April 10, 2020
Worth watching, listening -- Father George W. Rutler's Good Friday reflections -- recorded live today at Noon ET April 10, 2020. See here: https://vimeo.com/406005872
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
April 4, 2020
The term “parochial” is frequently used in a condescending sense, but no one today can get away with thinking that to be parochial is to be isolated from reality. As I write, the Navy hospital ship “Comfort,” last seen here on the Hudson River after the World Trade Center horror, is passing by our rectory windows. The convention center nearby,...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
March 31, 2020
I could never have fathomed all the things that have happened in our country during March 2020. I must admit that particularly over the last two weeks, I have been in somewhat of a “funk” because of the Coronavirus pandemic and all the uncertainty surrounding it. The news cycles on TV have been bad for some time, but even worse...
View Articles If you’ve met Tim, you know that his life was shaped by good values that were imparted to him by his parents and he...
March 30, 2020
I have a rule never to begin a paragraph with a first-person pronoun. I do this not because it would be inappropriate to use the monarchical “We,” as in “We have a rule,” or the princely “One,” as in “One has a rule,” but because self-reference confines the argument to personal experience. That is somewhat like the danger of using...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
March 22, 2020
Review of Upstream: The quest to solve problems before they happen, by Dan Heath — As the coronavirus crisis (COVID 19) subsides, there will be many dissecting our failure to anticipate and prepare for it, despite warnings that a pandemic was not a question of “if” but “when.” There will also be many who, with hindsight, will be dissecting how...
View Articles Thomas M. Loarie is a popular host of The Mentors Radio Show, the founder and CEO of BryoLogyx Inc. (BryoLogyx.com), and a seasoned corporate...
March 22, 2020
Geniuses often are thought to be absent-minded. Archimedes was so preoccupied with a mathematical diagram he was constructing during the invasion of Syracuse in Sicily in 212 BC, that he told a Roman soldier about to slay him: “Let me finish my numbers.” He was not professorially absent-minded, but present-minded. His obligation to truth took precedence over life itself. In...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
March 14, 2020
On September 10, 1919, General Pershing led his returning troops up Fifth Avenue before crowds numbering two million. In front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, he dismounted from his rambunctious white horse “Captain” to greet Cardinal Mercier, who had arrived in New York by ship the night before. The General made a point of expressing his esteem for the Belgian prelate....
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
March 9, 2020
Materialism, fantasy and false worship were the temptations Satan thrust at Christ, and he is tempting our nation the same way. These seductions are a formula for Socialism, which Winston Churchill in 1948 defined as “The philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” A poorly educated generation succumbs to adolescent idealism, bereft of history, unaware...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
March 4, 2020
A Review of Alex Berenson’s “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence” Over the past 35 years we have seen a sea-change in attitudes on recreational marijuana drug use. According to Pew Research an overwhelming majority of U.S. adults (91%) say marijuana should be legal either for medical or recreational use (59%), reflecting a steady increase...
View Articles Thomas M. Loarie is a popular host of The Mentors Radio Show, the founder and CEO of BryoLogyx Inc. (BryoLogyx.com), and a seasoned corporate...
March 2, 2020
Ernest preachers use their personalities to lead people to Jesus without obstructing him with themselves. They may honestly boast that they have been given the best information to convey, and we have it in the form of what we call the Bible—that is, the Biblia, or Books. At the start of Lent, our Lord makes us privy to the forty...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
February 25, 2020
I used to dread Ash Wednesday because of the endless lines of people coming for ashes. By the end of the day, priests look like coal miners. Sociologists may condescendingly consider the phenomenon of crowds coming for ashes, when they do not enter a church at other times of the year, a habit of tribal identity. If the mystery of...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
February 23, 2020
In case you haven’t noticed, we are in a big year for Texas and national politics – it’s election season. Here are some questions to ponder: How can I best know for whom to vote? As a Catholic, are there some voting guidelines we can follow? What authority do Church leaders have regarding politics and voting? Here’s another question...
View Articles If you’ve met Tim, you know that his life was shaped by good values that were imparted to him by his parents and he...
February 18, 2020
The names of the Franciscan friars Berard of Carbio, Otho, Peter, Accursius and Adjutus, are not as familiar as that of Francis of Assisi, who said that they had become the prototypes of what he called the Friars Minor. After his own failed mission to convert the Muslims of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade in 1219, he sent them on a...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
February 13, 2020
Luke the Evangelist is the patron saint of artists because he paints pictures with words. In describing the scene of old Simeon in the Temple encountering Jesus, Luke wrote that he “took him up in his arms” (Luke 2:28). That word picture of an old man holding a forty-day-old baby, reminds one of the 1490 painting by the master Domenico...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
February 4, 2020
The Feast of the Presentation recalls the old man Simeon chanting thanks for having lived to see the Messiah. His “Nunc Dimittis”—“Let thy servant depart in peace”—is part of the Church’s evening prayers. In 542 in Constantinople, the Emperor Justinian placed it into the Eastern Liturgy. This year the Feast fell on Super Bowl Sunday. Human nature instinctively finds entertainment...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
January 27, 2020
Precisely one year ago in the Italian town of Cremona, there was an imposed silence by order of the local government for eight hours a day, six days of the week for five straight weeks. The purpose was to allow the pristine recording by highly technical equipment of sounds played on the 1700 Antonio Stradivari “Stauffer” cello, the 1727 Antonio...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
January 26, 2020
I still believe in New Year’s Resolutions. There are those who say don’t worry about New Year’s Resolutions because you don’t keep them anyway. My view is (1) even if you do not keep them they have caused you to think about where you need improvement in your life, and (2) whatever positive outcome occurs you are better off than...
View Articles If you’ve met Tim, you know that his life was shaped by good values that were imparted to him by his parents and he...
January 20, 2020
While I suspect that Julian Guthrie, author of Alpha Girls: The women who took on Silicon Valley's male culture and made the deals of a lifetime, intended to show how four women “broke through” the “glass ceiling” in elite Silicon Valley venture firms and disrupted its “boys network,” I found the value of this book for me to be its...
View Articles Thomas M. Loarie is a popular host of The Mentors Radio Show, the founder and CEO of BryoLogyx Inc. (BryoLogyx.com), and a seasoned corporate...
January 20, 2020
I knew an elderly Scotswoman who read the Bible each night by the light of a candle. It had become a kind of ritual, for everyone needs a rite, including those reared in the stark Calvinist kind of worship of her homeland Kirk. While she did all of her other reading by electric light, the lamp was turned off and...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...
January 14, 2020
Prophets proclaim the truth, and they predict the future only in a derivative sense of cautioning about the consequences of denying the truth. Thus, the Church distinguishes between holy prophesying and sinful fortune-telling. There is a “psychic” near our rectory, who will tell your future for $10, but you have to ring the bell first, and I should think that...
View Articles Father Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's...