"Lessons From the Archives" offers article taken from the Catholic Herald's unparalleled archives, mostly but not entirely on the state and the future of the Catholic Church. Note that not everything that will be posted here is necessarily something the editors today agree with. It's an historical source as well as an theological, apologetic, and devotional one.
When the left slander the right and What it means to be on the right (1940)
Catholic Tory Douglas Jerrold explains the rhetorical tricks by which the Right's Leftist opponents makes them look like fascists and defines Conservatism.
Dorothy Sayers criticizes Rerum Novarum (1941)
The Anglican Dorothy Sayers claims Pope Leo XIII did not understand the meaning of work for the worker he was defending.
Performance precedes dogma: What people want from Christians when they don't want our beliefs (1942)
People who do not care about Christian belief looking for effects, for evidence, the editors write. If they do not turn to Christianity again, it is not because of the difficulties of Christian teaching, but because they are not inspired by Christian performance.
Caryll Houselander: Ours is a utility religion (1947)
Our religion is like a utility suit, says spiritual writer Caryll Houselander. "There is as little of it as possible, it is had at the minimum cost, it only fits small people."
Britain vs France in 1948 (1948)
The novelist Bruce Marshall, living in France, compares the moral lives of the more religious French with those of the less religious English, and gives the advantage to England.
A Russian Catholic hero who resisted the Czar and the Communists (1953)
Imprisoned by both the Czarist government and the communist one, the Russian Catholic priest Bl Leonid Feodorov witnessed not just to God. He exemplified the pursuit of Christian unity through his friendships with the Orthodox.
What Pius XII wanted from philosophers (1958)
Pope Pius XII presses on an international gathering of philosophers the idea that love of the living God helps philosophers do their work, because then they will be taking "into account all reality."
Farewell to the Church comfortable (1967)
A Catholic musician laments all the changes that affected the laity after the Second Vatican Council. The layman, Anthony Petti writes, "could be tempted to feel himself a member of the Church Chaotic."
Doctors forget they are plumbers (1993)
Contrarian and smoker Alice Thomas Ellis points out that doctors change their minds (they once endorsed smoking) and certainly should not play God.
What Benedict XVI thought about liturgical change (2005)
Liturgical scholar Alcuin Reid summarizes Benedict's understanding of the Mass a week after he was elected.
Summorum Pontificum a restoration after a gross impoverishment (2007)
Dom Alcuin Reid celebrates Benedict's XVI's freeing of the Latin Mass and criticizes the false understanding of liturgical development it corrected.
Don’t apologise for the inquisition (2007)
Quintin de la Bedoyere warns against trying to excuse and rationalize the Spanish Inquisition, "unless showing that others were worse than you constitutes a defence."
The picture (slightly cropped) is taken by Pathlost and used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
