Links
This site does not provide a list of links to other sites falling broadly into the same category as itself, because it has no intention of falling exclusively into any category.
He is a poor writer to all of whose writings a single label can fairly be applied and he is a poorer reader who spares himself the effort of understanding what a writer has to say on different subjects by categorizing his thought in advance and reacting to the category instead of to what is actually said.
“Rather than engaging with a man and his thought, simplistic minds will long prefer to classify everyone once and for all in a rigid category under a verbal label as though to make him more convenient to find again if necessary,” remarked Dom Delatte (1848-1937), the saintly third abbot of Solesmes.
I have no intention of encouraging such attitudes. Instead I intend to draw readers’ attention to a handful of web sites or individual pages which I have found worth reading and I will try to give a few details about them. Obviously there is no question of 100% endorsement of their contents and from time to time the list will change.
To begin with, a few useful resource sites:
If you do not read Latin and Greek there is the collection which ambitiously describes itself as thecatholicarchive.com, access to all of which costs just $39.99. While if you especially want Latin and Greek documents, but don’t want to pay for them, there is the amazing collection made available by www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu, including the whole of Migne’s Patrology of the Latin and Greek Fathers. The random range of texts in various languages available from www.obrascatolicas.com offers some titles that are not available elsewhere (they ask for donations). There are some good resources available also at John Lane’s site. They include a large number of articles by Mgr. Fenton. And if you happen to like reading me, you can also find nearly all of my English-language forum contributions there, while my French language forum contributions appear on www.leforumcatholique.org.
Philosopher and theologian Dr Francisco J. Romero Carrasquillo offers a very substantial library of serious books of philosophy and theology at his delightfully-named iteadthomam.blogspot.fr. He offers pdfs at $9 a book, which is certainly lower than buying hard copies even if you could find them, or $599 for the entire collection (100 gigabytes, sent on a hard drive). His blog articles are interesting as he is a genuine scholar, but they are often adversely affected by his misdiagnosis of the nature of the crisis we are living through.
In the field of philosophy I return again and again to the books and articles of Dr Edward Feser (rhymes with “gazer”). You can find his blog at edwardfeser.blogspot.fr. When talking to non-Catholics who have the impression that atheism is winning the intellectual debate with believers, Feser is the man I point them to. He not only understands the issues; he has an enviable gift of making them comprehensible to the minds of our contemporaries, half-zombified as they are by mis-education and the media of disinformation.
Happily an incomplete grasp of the scope of infallibility and of the duty of doctrinal obedience has enabled Dr Feser to avoid substantial pollution of his thought by the errors of those he mistakenly acknowledges as possessing doctrinal authority. But his best work does not lie chiefly in the field of revealed doctrine anyway but in metaphysics.
Goodness! I hear some readers observing – these people are not even sedevacantists! Quite true. Another of my favourite sedeplenist thinkers and writers is Philip Trower, now well over ninety. I can no longer find his masterpiece The Church Learned and the Revolt of the Scholars as a free download, though you can always hunt, but many of his other writings can be read here.
Trower describes and analyses the process by which Catholic doctrine has been supplanted by heresy in the seminaries, the manuals, the periodicals and all but everywhere else in order to create an artificial consensus in which heresy is the new orthodoxy. He knows the theologians involved, their books, their ideas and where those ideas came from. He has an outstanding grasp of how the theological revolution took place and he writes very clearly. I see no reason to deprive oneself of what he does well on the grounds that he contributes nothing to explaining the paramount mystery of the apparent collusion of divinely guaranteed doctrinal authority in the success of this revolution – a subject he discusses only in passing.