The Catholic Thing

By Randall Smith Fulton Sheen, officially to be declared "blessed" in a few days, began his wonderful book Three to Get Married with these four sentences: It takes three to make Love in Heaven – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It takes three for Heaven to make love to earth – God, Man, and Mary, through whom God became Man. It takes three to make love in the Holy Family – Mary, and Joseph, and the consummation of their love, Jesus. It takes three to make love in hearts – The Lover, the Beloved, and Love. This was a brilliant summary of the relationship between the threefold communion of love that binds the three persons of the Triune God and the love that should bind the spouses and children within a family. How can we begin to understand the Triune God, a reality that transcends our human reason? We begin with what we know concretely in our own world: human marriages. So too, we begin to understand God as "Father" in relation to our own fathers. "He is not merely an angry, distant God," we say, "He loves us like a Father." But upon reflection, we come to understand that the relationship really operates in the reverse. God is the paradigm "Father," and our human fathers merely participate in His "fatherhood." Our human fathers are partially responsible for our existence, but not fully, as is God. Our human fathers care for us, but not perfectly, as does God. So, as we reflect upon the fatherhood of God, we better understand what human fatherhood is meant to be. The closest we come in this life to understanding the loving communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is the family. It begins with a man, a woman, and the love that binds them. But then the love they share becomes incarnate in an actual person – a child. Anyone who has married friends has probably experienced a slight awkwardness spending time with one but not the other. It may be that you were close friends with one of them before the marriage, so you just mix more naturally with that spouse. But if you know that these parents love their children, then you will also probably know that there are few things better you can do for your friends than to love and support their children. Loving and supporting their children is loving and supporting them – the fruit of their union as a couple. It is not his child or her child; it's their child. The child is the embodied union of their love. So we start with human marriage, but upon reflection, we realize that we can understand marriage and the family best as modeled by the Triune God: a unity of love that does not destroy their distinctness, and a distinctness of persons that does not make impossible their true unity. And this is a unity of persons that is not closed in on itself, but is expressed outwardly, abundantly inviting others into communion and fellowship. The love of a great family never stops at the door of the house. It goes out to invite others in. What makes this sort of love in marriage possible? As Catholics, we believe that we are given the grace to love this way by the Holy Spirit. Since the Holy Spirit is the Love shared between the Father and the Son instantiated as a distinct divine person, when we share in the gifts of the Spirit, we participate in the very Love shared between the Father and the Son. In Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, Konstantin Levin, an unbeliever, marries Kitty, a woman he has loved deeply for years. At the wedding ceremony in the Church, Levin is led through what are to him a series of awkward steps he barely understands. But he does them anyway because of his love for his bride, and he is delighted. At one point in the service, he hears these words: "Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace and help, O Lord, we beseech Thee." Tolstoy writes: "Levin heard the words and they impressed him. How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants? thought Levin, recalling all his recent fears and doubts. 'What do I know? What can I do in this fearful business,' he thought, 'without h...

By Casey Chalk Earlier this year a meta-analysis in Advances in Psychological Science found a correlation between having a heightened sense of self-righteousness and what is called "third-party punishment," meaning punishing someone for a perceived infraction, even when you are not the victim of that infraction. An earlier study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are eager to express outrage and punish wrongdoers even when there is no identifiable personal benefit, because moralistic behavior signals our moral character to others. Worrying contemporary factors aggravate this phenomenon. We live in a culture that diminishes the role of sin and personal culpability while amplifying our sense of self. Social media encourages the creation of curated versions of ourselves that foreground our "best version of ourselves" while concealing our vices or shortcomings. We inhabit a deracinated, atomized society in which we know and are known by few people, but, ironically, are beholden to an obsession with celebrity – not only actual celebrities, but the cult of celebrity, where we aspire to be celebrated through "likes" and "shares." Much of this digital culture primes us for both virtue signaling and participation in "cancel culture." It's alarming, not only because of the likelihood of unjustly ruining reputations and careers, but because of what this paradigm does to the souls of those who participate in it. We don't know these online people, and are rarely privy to sufficient context to effectively evaluate them. Yet we caustically comment on the public, viral misdeeds of others – parenting decisions, relationship choices, appearance, or social etiquette. How could such behavior not do bad things to our souls? The Church offers a different way of understanding correction, a truly Christian ethic based on a proper anthropology, an understanding of human weakness, of repentance, forgiveness, and redemption that enables us to overcome errors. It does good, both for the one being corrected, as well as the one correcting. At Sunday Mass earlier this month, we read: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone." (Matthew 18:15) This is a method of correction that is discreet, respectful, and premised on the existence of a relationship, someone we know, with whom there exists a degree of trust and social currency. That correction, in turn, is not a way of burnishing our own moral credentials, but a desire for metanoia and the strengthening of personal bonds. We admonish the wayward because we love them and desire their good. Another component of the Christian conception of correction is the prudential evaluation of circumstances. Is the person we perceive to be in the wrong capable of receiving correction? If not, attempting to do so may very well retard that person's ability to receive correction later. Even if we think someone capable of listening to us, we may be rebuffed, and must prudently judge whether the error is so egregious as to be raised in a broader setting, which could very well also provoke evils worse than the first one. Perhaps, the offense is simply worth patiently suffering and praying over. It's dissatisfying but often the best option, because many wrongs, though censurable, risk causing far more harm if they are publicly exposed. The sacrament of penance provides another proper forum for confrontation and repentance, because all Catholics are expected to regularly examine their consciences according to an objective standard of justice, and confess sins to a priest offering absolution in persona Christi. Many Catholics do not avail themselves of this incomparable gift. But those who do, even those stubbornly resistant to perceiving their own sins, enter into a framework where they are humbly willing to be instructed and strengthened by sacramental grace. I knew a laywoman serving in a variety of authority roles in the Church who became incen...

By Anthony Esolen In the pilot episode of the old television show The Waltons, the six Walton children have gathered outdoors in the cold and the snow, where a lady from a religious charity is handing out Christmas presents to the littler ones. The presents have been donated by people better off than almost anybody in their mountain village. She gives a present in exchange for a Bible verse. Mary Ellen, the oldest of the Walton girls, knows a lot of verses, not because she is pious, but because Mrs. Walton makes her memorize them when she has misbehaved or talked back to her elders, which is often. She's the one to go to when you need a verse. "That's too long!" says one of the local boys. "Give me a shorter one." "Jesus wept," says Mary Ellen. That earns the boy a gift, and a look of pious ecstasy from the charitable lady. But things are not all well. When the smallest Walton, Elizabeth, about five years old, opens her present, it's a porcelain baby doll with a crack and a large hole in the face. "She's dead!" the little girl cries in horror and dismay. We are to feel the shame of it, and indignation, that someone would donate a dead baby doll for the poor. Not from malice, but from sheer thoughtlessness. Fifty years later, the feminist claptrap called Barbie opens with a group of little girls playing with their baby dolls, when a goddess-like Barbie shows up, stylish and gigantic and as feminine as a mannequin in a couturier's shop. Then, to Richard Strauss's fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra, one of the girls, in awe, smashes her doll's head on a rock, and another throws hers up in the air, spinning in space, just like the bone one of the apes has tossed in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It becomes the sign: BARBIE. So our "evolution" is from little girls playing with baby dolls, as the narrator tells us, to Barbie – or, as I'd put it, from something warm, natural, self-giving, and productive, to something cold, unnatural, self-worshiping, and sterile. Sure, I know, it's a joke. We're not to take it seriously. So goes the bait-and-switch. Yet somehow, I cannot see the humor in a dead baby. "Did you hear the one about the dead baby flying in the air?" said nobody at a bar, ever. The odd thing about it, what the film's makers somehow managed to miss, is that without babies there is no evolution. That is the Darwinian imperative. In mammals, the mother must suckle the babies, and the longer the period of immaturity, the greater the dependence of the offspring on the parents. Without a strong maternal instinct, mammals do not survive. We need not accept Darwin's account of the origin of species in order to admit this much. It is the inexorable logic of survival. You must play your cards most wisely to beat the house. Toss away your aces, and you die. Not immediately; but the house, Nature, has all the time in the world, and you do not. Only the spiritually exhausted Western world would make a joke about little girls smashing their baby dolls. But the joke is on the West. We are contracepting and aborting ourselves to death. Nor are we healthy apart from those obvious evils, since we have sown confusion in our children and suspicion and recrimination between the sexes, supposing even that we humble ourselves to acknowledge that there are two sexes. And only two. The dealer looks at your winnings and shrugs. The pile will dwindle to nothing. It must. "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing," says the aged Moses to the people. "Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." (Deuteronomy 30:19) The terms are not ours, but God's. Man can no more create a moral law than he can summon a grain of sand into existence from nothing, or invent and impose a new law of gravitation. And the people of Israel would have the choice of death right before them as they entered Canaan. Worship of the Canaanite god Moloch, accompanied by child-sacrifice as a quid pro quo, turns the public square int...

By James P. MacGuire In 1896, Episcopal clergyman John Byron Diman founded St. George's School in Newport, R.I. It became one of the so-called Saint Grottlesex schools, that name being a portmanteau of St. George's, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Groton, and Middlesex: Protestant prep schools that fairly defined the Gilded Age But then the Rev. Diman had a change of heart. He converted to Catholicism and joined the Benedictine Order at nearby Portsmouth Priory, a community founded from Fort Augustus in Scotland. As now Father Hugh Diman, O.S.B., and ever the energetic educator, he founded Portsmouth School on the priory grounds in 1926. (Hugh was his name "taken in religion.") In his original prospectus, Fr. Diman noted that the Portsmouth school would be the first Benedictine school in the United States belonging to the English Congregation and cited such characteristics of Benedictine education as: a general appreciation of scholarship, thoroughness in work and a belief in broad and liberal education as opposed to narrow specialization….Religion enters into the warp and woof of the School's daily life. The chapel for the religious community and the School is the same. Students may enter or leave it at will. Thus, while religion is not thrust upon them, the daily spectacle of the Mass, the occasional presence of sung Vespers or some other part of the Office, the sight of the quiet and ordered routine of the Community often reach the mind and soul of even the most light-hearted looker on, where calculated effort would generally fail. English boys' preparatory schools such as Ampleforth College and Downside School served as its models, and, like Portsmouth Abbey, both are co-educational today. Eighteen students enrolled in the school's first year. Among them was Christopher Wyatt, brother of actress Jane, whose mother's name, Euphemia van Rensselaer Waddington Wyatt, was the longest in the Social Register. The school's enrollment doubled in the second year, and by the early 1930s "Father Diman's School" had a national reputation, six forms, and students from across the country. By 1939, the school could count 118 graduates since its first Commencement in 1931. Of these, thirty had gone to Harvard, nineteen to Yale, thirteen to Georgetown, and eight to Princeton. Father Hugh died after a second heart attack in March of 1948. Alumni of all his three schools attended the Pontifical Requiem Mass for his soul in the Priory chapel. Headmasters served as pallbearers, a fitting tribute to an extraordinary educator and priest. In more recent years, the now Portsmouth Abbey School has undergone changes of development and crisis. Most of the present campus was designed by the Italian-American architect Pietro Belluschi in a modernist redwood-and-fieldstone motif; the octagonal church at its centerpiece modeled after the Justinian Revival church of San Vitale in Ravenna, and often referred to by architectural historians as a "mid-twentieth-century masterpiece." But Portsmouth Abbey has experienced the shock of several faculty sex abuse cases and consecutive abbots who resigned for troubling personal lapses. But under the Headmastership of Matthew Walter and his dynamic wife Paula, Portsmouth Abbey School is entering what St. John Henry Newman would call a "Second Spring," with record applications, a much-strengthened faculty, and ever-improving college placement. Along the way, Portsmouth has known some wonderful characters. Librarian Brother Basil Cunningham, for instance, a leading tournament bridge competitor who could recite entire genealogies of European royal families but had such a deathly fear of lightning that he would summon a cab from Newport eight miles away to drive him during a storm the two hundred yards from the library to the monastery. Or the polymath eccentric genius Dom Andrew Jenks, who seemed never to sleep, seldom showered, computed the school's entire daily class schedule in his head, and produced day-old pancakes from...

By Auguste Meyrat With many members of the Gen Z cohort (b. 1997-2012) coming of age and entering public life, it behooves older generations to understand them better. I can recall the many essays, books, and movies examining my own generation, the millennials (b. 1981-1996), as well as those assessing Generation X (b. 1965 -1980) before that. While they were not always accurate or entirely enlightening, they helped ease tensions between generations. Unfortunately, with Gen Z, the differences may be so vast and deep that understanding them will prove more difficult. So much of their formative experience is unprecedented. Not only have they grown up with smartphones, high-speed Internet, and now AI, but they have also experienced a number of widespread social disruptions, including the Covid lockdowns. Altogether, this makes their integration into adult life especially challenging – and I say this as a teacher who has worked closely with Zoomers for decades. As my friend and fellow teacher-writer Jeremy Adams explains in his book Hollowed Out (which I reviewed here), much about Gen Z is a paradox. On the outside, they have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips (theoretically: many will not even be aware of what today's date, 9/11, signifies). And they enjoy countless amenities. On the inside, many of them still feel empty and resentful. In response, Adams calls for a nation-wide intervention to help these youths discover the blessings of American democracy and Western wisdom. While this solution makes sense to older generations, Zoomers would likely scoff at the very idea. As Joey Oliver makes clear in his new book American History Z: Gen Z's Journey to the Far Right, the situation for Zoomers has deteriorated well beyond Adams's modest proposal. A Zoomer himself, Oliver gives a detailed account of how these ostensibly privileged people have grown up to despise their cultural patrimony and embrace radicalism. The account is hard to read at times, but sheds light on a host of blind spots that everyone who hopes to improve the outlook of today's young adults should understand. Far from growing up in an idyllic culture of stability, respectability, and technological advancement, Oliver and his peers witnessed firsthand the great crumbling of every narrative that had earlier defined the West. Race, immigration, feminism, free speech, economic opportunity, public health, American history, or democracy – all these subjects were reopened and recast despite inherent contradictions, corrupt leadership, and online polarization in Zoomer circles. This was not all bad. Secular leftist narratives tend to target Oliver's own demographic – white conservative males – making them a scapegoat for all the world's ills. For decades, the great majority of institutions had thoughtlessly reinforced this toxic messaging while simultaneously lamenting the sudden rise in political and cultural polarization in American life. But other voices arose to challenge these narratives and restore a degree of sanity to public discourse, bravely running through the gauntlet of censors and cancellers. While some of these advocates held steadfast in their positions, many were either silenced or pressured to recant, leaving much of their Zoomer audience to fend for themselves. This collective abandonment of Zoomers makes up the darkest aspects of Oliver's story. Yes, secular leftism (popularly known as "woke culture") was slowed down by countervailing forces, but it has not gone away. The conflict between right and left simply became more intense as political violence became common and public discourse degenerated into hate-filled propaganda. The revival of democratic virtues that Adams recommended in his book was replaced with partisan tribalism. In the end, Oliver loses faith in the whole American project. All the people he followed have let him down, making him a cynic before even reaching age 30. What's even more striking is his overwhelming scorn fo...

By Michael Pakaluk "We know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good" (Romans 8:28). Disasters must come in this fallen world, and maybe they will come to us. There are relatively few sayings of Jesus which the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve. But one of these addresses the fact of disasters. About those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, or the 18 victims of what we might call "the Tower of Siloam disaster": ". . . think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem? No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish." (Luke 13:4-5) As is his wont, Our Lord here uses visible realities as signs of the invisible. He knows human nature, that disasters invite us to feel, to our shame, that we the living are somehow "better" than those who died. This reaction is telling, because it shows that we inevitably interpret disasters as moral events. No matter what some may say intellectually, we cannot succeed in interpreting them as meaningless chance events. And this propensity is fundamentally correct. Our Lord teaches us its meaning: visible disasters are not meant to winnow out, the way the Last Judgment does. They are mere images of the only true disaster, damnation. And should stimulate us to repent. We soften Leon Bloy's saying, that the only tragedy in human life is not to be a saint, if we neglect to consider that there is only one eternal alternative to sainthood. Many of us alive in the days following the 9/11 attacks watched videos of the planes going into the towers again and again, not yet believing it. We liked to shock ourselves repeatedly, first, by provoking the feeling that "if only" this or that had not happened, we could have avoided it. "If only" the flight school had reported them; "if only" that suspicious airline official in Portland had not let them on). And then, second, with the feeling that "but it really did happen," which is the same as "it really was permitted by God." And this is shocking. But did you and I repent? Was each episode of such self-inflicted shock followed by a commensurate, passionate cry for mercy? Did Catholics adopt new mortifications in atonement? People did return to church, it was noticed, but such good impulses were soon swallowed up by vengeance and warfare. St. Paul speaks to the difference between the "permissive" and the "perfect" will of God. How do we know whether a disaster is the one or the other for us? You might look at the day before disaster. Twenty-five years ago, September 10, 2001, Todd Beamer returned from a five-day trip to Rome with his wife, Lisa, who was pregnant with their third child. He was sent there by Oracle with a group of 500 other employees and guests, as a reward for his excellence in sales. Todd was an Evangelical Christian. When in Rome, did he and his wife go to hear the man widely reputed to be a saint, John Paul II, who gave a General Audience in St. Peter's Square on Psalm 47? Even if not, surely the saint's words spoken then articulated God's meaning for their lives: Until the coming of the Messiah, hope of the nations, the Gentiles did not adore God and did not know who he is. Until the Messiah redeemed them, God did not reign over the nations through their obedience and their worship. Now instead, with his Word and his Spirit, God reigns over them because he saved them from deception and made them his friends. Once they got home, Todd needed to travel to San Francisco to do a favor for a friend by being present at a meeting with Sony. To spend more time at home with his wife and young children before leaving again, however, he decided not to take an evening flight, which was his usual practice, to get there the night before, but to take a morning flight, September 11. Was this choice a fatal mistake? To summarize: He was a believing Christian. He did his work well. He and his wife were generous in welcoming children. He was a good friend to a co...

By Francis X. Maier For three of my 27 years on diocesan staff, I had the attached duty of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs. It was great work. We had good relations with local Protestant and Latter-Day Saint communities; cordial discussions with local rabbis; and personal friendships with local Greek Orthodox and American Jewish Committee leaders. With Islam, the story was different. Over the years, we had a total of two contacts: one letter from a local imam insisting that we convert, and one visit from a young, formerly Catholic imam eager to explain how all the good in Christianity was really derived from Islam, the (allegedly) original divine revelation. Alas for him, he picked an unreceptive audience. I mention this for a reason. During those same years, I remember at least one night sitting through a parish presentation on the three "Abrahamic" faiths. In it, the parish DRE repeatedly, with the best of intentions, compared "the Bible" and "the holy Qur'an." I then had the delicate task of explaining that, in Christian belief, the Bible is holy and inspired by God. The Qur'an – whatever its beautiful elements might be – is neither. Christians do not recognize Muhammad as a true prophet. Nor is Islam the product of divine revelation, much less the original one. And the three "Abrahamic" religions – as Rémi Brague, Jacques Ellul, and many others have noted – have far deeper differences than similarities. Simply put, inter-religious dialogue, including with Islam, is an admirable goal. But confused irenicism serves neither the truth nor a healthy mutual understanding. Brague, the distinguished French Catholic philosopher and Arabist, describes the limits of Christian-Muslim dialogue: For Islam, the survival of the Christian religion is an anachronism. Islam presents itself. . .as the true Christianity, given that, according to Islamic thought, Christians have disfigured the authentic Gospel, just as the Jews, for their part, have sold out the authentic Torah. Thus it is out of the question to appeal to common Scripture. This means, from the Muslim point of view, the "Islamo-Christian dialogue" is a dialogue between true Christians (that is, the Muslims themselves) and people who imagine themselves to be true Christians, but are not. This is why dialogue interests Christians more than it does Muslims. In practice, Islamic ignorance of, and chronic disinterest in, the actual content of Christianity can be astonishing. Bernard Lewis, the great Jewish scholar of Muslim civilization, noted that over the centuries and into the modern era, most Muslims have believed that "the Trinity, the worship of which Islam condemns as near-polytheistic blasphemy, [consists] of God, Jesus, and Mary." Most Christians know that they don't know Islam. But the opposite is not true. Most Muslims tend to assume that they already know everything they need to know about Christianity since the Qur'an speaks of Christians. The result is a gulf made unbridgeable by Islam's claim to be the original, and the only pure, divine revelation, superseding all others. None of this need preclude honest attempts at mutual respect and understanding. But it should preclude Christian naïveté. Catholics pray the Nicene Creed at every Sunday Mass. It's the constitutional expression of what we believe. Across 17 centuries, men and women have died defending it. With the exception of the Creed's first line, Islam rejects every key element of the text. Historically, in Muslim-dominated cultures – as Rémi Brague notes, and we too often forget – "Jews and Christians were subjected to various measures explicitly designed to make them understand, by humiliating them, that it would be in their interest to adopt Islam." Similar forms of Muslim behavior continue today. Christians face prejudice, persecution, abductions, and forced conversions in various Muslim states. This week we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Blaming an entire religious community for the actions of...

By Amy Fahey A little over a year ago, I took my aged father for a specialist visit. The appointment, which I still recall with painful clarity, put me in mind of the Anglo-Saxon poem known simply as "The Ruin." The manuscript is damaged, so what remains is itself a kind of ruin, a meditation on former splendor contrasted with brokenness and fragmentation. It struck me then, as it does now, as a fitting metaphor for the current state of healthcare in our nation. The receptionist hands me a tablet and stylus and tells me to register my father. There are a series of questions on the screen, all related to his bladder. In addition to recently losing his vision, my father is now hard of hearing, so I begin: "How many times a day do you have to." But I stop myself as I realize how embarrassing, even dehumanizing, this will be in a crowded waiting room. My father waves his hand in the air and says with his characteristic midwestern bluntness, "Just answer down the middle for all of them. They don't read that sh*t anyway." The wife of a couple nearby cups her hand to her mouth in a repressed giggle. Her husband turns to her and says sharply: "Well, he's right." When we make it to the appointment room, the good doctor (I have heard from my father that he is a good man, a Catholic) breezes in with his own hand-held screen, followed by a young woman in a white coat, who presumably is following the doctor on his rounds to learn the art of healing. He begins scrolling rapidly, reviewing my father's records. Meanwhile my father, summoning up all his courage, launches into a well-rehearsed declaration of independence: "I'm not getting any shots today. I don't want any more of that crap put into my body. I've had enough chemicals – they've totally messed up my system." I'm sure the doctor listened attentively. But I'm also sure his mind was working – working fast. It had to: as he told us, my father was one of seventy patients he would see that day. I did rapid calculations. Say the doctor arrived at the clinic at 7:00 am and didn't leave until 6:00 pm, with a break somewhere to eat or to discuss a patient's clinical notes with that young woman, or to voice-to-text those clinical notes or even just to relieve himself. That would mean an average of about eight minutes per patient. My father's weeks of agonizing anticipation, reduced to an eight-minute appointment. Still, my father hands the doctor one of his favorite cigars: a Rocky Patel Decade. The doctor is effusive in his thanks. Decades, he says, are his favorite too. He is golfing later that week and will smoke it then. The good doctor then simply says, "Your numbers have been coming down. We'll give you a break and reevaluate." And that is that. I think it's too generous to say that American healthcare is at a crossroads. It is, like the once-glorious city in Roman Britain contemplated by that anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet a millennium ago, in ruins. Fears that AI might depersonalize healthcare seem to have missed the glaring reality that healthcare has been increasingly depersonalized for years now. When was the last time a doctor spent more time looking at you than at a screen? Who hasn't had the experience of feeling like the doctor is just one Google search ahead of you (or sometimes behind) in diagnosing or determining treatment options? I'm not suggesting there aren't excellent, dedicated, and humane people in the medical profession. There are, and I've been blessed to know some of them. Yet even as studies warn us of the "cognitive overload" of overworked medical personnel, and prognosticators predict the "cognitive debt" AI will usher in, it seems obvious that both overload and debt have already crossed the threshold of our clinics and hospitals. As in education, COVID only exposed and accelerated a problem that was already there. Yet there are signs of hope. For several years, my family and I have belonged to a Christian health share, an alternative to conventional insurance ...

By St. Pope John Paul II Through work, man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself. Man is made to be in the visible universe an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. . . . The Church is convinced that work is a fundamental dimension of man's existence on earth. She is confirmed in this conviction by considering the whole heritage of the many sciences devoted to man: anthropology, paleontology, history, sociology, psychology and so on; they all seem to bear witness to this reality in an irrefutable way. But the source of the Church's conviction is above all the revealed word of God, and therefore what is a conviction of the intellect is also a conviction of faith. The reason is that the Church – and it is worthwhile stating it at this point – believes in man: she thinks of man and addresses herself to him not only in the light of historical experience, not only with the aid of the many methods of scientific knowledge, but in the first place in the light of the revealed word of the living God. Relating herself to man, she seeks to express the eternal designs and transcendent destiny which the living God, the Creator and Redeemer, has linked with him. The Church finds in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis the source of her conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth. An analysis of these texts makes us aware that they express – sometimes in an archaic way of manifesting thought – the fundamental truths about man, in the context of the mystery of creation itself. These truths are decisive for man from the very beginning, and at the same time they trace out the main lines of his earthly existence, both in the state of original justice and also after the breaking, caused by sin, of the Creator's original covenant with creation in man. When man, who had been created "in the image of God. . . .male and female," hears the words: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it," even though these words do not refer directly and explicitly to work, beyond any doubt they indirectly indicate it as an activity for man to carry out in the world. Indeed, they show its very deepest essence. Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth. In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe. Work understood as a "transitive" activity, that is to say an activity beginning in the human subject and directed towards an external object, presupposes a specific dominion by man over "the earth," and in its turn it confirms and develops this dominion. It is clear that the term "the earth" of which the biblical text speaks is to be understood in the first place as that fragment of the visible universe that man inhabits. By extension, however, it can be understood as the whole of the visible worl...

By Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF Cardinal Robert Sarah's address this summer to the European Parliament identifies a foundational problem in contemporary bioethical discourse: the widening gap between language and reality. Words that once conveyed stable meanings – "healthcare," "rights," "dignity" – are increasingly deployed with ideological elasticity. Sarah warns this linguistic instability constitutes a "crisis of the logos or of reason," a breakdown in the relationship between words and the realities they signify. Language ceases to correspond to reality; reason loses its footing, and moral judgment becomes vulnerable to sentiment, ideology or political coercion. Sarah's thesis rests on three philosophical principles deeply rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition. First, language must correspond to reality. For Sarah, language is not a neutral tool but an instrument of truth. Words are meant to reveal reality, not obscure it. Once medical discourse employs euphemisms or ambiguous terminology, it becomes difficult to identify the moral nature of medical actions. When terms such as "healthcare," "choice," or "medical aid in dying" conceal the underlying reality of direct killing or murder, the loss of linguistic clarity spawns a loss of moral clarity. Second, reason is the basis of ethical judgment. Sarah's critique presupposes a classical and Christian understanding of reason as the faculty capable of discerning truth. In turn, ethical judgment is directly dependent on reason's ability to apprehend the nature of the human person and the goods proper to human flourishing. Rather than rational inquiry into human goods, many bioethical debates today become mere contests of sentiment or political power. Third, human dignity is objective and intrinsic. Sarah insists human dignity does not depend on "autonomy," utility, or political consensus. It flows from the nature of the human person as an imago Dei, a being created in God's image. The consequences of ignoring these principles are particularly acute in bioethics, where, as Sarah argues, the stakes involve human life, embodiment, and dignity. For this reason, Sarah's lectio evaluates coherently four major bioethical issues: abortion, in vitro fertilization, transgender ideology, and physician-assisted suicide. In each case, he demonstrates how linguistic distortion functions as a precondition for moral confusion and policy error. Referring to abortion as "health," for example, is a linguistic manipulation that conceals the elimination of life. Sarah cites American, European, and international policy documents where "sexual and reproductive health" is routinely used to include abortion. He argues this egregious "reversal of the logos" reframes the deliberate termination of a human life as a form of healthcare, conditions human dignity on maternal choice, and treats the unborn baby as an object whose existence depends on external approval. Sarah insists the linguistic distortion of "health," "choice," and "rights" normalizes abortion by embedding it within the language of medicine and the Constitution. But if abortion is described as "healthcare," the unborn child becomes a pathology, the moral reality of direct killing is obscured, and reason is subordinate to political expediency. Within this conceptual framework, warns Sarah, it becomes difficult – if not impossible – to recognize the gravity of the act of abortion. Sarah also contends that the language of "reproductive rights" justifies in vitro fertilization, embryo cryopreservation, selective reduction, and embryo disposal. While the term "rights" is employed to frame the baby and its laboratory production as entitlements, it clandestinely obscures the moral implications of creating and destroying human beings at their embryonic stage. And when IVF is framed as a "right," the child becomes a product of technique rather than the fruit of a unitive act of marital love. The genesis of a new human being is relocated from...

By Randall Smith The Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes says that the Church has the duty of responding to "the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other," in "language intelligible to each generation." So too, one often hears that the Church should be "in dialogue" with the modern world. This is not the same as "accompanying" people, which presupposes no disagreement. In dialogue, the parties can disagree in hopes of coming to a better understanding of one another. So, let's accept for the moment the notion that it is good that the Church sets itself the goal of entering into a dialogue with this generation. But a dialogue with whom? And what language would be intelligible to them? "Modernity" is not a monolithic entity. The Church does not have merely one dialogue partner, but a host of them, each with its own presuppositions and its own "language." So the Church must learn to speak in multiple languages to different audiences. To be effective, the approach they must take will differ depending on the group they are addressing. Some of the Church's dialogue partners, for example, still accept the old Enlightenment dichotomy between reasonable "science" and unreasonable "faith." The Church addresses this group by trying to show the reasonableness of the faith. These texts tend to be more densely "philosophical." When the Church tries to show that the tenets of the faith are as reasonable as any philosophy, there will be "Bible Christians" who accuse the Church of subjecting the Scriptures to human reason and creating an "unbiblical theology." When the Church works to show how her positions are well supported Biblically, the Enlightenment group accuses her of believing in the authority of an outdated, archaic text. So the situation is even more complicated than having to learn to speak multiple languages. Speaking "intelligibly" to one group can alienate the others. There are some who find the language of Enlightenment science and reason too restrictive. They prefer the language of passion and beauty. For them, the philosophical language the Church uses in her conversation with scientists is too "logical," too "deductive," too bound up with philosophical categories. The Church, they say, needs to be more "pastoral," by which they mean more "open," more attentive to people's emotions and their "lived experience." That's fine, but it's not an approach that works well with everyone, especially hard scientists and serious philosophers for whom such "emotional appeals" seem like manipulation of the ignorant. Some, like the Marxists, criticize the Church for being overly concerned with the things of Heaven and not sufficiently concerned with the injustices found on earth. They call the faith "the opiate of the masses" because the hope for Heaven, they believe, anesthetizes the faithful to the abuses they are suffering now, especially from political and social injustices. This is obviously an unfair criticism, since the Church has never been shy about fighting human injustice, and no group has done more to help the poor and the working classes than the Church. So the Church makes statements about political, social, and economic injustice. When it does, however, other groups will criticize it for being "too political," insisting that the Church should be laser-focused on "getting people into Heaven." And when the Church defends the poor and the weakest in society, followers of Friedrich Nietzsche accuse the Church of supporting a "slave morality," undermining the strength, drive, and "manliness" of the culture. The Church needs to dialogue with all these different groups. But the "language" and the approach with which the Church addresses one group will not necessarily work with the others. For some, Church documents are based too much on the Scriptures. For others, there's not enough Scripture. For some, there's not...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza Pope Leo XIV is traveling to Rimini today for the annual cultural festival organized by Communion and Liberation (CL). Few use its formal name, the "Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples." It's simply "Rimini." It might be the only thing many know about the Italian coastal town, which draws major figures from the worlds of religion, the arts, and even Italian politics for its summer gathering. Some 80,000 participants attend, with three-quarters of a million more following online. Communion and Liberation inaugurated the Rimini meeting in 1980, and already in 1982 St. John Paul the Great visited. Pope Leo will be the second pope to visit and what he says about culture, art, and beauty will be noted carefully. Just this week at his general audience, the Holy Father spoke of music and the worship of God. This year's Rimini theme is taken from the final line of Dante's Paradiso: "The Love which moves the Sun and the other stars." It's perfect for Rimini, where devout Catholics speak in a language that they hope will engage even nonbelievers. Thus the "love" of this year's theme is explained as "the dynamic principle of the cosmos, the energy that holds everything together and drives it toward fulfillment." That sounds a bit like "The Force" in Star Wars, but that's the CL way. They are clearly intended to offer an opening to the Holy Father and his recent teachings on artificial intelligence. "We live fragmented within digital bubbles that isolate rather than connect us," CL's introduction continues. "In a world where algorithms decide what we see and whom we meet, rediscovering love as a force that moves and transforms becomes a radical challenge. It means recognizing that reality is not static chaos, but carries within itself a direction, a dynamism that pushes us beyond ourselves." That there is a dynamic that takes us beyond ourselves was articulated at Rimini in two memorable addresses that were not given by a pope, but a future one: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 1990 and 2002. How does that love dynamic manifest itself? In beauty and sanctity, which is what Ratzinger said the Church offers the world as her ultimate testimony. Ratzinger was close to the CL movement and its founder, Msgr. Luigi Giussani, so much so that he preached at Giussani's funeral Mass just months before his own election as pope in 2005: Father Giussani had grown up in a house – as he himself said – poor in bread, but rich in music. . . .And so, from the beginning he was touched, indeed wounded, by the desire for beauty; he was not satisfied with just any beauty, a banal beauty: he sought Beauty itself, infinite Beauty; thus he found Christ, in Christ the true beauty, the path of life, the true joy. Ratzinger was thus applying to Giussanni a longstanding claim of his, articulated most famously at Rimini in 2002: I have often already stated my conviction that the true apologia of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth, against any denial, is on the one hand the saints and on the other the beauty that faith has generated. Earlier in the same address, Ratzinger recalled "an unforgettable experience for me was the Bach concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Munich after Karl Richter's untimely death." "I was seated next to the Evangelical Bishop Hanselmann," he said. "When the last note triumphantly faded away, we spontaneously looked at each other, and just as spontaneously said, 'Whoever has listened to this knows that faith is true.'" Ratzinger too grew up rich in music; he described his hometown as belonging to the "Mozart region of Bavaria." In the truly magisterial lecture that he gave at Rimini in 1990, Ratzinger addressed the question of authentic reform in the Church. Some twenty-five years after Vatican II, he explored what true and false reform meant. What needed to change so that what doesn't change – the Gospels, the deposit of the faith, the tradition of holiness – can be discovered ...

By Robert Royal We recently reached the 250th anniversary (a quarter-millennium) of the dominant nation and culture of our time – and of one of the greatest countries in world history. Yet just a few weeks later, you'd hardly know it. And only a month ago, everyone was talking – even here – about a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, a 3000-year-old foundation stone of our civilization. That, too, passed quickly and is unlikely to become a classic. The Church keeps better time – witness the recent Feast of the Assumption. But we need much greater attention to what's important, deep, steady, and (relatively) lasting even in our passing world. Now and then, we get it, for instance, Patrick J. Deneen's new book American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls. Many know Deneen as the author of Why Liberalism Failed and one of the brighter lights at Notre Dame. But he has had a long interest in the Odyssey and its connections to the American experience. And he deliberately timed the book to come out at this moment. At first sight, connecting modern America to Bronze-Age Greece may seem a stretch. But in this brief, lively, and approachable treatment, Deneen ably uncovers several valuable truths. To begin with, as the book's subtitle indicates, Deneen sees a deep divide particularly in American souls, and one that has existed from the beginning. The Pilgrims, he notes, crossed the wide Atlantic on their "errand into the wilderness," but also in search of a true home. They were not just explorers, like Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci (who gave America its name), but also somewhat similar to Odysseus in seeking their proper place. At the same time – and here's the divided soul – in a sense they were explorers, leaving home in search of a better life, "a city on a hill." Deneen traces this paradox through American culture. We are, more than most nations, a people who are both restless and seeking rest – but a rest that lies over the horizon. Augustinian echoes are obvious here, in that all human beings are seekers, of course, often not knowing that the only real rest is in God. But in America that perennial search also has had this-worldly personal and social dimensions. As an Italian friend of America wrote decades ago, we're the only people on earth whose very Constitution confesses to seeking a "more perfect union," mere perfection being not enough for us. Deneen explores this ambivalence in the American soul via several landmarks in American popular culture. In The Wizard of Oz, for instance, especially the film version, Dorothy yearns for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." And she gets it in Oz where – like Ulysses – she encounters strange beasts and multiple adventures. But it's precisely those experiences that help her to realize "there's no place like home," even a plain farm in Kansas. In a later chapter, Deneen notes a similar division in the film It's a Wonderful Life. The young George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) wanted to see the world, do great things, escape the "limits" of small-town life. But forced to take over the family business, he never has the chance. Yet – as the heartfelt Christmas conclusion makes clear – he did achieve great things, even had adventures of a sort, by not leaving and therefore living the heroic life of "ordinary people." Several of Deneen's comparisons are surprising. The Laura Ingalls Wilder series "Little House on the Prairie," set in Mankato, Minnesota, may seem as distant from the Odyssey as a story can be. But Deneen traces exactly what must have been the attitude of many settlers who journeyed into the wide-open American West, an odyssey and errand into the wilderness to be sure, but also a search and a discovery of a new home. These readings can at times also be a little strained. Field of Dreams, a great film about the quintessential American sport – baseball – displays elements of voyaging and nostalgia, to be sure. But it takes no little forcing to fit it into the overal...

By K.E. Colombini On a trip back home to Southern California, I had the opportunity to visit the church of my baptism, my "mother church," as they say. When I became Catholic at the age of twelve, in April 1976, Holy Family, in the city of Orange, had just the previous month become the cathedral for the new diocese south of Los Angeles. Not much seemed different with the passing of nearly half a century, yet the evolution of the cathedral for the Diocese of Orange in the intervening years is itself an interesting story. There was nothing spectacular about Holy Family, which was built in the late 1950s, and I don't know why it was selected as the first cathedral for the diocese. In the early 2000s, there was a move by the bishop at that time to build a new, larger cathedral in Santa Ana. His ambition for a seat worthy of his see had a price tag of $200 million, but the timing was bad, with the Church's sex-abuse scandal hitting the diocese hard in those days. Another opportunity presented itself in 2010 when Crystal Cathedral Ministries, founded by televangelist Robert Schuller, declared bankruptcy. The Orange Diocese acquired the modern Philip Johnson-designed Crystal Cathedral complex the following year, and extensive renovations led to the 2019 opening of the newly christened Christ Cathedral. Sitting in a pew at Holy Family, now just a humble parish church again, I was grateful for it, and what it meant and still means to me. Married and with a growing family, I moved out of Orange County to Sacramento in October 1990. I won't forget Holy Family, even though I had not been there in decades. During the 1990s, I worked in downtown Sacramento, where the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, built in 1889, sits a stone's throw from the State Capitol, City Hall, and the heart of the city. It was a frequent refuge for me, with weekday Masses at noon drawing a large group of office workers. In those days, Bishop Francis Quinn lived in the rectory next to the cathedral, and I've always thought this to be a far better arrangement than, say, a suburban home. A bishop should have a strong presence at his cathedral, as Quinn showed admirably when, in April 1993, a gunman killed two workers at the downtown library, a few blocks away from the cathedral, before being killed himself by police. Quinn was on hand quickly to administer last rites himself and comfort those on the scene, and an image of him doing so was spread across several columns of the next day's front page of the Sacramento Bee. This is the sort of pastoral visibility that is important for the Church, and which we rarely see in our prelates. Under Quinn's successor, William Weigand, a top-to-bottom renovation of Blessed Sacrament was completed in 2005 at a cost of $34 million. Just from an aesthetic point of view -and discounting needed repair – it was sorely needed; the interior could be dark and dreary. This project opened it up and created a beautiful, light-filled space and a sanctuary worthy of a cathedral, especially one in a capital city. When one first sees the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, it is easy to be awed by its Romanesque enormousness, with a dome one hundred and fifty feet high, worthily attesting to the significance of a city that was once the fourth largest in the nation. What's hard to believe is that it is half its originally intended size. In the late nineteenth century, St. Louis Archbishop John Kain acquired land for the cathedral, but efforts were stalled by a tornado in 1896 that killed more than 250. Money that was intended for the cathedral was reallocated to tornado relief, and construction plans were delayed and downsized. After the success of the 1904 World's Fair, the project began anew, with construction completed in 1914. The cathedral's interior mosaics, one of the largest collections in the world, were not completed until 1988. Our cathedral basilica may be over a century old, but in St. Louis we refer to it as the "New Cathedral...

By Kristen Ziccarelli Today, August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, commemorates one of the most mysterious moments in Christ's public ministry. Ascending Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John, Jesus is transfigured before them. His face shines "like the sun," and His garments become dazzling white, Moses and Elijah appear beside Him, and the Father's voice declares, "This is my beloved Son. . . .listen to Him." Peter immediately responds, "Lord, it is good that we are here." The Transfiguration is recounted in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It happens in the final year of Jesus's life, before his Crucifixion. So this should lead us to wonder: Why did Christ ascend Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John before His Passion? Why reveal His glory at that particular moment? Archbishop Fulton Sheen offers one illuminating answer in his short book, The Life of Christ: "Peter the 'rock,' James, the one destined to be the first Apostle Martyr, and John, the visionary of the future glory of the Apocalypse. Undoubtedly, He chose these three because they most needed strength for the hour of trial." The crux of Sheen's observation is that Christ did not reveal His glory after the Cross as a reward for their fidelity, but before the Cross to strengthen and support them in preparation for it. Though Peter would deny Him, he would later repent. James would become the first Apostle to lay down his life for the Gospel. John would stand beneath the Cross, only later receiving the heavenly vision recorded in the Apocalypse. Christ knew precisely what awaited each of them, but before asking them to witness the greatest ugliness in history, He first allowed them to behold its greatest beauty. It is interesting to reflect on the Transfiguration specifically in light of beauty's purpose in the spiritual life. Or to even surmise – as many might not consider – that beauty has such a purpose. The world has a way of trying to justify things according to their utility. From that perspective, beauty may seem unnecessary, or even indulgent, compared to more practical concerns. Even in modern Christian circles, beauty may be relegated to something secondary, its relationship to truth and goodness severed. But the scene of the Transfiguration, where Christ's "face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light," is probably one of the most striking scenes of beauty in the Scriptures. Beauty presenting the means by which Christ Himself prepared His disciples for suffering? He could have strengthened them another way; he could have simply commanded them to persevere. He could have told them a parable or sent a message through an angel. Instead, He gave them an encounter with His glory. Beauty strengthens, but how? For one, it reminds us that the visible world is capable of revealing something beyond the banal, which can offer both hope and solace. At the time we encounter it, we may feel both fulfilled and unsatisfied, enlightened but desiring more. We recognize the existence of something we have always longed for yet cannot fully possess. But more importantly, this experience moves us to perfect contrition, which is born not principally from fear of punishment, but from love itself. Beauty awakens that love, and having glimpsed something of God's glory, however fleetingly, we recognize how little we wish to be separated from it. In the Gospel of Matthew, Peter's response is recorded as, "Lord, it is well that we are here." He continues with Peter making a proposal: If you wish, I will make "three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah." It is easy for us to relate to his stunned reaction: our encounters with authentic beauty awaken the desire to remain. We listen to symphonies not wanting them to end; we sadden at the thought of the vivid sunset sinking finally below the clouds. But Christ will lead the Apostles back down, to where crowds are waiting, and where there is suffering still to be endured. Th...

By Randall Smith There was a bit of a kerfuffle a few years back over the phrase in the Our Father: "Lead us not into temptation." It was suggested that the phrase be changed to "do not let us fall into temptation," reasoning that the original wording incorrectly implies God pushes people into sin, whereas it is Satan's domain to tempt. It is certainly true that God does not lead people into sin, but I think the complaint misses a grammatical point. It is fine to pray: "Do not let us fall into temptation," but I don't merely want God to "not let me fall": I want Him to lead me away. Consider this image. You see a beautiful, sensuous woman across the room, provocatively dressed. You could walk towards her and be more deeply tempted by her. Or you could turn and walk away. I think it is time to pray, Lord, lead me not into – lead me out of, lead me away from – temptation. It would be foolish to pray: "Lord, lead me into some serious temptation, so that I can see whether I am able to resist it." Better to just walk away. I knew a man who participated in group "anger management" sessions. While he listened to the stories of how several people had lost their tempers, he kept saying to himself as each story proceeded through the sequence of events leading up to an explosion: "Just walk away; just walk away." But they hadn't. The problem is, in some instances, that can be hard. It's not something you would do "naturally" on your own. So a little outside help might be necessary. There is a humorous scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the ostensibly pure and noble Sir Galahad finds himself in a castle full of women who are tempting him sexually. At that moment, Sir Lancelot and a group of other knights break in to "save him." LANCELOT: We were in the nick of time; you were in great peril. GALAHAD: I don't think I was. LANCELOT: Yes, you were; you were in terrible peril. GALAHAD: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril. LANCELOT: No, it's too perilous. GALAHAD: Look, I'm a knight; I'm supposed to get as much peril as I can. LANCELOT: No, we've got to find the Holy Grail. Come on! GALAHAD: Well, let me have just a little bit of peril? LANCELOT: No, it's unhealthy. This is often the way it is with temptation. Even the great St. Augustine says in his youth he prayed: "Lord, give me chastity and continence – but not yet." The Lord's prayer contains the admission that there are certain things I am tempted by, to which one adds the request: "Lord, lead me away from them!" Sometimes, we need some stern, serious help to get moving in the opposite direction from the one we are disposed to follow. But there is something more. "Lead us not into temptation" comes directly after the prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." One common temptation is to allow others who have offended us to "live rent free in our minds." We say we forgive, but the offense can live on in our hearts and minds. Sometimes it "lives on" in the form of resentment toward the person who wronged us. But sometimes, if we have in fact forgiven that person, it can still "live on" in the form of fear that such offenses may happen again and again or in the form of fantasies about how one would react and boldly fight off such offenses in the future. This too is a grave temptation – a temptation not to let the past be past and allow it instead to live on in you. So we pray: Lord, let me forgive the trespasses of others the way you have forgiven mine. And don't let the residual effects of those trespasses live on in me. Something bad happened; there's no denying it. But O Lord, don't let it lead me into temptation to do evil myself to others or to become cold, arrogant, or embittered. Temptation is just something that comes along with life. We all have desires. What kind of miserable, lifeless life would it be if we had no desire? The problem is we can desire the wrong things or desire good things in the wrong way. I see a...

By Robert Royal This is the first summer in quite a while that circumstances have prevented me from taking a walking pilgrimage, usually something like the Camino de Compostela (here) or the Via Francigena (which nearly killed me a few years ago between the heat and distance (here). My favorite, however, is still St. Cuthbert's Way, which runs from Melrose in Scotland over the mountains on the border with England and down to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne (here). I'm deeply convinced that a walking pilgrimage – in its combination of the spiritual and the physical on God's green earth– is of far greater human and religious value than anything we've yet seen in the interminably bureaucratic synodal "walking together"(here). But it must be a real pilgrimage, and there are disturbing signs that many people are now turning even some of the most hallowed pilgrim routes, followed by great saints and penitent sinners over centuries, into just one more self-involved path to "personal fulfillment." There are even pilgrimage "influencers." And those who enter classic pathways in search of "wellness." (Mercy, Lord.) To be clear: a pilgrimage doesn't have to be a perfect ascetic or soulful exercise. Or a perfect anything. Even in the Middle Ages, Chaucer (realistically) included the lusty Wife of Bath and tipsy Miller in The Canterbury Tales, his poetic account of a group of pilgrims – sinners as are we all – on the way to the shrine of the great martyr St. Thomas Becket. Anyone who makes a walking pilgrimage even today will find that there are days of drudgery and distraction amid others of lightness and purpose. Sometimes even a single day will take you through many combinations and permutations of highs and lows. In all that, the walking is like life more generally – with the difference that you've chosen, if you've chosen wisely, to pursue a particular path to a definite end. Which is not normally something you do every day. And if you're also lucky, it will make other paths clearer and more bearable. There is a kind of "personal fulfillment" in all this, but it's a fulfillment that results from being less focused on yourself and more focused on the Way. I think that this is one reason why the early Christians were often described as followers of hē hodós "the Way" (Acts 9:2, etc.). That Way would be the Very One who told us He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It's worth reflecting on that historical fact. Later, of course, maybe within a decade after the Crucifixion, the name changed: "the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch." (Acts 11:26) Which seems to suggest that it was, at least initially, as important to walk the walk as to talk the talk. As the disciples on the way to Emmaus and St. Paul on the way to Damascus found out, some earth-shaking things can happen when you leave the familiar and are "on the way." The apostles travelled far, mostly on foot – Paul, of course, all over the Eastern Mediterranean; Peter to various places and, with Paul, eventually to Rome; James, maybe (according to later records) to Spain and then back to martyrdom in Jerusalem; Andrew to Russia; Philip to Turkey; Matthew to Ethiopia; Thomas to India, etc. Where and how they died in several cases are now, like many ancient things, rendered somewhat uncertain in the mists of time. But we can be certain that they all took seriously Jesus' great command to preach the Gospel to all nations. Which is why their graves, too, have themselves become places of pilgrimage. There's something bracing about getting up in the morning and, instead of following your usual routine or jumping into the car, instead tying on your walking shoes and heading off on you know not what. I have friends and family who like what's predictable and balk at the idea of taking off on unknown paths. I – sort of – get that. It's good and necessary to have a certain amount of predictability in your days. But it's also an illusion. Even if you're sitting at home today (...

By Fr. Thomas Kuffel Nike, the shoe company, not the ancient Greek goddess, famously said, "Just Do It." But why is the company called "Nike," and what does the word mean? Nikê is the Greek goddess of victory in war – and life. Battles bring victory, and she brought victory to Zeus, supporting him in his wars. Taking note, Nike became the shoe company that brings victory to athletes. St. Paul, too, noted this mythology and reordered it to Christ: "In all these things we are more than conquerors (hyper-nikomen) through him who loved us." (Romans 8:37–38) Victory is ours because Christ intercedes, not Nike. Jesus is the one true God. He gives us victory not in mythical battles, but real, spiritual battles with Principalities and Powers, evil spirits, trying to conquer us through temptation and suffering. Suffering is a profound problem and breaks many people. Suffering people weaken and, in their weakness, forsake the fullness of life. They give in to temptations, trials, and tragedy. In the abyss of suffering, despair arises, and sin suffocates hope. Yet St. Paul, a man who suffered intensely while living and preaching the Gospel, replies: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" (Romans 8:35) Moses warned of these seven woes, telling the Israelites that if they broke the covenant with God, these curses would occur, not as a condemnation but as a correction. Corrections cause suffering, but the sufferings are curative, not harmful. Yet many see suffering as vengeful, criticizing God, saying that He causes suffering and cannot, therefore, be all-loving and all-good. In contrast, the wise see suffering as God's way to stop people from sinning and losing their lives. Sin destroys us. It separates us from Christ, as St. Paul tells us, "I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." (Galatians 5:21) What things? "Immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like." (Galatians 5:18–21) Sin, not suffering, separates us from God. Separated from Him, the spiritual battle is lost (though the larger war is not yet over). Sin impedes the Holy Spirit from working in our lives. God, however, intervenes and sends His Son. In His death (ironically) and resurrection, Jesus is victorious. He defeats the Powers and Principalities, and restores us to life with his grace. Grace, partaking in God's life, changes sins into victory and sufferings into triumph. Any victory costs. It entails suffering, but the suffering we endure has a purpose. It is not worthless. In fact, St. James tells us, "Blessed is the man who endures trial, for when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him." (James 1:12) Yet many people see their sufferings as meaningless. They live in the here and now, not in the eternal hereafter. St. John Paul knew this. In his great work Salvifici doloris, he writes: Suffering seems to belong to man's transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense "destined" to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way. (¶ 2) That call asks us to go beyond our present self and discover the great experience of encountering God. Through suffering, Christ's passion, death, and resurrection become alive in us. And through our own cross, we conform our wills to the Father's as did Jesus. In other words, suffering embraced saves. Instead of seeing suffering as a way to God's victory, many reject God's will, thinking suffering is foolish. Christ dismisses that thinking, telling us to take up our cross daily and follow Him. Following Jesus, at first, leads us into the desert. Alone, hungry, and lost, Jesus speaks to us. He gives us Himself not just in words and miracles, which ...

By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg When I ask my classes, "What is a cat?" inevitably the answer is, "Whatever someone says it is." Not so long ago, every seventh grader knew what a cat was. Now, that certainty has evaporated into subjectivity. But after a few months of instruction in logic, a kind of mass awakening occurs: the class discovers that "truth is not consensus, but the convergence of the mind and reality." That moment is a glimpse of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language, and of what is at stake when words lose their grounding in reality. "Cat" is not the eternally correct sound for the purring, sharp-clawed mouse predator curled up in the corner. Nor is it an arbitrary noise, infinitely malleable, determined by our desires and consent. Somewhere between those two errors of excess and defect is an elevated golden mean of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language. Anyone raising and educating children today is submerged in the wreckage of both errors; grammar, rightly understood, is the remedy. Before any grammar lesson can be taught, however, three preliminary questions must be answered: What is the origin of language? What is the nature of a word? And what is the purpose of human speech? The answers to these vital questions are not principles belonging to grammar itself. They are borrowed from higher science, the way a carpenter builds a house to a set of principles that belong properly to the architect. Grammar is a construction project subordinated to reality itself. The most important question about the origin of human language is: Does it come from man, or from God? Scripture is explicit. In Genesis, God spoke the universe into existence. St. John tells us, "In the beginning was the Word," and He is the Second Person of the Trinity. Man's capacity for language proceeds from his creation in the image and likeness of that Word, and every true act of naming is a participation in the Logos through whom all things were made. God gifts man the power to name things properly. In Genesis 2:19, God brought every animal to Adam "to see what he would call them, and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was its name." The task of naming was entrusted to man as an act of vicegerency, the exercise of delegated headship, undertaken in true freedom by man made in the divine image. (ST I, q.96, a.1) Adam named each creature according to what it truly was, not according to what he wished it to be. If we lose sight of this distinction, we drift into wishful thinking about language and its proper use. But if we recover this distinction, we are reminded that language is a covenant, a gift bequeathed to a communion of souls who are bound, generation to generation, to hand it on faithfully. So, what is a word? A word is not merely a sound or a random collection of phonemes. A word has a material body, made manifest in the syllables we utter, and a soul – the immaterial concept or intelligibility it conveys. St. Thomas calls this the verbum mentis, the inner word the intellect abstracts from a real thing; the audible word is only the outward sign of a form conceived in the mind. Say "cat," and the sound carries us past itself and the cat to "catness," an essence we recognize whether the animal before us is calico, Siamese, or Persian. Essence is one thing in a cat and another thing in a word about a cat. A word is an artifact of reason, bound to its concept not as a natural being but as a sign is bound to what it signifies. A word is a small act of communion between a mind and the real. Because it is communion and not composition, the bond can be broken, but not without cost – and even abuse. St. Thomas teaches that the purpose of speech is to convey reality in the charitable service of the other. Reality and truth are convertible. Truth is a virtue bound to justice, what we owe to the other. To speak falsely is to fail justice. To convey reality in service of the other requires charity, exercised prud...

By Francis X. Maier Yes, alas, it's another election year. You know what that means. The free-fire zone, formerly known as our public square, demands that we steal a break from our screens – and think. We think in order to understand. And we best understand the character of our times by tracing the lineage of the ideas and actors who have shaped them. Marx, Nietzsche, and many others are among the usual suspects. But I'd argue that the pedigree goes much farther back. The late political activist Saul Alinsky named the founder of the modern revolutionary spirit on the epigraph page of his Rules for Radicals: "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer." Alinsky was an agnostic secular Jew. He had no belief in a personal devil. He had far more interest in the power structures of this life than in any imagined next. His reference to Satan was thus purely ironic and deliberately provocative. But his epigraph does capture a distinctly modern (if discreet) sympathy for Lucifer as a kind of Prometheus; a wronged hero fighting for his dignity, insisting on his own path, and courageously resisting tyrannical authority. It's a view that derives from 19th-century Romantic-era writers like Blake, Shelley, and Byron, who in turn drew on John Milton's great epic poem Paradise Lost, recasting Milton's Lucifer as less a villain and more a tragic figure. Except they got Milton's Satan entirely wrong. For those who haven't read Paradise Lost or have forgotten it since school, it's one of the great treasures of Western civilization. The story is simple. In Heaven, God exalts His begotten Son and places Him above the angels. Envy and wounded pride drive Lucifer and his followers to revolt. Defeated, they're cast into Hell. In his torment and futile rage against God, Satan attacks and corrupts God's innocent creation: Adam and Eve. Milton's portrait of Satan is the exact opposite of admiration. Obsessed with his own swollen pride, refusing to accept the reality of his sin and dependence on his Creator, Satan methodically disintegrates from a spirit of immense grandeur and power to a scheming, loathsome snake. Locked in unending frustration and fury, he cannot build or create. He can only posture, seduce, hurt, and destroy. He becomes the father not only of lies, but of nihilism. On the cultural front, Roger Scruton described the nihilism in our modern appetite for deconstruction – tearing down old truths, reinterpreting literature and history, upending political structures – in a chapter appropriately titled "The Devil's Work." (see here) Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured the deceit and nihilism of revolutionary politics in Demons (also titled The Possessed or The Devils), his novel of radical agitation and violence in rural 19th-century Russia. For Dostoyevsky, the revolutionary temptation was a "fire in the minds of men." And that phrase, that fire, later became the title of James Billington's great study of the roots of revolutionary thought. For Billington – the late Librarian of Congress, Harvard and Princeton scholar, and CEO of four federal cultural institutions – the modern revolutionary impulse is a kind of elite virus, the "spiritual thirst of those who think rather than [a] material hunger of those who work." Modern revolutionaries "are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era." Revolutionary thought becomes "an object of faith and a source of vocation, a channel of sublimated emotion and sublime ambition. If traditional religion is to be described as 'the opium of the people,' the new revolutionary faith might well be called the amphetamine of the intellectuals." His chapter on "The Occult Origins of [Early Revolutionary] Organization" has special interest for a Christian reader. So what's the point here? Just this: If we don't see the fire in our own back yard, we haven't been paying a...

By Michael Pakaluk I wonder if a certain greater sobriety is not asked of us as regards our use of social media. And if so, who is going to tell us so? So much that is stern and chastising has been removed from the public acceptance of our faith today. This is strange when, never before, it seems, has such chastisement been so very badly needed. To see what I mean, open the pages of the spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis. St. Thérèse of Lisieux memorized entire chapters of this book. Pope Benedict called it "that golden text of spirituality." St. Theresa of Ávila directed that a copy should be placed in every convent that she founded. In his chapter on love of solitude and silence, Thomas writes: Very many great saints avoided the company of men wherever possible and chose to serve God in retirement. "As often as I have been among men," said one writer, "I have returned less a man." We often find this to be true when we take part in long conversations. It is easier to be silent altogether than not to speak too much. To stay at home is easier than to be sufficiently on guard while away. Anyone, then, who aims to live the inner and spiritual life must go apart, with Jesus, from the crowd. . . .No man appears in safety before the public eye unless he first relishes obscurity. No man is safe in speaking unless he loves to be silent. Let me "operationalize" this teaching, as a modern social scientist might say. Should we say that no one should spend more minutes on social media during the day than he has already spent in prayer? Or consider prayer as like revenue, and you are not permitted to spend any time in speaking, except what you have earned in praying. "Raise your eyes to God in Heaven and pray because of your sins and shortcomings," Thomas says at the end of the chapter. Then we seem to have forgotten the traditional warnings against idleness. Idleness is definitely not the condition of having nothing to do on the Internet. St. Jerome says, "Always be doing something, so that the devil may find you always occupied." But are you "doing something" in his sense when you are reading posts or posting yourself? Suppose there is only one chore or task or duty which remains to be done, as you are aware. Doing which of these – that chore or that post – would be "doing something"? If reading to your child, improving yourself in some definite discipline, fixing something, calling a relative or friend – if any of these remains undone, then Internet activity which produces nothing of worth meets the definition of "idleness." St. Thomas Aquinas and other great spiritual writers teach that idleness involves not simply being "unoccupied," but also turning away from a known good. Newman spoke sternly about something he called "viewiness" in the Preface to his Idea of a University. We repeat, perhaps too easily, the sense of his opening lines there, about how a university exists mainly to form students, not to advance knowledge. But do we read on and see how he would be horrified if a university's formation led to what he disparaged as "viewiness" in the students? Yet what else could it lead to, if every view gets affirmed with an "A," and if it's presumed that every student in every submitted essay might reasonably have something "original" to say? An intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him, is one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day. It is almost thought a disgrace not to have a view at a moment's notice on any question from the Personal Advent to the Cholera or Mesmerism. This is owing in great measure to the necessities of periodical literature, now so much in request. Sound familiar? There's more: Every quarter of a year, every month, every day, there must be a supply, for the gratification of the public, of new and luminous theories on the subjects of religion, foreign politics, home politics, civil economy, finance, trade, agriculture, emigration, ...

By Kristen Ziccarelli French existentialist Gabriel Marcel called hope "the stuff of which the soul is made." Dante marked the entrance to Hell by its absence: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate ("Abandon all hope, you who enter here.") Civilizations are not often measured in terms of hope. We are more inclined to judge them by military might, political stability, or economic outputs – all of which are fair metrics, in a way. Yet at a moment when many argue that Europe and the United States are forgetting their civilizational roots and in need of a revival of faith, love, and law, there's a deeper, lingering question: What kind of future do our people believe is possible? As an American who travels to Europe frequently, I have noticed how many Americans visit Europe seeking inspiration from her Christian past. Yet when it comes to the present, I have also noticed how many Americans comment that Europe appears worse off in terms of economics, the practice of the Faith, respect for life, birthrates, and optimism about the future. And yet, as true as this might be, I've found increasing reason for hope, not because of Europe's institutions, economies, or politics, but because I've come to know her Christians. More than most Americans, my own life since childhood has been deeply intertwined with Europe. I spent my formative years in Slovenia and Germany and fell in love with the opera, literature, and rich history of the Old World. When I moved to Edinburgh to begin my master's degree, I went to Mass at St. Albert's, which served as the home of the university's Catholic Student Union. Under the wise and intellectual leadership of Dominican priests, I met Catholics from all over Europe whose witness of charity and appreciation of their glorious inheritance inspired me to place the Faith at the center of my life. Still, as beautiful as were the Latin liturgy and the weekly concert Masses at St. Mary's Catholic Cathedral, they were secondary to the transformative effect of the witness of my Catholic friends. I realized during that time how small the practicing Catholic community had become, even within one of Europe's leading universities. Of 49,000 students at the University of Edinburgh, the chaplaincy has probably around 100 weekly student visitors: about 0.2 percent. From a numbers standpoint, that is not a good ratio. And yet, the faith has never been solely about numbers. The future of Catholic Scotland or Christian Europe, if it is to have one, will depend far less on the number of registered members, or even the preservation of its structures. I believe it depends on the fidelity of its Christians. It was first in Edinburgh that I encountered the living faith of European friends who love their Christian inheritance and choose every day to witness to it and defend it. Their witness is an inspiration beyond words – they believe in miracles, and even amidst the world's brokenness, in the triumph of the heart over all else. In Charles Peguy's poetry, he imagined God saying, "[the] faith that I love best is Hope" because "my children see what happens and believe things will improve." On my side of the Atlantic, most conversations about Europe today are fatalistic. Many are convinced that widespread secularization, demographic decline, the influence of Islam, and mass migration have already settled the question of whether Europe has a future, let alone a strong one. I find myself far less doubtful than many of my counterparts in Washington, D.C. There is no denying the darkness of our present age – but still, I find myself hopeful. Hope is a misunderstood theological virtue. It is often mistaken for optimism, which depends upon favorable circumstances. Hope does not. St. John Paul II turned repeatedly to young people, calling them "the future and the hope of the Church and of the world." His words describe people I have been privileged to know. My Christian European friends are not necessarily winning the "culture war," but...

By Joseph R. Wood Recently, I read an author's claim that "as Christians we can't simply ignore politics. We're supposed to be leaven in the world. So we can't just retreat to the hills as St. Benedict did." Actually, people nowadays do "retreat to the hills" to live under the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedictine communities in many places, especially in the hills, are thriving; likewise Carmelites. So are orders such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, and others who blend retreat from the world with action in that world. They are all a powerful leaven. Maybe the author intended that as a throw-away shot at the so-called "Benedict Option," with its much-discussed merits and blindnesses. But he seemed to convey implicitly that contemplative life is obsolete. Yet the Catechism still endorses this life, even in the case of hermits, whose retreat is perhaps the most severe. The author paraphrased Pope Benedict XVI in support of Christian political engagement. Pope Benedict was also a loving advocate for contemplative life. His burial ring bore an image of St. Benedict, "founder of Western monasticism and patron of my pontificate." Speaking to Carthusians with their profound solitude and silence, he described the "deep bond . . .between pastoral service to the Church's unity and the contemplative vocation in the Church." He went on: Dear brothers you have found the hidden treasure, the pearl of great value (cf. Matthew 13:44-46); you have responded radically to Jesus' invitation: "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Matthew 19:21). Every monastery – male or female – is an oasis in which the deep well, from which to draw "living water" to quench our deepest thirst, is constantly being dug with prayer and meditation. Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, no stranger to political engagement, offered similar thoughts on both Eastern and Western contemplative life in his 1996 Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata: Men and women hermits, belonging to ancient Orders or new Institutes, or being directly dependent on the Bishop, bear witness to the passing nature of the present age by their inward and outward separation from the world. By fasting and penance, they show that man does not live by bread alone but by the word of God (cf. Matthew 4:4). Such a life "in the desert" is an invitation to their contemporaries and to the ecclesial community itself never to lose sight of the supreme vocation, which is to be always with the Lord. Institutes completely devoted to contemplation, composed of either women or men, are for the Church a reason for pride and a source of heavenly graces. By their lives and mission, the members of these Institutes imitate Christ in his prayer on the mountain, bear witness to God's lordship over history and anticipate the glory which is to come. The kind of reflexive rejection of contemplative life that I noted above sometimes comes from those who, at the end of careers in or near the political maelstrom, find themselves wondering what it was all about. What gaps does a life of intense concern with that "passing nature of the present age" leave, especially for those whose hopes of progress in the earthly city may have been more expansive than St. Augustine told us to expect? "My kingdom is not of this world" can't be shrugged off while looking at the latest polls. But the author I've cited touches on a real problem. How is it possible to live a more contemplative life if heading for the hills is not a "realistic" option in one's circumstances? That can be especially urgent for those who find themselves both repelled – negatively – by what now passes for politics and reason in our culture, polity and Church, and called – positively – to closer union with God. One rich source to consider this question is the work of Fr. Donald Haggerty of New York. In his book, The Contemplative Hunger, Fr. Haggerty wonders if a "conte...

By Stephen P. White I'm old enough now to be the sort of person who will occasionally observe, in all apparent earnestness, that being around young people makes me feel young at heart. This is a concession to the realities of middle age which I am loath to make, but here we are. I have just returned from two weeks lecturing on Catholic social teaching in Poland with some three dozen young people, mostly in their early to mid-20s. By any measure, this group was exceptional relative to their peers: they were academically excellent, religiously serious (mostly devout Catholics), vocationally minded, and incredibly diverse (we had students from both Peoria and Papua New Guinea). Yet for all this, they were consistent in their evaluation of their own generation: anxious, fearful, and generally unsettled. More than the normal uncertainties of youth, this generation seems unsure of who they are, who they are supposed to be, and whom they might look to for answers. In short, they have inherited a profound doubt about even the possibility of hope. The horizon against which they are taught to understand themselves seems to be shrinking. Young people feel the longing for greatness but increasingly seem to fear that such longings are illusory, that the call to greatness is unanswerable. They are taught to strive for passing things – money, status, academic excellence – not because these passing things will satisfy, but because these things are all there is. It is a miserable lesson taught by a frustrated and cynical age that, having lost its own confidence in human possibilities, has inoculated a younger generation against hope. My students are more immune to all this than most, but they see it all around them and cannot help but be touched by it. And that should unsettle all of us. Youth, we older folks sometimes like to tell ourselves, is wasted on the young. I suspect this is mostly sour grapes on the part of people who are surprised to find it difficult to touch their own toes. The physical advantages of youth are obvious. But there are disadvantages, too. Ronald Reagan – then 73 years old and seeking reelection against the 56-year-old Walter Mondale – famously joked in a debate: "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." The joke is, if anything, even funnier after four decades. Youth (and its necessary companion, inexperience) is not, it turns out, much of a qualification for anything. Surely physical health and beauty, which come more easily to the young, are good things, but they are not reliable indicators of character or virtue. The measure of man is to be found elsewhere. Young people, moreover, seem to know this. They understand, with all the hope and anxiety that comes with it, that they are not yet the men or women they will become. That space – the space between the person one is and the person one is becoming – is where the ultimate drama of every human life plays out. This knowledge ought to be a source of wonder and of hope, for both the young and not-so-young alike. But it can only be that when human life is set against its proper horizon. Christian faith broadens those horizons – far beyond the temporal and material – to their uttermost limit. In the light of the Incarnation, we perceive the fullest possible reach of human aspiration: perfect union with God himself. This union is not an obliteration of self but a fulfillment. As Pope John Paul II observed in his first Urbi et orbi: "For God and before God, the human being is always unique and unrepeatable, somebody thought of and chosen from eternity, some called and identified by his own name." To be holy is to become conformed to God and, in so doing, to become truly, perfectly oneself. I said that being around young people has a way of making me feel young at heart. What I mean is that young people tend to perceive more easily the drama into which we are all summoned. If the young are less calloused by the inevitab...

By Robert Royal I don't often comment on films or – truth be told – usually care much about them. I leave that to those who do care and are much better at it. (See under: Miner, Brad.) Most movies seem, to me, to have a greater cultural impact than they deserve. I can't deny that they've replaced the kinds of fiction that once shaped middlebrow culture. So my lack of interest is a fault, in a way. But in a culture like ours, from which Christianity is increasingly excluded, when a film like Christopher Nolan's just-released Odyssey generates such mid-summer buzz – about a book almost 3000 years old – it's worth considering what's happening to some of our oldest cultural foundations. So, given my adolescent obsessions with Greek and Latin, and the current cinematic excitements, I made an early trip to the theater this weekend. It's easy to nitpick about film versions of the classics. Troy, with Brad Pitt as Achilles, took vast liberties (far too weak a word, in fact) with Homer, but was in my estimation worth watching and even re-watching in its own right. There's a substantial subset of Tolkien readers who cannot abide Peter Jackson's trilogy and what they regard as all its works and pomps. (I am not one of them and frequently revisit it.) Happily, Dante's Commedia is utterly unfilmable, though some foolhardy directors have tried. Nolan has already been attacked for his mauling of several episodes, changing the arc of the story, obvious anachronisms, and non-traditional casting (a black Helen of Troy and "trans" Sinon?). Major blemishes, to be sure, but he's admitted he wanted to create something that would speak to an audience – and was perhaps calculated to sell. And as they already said in ancient Greece, "Even Homer nods." In the end, his Odyssey is worth a look, though it would be an abuse to call it Homer. Besides, even in literary terms, there's been plenty to object to in most later versions of Homer. The 18th-century classical scholar Richard Bentley, scanning the translation of the great Alexander Pope (an English Catholic), remarked: "It is a very pretty poem Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." That's what almost everyone who has wrestled with Homer's Greek feels about translations. The recent translators – Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald – are readable, but not so very pretty. Emily Wilson's much-promoted, postmodern, feminist-inflected version (Odysseus is recast at times as a villain) doesn't impress the present writer. It begins: Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy. Ah yes, the Greek man, for millennia believed to be a hero, was "complicated," and wrecked a holy city. Her distortions of key elements of the story – Nolan seems to have followed her at several points – betray Homer, about which more below. A joke used to float around classics departments about the insoluble question of the "authorship" of the Iliad and the Odyssey: "Homer didn't write them; they're by another poet, with the same name." What cannot be disputed is that the "author" knew how to tell a story. (So does Nolan.) In the ancient world, it was said that the Iliad was the vigorous, martial work of Homer's youth. In his old age, he had softened, and turned out the magical, mystical episodes of the Odyssey. Modern readers tend to like the latter over the former, which is probably a reflection of how little we appreciate the armed defenders who make peaceful living possible, and how much we prefer merely to be entertained. Still, those old epics speak to us, even decades after our educators made the fateful, perhaps fatal, decision not to teach texts like the Bible, Homer, the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Fathers of the Church, and many other foundation stones of our civilization. Among their deeply human themes, the ancient epics are also notably concerned with "the gods" and the afterlife, and their interactions and importance for this world. Circe ...

By John M. Grondelski Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's inaugural encyclical, is largely understood by the public as addressing artificial intelligence. The general public's view is that, like his namesake 135 years ago in Rerum Novarum, Pope Prevost intends to address the "new things" of the 21st century. To quote Abraham Lincoln: "There is some truth in this. . ." But to continue his quotation, ". . .I am glad of it, but it is not WHOLLY true." (emphasis in original) There are even those who want to spin Magnifica humanitas as a papal abandonment of "pelvic theology" in favor of "social justice." There is far less truth in that. While the pope sought to address "new things," good stewards know how to bring out of the Church's storehouse "things old and new." (Matthew 13:52) Yes, we need to address "new things." But we address them with the wisdom of old. What is a more central point to Magnifica humanitas, however, is a more central anthropological truth: the human person cannot be replaced. The human person is non-substitutable. As Vatican II reminded us, the human person is the one creature on earth that God wanted for itself. (Gaudium et spes, 24) The challenge artificial intelligence poses, on the practical level, is the likelihood of causing human unemployment by the technologization of work, especially basic work often branded as "entry-level." That especially threatens vulnerable populations: the young, trying to break into the job market; the inexperienced; and the untrained. If, a decade ago, a certain smugness told miners to "learn to code," today's hubristic reply might be "polish your barista skills." Employment and unemployment are not just economic phenomena because work (as Pope John Paul II noted 45 years ago in Laborem exercens) is not just a cost factor. Employment is essential to human flourishing (which is a bigger and more important category than even economic prosperity, though they are not exclusive). People need to work. A society that deprives people of work – in the name of a utopian vision or to maximize profits – is an inhuman society. And let's not allow some people to get away with downplaying that truth because they won't admit what they want is a society driven purely by economics. As in the old adage, these are folks who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. AI also poses a theoretical challenge. Ever since Plato – and especially since Descartes – there's been a temptation to think of the human person as a mind merely inhabiting a body. Contemporary transhumanism simply radicalizes that mistake by imagining consciousness detached from embodiment. Christian anthropology insists instead that the human person is an embodied unity whose dignity cannot be reduced to information or computation. (Of course, according to certain early theologians, it was precisely that incarnational state that provoked diabolical rebellion). That some "transhumanists" have visions of minds detached from bodies dancing in their heads suggests that the theoretical threat continues. The core problem is not technology: it's humanity. Oren Cass captured this problem in his reflections on the common social-event question, "What do you do?" It typically functions, Cass observes, to pigeonhole people: doing X gets you special creds, doing Y is meh (except when the specially credentialled need food deliveries, plumbing repairs, or electrical work). Very few ask the question from the standpoint of the Christian anthropological value of work, i.e., what does who you are find expression in what you do? A crucial truth of Magnifica humanitas is the centrality and irreplaceability of the human person. Man is not just a thinker that a machine can replace. Man is not just a worker that a robot should replace. The encyclical asks the question: do you think that a person's qualitative distinction trumps his potential functional technological-economic substitutability? Is a person more than just a cog in somebody...

By Robert Royal I recently attended the funeral of a young man who died tragically. It happened to be a solemn high Traditional Latin Mass, entirely licit and even affirmed by the presence of our local bishop, his retired predecessor, and a couple dozen priests. That liturgy, however, was – all extraneous considerations aside – definitely not something to be reduced to the controversies surrounding the recent SSPX consecrations, the back and forth about Traditionis custodes (Pope Francis' sharp curtailing of the TLM), or the short- and long-term fallout of Sacrosanctum Concilium (the Vatican II document on liturgy). It was all directed towards prayer for the eternal destiny of the young man's soul and the souls of us all, which – sad to say – seem to get scant attention in the Church today, even at funerals. It was a deeply moving experience, and it got me thinking, afterwards, as to why modern funerals so often are not. There's been a massive shift in the Church towards what are often even called – even at Catholic funerals – "celebrations of the life" of someone who has died. And there seems to be an unspoken current running beneath it all that, despite all Our Lord's warnings about the narrowness of the gate, everyone ends up in Heaven. (By the way, it won't do to blame Hans Urs von Balthasar or, more recently, someone like Bishop Robert Barron among others, for encouraging this attitude. I noticed during the Rosary before Mass that the Fatima prayer contains the formula, "And lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy." Sure. The prayer doesn't say that all are saved, or even that many are. And in truth, to judge from the Scriptures, not all of us are. But it certainly expresses that hope, which we all should have.) Still, the easy assumption that all or almost all are saved is not only a theological question. We have to recognize that it basically short-circuits the whole of Christian life, which is at least a drama, and oftentimes a spiritual battle. If not, why, then, did Jesus have to die on the Cross to save us? Why, even, does He have to tell us to leave all and follow Him? We know that missionary work (now replaced by the tonier but vaguer "evangelization") has also dissipated in recent years. Is it too much to think that missionaries now are just another victim of the soft and formulaic "dialogue" and "respect" for other religions (and none) that seem to have displaced the command to preach the Gospel to all nations? And is that, too, just another consequence of the current etiquette that pretty much everyone is eternally fine, whatever they believe or, often enough, even whatever they do? There was a time when everyone in the Church, even schoolchildren (in my own case), was taught about the "Four Last Things": Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. There was no squeamishness in talking about such ultimate matters – but this was before the advent of the Christian snowflake. It's all still present in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (¶ 1020-1060). But does anyone preach such truths or take them seriously anymore? And how long before, without renewed attention to the main things, they disappear entirely from catechesis? There are even teachings, Catholic teachings, in the Catechism about Purgatory. There's been a long-running debate between Catholics and Protestants over whether Purgatory is mentioned in the Bible. If you accept the text of the Old Testament that the early Church used, which included prayers offered for the dead (Maccabees), Purgatory is the logical consequence. It is not, if you choose the slimmer canon of Jewish Scriptures, as do some Protestants, which had a complex history but was probably defined some centuries later by rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of Jerusalem and dispersal of the Jews. If you think about it for a moment, unless Purgatory exists, it makes no sense to pray for the souls of the dead. The families and friends of the departed can gather toge...

By David Warren One of the best ways to keep everybody angry, and thus to let us share in the modern experience, is to use words in a left-brained sort of way. I refer, of course, to Iain McGilchrist, the writer who has given us the most thorough and accessible account of our two brains. For we, like the other senior animals, have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. Both are in use for ordinary consciousness unless one or the other has been cancelled by some horrific accident. McGilchrist is an abnormally intelligent neuroscientist, an influential psychiatrist, and was a credible English professor in his earlier Oxford life. He remains the master of several disciplines in the humanities. It is rare that we find such a crossover to scientific authority. The intellectual world now seems to specialize in one or the other: science or socialism. But he is not spouting scientific bafflegab. He really does demonstrably know what he is talking about. And he is not one of those tedious "new atheists" either. Left and right brains had been frequently treated in pop literature, before, which was crudely aware of the cerebral hemispheres, generally in a silly, pop-fashion way, that often confused one hemisphere with the other. Because McGilchrist isn't a flake and is conversant with physiological research (he has trained as a doctor), he can actually be considered an authority. Nor is he innocent of epistemology and metaphysics. Read his book The Matter of Things (2021), some 1500 reasonably entertaining pages, or his earlier magnum opus, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009). Of course these books will require attention, as anything would, which tracks back to the scientific revolution and explains its limitations. As mere collections of quotations from Western thought, they are formidable. What McGilchrist establishes is that the left brain provides the factitious, unimaginative, and naturally arrogant mental order, which was used by our swamp ancestors to identify "stuff" – specifically, food — by ruthlessly excluding all other objects in the environment. It is machine-like, especially in the sense of showing no curiosity, and no remorse, except in the context of its limited function as complement to right-brained thinking. But it is essential to human and most other forms of life, and one can't get rid of it without dying. But if one thinks nature and the human mind function like a machine, or in some other deterministic way, one already suffers from left-brained thought and is one of nature's aspiring automatons. It remains the natural method of bureaucracy, of mechanical "progressive" advance, and of systems of censorship and blind power. Indeed, bureaucrats might be expressly defined as "persons we could do without," just as they contrast with more intelligent forms of life. This may sound like a prejudiced political statement, but I beg the reader to study the sciences surrounding "brain lateralization" in order to form his own (hopefully right-brained) conclusion; or rather, "impression," for the right brain is never so sure of itself. It cannot be, for the right brain is left to investigate such awkward things as beauty, goodness, and truth, and so far as we are finite beings we cannot know their perfection, or final extent. Conversely, when we were limited to the left-brain functions, we could not know that the transcendentals were even possible. They are irrelevant to the task of finding food, after all, or even to identifying poisons. If one were a Communist, however – that is, a heroic left-brained revolutionist – one would inevitably have the opinion that nothing else is important. We call this "scientific materialism," and in fact it kills you. But the right-brained exist for another purpose (in addition to keeping the left-brained from killing themselves). Instead of locating food sources, it is necessary for several other purposes, and must continuously survey...

By Stephen P. White I am in Poland, as I am every July, for the Tertio Millennio Seminar, a three-week meeting on Catholic social teaching and the thought of John Paul II. As we often do, we began our seminar with Mass in the St. Leonard's chapel. It was there that a newly ordained Karol Wojtyla offered his first Mass on November 2, 1946. The chapel dates from the 11th century. Built in the Romanesque style, it has little decoration beyond the arches and columns. It does, however, contain the mortal remains of some of Poland's great heroes, and their sarcophagi provide all the ornament the chapel requires. King Jan III Sobieski, who saved Europe by defeating the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna (1683), is buried there alongside his wife. Sobieski's predecessor, King Michał, lies nearby. The other three tombs in the chapel are the tombs of men who fought, unsuccessfully in each case, for Polish independence. General Władysław Sikorski, the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile and commander-in-chief of the Polish Army during World War II, is also buried there. Sikorski died tragically in a plane crash during the war. He was buried in England, and his remains were only permitted to return to Wawel in 1993 after the fall of Communism. When Poland ratified the first modern constitution in Europe (the second in the world after the United States Constitution) in 1791, the Russians invaded to put a stop to it. Józef Poniatowski led Polish forces in defense of the new Constitution, an effort which ultimately failed and resulted, eventually, in the first partition of Poland. Beside the tomb of Poniatowski lies Tadeusz Kościuszko, who crossed the Atlantic in 1776 to join the American army. He designed the fortifications at West Point and played a decisive role in the American victory at Saratoga. He was a lifelong champion of Polish independence, a dream he never realized, and long after his death became the namesake of the RAF's Polish Squadron during the Battle of Britain in World War II. In life, Kościuszko was known for his unimpeachable character. He was a true devotee of human freedom, wherever it was threatened. One example: Kościuszko made his friend, Thomas Jefferson, the executor of his will, which ordered that his not insignificant American assets be used to purchase American slaves, free them, and set up schools for their education. (For complicated reasons, including legal challenges that ended up before the Supreme Court, Kościuszko's will was never carried out.) Young Father Wojtyła chose to offer his first Mass among the tombs of these Polish heroes, not from some misguided sense of nationalism, nor because they were successful in preserving or achieving Polish independence (most weren't). Nor was the future pope under any illusion that these heroes were great exemplars of the Catholic faith; not all heroes are saints. Nevertheless, these men were true heroes. And while they may not have been heroic examples of faith, hope, and charity, they possessed real virtues: justice and fortitude, to be sure, but also loyalty and a willingness to sacrifice for the common good. These heroes used those virtues in the service of their people and their beloved nation. And so while most of these "secular" heroes never lived to see Poland free, and are not counted as saints, their memory and example were precious – indeed, formative – to a young Karol Wojtyła who did become a saint. Moreover, John Paul II understood, from both Polish history and his own experience of Nazism and Communism, just how precious and fragile freedom can be. This shaped his view of freedom in the modern age, and in particular, his admiration for (and occasional critiques of) our own experiment in ordered liberty here in the United States. Politics requires virtue. This is true always and everywhere, but it is particularly true in a democracy (or if you prefer, a republic) like our own. People who cannot govern themselves cannot be expected t...

By Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino As everyone knows by now, the ordination of bishops carried out by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has resulted in the automatic excommunication of the six bishops involved. No matter how it may spin its canonical status, the Society is now definitively outside of the Catholic Church. Insofar as the SSPX denies the authenticity of Vatican II, this outcome was inevitable. After all, Pope Leo himself has been uniting the Church around the Council, devoting his weekly audiences to examining, and profusely praising, conciliar teaching. One cannot cogently argue, as the SSPX does, that Vatican II was not a legitimate council. (Subsequent developments, of course, can be debated, and are – within the Church.) In fact, the great synod bears every mark of an authentic ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. What are these marks? • The Council was formally convoked by the bishop of Rome, John XXIII. • Ahuge number of bishops, over 2,500 from the entire world, was gathered at the Council for debate and deliberation from 1962-1965. • All bishops could speak freely or, if desired, submit written comments (which were then carefully examined by the Theological Commission). • The Theological Commission (where the conciliar documents were drafted or reviewed) was composed of a mixture of more conservative and more progressive bishops and theologians. A review of their journals reveals that even the smallest points were debated freely and at great length. • Anyone who studies the texts of Vatican II will see the extraordinary care and balance achieved by the documents – which underwent numerous drafts before final voting. • Paul VI always insisted that the concerns of the (more conservative) minority be adequately addressed. To cite only two examples: At the last minute, Paul mandated nineteen changes to the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio) in order to satisfy those bishops who wanted a stronger accent on the truth mediated by Sacred Tradition. Secondly, Paul insisted on the Nota Explicativa Praevia appended to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium). This interpretative note was added to ensure, in juridical-canonical language, that papal primacy was in no way jeopardized by episcopal collegiality. • Each one of the sixteen conciliar documents was approved by an overwhelming majority vote. • Each of the documents was formally promulgated by the Bishop of Rome, Paul VI. In truth, one could more easily marshal questions about the First Vatican Council, held in 1869-1870. At that council, episcopal speakers were occasionally shouted down, and some seventy bishops left Rome so as not to vote "non placet" on the infallibility of the papal magisterium. The argument against the legitimacy of Vatican II, made by the founder of the SSPX, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, is straightforward. He and his movement contend that the most recent council fulfilled the long-standing dream of liberal Catholicism: marrying the Church with the French Revolution. The Council allegedly betrayed the ancient Catholic faith by incorporating the three chief principles of the revolution of 1789: liberté, égalité and fraternité. The conciliar declaration on religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) is little more than the "liberty" of the revolution – leading inexorably to indifferentism in religious matters, thereby undermining Catholic truth. And in promoting episcopal collegiality, Lumen Gentium made common cause with the revolutionary notion of "equality," speaking as if all bishops were equals, thereby corroding papal authority and primacy in the process. And the revolutionary "fraternity" may be found most clearly in the Decree on Ecumenism, wherein the SSPX argues that contemptible heretics are now facilely called "separated brethren." Also central to the SSPX argument is a statement by Yves Congar, one of the important theological experts at Vatican II. In October 1963, the Council took several votes in order t...

By Randall Smith Magnifica humanitas has been widely discussed for its approach to artificial intelligence. Pope Leo emphasizes the importance of the schools for training people to retain their humanity in the face of these challenges. If we took the encyclical as a guide to education, what sort of education would that be? An essential goal would be to educate students about the dignity of the human person and what is required for the integral development: body, soul, and spirit. It would teach students that, "elevating any single dimension of human existence to an absolute is always a mistake." The university would have to model this respect for dignity in its own actions and in the rules governing the community. A Catholic university would teach its students not only about rights, but also about their responsibilities and duties. Such an education would consider the nature of the common good and our obligations to it. Given the pope's comments, an authentic education would be one in which "a love for truth" is fostered. "When people come to believe that nothing is genuinely true and that principles are hollow," he writes, "when questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective," the bonds of trust needed for democratic life are weakened. And so, "we are in need of a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism," and avoids any ideology that, "in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to choose facts selectively, distorting and renaming them," whose proponents "eventually, inhabit a reality constructed to fit their own convictions." But in addition to avoiding the error of assuming there is no truth, or that there is just "my" truth and "your" truth, students should also be taught to avoid the error of assuming that reaching truth is relatively easy. Students should learn, writes the pope, that authentic education is "a long journey requiring patience and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances." They should be taught how "truth is often distorted in order to serve particular interests and communication strategies." Students should learn the value of technology, but also how "technology shapes those who use it." And they should be taught to avoid succumbing to the dominance of the pervasive "technocratic paradigm." Computers and cell phones would not be a ubiquitous presence. A "genuinely healthy" community would integrate "rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised." Universities should take care that a "culture fostered on the internet does not become an instrument of excessive distraction, homogenization or dominance." Rather, they should establish settings "in which inner freedom and critical thought can mature." Attaining such "inner freedom" and the ability for "critical thought" require the virtues, intellectual and moral, and a university fails if it does not inculcate them. So too, the pope speaks repeatedly of the importance of dialogue "to establish a set of basic agreements that enable the creation of a shared vision, upon which everyone can move forward together." Dialogue of this sort is not easy; it requires patience, discipline, and skill and "an attitude that seeks to forge bonds of fraternity built on listening, an open demeanor, making time for each other and even wasting time together." "As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented," he warns, "it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought." Thus, a "principal challenge" for universities "lies in the integration of knowledge," hence they must cultivate in their students "both the capacity to connect and synthesize knowledge in order to grasp complexity, and the skills necessary to verify facts." "Many educat...

By Michael Pakaluk When J.D. Vance's memoir of his path back to Christianity, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is described at a high level of generality, we see immediately that it is a book of the highest importance. Here is a leader on the world stage who grasps, and is not afraid to say, that Christianity has been the source of social unity for European – that is, Western – civilization, and also for that nation we call the United States, and even for neighborhoods and families. The only two realities that unite us across disparities of wealth, race, and creed are the military and the Church, he likes to say. Economic bonds – trade agreements and business relationships – are insufficient. So too are procedural constructions of "international order" and human rights. Rather, these systems risk dissolving subsidiary unities; and when they become "global," they serve only to unite the elites of various countries, rendering them incapable even of understanding the concerns of common working men and women. Now add that this perceptive world leader has embraced Catholicism as that realization of Christianity that he regards as best. I don't think that commentators who anticipated a "Catholic moment" thought it could take this form. Also working at a high level of generality, we can say that Vance converts to Catholicism because of a neglected transcendental. Some have seen Christianity as the source of Beauty (Kenneth Clark). Others, as the source of knowledge, science, and our grasp of Truth (Pierre Duhem). Still others, for its fostering of holiness, the virtues, and the Good (Tom Holland). But Vance correctly sees it as the glue that can make us, across our differences, in various ways One. In this he is closely following Vatican II, which in Gaudium et spes taught that the Church, "thanks to her relationship with Christ, [is] a sacramental sign and an instrument of intimate union with God, and of the unity of the whole human race." (n.42, quoting Lumen gentium n.1) But this is at a high level of generality. The book is a memoir and begins, again, with Vance's "hillbilly" roots in Appalachia, with tales of Mamaw and her crass bits of wisdom and guns. True, the book is interspersed with mini-policy papers on Catholic social teaching – immigration and other topics you'd expect from a potential presidential candidate – that are not always very accurate or well-grounded. But what keeps the book moving are anecdotes and tone of a tent-revival testimony. Therefore, it must ultimately be evaluated for that testimony and, as a Catholic's memoir, whether it witnesses well to Catholicism. The man giving witness is appealing and good-hearted. He shows real self-knowledge about the pointlessness of his ambitions as a young man. He wants above all to be a good father. He puts being a good father above his career. He sees that being a good father means caring for the character of his children above all. Although highly credentialed, he wants to stay united with ordinary workers, like his dad, who was a welder. He strives to consider himself no better than they are, to regard their work as having equal dignity with his own. He has a generous love of the religious pluralism distinctive of America. In this, he is like a mainline Protestant from the 1950s. He's a Catholic who loves Charlie Kirk, and who can also get along with progressive Christians in supporting the labor movement. He loves the generically Christian American civic religion of the 1950s. But when I consider the book as the story of a Catholic convert, I find multiple shortcomings, and one very disturbing and scandalous chapter, which together make this a book that I cannot recommend to young persons or inquirers. This is a shame, because these shortcomings could easily have been repaired. The scandalous chapter is entitled "My Favorite Year," which describes how he and Usha shacked up in Cincinnati, bought two dogs, and lived like the secular elites Vance loves to ...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza In the early days of July 1826, Thomas Jefferson "marshalled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July." So writes Jon Meacham in his marvelous biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Jefferson did, repeatedly asking in his final agony in the evening hours of July 3: "This is the Fourth?" He finally heard the twelve chimes of midnight on his bedroom clock; he lingered, drifting out of consciousness, but knowing it was the Fourth. He died at ten minutes before one o'clock that afternoon. Five hours after the third president died at Monticello, the second president, John Adams, died in Quincy, Massachusetts. His famous final words were false: "Thomas Jefferson survives." Both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, two hundred years ago. (The fifth president, James Monroe, would die on the Fourth in 1831.) It's the great anniversarial coincidence of the Founding Fathers. The reaction to the twin presidential deaths on the fiftieth anniversary of the first Fourth was that Providence was at work, not unlike how Catholics consider miracles in the causes of saints. John Quincy Adams, president at the time of his father's death, styled the coincidental deaths "visible and palpable marks of Divine Favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe." The junior President Adams issued an executive order in memory of the senior Adams and Jefferson: A coincidence of circumstances so wonderful gives confidence to the belief that the patriotic efforts of these illustrious men were Heaven directed, and furnishes a new seal to the hope that the prosperity of these States is under the special protection of a kind Providence. In early August 1826, with President Adams present, Daniel Webster was more fulsome at Faneuil Hall in Boston: Adams and Jefferson are no more. On our fiftieth anniversary, the great day of national jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and re-echoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight together to the world of spirits. Webster continued: If we had the power, we could not wish to reverse this dispensation of the Divine Providence. . .[that] the heavens should open to receive them both at once. As their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as in their long continuance, proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care? The Declaration of Independence, signed fifty years before Adams and Jefferson died, professed a "firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence." Now, it seemed to their contemporaries that Providence had vouchsafed a final protection, calling Jefferson and Adams home on the anniversary of their great work. Meacham wrote that Webster "painted an indelible portrait of Jefferson's and Adams's ascent to the American pantheon." Catholics do not have a pantheon, but there are the saints. Catholic saint-making – or saint-recognizing, strictly speaking – has two broad parts. First there is the human judgment, after a painstaking examination, that the candidate lived a holy life, culminating in a declaration of "heroic virtues." The second is the celestial confirmation, the requirement of a miracle, understood to be divine evidence, as it were, that the candidate is in heaven, interceding before God. The Fourth in 1826 was something like a miracle for the secular canonization of the nation. What the founding generation of Americans knew by experience – and aspiration – had apparently been confirmed by Providence. They knew the heroic virtue of the young republic; now a divine benediction had been granted. Organizers of the golden jubilee of the Declaration had greatly desired to have Jefferson in Washington, but he was too ill to travel. He wrote a letter f...

By Francis X. Maier The historian Henry Adams once described politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds," and that's often where we seem to be in these last days before our nation's 250th birthday. As a Wall Street Journal column noted earlier this week, chronic Democratic hatred of Donald Trump, along with Trump's own many "genuine sins and imagined ones, handed the left permission to come unglued," with the result that "radical, dangerous, and merely stupid [ideas] are not only permissible but mandatory" on the growing port side of the Democratic party. Our need to escape from today's constant political hysteria is one of the reasons we bury ourselves in entertainment. We'd all like to find a safe and quiet place to live, even if its name is Fantasyland. Alas, as Christians we can't simply ignore politics. We're supposed to be leaven in the world. So we can't just retreat to the hills as St. Benedict did. Living our faith in the real world means that we need to help build a better society. And in 2026, that's harder than ever. What a Christian means by the "common good" and "human dignity," and what a non-believer means by exactly the same words, can be very different. The abortion issue is far from the only relevant example. Three simple principles guide Christian political thinking. First, we need to serve the common good – the real common good, which is not the same as providing "the most stuff for the most people." Second, we need to defend the dignity of the individual person. And third, we need to do these things in the right order of priority. For example, individuals can't demand respect for their desires and behaviors if these things cripple the general welfare. Likewise, we can't serve the common good by demeaning each other or exploiting individuals, especially the weak, the poor, and the innocent. And while lots of social issues need our attention – things like hunger, health care, and just immigration policies – no issue is more fundamental to human dignity than the right to life. Without the right to life, all other human rights are simply pious sentiments dressed up in idealistic language. These principles should be obvious. But in the span of my adult life, the entire landscape of American culture has changed drastically. Americans who self-identify as atheist, agnostic, or having no religious affiliation at all went from 16 percent of the population in 2007 to 29 percent in 2026. And that has serious implications, because religious freedom – one of the cornerstones of the American Founding we celebrate this week – can't be a concern for people who have no religious faith. In fact, outright hatred of Christian believers is on the rise in this country. My point is this. The nation we think we live in isn't the one we now actually live in. Our civic institutions and vocabulary may seem the same, but the realities of power are different. Without God, man always ends up in some form of idolatry. When God leaves the stage, the state expands to fill his place. And God has been exiting the stage of our public life – or, too often, been pushed off the stage – for decades. To borrow some thoughts from Philadelphia's archbishop emeritus, we might profit from reading two things: Neither one is the Declaration of Independence. Neither one is the Constitution. Neither one has anything obviously to do with politics. The first is John Bunyan's novel, The Pilgrim's Progress. And the second is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Celestial Railroad." Bunyan's book was written in 1678, and it's one of the world's great religious allegories. More copies have been printed of Pilgrim's Progress than any book in history except the Bible. It embodies the early Puritan hunger for God that inspired America's first colonists and shaped the roots of our country. Hawthorne's short story, written in 1843, is a very different piece. It's one of the great satires in American literature. Hawthorne was a descendant of Puritan...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia What is a thing worth? In economics, it's relative. Prices fluctuate. Markets rise and fall. A thing is worth what someone's willing to pay for it. Back in the 1980s, my LPs were worth a lot. With the arrival of CDs, they were worth almost nothing. Then, when vinyl became cool again, they had new worth. The problem is that we apply the same economic, relativistic thinking to other areas. We fail to recognize the intrinsic worth of anything. Thus, our leaders don't treat their offices as worthy of respect. Instead of yielding to an office, they twist it for their own purposes. In our culture of death, even persons are worth only what they bring us or what they contribute to society. We think that about ourselves, finding our worth in how much we earn, or accomplish, or win praise. We treat marriage and family as worth the goods they bring us, as a benefit to the spouses, perhaps, but not intrinsically worthy of sacrifice and perseverance. Worse still, we apply that same consumerist mindset to God. He has worth to the degree that He helps me. As a priest, one of the most maddening things is when people say, "God is really important in my life." Really important. You know, like my dog and my yoga instructor. It's a line that reveals how we relativize the worth of God. So, what is God worth? Three times in today's Gospel (Matthew 10:37-42), our Lord uses the phrase worthy of me. It's shocking. He uses it to place His worth above that of family: Whoever loves father or mother more…whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And above even that of our own lives: whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Thus, His worth transcends the most important things in this world. It's not just intrinsic but infinite. Jesus' words are shocking to us for these reasons. But even more because we have such an attenuated notion of worth in general. In a culture that relativizes the worth of everything, it's a shock to the system to hear that God is worth losing parents, children, and our own lives. What our Lord says here is a claim only God can make. It's a stark reminder of His transcendence and His right to our full devotion and love. We're always tempted to tug God down to our level, to domesticate His transcendence and place Him among the many things that we "value." We never get rid of Him, of course, because God is really important in our lives. But considering Jesus' words in the Gospel, we must be renewed in our minds and recognize God's absolute worth. And what are you worth? Only God is all good and worthy of all love. That's a shock to our relativistic mindset. But even more astounding is that He gives us a share in His eternal worth. He creates us in His image and likeness. The life of every human person has intrinsic worth – not because of what they produce or do – but because God has given us all a share in His dignity. Interestingly, we can approach this from the economic mindset: you are worth what God is willing to pay for you. You are worth the death of the Son of God. He not only gave you a share in His dignity at Creation, but also a share in His own life at Baptism. We show God's worth by preferring nothing to Him. He shows us our worth by dying for us. The Christian life is thus founded on the proper, fitting, and worthy response to what God has accomplished. It is not a striving to make ourselves worthy or earn our own dignity. It is to recognize that He has revealed our worth by dying for us. We now are to live in a manner worthy of the call we have received. (cf. Ephesians 4:1) Central to this is worship – a word that comes from the Old English worth ship. It means to give something worth or, better, to acknowledge its worth; to prize something – Someone – above all else, not because of any benefit we might gain, but simply because He is good and deserving of all our love and adoration. We are to worship God, not just value Him. This points to ...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza The Cardinals attending the extraordinary consistory in Rome will depart today, just as the customary delegation from the Patriarchate of Constantinople arrives for the solemn feast of Peter and Paul. It's an annual fraternal custom. A delegation from Rome visits Constantinople for the feast of St. Andrew on November 30th. Last year, Pope Leo XIV led the delegation personally in the context of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. On June 29th, the Successor of Andrew sends representatives to the Successor of Peter. The Year of Our Lord 2026 included a unique moment in the warm relations between Rome and Constantinople under Patriarch Bartholomew, now the longest-serving Patriarch of Constantinople in history. His thirty-fifth anniversary falls this October. Visits of Andrew to Peter are now routine. But three months ago, something unique took place. Bartholomew took the seat of Benedict. The Institut de France is itself a unique entity, intended to be something of a repository and custodian of French culture. It houses five prestigious academies for scholars, scientists, writers, and artists, analogous to the Royal Societies found in Commonwealth countries, or the pontifical academies in Rome. It is more central to the intellectual culture of France than those analogues, though. One of the academies is that of Moral and Political Sciences, which includes foreign associate members. When invited to join, a new member is assigned a specific "seat," which is held for life. Upon admission, the new academician is invited to give an address that, by custom, includes a eulogy for the previous holder of that seat. This year, Patriarch Bartholomew was admitted to the seat previously occupied by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger since 1992 and held until his death on the final day of 2022. "It reveals not only the continuity of an academic tradition, but also the spiritual bond between Rome and Constantinople – between Old and New Rome," Bartholomew noted. The seat that passed from Benedict to Bartholomew is a noble one; Ratzinger's predecessor was the great Russian scientist, dissident, and witness of conscience, Andrei Sakharov. There is more than some sadness in that sequence today. The seat occupied by the bishop of the First Rome and now the Second Rome was held before them by a Russian. Today, the bishop of the Third Rome – Patriarch Kirill of Moscow – is no longer in communion with Bartholomew. In blessing the war of Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, in which Orthodox Christians are killing each other within the very same flock over which Kirill presides, the Patriarch of Moscow has become a counter-witness to the Gospel. It is a long way down from Sakharov, the conscience of Russia, to Kirill, the corrupter of the Russian conscience. In his 1992 address eulogizing Sakharov, Ratzinger noted that after 1968 the Soviet regime excluded the physicist from work related to state secrets. Thus marginalized, "from that time onward his mind focused on the question of human rights, on the moral renewal of the country and of humanity, and more generally on universal human values and the demands of conscience." "He who so loved his country had to become the accuser of a regime that was pushing people into apathy, weariness, indifference, that was causing them to fall prey to external and internal misery." Ratzinger continued: One could say, of course, that with the fall of the communist system Sakharov's mission has been fulfilled; that it was an important chapter of history which is now part of the past. I think that reasoning in this way would be a grave and dangerous error. First of all, it is clear that the general orientation of Sakharov's thinking regards human dignity and human rights. Obedience to conscience, even at the cost of suffering, is a message which loses nothing of its relevance even when the political context in which this message had acquired its special relevance no longer exists. Today in...

By St. Pope John Paul II Excerpted from Address of John Paul II to the members of the Pontifical Council for the Family, June 4, 1999 The theme of fatherhood, which you have chosen for this plenary meeting, refers to the third year of preparation for the Great Jubilee, dedicated precisely to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is worthwhile reflecting on this theme, since in today's family the father figure is in danger of becoming more and more hidden or even absent. In the light of the paternity of God "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Eph 3:15), human fatherhood and motherhood acquire all their meaning, dignity, and greatness. "Human fatherhood and motherhood, while remaining biologically similar to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a 'likeness' to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love (communio personarum)." (Gratissimam sane, n. 6) We can still hear the vivid echo of the recent celebration of Pentecost, which moves us to proclaim with hope St. Paul's affirmation: "All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God." (Rom 8:14) Just as the Holy Spirit is the life of the Church (cf. Lumen gentium, n. 7), he must also be the life of the family, the little domestic church. For every family, he must be the inner principle of vitality and energy, which keeps the flame of conjugal love ever burning in the spouses' reciprocal gift of self. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us to the heavenly Father and enables the trusting, jubilant prayer "Abba, Father!" (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6) to rise from our hearts. The Christian family is called to be distinguished for its atmosphere of shared prayer, in which God is addressed with the freedom of children and called by the affectionate name of "our Father"! May the Holy Spirit help us discover the Father's face as a perfect model of fatherhood in the family. For some time now, the family institution has been under repeated attack. These attacks are all the more dangerous and insidious since they ignore the irreplaceable value of the family based on marriage. They have reached the point of proposing false alternatives to the family and of calling for legislative recognition of them. But when laws, which should be at the service of the family, a fundamental good for society, turn against it, they acquire alarming destructive power. Thus, in some countries, there is a desire to impose on society so-called "de facto unions," reinforced by a series of legal effects which erode the very meaning of the family institution. "De facto unions" are marked by instability and the lack of the irrevocable commitment which gives rise to rights and duties and respects the dignity of the man and woman. Instead, there is a desire to give juridical value to a will that is far removed from any form of definitive bond. With these premises, how can we hope for truly responsible procreation which is not limited to giving life, but also includes that training and education which only the family can guarantee in all its dimensions? Arrangements of this sort ultimately put the meaning of human fatherhood, of fatherhood in the family, seriously at risk. This happens in various ways when families are not well established. When the Church explains the truth about marriage and the family, she does not do so only on the basis of the data of Revelation, but also by taking into account the demands of the natural law, which are at the foundation of the true good of society and its members. In fact, it is important for children to be born and raised in a home where parents are united in a faithful covenant. It is quite possible to imagine other forms of relationship and cohabitation between the sexes, but none of these, despite some people's contrary opinion, offers a real juridical alternative to matrimony, but rather a weakening of it. In the so-called "de facto unions," we see a more o...

By Auguste Meyrat Among the greatest challenges that Jesus poses to His disciples are His prescriptions on wealth. On the one hand, Jesus extolls poverty. He begins the Beatitudes with the declaration, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Elsewhere in the Gospels, He tells a rich man to give away all his possessions since "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." On the other hand, Jesus also acknowledges the need for productivity, especially in the parable of the talents, where the third servant is punished for not generating a profit with the one talent with which the master had invested him. Jesus also recognizes the need to pay taxes to Caesar ("Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's") and even does so Himself without complaint. Christians have traditionally reconciled these two views by treating money as a means and not an end. You should indeed work and produce wealth, but must never idolize money or fall into greed. Unfortunately, instead of maintaining this balance, Catholic progressives (among others) now idolize the poor and condemn wealth. They, therefore, ignore the actual causes of poverty (social and political dysfunction, lack of education, indolence, addiction and vice, etc.), and focus their ire on the ultrawealthy and capitalism because this fits a false political "narrative." The main problem with this view, however, is that it frames poverty as a material rather than a spiritual phenomenon. In truth, behind every rich tycoon and penniless pauper is a story that involves certain beliefs, values, and perceptions, i.e., the immaterial part of themselves. To better understand this dynamic, one would do well to read Theodore Dalrymple's modern classic Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass. As a psychiatrist working in the slums and prisons of England, Dalrymple was close enough to see what really afflicts the poor. It is usually not various systems of "oppression," the lack of economic opportunities, or the rise in CO2 levels; it's more often an attitude that rejects discipline, gratitude, and personal agency. Of course, Dalrymple recognizes that this mindset does not arise spontaneously, but has been inculcated by popular media, public education, and ideologues and demagogues. Growing up in unstable households, rife with domestic abuse, alcoholism, and criminal neglect, the children who make it to adulthood are completely unequipped to cope with reality and blame others for their problems. They cannot control impulses, work a steady job, or make sacrifices. Many of them cannot read, write, or do arithmetic, and few of them are part of a religious community. As a result, hardly anyone in this class has a moral compass to guide them. When Dalrymple talks to a group of murderers in a prison where he worked, he notes they were "so convinced of the gross injustice of the world that they were convinced also that nothing they did themselves could add significantly to its sum." This distorted moral outlook also comes out in many stories of women staying with abusive and unfaithful men because they learned to equate love and commitment with lust and wrath: "In the absence of a marriage ceremony, a black eye is his promissory note to love, honor, cherish, and protect." Many souls are thus condemned to live in squalor in an otherwise developed country like England. The men end up unemployed and frequently in prison; the women have children out of wedlock and continue coupling with different partners; and the children internalize the chaos around them, forming gangs, bullying others, and committing crimes with impunity. Sadly, this situation is only made worse by the poor's supposed champions in the British upper classes. Like their counterparts in America, they call for more welfare payments, more social services, more subsidized housing, and less policing. They believe that poverty is de...

By Robert Royal But first a note from Robert Royal: Thanks from the bottom of our hearts to all of you who donated to our mid-year fundraising campaign. From what we've received and what we can anticipate will still arrive, especially monthly donations, we're confident that TCT is good now for the rest of the year. So, let's carry on together! Now for today's column... The proverbial Martian visiting America in this 250th year (a whole quarter millennium) of our existence would be struck by many things. But probably by nothing more obvious than the large gap between what, on the one hand, we daily say and do – and on the other, what we would like to be. We're worried about how technologies like AI are coming to define us, but are mostly blind to how we've already defined ourselves – confined ourselves, really, even before the devices took over – to a materially prosperous but flat view of the world and ourselves. The Church, in recent years, has been trying to compensate with terms like Dignitas infinita and Magnifica humanitas, concepts that, in their argumentative way, do try to get at the problem. But they fall well short because what we desperately need now is not yet more arguments, but serious and artful poetry. The incomparably great Dante Alighieri already understood all this at the beginning of his Paradiso: Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria; però l'essemplo basti a cui esperïenza grazia serba. To transhumanize in words Cannot be done; but let the example suffice For those whom grace reserves the experience. (RR trans.) It's been said by some scholars that, by some inexplicable inspiration, Dante invented this idea of "transhumanism." Perhaps so. But he certainly meant something different, something Christian, by it, unlike the grotesque transmodern projections emanating from the thickets of AI in our day. And nota bene: he recognized several deep questions as well, even as he was embarking on writing a poem about the only realm in which we achieve real happiness, a state for which the term human "dignity" is a pale and distant shadow – as if we were all merely Victorian ladies and gentlemen claiming a decorous position in polite society. But we are His sons and daughters. Christianity, which is to say the truth about human existence, is much more fierce, and on a wholly different plane, than that. And to grasp that truth at all requires considerable skill, indirection – and poetry. (See Emily Dickinson's "Tell all the truth but tell it slant.") Dante Alighieri by Giotto di Bondone (attributed), c. 1333-37 [Cappella del Podestà of the Bargello Palace, Florence: source: Wikipedia] We need arguments, of course, to keep from falling into "subhumanism." And to prevent poetry from turning into sentimentality or idolatry. And also to remind us that what exceeds human reason is not, therefore, irrational, but participates in something that, beyond us, paradoxically makes us more ourselves. Because it brings us into the presence of the Truth beyond truths. This has long been understood in the Christian tradition. Modern rationalism and scientism see the transcendent as something unwarranted; within the Faith, that transrationalism is precisely what shows Christ's very power and truth. As St. Ambrose, who knew a few things about such matters, put it: Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum ("It pleased God to save his people not through dialectics [i.e., argument]"). His follower, the great St. Augustine, wrote Si comprehendis, non est Deus ("If you understand, it's not God.") And in more recent days, St. John Paul II urged that we rediscover a more ambitious reason, a reason that appreciates its limits and seeks answers that it needs, but goes beyond what human powers can achieve solely on their own. These can only come to us as revelation ("thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given") or, in its way, what we might call a kind of poetry. That few people read or value poetry...

By Stephen P. White But first a note from Robert Royal: We had a very good campaign day yesterday. (Have I said lately how confident I am in the generosity of our readers?) So all the more reason that we get over the finish line in what I hope will be these last few days of our fundraising. Many thanks to all who have contributed to get us where we are now, and one last appeal to those of you who haven't donated yet. I don't do begging well. Please, don't make me. Give. Today. Now for today's column... The bishops of the United States are gathered in Orlando, Florida this week for the USCCB's annual June meeting. The conference's June meetings are generally more low-key than the November plenaries in Baltimore. That said, this week the conference welcomes a new president (Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, who was elected last November) and a new apostolic nuncio (Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, who replaces Cardinal Christophe Pierre). If there is an aspect to this June meeting which is likely to garner attention, it is this: This evening, June 11, 2026, the bishops of the United States will gather in the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe in Orlando and consecrate the United States of America to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The bishops made the decision to consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart back in November 2025. Months of planning have gone into this consecration, including a nationwide novena and an extensive campaign to get the word out at the diocesan and parish levels. As we reach the culmination of all this, it is worth reflecting on what this consecration means for the Church in the United States. First, as this year marks the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the bishops have made it clear that the consecration ought to be understood "as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary." The founding of this nation is not merely worth remembering; it is worth celebrating. And so the text of the bishops' prayer of consecration acknowledges, "We celebrate the abundant gifts you have given this nation, founded on the self-evident truths that our Creator has endowed all people with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Whatever else needs to be said or understood about our history as a nation, we ought to begin with gratitude. Second, in addition to expressing gratitude, by consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart, the bishops are proclaiming a fundamental truth about all human endeavors, including our political life, namely, there is no greater perfection for human beings than to be conformed to Christ. In His Sacred Heart we discover both the perfection of our human nature and the overwhelming mercy of God, who not only saves us from sin and death, but invites us to share in His divinity. Such a claim certainly goes beyond the Declaration's language about "Laws of Nature and Nature's God," but the two claims are far from incompatible. Man is not the ultimate judge of his own affairs. Moreover, the common life of our nation is not diminished by being under the laws of nature, still less divine law. Rather it is precisely in being under such higher authority that political life can be ordered in such a way as to achieve its proper ends. Third. Like every nation in history, our political life has not always been perfectly ordered to its proper ends. Grave injustices – from slavery to abortion – have marred our history over the centuries. We have been divided to the point of open Civil War in the past, and we are divided in many ways today. The sins and failings of this nation cannot be healed, still less corrected, by self-loathing. This country cannot be made beautiful by despairing of her promise. But, like all of Creation, she can find healing in the merciful heart of Jesus, the King of Kings. In consecrating this nation to the Sacred Heart, the bishops are gratefully celebrating what is best, acknowledging that we stand under the judg...

By Casey Chalk But first a note from Robert Royal: We're near the end and near the goal! We're only several thousand short of putting TCT on a solid footing for this year and beyond. Now's not the time to slack off. One last, big push. . . .And then we can all get back to the main, truth-telling purpose of The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... When the classic French novel Madame Bovary first appeared in 1856, public prosecutors tarred the serial novel as obscene – outrage aux bonnes mœurs et à la religion ("an outrage to public morality and religion") – given author Gustave Flaubert's intimate portrayal of a bored bourgeois woman enmeshing herself in multiple extra-marital affairs. As these things often go, the ensuing trial of Flaubert only elicited more public attention for the book, and after his acquittal the following year, it became a bestseller. When it was translated into English two decades later, Madame Bovary became a global phenomenon. The irony, today, is that Flaubert's description of Bovary's sensual escapades would barely merit a "PG" rating. The Catholic Church doesn't come off particularly well in Flaubert's celebrated masterpiece. Uneducated lay Catholics are described by one character as adhering to "prejudices" and "traditional ways," relying on their "novenas, and relics, and the curé. . .rather than finding it natural to go and see the doctor or the pharmacist." Pious Catholic literature is described as "condescending," "sentimental," and "saccharine." The local curé is portrayed as ignorant but self-assured, incapable of effectively defending the old religion against Enlightenment-influenced skeptics. Whatever Flaubert's intentions with the novel, literary critics in the more-than-century-and-a-half since Madame Bovary's publication have noted that the titular character is actually quite banal, a morally and intellectually stunted individual who is ridiculous and unhinged the further she descends into her sins. She is the embodiment of the romantic – both her intellectual and moral life are entirely detached from the people and world around her. And, in that sense, she very much sounds like the immature, atomized, digitally-addicted modern self. We are all well-aware of the effect of smartphones on the human attention span and cognitive performance, a fact increasingly well-documented by empirical research. Both smartphones and social media also distort our conception of reality and relationships towards the extreme or idealized, given their tendency towards a filtered, curated self-presentation and algorithmic amplification. Once, it was commonplace to speak to a stranger in public; now, it's considered awkward and even potentially rude to interrupt a person glued to his or her device. There's even a word for snubbing other people in favor of smartphones: "phubbing." Then there's the emotional and intellectual dangers posed by artificial intelligence. Recently published research from the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University discovered that one in seven young adults in committed relationships routinely communicate with artificial intelligence as a romantic companion. Almost a third of respondents had experimented with one of these romantic bots at least once. Interpreting that data in light of an ongoing pornographic addiction epidemic, we are talking about generations of Americans whose conceptions of romance and intimacy are alarmingly untethered from reality, focused on idealized fictions that infantilize and morally impoverish the user. Artificial romantic partners and pornography videos cater to one's narrow and (often) progressively depraved desires. Those who succumb to these temptations are certainly ill-prepared not only for the challenges (and wonders) of true relational intimacy; they're also ill-conditioned for the spiritual life, which requires a capacity for contrition and contemplation. All of this we see in the character of Mada...

By David G Bonagura, Jr. But first a note from Robert Royal: Beauty comes to us in many forms, among them, in my (clearly unbiased) view, via TCT. Time grows short, donations still are too. We need a final push this week. It's about the existence of The Catholic Thing. What more can I say? Now for today's column... What do you suppose was the favorite site in Rome for the majority of a group of twenty-six college-bound students visiting for the first time? St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museums? The Colosseum and the Forum? The Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps? It was the Jesuit Church of the Gesù, the high point of Baroque church architecture. Its golden opulence; its eye-popping "Triumph of the Name of Jesus" fresco ceiling that draws viewers up to Heaven; its magnificent dome; its extravagant twin side altars dedicated to St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier. It's like nothing late Gen Z American Catholics have ever seen – in person, on screen, or even generated by AI. These students encountered real beauty for the first time and were overwhelmed by it, so much so that subsequent site visits, as fabulous as they all were, did not supersede the Gesù as the favorite. They were not just impressed; they had an existential experience. "Art moves us because it is beautiful," wrote Sir Roger Scruton, "and it is beautiful in part because it means something." Catholics often remark that beauty should take the lead in evangelizing a culture that is impoverished by the mundane, the functional, and the ugly. Yet we have difficulty translating this talk into practice. We should not have to travel to Rome to experience beauty in architecture, painting, sculpting, décor, or, for that matter, in music or in the Mass. We know only too well that, immediately following Vatican II, Church leaders, clerical and lay, made a conscious choice to reject the beautiful and impose the ugly. In the false name of renewal, beautiful churches were destroyed so widely – stained-glass windows and high altars were removed, gold tabernacles were replaced and pushed to the margins, marble was covered with wainscoting – that the term "wreckovation" was coined to describe the phenomenon. The same remove-and-replace process destroyed liturgical music and undermined the celebration of the Mass. The last two decades have seen something of a revival, as a few pastors have raised money to restore splendor to their churches and to their liturgies. But even though some Church leaders now acknowledge the failures of the post-conciliar wreckovation movement, most Catholics still encounter only the ugly and the banal in their local parishes. Why is this? I submit two interrelated reasons. First, Catholic leaders of the Boomer generation, even if dissatisfied with the status quo, largely cannot shake the prejudice they imbibed or inherited – ironically, from many pastors of an earlier generation who implemented the stripping of the altars – against pre-Conciliar expressions of beauty. This explains their dismissal of or apathy toward the Traditional Latin Mass, Gregorian Chant, high altars, and ornate liturgical accoutrement. They will not allow these things in their parishes, therefore, or only grant them in limited quantities – an Agnus Dei or Salve Regina or Tantum Ergo at benediction, but that's all. This leads us to the second reason. Our experiences of beauty (or ugliness) within religious contexts typically are filtered through sources of authority. They choose the designs of churches, the decorations, the music, the vestments – and they tell us what is beautiful, or what we should think to be beautiful. In their defense, the Boomers are not unique in their prejudice against an earlier artistic expression: one generation often reacts against the tastes of its immediate elders: the 18th century Neoclassical movement summarily rejected the ostentation of the Baroque and Rococo; Cubist painters rejected the whimsical moments captured by their Impres...

By Randall Smith But first a note from Robert Royal: The Christian story is unbelievable to many people today. But as Professor Smith argues below, it makes perfect, literally unavoidable sense. One reason TCT exists is to explain the faith in terms that bring the great mysteries home to us. We're getting near the end of our fundraising campaign and still have several thousand dollars to go to meet our needs. I have faith in the intelligence and benevolence of TCT readers so I just ask: If you understand and want to further this mission, now's the time to become part of the work of The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... Some people wonder: Why stick around in this life if the next life is so great? In fact, why has God sent us into this world at all if His ultimate goal for us is union with Him? Why not just get us there? Why send us here, risking the possibility that things might turn out badly? It's as though God was saying: "I am putting you in this very fragile ethical situation where you'll be pretty much over your heads, and although I want you to succeed, if you screw up, you're doomed. Good luck!" Everything about the Christian faith tells us that is not what God is doing. So why are we in this world when we're meant for the next? Perhaps it will help to engage in a little thought experiment. Let's say there is a loving Creator who freely wants to share that love with some creatures, a God who, as Pope Benedict XVI put it, "created the universe in order to enter into a history of love with mankind." How would He do this? Love must be received and given freely. So God can't keep these creatures with Him, "under His wing," so to speak, because that wouldn't allow them any real freedom, any more than children kept at home, even with very loving parents, have any real freedom to become who they are meant to become. So God's creatures cannot remain always and only with and in Him; they must go out to develop in a place and in circumstances where they can learn to love freely. It would have to be in a place that was vast enough to keep their minds always expanding, preparing bit by bit for union with their transcendent Source. It would need to have sufficient resources to support these creatures but not be perfect in every way. If it were, then people might only choose God as a source of pleasant things, as though He was simply the divine "caretaker." That's not love; it's dependency. To learn to love like adults, they can't be treated like children forever. So this Creator would have to put us out and away from Him, in some sense. And He can't make Himself visible at every moment lest we simply depend on Him constantly to mend our troubles and pains and to provide for us and others. If He does, we don't grow in love. We simply exist, like spoiled children. To learn to be selfless lovers (which is the only real kind), these creatures would need to learn to put the needs of others ahead of their own. But how would they do that if they were in a world with no needs? So too, without struggle, there can be no real virtue. To develop virtue, people must be tested, "like gold tested in fire." And if we're in a world with others like us – as we must be if we're going to learn to love (loving trees or dogs will not be enough because they're too subservient to our wills) – and if those others are as free as we are – free to love or not love – then it simply is the case that, occasionally, or maybe quite a lot, they will choose not to love. They will choose to be selfish rather than selfless, to dominate others rather than serve, and to take what they can get rather than share. What then? You don't have to struggle much to love people who are perfect. Love is perfected by the challenge of loving people who aren't perfect. Learning how to deal with those who say NO to love and who decide instead to dominate would be another important way of developing the love these creatures need. It would also be especially important since...

By Michael Pakaluk Catholics who sometimes worry that the Church is no longer sufficiently bold in its preaching of the Gospel might at least derive some comfort from its buildings. Sacred buildings stand a long time and carry on the convictions of those bolder folks who came before us – unless they are burned down or, in an interesting case, blocked. Two examples come to mind. The first is St. Paul's Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which the parish's website, in its history of itself, describes as deliberately placed in an "aggressive setting beside an expanding secular university." The booklet about the construction and design of the church, "St. Paul Church, Cambridge, Mass. – Description, Exterior and Interior," written by its first pastor, Fr. John J. Ryan, begins with a remark by the then-Cardinal of Boston, William Henry O'Connell: "The edifice you describe, Father Ryan, is a book in stone, and must be put into print." The cornerstone of this exquisitely beautiful church, designed by Edward T.P. Graham, a Harvard graduate and parishioner, was laid in 1916. Its construction, slowed by the Great War, was completed in 1923. Fr. Ryan's booklet describes the Church as placed "at the head of the 'Gold Coast,' a term given to the street on which front the splendid dormitories of the reputed wealthy students of Harvard." He means Wigglesworth Hall on Massachusetts Avenue. As for this "book in stone," he comments: St. Paul's Church is the formal expression of an unqualified belief in revealed religion and the Divinity of Christ. Looking at the frieze, this faith is disclosed by the Angel of Revelation supporting a cross; towards the cross are ancients looking for the salvation that shall be the gift of the cross; and, counterbalancing, are to be seen the Christians who also regard the cross as the source of salvation and every spiritual good. The tympanum exhibits a beautiful bas-relief bust of St. Paul, the interpreter of the old law and the new law, his finger on the text and the page held open by the sword grasped in his left hand. The text is engraven on the rim of the tympanum and reads; "The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of truth." (1. Timothy. Chapter III.) The quotation from St. Paul, the Patron of the church, is the key to the complete understanding of everything within and without this temple of God. The verse about truth directly confronts Harvard University with its then-new motto of Veritas. I say "new" because apparently soon after Harvard's founding until around 1880, its motto was understood to be a religious expression: either In Christi Gloriam ("for the glory of Christ") or Christo et Ecclesiae ("for Christ and his Church"). But in the 19th century, "Veritas" was discovered in some old records and came to supplant the older formulations (although combined forms were used also). When Fr. Ryan placed "the pillar and ground of truth" over St. Paul's door, Harvard had been proclaiming "truth" without Christ and without the Church for a generation. The inscription answers: truth needs a pillar, even for a university. Readers who have visited St. Paul's may be surprised to learn that, when the church was planned, it was understood to be directly facing the university and testifying to Catholic truth rather boldly. Isn't the building, rather, tucked away behind a tall apartment building (Longfellow Court)? Actually, that building went up soon after construction of the church started and was completed in 1930. I have heard old-timer locals refer to the apartments as "spite block." If spite was an intent, the architecture itself is like a medieval siege and counter-siege. A slab was imposed to cover up that "book in stone." The other great example is the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, built at roughly the same time as St. Paul's (1900-1909) and dedicated by James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. It stands on a hill along South Temple, half a mile from the Mormon Temple Square. On ...

By Kristen Ziccarelli But first a note from Robert Royal: We've reached the end of another week in our mid-year funding campaign and we're about two-thirds of the way to our goal. We can't slack off now. What we do in these days makes a difference between TCT continuing and – well – let's not think about that. Don't make me beg, please. We need your help, today, to make the coming days all they can be at The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... On her Feast Day today, May 30, Joan of Arc is remembered as one of the greatest saints of not just her time, but all time. The Maid of Orleans inspires us all with her military victories for France, fearlessness in battle. and extraordinary trial and martyrdom. And yet, the most important thing about Joan was none of those things, but the fact that she was obsessed with the will of God. As Alexandre Havard writes from her perspective in Coached by Joan of Arc: Lessons in Virtuous Leadership, "my love for France was not the fruit of an extreme patriotism. It is true that my father was a patriot. However, what obsessed me was the will of God. My patriotism did not give birth to my visions; my visions gave birth to my patriotism. My voices advised me to do things I could not imagine; they commanded me to do things I found repugnant. I felt sorry for the French because God felt sorry for them. I loved France for God." At her canonization in 1920, Pope Benedict XV's Divina disponente declared that St. Joan of Arc would be added to "the number of Saints, so that, from her example, all Christians may learn that obedience to the will of God is holy and devout, and obtain from her the grace to convert their fellow citizens to obtain heavenly life." At thirteen years old, Joan began receiving visions from God and the saints. France at the time was fractured by the Hundred Years' War. England had claimed much of northern France, including Paris, and the French throne itself stood empty. As the English laid siege to the city of Orléans along the Loire River, the nation appeared close to collapse. Illiterate and barely more than a child, eighteen-year-old Joan sought the help of her uncle to bring her to the Dauphin, the future Charles VII. She told him that she had been sent by God "to raise the siege of Orléans and to aid you in recovering your kingdom. God wills it so." Against every worldly expectation, Joan helped lead French forces to a series of victories against the English and safely escorted Charles to Reims, where he was crowned at the cathedral King of France in 1429. On May 30, 1431, she was put on trial and burned at the stake for "heresy" in Rouen. Both in 1431 and now, nearly 600 years after her trial, the distinction between patriotism and obedience matters enormously. Her response to serve God faithfully in the concrete circumstances He placed her in changed the course of history. Many devoted faithful are often tempted toward one of two extremes. Some withdraw from public life altogether, convinced that retreat is more noble or exhausted from the civic decline they witness around them. Others immerse themselves in political identity so completely that faith becomes secondary to partisan allegiance. Reading her trial documents or the many accounts of her life, it is clear St. Joan of Arc did not possess a partisan soul, nor did she fight for the nation as an end in itself. That is a kind of patriotism that is profoundly Christian, because it does not ignore a nation's failures, nor does it idolize national identity. Instead, it asks what God's will is: discerning our duty toward our own (the ones closest to us in our neighbors, our communities, and our country). Saint Joan of Arc understood that love of country could become a form of Christian service when it was ordered properly by a prior love of God. St. Joan of Arc's life also helps us to recover a richer understanding of the virtue of piety. St. Thomas Aquinas describes piety as the virtue by which we render "duty an...

By Matthew Walz But first a note from Robert Royal: Professor Walz reminds us today of a fundamental truth: that underneath all the challenges we face, it all comes down to trusting the One who deserves our trust. This evening, we'll be starting a short course on the Augustinianism of Pope Leo, which will look at some additional home truths that our world ignores at its peril. Please join us by enrolling (click here). And please, also, remember why it's important to support everything we do at The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... During this past academic year, I was honored to hold the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College. (This was especially an honor since this same Chair was held initially by TCT's own Robert Royal and then by Joseph Pearce.) Soon after accepting this appointment, the Church announced that she was going to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor or Teacher of the Church, which she did last November. For me, this was a happy coincidence or a "God-incidence," as a priest once suggested I call such a happening. I was being asked, I thought, to ponder the significance of Newman as a Doctor. The "of" in "Doctor of the Church" (the genitive case of Ecclesia) certainly expresses a relationship of possession: a Doctor belongs to the Church; he or she worked and still works on behalf of the Church's evangelistic mission. The "of" also suggests, it seems to me, the object of a Doctor's teaching (in Latin, Ecclesiae can be read as an "objective genitive"). Thus a Doctor not only represents the Church, but also teaches the Church herself, bringing her to a greater realization of revealed truth. The Church learns something new from Newman. Newman mined the depths of the Church's Scriptures and Tradition in illuminating ways, and in turn he articulated novel insights that have now become part of the Church's intellectual treasury. Newman taught the Church a whole host of things, ranging from the development of doctrine to the primacy of truth to the nature of conscience. But I want to consider here something that the newest Doctor teaches the Church by reflecting on a captivating phrase that he uses, a phrase altogether pertinent to those who desire to be sanctified in truth. The phrase comes from a meditation written by Newman called "Hope in God – Creator," one of the most powerful of his numerous Meditations on Christian Doctrine. God the Creator, Newman says, "knows what He's about." God knows what He's about! Perhaps more than any Doctor, Newman teaches us how to take this phrase as a touchstone for our lives. Do we know what we are about? Do we trust that God knows what He's about? What does it even mean to know what one is about, especially since we encounter so many shadows and images on our way toward and into truth? (Newman had the words Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem cut on to his tomb). Humanly speaking, to know what one is about is an achievement, perhaps of a lifetime. Great minds have long recognized it as such, though not as pithily as Newman. Consider, for example, Socrates, undoubtedly a man who knew what he was about. The Delphic oracle revealed that none is wiser than Socrates. Thus provoked, Socrates probes this assertion, eventually seeing that its truth lay in Socrates' knowing-that-he-does-not-know. As Plato recounts it, moreover, Socrates' knowing-that-he-does-not-know stood at the heart of his apologia, his defense against those fellow Athenians who accused him of spreading harmful teachings. Newman, of course, also delivered an Apologia in response to similar accusations from his fellow countrymen. Like Socrates, Newman narrates just how far he probed his own knowing-that-he-does-not-know in pursuit of the fullness of truth. It was a relentlessly honest probing that led him into the arms of Mother Church and the intellectual sanctuary of her infallibility. We know, of course, that there exists an even greater model o...

By Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen But first a note from Robert Royal: A happy Memorial Day to all our readers. As we remember the heroes fallen in war, let us all recommit ourselves to the battles that must be fought in our own day – both on real battlefields and in daily life – against the many current threats to human life, liberty, and Godliness. Now for today's column... The great French preacher Lacordaire once said the vocation of a soldier is next in dignity to the priesthood, not only because it commissioned him to defend justice on the field of battle and order on the field of peace, but also because it called him to the spirit and intention of sacrifice. Generally, respect for groups varies with their number; the more numerous they are, the less they are esteemed. But it is not so with the fighting forces. No group equally large is so revered. It is their high calling to the defense of justice and freedom that makes them loved. It was a soldier who first uttered the words recalled by the Church at Communion: "Lord, I am not worthy to have Thee come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed." (Matthew 8:8) The Breviary, which priests read daily, praises Judas Maccabeus, who refused to surrender to superior enemy forces and died saying: "Far be it from us to do such a thing as to flee from them. If our time has come, let us die bravely for our brethren, and leave no cause to question our honor." (I Maccabees 9:10) Isaiah heard the Seraphim around the throne of God address Him as the Lord of Armies. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory." (Isaiah 6:3) Life is a battle. St. Paul himself said: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." (II Timothy 4:7) In a similar spirit, he enjoined Timothy: "This charge I commit to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophetic utterances which pointed to you, that inspired by them you may wage the good warfare." (I Timothy 1:18) "Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus." (II Timothy 2:3) The soldier's armor in the great battle of life is as follows: "Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take also the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." (Ephesians 6:14-17) There is a war inside me: the flesh against the spirit. "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members." (Romans 7:23) If He who valued life more than anyone else did not consider death too great a price for Him to pay to defeat evil, why should I not be prepared in His name to suffer the hardships of armed service so that evil may be conquered? If the Cross of our Savior was a proof that there was something wrong in man that could be righted only by a sacrificial death, why should not this war be to me a proof that there is something so wrong with the modern world that it can be righted only by my sacrificial life? I am not fighting for a freedom that means the right to do whatever I please but for a freedom that means the right to do whatever I ought. Oughtness implies Law; Law implies Intelligence; and Intelligence implies God. I am not fighting merely to make the world safe for democracy; I am fighting to preserve the roots of democracy – the moral law rooted not in Power, but in God. I am not fighting for freedom from something; but for freedom for something: the glorious freedom to call my soul my own and then to save it in cooperation with God's grace. I am not fighting to preserve the kind of world we had just before this war. If I were, I would be fighting to preserve a world that produced tyrants and dictators. The n...

By John M. Grondelski But first a note from Robert Royal: Probably the deepest challenge of our time, as our columnist demonstrates today, is the defense of the human person, as we've always understood persons in the Christian tradition. AI is the most evident coming challenge (next week we'll bring you commentary on Pope Leo's first encyclical that's on this whole subject). But there are also many deeper questions that have long troubled our times - we can't even say who is a man or a woman. At TCT, we're committed to battling for truth despite the immediate challenges like AI as well as the long-term cultural trends. If you understand what's at stake - and I'm sure you do - please, join us in this work. The harvest could be great but the laborers fewer than we need. Help us make the Catholic case even stronger. Support TCT today. Now for today's column... Modern philosophy flatters itself by claiming it was responsible for the "turn to the subject," i.e., the human (and, usually, a very subjective understanding of the human). But focus on the human is hardly a modern discovery. St. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop-theologian, is noted for his line gloria Dei vivens homo – "the glory of God is man fully alive." Nor did the bishop of Lyons pluck that thread out of nowhere: the Psalmist praises the Creator for making man "a little less than the angels." (Psalm 8:5) Eastern Christianity long recognized that God's work of salvation was really deification: of bringing the full image and likeness of God in man to flower. (Genesis 1:27) The dignity of the human person was so central to the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II that it was the focus of his inaugural encyclical, "The Redeemer of Man" (Redemptor hominis). Nor did that pope tire of quoting Gaudium et spes (no. 22) that Jesus Christ "fully reveals man to himself." Note what the Council says – and doesn't. The Council doesn't say Christ "fully reveals God to man" (though that's true). It affirms Jesus "fully reveals man to himself." Carl Trueman brings those insights in his new book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. He argues that, in some ways, Nietzsche was ahead of his time. Proclaiming the "death of God" to a world still coasting on religious gases was ineffective. As with nominalism, the culture still concealed the gaping abyss the "death of God" entails – not least of which is destroying the divine image and likeness in man. In three chapters, Trueman goes on to demonstrate how contemporary man is achieving that in the area of sex (the sexual revolution and abortion), artificial reproduction (IVF and surrogacy), and death (an enemy which, if it can't be stopped, can at least be forced to bend to one's wishes about when and where). Man as the divine image and likeness is the unifying theme in Trueman's work: if the human person is made in the image of God who is good, then man's forays into sin constitute a defacement of that image. That too is not necessarily a new insight: already in the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great, in his first sermon for Christmas, admonished Christians to "remember your dignity" (albeit as redeemed by grace through the Incarnation). But Trueman argues persuasively that moderns are not simply disfiguring their divine image and likeness. Rather, they are actively and almost with pleasure working to "desecrate" that image, to try to destroy the divine image in man by replacing it by an autonomous human god. This isn't just a moral question: what sins people commit. It's an anthropological question, the one the Psalmist posed: "Who is man?" Trueman's starting point is important for two reasons. First, it provides a common ecumenical and interreligious point of departure. Jews and Christians can share a mutual perspective while, Scripturally based, it may ameliorate some of the notions of radical human corruption that reigned among the classical Reformers. Second, it applies to all men: all human perso...

By Robert Royal St. Augustine famously wrote of having come late to the Beauty that is God: tam antiqua, tam nova ("So ancient, so new"). It's a brilliant and profound way of expressing the truth that the deepest Good is not in the past or in the future, but by its very eternity transcends time. It's like a heart-rending piece of music that, even the very the first time you hear it, is both fresh beyond all expectation and, in the same moment, an evocation of a place that you feel you have known and longed for your whole past life, the one true home of the human heart. By contrast, what we're most often immersed in is a false, politicized version of old and new. A limited politics is, of course, a necessary and good thing. But when politics takes on a religious importance, a defining reality for our lives, it's a dangerous and partial substitute for the real thing. What's "conservative" then becomes merely a return to some idealized past; the "progressive" turns into a drive for some future utopia, whatever the cost (which is usually large in terms of human casualties). Compared with that deeper, truer music of Creation, the substitutes – if they come to possess us – are like an organ grinder's tune geared to make the monkeys dance. That's good neither for our souls nor our public lives. And it's always the main task of our lives to take care of temporal matters with our eyes fixed on the eternal. Which is what we strive to do, day in and day out, here at The Catholic Thing. So today I have to ask you to join us in supporting work that seeks some larger, more Catholic way. We only come to you twice a year asking for your support. And as part of this mid-year funding campaign, we have some remarkable new/old things to report. First, we're re-launching today the website of the Faith & Reason Institute (www.frinstitute.org), the parent institution of The Catholic Thing, in a new format that will make it easy to keep up with our writers, fellows, and varied activities. I think the staff did a wonderful job and produced a format that's both attractive and accessible. Please take a look. You'll see not only worthwhile written material by myself and others at TCT, but also an archive of the Posses; our video series on martyrs and persecution "Faith under Siege"; our TCT courses (my new course on Pope Leo's complicated relationship to his Augustinian heritage starts next week); our annual Summer Seminar on the Free Society, which this year features a dialogue between Western and Eastern Catholics about the public square; and several other new initiatives that we'll be rolling out shortly. We're only able to bring you all this thanks to the generosity and fidelity of people like yourself who care about Catholic truth, and are willing to support us in this mission of keeping Faith and Reason present, together, not only among ourselves but in the whole world. As St. John Paul II wrote at the beginning of his encyclical Fides et ratio: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know Himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. Much is at stake in this dual approach to knowing God. I'd like to call your attention to one new feature in particular that we're launching. Many people these days are confused about what the Church teaches and why. And while columns on this page often address those questions as they crop up in the news and public debates, and our courses look at broader subjects, we decided that lots of readers would benefit from a simple, but more systematic approach. And what better way to do that than by going through the Catechism of the Catholic Church? And not on your own, but with the guidance of my Posse colleague and friend Fr. Gerald Murray. So, you'll shortly be receiving the first installment via email and an...

By Brad Miner By first a note from Robert Royal: There's just over a week until I begin my brief course on Pope Leo and the Augustinian tradition. Don't miss this chance to learn more about our American pope, the religious tradition he was formed by, and the ways in which he seems to follow or depart from the legacy of perhaps the greatest thinker in the early Church, St. Augustine of Hippo. You can register easily and quickly by clicking here. I hope to see you then. Now for today's column... First, let's review the Corporal Works of Mercy, which are seven in number: 1. To feed the hungry 2. To give water to the thirsty 3. To clothe the naked 4. To shelter the homeless 5. To visit the sick 6. To visit the imprisoned 7. To bury the dead There's a church in Naples, Italy, devoted to them. And its founding is a lovely story. In 1601, seven (how appropriate) young Neapolitan noblemen, all in their 20s or 30s, joined together to form Pio Monte della Misericordia (the Pious Mount of Mercy). And on every Friday, they gathered at the Hospital for Incurables (Ospedale degli Incurabili) to minister to the sick. Then they decided to elevate their commitment by founding the Mount – and a church with it. The charitable institution and the church survive to this day; the hospital is long gone. But when the construction of the church was finally completed, an altarpiece was needed, so one of the seven young nobles, Giovan Battista Manso, a patron of the arts (and a friend of the poets Torquato Tasso and Giovan Marino, and the scientist Galileo Galilei), knew that a certain young painter, Michelangelo Merisi, had just arrived in Naples. We know him, of course, by the name of his birthplace, Caravaggio, and he was on the run from the law for having murdered (on May 29, 1606), a young Roman nobleman, Ranuccio Tomassoni (noble only in the sense of his family's "dignity"). Giovan Manso did not care about that, and he was happy to shelter Caravaggio – if he would paint an altarpiece for the Pio Monte della Misericordia. Besides, Caravaggio had been spirited to Naples by the Colonna family, and though I don't wish to evoke vile stereotypes, that bunch stepped right out of a Baroque-era version of The Godfather. Of course, what we think of today as "the law" was rather ad hoc in the 17th century Caravaggio didn't hesitate to accept the commission. Work was his drug. Besides, Manso and the Monte didn't nickel-and-dime the artist. His fee is estimated to have been in the range of $150,000 to $220,000 in 2026 U.S. dollars! That's more than a fair wage for the amount of time the painter spent creating it between September 23, 1606, and January 9, 1607. Three months and a skosh, for heaven's sake. The painting is extraordinary. It is also, perhaps, the most difficult to "see." Caravaggio was the preeminent tenebrist. That term comes from the Italian word tenebroso, meaning dark or brooding or mysterious, and the words tenebrist or tenebrism likely weren't used in the 17th century – may, in fact, be 20th-century coinages. But I think we can be confident that when Giovan Manso – or if not he another – first saw the finished work, there was a whispered, "Tenebroso." Being an art lover but not an art historian, I can only speculate that Caravaggio's development of the technique (and he was surely its master) had something to do with his love of the human figure and the drama in humanity, and with his rather unique process (working quickly, painting directly on canvas without sketching), and (here I speculate) looking over his shoulder to see if the law was about to kick down the door. Whatever the reasons, the results were always stunning, and you see it from his earliest work all the way to the last: from Boy Peeling Fruit (c. 1592) to Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). But it was never so stunning or as impenetrable as in The Seven Works of Mercy. Let's break down The Seven Works of Mercy into four parts: top, middle (right and left), and bottom. At t...