The Hands of the King

07 Thursday Apr 2011

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Articles Published in Other Venues, Church History

(Originally published on June 25, 2009)

The comical reaction I got from a television anchor may never leave my memory. When I told her that the people who lived under King Saint Louis IX of France were freer than we are now in America, she looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. If you are a Monarchist, or a “monsymp,” you have probably gotten similar reactions when a banal conversation about current events terminates in a statement challenging the fundamental and flawed presuppositions of modernity. Continue reading →

About Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J.

21 Wednesday Jul 2010

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Catholic America, Church History

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This weekend, I’m giving a talk on Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J. Father De Smet was part of a notable chain of three great American missionaries: Father Charles Nerinckx, the Belgian secular priest and pioneer missionary of Kentucky, recruited De Smet into the Jesuit American mission; and De Smet, in turn, recruited Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle, the Dutch-born Father Arnold Damen. (In February of last year, Brother Maximilian and I had the privilege of reverencing the graves of Fathers Damen and De Smet.)

Readers who would like to know more are encouraged to read The Apostle of the Rocky Mountains: Father Pierre-Jean De Smet and Fr. De Smet, a short excerpt from the book, The Life of Father De Smet, by Fr. E. Laveille, S.J.

Father Feeney, Mary Daly, and Boston College

09 Saturday Jan 2010

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Catholic America, Church History, Fr. Leonard Feeney, St. Benedict Center, and Friends

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Writing for The New American, Jack Kenny has compared and contrasted the Boston-College career of recently deceased pagan-lesbian-radical-feminist* “theologian,” Mary Daly and the phenomenon of my own dear founders, who were treated harshly by that same institution in the 1940s. Unlike Daly, the four professors (including Dr. Fakhri Maluf) were neither witches, nor sexual deviants, nor dissenters from the Church’s magisterium, nor advocates of the non-extant “right” of a woman to butcher her unborn offspring. No, they simply defended a defined doctrine, one the Church has bound us to, which teaches that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. Continue reading →

The Centenary of Pascendi, the Battle of Vienna

20 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Church History

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An Important Centenary. This past Saturday marked a very important centenary. On September 8, 1907, the Feast of Our Lady’s Nativity, Pope St. Pius X published his wonderful encyclical condemning Modernism: Pascendi Dominici Gregis. The vigilant pope’s definitive condemnation of heresy was a fitting birthday present for the most holy Mother of God.

The enemies of the Church certainly remember the encyclical, even if her own children generally don’t. Continue reading →

The Church of History

04 Monday May 2009

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Apologetics, Church History

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Of all the “churches” calling themselves “Christian,” can any one of them irrefutably claim to be the Church founded by Jesus Christ? Does any conform to the clear, precise terms by which this Church of Christ is described in Holy Scripture: “the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim.3:15); or the “One Body” of which St. Paul repeatedly speaks (Rom.12:4-5; 1 Cor.10:17; 1 Cor.12:12-20; etc.); or the “Kingdom of Heaven” of the synoptic Gospels, and the “Kingdom of God” of Saint John’s? Continue reading →

American Wonderworker: The Life and Miracles of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos

25 Saturday Apr 2009

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Catholic America, Church History, Lives of the Saints

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Note: This article was originally published in December of 1998. Father Seelos was beatified Sunday, April 9, 2000. Deo Gratias! For books about the Blessed, go here.

Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, Pray for us!

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October in New Orleans. The Crescent City is getting its first annual breath of relief from the seemingly endless summer. Though the calendar says fall has started, September is still really summer in this city on the Mississippi. It’s 1867, and the relief is more welcome this year than most, for the Gulf-coast summer has brought something besides sunny, sweltering days and steamy, sticky nights. Continue reading →

America’s Jesuit Apostle: Father Arnold Damen

31 Wednesday Dec 2008

Posted by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. in Catholic America, Church History

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Having an aversion to serialized articles on the Internet, I have opted not to call this “Father Arnold Damen, Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle: Part II.” A clunky name, that. This is, nonetheless, a second article on Father Damen, but a “free-standing” one. Whereas Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle focused on our subject’s Windy-City work, here, we will consider Father Damen the missionary and, for your edification and/or amusement, Father Damen the ghost; for, according to some, the departed Dutch Jesuit still has an affinity for his old haunts in Chicago. Continue reading →