By John D. Grondelski
This year marks the centennial of the institution of the Solemnity of Christ the King. Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Quas primas on December 11, 1925, which sketched the theology and announced the new feast of the "Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
Contrary to this year's protest rhetoric, America does have a king. All men have a king, because the Kingdom of God encompasses all men. As the Preface for the feast observes, Christ presents to His Father "an eternal and universal kingdom."
The claims of Christ's Kingship might seem to most people today inflated, even triumphalist. They are an offense to a modernity that makes its peace with secularism, something of which even some clerics urge us to see as a positive development.
But one should not forget the historical context that motivated Pius XI. The world had passed less than a decade since the "Great War," which didn't acquire the appellation of "First World War" until a Second one outstripped it. The horrors of World War I profoundly marked that generation, shocked that a Europe which prided itself on its mission of exporting "civilization" could be so basely uncivilized.
Nor were the pope's concerns limited to the Marne, the Argonne, and Amiens. As nuncio, then-Archbishop Ratti was the last diplomat who stayed in Poland to witness the "Miracle on the Vistula," which halted the Bolsheviks' Western offensive in 1920. The Battle of Warsaw probably saved Western Europe from Communism for a generation.
The papal diagnosis of the previous decade - both of the mutual butchery of Europe's old order as well as the threat posed by the new regimes - was man's abandonment of God and His Law: "[T]he majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics."

That same dismissal of the Deity and Divine Law also would send men down futile rabbit holes of human-designed peace and security, culminating in the risible 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which solemnly proclaimed war to be forever outlawed - just a decade before the next World War. Pius XI had a different vision: "[A]s long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations."
A century later, those of us stuck in the postmodern condition may imagine the pope's warnings to be quaint in a world where "democracy" demands a strict separation of church and state, exiling God from the public square.
The truth is that democracy demands no such thing, though we pretend that it does to avoid the demands binding every human being by virtue of natural law - another reality unfortunately consigned to unjustified silence.
The Gospels may speak of the "things of God and the things of Caesar," but - while respecting the legitimate "autonomy of created things" - Christians never understood that division to make both sides equal, as if there were things of Caesar that were not first and always things of God.
The human temptation to build a world without God dates back to man's origins. It was, in fact, the temptation of the first sin: to be as gods, by which we, not God, defined good and evil. It was also the temptation of Babel: to reach heaven by human means.
It is precisely against those temptations that the Kingship of Christ stands. His is a Kingship rooted in spiritual truth, grounded in "justice, peace, and love." It is a Kingship that recognizes man's desire to reach Heaven is fulfilled through his union with the Crucified and Risen King, not by human self-sufficiency.
Contrary to those who would argue claims of human freedom, Quas primas explicitly connects "the blessings of real liberty" with recognition "both in private and in public life, that Christ is King."
The problem of genuine freedom is arguably a leading moral problem of our day. Is freedom the end in itself, self-justifying so that whatever is done freely is good? Or -...

By Robert Lazu Kmita.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: We are finishing the first week of our end-of-year fundraising, and we've already come a good way. As always, I like to get back to our main business as soon as possible - bringing you the very best commentary on things Catholic. But that, among other things, depends on you. So let's do this. Let's lay the foundation for TCT in 2026 - and beyond.
Now for today's column...
In recent months, we have heard a great deal about traditional liturgies being canceled in certain dioceses. Of course, this is nothing new. The tenacity of certain bishops, however, in eliminating not only these liturgies but also the groups devoted to preserving and transmitting the Catholic liturgical treasure cannot fail to worry us.
First, it must be said that the core of the heated debate surrounding the right of the Traditional Latin Mass to exist is not liturgical in nature. A certain vision of the evolution and state of the world over the past centuries - marked dramatically by the collapse of Catholic monarchies and by revolutions, Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, and the two World Wars - has generated the idea of a complete "readjustment" (i.e., aggiornamento) of the traditional categories of Christian theology and morality, as well as of divine worship.
The premise of this vision is sensitivity and understanding of modern man, who is allegedly no longer capable of receiving the Gospel as transmitted through the traditional means that the Church has employed for nearly two millennia. Hence, the "updating" of the entire Christian religion would be a necessity imposed by new historical conditions. Regardless of how it is phrased, this is the main argument of the "reformers" - often accompanied by the claim that "We no longer live in the Middle Ages!"
The second reason for the changes, systematically denounced by the lovers of Tradition and the defenders of continuity and immutability in divine worship, concerns the theological core expressed in the liturgical and sacramental forms, which were directed against the Protestant tsunami by the Council of Trent (1545-1563).
Critics insistently claim that these forms no longer meet the new needs. Fundamental notions such as "sacrifice," "symbol," "penance," "reparation," and the like have been bracketed under the influence of a confused ecclesiology. Thus, it is no longer clear whether the Catholic Church is still the one true Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ - the only community in which salvation is possible.
This, of course, leads us to the third reason for the liturgical reforms: the ecumenical one, which represents a notable departure from the teachings and ecclesiological style that existed before the Second Vatican Council. In this case, the goal is not so much to adapt to the sensitivity and understanding of modern man as to adapt to the requirements of dialogue with other Christian denominations - a dialogue in which openness and the desire to minimize differences (unfortunately, at the cost of diluting traditional teachings) are dominant.
Thus, although any form of communicatio in sacris with members of other denominations was strictly forbidden to Catholics before the Council, today joint prayers and meetings like those of Assisi and Abu Dhabi have become the norm, while the voices of the few Cardinals and bishops who raise concerns are quickly silenced.

In such a context, the Liturgy of the Ages - characterized by its monarchical and hierarchical principle, and by the sacredness and reverence faithfully preserved by the clergy and the faithful devoted to Tradition - remains the target of those convinced that it represents an outdated, sclerotic form, incapable of overcoming the current crisis.
In the excellent volume edited by Joseph Shaw, The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals, even the hierarchs charged with overseeing the activity of the Ecclesia Dei Commission (suppressed by Pope Francis in 2019, with its responsibilities t...

By George J. Marlin.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: With all the online infighting over who's a "Nazi" or a "Fascist," almost no one stops to think why it is that we regard such political formations as wrong. Today, George Marlin, recalling the trials of real Nazis, explains the need to resort to divine law and natural law. But to do that brings with it certain other public judgments as well. At The Catholic Thing, we'd be glad to see that, and labor towards it in various ways. And that's the reason for our end-of-year fundraising, which is moving along. But I have to be frank and say we need to step up the pace and need many more of you simply to step up. Our business manager, Hannah Russo, just reminded me that this week TCT turns seventeen. So by my reckoning, we're still in our early youth - and plan on having many years ahead. Please help us to make that a reality so that TCT can continue to appear every day, now and for a long time to come.
Now for today's column...
Exactly eighty years ago yesterday, the War Crimes Tribunal convened a trial to prosecute twenty-four Nazi leaders - a legal procedure with continued relevance for us today. The driving force behind the creation of the tribunal was American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Shortly after America entered the war, he said, "It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murders of thousands of innocent persons in the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith."
The November 20, 1945 indictment of the 24 Nazi ringleaders consisted of three parts. Part one accused the defendants of conspiracy to wage a war of aggression and violation of international treaties; these were "crimes against peace." Part two charged the defendants with violations of the laws and customs of war as embodied in the Hague and Geneva conventions and as recognized by the military forces of all civilized nations; these were "war crimes against peace." And finally, part three accused the Nazis of the extermination of racial, ethnic, and religious groups and with other atrocities against civilians; these were "crimes against humanity."
The arguments of the defense were essentially two. First, it was claimed that at the time the various acts were alleged to have been committed, the "crimes," which the defendants were now being charged, had no statutory basis: either in German law or international law; that the legal basis of indictments had been created after the fact. Since "ex post facto" laws are constitutionally prohibited by each of the Allied Powers, they could hardly have validity in a court convened by those nations.
The defense's second argument was that the accused ought not to be charged with the consequences of following the orders of Germany's lawful leaders. Hitler's supreme authority had been confirmed equally by appointed judges and elected legislators, and he was able to boast of the Nazi Party: "We stand absolutely as hard as granite on the ground of legality."
It was, however, perverse legality. Beginning with the decree for the Protection of the People of the State (1933), which obliterated the personal freedoms formally protected by the Weimar Constitution, the Nazis promulgated a series of legal outrages. There were "Racial Purity" laws that forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews. There were laws that forced the registration of "alien races" and genetically "less valuable" individuals; and laws that expelled Jews from government employment and permitted the "Aryanization" of Jewish assets. From such "hard as granite" laws, Hitler and the German leadership fashioned the Final Solution.
Yet, despite the enormity of these Nazi atrocities, the legal dilemma at Nuremberg was very real. In establishing a case against the defendants, especially on charges of "crimes against humanity," the prosecution had no pre-existing statutes sufficient to the task. B...

By Michael Pakaluk.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: When I meet many of you in person, I often hear how much you love reading The Catholic Thing. And I often reply: so do I - and I read it a day before you do, when I don't write it myself. And just look today at what Michael Pakaluk has given us all! How can you not support that? You know how. There's the Button. There's you. There's The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column...
The Church is a poet, in the strict sense, since through the Spirit she makes poems, that is, beautiful, created objects. Her sacraments and liturgical year are poems: they have meaning and even tell a story. Likewise, each parish church is a poem, and each liturgy celebrated there. And every faithful Catholic must be zealous for this poetry.
At least, so much I have gained by pondering Newman, Doctor of the Church. Newman traced the origin of his beloved Oxford Movement to a longing for this poetry. It was an attempt to recover the poetry that properly belongs to the Catholic Church.
It began in 1827, with the publication of John Keble's book of poems, The Christian Year. Few know this book today. Evidently, it played its role and departed. Yet historians say that, with perhaps 1 million copies sold, Keble's was the most popular volume of English verse in the 19th century.
The Christian Year contains a poem for each Sunday in the liturgical year, and for various feasts, such as St. Stephen's and Holy Innocents. Christian families used it as a breviary, reading aloud the poem for the week and memorizing it together. In doing so they would also pray, because, as Keble says in his Dedication, his poetry was the fruit of prayer:
When in my silent solitary walk,
I sought a strain not all unworthy Thee,
My heart, still ringing with wild worldly talk,
Gave forth no note of holier minstrelsy.
Prayer is the secret, to myself I said,
Strong supplication must call down the charm,
And thus with untuned heart I feebly prayed,
Knocking at Heaven's gate with earth-palsied arm.
Fountain of Harmony!
Keble, then, would re-enchant the world by enchanting it, by calling down "the charm" in prayer.
Newman's assessment:
[Keble] did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do; he made it poetical. . . .the author of the Christian Year found the Anglican system all but destitute of this divine element, which is an essential property of Catholicism; a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piece-meal; prayers, clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture lessons turned into chapters. . .a smell of dust and damp, not of incense. . .the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar. . .and for orthodoxy, a frigid, inelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just account of itself.
His happy magic made the Anglican Church seem what Catholicism was and is.

Because of the success of The Christian Year, in 1831 Keble was appointed Chair of Poetry at Oxford. Two years later, on July 14th, he preached his famous sermon on "National Apostasy," which Newman in his Apologia later said "I have ever considered and kept. . .as the start of the religious movement of 1833."
Thus, the Oxford Movement and therefore Newman's own conversion began with poetry. From out of the shadows of poetry (ex umbris et imaginibus), Newman entered into the truth poetry (in veritatem) of the Church.
For Newman, Keble was part of a broader movement of yearning after beauty and truth which today we call the "Romantic Movement" (on which see the perceptive commentary of Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty). But whereas the Romantic poets, whom Keble admired, looked to build a new civilization on the ruins of ...

By Francis X. Maier.
But first a note from Robert Royal:
Friends, There was a widespread Internet hiccup yesterday morning, which knocked out sites way beyond TCT. So if you got an error message when you tried to read Professor Gallagher's very fine column on the things that are Caesar's and the things that are not, I recommend seeking it out. It will clarify a lot of what's going on in the Church these days. I'm happy to say that service was restored before noon and even more happy to say that the tech glitch did not stop many of you from being generous during our end-of-the-year fundraiser, now underway. And just look at today's brilliant column by Fran Maier. If you value work like this, please show it. It's easy enough. Click the button below. Send a check. It all helps advance the mission of The Catholic Thing.
Now for today's column...
We're just weeks from 2026, and just months from America's 250th birthday. We're also just days from Advent, a season of self-examination and hope for Christians in preparing for the central event of human history: the birth of Jesus. It's a beautiful, serious, reflective time of year. Which makes it a perfect time for some awkward thoughts about who we are as a believing people and the character of the "American Experiment," the nation we call home and help sustain. So, let's begin.
On the place of religious faith and traditions:
1. The American Founding is a child of Biblical and Enlightenment thought. But the Enlightenment itself is a child of the Biblical framework - its anthropology and morality - from which it developed and tried to outgrow. To oversimplify: no Bible, no Enlightenment, no United States. At least, no United States as its Founders originally understood and intended it.
2. Despite more than a century of anti-Catholic prejudice and occasional violence, Catholics could successfully fit into and contribute to a deeply Protestant country because we shared a "mere Christianity" despite our theological and ecclesial differences. From the start, Jews too have shared in the country's Biblical roots. To put it even more forcefully: A Christian-inspired understanding of man and his purpose, and therefore his civic life, makes no sense outside its grounding in the Judaism from which it emerged. Thus, Christian anti-Semitism is a uniquely ugly form of blasphemy. Jesus and his mother were, after all, Jews.
3. Because of the above, other religious traditions can sometimes have difficulty integrating here. They must either adjust themselves to the Founding's original framework and "soul" (not an impossible task), or change them into something else, i.e., diminish the Christian and Biblical dimension of public life. The latter course has largely succeeded, conducted by a secularized, progressive leadership class. This accounts, in part, for the negative revisionism in American history and civics education during the past half-century. Note especially that Islam has an anthropology and view of the state and society very different from Christian and Enlightenment thought. This has obvious implications for public life. Note current conditions in Europe.
On Jefferson's "wall of separation":
4. Religion and politics make ripe ground for conflict. On the one hand, the "wall of separation" between Church and state appears nowhere in the Constitution. The phrase came from an 1802 letter by then-President Thomas Jefferson. Established Churches can work. Various U.S. States had an officially recognized church in the early years after independence. The last, in Massachusetts, was disestablished only in 1833. But history shows that they're a bad idea. Establishment usually benefits the state more than the Church, which too often becomes a dependency of, and a chaplaincy to, political power. Thus, the separation of Church institutions from the state is, in principle, a sound idea. But it can easily be abused by excluding religious institutions from public activity and appropriate collaborative s...

By Daniel B. Gallagher.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends, e made a good start towards our end-of-year funding goals yesterday, and I'm deeply grateful to all of you for your support. It's a great encouragement to all of us at TCT to see donations coming in from every state in the Union, and in countries from New Zealand to Switzerland. But we're only at the beginning and still have a distance to go. And in the meantime, the work needed is essential. As Professor Gallagher makes clear today, it's not just that the Catholic Faith can't be identified with any political party or project. The Faith gives us a quite different perspective on what our ultimate and relative commitments should be. It's a distinction as old and always relevant as Christ's admonitions about Caesar's coin and Augustine's explanation of the City of God.
And one that not only gets our spiritual lives right, it makes clear the relative place our political and social lives should occupy as well. Here, we not only write with such things in mind, we try to live them and to make them clearer in the lives of our readers and our world. It might seem a cliché that we can't do any of this without your support but it's the simple truth. So please, click the button, select how and how much you can support what we think of as a crucial contribution to our Church and our world: The Catholic Thing. Just click the banner below.
Now for today's column...
Amidst all the turmoil surrounding Cardinal Blase Cupich's decision to honor Senator Dick Durbin last month, objections raised by the faithful (including Cupich's brother bishops), and Pope Leo's unscripted comments, almost no attention has been given to a fundamental theological problem underlying the entire fiasco. "The tragedy of our current situation in the United States," Cupich wrote in a statement after Senator Durbin declined the award, "is that Catholics find themselves politically homeless."
At the November 3rd Keep Hope Alive Fundraiser, Cupich doubled down on his assessment of "our current situation" as a "tragedy," this time pointing to the dearth of politicians who embrace the entire gamut of Catholic social teaching: "Let's be true and honest," he said. "The tragic reality in our nation today is that there are essentially no Catholic public officials who consistently pursue the essential elements of Catholic social teaching."
But is that really a "tragedy?" If we want to be "true and honest," shouldn't we acknowledge that Catholics are not supposed to find themselves at home in this world, politically or otherwise? Doesn't Holy Scripture, along with a host of saints, remind us that the Gospel entails placing our hope in the home of a world yet to come?
"Put no trust in princes, in children of Adam powerless to save." (Psalm 146:3)
"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." (Matthew 22:21)
"My kingdom does not belong to this world." (John 18:36)
Another Archbishop of Chicago by the name Cardinal Joseph Bernardin created controversy in 1983 when he introduced the concept of a "consistent ethic of life" connecting the issues of poverty, war, capital punishment, and euthanasia to abortion in a "seamless garment."
Whatever one makes of this concept, I would propose that what we really need is a "seamless garment" connecting theology to the Church's teaching and preaching priorities. If we really expect this world to offer a political party that we could call "home," if we really expect politicians to embrace all of Catholic social teaching without exception, then we should probably call ourselves something other than "Christian."
I am not, of course, arguing at all that Christians should detach themselves from social responsibility. Neither am I suggesting that Catholics remain apolitical.

What I am suggesting is that Catholics engage the polis with their eyes set on the Kingdom of God, their mouths on the call to conversion, and their hearts on the hope of everlasting ...

By Robert Royal.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Dear Friends: Today we give you a somewhat longer reflection than is usual on this site about the U.S. Bishops' meeting in Baltimore last week and its ramifications here and in the Church at large. We're also beginning our end-of-year fundraising campaign - which is to say, we seek your support for all The Catholic Things you visit this site to find - not only our daily columns but our podcasts, courses, links to vital News and Commentary, and much more. We only fundraise twice a year because I have great confidence in you, our readers. And that confidence has been repaid for almost two decades now.
We don't come to you promising to change the world. But we do claim to provide the freshest, sharpest, and most balanced look into the Church and society that we can provide. It takes your help to do all this. As our regular writers know, I often remind them that even though they write for quite modest compensation, their reward will be much greater, we believe, in Heaven. Still, they and our dedicated staff, like all of us, find themselves facing higher costs of living and competing demands for their time. So I ask you as we're about to enter Advent and the Christmas Season to please be generous in support of our work, even more generous, if possible, than in past years. The challenges are many and the need great. We need everyone reading this to take part in this ongoing effort we call The Catholic Thing. Click the banner below.
Now for today's column...
In his address to the U.S. bishops at their annual meeting in Baltimore last week, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States, argued - nearly to the point of obsession - that Vatican II has to be regarded as the guide to the present and future of the Church. And the Council, he made clear, as interpreted recently by Pope Francis. ("Pope Leo also is convinced of this.") It was a bold, if doubtful, claim, given the well-documented ability of theologians to disagree. Even the more progressive among them might find reasons to dispute any such attempt to "control the narrative." Indeed, the Cardinal went further into even more difficult terrain, claiming - Rome must have cleared all this ahead of time - that "We now inhabit the world that the Council foresaw." It's telling - more on this below - that Pierre felt he had to push this so strongly at the American bishops, the implication being that he knows they're not so very much in agreement.
Now, most committed Catholics today often tend to pay too much attention to such passing statements coming from the pope or the curia. (Mea culpa. . .) And, sadly, sometimes "cancel" others just like the social media maniacs. The most important thing happening any given day on the surface of the Earth, however, may not be some large-scale political or ecclesial matter, but a priest helping someone to die reconciled to God and family. Or perhaps a humble, unknown person, entering into the way of becoming a human being as God intended us to be, one who will really make a difference in the world, which is to say, a saint.
Still, lesser truths also matter because truth is one of the divine names. As any fair observer might tell the Cardinal, no one in the 1960s - let alone the bishops gathered in Rome - had any clear idea of the world we currently "inhabit." It does no favor to the real achievements of the Council Fathers back then, or to our confused Church today, to make claims that probably none of them would have made for themselves. It's not merely a question of our brave new world of smartphones, the Internet, and AI, though those are already significant and threatening enough. We live in unprecedented conditions about the value of human life and the nature of human societies, over and above the older problems of sin and unbelief.
In the 1960s, to take a crucial example, Paul Ehrlich published a widely influential book, The Population Bomb, which confidently predicte...

By Robert J. Kurland
Every day, we encounter articles warning of AI's future dangers. But is machine learning really the threat? No. As psychiatrist Karl Stern warned 71 years ago in "The Third Revolution," the core problem is that intellectual elites have spent more than a century embracing materialism: scientism über alles.
Stern, a Jewish psychiatrist who fled Nazi Germany and converted to Catholicism, diagnosed this delusion with prophetic clarity. He warned that when we reduce persons to mechanisms, it opens the door to dehumanization in all its forms. The AI debate is the latest chapter in a story Stern witnessed firsthand: in Nazi Germany, materialist ideology reduced human beings to specimens in a racist biological theory, their humanity ignored.
Stern identified the fundamental error: science operates legitimately on the material, measurable plane. But when it claims this is the only plane, it fails on its own terms.
Consider Stern's famous thought experiment. Imagine assembling a research team to study Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Physicists analyze the sound waves, intensities, and frequencies; psychologists investigate Beethoven's childhood traumas and how he coped with deafness; sociologists examine his choice of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the post-Napoleonic political climate; neurologists use functional MRI to map which brain regions are stimulated when subjects hear the choral movement.
Yet as Stern observes, "No matter how much data our scientific team compiled, it could not 'explain' a single bar of the musical experience we call the Ninth Symphony. The problem isn't insufficient data. The problem is categorical: aesthetic experience, meaning, and beauty exist on a plane that scientific measurement cannot access.
This isn't a failure of science. Science cannot deal with all of reality. As Stern wrote, "Love and hate, joy and mourning cannot be quantified." You can map every neuron, measure every hormone, track every electrical impulse - and still not explain why one loves a prodigal son.
The same limitation appears across every domain that matters most to human life. Science can map neurological processes during moral decision-making, but it cannot ground moral obligation itself. Why should we sacrifice for others if we're merely collections of atoms following physical laws?
Fundamentally, science cannot answer "why" questions about purpose and meaning. It excels at describing mechanisms - i.e., how things work. But it cannot address teleological questions - why things exist, what their purpose is.
These aren't defects in the scientific method. They're inherent limitations that reveal reality's true nature: multiple planes of being, each requiring its own mode of knowing. The catastrophic error of scientism is claiming that only the material plane is real - that if science cannot measure it, it doesn't exist.

Stern's solution wasn't to reject science but to take it as a partial understanding of reality. The Catholic intellectual tradition, drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, has always insisted on what Stern called "multiple planes of being." Material reality operates according to physical laws that science can study. But persons exist simultaneously on several planes - body, soul, and spirit united in a person, a person made in God's image.
If Stern were alive today, he would tell us how his understanding of reality relates to potential dangers from AI. Consciousness cannot be achieved through algorithms - not because our computers aren't powerful enough, but because self-awareness belongs to a non-material plane of reality. No amount of computational complexity can bridge the gap between syntax and meaning.
Consider something as concrete as addiction recovery. Could an AI chatbot serve as a 12-Step sponsor? Technically, it could be programmed with all the right phrases. But it could never actually be a sponsor - because sponsorship requires what AI fundamentally lacks: empathy born of shared suffering, mor...

By Auguste Meyrat
One of the great paradoxes of the modern world is that as living has become easier, believing in God has become more difficult. This lack of belief stems from, among other things, the many choices of religion on offer. The world today is largely pluralistic and individualistic, and people now pick their religion like they pick out an outfit at a department store.
Naturally, this results in a kind of spiritual paralysis and malaise. With so many choices, the ordinary person might despair that any of them is the right one and might assume choice itself is an illusion. Moreover, this problem becomes all the worse when most educational institutions regularly deride religious faith and discourage its practice.
So, apologists not only need to argue for belief in God, but also for the act of belief itself. This is the challenge that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat - and a conservative Catholic - takes up in his recent book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat is well situated to appreciate the moods and prejudices of modern readers, and makes the case that they should reconsider their indifference to church and commit to a religion.
On one hand, Douthat's broad approach relieves him of having to account for obscure theological differences and speak as a reasonable layman who can identify with his audience. On the other hand, he is forced to attempt reconciliation between religions that are often opposed to one another.
Instead of assuming a great leap of faith from doubt into belief, Douthat works off the premise that people make many little hops from a qualified skepticism to full religious participation. His analogy usually works, but it can also mistake certain hops backward as progress.
That said, Douthat deserves praise for his eloquent defense of theism. He avoids the dry syllogisms explaining causation and contingency, but uses them as a means of dismantling the popular idea that science disproves God's existence.
While not exactly debunking religious faith, the momentous theories of heliocentrism and evolution have effectively disrupted and destabilized traditional faith: "Two hinge points, the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, are understood to have shifted the reasonable default to purposelessness and accident, materialism and atheism."
Douthat explains, however, that these theories mainly speak to the complexity of the cosmos, not to the absence of God. Moreover, as one surveys more recent scientific discoveries, it even appears more likely that God designed the universe.

Douthat presses on and explores the mystery of the soul. Similar to scientific breakthroughs in physics, new discoveries in neuroscience seem to challenge the existence of souls. And yet, such advances also may be seen as offering more evidence for the existence of an immaterial soul: "Whatever consciousness may be, soul or mind, dream or spell, it self-evidently has its own integrity, its own being, which is intertwined with physical reality without being reducible to physical substances and their interactions."
In expounding upon these points, Douthat gradually presses materialists into an untenable corner. In order to explain the soul and the universe, they must conjure up implausible theories of an infinite multiverse and of consciousness inexplicably "emerging" from complex neural networks in the brain. He makes it clear that today's materialists are desperately grasping at straws and, consequently, do not occupy the intellectual high ground.
After an interesting chapter on miracles and ghosts, Douthat moves on to the trickier case for religious adherence. After all, most people these days can at least be brought to a point of being "spiritual but not religious" - and leave it at that. It is quite another matter to coax them to the next step of committing to a religion.
Douthat's reasoning here is solid and dispels much of the do-it-yourself attitudes about religious practice. He explains the need for com...

Fellow TCT contributor Francis Maier warmed my heart last September with a favorable mention of Alasdair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals. This work is one of our most important recent philosophers' most important contributions to moral philosophy. I've taught it several times in a course on human nature.
As with all great books, it reveals more truth with each new reading. This semester, I finally realized that the work as a whole is a brilliant example of the use of philosophy as human reason to understand a truth given in revelation and faith.
MacIntyre, who died earlier this year, began his career as a Marxist before "seeing the light" of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. He eventually entered the Church. He understood well the complementarity of faith and reason that Aquinas infuses throughout his work. But MacIntyre relied on human reason, rather than revelation, as the ground of his work, knowing the truth to which that reason should lead.
MacIntyre begins the book by claiming that humans are animals, and that the differences between humans and non-human animals are narrower than many philosophers have claimed. He surveys scientific studies that have investigated the behavior of higher non-human animals, especially dolphins.
Such animals, MacIntyre judges, have something like reasons for acting that many philosophers have attributed only to humans. They exhibit a pre-linguistic kind of reason.
This reminds us that we are always animals with bodies, into which the human soul is placed and to which it is joined. We never escape our animal nature no matter how intellectual or spiritual we become. We all must control our bodies and choose our reactions to fear and desire, pain and pleasure. That's what the habits of the moral or natural virtues permit.
Great contemplatives are able, through prayer and reasoned discipline, to subdue the body's proclivities and demands to a degree that opens them to non-physical realities and God Himself. But their animal bodies will still die, as Christ in His human nature suffered bodily on the Cross.
Aristotle observed, and Aquinas developed, the notion that some non-human animals seem to exhibit a kind of practical wisdom or prudence in making choices. Our specific human rationality lies in our capacity to reflect upon and revise our reasons for acting in ways that non-human animals cannot, and thereby to consider alternative futures and different courses of action. That exercise requires the full language capacity that pre-linguistic animals lack.
We ourselves are born pre-linguistic, and the moral concerns that occupy us stem in many ways from our pre-linguistic concerns.

MacIntyre argues that at various times of our lives - pre-linguistic infancy for all, and for many, periods of illness or injury, or old age - we are all dependent on others for life itself. During those times, we incur a debt to others that, because it stems from receiving life, is beyond all measure.
We repay that debt as we become "independent moral reasoners," capable of evaluating our own reasons for acting independently of those who, in family and community, aided us in achieving that fully human condition of excellence or virtue. We gain that through the activities that we undertake with others, such as family life, practices such as playing chess or a sport, or working with others for a common good. Those practices have their "internal goods," which we learn to seek with others.
To discharge the debt that we take on during times of dependence, we as independent moral reasoners need others who depend on us. We can't be fully human without depending on others and having others depend on us.
This leads MacIntyre into an extension of the work of Aristotle and Aquinas. He explains that we need virtues of "acknowledged dependence," according to which we accept our own dependence on others and their dependence on us. These are virtues of giving and receiving, and they should orient the family and political o...

By Stephen P. White.
One of the wonders of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is its ability to completely engross the reader. The world Tolkien conjured up, though obviously fictional and fancifully so, is also unmistakably our world. And this was intentional. Tolkien hoped to create a mythology for his own England. His stories form a kind of literary protoevangelium, a mythical anticipation of the Christian world, that is to say, the real world.
And so Tolkien invented a mythical world, with its own languages, legends, peoples, and histories. Yet in the most fundamental sense, Tolkien did not create Middle-earth so much as he built it on real foundations. The moral stakes are the same as in our world. Virtues and vices are the same. Nobility and grace are the same. Goodness, both in the moral and metaphysical sense, is measured on a deeply human, and indeed Christian, scale. And so for all the hobbits and goblins and elves, his world retains a thoroughgoing realism.
This is why Tolkien could rightly describe his trilogy as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work," even though the stories themselves contain almost no direct references to religion of any sort.
In many ways, Tolkien's triumph is singular. Yet it shares with all great literature an ability to convey profound truths. Great fiction always does this. Indeed, fiction often does this more effectively than non-fiction, which in its earnest endeavor to adhere to established, verifiable facts or its tendency to overestimate the reliability of human reason, can easily present a view of reality so narrow and partial that it obscures or distorts our grasp of the whole.
Surely this is one reason Christ spoke so often in stories and parables. He wrote no essays or treatises.
And of course, the enduring appeal of Tolkien's stories is mostly due to their being compelling and interesting stories rather than the theory of myth which shaped their writing. (Though the latter may be a prerequisite to the former.) The epic scale of The Lord of the Rings - it is a very long story - allows a reader the time to become thoroughly engrossed.
Alas, all good stories must end (a fact which certain film studios seem loath to acknowledge). In recent years, the Tolkien estate has put out a slew of new additions to the Tolkien legendarium - previously unpublished bits of stories and partial histories. But The Lord of the Rings exists in the past perfect tense: a discrete, finite, and accomplished thing.
The English novelist Patrick O'Brian was no J.R.R. Tolkien. But in O'Brian's series of historical novels - 20 in all, plus one unfinished - I have found, if not a rival to Tolkien's beloved masterpiece, then at least a compliment. O'Brian portrays the careers of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend Stephen Maturin, a physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent, through the Napoleonic Wars.
O'Brian invented no languages or mythologies. His novels are set amongst historical events, sometimes described with slavish accuracy. But in his characters -particularly Aubrey and Maturin - one discovers an astonishing breadth and depth of reflection on human nature.

I've been re-reading the novels in recent months, having aged a bit since I last read them. On this second reading, I'm much more attuned to a similar thing happening to Aubrey and Maturin.
The first novel opens with the protagonists as young men, Aubrey a newly promoted "Master and Commander," and Maturin an impoverished, disaffected would-be revolutionary. Neither is married; both are at the beginnings of their careers (though with very different prospects before them.)
The friendship of Jack and Stephen - an unlikely pair, contrasting in physical appearance, temperament, religion (Stephen is a Catholic), and all interests save a love of music - allows for a fascinating study of human character, but perhaps more so, a study of the effects of time and fortune.
As their friendship deepens, each friend has time ...

By David G. Bonagura, Jr
I was recently asked, again: "Why is the Catholic Church so focused on abortion?" At least this time, it was asked out of curiosity rather than with anger. I can't imagine how such questioners perceive the Church. Do they think she is the institutional form of the Saturday Night Live Church Lady character? Or do they, perhaps, conjure up a Puritan bounty-hunter, keeping an intimacy log?
Whatever it is, they could not be more wrong. In fact, this time it struck me: the Church's approach to abortion shows her greatness and shows her, outside of celebrating the sacraments, at her best.
The Church, as the Body of Christ, touches men and women with the Son's saving love. Sometimes the greatness of the Church can be obscured by the sins of her members. But when handling abortion, with a few sad exceptions, the Church has nobly reflected the Father's justice and mercy, gifts that she exists to extend to all nations.
Abortion is not a modern invention; it's a sin as old as mankind. From her earliest days, the Church has prohibited abortion following the Fifth Commandment. "You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child," we read in the first century Didache. For the modern world obsessed with abortion as the failsafe of sexual libertinism, Pope St. John Paul II echoed this perennial teaching: abortion "always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being." (Evangelium Vitae 62)
But why the prohibition? It reflects a deeper truth: Human beings are the crown of God's Creation. Made in His image and likeness, human beings not only possess an inherent dignity; we are made to live with God forever. And He loves us so much that He has invited us to participate in His eternal plan through marriage and procreation. Human love reflects His divine love; generating new human life maximizes God's love. What God has created no man shall destroy.
For decades, the Catholic Church has proclaimed this Gospel of Life proudly and loudly to a world that has selected death as its culture. Other Christian groups have waffled. A few religions and groups have defended life, but not with the visibility that the Church has. She has not just taught from documents and pulpits. She has taken the Gospel of Life to the streets as the leading presence at the March for Life and at so many other public witnesses and protests. At all of these events, one thing is constant: Catholics praying the Rosary for strength and consolation.

The teaching Church is simultaneously a caring mother extending her embrace to her children. Shining her light into the darkest corners of the world, she has found countless women in hiding. They weep over their lost children and silently berate themselves for their sin. To these anguished women the Church reaches out with the tender compassion of Christ: "Peace be with you. Come and accept the Lord's mercy. He shed His blood for you. He forgives you. Come and return to the kingdom He has created you for."
In Christ, justice and mercy are not opposites. They fuel one another. Because mercy, in going beyond the limits of justice, restores what has fallen to the state of justice. Following her Master, the Church unites the two by restoring broken mothers to the community where they join their fellow Catholics in lifting up the lost innocents to God in prayer.
St. John Paul's Evangelium Vitae and the post-abortion healing ministry called Project Rachel stand today as the highest expressions of the Church's justice and mercy offered in the fight against abortion, the deadliest scourge of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In addition to defending the sanctity of life, the Church has reached out with an additional teaching effort. Women have been the Evil One's chief target as he advances his culture of death. He has fooled many of them into believing that their worth resides in acting contrary to their nature, and that their children in their wombs are no...

By Randall Smith
Debates about the "Catholic character" of the institution often stir up strong passions and debates at Catholic colleges and universities. Other "Catholic" organizations likely should be having these discussions, too. Indeed, when Catholic institutions stop having these discussions, it's usually a bad sign.
Some people think that a "Catholic" university should be just like any other university except with a Catholic chapel somewhere on campus.
A second group believes that a "Catholic" school should probably also teach "ethics" of some sort. Just make sure they understand not to cheat in business, lie on tax forms, or break promises. And be sure they're not racist. Whichever "ethics" tells them not to do that, teach that one.
Members of a third, somewhat smaller group have a sneaking suspicion, which they're usually not comfortable admitting out loud, that it would be good if the students were taught some "Catholic" values. What sort of "Catholic" values? For some, those would also be things like don't cheat in business, lie on tax forms, or break promises. Others might add things like "care for the poor" and be sure not to be racist.
A very small group thinks that the "Catholic" character of the university should permeate the entire education of its students. Students needn't be Catholic to be taught that Catholics hold a certain view of the nature and dignity of the human person; that Catholics believe the universe is the free act by one God who created the universe as an embodiment of His justice and love, and that we in our own way are meant to be instruments of that justice and love, aided by God's grace.
Whether non-Catholics and non-Christians accept these ideas for themselves is up to them, but it doesn't seem like an offense against their freedom to tell them that this is what Catholics believe. They might even find it somewhat compelling. Many have.
So, too, it seems reasonable enough to point out that Catholics believe the truths of reason and the truths of revelation will never contradict one another because both have the one God who is their Author. On this view, the scientist who gets to the truth of the created realm is "reading the Book of Nature" written by the hand of God Himself. And the literature professor who opens up the students' minds and imaginations is also providing something essential to a "Catholic" education. As John Henry Newman, our most recent Doctor of the Church, understood, both are crucial aspects of a "Catholic" education.
And yet, this business of "Catholic character" is often a hard sell, as hard as "selling" the persistent value of a liberal arts education. The battle for both often goes hand-in-hand. Lose the one, and you'll soon lose the other. The university, an institution dedicated to the wisdom attained by gaining a unified vision of all the arts and sciences - "a school of knowledge of every kind," as Newman described it - is, after all, a Catholic invention. Catholics should preserve it.

Some faculty resist talk of "Catholic" character because they think they will be forced to teach Catholic doctrine. But on the view I've proposed, if faculty teach the truth that is appropriate to their discipline with excellence, they already are, whether they know it or not, providing a "Catholic" education.
And quite frankly, it would be foolish to ask them to teach things for which they have not been trained. We don't ask theology professors to teach organic chemistry; so we shouldn't ask organic chemistry teachers to teach theology. It shouldn't be too much to ask, however, that theology teachers at Catholic institutions teach Catholic theology. Many don't.
Those who oppose the institution having a "Catholic character" are usually forgetting something - something that those who say they favor the Catholic character of the institution also sometimes forget. The Catholic character of the institution could be ideological, or it could be ethical, depending on how we underst...

By Brad Miner.
Scholars have long known that Elizabethan drama was a collaborative business. Yes, a play by Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, or William Shakespeare rightly belongs to each named author as the principal hand behind it. But there were often other hands involved as well.
A playwright delivered his script to the Lord Chamberlain's Men, say, and the various writers, directors, and actors (some performing all those tasks) would read and comment on the play. They'd debate the work's clarity, power, eloquence, humor, and, as a company, pound out a finished version the audience would see. Sometimes it didn't end there: if a jibe fell flat in a performance, they'd revise it. It happens on Broadway today - during rehearsals and previews.
We know this happened 400 years ago by analyzing original manuscripts that have survived (more or less) intact. Most are handwritten. (The famous First Folio - a printed version of Shakespeare's plays - appeared seven years after the Bard's death.) One such handwritten manuscript is Sir Thomas More (c. 1591-93).
You may not have heard of it. The principal author has long been thought to be Anthony Munday, who likely collaborated with Henry Chettle, and not just Chettle. Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, and William Shakespeare also had a hand in it. Literally.
There is a three-page section of the manuscript, written in cursive by "Hand D," that graphologists recognize as Shakespeare's handwriting. It's a speech given to More himself, in which the martyr-to-be calls for tolerance of foreign immigrants.
Any play about Thomas More was ill-fated less than a half-century after the death of Henry VIII. More had been martyred on Henry's order (July 8, 1535), and Elizabeth I's censors refused to allow a play about More to be performed.
Shakespeare was at the start of his career and some years from the great fame he'd achieve, although he was noticed: the playwright Henry Greene called him "an upstart Crow." Of course, Shakespeare would prove to be rather more than the country bumpkin Greene disdained.
Anthony Munday was several years older than Shakespeare, and there was an odd connection between them. The militant Protestant Munday had gone to Italy in 1578 as a spy to infiltrate Rome's English seminary, and evidence there (the Venerable English College) indicates that Shakespeare also visited a few years later, although not to spy. Munday then was openly anti-Catholic, and Shakespeare was secretly Catholic, so surely, they couldn't possibly work together! Yet they did.

Sir Thomas More tells the story of More's career as a public official. Its central irony is More's dedication to the King - indeed, his assertion of the necessity of obedience to Henry VIII - and the deadly consequence to More when he was unable to obey Henry in the "King's great matter."
The play begins on May 1, 1517, known to history as Evil May Day, when Londoners rose up against immigrants.
A character grouses about the strangers: "Our country is a great eating country; ergo, they eat more in our country than they do in their own." Another joins in: "Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey."
A riot is brewing until. . .Enter Thomas More, Sheriff of London. "Peace! Peace," the rabble cry. They'll listen to him. In a speech very much like Marc Antony's in Julius Caesar, More warns, woos, and sways them:
Grant them [the immigrants] removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th' ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, a...

By Fr. Thomas Kuffel .
Persuasive and powerful words ignite us. Their commanding rhetoric moves our emotions, giving us energy to follow. As powerful as persuasive speech is, however, a question arises. Is it true? Or are we just listening to eloquent arguments drafted by rhetoricians seeking to persuade us to follow?
Sophistry - the formal term for this - uses superficial and fallacious arguments that deceive a person into buying into the cause or pursuing the change. Worse, such arguments manipulate our rational powers by taking weaker or even fallacious arguments, making them seem stronger, deceiving a person from seeing the whole truth. They redefine terms, hiding behind traditional teaching but giving them a different twist.
Such is sophistry, as Pope Benedict XVI explains:
Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word "love" is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. (Caritas in veritate, 3)
This is true, sadly, not only in secular political circles but in religious ones as well.
Sophistry proceeds by not defining terms or giving a clear expression of what it wants to achieve. It promotes ideals rooted in ideologies that seem attractive, plausible, and even admirable. The words rhyme and the arguments rouse, yet the arguments rely on half-truths, not the fullness of the truth.
Truth, as the Catechism states, "carries with it the joy and splendor of spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful in itself." (No. 2500) Jesus is beauty because He is Truth incarnate. Believers behold Him through the power of the Holy Spirit so that our "faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God." (I Corinthians 2:4)
Jesus comes as Truth. He declares Himself to be the "Way, the Truth, and the Life." His truth penetrates our minds, giving us clarity, revealing the whole truth, not just parts. His truth sets us free. No longer deceived by persuasive arguments and eloquent speech, our minds penetrate to the substance of an argument to see if it is harmonious with Truth.
Made for truth, our minds grasp and then hold on to the truths revealed by Jesus. His truth touches our hearts and, once touched, nothing separates us from the love of the Truth, not even "tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword." (Romans 8:35)
Suffering tests the truth. Believers willingly die for it. The Maccabean martyrs, seven brothers, along with their mother, witnessed to the truth and were horrifically killed. They were "ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers." (Maccabees 7:2) Their bold witness encourages all believers to realize the power of the truth. It sets us free from sophistry so that we live in what is, what's real, rather than lies.

So too Jesus, the King of martyrs, witnessed boldly to the truth. He is God and man. This unexpected truth created controversy during His public ministry and still does today. Our minds balk at the idea that an all-powerful, loving God would become human to lift us from the denial of God as the source and fullness of truth.
Yet that is exactly what He did. "Being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:8) Believers confessing Jesus as the God-man should rather die than commit a single mortal sin. St. John Paul understood this deeply. In his declaration on the "Splendor of Truth," he states.
Martyrdom, accepted as an affirmation of the inviolability of the moral order, bears splendid witness both to the holiness of God's law and to the inviolability of the personal dignity of man, created in God's image and likeness. (91)
Being made in God's image means we are made for truth. Truth sets us free from disorder. God's Truth gives us freedom, and freedom gives us the...

By Daniel Guernsey
As part of the Jubilee celebrations, Pope Leo XIV laid out a vision for Catholic education over the last several days. He also declared St. John Henry Newman the 38th Doctor of the Church and the co-patron (with Thomas Aquinas) of Catholic education. These declarations are of great help at this moment, because Newman's vision of education is thoroughly Catholic, integrated, truth- and Christ-centered, and a sure guide for Catholic educators everywhere.
The pope also addressed Jubilee participants and students, delivered a homily, and published an Apostolic Letter during the education events. He hit several traditional issues in Catholic education, but added themes that are his own and worthy of note, particularly a deep appreciation for St. Augustine.
He first emphasized the importance of an Augustinian "interiority," quoting the saint: "Those whom the Spirit does not teach interiorly depart without having learned anything. . . .Do not look without, return to yourself, for truth dwells within you." Students need to develop an interior life, which is hindered by lives lived on screens or superficially in the world. He tells students: "say in your heart: 'I dream of more, Lord; I long for something greater; inspire me!'" Leo has zeroed in on the need for educators to help modern youth focus, interiorize, and turn quietly to the Holy Spirit in their education.
A related and now recognizable papal theme is a prudent use of technology. Leo encourages students to "humanize the digital, building it as a space of fraternity and creativity - not a cage where you lock yourselves in, not an addiction or an escape. Instead of being tourists on the web, be prophets in the digital world!"
He also advises educators that, "Technologies must serve, not replace, the person; they must enrich the learning process, not impoverish relationships and communities." Artificial Intelligence will have an enormous impact in education and human development. And it will take the deep and humane wisdom of the Church to use it properly.
He further emphasizes the importance of a sound Christian "anthropology" (i.e., understanding of the human person) given the rampant confusions of modernity: "The foundation remains the same. . .the person, image of God ( Gen 1:26), capable of truth and relationship."
Clearly, we must educate the whole person (mind, body, and spirit): "desire and the heart must not be separated from knowledge: it would mean splitting the person." Educators need to keep in mind the primacy of students' spiritual development and the learning of virtues that "cannot be improvised."

Finally, he focuses on unity, referring to his Augustinian papal motto, "In Him who is One (Christ), we are One." This is a wonderfully radical Christology, echoed in St. John Henry Newman's educational vision as well.
One of Newman's critical insights in The Idea of a University is:
all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator. Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearings one on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment."
This should encourage a deep appreciation for liberal arts education. Leo offers his support for such a vision with statements such as "The Catholic school is an environment in which faith, culture and life intertwine. It is not simply an institution, but rather a living environment in which the Christian vision permeates every discipline and every interaction." And " Following in the wake of the thought of Saint John Henry Newman, [Catholic Pedagogy] goes against a strictly mercantilist approach that often forces education today to be measured in terms of functionality and practical utility."
Leo's support for Catholic liberal arts education offers a remedy to those who have been seeking something di...

By Anthony Esolen
I take it as given that God commands only what is good for us and forbids only what is bad, which means sometimes also not permitting others to do what's bad. For we are social beings, and permission slides into participation, and participation slides into approval, and approval eventually demands celebration, and sometimes even compulsion.
Solomon's idolatry thus began when he looked outside of Israel for his wives. By the time Ahab was on the throne of Israel with the malevolent Jezebel, loyalty to God might cost you your life. Obadiah, master of Ahab's house, had to hide in a cave one hundred and fifty prophets of the Lord to keep them safe from Jezebel's murderous hatred.
If that was not bad enough, Ahaz the king of Judah, turning toward the gods of Assyria, "cut in pieces the vessels of the house of God, and shut up the doors of the house of the Lord, and he built altars in every corner of Jerusalem." (2 Chronicles 28:24) No doubt Ahaz considered himself a religious man.
When things have reached such a pass, in order to return to health, we may have to pull up the old evil by the roots. The saintly king Josiah did not simply encourage the worship of the true God, while permitting the well-established and well-heeled idolatry to go on in his midst. As soon as he was of age to command, "he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images," smashing the altars of Baal, reducing the images to dust, and strewing it over the graves of those who had sacrificed to them. (2 Chronicles 34:3-4)
Then the real renewal could begin. He repaired the Temple, and Hilkiah the high priest, searching in an old disused place, "found a book of the law of the Lord given by Moses." (34:14) Perhaps the priest knew where it was all along. Josiah then read the book before all the people of Jerusalem, and vowed to keep the commandments of the Lord, and demanded that the people do the same.
Josiah's reform had some staying power, continuing through his reign, and being of some force afterwards, though there was backsliding. Only the destruction of Jerusalem and captivity in Babylon sufficed to turn the hearts of the people back to the Lord.
Yet I am sure that before then, people had gotten used to the idolatry. Pluralist and tolerant all! What if small babies were sacrificed to Moloch? Babies don't have a real life, not yet.
What if some people enjoyed the ritual prostitution and sodomy in worship of the Baalim? Hiel may have gone a little too far when he rebuilt Jericho during the reign of Ahab, laying its foundation in the body of his firstborn son Abiram, and planting the gates in the body of his youngest son Segub (1 Kings 16:34), but who could be incensed about it, other than somebody like that half-mad ruffian Elijah?
We are now in the midst of a great and widespread sickness. Children are snuffed out in the womb, between 2,500 and 3,000 every day in the United States. Many people who decry those murders are quite all right with something related to abortion, just as ghastly, and with greater power to destroy human civilization: the deliberate manufacture of children, and the freezing of embryos not wanted.

Marriage is in free-fall, and so are birth rates. Many neighborhoods are empty for most or all of the day, which means that they are neighborhoods no more, but only locations.
Pornography is everywhere. Libraries welcome drag queens to read to little children stories that inseminate their minds with perversion. The unnatural is celebrated, and in many a workplace is thrust upon you so constantly that it is hard to get through a day without paying it compliance at least.
Children are mutilated, and people cheer the mutilation, pretending that a boy can become a girl or a girl can become a boy. The confusion is so widespread and infectious that language itself is twisted into pretzels to comply with it. Imagine having to explain to anyone before yesterday...

By Michael Pakaluk
Some parts of the life of Christ cannot easily be imitated, and yet good Christians find a way. We cannot literally die with Christ each day - grandma could not literally be shot once a day - and yet we can "mortify" ourselves, that is, put to death some desire, or even our own will.
Likewise, we cannot be laid in a tomb each day. And yet we must accept the humility of sleep each day. If day is like life and night is like death, then lying in one's bed is like being laid in the tomb. And indeed, it is easy to conceive of a Christian, suffering from insomnia or early morning terrors, remaining in his bed, even though he is not sleeping, consoling himself with the thought that he is doing good nonetheless, because he is imitating Christ in the tomb.
Sometimes we imitate, or show our aspiration to be like someone, by being nearby. Thus, Mary was near her Redeemer Son at the foot of the Cross. Standing beside Him was the closest she could be. And such nearness is transitive: if I place myself beside Mary, I place myself, too, as close as I can be to the Cross. Similarly, if I place myself near to my Christian brothers and sisters in their grave, as close as I can be to their mortal remains, I place myself as close as I can be to my Lord in the tomb.
The Church began in cemeteries, the catacombs. Pilgrims to Rome figure that they must visit the catacombs there. And yet, why? Were there a greater proportion of saints buried there? Walk through any Christian cemetery today, and you are visiting the graves of many saints. Or is it that the catacombs deserve special affection because they are from "the early Church."
But how confident are you that we are not now still in "the early Church"? I am as concerned as anyone about the apparent impending End Times. But Our Lord told us clearly that we do not know the "when." What if in God's providence the Church is to exist for 20,000 more years, and we right now are neglecting to visit the graves of "the early Christians"?
I can imagine few things more salutary for a family than to visit a cemetery. Sunday may be the best day for it, the "day of rest." When others are shopping or watching games on TV, it is as if the father and mother say, "Children, this is where all of us end up. Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return. Give thought to your last end. What we most want for you is that your lives end well. We have fellowship with others in eternity. Make these the audience before whom you live your life, this 'cloud of witnesses.' "
And at the cemetery, it would not be inappropriate to give thanks - thanks that, in these days of cremation and scattering in which we live - someone cared enough to purchase the ground and place a stone and memorialize for centuries an immortal life lived here for only a few decades.

To give thanks, too, that, while many men have perished at sea - from drownings, or their bodies jettisoned into the deep from gang planks - these bodies here could be placed in solid ground and therefore visited. And thanks as well that while millions of men have been vaporized by artillery at war, these bodies, whole and entire - "temples of the Holy Spirit," as we are told and believe - could lovingly be put to rest as if in a bed.
One might explain civilization by pointing to what is around a village green. The town market, the Church, a school, a civic hall, a bank. But then also: the cemetery.
It becomes a place of accounting: "These are the ones who have lived. They had their day, and they made their mark. What did they do with their portion? Did they make good use of the time allotted to them? Did they discover what is good and pass it on to us? And then what about me? My life is seen. What I have done is definite. What will it look like in the sight of others, when it too is over and taken into account?"
The Church, through its maternal granting of indulgences, teaches us to visit cemeteries. From November 1 through November 8, you and ...

By Francis X. Maier
I've used personal computers for work and play since 1982. My first PC was a Kaypro II. The Kaypro was a high-tech marvel back then, and as a bonus, it was (in theory) "transportable." Sturdy and reliable, it had the user-friendly mobility of a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile. I loved that machine. It was text-based only - ghost-white letters glimmering on a tiny dark screen, with no consoling graphics - but it got the job of word processing, formerly known as writing, done.
Alas, love in the technosphere is fleeting. Along came the GUI, the "graphical user interface," and I switched to Apple and Windows computers. Why, you ask? Isn't it obvious? My Kaypro's gray frumpiness, like a paramour who's suddenly developed warts, couldn't compete with their sexy young operating systems. All those desperate hours of writer's block, staring into an empty black screen without a creative thought in my noggin, could now be filled, in a blaze of rainbow color, with Pac-Man.
In the end though, that romance went south as well. One-way relationships always do. The truth finally dawned on me one day, after another disappointing round of (deadline-evading) Monkey Island. I was paying tech companies hefty fees for the use of software I didn't actually own, couldn't share, and couldn't legally hack. Meanwhile, those same companies were not paying me for the personal data they harvested and then redeployed to sell me more software I wouldn't own, to use on operating systems I didn't understand, which ran on magic boxes whose guts were a mystery.
So I taught myself Linux instead.
Linux is a free operating system with a vast array of free software. And it runs on any computer. Today, Linux comes with optional GUIs that can make it look nearly identical to a Mac or Windows desktop. But the original, and still the most powerful, way of communicating with a computer running Linux or any other operating system is the CLI, or "command line interface."
The CLI is to a GUI as Swahili is to English. They're both a kind of language. And that's where the family resemblance ends. If your mind goes blank at the mention of a routine CLI command like "sudo dnf config-manager -add-repo " you're probably human. But a computer, crunching endless zeroes and ones with mechanical un-humanity, grasps it with unforgiving precision.
Apple and Microsoft disguise the inner beast. Linux programming lets you peek at it under the hood. The workings of a computer aren't magic, but they're also not remotely human. And anyone who imagines that "intelligent machines," should they ever achieve real consciousness, will be human-like and human-friendly, needs his head examined.

So much for the story above. What's the lesson? Simply this: Appearances deceive. And not just with computers. The surface of an advanced, tech-suffused culture may gleam with sunny promise. What goes on under its hood is another matter.
Here's an example. Between half and two-thirds of U.S. adults have gambled, at least occasionally, over the past year. Nearly 8 percent gamble every day. This includes everything from state lotteries and online betting to local casinos. For some, gambling is simple entertainment. For others, it's a serious problem.
Gambling demographics are revealing. Economic class and education matter, but not in a simplistic way. More income often supports more gambling, but lower-income gamblers suffer much higher real-world risks and damage. And they're especially vulnerable to manipulative marketing.
From a Catholic perspective, gambling isn't inherently wrong, so long as it's fair, moderate, and doesn't compromise one's basic needs and responsibilities to others. But in practice, the U.S. gambling industry is organized to produce exactly the opposite results. In 2023, the industry spent more than $730 billion on advertising. In 2025, that figure will exceed $1 trillion. It's impossible to watch televised sports without a hurricane of high-energy, ...

One of the better ways of trying to understand a writer or speaker is to imagine what audience he thinks he's addressing, and what he believes that audience most needs to hear. For the popes of the last half century or so, I think I pretty much understood what St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were driving at, and the people they hoped to reach. With Francis - and now Leo - I'm much less sure. Because the world that they seem to think that they're addressing is not the one that I believe I'm living in.
Item: Leo's recent homily to "Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies," during which he remarked: "The supreme rule in the Church is love. No one is called to dominate; all are called to serve. No one should impose his or her own ideas; we must all listen to one another. No one is excluded; we are all called to participate. No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together."
It caused a stir because some people interpreted this to mean denying revealed truths of the Faith in favor of the amorphous "walking together" and "dialogue" that Pope Francis hoped would synodalize the whole Church. That interpretation doesn't seem entirely wrong, since Fr. James Martin, S.J. immediately highlighted those words for his usual causes.
But it doesn't seem entirely right either, at least in Leo's case. In fact, when he was addressing the members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See in May, he affirmed quite clearly that:
the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world, resorting whenever necessary to blunt language that may initially create misunderstanding. Yet truth can never be separated from charity, which always has at its root a concern for the life and well-being of every man and woman. Furthermore, from the Christian perspective, truth is not the affirmation of abstract and disembodied principles, but an encounter with the person of Christ himself, alive in the midst of the community of believers.
Yet whenever the subject is "synodality," substantial affirmation of truth seems to become an embarrassing no-no, even a stumbling block. It's been claimed lately that Leo is still using Francis' team of speech writers. Perhaps so. And maybe once the whirlwind of the Jubilee is over, we'll get more considered words from him. But if he had asked me to write that controversial speech about none of us possessing the whole truth, I would have emphasized that, particularly in our day, the vast majority of people already believe that no one, no church, no institution has the truth.
It's far more urgent that they hear something like, "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20)

All Christians are, of course, "on the way," since none of us has arrived at our final destination - yet we're accompanied by revealed truths that guide us on our way, even as we strive to live them more fully.
Yet we have a second pope now who at times seems to assume that the people who actually pay some attention to what a pope has to say need to be warned not to be so sure they have a grip on Catholic truth. When I look around me in our flailing postmodern world anno Domini 2025, however, Catholics and non-Catholics alike are far more in need of assurances about the truth of God's Word and the historic teachings of the Church.
In fact, this whole episode reminded me of arguments that I got caught up in some decades ago. At the time, two Protestant theologians - if memory serves - Stanley Hauerwas and George Lindbeck were talking about how Christian currents had changed in recent centuries.
I'm simplifying and probably garbling their central points, given the passage of time. But the historical part went something like this. Christianity had moved from what was basically an authoritarian posture (churches simply declared doctrines with a...