The Return to Order Moment

One would have to live in near-total isolation to have missed the fact of Queen Elizabeth II’s death on September 8, 2022. The news media of the world turned toward a castle in Scotland when the Queen passed away and spent hours describing her life story in detail. Some coverage has been respectful. Other reporters have leaned toward the lurid. However, very little, if any of the coverage has desc...

Ever since the early sixties, the left has largely had its own way when it comes to public policy. The ball got rolling with the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. It accelerated with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The Sexual Revolution and the anti-Vietnam War protests took these issues to the streets. The Reagan Administration stalled this so-called progress but did little to roll i...

The late Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” In other words, fixing the culture will fix the politics. Today’s episode is going to focus on the building block of culture, the family. The place of the family must be restored, or else society is doomed. That truth can be seen in three aspects of America's society - the epidemic of fatherless children, the number of "ea...

Pope Francis called his recent trip to Canada a “Penitential Pilgrimage.” In so doing, he called into question the sacrifices of innumerable priests, brothers, nuns, and laypeople who gave their efforts, and in some cases their lives, to bring Christianity to all corners of the world. In doing so, he sacrifices our Catholic Heritage to the spirit of the age. He has done this before, most notably i...

Over the centuries many great saints have fought for the church. Some, like Saint Paul, spent years on missionary voyages to plant Christianity in new lands. Others, like Saints Bernadette and Therese, the little flower, spent their adult lives secluded in convents. It is good to reflect on the lives of the saints and to choose one or two for special devotion. However, focusing on the Saints can a...

If we had to find a date to say when the sexual revolution began, August 18, 1960 would be a good place to start. That day, the first contraceptive pill went on sale in the United States. That marked the beginnings of mass society’s acceptance of a separation between the marital act and procreation. Certainly, there were those who led immoral lives before 1960, but they were both obvious and few....

Henry the Eighth is getting a historical make-over. For centuries, the English king was most often a figure of ridicule. The only thing that most people knew about him pertained to his deplorable marital history. However, some historians are reconsidering his role in English history, looking at him in a far more favorable light. They paint him as a figure who made England stronger abroad and more...

Modern American culture is falsely egalitarian. Once men wore suits to baseball games. Now everyone dresses as if they were about to go on a tramp through the woods. There are many situations in which work clothes are appropriate. No one wears a tuxedo to do heavy yard work. That is reasonable. People in many trades need clothing that is as tough as the work that those people do. However, when one...

For generations, the press depicted Wall Street as a group of greedy men ready to do anything to make a profit. Even today, pieces of that reputation remain. In fact, modern leftists cannot decide whether to applaud or hiss when they see a radical billionaire. The hissing is a remnant of the old attitude toward Wall Street. No one trusts someone who is so greedy that they accumulate that much mone...

One current trend in the academic pretense called Critical Theory is to re-examine the heroes of the past and shoehorn them into precast Marxist molds of oppressor and oppressed. One of the victims of such re-appraisals is Saint Junipero Serra, who some refer to as the founder of California. The State of California acknowledged as much when it placed a statue of Saint Junipero in the U.S. Capitol’...

Friday, June 24th, Two Thousand Twenty-Two can be seen as one of the great days of American History. That day, the Supreme Court announced that it was reversing the disastrous Roe versus Wade decision. Even before the announcement, the left-wing misinformation machine cranked into high gear. Such a strategy is ultimately counter-productive because people will eventually discover that they have bee...

Modernism is a difficult term to define because it has so many parts. No definition could possibly sum up all of the errors contained within it. Fighting against it is rather like playing a game in which one defeats an adversary – only to have another arise. The fight against Modernism includes tearing down its component parts – relativism, indifferentism, post-modernism, the so-called woke agenda...

Most parents and students spend little time thinking about school during the summer. That is a mistake because this is the time that school boards and administrators plan the programs that they will implement in September. Many of those programs are more about indoctrination than they are about education. Three examples of that indoctrination make up the body of this podcast. Listeners who wish to...

From one perspective, it may appear that liberalism has never been stronger. The woke world can, indeed, be described as liberalism on steroids. Ultra-liberals rule America’s schools, news media, entertainment, and almost every other cultural institution. Their influence appears to be as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. However, just as Gibraltar is riddled with small caves, leftist domination look...

Today, the Return to Order Moment discusses the relationship between the two men who are, perhaps, the Catholics about whom Americans have heard the most – Pope Francis and Father James Martin. Father Martin is best known for his advocacy for homosexuals within the Church. His very public stand openly violates Catholic doctrine but has been applauded by Pope Francis. This attitude has far-reaching...

Our nation is beset by many challenges. Some of them are big enough that they threaten the nation’s very existence. From both the right and the left, there are calls for secession – literally to tear the United States apart. The idea is that the red states and the blue states have so little in common that they should just split apart. This so-called solution is simplistic. It can never work. At th...

Today, we are bringing you success stories, which is the reason that we titled this episode Victory Laps – Remembering and Celebrating Success Against Socialists, Leftists, and Modernists. Anyone who watches the so-called mainstream media can tell that the left is losing and that they know it. As their position deteriorates, their language becomes more outrageous. They hope that the excess of word...

Many modern historians dismiss the work of great men. Real history, they claim, arises from the everyday experiences of the common people. Certainly, the everyday lives of people are important. However, this theory of history overlooks the fact that a few great people have influenced history far beyond that of millions of the common people. One of those great men – perhaps the greatest of the grea...

Religion and culture are undeniably linked. However, some say that religion is a part of culture, and others say that culture grows out of religion. Those who argue that religion is merely a part of the culture are really saying that there is no true religion at all. Religion, they assert, is dynamic and must change when the cultural climate changes. At the TFP and Return to Order, we take the opp...

One of the many unfortunate fruits of the so-called “Spirit of Vatican II” was something called “Liberation Theology.” A product of the overheated period after the disruptions of the late sixties, this school of thought promised to reconcile Catholicism and Socialism. Of course, such a reconciliation is impossible in that no one can reconcile truth and lies. By the early eighties, Liberation Theol...

Currently, the world faces many crises. Ukraine still dominates the front pages as Vladimir Putin’s atrocities come to light. So-called transgender athletes deliberately cultivate controversy to advance their absurd cause. The Biden administration gropes and blunders its way from misstep to gaffe to catastrophe on a daily basis. Uncertainty about China’s next move makes predicting the future even...

In 1962, the Supreme Court removed prayer from public education in the United States. The result has been disastrous. Ever since that day, the courts have acted as though school students need to be protected from God. This attitude is both dangerous and ironic. The danger should be obvious. Without God’s protection, we are open to every type of evil. This podcast will examine two ways in which tha...

During the first half of the twentieth century, an anonymous commentator described the importance of culture by comparing the British and the Americans. “An Englishman,” he said, “walks as if he owns the world. An American walks as if he doesn’t CARE who owns the world.” Assurance has always been the hallmark of the American culture. We might be right or we might be wrong, but we were always sure...

The media would have you believe that there are only two choices in the race to decide which ideology will rule the future. One is liberalism, which has held sway in the Western world for the last 250 years. The other is Putinism, the self-contradictory set of ideas being advanced by Russia's enigmatic and violent leader. That is a false dilemma because it leaves out traditional Western Catholic S...

No event since World War II has so dominated the attention of the world than Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Supposedly learned commentators on television as well as newspapers and magazines use terms like catastrophe, unprecedented and genocide to impress listeners and readers with the importance of these events. However, there is a supernatural element that the pundits do not mention. The...