31 July 2026
The Stations of the Cross According to St Alphonsus Liguori
1. Must be done before stations of the cross legitimately erected.
2. 14 stations are required. Although it is customary for the icons to represent pictures or images, 14 simple crosses will suffice.
3. The common practice consists of fourteen pious readings to which some vocal prayers are added.. However, nothing more is required than a pious meditation on the Passion and Death of the Lord, which need not be a particular consideration of the individual mysteries of the stations.
4. A movement from one station to the next is required. But if the stations are made publicly and it is not possible for everyone taking part to go from station to station, it suffices if at least the one conducting the exercise goes from station to station, the others remaining in their places.
5. Those who are "impeded" can gain the same indulgence if they spend at least one half and hour in pious reading and meditation on the Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II: XXXIX That the Distinction of Things Is Not From Chance
Should We Be Worried About Artificial Intelligence?
/ ctsstudios
Get the Book: https://go.ctsbooks.org/artificial-in...
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3rcvAer...
Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:14 Background
06:28 What is AI?
15:18 What is ChatGPT?
18:38 Can AI think for itself?
27:06 What does it mean to understand?
33:34 Can computers understand?
36:04 Is AI good or bad?
38:02 Should we be afraid of AI?
44:48 Laws of Robotics
46:34 Dark forces
49:29 Worshipping AI
55:33 Catholicism's Answer to AIDid Anne Boleyn Attack Jane Seymour? Tudor History
Joan Leslie: Classic Hollywood Star Who Was True to Herself
Joan Leslie was a Catholic film star who sued to break her contract. "She realised the roles the studios were now offering her lacked moral clarity and substance."
From Aleteia
By Mary Claire Kendall
On October 12, 2015, almost 55 years to the day after she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she died in Los Angeles at age 90.
Joan Leslie was a darling and talented star who radiated refreshing innocence. But she was no ingénue. Rather she embodied a simple yet multilayered high moral character.
As Velma Goodhue in High Sierra (1941), she played a young working-class girl with disability; hardened criminal Roy Earle, played by Humphrey Bogart, befriends her. Earle pays for an operation to correct her clubfoot, then falls in love with her. Velma is engaged; Roy, left heartbroken.
As Gracie Williams, in her next role, opposite Gary Cooper in Sergeant York (1941), she played York’s sweetheart and future bride. Gracie knew what she wanted — York. But he needs to measure up before she agrees to marry him. But she is in love with him, which Leslie beautifully portrays.
It was much the same with her character, Mary, in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), opposite James Cagney as the famous Broadway entertainer George M. Cohan, who takes an immediate liking to this aspiring singer, soon marrying her. Through it all, she stands by her man, while cunningly yet playfully steering him in the right direction.
Then, too, she knew what she wanted in Hollywood — respect. And, when Hollywood began giving her roles that were morally empty, she demurred.
Forged in the Depression
Born Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel on January 26, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan, she was the youngest of three girls, who, like their mother, were all musically talented — Betty and Mary learning to play the sax and banjo, Joan, the accordion.
As the Great Depression metastasized, and their banker father lost his job, the three sisters hit the vaudeville circuit as “The Three Brodels,” touring in Canada and the United States, under the radar of child labor laws by pretending they were older — nine-year-old Joan claiming she was 16. Given her prodigious impersonation talent, doing flawless imitations of Hepburn, Chevalier, and Durante, it worked.
Her Irish ancestry bequeathed to her a rich Catholicism which she lived devoutly; she was formed in the faith at Catholic schools in Detroit, Toronto, and Montreal.
Soon catching the eye of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scout in New York, Joan was signed to a six-month contract, earning the princely sum of $200 a week, while attending the Little Red Schoolhouse with Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and Freddie Bartholomew. But, after she was cast in Camille (1936), her lines were cut, she dropped, and it was back to New York for radio and modeling. Before long, she returned as a freelancer mainly for RKO Pictures, when her sister Mary was signed to Universal Studios.
Chosen by Hollywood’s top directors as one of 13 “baby stars of 1940,” Warner Bros. snatched her up, changing her name to Joan Leslie and screen-testing her for High Sierra. Not knowing she was testing for such a big film, she got the role because, as the Sunday Morning Star reported, “she could cry on cue.”
Fast on the heels of that success came her starring role as Gracie in Sergeant York, teeing up Yankee Doodle Dandy. Life described her portrayals as “sweet innocence without seeming too sugary.”
She made four more films, released in 1943, and during World War II volunteered regularly at the Hollywood Canteen, featured in the Warner Bros. film of that name (1944).
Fighting for character
Though considered “the most promising star of tomorrow” in Motion Picture Herald’s 1946 poll, that same year she realized the roles the studios were now offering her lacked moral clarity and substance. So she fought and won in court and was released from her Warner Bros. contract — the Catholic Theater Guild recognizing her “consistent refusal to use her talents and art in film productions of objectionable character.”
Jack Warner responded by blacklisting her. Shut out by all the major Hollywood studios, she was forced to accept work at the “poverty row” studio of Eagle-Lion Films and her career never recovered. Pivoting to full-time mothering, she accepted the occasional film role, including Republic Pictures’ Flight Nurse (1953) in which she played Polly Davis, based on successful flight nurse Lillian Kinkella Keil with a storied Air Force career. She made her last film in 1956 while doing television shows sporadically.
She had wed William Caldwell, an obstetrician, in 1950, giving birth to twin daughters Patrice Joan Caldwell and Ellen Marie Caldwell, on January 5, 1951 — both becoming outstanding teachers. A devoted wife of 50 years, while seeking greener pastures, she developed her Joan Leslie clothing line under the Leslie Fay label. In 2001, she founded the Dr. William G. and Joan L. Caldwell Chair in Gynecologic Oncology for the University of Louisville — having also volunteered for over 50 years at St. Anne’s Maternity.
On October 12, 2015, almost 55 years to the day after she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she died in Los Angeles at age 90, at peace knowing she had been true to herself.
Rome Makes Bombshell Announcement About The Future Of The Traditional Latin Mass
People who should know better are already making excuses for this. Cardinal Roche makes it clear: Leo will not change direction on the TLM. Traditionis Custodes stays.
Why the Middle Ages Were a Paradise for Psychopaths
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Getting Away with Crime Before Modern Forensics
0:45 - The Dark Triad and the Psychopathic Knight
4:27 - Synderesis: The Medieval Blind Spot
5:56 - King Henry II, Louis VII, & Royal Betrayals
7:29 - Thomas Aquinas & The Categories of Evil
11:19 - Peasant Impostors: The False Baldwin & Martin Guerre
15:09 - Why You Shouldn't Romanticize the Middle Ages
WORKS CITED
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros., 1947.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard University Press, 1983.
Guibert, of Nogent. A Monk's Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent. Translated by Paul J. Archambault, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Wickham, Chris. Medieval Europe. Yale University Press, 2016.
Muzzey, David Saville. “Medieval Morals.” International Journal of Ethics, vol. 17, no. 1, 1906, pp. 29–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2376098.Traditional Catholic Morning Prayers in English | July
The One Passage that Proves the Papacy (to Protestants)
This Is What Changed St Ignatius of Loyola’s Life Forever
Today is the Feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
From Aleteia
He was an entirely different person after reading these stories.
Ignatius Loyola wasn't always a saint. In fact, before his conversion, he was quite the womanizer, gambler and fighter. In other words, being a faithful Catholic wasn't his "style."
Instead, St. Ignatius was enraptured by the fantastical tales of knights and ladies. He would often dwell upon these stories and place himself in them. He recounted later that he often “pictured to himself what he should do in honor of an illustrious lady, how he should journey to the city where she was, in what words he would address her, and what bright and pleasant sayings he would make use of, what manner of warlike exploits he should perform to please her.”
These tales fueled his life for some time and influenced how he looked at the world. It was a life divorced from Jesus Christ, taken up in many vain pursuits for power and glory.
If he kept on the path he was going, who knows what would have happened to him.
It took a cannonball to set him straight, leaving him bedridden for an extended amount of time. While recuperating he desired to read more stories of knightly adventures.
Saint stories
Providentially there were no such books around. This forced him to read two books that deeply shaped him and transformed him into another person. Ignatius explains what happened next in his autobiography (written in the third person):
As Ignatius had a love for fiction, when he found himself out of danger he asked for some romances to pass away the time. In that house there was no book of the kind. They gave him, instead, “The Life of Christ,” by Rudolph, the Carthusian, and another book called the “Flowers of the Saints,” both in Spanish. By frequent reading of these books he began to get some love for spiritual things. This reading led his mind to meditate on holy things, yet sometimes it wandered to thoughts which he had been accustomed to dwell upon before.
While perusing the life of Our Lord and the saints, he began to reflect, saying to himself: “What if I should do what St. Francis did?” “What if I should act like St. Dominic?” He pondered over these things in his mind, and kept continually proposing to himself serious and difficult things. He seemed to feel a certain readiness for doing them, with no other reason except this thought: “St. Dominic did this; I, too, will do it.” “St. Francis did this; therefore I will do it.”
The lives of the saints cut straight to his heart and appealed to his innate desire to lead a life of adventure. This time, instead of being a brave knight winning the heart of a lady, Ignatius was inflamed to become a heroic saint and win the world for Jesus Christ.
As a result, Ignatius began to think more deeply about his own life and his need to repent for the many sins of his past. Once he fully recovered from the injury, Ignatius set out to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage to atone for those sins. He was a changed man and it didn't take long for his new found zeal to be utilized in the proclamation of the Gospel.
He would go on to found the Society of Jesus, and desired each day to imitate the lives of the saints he read while convalescing. Through God's grace, he was able to accomplish the tasks set out before him and became one of the most beloved saints of all time.
All because he read the lives of the saints and the life of Jesus Christ.
The Clearest Sign of a Bad Bishop
Listen to Homer. Skip the Movies.
To the ancient authors, "Earthly life possessed neither value, nor meaning apart from the invisible yet decisive influence of the gods—or of God."
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From One Peter Five
By Robert Lazu Kmita, PhD
My profound interest in film adaptations of literary masterpieces has never been rewarded. Quite the contrary. When it comes to this branch of contemporary cinema—adaptations—most directors and screenwriters seem determined to convince me of the infallibility of their mediocrity. And those few, very few, who have managed to do otherwise have invariably been distinguished by their fidelity to the works they adapted.
Among the classical authors, Homer has received the worst treatment. Then again, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. It is only natural that the greatest author in the history of world literature—the man who composed two masterpieces, the Iliad and the Odyssey, without any previous model to follow—should have inspired the largest number of adaptations. Although I cannot claim to have seen them all, over the course of fifty years I have watched a significant number of them.
To understand the substance of my criticism, I must first reveal a significant detail: I was raised on the myths and legends of ancient Greece. From my earliest childhood, my mother, a great lover of wandering heroes, began telling me the adventures of Ulysses. Alongside Heracles, he has always been my favorite hero. And not mine alone, since countless authors of the most diverse kinds—from Virgil and Dante to James Joyce and Henryk Sienkiewicz—have sought to extend his legendary shadow within their own works. It is only natural, then, that filmmakers should aspire to the same. The only consistent result they have achieved, however, has been to confirm, time and again, one bitter conclusion: the more ambitious the attempt, the more resounding the failure.
The aesthetic qualities of a supreme poetic or literary work are impossible to reproduce. Every competent translator knows this elementary truth. The finest translations are those produced by other great poets and writers. It is enough to mention Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and poems to make the point clear: it cannot be otherwise. To translate a genius, you need another genius. Simple enough and completely non-democratic, isn’t it?
Film directors, however, seem unwilling to acknowledge this simple axiom. Convinced—whether rightly or wrongly—that they are geniuses as directors, they also assume they are geniuses as writers. A fatal mistake, concealed beneath the stammering excuses they offer. These excuses almost always come in two parts. The first concerns the change of artistic medium: the art of words, which poets and writers use as their “raw material,” is one thing; the art of moving pictures (derived from dramatic art) is something entirely different. Who would dare deny it? Cinema has its own means of expression—which is precisely why suitable adaptations are necessary. In this respect, no special effort is needed to persuade us that this is true. But when it comes to adapting the content—that is, the story itself—nothing and no one has ever succeeded in offering either a convincing argument or a satisfactory creation. Just as films inspired by video games are generally lamentable, so too are films inspired by literary masterpieces. Boring and superficial. From an epic drama, they make an action movie. Just ask admirers of Tolkien’s works. But what arguments do directors and screenwriters have when they disfigure the masterpieces of world literature until they become unrecognizable?
Let us set aside every argument that concerns the necessity of adapting a work to the specific means of cinema. I have already said that such arguments are acceptable within certain limits. The arguments that concern me here are those relating to the alteration of the content—that is, as I have already said, the rewriting of the story itself. The ultimate line of reasoning I have encountered, in dozens of variations, is always the same: modern audiences no longer possess the sensibility required to appreciate an ancient epic poet. Therefore, the stories must be rewritten for today’s viewers. Without exception, all such rewritings reflect the profound crisis out of which the modern world and modern culture have emerged: the obliteration, to the point of disappearance, of the supernatural.
For the ancient authors, whether pagan or Jewish, the existence of the invisible world and of the beings that inhabited it was the supreme axiom. Earthly life possessed neither value, nor meaning apart from the invisible yet decisive influence of the gods—or of God. Certainly, we cannot reduce pagan polytheistic idolatry and the monotheistic faith of the chosen people to a common denominator. Yet, as some of the Holy Fathers of the Church recognized, there was something in the wisdom of the pre-Christian ancients that was not alien to the supreme Logos. Indeed, the presence among them of thinkers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who speculated about the existence of a single, uncreated supreme deity, points to philosophical currents that foreshadowed the Incarnation of the Divine Word.
Here, then, is the first aspect of Homer’s world that demands our attention: everything that happens “below,” in the world of men, is strictly influenced by and subordinate to the conflicts and decisions made “above,” in the world of the gods. Without denying the massive element of superstition in the religion of the ancient Greeks, we nevertheless recognize that dual dimension of the cosmos to which the Christian Creed also bears witness when it reminds us that Almighty God created all things, “visible and invisible.” The consequences of such a belief are remarkable.
The existential dilemmas and dramas of Homer’s heroes all arise from the tension between these two worlds. Likewise, the principal concern of his heroes, however veiled or only dimly perceived, is always the passage from the world “below” to the world “above.” This is why war, honor, glory, and—last but certainly not least—death possess exceptional connotations, utterly different from the values of a culture for which there is nothing beyond this life. A culture for which, in fact, there is no longer any “world beyond.”
The adventures and decisions of those who lack faith in a transcendence polarized between Hell (Hades) and Paradise (the Elysian Fields) become the traumas, psychoses, and neuroses of Leibnizian monads, for whom Joker is no less plausible a character than Ulysses. For anyone with even a modest understanding of the ancient world, such a vision is utterly unintelligible and completely at odds with Homer’s universe. In Homer’s world, war itself is animated by higher forces; it is not merely a somewhat more dynamic manifestation of prevailing chaos. The music of Homer’s world calls to mind the royal anthems of Händel, not a death metal concert. Here we encounter, perhaps, the most radical difference between our world and the world of the author of the Iliad.
War is understood as a vast ritual arena in which one either receives or loses κῦδος kydos—glory. Like ambrosia, the immortal food of the Olympian gods, glory is the only “nourishment” capable of bestowing eternal youth and life without death. Derived exclusively from the honor and courage embodied in military heroism, it is the immediate goal of all those engaged in the struggle against their own weaknesses and shortcomings. Like every great writer, Homer portrays the limitations of his heroes with genius. We are astonished by the tears of Achilles, the legendary warrior, who weeps bitterly with his head resting on the shoulder of his mother, the nymph Thetis. Or by the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, both sharply rebuked by the wise Nestor, who reproaches them for “quarreling over girls.” Homer did not spare his heroes. Yet he also emphasized what distinguished them from the anonymous multitude who lacked their qualities: the capacity to respond in a unique way to unique situations. Only legendary deeds can justify the reception of divine glory. Thus war, despite all its cruelty, is and remains a field of glory—a vast ritual ground where those who fight well receive the support of the immortals. The Christian world inherited this vision while ennobling it.
Much as the imaginary art of alchemy was said to transform common metals into gold, Christianity transmuted the substance of pagan heroism into the gold of holiness. This explains the presence of Homer’s martial vocabulary throughout the stories of the Holy Desert Fathers: Anthony the Great, Macarius of Egypt, and Pachomius the Great. Detailed philological studies of the language of The History of the Monks of Syria by Saint Theodoret of Cyrrhus (c.393–458) have demonstrated this conclusively. The difference lies in their orientation: whereas the pagan heroes are focused on military exploits, the Christian heroes of the desert tradition are engaged in the vast cosmic war against the demons of whom Saint Paul speaks in his Epistle to the Ephesians (6:12). Such parallels, however, make it possible to interpret the pagan epics through a Christian lens.
Far less well known than his controversial brother, Hugo Rahner, S.J. (1900–1968), left behind writings that deserve far wider recognition. One of these is the magnificent monograph Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung (Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, 1957), which contains a remarkable section entitled “Saint Homer.” There, while rejecting the interpretations of those historians who sought to regard all the sacraments and rituals of the Christian religion as mere borrowings from pagan cults, Rahner shows how certain Church Fathers—foremost among them Saint Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215 AD)—interpreted Homer’s works. His conclusion points to the discreet persistence, even throughout pre-Christian history, of traces of Divine Wisdom that guided those who loved her toward the Gospel.
The essence of Hugo Rahner’s interpretation remains unchanged: now more than ever, the ancients have an important message for modern people, who have forgotten their roots and their fundamental beliefs: the importance of the “unseen world” is crucial, while ignoring it is fatal. Moreover, no personal crisis, drama, or tragedy can be resolved without restoring a harmonious relationship between the two worlds. Ritual is the only means of accomplishing this otherwise insoluble task. How can a film director receive and convey such a message when, in all likelihood, he does not even believe what Homer himself believed?