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A New Age of the Church?
Episode 60
Thursday, July 31, 2025 • Duration 06:25
by David G. Bonagura, Jr.
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), Catholic convert and eminent historian of culture, despised the tripartite division of both secular and ecclesiastical history into early, medieval, and modern periods. For the Church's history, by his erudite reckoning, there are six ages, each lasting three or four centuries. "Each of them begins, and end, in crisis," he writes in one of his final books, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture.
From the crisis point, each age, except the first, spanning from Pentecost to Constantine's conversion, passes through three phases of growth and then decay: intense spiritual activity and birth of new apostolates, achievements in the Church and in culture, assaults from enemies inside and outside the Church that depreciate or destroy these achievements.
If you are curious about the six ages, I encourage you to read this short book, included in its entirety in a wonderful volume of Dawson essays edited by the late TCT contributor Gerald Russello. For now, Dawson's sixth age, which began with the crisis of the French Revolution and continued at the time of his writing, is worthy of special attention.
Dawson describes the post-Revolution years as "an atmosphere of defeat and disaster:"
Everything had to be rebuilt from the foundations. The religious orders and the monasteries, the Catholic universities and colleges and, not least, the foreign missions had all been destroyed or reduced to poverty and impotence. Worst of all, the Church was still associated with the unpopular cause of the political reaction and the tradition of the ancien régime.
Does this sound familiar?
According to Dawson's criteria, we could well consider the crisis in Catholic practice, theology, education, and social standing that began after Vatican II as a new age of the Church. What happened in 1789 happened again in the 1960s, only this time the assaults chiefly came from enemies within.
The post-conciliar crisis sparked stark changes in every aspect of Catholic life, so much so that the Church appeared to many as if she were beginning a new age. Theologian Karl Rahner, who apparently had not read Dawson, thought so: he called Vatican II the dawn of the third age of the Church.
But Dawson's criteria for a distinct historical age require a certain type of change to follow the crisis: a spiritual response, accompanied by new apostolic endeavors, that returns the Church to her evangelical core. These spiritual works eventually shape the age by bearing ecclesial and cultural fruit.
Though not as dramatic as the work of St. Francis or the Counter Reformation that precipitated prior ages (at least, not yet), the apostolic spirit of the would-be seventh age of the Church that began at Vatican II is marked by what the Council desired: a return to Scripture and Tradition, which are harnessed to bringing the secular and the skeptics into union with Christ. The leading figure of this new age is Pope St. John Paul II. Its name is the New Evangelization.
The apostolic works of this new age are physical and virtual, in-person and online. They span the gamut of modern life: publishing houses, online platforms, think tanks, liturgical institutes, sacred music and sacred art revivals, faithful schools and universities, new religious communities that are traditional in substance and contemporary in style.
At the beginning of this new age, we cannot yet see the fruits. Even in times of renewal, the weeds grow along with the wheat in every season and in every soil. Dawson cautions that a time lag exists between the spiritual sowing and the cultural harvest: "The spiritual achievement of today finds its social expression in the cultural achievements of tomorrow."
Devoted student of history that he was, Dawson would likely blanch at identifying a new historical period while within it. Yet, since for Catholics "all successive ages of the Church and all the forms of Christian culture form one part of one living whole in wh...
On Echeverria's 'Redeeming Sex'
Episode 59
Wednesday, July 30, 2025 • Duration 06:58
By Casey Chalk.
The gym is a near occasion of sexual temptation. At least mine is. Whenever I go, this husband and father of six, who is waging a losing battle against the notorious "dad bod," has to navigate around scores of attractive twenty- and thirty-something females wearing clothes that in an earlier, more "prudish" age, would have been considered embarrassingly inappropriate for mixed settings. I just do my best to keep focused on the reps and reading my Magnificat between sets.
More recently though, I've been inclined to pray, both for the attractive, often near-perfectly fit women, as well as their confident and muscular male counterparts. For beneath all the nauseating, self-absorbed posturing of gym culture is, I think, a deep sadness. What, exactly, are we all doing there? For sure, "maximizing" our health, as it were (though I prefer to invert it and jokingly call it warding off death). Yet I doubt most young folk see it that way - death is far too distant for them. They are there, whether they admit it or not, because they want to be beautiful. But to what end?
Presumably, most of my gym confreres are either in romantic relationships or looking for one - though, curiously, Gen Z'ers are having less sex than previous generations, as much recent reporting has noted. Our culture seems no less obsessed with sex than it was in earlier decades, but that obsession is now a digital and online one, performed (and consumed) in front of screens, often alone. At the gym, there are many beautiful, hyper-sexualized bodies. . .but at least some of them are actually engaging in less sex. Many will choose never to have children.
Catholic teaching would say this reflects a fundamental failure to appreciate what sex (and sexuality) are for, as Catholic theologian and professor Eduardo Echeverria persuasively argues in his new book Redeeming Sex: The Battle for the Body. Echeverria's text is deeply philosophical and theological - with extended chapters on the hermeneutics of meaning and truth, Christian anthropology and personalism, and differing understandings of divine revelation. That depth may deter readers with only a passing knowledge of these concepts. Yet his perspective is also aimed to be both accessibly practical and passionately ecumenical - indeed, I can think of few Catholic scholars with as much familiarity with contemporary Protestant theology as Dr. Echeverria.
For my purposes here, however, I want to focus my attention on what Redeeming Sex has to say about the kinds of struggles experienced by the kinds of people I see every week at the gym. As much as the careful, scientific refining of the human body in the gym has to do with sexuality, it can't help but tend towards a certain type of vanity and self-gratification. We aim for a more attractive body, because we want to feel good about ourselves and be celebrated by others, and we hope to attract the attention of one whose physicality is approximately as toned and beautiful as ours.
And the more our conception of beauty is defined by what we see on screens, be it social media, sensual images, or downright pornography, the more sex becomes wrapped up in ourselves and satisfying physiological inclinations.
Yet as Echeverria argues, reducing sexuality to mere physical and biological desire, based on a materialistic anthropology, "blocks self-transcendence and hence makes it impossible for the individual to be fulfilled in a relationality." In effect, if sexuality is not self-gift, it will necessarily devolve into self-indulgence, as Pope John Paul II argued in his classic text Love and Responsibility.
And self-indulgence reflects a narrowing of the human horizon, a turning inward that in its narcissistic self-worship resembles Gollum, a shameful, sniveling, and entirely unscrupulous individual whose entire identity revolves around pleasing himself.
"Preoccupation with self-egoism generates a contradiction between our individual self-affirmation and being fulfill...
Jesus Is God!
Episode 58
Tuesday, July 29, 2025 • Duration 07:36
By Brad Miner.
Have you heard this from someone? "It's absurd to say Jesus is God, since he never made the claim himself!" People can get away with this if the Christian with whom they're speaking isn't prepared to refute it, citing chapter and verse.
Of course, militant unbelievers won't be convinced of the divinity of Christ, no matter how clearly and thoroughly one cites Scripture to show it's exactly how He described Himself, because for them the Bible is a work of fiction.
Those who admire Jesus as merely a "great moral teacher" note that Jesus never said the words, "I am God!" But these literalists miss the forest for the trees. C.S. Lewis addressed this in Mere Christianity. It's foolish, he writes, to say you're "ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God."
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
What, then, are the occasions on which Jesus made clear that He is God incarnate? They are numerous throughout the New Testament (and, by extension, the Old), but I'll focus only on John's Gospel (with connections to the Hebrew Scriptures).
In John, Jesus uses the phrase "I am" repeatedly, often with titles or descriptions, to assert His divinity. These "I am" statements, along with other declarations, highlight Jesus' eternal existence, His preeminence, and His role as intermediary between us and the Father:
"I am the bread of life." (John 6:35) Jesus, the source of spiritual nourishment and eternal life. (Gifts that only come from God: Exodus 16:4 and the manna, the bread from heaven.)
"I am the light of the world." (John 8:12) Jesus is the Creator's illumination. ("Let there be light," Genesis 1:3.)
"I am the gate for the sheep." (John 10:7)The only way to enter the Kingdom, through the ultimate gatekeeper. (Jesus as the shepherd of Isaiah 40:11,)
"I am the good shepherd." (John 10:11) Jesus presents Himself as the protector of His people, a role traditionally associated with God's care and guidance. (40:11 again.)
"I and the Father are one." (John 10:30) This declaration asserts Jesus' unity with God the Father, implying that He shares the same divine essence. (Perhaps an allusion to the Shh'ma of Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.")
"The Father is in me, and I am in the Father." (John 10:38). The unity between Jesus and God the Father. (The Shh'ma again.)
"I am the resurrection and the life. (John 11:25) Jesus' power over death and His ability to grant eternal life. (Isaiah 26:19: "Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.")
"I am the way, the truth, and the life." (John 14:6) Jesus is the only path to God. (Isaiah 30:21: "And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it.'")
"I am the true vine." (John 15:1) Jesus is the source of life. (Isaiah 5: "For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.")
"All that the Father has is mine." (John 16:15) Could it be clearer? (1 Chronicles 29:12: "Riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might; and it is in your hand to make great and to give strength to all.")
I've saved for last what is, I believe, the clearest statement by Christ of His divinity: John 8:58. The context: He is in the Temple precincts and is speaking to a gathering of followers and skeptics. He has just told them that "the t...
James Hitchcock and the Continuing Battles over Vatican II
Episode 57
Monday, July 28, 2025 • Duration 07:29
By Robert Royal.
But first a note: One of our contributing writers, Eduardo Echeverria, and two of this site's friends, Ralph Martin and Ed Peters, were abruptly fired from the Sacred Heart Seminary this week by Detroit's new Archbishop Edward Weisenburger. The situation is still developing, so we will be commenting via the Papal Posse in a few days as the situation becomes clearer. In the meantime, today, a very different story from the groves of academe.
Now for today's column...
James Hitchcock, the American Catholic historian, died in his native St. Louis last week. He was an accomplished academic - Princeton PhD - and his History of the Catholic Church will remain a point of reference for years to come. But he was also a man of broad insight and learning, an able tongue, and a ready wit that he applied not only to the past, but to the present. His volumes on public Catholicism, such as Catholicism & Modernity, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, and The Pope and the Jesuits, were guiding stars for many of us younger readers trying to find our way through the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. But when friends passed along the news of his death, one of his essays came spontaneously to mind: "Postmortem on a Rebirth: The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance."
His main point in that text was to disprove the view that the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II was an intellectual desert:
Conventional wisdom in Catholic intellectual circles of the 1970s holds that the condemnation of modernism [by Pius X in 1907] brought an end to serious Catholic thought for more than fifty years, ushering in a reign of terror which inhibited intellectuals until the benign pontificate of Pope John XXIII (1958-63) and the dramatic changes of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Of course, anyone who knows anything about Catholic culture in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century also knows that, despite some bumps along the road for some specific thinkers, this is not only false, but something close to the opposite of the truth. I've written a bit about this in my book A Deeper Vision, and Jim Hitchcock, in particular, knew quite a lot. His summaries of various thinkers in just a few pages here can only be termed magisterial.
What's true is that, in several nations, Catholic thought had been undergoing what Hitchcock called a "rebirth" ever since Leo XIII's encyclicals Aeterni patris (encouraging renewed study of Aquinas) and Rerum novarum (a Catholic approach to the new social and political conditions in the modern world). Not only did many world-class Catholic thinkers emerge as a result, they were valued both inside the Church and even in secular, sometimes historically anti-Catholic institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, the Universities of Virginia, Chicago, Toronto, Oxford, and beyond.
It's enough to mention just a few of the most obvious names to prove his point. Among the orthodox Thomists: the Maritains, Gilson, Simon, Pieper, Gilby, and Fulton Sheen (if you think he was just a glib media figure, take a look at his doctoral dissertation, "The Spirit of Contemporary Philosophy and the Finite God," for which he - the first American to do so - won the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy at the then-prestigious Catholic University of Louvain). And less orthodox Thomists - sometimes bordering and more than bordering on heterodoxies - also flourished, figures like Rahner, Lonergan, Maréchal, and many more.
In the same period, though its practitioners sometimes encountered pushback from the more pugnacious neo-Scholastics, were other currents like personalism, existentialism, and la nouvelle théologie: Guardini, Daniélou, de Lubac, Congar, Chenu, Marcel, Dawson, von Hildebrand, Bouyer, von Balthasar - later Ratzinger and Wojtyla.
Pius X may well have aimed at curbing now-obvious heresies. And acolytes of the pope went further than he did himself in sniffing out modernists. But you could hardly claim tha...
The Heart of Prayer
Episode 56
Sunday, July 27, 2025 • Duration 05:26
By Fr. Paul D. Scalia .
"Lord, teach us to pray." This appeal by the disciples arises from their immediate circumstances. They had just seen Christ Himself praying. And they knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray. It's reasonable now that they should ask the same of our Lord.
Lord, teach us to pray. This appeal arises, more importantly, from the depth of the human heart. It's an appeal that every disciple should make to our Lord. We are created for prayer, for that intimate conversation with God, to walk with Him in the cool of the day. But we don't know how to pray as we ought. We need to be instructed.
And because our wounded human nature goes astray, we need to be corrected as well. Until we recognize the futility of our own prayer, we won't really begin to pray. Implicit in the appeal of the disciples is that there's a right way to pray - and thus a wrong one as well. Indeed, human history is full of mistaken ways of prayer and worship - some silly, some dangerous, all unworthy of both God and man. Jesus has come to give us the way of prayer.
So Jesus gives us the first and last word of prayer: Father. "When you pray, say: Father." The bluntness of Luke's account shocks us into realizing the reality of the One to Whom we pray. He is eternally Father and has introduced us into His Son. Our divine sonship is the heart of all prayer.
Prayer is, first of all, the ascent of our heart and mind to the Father. That's fundamental to all prayer. "For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, 'Abba, Father!'" (Romans 8:15)
Saint Josemaria Escrivá experienced this gift of prayer when, travelling in a streetcar in Madrid, he suddenly felt a clarity about his sonship: "I had learned to call God Father, as in the Our Father, from my childhood. But feeling, seeing, being amazed at that desire of God that we be his children. . .that was on the street and in a streetcar. For an hour or an hour and a half, I don't know, I had to shout Abba, Pater!"
Abba. Father. If we go no further than that one word, spending all our time saying it with faith and love, then we have prayed well.
But we do go further. The simple acknowledgement of God as Father establishes the proper order of things. It provides the context in which all other prayer is made. Our prayer ascends to the Father so that His grace will also descend to us. The word "pray" really means to ask. Indeed, most of us think of prayer as only petition. Our Father doesn't mind our petitions. So the remainder of our Lord's instruction addresses the confidence we should have in asking, a confidence that comes only from knowing God as Father.
Jesus gives us an odd parable (typical for Luke's Gospel) about a not-very-good friend whose "generosity" is won over by persistence. Point is, God is better than that friend. If a bad friend can be won over by persistence, how much more your loving Father by a simple asking.
The instruction concludes with a surprising but logical statement: "If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" It's surprising because, well, He calls us wicked. He's not wrong, but maybe He could have been gentler?
Anyhow, the statement reminds us of the distance between our goodness and the Father's. We should not think of Him as being good to us as we are good to others, not like that friend in the parable. His goodness infinitely surpasses ours. We should not think of the Father's goodness according to our own constrained goodness. Nor should we estimate His Fatherhood according to our poor image of it. As Tertullian said, "Nemo tam pater quam Pater - no one is so much a father as the Father." (See CCC 239)
But the conclusion is also surprising, because our Lord introduces the gift of the Spirit at the very end of the instruction. How much more will the Father ...
July 20th in the Round
Episode 55
Saturday, July 26, 2025 • Duration 06:06
By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza
Last Sunday, to mark the anniversary of the moon landing in 1969, Pope Leo XIV had a video call with Buzz Aldrin, who was delighted and moved to speak with the Holy Father and receive his blessing.
Robert Prevost was 13 that summer of '69 and, like millions of other teenage boys, certainly gazed up at the sky in wonder. That fall, he would leave Chicago for a high school seminary in Michigan.
I hope that Pope Leo likes anniversaries. I do. They liberate us from what is happening right now, and remind us of happier things, of the various intrusions of Providence into history. Or perhaps better to say, remind us to be more attentive to the Providence that does not intrude so much as sustain and support and surround us.
Readers will appreciate that I am particularly keen on anniversaries that fall on July 20th, the date of my priestly ordination. I was ordained in 2002, just a few days before St. John Paul the Great arrived in Canada for World Youth Day; this year was my 23rd anniversary.
By happenstance, I spent the anniversary on a four-day train journey across Canada. In the age of cheap air travel, no one takes the train across Canada except to take the train across Canada. Via Rail's The Canadian goes from Vancouver to Toronto twice a week; I have wanted to go for some time, an experience of the vastness of Canada and its history.
It was, as it happens, on July 20th, 1871, that British Columbia joined the fledgling Dominion of Canada. A transcontinental railway was a condition of joining, even though it seemed utterly impossible at the time. In 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation, the United States had purchased Alaska, and not a few Canadians thought that Americans might desire more northern territory. So, a railway was built in a mere ten years from first sod turning to the last spike.
Pierre Berton, Canada's preeminent popular historian, wrote in 1970 - a year after the lunar landing - that while in the 1850s there was fanciful rhetoric about one day hearing "a steam whistle in the passes of the Rockies. . .a century later, public figures were prophesying with equal recklessness and incidental accuracy that their children would live to see a man land on the moon."
"The comparison is a reasonable one," noted Berton. "For most colonial Canadians at mid 19th century the prospect of a line of steel stretching off two thousand miles into the Pacific mists was similarly unreal."
But they built it - a railway and a country.
Sunday morning, I offered Mass aboard the train while passing through Saskatchewan, where the bright fields of canola look as if God had taken a yellow highlighter and dragged it across the endless prairie. Jesus spoke of the "fields white for harvest" (John 4:35), but the golden canola is prettier. My Jewish friends joke sometimes that Canada would have made a better Promised Land than Canaan. Prettier, to be sure.
Canada has been an unimaginably blessed country in which my parents made a life, and the altar of the rails seemed somehow suitable to give thanks for this abundantly bountiful part of Creation. Psalm 16 is the psalm of the priestly tribe, but it can be applied to those fortunate souls who make Canada their home: The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6)
I was disappointed to observe that, while the election of the new Holy Father has prompted new attention to Pope Leo XIII, nobody seemed to notice that July 20th was the anniversary of his death in 1903. I considered it a grace to be ordained on the 99th anniversary of his dies natalis (please God). Perhaps one day Leo XIII will join his predecessor (Blessed Pius IX) and successor (Saint Pius X) in being raised to the altars, but it does not seem likely.
I keep it as a sort of private feast day. While John Paul II changed my life, it is Leo XIII whom I regard as the great visionary pope of our time. Leo XIII and John Paul II can be considered papal twins, as it ...
What Changes and What Doesn’t
Episode 54
Friday, July 25, 2025 • Duration 06:29
By Joseph R. Wood
"Everything changes," exclaimed an elderly woman in Sydney with a broad Australian accent. She was expecting Mass at a church when the COVID-19 restrictions had just been lifted. But this particular church had shut again due to virus exposure among the priests there.
She was agreeing (maybe unintentionally) with the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, who argued that everything is "flux." He focused on the material world that changes constantly. He was known as the "philosopher of tears," given to melancholy.
This moment has run through my mind as I again enjoy the privilege of teaching at George Weigel's Tertio Millennio Seminar in Kraków, Poland. I'll move on shortly to Slovakia, where I'll join our editor-in-chief, Robert Royal, for the Free Society Seminar.
These seminars assemble groups of very bright, faithful Catholics in their 20s and 30s, mostly European and American but occasionally from beyond, for an intensive examination of Catholic truth and contemporary problems confronting the Church's teaching. And there's plenty of wonderful conversation where real philosophy - seeking wisdom - emerges.
The seminars were started by Michael Novak of blessed memory, a prolific advocate of free markets and liberally-grounded political institutions regularly mentioned on this website, which he also helped found. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Novak hoped the seminars would help a new generation of Central European Catholics learn the habits and ideas that their countries would need as they moved out of the dark decades of Communism.
The Americans would discover the depth of Catholic tradition and faith that had been brought here centuries before, survived the Communist era, and might animate the future of the region and the West.
Novak was no "philosopher of tears."
But in recent seminars, I've been struck by the changes since the students began coming decades ago. These changes can bring out the weeping Heraclitus in me.
The political and economic institutions that defeated Communism, or at least let it defeat itself, are no longer attractive to many in the West, or to many in Central Europe who see totalitarian Communism as having been replaced by something offering homo economicus and moral relativism as the fullness of being human.
Amid all the changes is a sense of instability, that truth doesn't exist or can't be found because everything changes anyway. That has yielded a widespread loss of hope accompanied by forgetting that suffering is part of life, that it has meaning, and that while it should be reduced where possible, it also brings those of us with faith to the greatest possible joy.
The students at these seminars are looking for, and finding, truths that, unlike the seasons or political institutions or social fashions or popular opinion, don't change.
I've experimented here with an ancient source, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was a scholar-historian and a man of action, a general. He writes of the 5th-century B.C. wars, primarily between Athens and Sparta, that hastened the decline of the Greek cities as a dominant and sometimes successful political form.
That was a century when "revolutions broke out in city after city," and events in one place caused in others "still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal. . .[with] an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge."
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as courage; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character. . . .Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. . . .Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted. . . .In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to ...
The Truth in Full
Episode 53
Thursday, July 24, 2025 • Duration 06:24
By Steven P. White .
I just finished spending two weeks studying the Church's social teaching with a group of young men and women in Krakow, Poland. The students came from all over the world: predominantly the United States and Poland, but also Cameroon, the Philippines, Finland, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia.
One of the biggest challenges in teaching students Catholic social teaching is helping them understand that the Church's social teaching is more than a collection of moral exhortations and prohibitions, though it certainly includes both. As I always emphasize to my students, the Church's social teaching is descriptive before it is prescriptive.
That is, if we want to understand what the Church says about what we owe to one another as persons, or how we ought to order our common life in service to the common good, we must first understand what it means to be a person and what it means to be part of a society, and what the Church means by the common good.
Over the years, the Church has identified what she calls the four "permanent principles" of Catholic social teaching: The dignity of the human person, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good. If one understands these principles and how to apply them, then Catholic social teaching becomes a powerful framework for thinking through some of the thorniest problems of contemporary life. Begin with general principles and apply them to the particulars of public life. Sounds simple, right?
Not quite.
Knowing the principles that ought to guide our moral action and applying them is obviously important, but in an age marked by skepticism and relativism, the principles themselves must be accounted for. It is one thing for the Church to speak, for example, of "human dignity" or "natural law," and the faithful may take these as axiomatic simply on the basis of the authority of the Church. It is another thing to be able to defend, justify, and propose the principles to a world that doesn't acknowledge the Church's authority.
Among Catholics, there is sometimes a tendency to treat moral theology - which includes Catholic social teaching - as a sort of moral mathematics, a moral algorithm. Begin with fixed principles, enter certain inputs, and the moral calculus produces concrete moral judgments. The whole process is seen as deductive, deriving certitude in particular judgments on the basis of fixed general principles.
The problem with this is not that it treats certain principles as fixed and true, nor that it treats moral truth as something that we can know, but that relatively few moral decisions can be made on the basis of deductive reasoning alone.
Most of what we learn, we learn through induction: we begin with noticing the way things are and, on the basis of those particulars, we derive general principles. This way of arriving at the truth does not always follow the laws of deductive logic, but it is no less capable of arriving at the truth. For example, it's a formal fallacy of deductive logic to hold that the word of an untrustworthy person ought to be considered untrustworthy. But we all know from experience, that liars aren't to be trusted.
It's reasonable not to trust liars even while acknowledging that the character of one making an argument does not determine the logical validity of the argument he makes. A reasonable person uses both deductive and inductive reasoning because both lead us to the truth. If we rely exclusively on one or the other, we hamstring our own ability to acknowledge the truth.
A great teacher of mine used to say that human beings are "datives of truth," by which he meant that our capacity to receive and recognize the truth is the most distinctive thing about us. It's practically the definition of the human person: We were made for truth.
Understanding the truth about the human person requires us to make use of the full array of human reason, just as understanding the natural law requires us to pay close attention to the nature of things. Unde...
The Radical Truth: Christ Reveals Man to Himself
Episode 52
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 • Duration 06:35
By John M. Grondelski
This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the first of the seven ecumenical councils, accepted by Catholics and Orthodox alike. The Council met from May to June 325. Pope Francis wanted to go to Turkey (within which Nicaea now sits) for the occasion. His extended illness and death made that trip impossible, though it remains likely that Pope Leo XIV will go to Turkey this Fall, his first international pilgrimage.
The early Councils were dominated by Christological and Trinitarian controversies: how Jesus's human and divine natures fit together and how the three Persons of the Trinity were related. Modern people, unaccustomed to thinking in terms of "natures" and "persons" (in a technical theological sense), perhaps imagine those Councils were preoccupied with much ado about nothing. However, contemporary cultural and political debates about what a human being is and gender ideology reveal that the "nature/person" question is alive and well, even if we have forgotten the terminology that could help clarify things.
On the Christological side, the councils have repeatedly returned to the relationship of Jesus's divine and human natures. Could a being simultaneously be human and divine? If so, how? Was it a question of inverse proportionality: the more divine, the less human? Or a theoretical equality that, nevertheless, shut off certain practical dimensions of one nature (usually the human), e.g., was Jesus's human nature in some kind of suspended animation, some frozen sleep?
Eventually, by the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, orthodox Christian faith affirmed that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. . . fully, actively, completely, simultaneously, and truly divine and human. Yet I fear that for many Catholics still, the raw, sobering truth of the Incarnation isn't fully appreciated.
That is why we would benefit from recalling a central element of St. John Paul II's theological anthropology. He lifted it from Vatican II and set it front and center in his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis. He never tired of repeating it throughout his papacy.
That central element is the truth that, if human beings want to understand themselves, their model is Jesus. As John Paul put it:
Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. (Redemptor hominis, 8, emphasis added)
Reread that text carefully. Jesus Christ "fully reveals man to himself." John Paul did not write Jesus "fully reveals God to man." Yes, Jesus Christ is the Self-Revelation of God. But that's not where John Paul put stress. Jesus Christ is the revelation of man and his vocation.
In other words, if you want to know what it means to be human, you have one (actually, two) models. Jesus Christ. And the Blessed Virgin Mary (because, if you take seriously Our Lady's Immaculate Conception due to the prevenient grace won by her Son, she also reveals what a human being should be).
As Scripture reminds us, Jesus Christ is "like us in all things but sin." (Hebrews 4:15) That "but" might at first seem like a really important exception, given that we are all sinners. But it requires us to think about it.
God did not make man sinful. Sin was not part of the design of Creation. God made man good, indeed, "very good." (Genesis 1:28) Which means that it is not Jesus but us - all of us - who misrepresent what it means to be truly human as God made human beings. It is us, not Christ, who deviate from the norm. We are not what we are supposed to be. Sin may be universal, but it is a self-inflicted, not congenital, deformity. The truth is that, in Jesus (and Mary) we see what man - obedient to the Father - should be.
"But I'm not Jesus," you object. True. But Jesus died for you. In the Redemption, He offers you the graces needed, in the life in which you ate now, to live as God wants, to be "holy and pleasing in His sight." (R...
Traditional Liturgy
Episode 51
Tuesday, July 22, 2025 • Duration 05:59
by Randall Smith
When I get exasperated by some of the failures in contemporary liturgical practice and annoyed by the perpetual arguments over it, I am tempted to exclaim: Okay, that's it. We need to return to the traditional Catholic liturgy!
You know what I mean. The Mass in Greek. Every other liturgy is a later translation and not always a reliable one. There are good reasons why the Latin translation of the original Greek Scriptures was called "the Vulgate." It was the vulgar (that is, common) language of Italy.
Translating the text and the liturgy from its original form to the "vulgar" Latin of the common people was always questionable. Did they do it just because people couldn't understand Greek anymore? Does anyone think that's a justification for translating the liturgy? Who thinks it is important for people to hear and understand the words of the Eucharistic prayer?
I am open to those rites, such as the Maronite, that may have preserved the original Aramaic of Christ. But since the Scriptures are in Greek, I can see no reason that the liturgy shouldn't be done only (or mostly, other than the Aramaic) in Greek. The Roman form of the liturgy in Latin probably wasn't commonly used before the fourth century.
Some people claim that later liturgical changes were made "in continuity with" the earliest liturgies of the Church. But that's just silly. Can anyone imagine that Peter, Paul, James, and John never spoke the Mass out loud when they traveled from village to village? Does anyone think they whispered quietly to themselves while people knelt or wore black beanies with a little puff ball on the top and did mass at a huge, gilded altar festooned with multiple golden cherubs and candles? You wouldn't have found such things even in the medieval church.
Anyone who has ever been to a Gothic cathedral in Europe likely knows that those elaborate golden altars in the back of the church weren't added until the Baroque period. Most are tacky additions that don't match the aesthetics of the building. If the popes of the time hadn't been weak or corrupt, they would have prohibited them.
And even to speak of continuity in the Mass, as though it was a monolithic entity, is absurd. There have been over a hundred different rites in the history of the Church. Six of them are still in use. And many who attend the other five resent the notion that the Latin rite is the Mass
All one need do is attend the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom to realize that the "continuity" between that rite and the Tridentine liturgy is significantly less than what exists between the Tridentine and the Novus Ordo.
I'm not a fanatic. I am open to some of the developments that occurred up to the time of Thomas Aquinas. He would have said Mass using the Dominican rite, which differs greatly from anything you would find today. But to my mind, anything after the thirteenth century is suspect and probably shouldn't be allowed.
All the golden falderal added after 1500 are obvious corruptions. Read St. Bernard's letters about gold in churches, and you'll find that he wouldn't have tolerated it for a moment.
It was probably only allowed because some of the more disreputable bishops at the Council of Trent were over-reacting to Protestantism. If you look at some of the participants at Trent, the character of the corrupt Renaissance popes who reigned during its deliberations, and its unwarranted duration (no other council comes close to its eighteen-year duration; the next longest being four years), doesn't all this put enough doubt in your mind to suspect it might not have been a real council like Nicaea - enough to conclude we need not be bound by its so-called liturgical "reforms"?
No, I insist; it's obvious: it must be Greek or nothing. Everything else is just bad liturgy and makes a "different church." I have no doubt that if we returned the liturgy to the original Greek the churches would be full, and young people would return in droves.
Now, to be honest, ...
