News

By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing - Based on empirical data, those two words – comfort and joy – don’t even belong in the same sentence.  We live in the most materially advanced culture in history.  Even our poor are well-off by half the world’s standards.  Compared to other advanced nations, we’re also still (if too often tepidly) a “religious” people.  We have a wide range of liberties and opportunities.  Our lives are stuffed with emollients, distractions, mood lifters, painkillers, and comforts unimaginable just a century ago. And yet at the same time, U.S. rates of loneliness, porn usage, sexually transmitted disease, and suicide, along with gender dysphoria among young people, have all increased. 

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine - So, where would that leave the House of Loreto?... Just where the Muslims left it, presumably, having first destroyed the basilica surrounding it back in 1260, while allowing the Franciscans to maintain the house itself. The trouble with that analysis, however, is that it fails to account for the stark staring fact that there is no longer any evidence of there being such a house at all in a place called Nazareth. But there is such a house many hundreds of miles away in a place called Loreto, located along the Adriatic Coast of Italy, some four hours by train from Rome.