As a parish priest, I often hear stories about homeschooling families who have been put through the ringer when it comes to preparing for the sacraments. Their priests indicate that they must pay for and join the required, officially sanctioned religious classes offered by the parish because they suspect the parents haven’t properly prepared the children. A priest would never demand that a parochial school child do the same. This lack of trust displays a fundamental misunderstanding of Catholic homeschoolers and denies that they are actually engaged in Catholic, religious education. Questioning the ability of parents to provide a religious education not only goes against the Church’s teaching on the primacy of parents as educators, but also displays a lack of knowledge about how well-educated homeschoolers truly are, particularly in the faith. The proof is in the statistics, a huge number of homeschoolers go on to religious vocations. 

In spite of the tremendous, proven success of homeschooling, The National Catholic Register reports that one of the working groups of bishops at the Youth Synod has concerns. The note from the group mentions that, “homeschooling can have an ideological basis,” and goes on to ask, “Are parents qualified to homeschool them?”

The problem, it seems, may not be ignorance of the community in question but the fact that homeschoolers show a reluctance to deconstruct the tradition, seem to know some Latin, and may, in fact, be willing to use it during real-life actual prayers. They love Catholicism, thus they are ideologues. Ironically, those ideologues love their bishops and priests and are great sources of strength in their parishes. This reminds me of the time I was accused of brainwashing the parish schoolchildren during the normal process of teaching the faith because I was wearing a cassock. If simply being Catholic and doing normal Catholic things is considered extreme and ideological, well, we’re just going to have to disagree.

It’s the question that really bothers me, though – Are parents qualified to teach their children?

First of all, just how successful do they have to be until that question forever disappears?

Second, we should really have some sort of shared understanding of what education is meant to achieve. Is it to become a particularly well-paid cog in a globalist-capitalist economy? Are schools simply training grounds for the next generation of compliant wage-earners? If so, sure, let’s go ahead and pack the classrooms with ipads and standardized tests and get an expert in educational theory to load those precious little minds up with the tools they need to grab a coveted spot in a nice cubicle near the water cooler for fifty years of middle-management bliss. No offense to anybody intended, we all do what we have to do to earn a living, but is this how we want to define success in life? Is it the best possible reason to why we read books and learn and explore?

Education is not and cannot be primarily concerned with merely functional activity, it is about developing a capacity for happiness. It is about learning to recognize the beautiful and the good and then to form young souls to be receptive to that beauty, to achieve inner harmony and virtue. Education is poetry. Education seeks sainthood.

My children are homeschooled. They read novels all day long. The boys play with Legos. The girls do extravagant macrame crafting projects. They bake cupcakes and make pancakes. My daughter recently created an entire unicorn costume with nothing more than scrap fabric and a sewing machine. My son plays the piano in fits and spurts all day long and when he can’t sit still and focus he gets a quick break to dig a hole in the backyard. Perhaps more important is what they don’t do. They don’t get bullied. They don’t stare vacantly into space while waiting for the rest of the class to catch up on the lesson. They don’t feel marginalized and stupid when they’re the ones who have fallen behind. They don’t wake up in the dark and wait for a bus in freezing cold and then fall asleep at night exhausted while trying to complete unnecessary homework.

Through homeschooling, our children have been given their childhood back. The simple fact of allowing them to be human beings gives them space to learn far more than they would in any other context. When education is in harmony with the soul, learning and education becomes a passion, not a chore, and our children learn with very little effort. Most important, while they skip around the house memorizing multiplication tables, they are happy.

This may seem overly romantic, to claim that this is how education can work and for an average child no expert educators are necessary, but there is great wisdom in the Church’s perennial teaching that parents are the primary educators of their children. This is because children are master imitators, and who better to imitate than their very own parents? Education is based primarily on watching and mimicking parents. They pray with us. Cook with us. Read with us. Play music with us. They learn to socialize with a diverse range of people by listening in during dinner parties. They learn to love virtue by first being loved by us.

I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all there in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, Plato’s Republic, and any number of explications of classical education. Plato talks at length about how children are naturally influenced and shaped by those around them. It makes sense that I, as their father, would want those influences to be me and their mother. No one loves them more than us, so no one should influence them more than us. No one can prepare their souls to be more receptive to all that which is beautiful, noble, and true than us.

The world can be an ugly place. It can be harsh and prosaic, dominated by power and politics, and overwhelmed by a functional view of existence. Education isn’t meant to suit us to win in such an environment, education is meant to open us up to possibilities beyond such limited thinking. It’s time to honor those parents who are able and willing to do so, by whatever educational means they choose. Particularly in our parochial schools, how can we invite more involvement from parents?

Parents are uniquely well equipped to teach their children. They are the experts. The question really should be: How can we support homeschooling, and how can we learn lessons from them for our parochial schools to imitate?

Ask any group of reasonably well-read Catholics to name a living Catholic horror writer, and, since the death of William Peter Blatty early last year, the only one they can usually come up with is Dean Koontz. (I should know. I’ve made the experiment on multiple occasions.) But during the past decade or so, as we have seen a small but intentional movement toward the cultivation of Catholic fiction, a few brave authors have begun to delve into the darker side of the spiritual realm and still emerge with their faith unscathed, or even strengthened. If you’re looking for good stories to send shivers up your spine that will not leave you in the depths of atheistic despair, the authors below are worth checking out.

Tim Powers is an acknowledged master of fantasy with dozens of novels and short story collections. His work has inspired spin-off video games and even the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. He’s also a practicing Catholic. At a talk he gave last year, which I attended, Powers said, “Any reader who goes looking for specifically Catholic fiction would be a bit at a loss with my books.” He went on to say, “What fantasy fiction does is to literalize metaphors… To un-literalize all of our stuff defeats the purpose of the genre… but of course, any story can serve both purposes.” In other words, you may have to do some metaphorical thinking to find the Catholic themes. Powers writes primarily “secret histories,” that is, history reimagined as if the real events had in fact been shaped by supernatural forces. Just skimming the list of his novels, you’ll see words like voodoo, zombies, psychic vampire, magic, werewolf… in other words, a little something for every creepy taste.

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is one of our former editors here at Dappled Things. Her novel, A Bloody Habit, was released by Ignatius Press this summer. My full review is forthcoming in our next issue, but suffice it to say, it’s Victorian skepticism and Dominican vampire slayers at their best. As Nicholson said in a recent interview with Catholic World Report, “If evil isn’t evil, and sin isn’t sin, and vampires aren’t vampires, the thrill of the Gothic is reduced to lame angst. I find angst very boring indeed.” There is nothing boring about A Bloody Habit, and I’ve heard rumors that she’s working on a sequel with werewolves!

Andrew Seddon is an author who comes highly recommended to me, but whose work I have not yet had a chance to explore. However, the brief glance I took at the samples available on Amazon convinced me that I need to move him up on my To Read list. Seddon is the only author featured here who has not written a vampire novel. (What can I say? Vampires drink blood to achieve immortality. It’s a trope that resonates with Catholic imaginations.) Instead, Seddon prefers good, old-fashioned ghost stories. He has three collections of spooky short stories, Tales from the Brackenwood Ghost Club, What Darkness Remains, and In Death Survive. He also writes science fiction, historical fiction, and devotionals.

Lastly, there’s me, which I mention because if you go looking for work in this tiny niche of Catholic-themed horror stories, my name will probably come up. My own contribution to the genre is my 2015 novel Jennifer the Damned, published by Wiseblood Books. It’s about an orphan vampire raised by nuns. Like Nicholson, I’m not a fan of modern quasi-vampires. Jennifer kills people. Things get messy. Metaphors are literalized.

If you know of Catholics or other Christians who are writing quality chilling tales, please share them with us in the comments! (I’m looking at you, Orthodox brothers and sisters. Vampires came from your neck of the woods.) The realm of the Gothic is fertile soil for the Christian imagination, but for a reader, it can be daunting to try to find the wheat hidden among the detritus of chaff. I hope this helps.

Happy haunting!

In the early, 1860s, Louisa May Alcott was working on her latest masterpiece. That’s right, Pauline’s Passion and Punishment, a sordid little tale of revenge and romance. Here’s the glorious first paragraph:

To and fro, like a wild creature in its cage, paced that handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps. Some mental storm, swift and sudden as a tempest of the tropics, had swept over her and left its marks behind. As if in anger at the beauty now proved powerless, all ornaments had been flung away, yet still it shone undimmed, and filled her with a passionate regret. A jewel glittered at her feet, leaving the lace rent to shreds on the indignant bosom that had worn it; the wreaths of hair that had crowned her with a woman’s most womanly adornment fell disordered upon shoulders that gleamed the fairer for the scarlet of the pomegranate flowers clinging to the bright meshes that had imprisoned them an hour ago; and over the face, once so affluent in youthful bloom, a stern pallor had fallen like a blight, for pride was slowly conquering passion, and despair had murdered hope.

Here are some helpful reviews from Goodreads:

“I love several of Louisa May Alcott’s other works. Pauline’s Passion, unfortunately, is not one of them.”

“Definitely not my favorite Alcott book. I couldn’t stand to give her a two star rating, though.”

“I found I did not like Pauline at all, and she certainly deserves punishment.”

We’re a long way from Little Women.

Little Women, in fact, hadn’t been written yet. Mostly because Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write it. She knew that most of her work to date was “rubbish,” but still, when her publisher proposed that she give up writing pulp and devote her skills to the March family, she considered it a moral tale lacking in artistry. I believe the exact quote is, “moral pap for the young.”

Once started, though, she fell in love with the novel – or, at least, it appears that she fell in love with Jo, who is hesitant to marry and appears to share Alcott’s taste for pulp fiction – and worked on the story day and night, completing it in a mere ten weeks. This was typical behavior for Alcott, who probably suffered from mental illness. She would refer to her episodes as a descent of the “horrors,” and they often had her swinging into manic periods of intense creativity before plunging into suicidal thoughts.

A lot of other people liked Little Women, too, because it sold quickly and made Alcott rich and famous. It has been made several times into films, including this 1980 anime version, and the latest remake is now playing over at PBS, This one stars Lea Thompson and I’ve read that it takes liberties with the text, but sometimes it’s quite interesting to watch what choices the writers and actors make in that regard.

I suppose what’s so fascinating about Little Women is that it has a veneer of a simple, moral tale, but the illusion only holds at the surface. I remember reading it when I was about nine years old and it seemed easy enough to comprehend even for a child at that age, but underneath the polished writing and sentimentality swirls a vortex of feminism, madness, and uncertainty. As she’s speaking with Laurie, Amy pulls back the curtain for a moment: “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you’d imagine.”

Little Women endures not because it is a straightforward coming-of-age tale, those are a dime-a-dozen, but it endures because it’s deceptively complex in a way that defies us at first read to take it all in. This, I suspect is why remakes continue to be made and the story is so adaptable. As Alcott writes, it is full of “good strong words that mean something.”

While the Anglosphere clearly has an unending hunger for all of Prof. John Tolkien’s imaginative works, we do not seem to know how to properly appreciate or exploit that work. Or rather, we exploit it poorly because we do not appreciate it for what it was. The years after The Professor’s death were spent in anticipation for the publication of the backstory of sorts to his wildly popular The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Tolkien bravely took up the work of sorting through his father’s messy mass of manuscripts, and in 1977 finally published The Silmarillion to the delight and confusion of countless readers. The younger Tolkien even admits this work’s deficiencies in his preface to the more recently published The Fall of Gondolin:

There was indeed The Silmarillion that I published in 1977, but this was composed, one might even say ‘contrived’ to produce narrative coherence, many years after The Lord of the Rings. It could seem ‘isolated’, as it were, this large work in a lofty style, supposedly descending from a very remote past, with little of the power and immediacy of The Lord of the Rings. This was no doubt inescapable, in the form in which I undertook it. (11)

The “Silmarillion” material was not originally intended to be a part of Tolkien’s other published stories. The Hobbit had no connection at first to the world of the Valar, Melkor, and the Silmarils that he had been tinkering with for many years; no more than other lighthearted stories like Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major. However, the popularity of his little hobbit novel drove Tolkien’s publisher to demand a sequel, and he found himself unable to continue the story of Bilbo Baggins without absorbing the entire narrative into the far more detailed legendarium he had been manufacturing for decades. The Hobbit was revised to accommodate the larger “Saga of the Jewels and the Rings” (12) that Tolkien had begun to structure, and the result was perhaps the greatest unplanned-for literary sequel ever written. Casual references to ancient kingdoms and heroes abound in The Lord of the Rings, leading the reader to feel the weight of history as much as might an ancient Anglo-Saxon poet wandering amidst Roman ruins after the death of his lord.

However, the fragmentary narratives that Tolkien had been writing since the Great War were also a source of constant frustration. He had a handful of powerful stories set in the same notional universe but lacked a great deal of connective tissue. The stories of Melkor and Ungoliant stealing the light of the trees, of Túrin Turambar’s tragedy, of Beren and Luthien’s sacrificial love: these are all powerful stories clearly set in the same world but which stand very well on their own as satisfying, complete works.

The poor reception of The Silmarillion seems to have been something of a blow to Christopher Tolkien. He acknowledges that it is an imperfect work that required forcing many ill-fitting pieces together to make a misshapen whole. His father had never found a way to make the pre-Hobbit history of Middle-earth work as a coherent and engaging story. One might interpret Christopher’s multi-volume The History of Middle-earth as an extended explanation (or excuse) for why The Silmarillion could not be made better than it was, what with its endless and pedantic slog through his father’s manuscripts.

But in 2007 a standalone edition of the story of Túrin Turambar was published as The Children of Húrin. This powerful story truly found its footing in a novel format. There is a brief introduction by Christopher Tolkien for those unfamiliar with relevant context from The Silmarillion, numerous watercolor illustrations by the great Alan Lee, and then simply the story in all its glory and tragic weight.

It was ten years later when The Professor’s favorite story from these histories was published in its own volume: Beren and Lúthien. Many expected this publication to be a narrative pieced together from the various manuscripts and complete, like The Children of Húrin before it, but in this respect Tolkien fans were much disappointed. Instead of a complete and satisfying story, readers were treated with a compilation of versions and revisions of the Beren legend in the same pedantic fashion as in the History and Lost Tales volumes.

And now we are “treated” with The Fall of Gondolin, a story overbrimming with unrealized potential. This is again a collection of manuscripts, summaries, and notes from the elder Tolkien… and so much pedantic padding from his son that it sucks all the life from the narrative.

The reader can mentally cobble together a totality from the fragments in Fall, but not without ignoring some things and inventing others. The first major version of the story skims lightly over the early part (the journey to find Gondolin) and is dense with the climax (the attack of Melkor on the hidden city). The second major version expands greatly on the early part, adding in some retroactive continuity to tie it into other stories, and simply ends before the arrival of the protagonist in Gondolin. Minor versions and fragments are interspersed throughout, again with no shortage of editorial commentary. Readers are subject to storytelling whiplash, being forced to read the end of the story before its expanded beginning, when they could have been delighted with a unified whole if the editor had thought it worthwhile to put an effort into retelling one of his father’s greatest stories.

The story of Tuor the unheard prophet has a mythic might. Many people have seen illustrations from this story, especially of the sea-god Ulmo rising from the storm-whipped sea to send the untamed Tuor as his messenger to the hidden Elven city of Gondolin. He commands the elf-king Turgon to leave the comfort of his valley stronghold and take up arms against the orc armies of Melkor. The king listens to the advice of his nephew Meglin and trusts in his wealth and vigilance to protect him while Melkor rules the surrounding lands with an iron fist. But Melgin is kidnapped by an orc band and betrays Gondolin to Melkor to save his life and to steal the elf-wife Tuor has taken for himself. The siege and fall of Gondolin to an army of orcs, balrogs, and dragons is nearly as terrible and weighty as the Fall of Troy. So too is the flight of the few survivors into the surrounding wastelands. There is more than enough material to have published a satisfying novella with a small section of notes about the evolution of the story in an appendix.

Sadly, we are left instead with this hodge-podge of versions and fragments, of tedious notes and a thirty-dollar price tag. It is unlikely that Christopher Tolkien will publish any more collections, being at the ripe old age of 94. I do not say that he has wasted his talents as a curator of manuscripts, but I think perhaps that he could have also worked with professional storytellers to bring his father’s unfinished tales into a more finished and publishable state. There seems to be little point in writing academically at length about stories that have never had the opportunity to sink into the popular imagination. And this brings me around to my original point: that Tolkien’s writings, especially his unpublished writings, have never been properly exploited.

Sure, the film rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have been exploited in the cynical sense of the word. The coming exploitation of the larger history of Middle-earth by Amazon Studios is likely to be even more cynical than Peter Jackson’s efforts, but at least he had some respect for the source material. There is a way of exploiting the raw materials—Tolkien’s fragmentary manuscripts—in a way that honors and completes them. He would have completed them in his own way, of course, but without some attempt at completion by others they will never be more than curiosities for fanatics, rather than the powerful myths he wished them to become. There is some tragedy in that Christopher Tolkien has not heeded the word from another great text: “The letter killeth, but the spirit bringeth alive.”

The site of the ancient basilica of Nicea may have been discovered under a lake. “It seems likely that the remains of the church at Nicaea now lie three meters under the water in a lake. Even before the site has been excavated, local authorities have developed ambitious plans to make it accessible to tourists by constructing a submarine archaeological museum…. Now, those torn between an active beach vacation with lots of scuba diving and a religious pilgrimage no longer have to choose.”

Many common phrases we know and love come from the Middle Ages. “A red-letter day: During the fifteenth-century it became customary to mark all feast days and saints’ day in red on the ecclesiastical calendar, while other days were in black.”

What’s even better than San Quentin inmates hearing Johnny Cash? San Quentin inmates learning Gregorian Chant. “Archbishop Cordileone, in a statement, commented, ‘I saw these men, who humanly speaking are in a dire situation that may seem hopeless, be lifted up to God by sacred beauty and given new hope. They love to sing, and they worship well. So, the response of the men to the invitation to form a Latin Mass schola was overwhelming but not surprising.’”

Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, one of his outpourings of black emotion painted on the walls of his Villa of a Deaf Man, is a heartbreaking reckoning with the march of time, power, and aging. A meditation on the lengths to which the mad gods – and following after them, humans seeking to imitate godlike power – will scapegoat and ravage the innocent to keep their demons at bay. Goya himself was furious with a filicidal Spain that was in the habit of sacrificing its sons to the whims of hapless and corrupt politicians, and his artistic response is devastating as he covers the interior of his dwelling with darkening ruminations.

The Greeks and Romans were always adept at sensing the limits and hidden costs to their desire for power. Hesiod writes of how the god Cronos – the Greek equivalent of the Roman Saturn – was warned that one of his children would overthrow him and chose to devour them even as they slipped from between their mothers legs covered with birth-dew: “These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother’s knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods.”

See the cannibal god bent to his knees in a mockery of a father’s pious awe at nativity, his grasping corpse fingers clawing out to rend soft flesh. Hear the bones of his sons breaking on his teeth. Feel the wetness of the tears slipping from his horrified, enslaved eyes even as he continues time and again to press the flesh of his flesh to destruction. These regrets are the only reward for corrupt power, for the power itself long ago ceased to be a pleasure and took on the trappings of necessity. Empathize if you can, with the moral anguish that, even at his most compromised, the predator is convinced belongs to him alone. In all his anti-hero glory he is convinced that he is, in fact, the victim, that this is the cost of stability, civilization, and progress. It is a heavy burden he carries, heavier even than the weight of the stone that he has thrust down into his belly convinced it is his most recent progeny. It is a titanic nightmare of wounded power, the rawness of wanting more power, and the illusion of power in a god who is frightened of a child.

He vomits up the stone and his son returns to avenge his missing brothers.

There are a number of theories about what metaphor is most apt to explain the meaning of the painting – Spain’s interminable wars and political struggle, death, Goya’s worsening illnesses, his own relationship with his son. Here’s what I come back to, though. It’s about a father eating his son.

Musician Sufjan Stevens has a song called Saturn, in which he writes of Saturn bemoaning himself as a melancholy creature, a victim who is forced to, “consume the child that trails me.” The god’s quest for power has become an addiction and he has begun to imagine that he is the victim. Saturn makes an incision in the body of his son and holds it forth, saying, “Take this body, blood shed for you.

Fathers are meant to protect their sons. It’s the most natural instinct in the world. I can hardly believe that we must chastise segments of the clergy of the Catholic Church on this principle. A father does not leave bite marks on his children, and I imagine that the priest-predators know this. Perhaps they are sorry but are too inundated by the crippling addiction of sin to really care anymore, so their evil ever trails behind them like a shadow. They may say that they are conflicted in an attempt at a false penance. After all, they don’t want to be monsters.

But look, I don’t care. How is it possible that Saturn is still devouring his children?

The inhabitants of Canaan immolated their sons before Moloch. The Aztecs ripped the hearts out of the children of their enemies and built their cities on towers of skulls. Monarchs have frequently entombed their brothers and sisters into an early grave. Abortion clinics ease us into a carefree life of travel and a successful career path free of financial burdens.

We gaze upon Cronos as Goya paints him and we are horrified – but this is a nightmare that has become incarnate. It’s thinly disguised but we are living the actual, real-life reality of the most horrifying of myths. What Satan could only dream in his darkest fantasies we have appropriated as our dinner.

The Romans accused the early Christians of eating their children. Perhaps they were more prescient than we thought. Not that they actually understood Christianity, but they understood every other religion in the world quite well. They simply couldn’t believe there would be a difference, that Christianity would be about anything other than accessing the levers of power. In their minds, of course Christianity was involved in blood sacrifice and magical rituals because that’s what all the rituals they had ever known were about. How do we control the harvest? How do I force that stunning woman to fall in love with me? How do I influence those around me to my own advantage? This is the game. It is the sinew that scaffolds myth and cult. Goya does us the invaluable service of ripping away the flesh to reveal the bloody horror within.

Sufjan Stevens, wrung out from the personal cost of singing about the death of his mother during an earlier work, began to carry around his dog-eared book of Greek mythology. He noticed what others have noticed before him, that Cronos is an avatar of anti-Eucharist. This is what we’re left with when we empty religion of its defining virtue, the virtue by which we give God what we owe him with no thought of recompense. When the choice is made to use and abuse the Church as a means of consolidating power by manipulating the divine, we end up with spiritual fathers feasting on the flesh of their spiritual children.

The Church, however difficult it may be to believe right now, does have a true Father. As Gerard Manley Hopkins notes, the incarnate God pours his lifeblood like sweetness to our lenten lips, and although our scarce-sheathed bones are weary and bent, God shall strengthen and bring his children to fullness of stature.

Jesus Christ is everything that Cronos is not. He is sackcloth and ashes on the outside, smoldering with a sacrificial love on the inside – a true priest’s love. He is immolated and yet immortal. Broken open and yet ascended in clouds of angelic glory. He is bread. He is the food. We are the banquet-goers, but in this meal we do not meet as enemies vying for power but as lovers unfolding into each others souls.

As writers and artists, it may be many years before we find adequate words to express the grief and sorrow of all people of good will over the fresh wave of revelations about abuse and its cover-up in the Catholic Church. Yet as Catholics, we at Dappled Things recognize that it is impossible for us to remain silent in the face of these facts. At best, silence would neglect to do justice to the gifts God has given us. At worst, it would make us complicit in the failure to address crimes that have already been too long concealed.

In the practice of the art of writing, we have learned to value the telling of truth, even when — especially when — uncovering the full truth is not a simple matter. In an unwavering commitment to truth, the laity and clergy can model the honesty and transparency we hope to see from all levels of Church leadership, from Pope Francis and the College of Cardinals down to the local parish council. The pain of victims in this crisis has been unnecessarily made worse by a lack of honesty and transparency. Abusive obfuscation, like all other abuses, must end. It is time to seek the truth not in silence but in words: both the words that have already been spoken and the words that have yet to be heard.

Some of these words can be spoken by us. Some must be spoken by others. We join our brothers and sisters in Christ who have already called upon the bishops and cardinals in union with the Pope to cooperate with the full investigation of all allegations of abuse or indications of corruption. The truth must come to light, and we must welcome its revelation, no matter how painful. Those who have the knowledge of what has really happened have a duty to come forward in the name of truth. Those who have the care of souls bear this responsibility all the more heavily. Only in this way can there be full healing and reparation.

Let us never lose faith that the truth exists and can be discovered — not despite, but through, all the subjective and refracted accounts of experience. Let us have the patience to attend to these accounts, to sift through them, to hear all those whose voices must be heard, and in this way to let the full truth be known. Let it be known to the world, too, that the united, wounded, but still beautiful Body of Christ stands in total opposition to the abuses perpetrated by some of her members, even some of her leaders. We stand in opposition to the abuse of sexuality, in opposition to the abuse of power, and in opposition to the abuse of truth and of trust.

Catholic arts and letters are not meant merely to decorate the face of the Church. Our art may not and must not be a saccharine distraction from the stench of the “smoke of Satan” in the Church. Rather it will be, in the face of the ugliness and horror of sin, a song of the beauty and goodness of God: sung not in ignorance or denial of the reality of evil, but in defiance of evil’s desire to triumph over us, and in faith and hope that Christ’s victory over death is enough for us.

Words grounded in truth can both expose wounds and heal them. At Dappled Things, we welcome the Spirit of Truth into the words we write and speak. We call upon Him to work in us and through us, rededicating ourselves to His service. We pray that, on the other side of this storm, the Church may be purified and truer to her calling, that the souls of those whose faith is shaken may be comforted, and that there may be healing and justice. And we recommit ourselves to pursuing what our journal has always sought to provide: a place to find rest in beauty, to taste and see the goodness that so often seems distant or nonexistent in our world, and to answer the call to purify and restore Catholic culture from within.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

September 14, 2018

Bernardo Aparicio
Founder & Publisher

Katherine Aparicio
Business Manager

Rosemary Callenberg
Associate Editor

Katy Carl
Editor in Chief

Kent Lasnoski
Associate Editor

Meredith McCann
Poetry Editor

Jonathan McDonald
Web Editor

Natalie Morrill
FIction Editor

Josh Nadeau
Associate Editor

Christopher Petter
Associate Editor

Meg Prom
Art Director

Michael Rennier
Associate Editor

Ellen Toner
Associate Editor

Karen Ullo
Managing Editor