Let us pray.
Grant Lord, we beseech Thee, Almighty God: that the reverend solemnity of Blessed Donatus, Thy Confessor and Bishop, may both increase our devotion and set forward our salvation.
Through Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
R. Amen.
What Are We to Think of the New Composition of the International Theological Commission?
As long as it's under the Presidency of the Heretic-in-Chief, I have little hope for orthodoxy. I pray every day that Fernández will be sacked!
From Rorate Cæli
By Serre Verweij
The International Theological Commission: A Reboot - Is It a Compromise Between Pope Leo and Cardinal Fernández?
The International Theological Commission, an important auxiliary body linked to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has undergone its customary membership renewal, which occurs every five years. This time, however, it does so while Cardinal Fernández remains officially its Prefect.
According to the Commission's statutes, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith proposes the candidates, whom the Pope then appoints. A certain degree of influence by Fernández is therefore unavoidable. The question now is to what extent Pope Leo appears to be constraining him.
The six persons who received renewed mandates include the Commission's secretary, Archbishop Piero Coda — a moderate progressive who has spoken extensively of synodality and expanded roles for women in the Church, without calling for doctrinal change — and Sister Josée Ngalula from Africa, who strongly opposes homosexuality while supporting the ordination of women to the diaconate. The remainder are the mainstream figures Father Alberto Cozzi and Father Simon Francis Gaine (a Thomist), together with two orthodox members: Professor Reinhard Huetter and Sister Isabell Naumann.
The twenty-four new members constitute a markedly uneven composition.
A Handful of Radical Modernists
Cardinal Fernández appears to have secured the appointment of a few fellow radicals, but only a very few — three to four clearly problematic choices.
Claudia Leal Luna, from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (following that institution's takeover by radical modernists), stands out as the most concerning appointment, specifically on matters of sexual ethics. She has championed a modernist pastoral approach grounded in Amoris Laetitia while formally declining to reject Catholic doctrine, and she has worked to undermine the 2021 Vatican Responsum that rejected the blessing of homosexual unions.
Luna is the only new member known to have flirted with LGBT advocacy. Sara Parvis from Scotland, however, appears to be the most openly dissident voice on the question of female ordination. While she has not called explicitly for female priests, she has defended an ordained female diaconate as a genuinely distinct possibility — a position that the Church largely settled in the negative under Francis.
The Brazilian theologian Tiago de Fraga Gomes has rightly been criticized for his embrace of religious pluralism, including the claim that no "historical religion" is absolute — a position difficult to reconcile with the Catholic teaching on the uniqueness of Christ as Savior.
These three stand out as particularly poor choices, though they remain, thankfully, a small minority.
Enablers of Modernism
A few figures with more obscure intellectual profiles have so far largely escaped scrutiny. They are not themselves open activists on key doctrinal questions, but their expressed views on pastoral care or canon law suggest that they are likely sympathizers with, or fellow travelers of, more programmatic modernists.
The Spaniard Ángel Cordovilla, Dean of Theology at the Pontifical University Comillas in Madrid, has spoken of how Francis helped him to move beyond "rigidity" — a remark whose implications are quite suggestive and may explain why Fernández would have wished to see him appointed.
Father Gaston Ogui Cossi, a theologian and priest from Benin, has placed himself at odds with the orthodox bishops and clergy of Africa by criticizing the exclusion from the Eucharist of Catholics living in sinful extramarital relationships, including polygamous unions — a practice recently reaffirmed by the African episcopate in coordination with Pope Leo. It is fair to ask whether Fernández was seeking a more progressive African voice.
Father Patrick Mwania from Kenya is a potentially similar case, though with less certainty. In an interview given during the conclave, he described Francis as having always been deeply progressive and pastorally open — including toward persons of different ideologies and orientations — even as a cardinal, while suggesting that Francis nevertheless remained loyal to Church doctrine. He implied that the cardinals would want a Pope who would build upon what Francis had accomplished.
Mediocrity and Banality
Several of the new members have confined themselves to cautious, centrist statements capable of satisfying multiple constituencies — praising synodality, for instance, without pushing radical reforms, and pursuing ecumenism that is neither purely relativist nor robustly doctrinal. With due respect to those involved, some of their preferred themes have a certain banal and studied safety about them in a moment of genuine ecclesial gravity.
The Korean theologian Teresa Hyeon Soon Choi, of Sogang University, has written on synodality and spirituality, and in 2016 spoke of implementing the mercy of Amoris Laetitia — without, however, specifying what that implementation would concretely entail.
Sister Shu Chin Hu from Taiwan has championed Karl Rahner's concept of the "anonymous Christian" and has focused chiefly on holistic spirituality and religious experience.
The German theologian Jan-Heiner Tück is a genuinely complex case. He has defended priestly celibacy and simultaneously called for married priests; he has criticized both the German Synodal Way and Traditionis Custodes; he has defended the controversial passages of Amoris Laetitia while opposing female ordination and expressing skepticism about progressive reform on sexual ethics.
Father Clarence Devadass from Malaysia represents centrism in concentrated form. In 2016 he spoke of mercy toward marginalized LGBT and divorced-and-remarried persons, while also insisting that doctrine is not in conflict with mercy. He has focused on interreligious dialogue and synodality, yet has also been outspokenly pro-life. Father Gilbert De Lima from India similarly represents the theological mainstream of the Indian subcontinent; he has been involved in interreligious dialogue, ecumenism, the Christian understanding of suffering grounded in the theology of John Paul II, and priestly formation.
The Dominican Father Jorge Scampini has promoted rapprochement with Lutheran theology while maintaining the traditional doctrine on the Eucharist; the German Jesuit Father Bernhard Knorn appears to have largely avoided controversy, concentrating on themes such as reconciliation. Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan, Dean of the Theologicum at the Catholic Institute of Paris, has engaged extensively with interreligious dialogue while steering clear of doctrinal controversy.
Maria Teresa Fattori, a researcher at the University of Teramo, is associated with the Bologna school — a center of progressive historical revisionism regarding Vatican II — yet appears herself to work primarily as a descriptive historian. Fabricio Leonel Forcat from Argentina is linked to the so-called theology of the people, yet is not known to advocate for radical doctrinal change on that basis.
Ratzingerian Orthodoxy
At the same time, several voices ranging from moderately to robustly orthodox have been added — though most are of the Ratzingerian rather than the traditionalist variety. They in fact outnumber the progressive voices, while centrists appear to form the plurality.
Two recipients of the Ratzinger Prize — Father Michel Fédou and Father Paul Béré, both ironically Jesuits — have been appointed, as have orthodox historians such as Father Carlo Dell'Osso and Professor Boyd Taylor Coolman. Even Fédou, while defending dogma against pure subjectivism, has tended to present dogma as a "liberating expression of the faith" — a characteristically moderate Ratzingerian framing.
Father Csaba Török, a priest from Cardinal Erdő's Archdiocese and spokesman for the Hungarian Bishops' Conference, has also been appointed, as has Professor Khaled Emmanuel Anatolios, Chair of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Father Lubomír Žák from the Czech Republic is noteworthy for his resistance to relativistic ecumenism with Lutherans.
The Mexican theologian Father Julián López Amozurrutia deserves particular mention. Under Francis, he had the courage to defend the indissolubility of marriage and to reaffirm that second civil marriages constitute adultery in the eyes of the Church. Cardinal Fernández was likely less than enthusiastic about his inclusion on the Commission.
Conclusion
Even Infovaticana reports having found nothing objectionable in the work of eleven of the new members. The overall renewal is not radical in character and is not, on its surface, openly activist in orientation. Fernández was not permitted to pack the Commission in the manner he almost certainly would have been able to do under Francis.
At the same time, he did succeed in placing a handful of allies and enablers on the Commission. He is not a dominant force, but he has not been entirely sidelined either. He will in all likelihood complete his five-year term through 2028. The decisive question remains what will happen after that.
Art as a Bridge Back to Ourselves
"I can offer a small light showing the way out, and, hopefully, a permanent reminder etched into hearts of who we have been and who we can still become."
From The Imaginative Conservative
By Kay Clarity
I cannot, by myself, eclipse the darkness of disconnection, growing illiteracy, and lives filled with an infinite scroll. But in my work as an artist and especially in these sincere, thoughtful encounters with art, I can offer a small light showing the way out, and, hopefully, a permanent reminder etched into hearts of who we have been and who we can still become.
We are becoming illiterate.
For many older demographics, this is true in a kind of atrophied or analogous way. The pre-internet age grew up differently, and now we are becoming less intellectually muscular as our attention frays due to the rapid influx of stimuli in our online worlds.
For the young, however, “illiterate” is becoming an increasingly literal, accurate term.
The conversation around this phenomenon is growing everywhere, in person and online. Anecdotally, professors and teachers are stumbling into new thresholds of shock at the degrading of the interior life and intellectual formation in those they teach.
Many of their students, increasingly, can barely read or comprehend what they are reading.
The effect seems to worsen every year.
Corporately, our attention is fading, as every age group grips onto short-form video like a kind of life ring in a sea of chaos, blocking out “wars and rumors of wars,” both real and symbolic, and signaling a constant, numbing, apocalyptic threat while we sip our lattes.
Reading time, even among the academics and previously avid readers and writers, is plummeting. Everyone is disappearing into a cloud of incessant noise and simulacra. We are Odysseus without the mast, with our entire lives passing us by as we are spellbound by our technological sirens.
While I believe I have some solutions, I am not immune to this, and have become fascinated by the extended experiment my life has become.
As iPhones first began to enter human social life, I was digging through Aristotle and Aquinas and Bernanos, ravenously underlining difficult passages of Kant, learning and teaching polyphony, and wandering over cobblestone and through art museums in Vienna on the occasional day off. Despite the full schedule, when we needed a break, we met for time-indulgent dinners. We froze in the brutal cold of winter, speaking through chattering teeth as we huddled over mulled wine at the Adventmarkt. We stopped to chat on the gravel walkway, even when late for class. We got milk and sauerkraut from the local farms. We prayed. Somewhere in those 80-hour, all-consuming weeks, I still regularly wrote songs.
I had no sense whatsoever of the tectonic shifting taking place away from my infinitesimally small castle-turreted corner of the world.
I was shocked the first time someone took a phone out mid-conversation some time in 2014 after I had moved on from my studies and returned to Canada. Immediately, without a blink or warning, this little handheld machine had incinerated the human connection.
I learned that day that a machine could be more important than the sentence I was forming specifically for the person in front of me. I learned how rapidly the glitter of the machine could rob us of everything that mattered.
I fought to keep the attention I had remarkably not lost in a time when it had already rapidly faded for others. Not only had I not lost it, but the opposite was the case: I had been strictly and deeply cultivating it for years on end prior. My entire life was focused attention, even to the point of exhaustion. I knew it was hard won, and precious.
By the time I got to Los Angeles in 2018, still trying to hold the line of my attention, I was relieved to be in a place with so much going on so that my free time could be filled with people, artistic projects, and the buzz of the city rather than the growing Goliath temptation to scroll away my life.
But with the virus shut downs of 2020, and my truly human life utterly dependent on relationships and locations outside of my home, I caved. I have since watched the rot enter and transform my own time, life, and ways of relating.
I, too, am slowly becoming less literate.
I, too, am slowly becoming less human—less deeply engaged with reality.
There is no easy way out of this. All we have is the hard road of consistently re-wiring our brains around intentional reality, presence, and the work of the mind, heart, and body. It is not lost on me that the stakes have become almost infinitely higher with the ubiquitous use of AI.
(It is also not lost on me, either, that I struggled notably to access the word “ubiquitous”—what’s that word again?—and asked AI for help.)
I believe meaningful encounters with the deeply human, but especially the things which point even deeper toward our own essence and into the Divine, is the most effective way to re-engage our desire for more out of life and re-wire our brains and hearts away from compulsive entertainment. Thoughtful artistic avenues, especially those with a heavy emphasis on audio and visual to start, seem to be a real route back. Where the mind may lag in lethargy due to the atrophy of attention, the heart can yet burst forth from the depths, responding from a place less easily and immediately wrecked by the war on our vulnerable neuroplastic synapses.
Directed engagement with art, especially that of others which whets our own unique desire to create, seems to be a critical bridge back.
To this end, although more from intuition than stark intentional contrast, I created my Art Episodes a few years back: a guided encounter with mixed media to allow, for a brief half hour, the choice of attention, reflection, presence, and a personal response.
Filmed monthly during Covid with limited studio possibilities in my home space, they carry an unmistakable mark of the imperfect real. There is little sheen. This lack of veneer has become, I believe, only more of a feature and less of a bug as many grow weary of the dominant artificial.
I have now formed them into a course format, believing that a few small but focused and sincere encounters with the world of art can help claw back some of our humanity again. A meaningful encounter with something deep, beautiful, and real, calling on the truest parts of ourselves, can transform a life forever. Bringing about that encounter in our current milieu is a worthy challenge.
While all of us are increasingly in need of this encounter of the heart with reality, it is especially true for the very young.
Many of us still have the memory of a world where attention was the default; where boredom was common and offered a precious vacuum for inspiration; where we hadn’t been so conditioned to immediate return and gratification from things that demand nothing of us. We sense a choice before us, even while we usually override the good inspirations to read, pray, slow down, deeply live. We need something to help us regain what has been lost and help us choose the good we know.
But for someone raised on the machine, in a degrading commons, at a fever pitch of politics and division, and by the inattention of many of the adults around them—as most of our young have been—we need to give them this gift of our memory while it is still in view.
I cannot, by myself, eclipse the darkness of disconnection, growing illiteracy, and lives filled with an infinite scroll. But in my work as an artist and especially in these sincere, thoughtful encounters with art, I can offer a small light showing the way out, and, hopefully, a permanent reminder etched into hearts of who we have been and who we can still become.
I would love to see many—individuals, parents, teachers—benefit from these encounters as a tool to begin the hard work of tilling the soil of souls: our own and those of whom we love.
__________
The featured image is “An Art Lover (1868), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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