Welcome to the launch of Gaudium, a magazine of Catholic Faith, Reason, and Culture.  Current events highlight sharply the need for another faithful Catholic presence on the internet.  Twitter and other social media sites may have their place, but they also have their dangers, far too much power, and more and more they seem to both reflect and exacerbate some of the worst trends in our world.  We have need of greater reason, reflection, charity, and understanding.   And we need more joy. 

A priest once commented that there are two views of history: the rowboat and the canoe.  The canoe approach is common today among progressive thought.  It holds that we turn our backs on a backward, dark past, from which we have escaped and look toward a brighter future that we will remake in our own image.  This has sometimes infected even the Church itself as even Catholics begin to look on their past as dark and shameful.

This cannot be, for by this Catholic severs himself from his own rich heritage.  Therefore, under the patronage of Our Lady, Cause of Our Joy, and St. Luke the Evangelist, the mission of Gaudium is to promote growth in holiness, to respond to the conditions of our time, and to illuminate the culture of Christendom in order to proclaim the reign of Christ the King in our world.  In Him alone, crucified, risen, and enthroned as King, lies the world’s hope for true joy. Thomas Aquinas held that joy was supernatural in origin, a gift of the Holy Spirit.  A world that cuts itself off from God can hardly expect to experience it.  G.K. Chesterton once suggested that every age is converted by the saint that contradicts it the most.  Perhaps this age may also be converted by the virtue that contradicts it, hence Gaudium, joy, as a theme and magazine title.  

We hope to help reconnect the Catholic to his own rich history and traditions, a past that has produced some of the greatest literature, philosophy, theology, art, and architecture the world has ever seen.   And for most of history, we knew this.  This is the rowboat view of history.  We move forward as much as the canoe does, but with our eyes also on the past and grounded in our own traditions and history.  It is time to recover and reclaim this heritage.  As such we invite submissions on a wide range of topics on the culture, heritage, tradition, history, and literature of the Catholic Faith and their application to modern society and present problems and challenges.

Long Live Christ the King!

—The Editors