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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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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, ...

By Robert Royal
A doctor who came to one of my lectures recently told me of a problem within the medical profession: with some noble exceptions, the general practitioners know less and less about almost everything, and the specialists know more and more about almost nothing. (He's a specialist himself.) I don't know if this is broadly true in medicine. I do know that it seems to describe a great deal about what goes on in the modern world.
For instance, Sigmund Freud was once believed to have finally exposed the truth about the depths of the human psyche. From what I hear, it seems that psychiatrists and psychologists have mostly moved on - to what, it's difficult to say, other than endless talking and psychoactive drugs. Yet whatever else you might say about Freud, at least he approached things through (relatively) human pathways: ancient mythologies like Oedipus, and solid Latin terms like ego, id, and superego. He probably would have laughed himself silly over terms like "sex assigned at birth," which is accepted now even by the American Medical Association.
But Freud, who wrote influential tomes like The Future of an Illusion (i.e., religion) and Civilization and Its Discontents (everyday sadness), was almost blind to the rise of the greatest evil of his time: Nazism. He only survived by fleeing from Vienna to England just before the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany. His awakening came too late to save his sisters, all in their eighties; one died in Auschwitz, another at Theresienstadt, and two at Treblinka. Even then, the master of the human psyche didn't really take the full measure of the most obvious, real-world evil in his day. He wrote a letter from the safety of London saying that he expected the Catholic Church would sort out the Nazi problem.
If only. To our shame, the Church at first tried to work with Hitler, but quickly found out that was a deadly illusion. One heroic figure, Franz Jägerstätter, refused all collaboration, even the Nazi subsidies he could have received for his children, as a poor farmer and parish sexton. He was executed, of course. Pope Benedict declared him a martyr and beatified him in 2007. It's worth watching A Hidden Life, Terrence Malik's film about him.
In the event, it was the Allied and Soviet armies that "resolved" Austrian Nazism. And thereby hangs a tale.
When we are told by Church authorities (including Pope Leo, I'm sorry to say) that "war never solves anything" (contrary to a millennium-and-a-half of just-war and tradition) or that the death penalty is "inadmissible" (Pope Francis, also departing from traditional wisdom), or are invited to believe that "social justice," or politics in general is our primary task, despite St. Augustine's warnings about the City of Man, we should beware. Because we're building Towers of Babel out of "expertise" and departing from the fuller and more modest wisdom of a long tradition.

Most people today, even many Catholics, think of tradition as a shackle on human freedom from which we must be liberated. There are always plausible reasons advanced why this is so. But single persons - even whole generations - are just a small part of the accumulated wisdom of the human race. It's through the experience of many generations in many circumstances that we indeed are liberated - from the partial and narrow views that exist at any given historical moment.
It's good to focus on Jesus, who liberates us from sin and death. But accepting that crucial truth will lead us into others. Pope Benedict was fond of quoting Hegel's remark that "Reason has a wax nose and may be turned in any direction." There were reasons given for Nazism and Communism in their day, and there are reasons today offered for "sex assigned at birth" - bad reasons that need to be confronted by right reason.
Despite some of his own occasional wobbliness on the tradition, Pope Leo has recently offered a kind of perennial wisdom to guide us through the current madhouse. Speak...

by Fr. Thomas Kuffel.
Two sisters, close to Jesus, invite Him into their home. Martha and Mary, dedicated disciples of Jesus, are also to become controversial. Martha complains because she is worried about many things, busy taking care of home and hospitality. Mary, content at the feet of Jesus, shows that she is a disciple intent upon hearing Him preach. In contrast to her sister, she is not worried. She is at rest. The two sisters have a brother also, Lazarus. He, too, plays a notorious role in the family: he dies only to have Jesus raise him from the dead.
Mary is the most controversial figure. St. Gregory the Great says she is the same woman from whom Jesus cast out seven demons. (Though other commentators are not so sure.) In any event, Luke presents Mary as a distraught woman whose sins are many, falls at the feet of Jesus, and smashes an alabaster jar filled with nard. St. Gregory, in his homily on Magdalene, declares: "She turned her crimes into so many virtues, that all that in her had despised God in sin was put to the service of God in penance."
Mary anoints Jesus not once but twice, as St. John describes it:
There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment." (John 12:2-3).
Who is this woman who causes such controversy?
In his letter concerning the feminine genius, The Dignity of Women, St. John Paul II refers to Tradition and tells us: "The Gospel of John (cf. also Mark 16: 9) emphasizes the special role of Mary Magdalene. . . . Hence she came to be called 'the apostle of the Apostles.' Mary Magdalene was the first eyewitness of the Risen Christ. (Mulieris dignitatis 16)
Not only is Mary Magdalene the first witness of the resurrection, but Christ also redeemed her from a life of sin.
Many have regarded Mary as merely a prostitute, but in reality, seven demons possessed her. Which demons possessed her we cannot say with certainty, but like other exorcisms that Jesus performed, their dramatic expulsion was memorable.
'Legions' possessed the man at Gennesaret; Jesus cast them out and sent them into a herd of pigs, which drowned. At the exorcism in the Synagogue, demons declared they know who Jesus is, the Holy One of God. They possessed a boy who convulsed and foamed at the mouth, and Jesus rebuked them. A demon possessed the Syrophoenician Woman's daughter. With a word, Jesus dismissed him. These powerful stories reveal a different, greater dimension to Mary Magdalene than being merely a prostitute.

Magdalene knew evil face to face. Like most who suffer from demonic influence, she feared for her life. Her sins controlled her life as the demons took greater control over her. Desperate for help, she turned to Jesus. Falling at his feet pleading for freedom, Jesus declared, "Your sins are forgiven." (Luke 7:48) From that moment on, Magdelene became a disciple.
Such accounts cannot be trivialized, reduced to sins of the flesh. St. Gregory says that the seven demons are the universal and deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Seven is also the number of the covenant by which the demons made the pact with her that destroyed her life.
In an instant, with a simple confession, Jesus freed her from that covenant, removed all her sins, and invited her to follow Him. A dramatic change took place. She becomes an apostle to the Apostles, filled with His Spirit, for she knows the struggle of sin and the power of Jesus
Because of her experience with evil, Magdalene focuses solely on Jesus. When He comes to visit, she wants nothing else than to partake of His presence. She, a sinner, became a saint and now wants to abide with her Savior, relishing his every word. Can this happen to us, too?
Martha, a woman with many concerns, was busy. Not that busyness is bad, but priorities need to b...

by Fr. Benedict Kiely .
Anecdotal evidence, while not necessarily without value or verity, needs solid facts to become confirmed as reality. For the last several years, there has been much talk of increasing numbers of young people, particularly men, coming to orthodox Christianity and, in particular, to the Catholic Faith. These stories now have a factual basis. More than 10,000 people were baptized or received into the Church in France last year. In other European countries and the United States, more people came into the Church at the Easter Vigil than has been the case for decades.
Something that is being talked about is actually happening.
It might, perhaps, be too soon and too dramatic to talk of a "religious revival" in the bleakly secular West. But the desire, among many who know little or nothing of Christ, to discover the ancient truths of the Christian faith is - if the Church is meant to read the "signs of the times" - something not only to be welcomed, but to be fostered, with the treasures of beauty, truth, and goodness, which the 2000-year old history of the Church possesses.
Familiarity, as the old phrase goes, "breeds contempt." But Chesterton, writing more than eighty years ago, spoke of the "fatigue of familiarity." He wrote in a time when, even if there may not have been widespread practice of the faith in Britain, there would have been, for anyone with a modicum of education, indeed even with an elementary school education, a general knowledge of the simple facts of the Christian faith.
As the American novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, the "constant reading of the Bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under language as a whole, and under the English language."
Chesterton's point, in what he called the "specially Christian case," was the near impossibility of making the "facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen man it is often true that familiarity is fatigue." He continued that, if Christ were presented as a Chinese hero (in other words, as an esoteric figure) people would be more ready to respond.
That familiarity simply does not exist anymore, and not just in Britain. Across the Western world, as three or four generations have been successfully educated into ignorance, not only of the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity, but of the works of literature, music, and art which are the products of that civilization.
Quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, the knowledge of which could be assumed in the time Chesterton was writing, are now as unfamiliar as Sanskrit verse. To speak of "seeing through a glass darkly," or the "blind leading the blind," will not register with people who are the product of four years of expensive brain deprivation, known as a bachelor's degree.

All this, however, should not be seen as an obstacle, but rather as a magnificent opportunity, indeed, a providential moment.
There is no longer the "fatigue of familiarity," because the facts of Christianity are not only unfamiliar, they are unknown.
The Catholic sociologist Stephen Bullivant has spoken of the need for a "herd immunity" to the Gospel, before the faith can once again be proclaimed with better prospects of success. Unless I am misunderstanding him, it seems to be exactly the other way around. The masses, particularly the young, are not immune to a Gospel they have never heard; they are ripe for infection.
St. Paul walked into the Areopagus, where the Acts of the Apostles tells us, people did "nothing except telling or hearing something new." So, in this new Areopagus moment, the Gospel, ever ancient and ever new, can ignite the same fire for a surprisingly similar group of people, divided by time but not desire.
It is true that many, as at that time, will mock. But others will, and are, saying "we will hear you again about this." We know that a Dionysius and a woman named Damaris were converted by Paul's preaching of the Word to them, ...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray.
When Pope Leo XIV spoke from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on the day of his election he said: "we want to be a synodal Church." The significance of this depends, of course, on how Pope Leo understands synodality. The notion of a Church that is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic - and now Synodal - isn't clear to most, because synodality is a largely unknown concept. Its meaning will emerge as Pope Leo guides the "synodal path" with the help of the General Secretariat of the Synod. That secretariat's latest contribution to the ongoing definitional saga is not encouraging.
If you're wondering about the purpose of the Synod on Synodality, the General Secretariat, in Pathways for the Implementation Phase of the Synod 2025-2028, has provided this answer: "to build a synodal Church."
If you are also wondering what synodality is, Sister Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ, Undersecretary of the Synod Secretariat, answered in a recent interview:
I often quote an Australian theologian who was at our Synod, Ormond Rush, who states "Synodality is the Second Vatican Council in a nutshell." And all our documents, and still in these pathways, in the Final Document, highlight that what we are doing is really referred to the vision of the Second Vatican Council. We can say synodality is the way to understand the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council in this stage of the reception of the Council. So, it's nothing else but just continuing the reception of the Second Vatican Council. Because the council is not yet implemented everywhere, in a way.
Nowhere in the Council documents, however, is such an idea put forth.
Sister Becquart continues:
So it's a way to be Church. That was a way, from the early Church, that we retrieve from the Second Vatican Council as a fruit highlighting that, first of all, we are all baptized; and as baptized together as people of God, we are called to carry on the mission together. So, it's calling every baptized person to be a protagonist of the mission, to help us understand that we are called to work together, exercising co-responsibility for the mission - of course, a differentiated co-responsibility because we don't all have the same vocations. There is a diversity of vocation, of charisms, of ministries. But we are people of God, journeying with the other people.
How will this "way to be Church" come about? The Synod Secretariat, referring to the Final Document [FD] of the 2024 Synodal Assembly, offers this wearisome, jargon-filled justification of a revolutionary program [jargon emphasized]:
the dynamism that animates the FD, and which the implementation phase is called to take on, derives from the continuous articulation of certain polarities and tensions that structure the life of the Church and the way in which ecclesiological categories express it. Here are some of these polarities: the whole Church and the local Church; the Church as the People of God, as the Body of Christ and as the Temple of the Spirit; the participation of all and the authority of some; synodality, collegiality and primacy; the common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood; ministry (ordained and instituted ministries) and participation in the mission by virtue of baptismal vocation without a ministerial form. Implementation of the FD requires addressing and discerning these tensions as they arise in the circumstances in which each local Church exists. The path to advance is not to seek an impossible arrangement that eliminates tension in favour of one of the sides.
Rather, in the here and now of each local Church, it will be necessary to discern which of the possible balances allows for a more dynamic service of the mission. It is likely that different decisions will be reached in different places.

The Council of Nicaea would not pass the test of synodality as it in fact accomplished the "impossible arrangement" of "eliminating tensions" by deciding "in favour of one of the sides," that is, orthodoxy was af...

By Michael Pakaluk
What is the meaning of life? I shall tell you.
That life should have "meaning" is a distinctively modern concern. In the classical world, it was enough if a life were good, successful, and reasonable. We all strive for happiness, it was said: what could "meaning" possibly add?
In the classical outlook, however, it was taken for granted that any natural reality, such as human life, inherently has a telos (i.e., an end towards which it tends). Take away that telos and one looks for a meaning distinct from that thing. In a Christian culture, testimony to the truth becomes paramount, and therefore signs, such as the crucifix.
We must define terms. Let us say that if something is such that it should point to something, then that to which it points, when it points as it should, is its "meaning." The question of whether a human life has meaning is therefore the question of whether it is such as to point.
An example may clarify. A working weathervane points in the direction of the wind. A weathervane, then, by our definition has a meaning: its meaning is the wind's direction. That is "the point of a weathervane."
It is necessary to qualify and say that something has meaning "if it is such that it should point," because a weathervane might be broken, or impeded. In such cases, it still has a point, indeed, but it does not succeed in pointing.
Human life is such that it should point, but we through sin and ignorance ruin it and impede it from pointing. Christ, however, is the Savior of life's meaning as well. Christ makes even a life of sin and death a life that can point. And Christ endows us with new ways of pointing, too, in the "order of grace."
A human life can point, and therefore it can have meaning, in each of the three ways that anything at all can point to something else.
First, something which is tending towards another points to that towards which it tends. An arrow, for instance, points to that towards which it was set flying. That is why an arrow on a sign means the direction to which the arrow would be flying, if it were a real arrow.
We were made such that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. In creating us, God let us loose towards Himself. Therefore, by nature a human life is such as to point to that which gives it rest. But more than this, through deliberate choice we can make this fact about ourselves salient, by living in such a way that it is clear that we take our final home to be union with God and the peaceable communion of angels and saints.
The clearest way of showing that a life tends to this goal, is by making sacrifices which would make no sense except for this goal. Newman calls these "ventures of faith." We might call them "pointers." Those who sacrifice their very lives in this way are called "witnesses" by the Church, "martyrs." A martyr is someone who by deliberate choice has saliently made Christ the meaning of his life.

Second, a part points to the whole of which it is a part. One vertebra found by a clever paleontologist signifies to him the whole dinosaur. An American in Paris stands for and represents his country, whether he wishes to or not. A footnote completes the meaning of a cited sentence by giving its full context.
A human life can acquire meaning in this second way insofar it shows itself to be a part of, and therefore it points to, each of the three institutions of which it is meant to be a part. These are the natural institutions of country, family, and the supernatural institution of the Church. That is why an unchurched atheist, who conceives of himself as belonging to a global network mainly - and who is childless besides, and alienated from his parents - has completely deprived his life of this second kind of meaning.
Third, that which resembles something, points to that which it resembles. A life of imitation is, to that extent, a life with meaning, since it points to what it imitates. We moderns searching for meaning have gotten it completely wrong...

By Francis X. Maier
When an ambitious man is young, his thinking is a race car. It runs full throttle toward the target of success, however he imagines it. Men of more senior years, with fewer ticks left on the clock, think differently. The mind turns to making sense of things; to getting to the heart of the matter of one's time in the world. The task becomes ordering a riot of random memories into a coherent story; the fabric of a life that has meaning.
What's needed is an experience that, like a needle, sews the past and present together, because seemingly unconnected things often aren't. Here's an example.
I've been a C.S. Lewis fan for more than fifty years. I've read nearly everything he wrote. But the Christian heart of the man himself was at least as interesting as his work.
In 1993, Anthony Hopkins played the longtime bachelor Lewis in the film Shadowlands. It's the story of Lewis's late-in-life friendship with, then love for, and then marriage to, the American poet and convert Joy Davidman Gresham. Joy died of cancer barely four years after they married, and Hopkins does a masterful job of capturing Lewis's intense suffering at her loss. It's a beautiful film. But an even better telling of the same story preceded it by nearly a decade.
In 1985, BBC Wales produced the television film C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands (available on Amazon Prime), starring Joss Ackland. On his death in 2023, age 95, Britain's The Guardian newspaper described Ackland as "a beacon of power" as an actor, "part of the backbone" of British drama, and a man of "modest goodness."
His career spanned more than 130 stage, film, and radio roles from Shakespeare to Evita to Lethal Weapon 2. But the special force of his role as a tender and suffering C.S. Lewis grew from two not-so-obvious roots. Unlike so many others in his profession, Ackland was married for fifty-one years, until her death, to the love of his life; and with her, he fathered seven children. He was also a believing Christian, and not shy about his faith.

This made his role all the more memorable as a senior demon in the HarperAudio version of Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Ackland gives a brilliantly devilish performance precisely because his Screwtape is simultaneously so urbane, bureaucratic, condescending - and cruel. Ackland brings an exquisite purity, a relentless logic, and an ingenious, unsleeping tactical mind to the demon's loathing of "the human vermin" and "hairless bipeds."
Screwtape's contempt for God in debasing the "high dignity" of the spiritual world, by polluting it with half-breed creatures of the flesh, is equally fierce. And Ackland delivers it with icy clarity. God sees humans as sons and daughters destined to share in his joy. Screwtape sees them as cattle for food.
The reader can, of course, sense all of these things on the story's original printed page. But when Ackland gives them voice, they take on a new and vivid reality.
What lives acutely in my memory is the moment when Ackland's Screwtape - in counseling a junior devil - stresses that good intentions in a human target's soul should never be feared. Quite the contrary. Hell is full of the amusingly desperate damned who intended well in life, but never did anything about it; never took the smallest step to make their fellow-feelings real.
That's the goal of a really accomplished tempter: a well-meaning paralysis in the human heart. Intentions are reassuring, but they have the substance of a mist. An unselfish act in the service of another, and the inconvenience it costs, has weight.
Christianity, as C.S. Lewis himself learned, is more than a matter of intellect. It's a matter of love. It's concrete. It sanctifies the world. Which is why the Epistle of James urges Christians to "be doers of the Word and not hearers only."
So what's the point of mentioning any of the above? Just this. I suggested at the start that sometimes an experience, like a needle, can sew together the past and the present; memor...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza
The floodplains of the Guadalupe River in Texas seem to be a place of elevated Biblical literacy. I imagine then that when the raging waters brought death and destruction, more than a few turned to Psalm 69:
I am sunk in the abysmal swamp
where there is no foothold;
I have reached the watery depths;
the flood overwhelms me.
But I pray to you, O LORD,
for the time of your favor, O God!
In your great kindness answer me
with your constant help.
That psalm will be prayed at daily Mass today. And more than a few congregants, and perhaps a few preachers, will think about those who were overwhelmed by the floods in Texas.
The twentieth anniversary of the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 fell last Christmas, a reminder of the ferocity of the waters, which killed more than 225,000 people, displaced millions more and ravaged coastal towns for hundreds of miles in fourteen countries.
Floodwaters remind us that the prevailing Biblical view of the waters is one of chaos, disorder, danger, and death. That's hard to appreciate in an affluent 21st-century country.
The waters have been domesticated. In the summer, they are for recreation, sailboats, and jet skis; in winter, floating hotels cruise the oceans. Year round, unimaginable quantities of freight are shipped serenely downriver - and upriver - and across the oceans.
In the ancient world, contrariwise, there was fishing and transport and gentle rains to soften the fields, but always in the context of waters that could kill. The Biblical view is obscured when waters are yet another part of nature conquered by human ingenuity.
A typical Catholic couple, asked about the symbolism of water in the Sacrament of Baptism, say it means that their baby will be washed spiritually clean. A good answer in a culture where daily bathing is the norm. It's also a true answer, for baptism washes away all sin, original and actual.
Few parents will recall St. Paul: "When we were baptized into his death, we were placed into the tomb with him." (Romans 6:4) Who thinks of the baptismal font as a tomb? What parents would lay their newborn in same?
Baptism by immersion makes "the tomb" clearer. We die if held underwater long enough; even a short time can be fearful and anxious. A priest who performs baptisms by immersion takes care precisely to avoid such fear and anxiety. The baby (or adult) is only under water briefly.

When St. Paul wrote of the waters of baptism as a tomb, it would have resonated. A watery death was not rare. Paul himself knew the mortal danger of shipwreck. When the late Pope Francis would refer to the Mediterranean Sea as a vast "cemetery" for migrants, he was evoking ancient Biblical imagery.
The response to the flash floods on the Guadalupe River illustrated the dominant view now: that the waters should be domesticated, under our control. Leave aside the particulars of what should or should not have been done by whomever, the premise is that we can control the waters. Or at least we think we can.
There are implications for baptism as the ordinary path to salvation. If, in the natural order, we can and ought to save ourselves, is there need any longer to pray Psalm 69? If we can tame the natural waters, do we need saving from supernatural perils?
Today's Old Testament reading introduces us to Moses. (Exodus 2:1-15) A Levite woman puts her three-month-old son into a papyrus basket and leaves him among the reeds at the riverbank. The mother would have chosen a safe place, where the basket could easily be found, rather than setting the baby hurtling along the main current.
The animated film, Prince of Egypt, imagines something different. Baby Moses was threatened by crocodiles and hippopotami and the churning oars of Pharaoh's ships. The animators knew that the Biblical waters were fraught with dangers.
In due course, Pharaoh's daughter discovers the baby-laden basket when she comes to bathe and decides to adopt the child, calling him "Moses, for she said, 'I drew him ou...

by R.J. Snell.
Elon Musk recently promised to improve his version of an AI chatbot, nicknamed Grok. The fix did not go well, to put it mildly. In one description, Grok was intentionally designed to be "an 'anti-woke' competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT." But Grok seemed indistinguishable from its competitors. The fix, as was widely noted in recent days, whatever else it was, certainly was "anti-woke," with Grok turning into a holocaust denier, casting aspersions against Jews, threatening the Turkish president, and Grok giving itself the new nickname of "MechaHitler."
More than anything, the episode reveals, as sober-minded people know, that artificial intelligence is not intelligent. Large language models scour pre-existing texts and are highly efficient at pattern recognition. But they entirely lack the capacity for judgment or an experience of reality allowing them to engage in those second-order reflections typical of rational entities to see if a statement corresponds in any meaningful sense with primary reality as reality presents itself for our understanding and judgment. The so-called "hallucinations" of AI are good indicators of this fact.
Even more importantly, the failure of AI to exhibit intelligence provides an opportunity to tackle the actual elephant in the room. It isn't so much that AI is failing, but that the materialist, physicalist, and reductive visions of intelligence, which guide and govern AI boosters and coders, fail as an account of consciousness and intelligence.
As Adam Frank notes, "the current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw" infecting not only AI but most of the relevant disciplines, namely, it has overlooked "our experience." Modern science, he argues, has swiveled between two competing accounts of consciousness - physicalism or idealism - with physicalism reducing consciousness to the "physical mechanics occurring in the neurons" that (supposedly) generate consciousness itself. Idealism, on the other hand, attempts to free mind from matter and allow it a free-floating existence.
For anyone formed in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, these are not, and cannot be, live options. As rational animals we are entirely animal and entirely rational; we are not two distinct substances of body and self, nor do we simply have bodies or have minds. Instead, we are one being with two distinct principles, body and soul. And while the soul is the form and act of the body, it isn't a distinct entity from the body, and certainly the body cannot explain its own existence, operations, or life.
So, when a philosopher like Thomas Nagel suggests that our experience of subjectivity defies attempts to reduce it, or when Frank insists that experience, or "what it is like to exist," surpasses thinking of the mind as if it were an electromagnet, we are not surprised.
"The soul is the form of the body," but the soul is embodied. The soul does not hover above the body, nor is it a ghost haunting the machine somehow. The brain does, in fact, function when we think, and this is not at all odd or surprising. What would be surprising is if an MRI showed no brain activity while we were thinking.
At the same time, the brain does not explain the experience we have of ourselves as thinking, or feeling, or imagining, or tasting. Whatever the MRI notes does not even attempt to explain the experience. It points to something other than the experience, namely, the material substrate conditioning the experience. But the operations of the intelligence are not reducible to that substrate, and certainly consciousness of those operations - what we call self-consciousness - isn't what a material explanation even tries to articulate.

In the 1930s, Edmund Husserl was already exploring the crisis in science, where the contents of consciousness were thoroughly misunderstood and treated as if they were equivalent to the empirical objects of modern science, and thus reduced to what could be treated as measurable, quantifi...

by Msgr. Robert J. Batule.
When I was ordained a priest in 1985, my first pastor was about to turn 50 years old; he was a member of the Ordination Class of 1962. He saw himself and others saw him too as a "Vatican II" priest. There were meetings galore, a lot of "co-ministry" with women Religious, and, in discussions, frequent references to the marginalized and minorities of various kinds. But I don't recall that we had a single Holy Hour in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament in my five-year assignment there, nor do I remember hearing a word against co-habitation in the parish Pre-kayne-ah program. Moreover, I have no memory of any notices in the weekly bulletin announcing seminars on the topic of natural family planning.
There are always going to be different pastoral emphases, even in what might be regarded as not particularly ideological parishes. What developed, however, in many post-conciliar parishes are what we now call "safe spaces," meaning places you could go and not be reminded of words and ideas you don't like. When the "safe space" is breached after decades in some cases, you can well imagine the displeasure in certain quarters. But it was bound to happen at some point.
Over the last few years, men ordained priests in the 1970s have been marking their fiftieth anniversaries and are retiring from the active ministry. They are being replaced by men who weren't even alive in the 1970s! Indeed, the men in the cohort of younger priests now were only ordained in the last two decades. These younger priests are doctrinally more conservative than the priests they are replacing. This is not just anecdotal; the survey research bears this out too.
This has produced not a little bit of friction as the "spaces," to use the parlance invoked above, have gone from "safe" to "unsafe." Again, not in every instance, but changes are apparent in the pulpit, at the altar and in the Confessional, and in the classroom where there are parishes with elementary and high schools. In contradistinction to the examples I used from my first assignment, Holy Hours are regular occurrences in many parishes now, Pre-kayne-ah presentations are more apt to point out not just the incongruity but the sinfulness in cohabitation, and, relatedly, that marital chastity is not attained so long as contraception is practiced.
We always have to be careful with the words we place immediately before "Catholicism" in our speech or in our writing. We are, after all, referring to our faith, which is not, taxonomically, a political phenomenon. Nevertheless, there is a clear pertinence to conservatism since faith has attributes that most definitely tend in the direction of preserving whole and undiminished what is being "handed on." In this sense, then, there are distinctive biblical and ecclesial correlatives with conservatism.
Bishop Robert Barron, in the aftermath of the National Eucharistic Congress last year, commented that "liberal Catholicism could never have pulled off what happened in Indianapolis." What impressed him the most about the Congress was the sight of the outdoor procession with the Blessed Sacrament throughout the city streets of the Indiana capital.

Seeing so many thousands and thousands of Catholics take part in this devotion, along with their reverence and piety was deeply moving to Bishop Barron and no doubt countless others who saw what he saw. This caused Bishop Barron to observe that against the reverence and piety for the Eucharistic Lord, liberalism in religion tends "to reduce the supernatural to the natural."
If the Eucharist is merely a symbol, as a majority of Catholics think and believe it is, what you would want to do is re-define the meaning of the Real Presence and transubstantiation. For the transcendent and ontological character of these terms would need to be re-interpreted so that they focus on ourselves and not on the Lord.
That, unfortunately, is the trend that got started decades ago. It began with catechesis in the 1...

By Jeffrey Dirk Wilson.
Across hundreds of miles in Poland, the land is flat. Likewise, Częstochowa, though the monastery which houses the miraculous icon of the Black Madonna sits atop a hill. The choice of the site probably had much to do with its defensibility. It's the only monastery that I have visited which has ramparts.
The one hundred Pauline monks - named for St. Paul the Hermit c. A.D. 345 - who live there, as well as an extensive cadre of sisters, staff the premises. The monks are responsible for the many Masses each day. The sisters mind the museums and the tourist souvenir booths. How does one resist an elderly sister who looks you straight in the eye and smiles her very sweetest smile when she asks, "Would you like to buy something?"
There is a large church, but the icon, which is the centerpiece here, is in a smaller chapel. A Pole might consider it heresy to hear that as icons go, this one is not especially remarkable. In fact, one sees very little of the icon itself, only the faces and hands of Our Lady and her infant son. She is called the "Black" Madonna because of the darkness of the image. Centuries ago, before a million candles had been burnt in her presence, the tone might have been lighter.
The reason that one sees so little of the actual icon is that she is dressed in elaborate, even spectacular clothes.
The official guidebook says that there are two stories of the icon's origin, one of pious legend, the other of the art historians. The guidebook only tells the first of these stories. The board on which the icon is painted was (supposedly) taken from the table used by the Holy Family when they were at home in Nazareth. St. Luke got hold of it, cut out sections and painted portraits of Mother and Child. One hangs in Florence; the other is the Black Madonna.
Empress Mother Helena (c A.D. 246-330) - who went to the Holy Land, then under the rule of her son, Constantine (c. A.D. 227-337), the Roman Emperor - had it brought to Constantinople.

Meanwhile, in A.D. 476 the Roman Empire fell in the West but continued in the East with Constantinople as its capital until A.D. 1453. During that millennium, the emperors felt little but disdain for the rulers in the West, where once their predecessors had ruled. But occasionally, circumstances constrained emperors to seek help from rulers they despised.
In such a moment, the Black Madonna left Constantinople. Through the several hands of Eastern European rulers, she arrived in Częstochowa, where she has remained ever since.
It is nearly certain that St. Luke did not paint the icon. Art historians suggest it dates back to the ninth century, at least. In any event, the veneration of the faithful has hallowed this icon for a thousand years - and perhaps for a few centuries more.
The Poles - the ones whom I have met anyway - can recite their history over the past thousand years. They might slight the Lithuanians, though for some centuries, the Poles and Lithuanians formed the Commonwealth, sometimes just called, with great pride, "The Republic." But Polish lands, too, exchanged hands multiple times over the centuries.
Whatever importance Our Lady of Częstochowa has had for Polish national awareness before the sundering by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the centrality of her shrine for Polish nationhood increased with every year from the tripartite division of Poland in A.D. 1795 through the period of Soviet hegemony.
Cardinal Karol Wojtyła (later as Pope John Paul II) underscored that importance as he plotted and philosophized over modern Polish freedom.

Poland is basically a conservative, Catholic country. Crucifixes hang in train stations. At this holiest of Polish Catholic shrines, the reverence is profound.
There is a brass railing around the edge of the chapel where the icon hangs over the altar. People queue behind that railing. When they come to the altar area, they kneel and then walk on their knees behind the altar. Only when they emerge from the altar area ...

By Joseph R. Wood
My summer philosophical reading includes two Thomases: St. Thomas Aquinas, who needs no introduction here, and Thomas Nagel, New York University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus. He is an atheist of Jewish descent.
Whatever you read in the next few paragraphs, don't believe that Nagel is a quasi-Catholic philosopher. His book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, has to be enjoyed on his own terms.
Nagel succinctly rejects the "reductive materialism" - the notion that all of reality can be explained by material processes moving through time with no given end (telos) - that is "widely assumed to be the only serious possibility."
The natural sciences are dominated by the insistence that "the physical sciences could in principle provide a theory of everything." Under this view (often acting as an ideology), all reality can be reduced to matter and the principles by which its interactions unfold.
Nagel admires the physical sciences as they seek to understand reality within their domains. But he rejects the possibility that material causes alone could bring into being animals with consciousness and reason. He labels such theories "causal" explanations of what is.
He sees in the universe a place where "mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature." Consciousness and reason are not outcomes of strictly material Darwinian evolution. Rather, they point to a telos in the order of things that guides or directs evolution and the development of the universe.
This is a "teleological" explanation of reality. One kind of teleological view is theist, with God invoked as the propagator of the telos, or as the telos Himself.
Nagel is sympathetic to the arguments of those theists who, accepting an intelligent design of creation, point out logical and evidential flaws of materialist reduction theories. These arguments are often dismissed as unworthy of consideration merely because they are religious.
The reigning material Darwinists "are armed to the teeth against arguments from religion." The objections to material reductionism are, says Nagel, worthy of consideration on logical and philosophical grounds. But the materialists close their ears for no sound reason.
Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems these iconoclasts [critics of materialist reductionism] pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
When I see an atheist philosopher referring to the "orthodox scientific consensus" as an icon and its religious critics as unfairly maligned "iconoclasts," I know I'm reading an interesting book. I'd like to have listened to Nagel chat with Chesterton.

Nagel says a great deal about why the materialist explanations fail to explain consciousness and reason. But he's circumspect about why the theist teleological explanation - God - doesn't convince him. He comments that he lacks "the sensus divinitatis that enables - indeed compels - so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purposes as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling." He himself is even "strongly averse to the idea" of theism.
That is one example of what a lovely book this is. Nagel writes with clarity, occasional humor, and generosity. He treats those of different views seriously and respectfully, often having interesting arguments. He acknowledges the importance of individual inclinations in how we see the world. The book moves along with charity and humility.
His penchant for common sense is welcome.
If causal and theist explanations of reality don't work for Nagel, what explains "what is"? He is drawn to a natural (versus supernatural) teleology in which the telos of the universe is embedded within nature itself (but not put the...

By Stephen P. White
Human beings, having a rational nature, are free to choose between good and evil. This freedom constitutes, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, "the highest of natural endowments." We are not only free to choose between good and evil, but we are also responsible for those choices. We are responsible for the intentions by which we act, for the actions themselves, and, to some degree, for the consequences of those actions.
Our laws account for all three of these facets of moral action, which is why we distinguish, for example, between murder and manslaughter in criminal cases, and sometimes award damages in wrongful death cases even if no criminal offense was proven.
Even outside of the legal context, we Christians often think of moral actions in terms of culpability, that is, in terms of guilt or innocence. And there is good reason for this. We know that we will be judged by our actions and judged by One who knows not just our outward actions but our very hearts: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
There is much more, however, to our moral actions than culpability. Our free choice to do good or to do evil does much more than impute guilt or innocence on account of which we are liable to judgment.
Our moral choices, in a limited but crucial way, make us who we are. Man is not only capable of choosing between good and evil, he is capable of choosing to make himself good or evil.
God does not change, though we do. We are never simply static. Of course, we change physically over time. Our bodies grow, age, and die. Some changes are irreversible: our coming into being as a unique and immortal creation, for example, is irrevocable (though not of our own choosing). Grace changes us, too. Some sacraments even bring about a permanent change in the very nature of the one who receives them, what the Church calls an "ontological" change. Baptism accomplishes this. So does Holy Orders.
But we change in mind and spirit, too. We learn (and forget) things. We change in our moral habits as well, growing in virtue or chaining ourselves to vice. These are changes within ourselves that we do choose. Grace aids us, of course, but by the free choices we make, we become more and more (or less and less, as the case may be) the men and women we were created to be.
The whole drama of every human life plays out between the person one is and the person one is becoming. Human freedom is precisely that gift by which, through obedience to the truth and with the assistance of grace, man is able to act in such a way as to grow in the excellence for which he was made.

This teleological understanding of moral action and human freedom lies at the very heart of the Church's teaching about the human person and her understanding of the vocation of every person. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor:
Human acts are moral acts because they express and determine the goodness or evil of the individual who performs them. They do not produce a change merely in the state of affairs outside of man but, to the extent that they are deliberate choices, they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits.
This understanding of moral action is hardly new. The ancient Greeks understood it. The Church Fathers understood it. In fact, to underscore his earlier point, Pope John Paul II cites the great 4th-century saint, Gregory of Nyssa:
All things subject to change and to becoming never remain constant, but continually pass from one state to another, for better or worse. . . .Now, human life is always subject to change; it needs to be born ever anew. . . .But here birth does not come about by a foreign intervention, as is the case with bodily beings. . .it is the result of a free choice. Thus we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as...

By Robert Royal
Pope Leo will have celebrated the new Mass for the Common Home (or Care of Creation, Missa pro custodia creationis) in Rome by the time this appears today. It isn't a radical recasting of the liturgy - on paper. It mostly just introduces several prayers reminding believers that God created the world and placed us here within the Garden "to cultivate and care for it."(Genesis 2:15) As with the controversies over the Traditional Latin Mass, however, the significance of the Creation Mass goes far beyond the bare words to deep questions.
This Mass clearly has been long in preparation, maybe ever since Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato si' ("Care for Our Common Home"), though it was only announced, unexpectedly, on July 3, as was the first celebration only six days later. As with that encyclical, controversy is inevitable.
In the Christian tradition, Creation (not mere "nature," much less the reductive term "the environment") has often been described as God's second book of revelation, alongside the Bible, the first book, which gives us fuller understanding of precisely what it is that God made.
It's only very vaguely a "common home," at least since the Fall. We have here now "no abiding city." (Heb.13:14) Several recent popes have rightly emphasized our responsibility to care for what God has given. They less often have recognized the mortal struggle with nature that our forebears experienced. And we still do today. Floods (like the one that just carried off over a hundred people in Texas), droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wild animals, crop failures, diseases, and more.
As God said to Adam:
Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake;
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. . .(Genesis 3:17-19)
As farmers and even gardeners know, weeds, insects, and other pests proliferate in the "natural" state now. Fruits and vegetables take careful and constant attention, including wise and strong measures against what is otherwise "natural." This perpetual human struggle usually gets lost in current "environmental" debates, even within the Church.
It's easier to ignore such truths now than in the past because the whole world today benefits from technological inventions, which have brought us great improvements in the availability of food, shelter, energy, and health. These gains have also brought considerable losses in harm to the land, oceans, air, and our very sense of our own bodies as part of God's world. (Being "born in the wrong body" makes no sense to anyone with a Biblical perspective.)

We've recently become more aware of the downside of the "progress" of recent centuries and less aware of the benefits. Pope Francis rightly wrote of how the loss of a sense of Creation makes us into rationalists and technologists, mere "masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters." (Laudato Si 11) He and other Churchmen, however, have tended to neglect the role of inventors, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs in producing goods and the means to distribute them.
At the Royal Portal to the Cathedral in Chartres, the arts and sciences are presented as repairing the damage done to Creation by the Fall. We would do well to recover that medieval perspective, alongside proper attention to technological harm, today.
At the same time, in a fallen world, populated by fallen human beings, all we can ever achieve is a precarious balance, amidst various tradeoffs. We live longer and physically better than in the past, but also more precariously. All it would take in our time is the failure of the electric grid or the disruption of the Internet or interruption of the flow of food and other goods from farm to city to produce chaos and death on a glo...

By Randall Smith.
Many of us know that we're supposed to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow Christ. We might also know that Christ, although He is the Son of God and the Son of Man, the great messianic figure prophesied in Daniel (7:13-14), is also the "Suffering Servant," whose sufferings bring about our redemption, described in four "servant songs" in Isaiah. (42:1 - 53:12)
Knowing all this, we might still wonder: Why must we suffer? The large number of dead in the flash-flooding in Texas, where I live, for instance, raises the question anew. Why?
We don't want to turn Christianity into a cult of suffering - suffering for its own sake in a church for those "tough enough to take it." There are many things admirable about the Stoics, but a theology based on a Savior who weeps at the death of a friend and whose chief act is called "the Passion" is not, at heart, Stoic.
In Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, Jerry Cruncher wants his wife to stop "flopping" - going down on her knees to pray - because he thinks it will just bring more suffering and poverty, and he has enough of that already! Don't we all? So why does suffering play such a large part in Christian spirituality, given that suffering isn't something we naturally incline to, but painstakingly try to avoid?
The first thing we might point out is that, in St. Paul's letters, suffering is part of the "death to self" that is necessary because of our sinful selfishness. But our goal is to "rise with Christ." Still, let's not soft-pedal it. Putting others first before ourselves isn't easy. It's like a little "death," a death of the sinful self so that a selfless "self" can arise.
Consider how hard it is to go to someone you know you've violated or betrayed and say: "I am truly sorry." We like to feel big and confident, but saying "I'm sorry" can make one feel very small. What a jerk I was! It's hard. But necessary.
So too, in a fallen world filled with fallen people like you, other people will disappoint you. Before long, they'll screw up, and you will need to "take it" and not "pay it forward" to others. You may have experienced this when you get yelled at by your boss, so you go home and yell at your spouse, who then yells at the kids, who then go out and yell at their friends, who go home and kick the dog.
It just keeps rippling outward. Christians are called upon to be "circuit breakers" - to interrupt that vicious cycle of anger and abuse. But becoming a circuit breaker involves sacrifice and suffering. You have to take it without dishing it out. It can make you feel small - like a nobody - in a world of people who enjoy "lording it over" others.

Things will disappoint us. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get the great job, sometimes you don't. If there were no chance of losing, there would be no challenge, no excitement, and no sense of attaining something significant. But there's no sugar coating it: losing hurts.
If you're not ready for that suffering, you'll probably just quit. One of the best things we can teach young people is not only how to set goals for themselves, but also how to react when they fail. Because in this world, they certainly will fail, probably a lot. They need to learn to embrace that suffering if they're ever going to rise again.
Sometimes suffering results from putting our hopes in the wrong things. In any state of existence shy of the Beatific Vision, nothing can fully satisfy us. The sooner we recognize that this is a source of our dissatisfaction, the sooner we can look for things that will truly satisfy and fulfill us. Suffering caused by the insufficiency of the world is often God's way of calling us back to Him, who alone can fulfill us.
There are other reasons we suffer. In this fallen world, being just or bringing about justice for others is rarely easy, nor are the sacrifices needed for temperance and courage. If justice were easy, everyone would be doing it. As it is, people who work for justi...

By John M. Grondelski .
The New York Times recently published an op-ed by Jessica Grose entitled "Motherhood Should Come with a Warning Label." A conservative poster on X tweeted about it as yet one more example of the Left's anti-motherhood bias.
Now I would not be surprised if Ms. Grose took that view, but in this case, it's not completely true. Yes, she feints left. But our politics are so polarized that people don't read very carefully (or maybe hope that you don't).
Catholic social thought (CST) is controversial because it does not fit comfortably in the political categories of "right" and "left." Ideological Catholicism from either side cherry-picks CST to further a political agenda. Real Catholicism lets faith shape one's politics.
Although it may gore the sacred oxen of those who worship at the altar of Adam Smith, the Grose essay has important things to say in support of CST. As one woman summed up Grose's thesis: "[O]ur society and economic systems are built off taking my labor as a mother for granted." That's the "motherhood penalty."
Money, of course, isn't everything - especially when it comes to having and raising children - but it's not nothing, either.
In his most famous encyclical, which inaugurated modern Catholic social doctrine, Pope Leo XIII spoke in 1891 of a living and just wage as one "sufficient to enable [a man] comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children. . .[and] by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings [for old age]." (Rerum novarum, 46)
He spoke of one person as the wage earner (per the custom of his time, the father) to support a family, i.e., feed and clothe them, put a roof over their heads, and squirrel something away for old age. These are not radical wants.
Any observer of modern America must admit that the Leonine vision is almost totally absent from our social policies and even our default assumptions about family life. To achieve the things Leo XIII deemed to be part of what a living wage should afford requires, in reality in today's America, two wage-earners.

The consequences for women are not insignificant. In practice, it means that dedication to raising one's children is out of reach for most mothers, except for a privileged few or those unusually committed to the task, despite the costs. And the consequences for stay-at-home moms are long-term: as Grose notes, they stretch "all the way to retirement."
Some conservatives will say that these consequences are a function of how women choose to work. They generally drop in and out of the job market and often prefer part-time work so that they may also spend time with their children. Their financial profile, therefore, differs from the classical model for men.
That much is true. But the catch in viewing things this way is that "work" by definition means paid economic activity outside the home. And economic activity inside the home in childrearing is regarded as not valuable. It's treated as not valuable because it carries no price tag. And, in a world where the mortgage does, like it or not, parenthood often becomes expendable.
A woman devoting a substantial part of her life to her children is not just not making money. She is actually paying for that devotion. She is financially penalized for being a mother.
She gets no wages in a society whose price structure presupposes two-wage earners. Without wages, she loses contributions in both time and money into Social Security, meaning her eventual old-age benefits will be smaller and she will likely take much longer to be fully vested in terms of qualifying quarters.
If a mother caring for her children could rely on children caring for their mother in her old age (as was once the norm), there might be some balance here. But neither socio-cultural expectations nor the job market for young people support that today.
If she eventually gets into the paid-job market, it is likely to be later and, because of her years outside it, likely result in relegation to lower...

By Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky.
Like an internecine tribal war, an emerging pastoral problem within the Latin Rite revolves around an alleged irreconcilability between the post-conciliar new Mass (Novus Ordo) and the pre-conciliar, so-called Tridentine Mass, also known as the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). The difficulties affect parish communities and even families. Some of the tension is historical and healthy. Other forms are unjust, uncharitable, and unnecessary.
Those of us who have lived through the post-Vatican II turmoil recall that the pre-Vatican II accusation was paralyzing. A pre-Vatican II person stood accused of legalism, triumphalism, and intolerance. Today, many proponents of the TLM accuse fellow Catholics who attend Novus Ordo Masses as post-Vatican II.
Pope Francis' restrictions on the TLM did not resolve tensions, as he said he intended, but fueled discontent. And recent revelations that most of the world's bishops did not view the older Mass as a problem have stoked fires once more.
The Fathers of Vatican II taught that new liturgical change "should in some way grow organically from forms already existing." (Sacrosanctum Concilium 23) They did not mandate the vernacular, but permitted it (and did not envision that the Roman Canon would depart from the Latin). Pope John Paul II's doctrinal chief, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, tirelessly argued that a "hermeneutic of continuity" in liturgy and doctrine would eventually heal the perceived Vatican II rupture.
Sober Churchmen could have suppressed irreverent innovations: "Hootenanny Masses," folk Masses, liturgical dance, narcissistic priests, and the many violations of liturgical guidelines. But ill-advised changes wounded liturgical practices. Most importantly, faith in the Real Presence suffered.
In the 1970s and 1980s, authorities often labeled an orthodox seminarian as archconservative, pre-Vatican II, and rigid. Although occasionally naïve and immature, he held fast to the doctrines of the Catholic faith, especially the teaching on contraception and abortion. He preferred traditional sacred hymnody and objected to the vapid Glory and Praise Jesuit hymnal. He was a liturgical lawman and hoped priests would faithfully read the words of the Mass, accompanied by the prescribed gestures.

He silently endured the seminary authorities who forced everyone to stand (rather than kneel) during the Canon of the Mass. He rejected the bizarre innovation of liturgical dance, the abomination of clown Masses (sic), and a whole array of liturgical nonsense that haunts elderly Catholics today with flashback memories. A "pre-Vatican II" seminarian read the documents of Vatican II with a critical and faithful mind.
The typical "archconservative pre-Vatican II rigid" seminarian did not oppose the Novus Ordo. He lamented liturgical abuse and bad liturgical translations. In the 1990s, over 2,000 English-speaking Novus Ordo priests raised alarms over the revised liturgical translation. The bureaucratic plan was to desacralize the vocabulary (eliminate words such as spirit, holy, and Only Begotten) and distort the translation towards a feminist ideology. The translation wars continued until proponents of an accurate translation of the Latin Roman Missal declared victory with the release of a good English translation in 2011.
The return to relative liturgical stability and reverence enabled the restoration of the TLM - beginning with the Ecclesia Dei initiative of Pope John Paul II and continuing with the policies of Pope Benedict. Many hoped the reintroduction of the TLM into Church practice would help the Novus Ordo mature with the help of its elder brother.
The widespread celebration of the TLM encourages priests to reinforce and incorporate many of the reverent gestures of the TLM into the Novus Ordo without violence. Among the compatibilities: The crisp and reverent orans posture, downcast eyes (which immunizes a priest from the virus of narcissism), traditional sacred hymnody, celebr...

By Dominic V. Cassella
In the Gospel of John, our Lord is recorded as saying "I AM," the Greek "ego eimi," over forty times. The phrase should call to mind for the reader the episode in Exodus 3:14, when Moses encounters God and the burning bush. Moses asks for the name of God and the voice returns: "I AM."
St. Hilary of Poitiers tells us in his treatise of the Trinity that when he was a pagan and came across these words from Exodus, he knew - because of his philosophical training - that the speaker of these words must be the one and only, true God.
However, not all of the "I AM" statements are without qualification. Among these forty or so "I AM" statements in the Gospel of John, seven are attached to a predicate: "I am the bread of life" (6, Verse 35), "I am the light of the world" (8, Verse 12), "I am the door" (10, Verse9), "I am the good shepherd" (10, Verse11), "I am the resurrection and the life" (11, Verse 25), "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (14, Verse 6), and "I am the true vine" (15, Verse 1).
The names as presented by John seem to demonstrate what is called a "chiastic" structure. The first and the last statement parallel and relate to each other, just as the second and the penultimate statements, as do the third and fifth - each pair mirroring the other until the pattern, like an archway, arrives at its summit and interpretive cornerstone.
Classic examples of chiastic structure exist in both Sacred Scripture and secular literature. The story of Noah, the Gospel of Mark, and many of the psalms, along with Dante's Divine Comedy and Homer's Odyssey, all exhibit this literary form - where ideas are arranged symmetrically to emphasize a central theme or turning point.
Notably, John's prologue uses the literary device to focus on John 1:12 - that believing in God is what makes us children of God. And likewise, it seems that the same literary tool is being used through the "I AM" statements to emphasize the fact that Jesus is the "Good Shepherd."
In fact, if you exclude John 21, that "Jesus is the Good Shepherd" is arguably the central thematic statement of the Gospel. And, when you factor back in John 21, what you have is an epilogue where Jesus now makes Peter his Vicar and Shepherd of His Church.
The Church Fathers frequently saw something important in Jesus' singling out of Peter in the last chapter of the Gospel of John. From John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Jerome to Theophylact of Bulgaria and Thomas Aquinas, those who comment on this Gospel see in Christ's command to Peter to "Feed my Sheep" and "Follow me" a reaffirmation (or even reinstitution) of primacy.
It seems that Peter had abandoned his role as "rock" when, in fear of being attacked by the Jews, he chose to deny Jesus Christ. Such a denial is both a great moral, but also theological failure on the part of Peter. In fact, if we think about where we get our word heresy, that is the Greek haireó, meaning "I choose," we might even call Peter's denial the ultimate heresy.

With the election of Leo XIV, we would do well to remind ourselves and consider deeply the foundations and implications of the Chair of St. Peter, that the pope is to be the Shepherd of Christ who feeds His sheep.
Indeed, in light of Diane Montagna's recent discovery of a CDF report that undermines the rationale of Pope Francis' Traditionis Custodes (which limited the use of the Traditional Latin Mass), allegedly because the bishops of the world were concerned about it (they weren't), understanding the papacy, synodality, and their limits is especially relevant today.
As one finds throughout history, knowing the full extent and limits of papal authority has resulted in a large range of opinions and fiery debate. Ultramontanism and Tradition: The Role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Faith, a 500-page anthology edited by Peter Kwasniewski, gathers together 50 articles that shed light on this subject from authors such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, Thomas Pink, Edward Feser, Bisho...

by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
In these days when everyone talks of rights and few of duties, it is important for us Americans to recall that the Declaration of Independence is also a Declaration of Dependence. The Declaration of Independence asserts a double dependence: dependence on God and dependence on law as derived from God.
Where do we get our right of free speech? Where do we get freedom of conscience? Whence is derived the right to own property? Do we get these rights and liberties from the State? If we did, the State could take them away. Do we get them from the federal government in Washington? If we did, the federal government could take them away.
Whence comes the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Read the Declaration of Independence and there find the answer: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Notice these words: The Creator has endowed men with rights and liberties; men got them from God! In other words, we are dependent on God, and that initial dependence is the foundation of our independence.
Suppose we interpret independence, as some liberal jurists do, as independence of God; then rights and liberties come either from the State, as Bolshevism contends, or from the dictators, as Nazism and Fascism believe. But if the State or the dictator is the creator of rights, then the State or the dictator can dispossess men of their rights.
That is why in those countries where God is most denied, man is most tyrannized, and where religion is most persecuted, man is most enslaved. It is only because we are dependent on God that we are independent as persons from the total will of any man on earth.
Let us not think that by denying God we will have purchased independence. The pendulum of the clock that wanted to be free from its point of suspension found that on becoming independent of its suspension, it was no longer free to swing. The Communists and the Nazis and the Fascists who denied God as the source of their freedom got in the end the inglorious freedom of State prisoners.
Democracy is based not on the divine right of kings but on the divine right of persons. Each person has a value because God made him, not because the State recognizes him. The day we adopt in our democracy the already widespread ideas of some American jurists that right and justice depend on convention and the spirit of the times, we shall write the death warrant of our independence. . . .
The Declaration of Independence, I repeat, is a Declaration of Dependence. We are independent of dictators because we are dependent on God. Because we are dependent on God, it follows that it is religion's first duty to preserve that relationship between man and his Creator.
Religion and democracy, therefore, are not the same. Some religious leaders never once in their discourses mention the name of God, but they actually define religion as democracy. Certain alarmists, when a personal representative of the president was sent to the Holy Father, shrieked against union of Church and State - but they do not protest against the identification of religion and democracy, which is an insult to both religion and democracy.
If religion is democracy, then let us drop religion and become State servants; if democracy is religion, then let us scrap democracy and enter a monastery. Religion is not democracy. The two are as different as soul and body.

Religion is primarily for the salvation of man's soul, and democracy is primarily for the prosperity and common good of the nation. God is not Caesar, and Caesar is not God. Have our so-called called religious leaders forgotten: "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and to God, the things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21)?
Once religion abdicates its soul-saving mission as its primary end, it becomes as ridiculous a...

By Michael Pakaluk.
God's plan for a person's support in old age can be stated in five words: children, and the extended family.
The Church teaches that this is affirmed by the Fourth Commandment. "Honor your father and your mother" means to obey them when under their care, and to love and honor them always, which includes providing them with the necessities of life when they are old and infirm. "Children must give their parents material and moral support in old age and in times of illness, loneliness, or distress." (CCC 2218)
It's just that children repay their parents, treating their parents as once their parents treated them. The incentives are sound also: parents have an incentive to have children, to raise them well, to act towards each other so that their children will continue to love them - and to care for themselves, ultimately, by caring for others.
In cases where the couple cannot have children, or where the children have perished by war or disease, then - by "subsidiarity" - the extended family first should step in to act in their stead, much the way Elizabeth's kinswoman, Mary, helped her.
One may consider which is the more serious obligation, to care for the children one has begotten, or to care, when necessary, for those who have begotten you? Certainly, the latter is a highly serious obligation. Christ himself inveighed against those Pharisees who nullified the Commandment, teaching that children could withhold such care on the grounds that the available resources had already been declared "Corban," that is, dedicated to God. (Mark 7:11)
Arguably, our own Corban today is so-called Social Security "insurance." Suppose an elderly couple worked hard to raise, say, four wage-earning children and in justice wished later to claim from them needed support. The children certainly could each give 12.4 percent out of their incomes - a tidy sum - since they are already paying that to the government. And yet those funds cannot be touched, as they are " Corban" - dedicated already to paying for the retirements of strangers who did nothing to raise them.
"You nullify God's commandment by the traditions of men." Up against the claim upon their children in natural law, which parents have, is a tradition of men (i.e., SS) that is very weak indeed. As several SCOTUS opinions have clarified, "Social Security beneficiaries" have no property rights in what they paid into the system, and neither do they have a contractual claim. Congress could decide tomorrow to abolish the whole Social Security system on the grounds, say, that it is no longer wise to borrow from foreign governments (as we must do) to pay the benefits.

It's not that the government needs to step in here to do something lower-level entities cannot do. If a man today at age 25 starts work in a $50,000/year job and, in a compulsory system, puts as much income into an index fund as he's paying for Social Security "insurance" premiums (and suppose he never increases his contributions even if his salary grows), he will nevertheless have $8 million in his investment account when he retires at age 75 - enough so that he can live in luxury with his wife, cover their medical expenses, and have lots besides to bequeath to their children. That's how wealthy we are. I am not imagining an extraordinary case but assigning conservative figures to the most common, widely attainable case.
One arrives at similar grand retirement fund if one imagines that the father doesn't pay in anything himself. Instead, his children, in a compulsory system, as soon as they start work, contribute 12.4 percent of their earnings, until the time of their parents' deaths. The scheme is doable, we know, because we do it already, for strangers, through the government.
Social Security and government schools are of a piece. Parents are the primary educators of their children: they should have the first claim on a family's resources for educating their children. Yet their claim comes second, if there's an...

By Francis X. Maier .
Jacques Ellul, the French Protestant philosopher, sociologist, and theologian, famously argued that technology evolves autonomously. In effect, technology shapes society more than society shapes technology. He warned that humans become servants to efficiency and technical progress. Ellul also worried that technology undermines human freedom by promoting uniformity and reducing moral choices. Ultimately, he was concerned that technology becomes an end in itself, overshadowing human values.
In his book English Speaking Justice, the Canadian political philosopher George Parkin Grant critiqued modern liberalism and technological society along similar lines. He argued that even by its own standards, liberal society is unjust. He focused on how technology and liberal values shape our concepts of justice, and he examined how those values often undermine community and ethical life. In essence, he suggested that the pursuit of individual rights and technological progress often leads to a loss of deeper moral values.
Grant is the man I want to talk about this week. But here's a confession: With a few minor tweaks from me, AI wrote both of the previous two paragraphs. And it got the factual content therein more or less right, without the burden of my having to think about any of it. The program I used is Perplexity. I had a very pleasant editorial meeting with its algorithms, and Perplexity itself generously suggested that Ellul and Grant "might have mixed feelings" about my using it as a shortcut for avoiding any actual work. Which implies that machines, too, can be ironic. More on that in a moment.
Meanwhile, back to Grant. Summer is typically a time for rest and light reading. Yet for anyone more inclined to a challenge - for anyone seriously interested in understanding how our civilization got where it is - the work of George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) is an invaluable resource. He was a keen historian, an engaging writer, and a compelling cultural analyst.
Grant was that peculiarly Canadian creature (now extinct) known as a Red Tory. A committed Christian, he was morally and culturally "conservative." In other words, he actually believed what he claimed to believe, and allowed a Biblically-rooted faith to inform his public life. He opposed both euthanasia and abortion, and was a strong defender of Canadian national identity and its distinct history and culture in the face of American continental dominance. He was also a fierce critic of both the Vietnam War and the damage inflicted on the human spirit by an overconfident and idolatrous cult of technological progress.
In his lecture "Temporality and Technological Man" (collected here), Grant noted: "When Marx wrote of changing the world, he still believed that changing was not an end in itself, but the means to a future society conducive to the good life for all. . . .For all his denial of past [including Biblical] thought, he retained from that past the central truth about human beings - namely that there is, in man, a given humanness that it is our purpose to fulfill."

In contrast, Grant argued, today's secularized, technology-centric culture treats the human will as the only real source of meaning, and change itself as the ongoing proof of that meaning. It implicitly denies any end state, higher purpose, or inherent nature to our species. And this, in turn, destroys human dignity in the name of exalting it, by providing material benefits that only serve as temporary anesthetics for a deeper emptiness.
In his essay "Religion and the State" (collected here), Grant asked
Has the secular state, and the religion of progress that dominates its education, led to widespread happiness in North America in the last forty years? How can we escape the fact that the necessary end product of the religion of progress is not hope, but a society of existentialists who know themselves in their own self-consciousness, but know the world entirely as despair? In other words, whe...

By Sebastian Morello.
But frist a note from Robert Royal: I'm extending this mid-year fundraiser just one day because we're close, but only close. But this is it. Donations are always welcome, of course, but experience says the campaigns are when most people give. If you haven't contributed so far, here's one last chance. You read this site because you value this site. Please, today, show it.
Now for today's column...
For those not living in these Isles, it's very difficult to imagine what it's like here. Depression, bordering on despair, is almost palpable and crops up everywhere. Recently, I got chatting to a stranger in a pub, and mentioned that I was soon to attend the citizenship ceremony of a friend who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. "Why would anyone in their right mind want to join this country?" the chap remarked. "That's like climbing aboard a sinking ship."
Cecil Rhodes said, "To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life." A little over a century later, most people living here are in crushing debt. Mortgages are almost impossible to attain for anyone under thirty-five. And anyone who gets one will be paying it off for the rest of his life, spending over half his annual income merely to enjoy shelter from the elements. Monthly bills, groceries, and fuel have all risen over the past two decades while wages have remained stagnant.
The National Health Service (NHS) is failing. It's hard to see a GP, let alone get a hospital appointment for something more serious. Rather than reforming the NHS, the government only throws more of the taxpayers' money at it. Occasionally, the destination of this money is revealed, for example, when the public learned that eye-watering amounts of taxpayers' funds go to removing two penises per day in 'transgender' surgeries, mostly on vulnerable teenagers.
Beyond the ghoulishness of such mutilations, these revelations are disheartening given that taxation is already through the roof. Large portions of taxes are also used to house illegal immigrants in hotels, a significant minority of whom team up with naturalized immigrants in rape-and-torture gangs to prey on helpless native girls. England's towns and cities are overrun with new arrivals, and the country's capital can no longer be described as an English city.
The native English are doing what defeated people do: fleeing to the hills. Those who can, leave the country and never look back. Others move to rural areas, requiring enormous housing developments, in turn rapidly wrecking England's once universally admired countryside.
Owing to the UK's benefits system, an illegal immigrant, or someone who refuses to work, or claims some long-term fatigue or another expedient malady, can flourish here. If, however, you are just a normal person, who wants to get married, have some children, raise them wholesomely and non-ideologically, and acquire some property and security, you will spend your life being hammered by the structurally unjust 'system.'

In essence, this has become a land in which virtue is punished. If you voice your discontent in a clumsy Tweet or Facebook post, the thought police will come knocking, and you might end up with a prison sentence.
England is paradoxical. It's the land of both Darwin and Newman, of Bentham and Belloc, of bohemian transgression and tweedy conservatism, of the adventurous heart of imperial Britain and the rustic paradise of the little Englander. It's the land of mechanization, materialist reductionism, evolutionist progressivism, and all the noxious dogmas that together are called 'modernity', and yet it's the land of the Catholic Second Spring. England has been at war with itself ever since the treacherous attack on the Church's integrity that we've since euphemistically called the 'Reformation.'
Anglicanism distils the inner conflict, wherein Puritanism and Romanization struggle for rights and representation within a single institution whose buildings are stolen, whose offices...

by Robert Royal.
But first a note: We've got two days left and just a few thousand dollars to raise. There's a whole second half of this year that needs your support. One last push, please - and we'll be there.
Now for today's column.
Today is the feast of the First Martyrs of Rome, the mostly unknown group of early Christians who were persecuted and died in 64 A.D. under the Emperor Nero. Some were wrapped in animal skins and torn apart by dogs in public spectacles, others were covered in tar and burned alive as human torches. It was the beginning of anti-Christian violence that, sadly, has cropped up periodically over the past 2000 years and continues even today.
The Roman historian Tacitus lamented the deaths of the early martyrs - but not because of the inhumanity and injustice:
to stop the rumor [that he had set Rome on fire], [Nero] falsely charged with guilt, and punished with the most fearful tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were [generally] hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, in the reign of Tiberius, but the pernicious superstition [prava superstitio] - repressed for a time, broke out yet again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also, whither all things horrible and disgraceful flow from all quarters, as to a common receptacle. . . a vast multitude were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of "hatred of the human race."
And you thought that it's only since the rise of "Wokism" that the Church has been reviled for "preaching hate." Or that Christianity has been charged as a depraved superstition.
Yet martyrdom presents an unexpected paradox. The earliest enemies of the Faith in Jerusalem doubtless thought that crucifying Jesus would put an end to Him and everything He was trying to do. It turned out that His death - and Resurrection - became an even greater spur to the spread of the Gospel. Tacitus noted that the persecutions and martyrs evoked sympathy from the people, which advanced the Faith.
The 3rd-century North African theologian Tertullian famously remarked that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. It doesn't feel that way for people undergoing persecution or look that way for the few of us who pay attention to such things. But it's true.
Nigeria currently produces the highest body counts (5000 per year) of Christians martyred by Muslims. A little over a week ago, Muslims forced 200 Christians into a building there, which was set on fire. Most died from the flames, the rest were ambushed as they fled.
Yet the Church in Nigeria is the fastest-growing in all of Africa.
Sad to say, this past Thursday, something similar happened to a pair of Christian villages on the West Bank in Israel. Jewish extremists, often wrongly called mere "settlers," attacked Taybeh and Kafir Malik, burning down homes, which resulted in the deaths of three Arab Christians.

It's far from being the only time that Christians in Israel have found themselves under assault. A segment of Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel has demonstrated persistent bias against Christians, spitting on clergy, and intimidating people - typically Christians - who work or travel on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. Christian graves and holy sites have been defaced. In 2012, a Trappist monastery had its doors set on fire and the walls were spray-painted with the insult "Jesus was a monkey."
Though clearly the work of extremist Jews, it was shocking that this could occur in Israel. The Vatican took the unusual step of issuing a formal statement, criticizing the Israeli government for not controlling such expressions of hate. The custodian of the Holy Land at the time, Archbishop (later Latin Patriarch) Pierbattista Pizzaballa, commented, "The time has come for the authorities to act to put an end to this senseless violence and to ensure a 'teaching of respect' in ...

By Anthony Esolen.
I am a restorationist.
When Donatello committed himself to learning from ancient Greek and Roman statuary, he had to dig things up. More than a millennium of dilapidation and sediment had left much of ancient Rome buried under the dirt. Say the word "Renaissance," and your mind may turn toward the glory of Venice upon the waters, or Michelangelo dreaming under the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or Palestrina directing the polyphony of his papal choir. It might do as well to think of bookworms like Poggio Bracciolini delving into the forgotten shelves of monastic libraries, to discover lost works from the ancient world. It might do best of all to think of Donatello with a shovel.
Man forgets. It is, in part, a mercy that he does so. Each generation enjoys, by forgetfulness, a certain liberty from the previous. We need not repeat the stupidities of our fathers. We can come up with stupidities of our own. We can also, now and then, come up with some new thing that refreshes life, something that makes hard work a little easier, or sheds a brighter light on the life of the mind and the soul.
As long as we do not fall for some foolish ideology that prizes newness for its own sake, we can strike forth with confidence, trusting that if an innovation doesn't work, we can toss it. The most important things in our lives are not new. Human nature, the natural world, and good and evil do not change. God does not change.
The greatness of the Renaissance came not from rejecting medieval ways, though there was some of that, but from remembering and restoring what had been read and thought and done before those ways. It was not a radical break from the past.
Spenser considered Chaucer his leading light in English poetry. Tasso, as did all the great Italian poets, looked to Dante. But everyone drank from the fountains of the ancient world, pagan or Christian. They went behind the schoolmen to recover Augustine and the other Christian fathers. They went behind the medieval romances to read Plutarch's biographies of the illustrious men of Greece and Rome. Their fascination with that ancient world, their gratitude, their emulation, was never merely antiquarian or role-playing. They wanted to learn.
The Renaissance would never have occurred if the poets, artists, composers, architects, theologians, and statesmen of the time had said, "What's past is past and gone, so it's time for new things, because, after all, we know better than did our ignorant and dismal forebears." There is, in human history, no cultural renaissance without restoration. It is the restoration, the recovery of things forgotten or lost, and then their instauration in a fresh time, that brings the bud to full flower.
Man forgets. Sometimes, when I'm watching a film from ninety years ago and I hear birdsong, I can say, "That's a cardinal," or, "That's a mockingbird." The birds don't forget. A hundred years from now, the cardinals will be singing the same songs. That is both their glory and their limitation. But man does forget. In recompense, he can do more than remember. He can do what birds cannot do. He can set about remembering. He can recollect, which is an act of deliberation. He can restore.

So I say that in the Church it is high time for restoration.
We can begin almost anywhere. I've long called for restoring the original texts of hymns, repairing the editorial vandalism. We might also restore whole genres of hymns on the Christian life, particularly those that have to do with the Church as militant: "Christian, Dost Thou See Them?" Or hymns that are refreshingly frank about the fact that the world will not satisfy us: "My Spirit Longs for Thee." Or that remind us of the moment of death: "Abide with Me."
Imagine paintings all in yellow and white. Wouldn't we sicken of them, fast?
Of course there's more. I am struck, when I look into the "Treasury of Prayers" at the back of the old Saint Joseph Missal, by the beautiful and powerful prayers no...

by Father Raymond J. de Souza
But first a note from Robert Royal: Father de Souza takes us through some of the richness of Modern Catholic Social Teaching today, which is doubtless going to inform the current papacy and spur it to new developments. We're going to be here at TCT to guide you through the ups and downs of those developments. And we'll be trying to shape how various figures here and in Rome respond to the many challenges we face in the Church and the world. It's an exciting - if also perilous - time to be a Catholic. Become part of it all. We've got just a few days until the end of this fundraising campaign, which makes it possible for us to continue on for the rest of the year. So, please, make your contribution to this crucial work.
Now for today's column.
The pope's name is Leo, it's a jubilee year, and the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was observed this week. It must be time to re-read Annum Sacrum.
In May 1899, looking ahead to the Jubilee year of 1900 - the annum sacrum of the title - Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, calling for pastors everywhere to join him in consecrating the whole world to the Sacred Heart.
Leo XIII was an epistolatory pope extraordinaire, writing some eighty-five encyclicals, most of them mercifully brief, including Annum Sacrum. The style then was to get more involved in practical problems, and so one finds Leo addressing himself to the spread of Asiatic cholera in Italy (Superiore Anno, 1884), dueling in the Germanic countries (Pastoralis Officii, 1891), and the government regulation of Catholic schools in Manitoba (Affari Vos, 1897).
Annum Sacrum was emphatically universal. Leo favoured popular piety throughout his long pontificate, writing eleven (!) encyclicals on the Rosary alone. Devotion to the Sacred Heart was growing more fervent in the late 19th century, and Leo encouraged that. At the same time, there was a political point to be made.
The Sacred Heart was the favoured devotion of those who rejected the secularizing ideologies regnant in northern Europe, especially France. In 1875, the cornerstone was laid for the basilica Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre, adorning the high point of Paris with a defiant demonstration that France, even when given over to harlotry, remained the eldest daughter of the Church. And Sacré-Coeur has been faithful, marking this summer 140 years of continual Eucharistic adoration, more than 51,000 days, 24/7.
St. John Paul the Great, elected exactly 100 years after Leo's election, followed Leo in many ways. He prepared for the Great Jubilee 2000 by entrusting the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, another pious act touched with political significance.
After Our Lady appeared at Fatima - and with renewed intensity after the assassination attempt against John Paul on her feast day in 1981 - the Immaculate Heart became the favoured devotion of anti-communists.
Leo XIII's most famous encyclical is on the social order, Rerum Novarum (1891), and deservedly so. It should be read in conjunction with Libertas praestantissimum (1888) in which Leo pronounces liberty the "greatest of natural endowments." Leo XIII, after the mid-19th-century suspicion of political liberties, was a great pope of human liberty. The Sacred Heart pours out love freely in superabundance; it calls for a reciprocally free response.

Annum Sacrum can be read as briefly summarizing, in a devotional key, Leo's extended teaching on society and the state, the Church and free people, and politics and economics. In three important encyclicals on the state (Inscrutabili, 1878; Diuturnum, 1881; Immortale Dei, 1885), he took dead aim at the totalitarian impulse, insisting that all civil power was limited and that no human power could usurp all authority in a society.
He defended the libertas Ecclesiae to be sure, but also insisted upon a necessary zone of social and personal freedom. It was there that the wide array of social groups fulfills their miss...

Joseph R. Wood.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Note: We're in the final days of our mid-year fundraiser and are still a few thousand short of our goal. I really need one last push from you. We've been pushing ourselves. And I'm happy to report that right after Labor Day, we'll be offering two more exciting TCT Courses: one, on Edith Stein's 'The Science of the Cross' (for info click here), and the other - which I'll be teaching - on Pope Leo XIV and the Augustinian Tradition. And that's just for starters. If you value these and our other initiatives to say nothing of a great column every morning 365 days a year - please, we need you to show it. It's time to bring it all home. Click the button. Be part of the work of The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column.
Today's Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus presents a quandary. As I lamented to our editor, it's too big not to write about, and it's too big to write about.
My impression from a fair number of visits to churches in many places is that, aside from the Cross and images of Holy Mary and St. Joseph, the Sacred Heart is the most widespread image and devotion in the Catholic Church today. (St. Thérèse of Lisieux runs a close second, but my survey isn't rigorous, and who's counting?)
As I write, an especially grand church dedicated to the Sacred Heart is nearby, the Basilica of the University of Notre Dame, helping all on campus keep the devotion in mind.
So much has been written about the devotion, including much by some of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the last few centuries. St. John Henry Newman chose as his motto, Core ad Core Loquitur ("Heart Speaks to Heart"), and composed a beautiful prayer of devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Pope Leo XIII, whose work provides a source of inspiration for Pope Leo XIV, taught in his 1899 Encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Annum Sacrum (Sacred Year):
There is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another, therefore is it fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to His most Sacred Heart - an act which is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, seeing that whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ Himself.
The feast is a relatively recent addition to the Church calendar. The first approval for a local feast was in 1672 by the bishops of France.
The promises of Christ that we associate with the devotion came to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675. So the first official feast preceded her revelations, which accelerated and shaped the devotion's spread.
Local feasts in Poland and Rome came a century later, before the ecclesiastical approval of St. Margaret Mary's writings. Almost another century later (1856), Pope Pius IX placed the feast on the Universal Calendar.

Pope Pius XII recounts this history in his 1956 Encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis Aquas (You Will Draw Waters), marking a century of the feast's universal Western celebration. That encyclical carries a defensive tone. Pius rejects the misgivings of those who would question the devotion.
When I first entered the Church, I might have sympathized with the attitudes Pius opposes. Seeing "anatomically correct" depictions of a heart, it wasn't clear to me what we were adoring.
The Orthodox and Oriental Catholic churches have not followed the widespread Western love of the devotion. Maybe it seems strange to them to worship a human organ, and the Sacred Heart is indeed Christ's human heart.
But Pius explains that Christ's "Heart, more than all the other members of His body, is the natural sign and symbol of His boundless love for the human race." Pius emphasizes that this sign and symbol, rooted scripturally in the full humanity of Christ, is worthy of devotion only when we bear in mind that it points to His divinity. Christ's human heart was the seat of his human emotions and affe...

by Stephen White
But first a note from Robert Royal: Note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, June 26th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Prayerful Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss Leo XIV's episcopal appointments, the pope's comments on natural law, his support for priests and seminarians, and Leo's restatement of priestly celibacy. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column.
The Pew Research Center (I served in an advisory capacity ) has a new report out that looks at Catholic life in the United States. The primary takeaway from the report is that nearly half (47%) of American adults have a significant connection to Catholicism. One in five (20%) Americans identify as Catholic. An additional 9% of Americans say they are culturally but not religiously Catholic. An equal number (9%) say they are former Catholics. And 9% have a Catholic parent, spouse, or partner - or say they sometimes attend Catholic Mass.
In actual numbers, this means that something like 53,000,000 American adults are Catholic and an additional 71,500,000 are connected to Catholicism in one of the aforementioned ways. Now, having a "connection to Catholicism" is not the same as being Catholic. And "being Catholic" is not the same as "practicing the faith." But the reason the Pew report highlights the connections to Catholicism is simply that Catholicism has an outsized influence on the rest of American society.
We see this in lots of ways, from the overrepresentation of Catholics in Congress to the undeniable (if not always flattering) place the Catholic Church holds in the popular imagination. Catholicism matters more in America than our proportion of the population would suggest.
While Catholics may be a minority here, the U. S. Catholic population is large enough to make it the country with the fourth largest Catholic population in the world. Only Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines, have more Catholics. American Catholics are a relatively small minority, but which nonetheless forms a critical mass of sufficient size to shape American society beyond what one might expect.
Simply put, we American Catholics punch above our weight.
Which is worth keeping in mind when considering some other interesting data from the Pew study. Among the questions Pew asked were two pertaining to the Traditional Latin Mass
Unsurprisingly, the number of American Catholics adults who attend TLM on a weekly basis is not large. Only 2% of respondents say they attend TLM at least once a week.
Here's how Pew put it:
Very few Catholics report regularly attending a TLM today. Overall, 2% of Catholics say they do this at least weekly, 1% do so once or twice a month, and 2% do so a few times a year. An additional 8% say they either seldom or never attend a TLM "these days," while 87% of U.S. Catholics have not attended one at any point in the last five years.
This result surprised me, not because the number of Catholics attending TLM is so small, but because a closer look at the numbers suggests that the TLM actually plays an outsized role among America's practicing Catholics.
As a percentage of American Catholics TLM attendance is obviously small. But 2% of the Catholic adults in the United States is actually a lot of people. If 2% of America's 53,000,000 Catholics are attending TLM weekly, as Pew's data suggests, then the number of Catholics who attend TLM weekly is north of one million. I'm not convinced that's the case. (And to be fair, that's not a claim Pew makes.)
There's more. Given that only 29% of all Catholics surveyed say they attend Mass weekly, the Catholics attending TLM weekly would seem to make up a significant portion of all weekly Mass goers. Is it really the case that 5% of all American Catholic adults (including those who...

by John Grondelski
But first a note from Robert Royal: Be sure to tune in tomorrow night - Thursday, June 26th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Prayerful Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss Leo XIV's episcopal appointments, the pope's comments on natural law, his support for priests and seminarians, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
June used to be a month associated with weddings and the prospect of new families and children. Now it's Pride Month for much of the world - or maybe for the few deeply observant Christians, the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A long, sometimes deceptively smooth road has gotten us here.
In 1967, on the eve of the sexual revolution, Glenn Campbell released a song he took from a Nashville songwriter, John Hartford. "Gentle on My Mind" rose on the Billboard charts and helped Campbell crossover from country music to pop.
I call it Glenn Campbell's Ode to No-Fault Divorce. Or at least the Sexual Revolution.
The timing was perfect. When Campbell re-released it in 1968, Humanae vitae was just months away, as was Woodstock. Hartford, the songwriter, said he was inspired to write it by the 1965 hit film Doctor Zhivago, the guy who made cheating on your child's mother, Tonya, with lovely nurse Lara, international chic.
In many ways, the song prefigured our times. Marriage hasn't quite collapsed for the upper classes in the same way it has for working class or hillbilly folk. The former may commit their discreet indiscretions, but they're more the clean-cut Wichita Lineman than the young and muddy of Woodstock. Campbell was the better messenger for them.
He sings of a man who keeps "his sleeping bag rolled up" behind some woman's couch. He does it because "your door is always open and your path is free to walk." It's clearly an "open" relationship. He doesn't feel confined, "shackled by forgotten words and bonds/and the ink stains that are dried upon some line," which contemporaries pejoratively called "a license for love." Neither is he held back by tradition, by "the rocks and ivy planted on their columns now that bind me." He can always leave wherever he wants, across "the wheatfields and the clothes lines and the highways and the junkyards that come" between him and his nominal love.
Sounds romantic. Just not realistic.
His "love" object is imaginary, a projection of himself rather than a genuine woman. She's no burden because she's no responsibility. She's not like the "other woman's cryin' to her mother because she turned and I was gone." Like a real woman, a wife and mother of your child. Like Tonya, who had to figure out how to go on living in exile with Yuri's son, Sasha. Even like Lara in her futile search for her and Yuri's illegitimate daughter, Katya.
Unlike Hartford's muse, real women aren't always "ever smilin', ever gentle" on one's mind. Christ's yoke may be easy; a spouse's isn't always. That's what goes with "for better, for worse."
The heart of the song - and the subsequent problem - lies in two lines: "It's just knowing that the world will not be cursing or forgiving/when I walk along some railroad track."
That's exactly what no-fault divorce produced.

The entire purpose of "divorce reform" in the 1960-70s was to eliminate moral responsibility for breaking up a marriage. Up until then, the requirement to show cause - some moral defect like adultery, abuse, or abandonment - ensured initiation of divorce proceedings lay with the victim.
Introduction of "no-fault divorce" shifted that equation in two critical ways.
First, since the world would no longer "be cursing or forgiving," the victimizer could also launch the divorce. Indeed, he could use the divorce to compound his injury by making the aba...

By Randall Smith
But first a note from Robert Royal: We did well yesterday, but we still need to do better. Soon. I know you don't want me to start shouting and warning about dark futures unless we meet our goals. I've never done that - never have had to - because I've always been confident that our TCT readers come here and support us because they value what we do. If that describes you, now's the time. Click the button, write the check, set up a monthly donation. But please, do whatever you can. Now.
And, now, for today's column...
I've never really understood this idea that you can follow the "spirit" but not the "letter" of a Biblical commandment or Church teaching.
Yes, St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:6 that "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." But he says this in the context of a comparison between the written law of the Old Covenant, "carved in letters on stone," and the work of the Holy Spirit, "written not in ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets that are hearts of flesh." It's not the spirit rather than the letter of the law that gives life; it's the Holy Spirit that gives life - by spreading charity abroad in our hearts. The law is good, but when it is "written" only on our minds and not on our hearts, it only condemns. It does not transform.
But what some people seem to think when they claim they are following "not the letter, but the spirit" is that following the "spirit" of the law somehow justifies violating the letter of the law - and is even somehow superior because less "legalistic." This is what I don't get.
The commandment says, "Don't commit adultery." Now I can understand if someone says, "Following the spirit of that law means that I also shouldn't fornicate," or "The spirit of the law requires nurturing fidelity in marriage." That makes sense. What I don't understand is if someone claims, "Yes, I committed adultery, but I was following the spirit of the law, not the letter." How would you be following the "spirit" if you violate the clear intent of the law? Talking about the "spirit of the law" is often just something people say to get themselves off the hook.
Granted, the law itself, "Don't commit adultery" or "Don't fornicate," has only the power to condemn, not to transform. As St. Paul says, sin, "seizing an opportunity in the commandment" against coveting, "produced in me all kinds of covetousness." Many pious young Catholic men have found that you can say to yourself repeatedly, "Don't covet, don't covet," but it doesn't take the coveting away. It often makes it worse.
You need to concentrate on something else: things that will engage your heart and your love for others. What we need are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, not some twaddle about obeying the "spirit" rather than the "letter." And we need those gifts of the Spirit to animate and nurture the virtues that can strengthen our intellect and will and help us see the truth more clearly and discipline our passions and appetites.

I have a friend who, when he teaches a class on the Catholic view of the passions and appetites, shows movie clips of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together to suggest how the intellect and will are meant to cooperate in a beautiful, disciplined harmony with each other. That's the ideal. But then he shows them a picture of a sailor in a small sailboat fighting against a storm and warns them that this, too, is often our relationship with the passions and appetites.
Sometimes it's a dance; sometimes it's like beating against the wind in stormy seas. You can do amazing things if you learn the rules of dance, but you can't dance beautifully the way Astaire and Rogers did if you decide that the rule against stepping on your partner's foot is too "constraining." So, too, great sailors can do amazing things. But if you violate the basic principles of seamanship, you'll soon find yourself at the bottom of the sea.
People sometimes talk about a "spirit of forgivenes...

By Robert Royal
In 9 AD, when Jesus was probably a teenager, the celebrated Roman general Publius Quintilicius Verus led Roman forces against a coalition of Germanic tribes in the Teutoberg Forest. Legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX were wiped out. The Roman Empire, like America today, was the strongest military in the world, and was deeply shaken by the defeat. Verus killed himself. The Emperor Augustus, according to Suetonius, virtually whimpered, "Varus, give me back my legions." Yet Rome carried on for centuries. Hardly anyone remembers the Battle of Teutoberg. But everyone remembers Jesus.
There are, of course, major turning points in history, and America may have just passed one in bombing Iran over the weekend. Still, it's good to remember, for those of us who believe in sacred history, that wars and rumors of wars are common. God's purposes may be otherwise. Jesus told us as much: "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come." (Matthew 24:6-13, emphasis added)
Seemingly insignificant events, however, like the birth of a baby in an obscure corner of a great empire may be what really changes the world.
That said, the attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities raise some new and far-reaching questions, both military and moral. When America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945, Winston Churchill - a shrewd politician deep in history - remarked that henceforth security would be "the sturdy child of terror." He meant that The Bomb was so scary, with the potential to destroy the human race, that it would create a disincentive to use it by anyone but a madman.
One question, again both military and moral, about Iran is precisely whether the mullahs, their generals, and scientists are so fanatical - witness their repeated calls for the destruction of Israel and the Great Satan (i.e., America) - that they might be tempted to risk national suicide for their beliefs. They haven't hesitated to use conventional weapons directly and via proxies to kill thousands of people, including many Americans, in open attacks and terrorist incidents.
Since World War II, every pope has rightly warned about the horrors of war. But lately, Church leaders have noticeably drifted towards a pacifism that is no part of our tradition.
Pope Francis went beyond even the standard presumption against war to say, "There was a time, even in our Churches, when people spoke of a holy war or a just war. Today, we cannot speak in this manner. A Christian awareness of the importance of peace has developed. . . .Wars are always unjust, since it is the people of God who pay." [Emphasis added.]
Just this weekend, incomprehensibly, Pope Leo XIV claimed that wars never solve anything. Really? In 1941, Germany, Italy, and Japan were bitter enemies, but after being defeated in combat, are peaceful, prosperous allies.

Far more important than just one pope's opinion, the Church possesses a highly developed set of criteria for when it is just to resort to arms: yes, just-war theory. As difficult as it is to apply in current circumstances when the results may be not just large military and civilian casualties but the unleashing of near-apocalyptic nuclear exchanges, what else is there?
Take the first principle: Last Resort. There's a presumption against war in just-war theory. But if any military action at all is to be justifiable, there has to be a point at which a proper authority can say, "Enough!" Last resort cannot mean, just because we can continue imagining further approaches, that war never becomes the only reasonable option. America has tried pressure and dialogue for 46 years with Iran, for instance.
President Trump's decision is being debated even within the Republican Party, and a final evaluation of his choice will have to come after we see the results. Consequences do not justify the decision to go to war - that's a kind of consequentialism by which we would be saying something...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia.
"Dismiss the crowd so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms and find lodging and provisions; for we are in a deserted place here." The Apostles have a point. The crowds had followed Jesus out into the country, away from the towns and villages. Ironically, it was Jesus Himself who had decided to go with His Apostles to a deserted place to escape the crowds and the busyness of the towns. (Cf. Mark 6:31) But the crowds followed and now found themselves in need of food.
That is the context for one of our Lord's most important miracles, the only one recorded by all four evangelists. The whole scene is Eucharistic, of course. But the setting and context of the miracle - worked for people who had followed Him into the desert - indicates a particular dimension of the Eucharist. It is food for the journey. And that in turn reveals a profound connection between the Eucharist and the virtue of hope, the focus of this Jubilee Year.
Hebrews describes hope as "an anchor, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil." (Hebrews 6:19) It's a curious kind of anchor, that stabilizes us not where we are but where we are going to be. It secures us where He is and draws us upward. This corresponds to the description of hope as "already but not yet." By way of hope in Christ, we are already anchored in Heaven, where He is seated at the right hand of the Father. Thus, hope is certain and does not disappoint. Yet at the same time, we have not yet reached our goal and still look to it for inspiration.
The Eucharist bears these same traits. Our reception of Holy Communion in effect anchors us in Heaven. At that moment, we are already united with Jesus in risen and glorified Body. Thus, Saint Thomas calls the Eucharist the "pledge of future glory." It is a piece of Heaven (so to speak) given to us already here on earth that draws us upward to where we are not yet fully. It is not yet the fullness of His glory, only the pledge of it. Likewise in adoration, we already gaze upon Him under the veil of bread and wine - but we do not yet see Him face to face.
Hope is also referred to as the virtue of the wayfarer and pilgrim. It is designed, so to speak, for those who have set out on the way. It thus strengthens us on our pilgrimage through this world. When we know with a certainty of His victory and trust in His promises for grace and glory, then we can make our way more courageously and joyfully through the challenges of this valley of tears.
This also means that hope makes no sense apart from the journey, apart from striving for Heaven's glory. One reason our world lacks hope is because it has given up on the journey. In a bitter irony, the more we have confined ourselves to this world, and become comfortable and complacent here, the more hopeless we've become. The virtue of hope atrophies if it is not exercised in a striving for Heaven.

So also the Eucharist is meant for travelers - and no others. When a priest brings Holy Communion to the dying, we call it viaticum - food for the journey. In that specific circumstance, the Eucharist is clearly the nourishment the soul needs to journey from this world to the next. But in a broader sense, it is always viaticum, always nourishment for the pilgrim, food for the journey.
This is what the Apostles call our attention to in today's Gospel. The crowds were wayfarers and pilgrims of a sort. They had followed Christ out into a deserted place. They had journeyed for His teaching and healing - for Him. They needed nourishment precisely because they had chosen to follow Him rather than remaining in place, because they preferred the desert with Him to the towns with food.
In the sequence for this feast, Saint Thomas writes of the Eucharist as cibus viatórum - food for the travelers or "pilgrims' food." The current translation renders this line as food "for the pilgrim who has striven." Which doesn't quite capture the meaning. The Eucharist is not given to the...

by David G. Bonagura, Jr.
But first a note from Robert Royal. The Faith has survived the collapse of whole cultures, indeed whole civilizations. It's not something, however, anyone should want to try again. Which is why at The Catholic Thing, under the canopy of our parent organization, the Faith & Reason Institute, we strive to preserve both our spiritual and cultural heritage. David Bonagura makes the case for this dual approach succinctly today. Personally, I believe that it's only efforts like ours, and by many other actors working towards these common goals, that may save what's left of our culture and nation. It's not an easy struggle, but we're in it for the long haul. Are you? If so, it's time to show your support. You know how.
Now for today's column.
It is old news that the practice of Christianity and the study of the humanities have been declining for decades. Their falls, however, are rarely considered together. One has not caused the collapse of the other. The two are suffering because the spirit of our age despises the goal they share - the shaping of the human mind and soul for transcendent goods. Tracing their twin plights illuminates their virtues and the crippling worldliness that undermines them as lights on our journey to God.
Technology is usually the first factor to receive blame for keeping people home from church and from reading books. To be sure, the immediacy of smartphone entertainment drains the will of a desire to search for the invisible God and to read, think, and imagine. Yet churches were emptying, and liberal arts students were disappearing before the Internet was born. Limitless technology has deepened and accelerated the trend that predated it.
This trend is utilitarianism, the belief that only things and ideas with practical application in "the real world" have value. With its supernatural orientation, Christianity has no purpose in this view. Nor do the humanities with their focus on poetry, history, and literature, which distract from the pursuit of money, comfort, and prestige. Utilitarianism presents a truncated vision of the human person - whose value is measured by what he produces materially. Hence, it cannot understand religion and the humanities, as witnessed by the one question every liberal arts major must endure: "What are you going to do with that?"
Utilitarianism and its materialist anthropology have a deeper cause: human beings who live without faith in a transcendent, supernatural world that possesses greater value than the natural world. For Plato, the transcendent world was where truth is found. For Christians, the transcendent world is God's habitation, toward which we strive with everything we do. Throughout her existence, the Church has championed the humanities because, by their various means, they seek the truth, and God is truth.
A loss of faith naturally corrupts our understanding of human beings and our purpose. If we are merely evolutionary accidents instead of God's special creations, it's no mystery why the liberal arts are floundering: How can we have the humanities when we have lost sight of the purpose of humanity? Our Supreme Court justices, whether opining that human beings can declare their own meaning of existence or incapable of defining what a woman is, are bellwethers for a toxic culture grown sick from separating itself from its divine foundation.
Utilitarianism then becomes an easy refuge. If we are busy enough and productive enough, we can shield ourselves from the weight of those eternal questions of meaning, purpose, and what happens at death. Ever-present technology obligingly fills any potential void with something "useful" to do: check news, watch videos, offer "likes" on social media.

Rather than offer us the path to the transcendent, leaders of religion and the humanities have too often reduced these gifts to tools of utilitarianism. Liturgies that employ contemporary music and other gimmicks to make worship seem more "relevant," and ac...

By Robert Lazu Kmita.
But first a note from Robert Royal. Professor Kmita sharpens a point today that we've been trying to make with every column this week: that a perspective outside of the everyday - whether it be in literature, architecture, history, theology - though many think of it as irrelevant, actually brings greater relevance, fuller human and divine meaning to our lives. That's what we try to do every day of the year here at The Catholic Thing. If you're reading this, you probably know that. And it's what draws you here daily. So if you haven't already made your contribution to this work, what are you waiting for?
Now for today's column...
In an article dedicated to the reading of literary fiction, the remarkable Jesuit Father James V. Schall, one of the founders of The Catholic Thing, recalled the opinion of Rudolf Allers (1883-1963), who stated that it is always worthwhile to read literature. This assertion, Father Schall tells us, included even bad literature. The reason is that "we will almost always find there scenes of human reality that we would not notice otherwise."
From a very young age, I have been - and remain - an avid reader of fiction. Even my theoretical pursuits have always been subordinated to literature. This is because my mentor, a French professor named Marian Prada, taught me that writers and poets typically have a deeper vision of life, of the human being, and of the world, than most of us have. That may seem like a simplistic statement, one you've undoubtedly heard (or read) in one form or another. But when it is said at the right moment, by the right person, it takes on a value that can change your life. Allers's statement points in the same direction.
In his brief assertion, Father Schall was primarily referring to the depths of our life experiences, whose contents are often best highlighted by poets and writers. In addition to these distilled essences of humanity, works of fiction manage to offer vivid descriptions that can explain key concepts of Christian (i.e., Catholic) theology better than any rational-speculative discourse. "The sacred," "the profane," "sacrifice," or "symbol" are all such concepts. In a way that recalls the intuitive knowledge that mystics of all times strive to rekindle, the metaphors provided by a novel can reveal the cognitive value of such terms without leading you astray in the labyrinth of discursive knowledge.
For example, rereading The Mysterious Island (1875), a novel by Jules Verne (1828-1905), unexpectedly gave me a revealing image of the notion of "symbol" (synonymous with the Augustinian concept of "sign"). In this way, as I'll explain below, I was able to give our two younger sons (aged 12 and 16) both a catechism lesson and a lesson in literary aesthetics.
It is probably not necessary to explain very much why sacred symbols are of crucial importance in Christian (i.e., Catholic) theology. As evidence, it's enough to quote the definition of the Holy Liturgy proposed by the famous Benedictine liturgist Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875):
The Liturgy, considered in general, is the ensemble of symbols, chants, and acts by means of which the Church expresses and manifests its religion towards God.
So, before anything else, the Liturgy is "an ensemble of symbols."

I hasten to add and emphasize that everything is symbolic in the context of Catholic Tradition: the architecture of the churches, the liturgical objects, the holy altar, the liturgical vestments, the liturgical gestures - in short, everything. It is no coincidence that one of Pope Benedict XVI's favorite liturgists, Romano Guardini (1885-1968), wrote a beautiful short monograph entitled Sacred Signs.
Simply put, the symbol creates a link between a consecrated object, which plays the role of the symbolizer, and the entity or being from the unseen world, which is symbolized. For example, the holy altar is in a mysterious symbolic relationship with the transcendent person of Our Lord Jesus Christ,...

By Michael Pakaluk.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Our mid-year fundraiser moves along, and I'm grateful. But I'm also worried that it's moving too slowly. If you can't make a contribution right now, we understand. But there are many ways to configure donations: monthly, quarterly, and annually. I'm particularly grateful when someone gives $365 (dollar a day), $365.25 for those who want to be absolutely astronomically correct. Whatever works for you, we need your help. Now. So that we can get back to our main job of planning how to bring you the best commentaries, podcasts, courses, seminars that we can for the rest of the year. (Did I mention the Papal Posse?). I could go on, but enough said. Please. Support the work of The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column...
More than one important thing took place on June 19th. On that day in 325 in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik, Turkey), the first world-wide (or "ecumenical") council of the Catholic Church adopted a "symbol" that authoritatively expressed the ancient Christian faith. This was the first symbol formulated by the Church, after the Symbol of the Apostles. The Catechism excellently explains this perhaps unfamiliar terminology:
The Greek word symbolon meant half of a broken object, for example, a seal presented as a token of recognition. The broken parts were placed together to verify the bearer's identity. The symbol of faith, then, is a sign of recognition and communion between believers. Symbolon also means a gathering, collection or summary. A symbol of faith is a summary of the principal truths of the faith and therefore serves as the first and fundamental point of reference for catechesis (n. 188).
Today, then, is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. For the record, here is the original:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father (ek tês ousias tou Patros), God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, one in substance (homoousion) with the Father; through whom all things came to be, both in heaven and on earth, who, for us men, and for our salvation, came down, and assumed flesh, and was made man; he suffered and arose on the third day, ascending into heaven, and is coming to judge the living and the dead.
And in the Holy Ghost.
But those who say: "There was a time when he was not;" and "He was not before he was made;" and "He was made out of nothing," or "He is of another substance" or "essence," or "The Son of God is created," or "changeable," or "alterable" - they are condemned by the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
The Council of Chalcedon in 451 preserved a fuller version of this creed as composed by the Fathers at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which affirmed additionally the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This fuller version is what we say in Church on Sunday and is sometimes called the "Nicene-Constantinopolitan" Creed.
The anathemas at the end of the original version, and also a clause that apparently was removed at Constantinople ("begotten. . . from the substance of the Father"), make it perfectly clear that this creed was intended to reject the teaching that Arius, in the event, was forced, finally, to evince clearly, namely, that Christ was simply the highest created being, but not God.
I've heard it said that Catholics are bad at celebrating anniversaries and that, therefore, we ought to make a big fuss at commemorating the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea. But what does this mean? Does it mean that in this century, in 2025, if we were "good at celebrating anniversaries," in 2025 we would celebrate Nicaea, in 2031 Ephesus, in 2051 Constantinople, in 2063 Trent, in 2065 the Second Vatican Council, and in 2070 the First Vatican Council - for starters? This is silly.

Also, it seems frankly un-Catholic. In 1925, Pope Pius XI was occ...

By Francis X. Maier.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Fran Maier reminds us today that in the past, the Church has overcome many of the same challenges that we face at present. But that doesn't happen all on its own. It takes people with names like Hildebrand, Francis, Dominic, Catherine, Ignatius, Teresa, Karol, and many more, including you. In other words, people who stayed faithful and made a difference - as in our own ways, all of us may today. I often hear from readers that our daily columns help keep them sane and focused amid the many challenges and confusions of our age. That's no small thing,which means neither are your contributions to our efforts. The time is short. The need is great. And now is the time to make a big difference. Support The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column...
I'm a sucker for history because it's a great teacher. And I talk a lot about the Reformation because, while our world today and the world of the Reformation era are very different, they also share some striking similarities: political and social turmoil; big changes in technology that reshape how we learn, think, communicate, work, and believe; and a pattern of ambiguity and battles within the Church. Names from the Reformation era like Thomas More, John Fisher, and Erasmus are widely known. John Colet, priest and scholar, is barely remembered. But I want to focus on Colet here because his love for the Church and her mission speaks directly to our age.
Colet was born in England in 1467. The middle of the 15th century witnessed the chaos of three simultaneous and competing popes. The century was marked throughout by bitter political conflict. And it ended with a corrupt Renaissance papacy.
Colet was ordained a priest in the late 1490s. He began his ministry during the papacy of Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), one of the worst popes in the 2000-year line. None of this pushed Colet away from the Church. But it did anger him the way the moneychangers angered Christ. Google "John Colet, 1512 sermon" and you'll be a taken to a homily that he gave to English Church leaders just a few years before Luther posted his 95 theses. Five centuries later, it's still a stunning critique of corruption, ambition, greed, and indifference among Church leaders, and a barn-burner on the urgent need for Church reform. Nobody listened.
Colet died in 1519, just as Martin Luther was gaining steam in Germany. So he's sometimes described as a kind of proto-Protestant. But the facts simply don't support that. He was a friend of More and Fisher, and he had a huge influence on Erasmus. He treasured his priesthood, and very strongly believed that the clergy, despite their human flaws, were absolutely necessary for the saving role of the Church. He had no interest in reimagining doctrines or sacraments. He was a man of humility, fidelity, and Catholic continuity.
So that's some background. But here's the real reason I mention Colet.
He had an abiding love for the clarity and zeal of St. Paul. In 1497, barely 30 years old, he gave a series of lectures at Oxford on Paul's Epistle to the Romans. His lectures still have remarkable power. They speak directly to us, here and now.
And here's why: The Rome that Paul describes in Romans, especially in the first two chapters, is strangely familiar, and rife with recent echoes - the malice, confused sexuality, vanity, and strife. Paul's purpose in writing to the young Church in Rome was very simple: How should Christians live in such a place, the pagan capital of a pagan empire? Rome at the time was a dominant power in the world, just as America is today. Most first-century Romans viewed Christianity as an ugly superstition. Many saw it as a threat to public order and welfare. And if we think that our modern political leaders are disappointing, the Christians of Rome had Nero.

Colet made a sweeping tour of the letter's meaning for the Oxford audience. But two points are especially useful for our reflection today.
First, for ...

By Brad Miner.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Most people, I think, take it for granted that they know about St. Peter's. But Brad Miner gives us a great deal of helpful information and insight about that singular basilica in just a few words today. People may also take the daily appearance of TCT for granted, but I assure you it takes daily dedication on our end as well as your support to make it all happen - from the daily columns to News and Commentaries, to our podcasts, the Posse, TCT courses, and much more. We're getting to the point where it looks like we'll be here for the rest of 2025, but I can't emphasize enough how urgent it is that you do your part. Today. We're here every day for you, will you be there for us?
Now for today's column...
It was built upon the ancient Roman site known as Mons Vaticanus. Vatican Hill is on the west side of the Tiber, facing the seven hills of Rome, and - to put it clearly in context - it is the burial site of Peter, the man to whom our Lord said, "on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it."
St. Peter's Basilica, as we know it today, is a relatively new building, constructed mainly during the Renaissance, which is to say more than 1400 years after the Apostle was martyred on that very spot, c. 68 A.D.
The site was treasured by early Christians, but it wasn't until Emperor Constantine the First (272-337) ended the persecution of Christians and embraced the faith (in hoc signo vinces) that a church could be constructed over Peter's tomb. That was what we now refer to as Old St. Peter's. There are no extant 4th-century images of its appearance, but Shawn Tribe, writing in Liturgical Arts Journal, included this digital mockup "as it may have appeared closer to Constantine's time":

The old church took about 40 years to complete. And it endured for more than a thousand years.
Leon Battista Alberti (d. 1472), often considered the first "Renaissance Man," was among the earliest to call for a new structure to be built on the site because the 4th-century church was collapsing into ruins.
Construction of the current Basilica, however, did not begin until April of 1506. It was completed in November of 1626. Those 120 years may seem like a very long time to build a basilica, but Notre-Dame de Paris took six decades longer, and Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was begun 143 years ago and is not yet complete.
The plan for a new St. Peter's was kick-started by the return of the papacy to Rome from Avignon. And it was a propitious moment, given that there happened to be working in the city an assortment of geniuses such as we'll likely never see again: the aforementioned Alberti, Bernardo Peruzzi, Donato Bramante - and others - until, in 1547 and at the behest of Pope Paul III, the work fell to the great Michelangelo Buonarroti, who seemed never to relish his Vatican work. "I undertake this only for the love of God and in honor of the Apostle," he said. He had earlier tried to dissuade Pope Julius II from using him to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512), but at the age of 71, Michelangelo became the Chief Architect of St Peter's.

Historian James Lees-Milne has written that Michelangelo cleared out the clique of sluggish craftsmen who had been employed at St. Peter's and hired new "basilican workmen with a fresh enthusiasm and zest for the great and holy task ahead of them."
Michelangelo built upon the architect Bramante's work, but like Gaudí, did not live to see the Basilica's consecration. No matter. As the American art historian Helen Gardner wrote, "Without destroying the centralizing features of Bramante's plan, Michelangelo, with a few strokes of the pen, converted its snowflake complexity into massive, cohesive unity."

And massive it is. St. Peter's is the largest church in the world. The Basilica and Colonnade cover nearly 240,000 square feet - nearly six acres.
This brings us to the dome of St. Peter's - in some ways...

By Robert Royal.
But first a note: We're making steady progress in our fundraising, but we're behind last year. And you all know that nothing has gotten less expensive in the past twelve months. I won't belabor a point that you already understand. We can only come to you every morning, 365 days a year, if you are generous towards us during the two times a year that we ask for your support. Please, be generous and hopeful - hopeful that the work we do here will help both the Church and the world. There's the button. There's you. There's the future of The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column...
I don't remember precisely how I came to know Virgil Nemoianu, who died on June 6. Even his widow, Anca, isn't exactly sure. It must have been at the kind of informal salon that Jude Dougherty, legendary dean of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America for three decades, hosted at his home. D.C. locals and visiting eminences from Rome, Poland, the U.K., etc., would rub shoulders there. But somehow - Divine Providence often works through people and things that may never rise to great public prominence - we met. And Virgil became an intellectual inspiration, later my dissertation director, and - for forty years - my friend.
Back then, I was a youngish vice-president for research at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington. My then-boss and founder of EPPC, Ernest Lefever, was a distinguished Protestant foreign-policy expert. He instructed me one day that it was "unseemly" that I had researchers working under me with PhDs, while I had left mine unfinished to become a magazine editor at Princeton, before moving to the Center. Jude Dougherty wouldn't let me do philosophy, unless I quit my job to study full time (an impossibility for a father with children). But Virgil stepped in.
He was chairman of the Comparative Literature department at CUA, which was more in my wheelhouse anyway. I'd been studying Dante and literature in a couple of languages earlier. But unbeknownst to many, even at the university, he was also Secretary General of the World Comparative Literature Association, which is to say the biggest of the big fish in the discipline. And he generously made it possible for me to finish doctoral work without too much stress on the family.
He was also, for me in particular, a bit of a Godsend in that, as a native of Romania (communist when he was growing up), he had little patience with people in the academic or political worlds who were soft on the Soviets or who flirted - and more than flirted - with various forms of Marxism and socialism. He'd seen what all that led to up close, and wasn't about to indulge it in conditions of freedom where we had the gift of speaking the truth about poisonous intellectual and political illusions.
At the same time, he was intellectually sophisticated and disturbingly well-red in what seemed, at times, everything. And he fought for the proper life of the mind. For instance, the "canon wars" were roiling university campuses - leftists at universities were arguing even back then that the great books included in the curricula of most programs in Western civilization were (sigh) sexist, racist, imperialistic, etc. ad nauseam. He decided that we should jointly edit a volume of essays making a different case.
We rummaged around looking for a suggestive title and he found, in Shakespeare of course (Coriolanus I:10), exactly what we wanted: The Hospitable Canon. The unusual word "hospitable" here suggesting that, in fact, the great Western texts invite in everyone who wants to become a participant in "the best that has been thought and said." The canon was even open to new writers and thinkers - if they could survive the competition to become part of the great human cultural legacy.

Notably, Virgil also developed what he called the "theory of the secondary," by which he meant that the proper role of literature was not to become part of the dominant political and social culture,...

by Stephen P. White.
Let's do a little thought experiment. Do you think you could guess my political affiliation based on what music I listen to? Does my preference for, say, Jimmy Buffet, yacht rock, and country music from the late 1990s tip my political hand at all? These hypothetical musical preferences might tell you something about me (I have eclectic tastes, I'm probably part of Gen X, etc.), but would they tell you very much about how I vote? Probably not.
One person is a tiny sample size and, as the saying goes, there's no accounting for taste. What if I asked you about a larger group?
What if there were 1,000 people or 10,000 people who all liked Jimmy Buffet, yacht rock, and country music from the late 1990s? Now, do you think you could, with reasonable accuracy, guess the general political leanings of that group based simply on their shared taste in music? Has the larger sample size made that guess about political preferences easier, more difficult, or about the same?
Now, what if I told you (again, hypothetically) that I attend Mass every Sunday and that my three all-time favorite hymns to sing are, in no particular order, "On Eagle's Wings," "City of God," and "Be Not Afraid"? I especially like it when these songs are accompanied by an acoustic guitar.
Do you think you could venture a guess about my politics now?
I bet you do. At the very least, most of you have a hunch. Prudence might convince you to withhold that judgment. You might make some objection about "inductive fallacies" or "correlation not implying causation." You know you shouldn't judge, but that doesn't mean you're not also pretty confident that you could judge. The answer is already there in the back of your head. Even if you're withholding it, you know what judgment you're withholding.
Let's leave that (admittedly loaded) hypothetical for a moment and turn to the reality of the Church and the country in which we live. We hear a lot about political polarization these days, for obvious reasons. We also hear a lot about the ways in which political polarization has seeped into the Church.
While political polarization may exacerbate our ecclesial divisions, our most significant ecclesial divisions - e.g., about liturgy or sexual morality or the proper interpretation of Vatican II - long predate the current moment of political polarization. Moreover, as I've written before, it's hard to see American political polarization as the prime driver of our ecclesial divisions when so much of the Church outside the United States, and thus well removed from our domestic polarization, is dealing with very similar divisions.

Political polarization is at least as much a symptom of our ecclesial divisions as it is a cause. And I'm not the first to observe that many of our political divisions are underwritten by much deeper disagreements about the nature and ends of human life.
Those anthropological questions are, to the Christian mind, inherently theological questions. So we shouldn't be surprised to discover that the way we pray (or even what we like to sing) somehow shows up in the way we view our political life and the responsibilities of citizenship. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. The way we pray shapes the way we believe, which in turn shapes the way we live. To which we might add, lex civitandi - the way we pray eventually shapes the way we exercise our citizenship.
Now, of course, we can't really tell much about people's political beliefs based solely on what sort of liturgical music they prefer. No doubt, there are progressives out there who love to chant the Regina Coeli and conservatives who long to "Sing a New Church" into being.
Nor am I suggesting that liturgical renewal ought to be seen as a means to some political end, even a worthy political end. Instrumentalizing the worship of God is a wicked and disordered thing to do. But it is the case that right worship cannot but be a boon to the life of any community that so worships.
In a recent h...

By Auguste Meyrat.
But first a note from Robert Royal: I don't like fundraising campaigns. Maybe you do, and if so, God bless you. But if you'd like to help put an end to this one, the answer is easy. Be generous. Make your contribution. Support The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column...
If you consider the evolution of Christian apologetics over the centuries, most of the changes pertain to style and format. In the early days, apologists would deliver their arguments at forums or write letters on papyrus scrolls. In the Middle Ages, they would have formal debates or write lengthy, abstruse treatises on vellum. In the modern era, apologists have made use of radio, popular literature, television, and now the Internet to explain why Christianity is the one true faith.
As for the actual substance of Christian apologetics, not much has changed since the days of St. Justin Martyr. Many of today's arguments are the same as those articulated centuries ago. After all, if they haven't been disproven (and they haven't), there's little reason to develop new ones.
By contrast, opponents of Christianity are continually forced to reframe and reconstruct their arguments. These days, atheists prefer to invoke science in the effort to prove God doesn't exist. This, in turn, forces Christian apologists to adapt by speaking extensively on the sciences while articulating the same perennial points.
This approach is apparent in Science at the Doorstep of God: Science in Support of God, the Soul, and Life After Death (2023) by American scientist, philosopher, professor, and priest Robert Spitzer, S.J.
Spitzer systematically dismantles and debunks the supposedly scientific arguments of today's skeptics. In addition to proving God's existence, he also demonstrates that the old arguments are more relevant than ever, and that they even may prove necessary in saving scientific inquiry itself from materialist nihilism.
At the outset, Spitzer explains how modern physics and astronomy point to a beginning to the universe (with the "Big Bang") and how this important truth necessitates an immaterial God. This also addresses the usual atheist rebuttals that the universe is somehow one of an infinite set of universes (a multiverse) - for which no evidence exists.
These theories also conflict with the current expansion of the universe and the law of entropy. Seen differently, they are ideas that effectively trade away the conclusions supported by millennia of scientific and mathematical scholarship for the kinds of implausible narratives typically found in a superhero movie.
The same back-and-forth applies with the "fine-tuning" argument. Spitzer relates how the many variables that allow the universe to exist and sustain life (low energy, universal constants, the mass of fundamental particles) are so finely "tuned" that such a system arising randomly is virtually impossible.
There is also "string theory," which proposes a potentially infinite series of alternative dimensional universes, and a "Level IV multiverse," which claims that an unchangeable series of physical laws precedes the creation of the cosmos. Yet, again, none of these alternative theories are based on any real science, but rather stem from a deep atheistic prejudice with a science-sounding vocabulary.

Spitzer responds to an argument made popular by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins. A philosopher/scientist himself, Dawkins proposes the following syllogism: "1. Whatever is more complex is more improbable. 2. A cosmic designer (God) must be more complex than anything it designs. 3. Therefore, a cosmic designer must be more improbable than anything it designs."
Spitzer explains that not only does Dawkins have this backwards (in truth, God, at least in Christian theology, is "simple" and thus more probable than any designed reality). But Dawkins also misapplies and misunderstands science itself.
All the sciences are based on induction (forming conclusions from observed phenomena), not deducti...

By Joseph R. Wood.
But first a note: As Professor Wood explains today, the contemplative life, especially of hermits, is a fundamental service to the Church and the world, even though to many it doesn't seem so. Here at TCT, we cannot make such fundamental claims, but we do what we can, and we know it achieves results, not least among our readers. What we already see developing this year will call for some of the same - and even greater - efforts that we've made for the past decade and a half. We know economic times are hard out there, but they're hard for us too. And right now, we're not hitting our chalk marks for this mid-year fundraiser. So I have to ask, please, if you care about the future of Catholicity in this country and the world, we're in the fight. Will you be too?
Now for today's column...
This year's routine announcement of clergy assignments in my diocese included one that you don't see often. A priest will follow a hermit vocation.
Eremitical life, and the contemplative vocation in general, were central in early Christianity and remain a search for union with God for the contemplatives themselves, and for the good of the universal Church.
The early Desert and Church Fathers, often hermits, are a source of strength and grace, always being forgotten and always being found again. Today seems to be another "found again" moment.
As Sister Benedicta Ward explains, the earliest years of the Church saw some Christians determined to await the return of Christ "with a totality of commitment. . .[as] ascetics. . .who undertook a poor and celibate life. . .in the expectation of the coming of the Lord."
This asceticism was first undertaken in urban settings, but "gradually a need for more absolute retirement. . .caused people to seek. . .solitude away from social, political, and economic demands."
In these years, as Hilary White has noted, "there were no written rules to follow, no orders to join and permission was not needed from any ecclesiastic in Rome or Constantinople. You simply decided to do it."
People moved away from cities in search of solitude and silence, sometimes as hermits occasionally getting together for prayer or meals, sometimes in more tight-knit groups.
St. Anthony the Great sought solitude. But according to St. Athanasius, Anthony encountered other hermits and, in particular, St. Paul the First Hermit. Anthony himself attracted followers and became known as the Father of Monasticism for the group that gathered around him.
We think today of "hermits" as living in solitude and "monks" as living in a cenobitic community in accord with the Rule of St. Augustine or St. Benedict. The necessity for such rules and their emphasis on obedience to superiors became apparent in those first few centuries, as the rigors of ascetic life led some to holiness and others in all sorts of bad directions.
St. Dorotheos of Gaza reports the foul ways his wayward brothers showed their displeasure with him. St. Benedict, after living as a hermit then being drafted as superior for some misguided monks, was nearly murdered when they found his efforts to reform their ways too strict.
Two orders devoted to eremitical life became prominent over the centuries: the Benedictine Camaldolese founded around 1000 A.D. by St. Romuald and renewed half a millennium later by Blessed Paul Giustiniani, and the Carthusians founded by St. Bruno not long after St. Romuald. Both remain active.
In recent centuries, the eremitical vocation has often followed decades of devotion in a monastery. The experienced monk, equipped with the strength and temperament gained through years of monastic practice, leaves his brothers to seek a closer union with God and to undertake spiritual combat with the devil.
He'll usually stay close to his monastery, under obedience as part of complete submission to God, for both physical and spiritual support as he enters a deeper solitude.

Herein lies one of the most misunderstood aspects of monastic and eremitical life....

By Randall Smith.
But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, June 12th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the emerging papacy of Leo XIV, the removal of art by Marko Rupnik from the Vatican website, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
This year is the 1700th anniversary of the 325 A.D. Council of Nicaea, from which we get the Nicaean Creed. Some claim they don't want to be "constrained" by a creed. So why do we need a creed?
Our word "creed" from the Latin credo, meaning "I believe." If you say, "I believe," you need to believe something or in someone. It would be odd to shout: "I believe, I really believe!" but then if someone asks, "What do you believe?" you reply: "I don't know, but I know I believe." You have to believe in something. It might also be important to understand how and why you believe what you believe. But the first thing to get clear on is what you believe.
But to say, "I believe" in the sense understood by people who recite the Nicaean Creed is not merely to indicate, "Here's what I happen to think right now," as when someone in response to the question, "Where's the men's room?" says, "I'm not sure, but I believe it's over there." A creed is a statement of the fundamental principles that animate your life, as when someone in the face of great adversity proclaims, "I believe that goodness will triumph over evil" and then backs up those words with his actions.
When people recite the Creed, they are saying, in effect: "This is who I am." Or, if it is a community of persons, they would be saying, "This is who we are. We pledge ourselves to God and to each other. We set ourselves to live our lives this way, in good times and bad. We believe that living this way is the way to human flourishing, and we accept everything that comes along with it." A creed, in this sense, is something like a marriage vow.
Because it is meant to be an expression of who you are, you can't say, "Here is what I believe, but, you know, it could change tomorrow." If you did, then you wouldn't be talking about the beliefs that animate your life. You would have other, more fundamental convictions that animate the way you actually live and by which you judge everything else. If the beliefs in the creed fit with those deeper convictions, then fine. But if not, then the creed, or certain parts of it, get dumped. That's like vowing to be faithful in your marriage, but if things get difficult, you opt out. That makes your marriage less important than whatever you dump it for.
Oddly, there are theologians who claim that the creeds ratified in the past - at Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon - have no relevance for us today. The complexity of God cannot be captured in words, they say, so each generation has its own concepts, and each generation must compose its own creed.

But that's like saying, "Since no words can capture the essence of marriage, whatever I vowed to my spouse the day we got married is no longer relevant now. My new vow allows me to commit adultery." That's not a vow, nor would it be the basis of a creed. Can you imagine someone insisting, "I believe it's always wrong to lie," and then the next day, not only lying to you, but insisting he holds the same belief. I think you'd probably tell him, "I don't think you do believe that."
Pope Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, warned against those who "on the basis of preconceived assumptions," deny the universal validity of the faith. "Faith," he writes:
clearly presupposes that human language is capable of expressing divine and transcendent reality in a universal way - analogically, it is true, but no less meaningfully for t...