You can count on one hand the number of Novus Ordo churches in this country that feature a fully Catholic music program of any quality, consistent with the Roman rite tradition.
My biggest hero was Roman Gabriel, who was the QB of the Rams, and Roger Staubach. Those were the two guys I tired to emulate when I was little.
For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna, the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface.
The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.
When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.
I was at a party three weeks prior to the murders at Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s house.
