For more than 100 years, wrote Ray Domanico at City Journal, “All Hallows High School in the South Bronx has been educating immigrant and lower-income boys. Early on, the students were Irish; later, they were Italian; today, they are Hispanic and black.”
All Hallows, founded by the Irish Christian Brothers in 1909, is under-resourced. It spends less than half of what neighbouring public high schools spend per pupil, and its teachers earn “dramatically less”. Yet it has an impressive academic record.
School president (and former pupil) Ron Schutté described the ethos of the school. It “goes beyond providing a comprehensive academic programme that prepares students for college,” he says. “All Hallows is a Catholic school. Catholic schools are communities of faith. Through the teachings of the Gospels, our students develop strong character and a moral compass that will guide them for the rest of their lives … Love and respect go hand in hand to create a community that can challenge and overcome the unholy trinity of poverty, racism and academic failure.”
A makeover for the alt-right?
The alt-right seemed to have gone away, wrote Jonathon Van Maren at The Bridgehead. But now “certain alt-righters appear to be attempting a re-branding.
“Led by 22-year-old Nick J Fuentes, who runs the America First podcast, they are claiming to be the real conservatives who are genuinely standing up for Christianity in America.”
But look closely, and Fuentes is an alarming figure, using “slurs like ‘Jewy Jewstein’ ” and referring to writer Matt Walsh as a ‘‘race traitor’’ who ‘‘works for Jews’’. He had compared the Holocaust to baking cookies, and joked about the death toll being much lower than six million.
What makes him especially dangerous, Von Maren wrote, “is that he’s not always wrong”. His appalling statements were “mixed in with plenty of boilerplate conservative talking points on a host of issues”.
Let Christmas start early this year
“Complaints about the ever-earlier Christmas displays in malls and shops are a kind of American cliché at this point, along with complaints about the madness of Black Friday shopping after Thanksgiving,” wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review.
Normally, he said, he would be one of the complainers, an “Advent snob” holding on to “the conviction that there are twelve days of Christmas, and they begin on Christmas Day”.
But this year, “lots of people are letting go of their resistance and letting at least a little bit of Christmas come to their homes early”. The commercialism of Christmas, which at least includes news of “joy” and “goodwill to men”, “seems almost like a relief from the commercialism of social media” and its endless politics.
“So let it come. Break out the jazzy crooner Christmas albums. Deck the halls, find a new recipe for chestnut soup. Let the women put on those cheesy rom-coms. And let a little of the joy come early.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.