The Catholic Thing

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...

By Bishop James D. Conley President Trump recently announced measures to expand access to and reduce costs associated with in vitro fertilization (IVF). This is being billed as a pro-family and pro-life effort to help "American families have more babies." While the intention and goal are noble, IVF, in fact, undermines human dignity, marriage, and family life for a variety of reasons. But first, a word to those conceived through IVF, those struggling with infertility and, by extension, those wrestling with this aspect of the Church's teaching, which can seem counterintuitive, confusing, and even harsh. For anyone conceived through IVF, know that you are a gift, not just to your parents but to us all. Regardless of how someone was conceived, every human person is made in the image and likeness of God and therefore is loved by God and shares in the same inviolable dignity as each one of us. For those who struggle with infertility, I walk with you in your sufferings. There is a deep yearning within the human heart to love and to be loved. Spouses desire to come together in marital intimacy and bring new human life into the world. When that desire is unfulfilled, it can cause disappointment, stress, shame, envy, anger, and desperation. Like so many other sufferings, infertility is part of the mystery of Original Sin and the wounded, fallen world in which we live. Yet God calls us to bear these crosses with grace and dignity. We need not carry our crosses alone, however. Jesus meets us in our sufferings. He walks with us, desires to make us whole, and hopes we see the good He can bring out of suffering. As the Sisters of Life so beautifully state: "Jesus is intimately familiar with the barren wilderness and yearns to meet us there until we can rest refreshed in the Promised Land with Him." The Church supports technologies and medical interventions, such as restorative reproductive medicine, that help married couples address the root causes of infertility and naturally achieve a pregnancy through sexual union. These interventions are often very successful. Given the number of people with reproductive-health issues, these efforts deserve a greater commitment of our scientific and medical resources. Infertility cannot always be resolved successfully, either by restorative measures or IVF. But restorative options provide great hope and opportunity to couples, while respecting the dignity of human life, marriage, family life, and Church teachings. To return to President Trump's recent executive action, there are several key reasons why this action is ethically compromised and morally misguided. As our U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recognized in response, "The IVF industry treats human beings like products and freezes or kills millions of children who are selected for transfer to a womb or do not survive." It's important to understand that in nearly every IVF cycle, many more embryos are created in the lab than it's possible or desirable to implant in the womb of the intended mother. Those not implanted are either destroyed, frozen indefinitely, or abandoned, which often results in those tiny human beings becoming victims of medical experimentation. Often with IVF, multiple embryonic human beings are implanted in the womb and survive, but are then "eliminated" because they can threaten the mother's life and health. In other words, these babies' lives are terminated through "selective reduction" abortions. None of this is pro-life, nor is it pro-family. It's dismissive of human dignity and the real value of individual human lives, one of the clearest examples of the "throwaway culture" Pope Francis warned us against. At a fundamental theological level, IVF undermines the marital act as the natural means for achieving a pregnancy. Rather than begetting new life through an act of love between a husband and wife in accord with God's design for life-giving love, IVF relies on medical professionals and other technicians to manufactur...

By Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky Many things remind those of us with eyes to see of the enduring dangers of ideological confusion. In an effort to sort out a few of such confusions, veteran Catholic journalist Phil Lawler exposes the spiritual disorientation of post-conciliar Catholic life in his latest novel, Ghost Runners, which is just appearing this month A Harvard graduate who also studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Lawler brought his analytic rigor first to Washington as Director of Studies at the Heritage Foundation, and later to Catholic journalism - as editor of The [Boston] Pilot, Catholic World Report, and founder of Catholic World News, the first online Catholic news service in English. He also ran in 2000 as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts and, alas, was badly beaten by Senator Ted Kennedy. But it was a valuable lesson: too many pro-life Catholics fail to translate their convictions to ordinary life, including in how they choose to vote. Catholic World News has since transitioned (to use that now-suspect term) to the CatholicCulture.org website. Books (and films) about priests can be saccharine, pietistic, brutally scandalous, cartoonish, and downright dishonest. Even the great Fulton Sheen wrote a book, Those Mysterious Priests. Typical of Bishop Sheen, it contained orthodox and solid doctrine, though perhaps it failed to identify a few warts among the brotherhood. But if Phil isn't Fulton Sheen, neither is he Andrew Greeley (remember him?) ecclesiastical muckraker extraordinaire. In Ghost Runners, we see hints of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Godfather III, and perhaps a touch of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho along with a dash of Ghostbusters. Lawler's protagonist cannot escape the graces of his priesthood amid careerist and worldly Church officials. Even as he confronts evil - both clerical and secular - he discovers mystical realities within and beyond the confessional. And add in a PBS documentary on El Salvador for good measure. Lawler utilizes his extensive experience to demonstrate how priests navigate the Church's complex waters and sustain their faith. Although this is a work of fiction, the main character types are familiar to most priests - and in all likelihood especially so to the priests of the Archdiocese of Boston. Lawler sets his story in the Reagan years, a period that comes more sharply into focus as the narrative unfolds. The young priest protagonist tells his story to the chancery-appointed psychologist. He reveals his personality and the profiles of his brother priests. The narration describes the realistic and wonderfully complicated intricacies of the priesthood from the inside. Such stories are familiar to any priest alive today who suffered through the 1980s. Many religion writers - conservative and liberal alike - never quite capture that reality. Lawler does. The priest protagonist remains faithful despite many reasons to surrender to infidelity or walk away from the priesthood. He identifies several routine vices among the clergy that usually aren't categorized as scandalous but, like every sin, can lead to great evil. Catechists like me may pedantically write about the Catholic principle/prudential judgment distinction. Lawler illustrates the distinction with a compelling account of the priest's visit to 1980s El Salvador during its civil war. Perhaps unconsciously, Lawler captures the habitual and unhealthy caste system that begins in the seminary. He portrays this same ecclesial anxiety in his depiction of alleged mystical events. The treatment recalls an old joke from the pontificate of Pope John Paul II: What are the two things a bishop dreads most for his diocese? First, an alleged apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Second, a papal visit to his diocesan territory. But in a real-life instance, Lawler's characters wrestle with a third high-maintenance possibility: the allegation that little old ladies are undergoing mystical and miraculous...

By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas. But first a note from Robert Royal: Today, in Rome, the great English convert and theologian, St. John Henry Newman, will be proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV. Newman will enter that august and select company - he makes only the 38th Doctor (i.e., Teacher) out of all the billions of Catholics who have lived on earth. With good reason. His gifts were many and great. And today Fr. Stravinskas reminds us of his achievements - over and beyond the theology, the history, and the polemics - as a poet, and guide of souls. Now for today's column. St. John Henry Newman, at age fifteen, embarked on a decades-long journey: in the words of his motto, ex imaginibus et umbris in veritatem ("From images and shadows into the truth"). For many years on his theological sojourn, Newman stood by the teaching of the 39 Articles of Religion of the Anglican Communion, including the one that describes Purgatory as a "pernicious" doctrine. With much prayer, intense study of the whole thrust of Sacred Scripture, as well as the convincing witness of the Fathers of the Church, he ended up writing one of the finest works on Purgatory, "The Dream of Gerontius," which rivals the depth and beauty of Dante's appreciation of Purgatory in his Divina Commedia; perhaps this work is best known through the lovely hymn, "Praise to the Holiest," which Pope Benedict XVI quoted in his homily at Newman's beatification. In Newman's poem, a soul is in its last agony and is trying to make sense of his final moments, assisted by his Guardian Angel. The dying man cannot understand why he has become so calm in the face of this previously dreaded experience; the angel tells him that the prayers of the priest and his friends who surround him have given him confidence and, further, that the "calm and joy uprising in thy soul is first-fruit to thee of thy recompense, and Heaven begun." The man gradually slips more and more and becomes concerned about the loss of his senses; the Angel comforts him: "till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind; for e'en thy Purgatory, which comes like fire, is fire without its light." The soul is buoyed up by that knowledge and conforms his will to God's, asking but to see the Face of God for no more than a moment before embarking on his process of purification. The Angel declares that he shall, in fact, see God for just such a twinkling of an eye, but warns him: "That sight of the Most Fair will gladden thee, but it will pierce thee too." This soul will now "learn that the flame of Everlasting Love doth burn 'ere it transform." He is now ready to face the Lord in judgment, the sight of whom "will kindle in thy heart all tender, gracious, reverential thoughts." And what might such thoughts be? Best to allow the poetic genius of Newman to speak directly for, as he knew, cor ad cor loquitur (his cardinalitial motto: "Heart speaks to heart"): Thou wilt be sick with love, and yearns for Him And feel as though thou couldst but pity Him, That one so sweet should e'er have placed Himself At disadvantage such, as to be used So vilely by a being so vile as thee. There is a pleading in His pensive eyes Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee. And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself; for, though Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinn'd, As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire To slink away, and hide thee from His sight: And yet wilt have a longing aye to dwell Within the beauty of His countenance. And these two pains, so counter and so keen, The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not; The shame of self at thought of seeing Him, Will be thy veriest, sharpest Purgatory. As the man proceeds to the divine tribunal, he is astonished to hear earthly voices; once more, he is reminded that he hears the priest and his friends praying the Subvenite ("Come to their aid, ye saints of God") on his behalf, bringing now the same Angel of the Agony who strengthened Christ in His final hours to do the same for t...

By David Warren. Readers of books, and specifically fantastic books by Charles Williams and other Inklings, are summoned. I do not like them as much as I should, for I have never been a fan of fantasy literature, and I note that among the Inklings, only J.R.R. Tolkien is a reliable Catholic. But C.S. Lewis is almost a Catholic, and the other two I have read are largely sympathetic. I wouldn't put any of them on the Index. Williams was the first I discovered. I haven't fully discovered Tolkien even yet, though devoted types have upbraided me. Only Lewis is what I would call the preachy type, to whom I am naturally allergic. In a sense, Owen Barfield is the antidote to Lewis, though as an anthroposophist and translator of Rudolf Steiner, my trust in him is not unqualified. Let me just say that, like Lewis, I very much like him. Yes, Tolkien. I should have been reading by now, but my aversion to hippies when I was young and impressionable kept me away. Tolkienists may be nice people, but I am not a nice person. That is perhaps why I was drawn to Charles Williams, who by reputation was not a nice person. C.L. Wrenn (another Inkling), for instance, suggested burning him at the stake for his views, or something equally warm. While none of the Inklings were vegetarian when making arguments, this drew some blood. It is ALL HALLOWS' EVE today, and I have been rereading the novel thus entitled by Williams. It was his last, and as he died just a few days after Hitler, recent accusations of anti-Semitism against him are not really plausible. The worst you could say is that his Antichrist character is Jewish, but English-speaking intellectuals were not plunged into Holocaust reporting until later in that year, 1945. The novel opens with the death of a young woman, told from inside. It was the sort of thing that was happening when the book was published. Airplanes were crashing, here, there, and everywhere, making death slightly more common than it is today. And Christians will know that death has supernatural implications. Williams didn't avoid them. His plot, which develops out of the young woman - Lester Furnival - gradually realizing that she is dead, and then wandering through post-mortal London or the City of God, with her also late companion, Evelyn. Interactions between dead and living are presented from both sides. All Hallows' Eve, the seventh and concluding novel in Williams' remarkable series, deserved its place as one of Messrs. Faber and Faber's more reprintable books, reissued in America with a preface by T.S. Eliot. It was Eliot who tagged Williams as the author of "spiritual thrillers," a special genre. For remarkable people like Dante Alighieri and Charles Williams were capable of writing such things. It is easy enough to write a thriller, but making a narrative "co-inhere" with a spiritual plot is difficult, on the scale of impossible. One must rise to classical heights; casual contact just won't do. But Williams, too, was a shameless "religious nutjob," whose wanderings into, for instance, Jewish mysticism, can be distressing to the modern secular reader, for it suggests the universe is uncomfortably large, and there may be more in it than a remorseless secularism could tolerate. Indeed, Williams was also quite aware that Jesus Christ was a Jew. Curiously, it was the reliable J.R.R. Tolkien who delivered the most subtle criticism of Williams' processions into the occult. But Williams goes there to a purpose, and comes back with important news from the supernatural realm. It is that both good and evil are present at large, and will both be encountered when one invades either nature or supernature unprepared. A good life is, of course, the best preparation, and the Godhead, in the person of Jesus Christ, is the best companion. Williams was, by nature, a theological writer, whether his genre is theology or not. He can be entertaining, but even this is meant to a theological end. When he is writing of Dante - and his boo...

By Stephen P. White In June of 1577, an Englishman by the name of Cuthbert Mayne was taken under arrest by the High Sheriff of Cornwall and imprisoned in Launceston Castle to await trial for high treason. Mayne was born in Devon, in southwest England, and had been a Protestant cleric as a young man. But during his subsequent studies at Oxford, he converted to Catholicism. Mayne had narrowly escaped arrest once already and, in 1573, he fled England for the north of France. There, he joined the new English College in the town of Douai where he would receive ordination and complete his studies. The English College at Douai (or Douay, for those who are familiar with the translation of the Bible the college produced) was established in 1568 by William Allen. Originally intended to be a place of study for Catholic exiles from English schools, it soon became a seminary for training priests who, Allen hoped, would lead the reconversion of England and Wales. From the point of view of the crown, the English College was a training ground for traitors and foreign agents intent on overthrowing Queen Elizabeth at the behest of the pope. Suffice to say, the priests who returned from the English College at Douai to minister in their native lands did not expect a warm welcome from the English authorities. The treatment of Cuthbert Mayne showed clearly just how unwelcome they were. Mayne was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. When he heard his sentence read out, he replied, simply, "Deo gratias." Mayne was the first of the graduates of the English College at Douai to be executed for treason. He would not be the last. Between November 1577, when Mayne was martyred, and the October 1680 execution of Thomas Thwing, 158 men who studied at Douai were ultimately executed by the English authorities. Most of these were eventually beatified, and 20 were canonized (alongside other Martyrs of England and Wales) in 1970 by Pope Paul VI. Among the Douai men canonized, the best known of them was undoubtedly Edmund Campion, who was martyred at Tyburn, alongside his fellow Jesuit, Alexander Briant, and Ralph Sherwin. Both Briant and Sherwin were among the Douai men canonized by Paul VI, as was Cuthbert Mayne. St. Cuthbert Mayne, as I've said, was martyred at Launceston in Cornwall. Most of the other Douai martyrs met their grisly fate at the Tyburn tree - as London's infamous gallows was known - near the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Hyde Park was a royal hunting ground in the late sixteenth century, and the condemned prisoners would be paraded there from where they were imprisoned in Newgate or the Tower of London. As for William Allen, who would eventually be made a Cardinal by Pope Sixtus V, he went on to establish an English College in Rome modeled on the college at Douai. Many of the Douai martyrs, including Campion and Sherwin, also studied at the Venerable English College, as the Roman college is now known. As for the College at Douai, it survived until 1793 when, like so many other Catholic institutions, it became a casualty of the French Revolution. The college property was confiscated and its students imprisoned for some months before being released to return to England. By that time, mercifully, restrictions on Catholics in England had lessened, and the seminary of Douai was transferred to the newly created St. Edmund's College in Hertfordshire. The college had come home, and English Catholic priests were once again being trained on English soil. The next half-century saw the passage of the Catholic Relief Acts and the restoration of the English hierarchy by Pope Pius IX. In 1869, Cardinal Manning established a new seminary apart from St. Edmund's. His successor moved the seminary again. And his successor moved the seminary back to St. Edmund's in 1904. Right around this same time, the very beginning of the 20th century, a young community of nuns, devoted to the Eucharist and particularly to Eucharistic Adoration, wa...

by Daniel B. Gallagher When I retired after a decade of service at the Holy See, things were not going well. That was in 2016. Truth be told, things were already not going well even under Benedict XVI. The Roman Curia is a bureaucratic mess. But magisterial messes are even worse, and a massive one occurred four years after my departure. It wasn't a spontaneous comment made during an impromptu press conference. It wasn't an off-the-cuff, ambiguous statement on a topic like marriage, LGBTQ rights, or capital punishment. It was an entire theological vision. Or lack thereof. This October marks five years since the biggest bungle of the Francis pontificate. Sadly, it is closely connected to the very name Jorge Bergoglio chose upon his election to the See of Peter. Interpreting Saint Francis, his legacy, and the charism he bequeathed the Church has always been difficult. Fratelli Tutti massively compounded that difficulty. Most criticisms of Francis's 2020 encyclical focus on a specific item in the laundry list of issues he presents as crucial to our time: racism, immigration, interreligious dialogue, the dignity of women, capital punishment, and others. But I've seen very few critiques of the document's foundational principle. Even though Francis himself described the encyclical as a hodge-podge of prior homilies, addresses, and catechetical talks, at its core is a highly dubious and risky enterprise: namely, the bracketing of Christ from Christianity in the attempt to enter into dialogue with the world about the meaning of "fraternity and social friendship." "Although I have written it from the Christian convictions that inspire and sustain me, I have sought to make this reflection an invitation to dialogue among all people of good will," he wrote. (6) It is the "although" that is crucial here. Francis implies that the convictions about fraternity and social friendship that flow from his Christian faith can be communicated to others in a way that doesn't depend on that faith since they can indifferently flow from other faiths or simply from the un-evangelized human condition. Francis justified his approach by appealing to Saint Francis's engagement with the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Malik al-Kamil, in 1219: Unconcerned for the hardships and dangers involved, (Saint) Francis went to meet the Sultan with the same attitude that he instilled in his disciples: if they found themselves "among the Saracens and other nonbelievers," without renouncing their own identity they were not to "engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God's sake." Saint Francis's enjoined the friars to refrain from arguments and disputes not as a way of bracketing Christ's commandment to preach the Good News, but as the very means of fulfilling it. Saint Francis fully intended to convert the Sultan, not to merely share with him a Christian vision of fraternity and social friendship minus Christ. Without a foundational Christocentric principle, Fratelli Tutti quickly descends into platitudes that are almost laughable: Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all. (8) The idea is that Christianity shows or models the kind of community humans are inherently capable of. Yet the early Christians knew well that the koinonia they enjoyed was a gift. It was attributable to divine action, not human achievement. It consisted in the Mystical Body of Christ, not a political paradigm. It motivated the baptized not merely to preach something that Christ preached, but to preach Christ Himself. This was the foundational principle of John Paul II's first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (1979). The primary focus of Christian disciples should be on the community they have been made a part of through grace, not the co...

By Randall Smith Something that should more often be understood is that every assertion of a right involves a concomitant obligation on others either to do or refrain from doing something. If I have a right to health care, then someone has an obligation to provide it for me. If I have a right to freedom of speech, then others must not prevent me from speaking. Now consider the problems that arise in a society whose moral discourse is dominated by competing claims of rights - one in which people love talking about rights but rarely talk about obligations. If every claim of a right involves an obligation on others, and if no one is willing to consider their obligations, only their rights, this is a recipe for social frustration and worse. I've written before about what is often called "expressive individualism," which is rampant in our current society. Expressive individualists don't recognize unchosen obligations. Rather, on this view, people are bound only to those commitments "freely assumed." Harvard professor Michael Sandel describes this as the "unencumbered self." So, we all are willing to assert that we have an abundance of rights, but few of us, it seems, consider ourselves obligated to anything other than the things we choose. But why would I choose to obligate myself to something other than those things that foster my own expressive self-realization? And why would I obligate myself to something permanent, like a marriage, if the possibility exists that at some point in the future, it might not continue to foster my own expressive self-realization? And people wonder why fewer people are getting married and more people are getting divorced! Perhaps we need to learn a new language. Consider what might happen if, instead of "rights," we talked about obligations. Whereas rights in our culture tend to be absolute, obligations are always circumscribed. I have certain obligations as a parent or as a teacher, but they are not open-ended and unlimited. But if I have a right to own a gun or view pornography, then this right "trumps" any social "cost-benefit" analysis. Someone might say, "But widespread ownership of guns causes x, y, z problems." But that's immaterial if people have a right to own them. A claim of a right outweighs most cost-benefit analyses; that's why people claim them so often. Once you say you have a right, the conversation is supposed to be over. Some people in the Church also like to speak in terms of rights. They say things like: "People have a right to immigrate." That's not quite true, however. What the Church actually says is that people have a right to emigrate. They have a right to leave their country if they are subjected to tyranny and abuse. Countries shouldn't fence them in and prevent them from leaving, as was done by Communist countries during the Cold War, and still happens today. The problem with this "right," however, is that there is no concomitant right to immigrate to a particular country. If I travel to France and say to myself, "I quite like it here in Paris; I think I'll stay," the French government is not obligated to allow me to stay. I don't have a right to immigrate there. If they find that I have overstayed my allotted time, they will likely "deport" me - that is to say, they will repatriate me back to my home country. No one would blame the French for doing this, because I don't have a right to live in France that the French government must obey. Now, under certain circumstances, countries might be morally obligated to take people in. Indeed, we are called upon to be generous and to help people fleeing danger. But if we spoke in terms of obligations rather than rights, we might then be able to stipulate what obligations we have and what obligations those we have taken in have. We are a constitutional republic. Those who immigrate here have an obligation to uphold that form of government. The French have a language, culture, and form of government they wish to preserve. If I go...

By Robert Royal. It's common today to lament the widespread loss of faith in institutions: governments, schools, colleges and universities, courts, medical authorities, religions, and (not least) the Catholic Church. There are many reasons, good and bad, for this loss of faith. In most cases, it's simply the reaction to our institutions failing to do what they're meant to do. Sometimes there are such bizarre breakdowns that you're tempted to give up on such bodies yourself. The Catholic Church lost a great deal of confidence, of course, over the sexual abuse crisis. However much the Church has been unfairly criticized when other institutions - like public schools - have comparable and even worse records, with little damage to their reputations, the humiliation was a wake-up call. Or would have been, if the whole Church had adopted effective remedies for this all-too-real problem. Yet inexplicably, we have celebrity priests like Marko Rupnik S.J. accused of staggering abuses and blasphemies, yet still active in ministry. As are others. And on the less scandal-sheet level, consider the recent controversy over Cardinal Parolin's remarks about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. A spokeswoman for Aid to the Church in Need, which issued a report last week on the persecution of Catholics around the world, defended the Cardinal's contention that Nigerian Catholics were often the victims of social - not religious - conflict. She characterized this as an off-the-cuff remark, just intended to acknowledge the complexity of the situation. Perhaps so, but it's precisely what a person in a high position of responsibility - Parolin is the Vatican's Secretary of State - says almost randomly that's revealing. (A "Freudian slip" if you believe in such.) Part of what gives us confidence, or not, in a person's judgment is getting the proportions of things right in what are always complex situations. Parolin was correct that there are other causes than religious antagonism for the killing of Christians in Nigeria. In particular, the competition for land between Muslim Fulani cow-herders and Christian farmers. But that's a small part of the problem. (The Vatican's occasional claim that "climate change" explains bad actors also falls into this category.) And it's true that even some "moderate" Muslims are attacked by radical Islamists in Nigeria. But to draw attention to this side issue when something like 8,000 Christians have been killed, mostly by radical Islamists precisely for their faith, since the beginning of 2025 alone, suggests an almost willful desire not to state the real problem. The persecution and martyrdom of Nigerian Christians is so bad that the decidedly secular - and woke - Washington Post invited me recently to write a guest opinion piece (here). Don't miss the comments if you need further proof of how many Americans have, of late, gone batsh*t crazy. I myself wrote about the herdsman/farmer conflicts and the attacks on moderate Muslims in my book The Martyrs of the New Millennium, but more to the point: According to Open Doors, 4,998 Christians perished in Nigeria in 2023; "there were more people that were killed because of their Christian faith than all other places in the globe combined.". . .from 2019 to 2023, 33,000 Christians of various denominations and several thousand moderate Muslims were killed by Islamic extremists belonging to Boko Haram, Fulani militants (formerly mostly Muslim "herdsmen" involved in land disputes with Christians), and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWP), among others. Over an even longer period (2009-2021), the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety) - a Nigerian watchdog group - has documented 43,000 Christians killed, 18,500 Christians "disappeared," 17,500 churches attacked, 2,000 Christian elementary schools destroyed, and much else. Those cow-herders do have some unusual ways of getting grazing land. Aid to the Church in Need's 2025 rep...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia "Thank God I'm not like that Pharisee!" Now, if that's your response to today's Gospel (Luke 18:9-14), then you probably missed the point. Because there's more than a bit of the Pharisee in each of us, and not enough of the tax collector. Our Lord presents the parable as two different men in the Temple of Jerusalem. But it might as well be two different men within each of us. They represent the battle between pride and humility that rages in our souls. Pride is the inordinate focus on self. We typically associate it with haughtiness, the exaltation of self we see in the Pharisee. But that's only one manifestation of it. What's at the heart of pride is the self-referential thinking that turns a man in on himself (Incurvatus in se) and renders him incapable of opening to God and grace. So, pride isolates. Notice how the Pharisee is incapable of an authentic conversation with God. His prayer is self-focused and about his own virtues. It's not about God or God's goodness. In fact, it isn't even to God. He speaks the prayer "to himself." That line is a rich description of how spiritually crippling pride is. It traps us in ourselves, prevents us from going out and genuinely speaking with God or anyone else. It also prevents anyone from getting through to us to administer a necessary correction. The only outward thinking of the proud is to compare themselves to others. The Pharisee finds a foil in the tax collector and thus feels good about himself. Worse, he thinks that he is pleasing to God because he's better than another. In comparison to the lesser man, he can stand tall and proud in his prayer. But in so doing, he constructs his own prison. He's chained himself and his self-worth to being better than the other. This is what we call vainglory. It's a useless satisfaction because it rests not on the truth but on comparison. And the comparison could have worked out differently. The Pharisee could have encountered someone better, someone who fasts and tithes even more than he does. What then? For a man so self-focused, it would have meant discouragement and despondency. His peace is so caught up with being better than others, that being less would unnerve him. This, too, is a manifestation of pride, to think that we are displeasing to God because others are better than we are. For it is still an excessive focus on self instead of on God's love for us. It's the same error as the haughty, but with a different result. The error is comparison. That the Pharisee finds himself better than others is, in a sense, incidental. The real spiritual cancer is the constant comparison he always makes. Remember Uncle Screwtape's counsel: "To be" means to be in competition. The Pharisee finds his worth only in comparison to others, never in light of God's love for him. What matters - what gives him worth - is not God's love but his being better than others. And had it worked out differently, discouragement would have overwhelmed him. Comparison is the thief of joy. That old line contains a lot of wisdom. The man who finds his worth only by comparison to others will be haughty when he's better than they and discouraged when he's not. Those are simply two sides of the same pride coin. Another variation is to think ourselves failures for not meeting our own self-focused standards instead of receiving the love that God extends and finding our worth in His estimation of us. The proud set the terms for their being loved instead of receiving what God extends. They grasp for what He wants to give. Pride is slavery. Humility is freedom. "The tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'" To our culture, this must seem tremendously unhealthy. He would be accused of low self-esteem. In fact, his humility opens the door to a genuine conversation with God. Unlike the Pharisee, he's praying to God not to himself. Prayer is the first f...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza For devotees of Cardinal Newman, the coming week was already highly anticipated, with his formal declaration as a Doctor of the Church on the solemn feast of All Saints. Then this week, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV would also name him the co-patron saint of Catholic education, along with St. Thomas Aquinas. A happy thing, as few have given as much thought to the philosophy of education as St. John Henry, particularly regarding his (ill-fated) project in Dublin to found a Catholic university. Though the combination of Aquinas and Newman - or the combination of Aquinas and anyone? - is formidable, I confess I never think of them as teachers, per se. Scholars, certainly. And seekers of truth, more students themselves even than teachers of others. Both were creatures of the university - and professors do research and teach, with many accepting the latter as the price of doing the former. It's not unusual for the most accomplished scholars to teach very little, if at all. In the event, both patrons taught more through their writing rather than their lectures or tutorials. The Aquinas-Newman dyad is a happy one for another reason, in that over many years on campus their prayers were the ones I most recommended to students, fitting for their stage of life. Both wrote prayers and hymns. St. Thomas gave us the hymns for Corpus Christi, and I consider no occasion unsuitable for Praise to the Holiest in the Height (here), Newman's hymn from The Dream of Gerontius. The prayers I recommended to students were Aquinas' Prayer before Study and Newman's Mission of My Life. Not only young students can profit by praying them. The Thomistic prayer before study appears here and there in different forms. The estimable Dominican friars of the St. Joseph Province use this version: Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding. Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. The version I first learned when I was an undergraduate appears in the Raccolta, and expands the initial salutation: Infinite Creator, who in the riches of Thy wisdom didst appoint three hierarchies of Angels and didst set them in wondrous order over the highest heavens, and who didst apportion the elements of the world most wisely… It reminds us why Thomas is the Angelic Doctor, and a reminder too that intelligences have a lofty place in God's providence. I could never remember what the three hierarchies of angels were, but no matter, it was pleasing to think that they were watching over me. The Raccolta's English translation speaks of "copious eloquence," but the Dominican version above goes with "thoroughness and charm." I prefer the latter, as the world needs more wholesome and holy charm. Students, it seems to me, would learn better from charming teachers, even though neither Aquinas nor Newman are often thought of as charming. Newman, though, does propose in his "definition of a gentleman" a kind of charm as desirable. Education depends upon good teachers, but the goal of education is to effect some good in the students. Thus, Aquinas and Newman are exemplary models, for their achievements in the life of the mind, the search for truth, effected in them genuine goodness, the witness of holiness. The Prayer before Study was never as popular as Newman's Mission of My Life, which many memorized. Study, after all, can be hard. A mission is exciting. Newman's prayer is simply one of the best ever written in English and, while resonant with the...

By Francis X. Maier This year marks the 30th anniversary of Christopher Lasch's final book. Published just a few months after his death, The Revolt of the Elites (1995) capped a series of five extraordinary works starting with his Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). An accomplished historian, Lasch was also a penetrating social critic. He was never religious and always a man of the old, democratic left. But he saw the world clearly and wrote about it honestly. As a result, he had many Christian admirers. And much of his work aligns, if imperfectly, with Catholic concerns. Reading him today is like paging through the diary of a fiercely astute prophet. Simply put, Lasch argues that the appearance of modern life masks its real nature. We're swamped with material comforts and choices, but they have no higher meaning. Our personal autonomy is celebrated in marketing hype. Then it's promptly undermined in practice, because an economy organized around consumption needs a steady pool of dependent consumers. The Industrial Revolution created new wealth and eased the hardships of life for many. But it also removed work from the home, centralized it, and collectivized the labor force under "scientific" management. This, in turn, fed the rise of the social sciences, which - in Lasch's view - presume the inability of most people to understand and manage their own lives, and who thus need guidance from a phalanx of expert "helping professions." As he relentlessly documents, the early leaders of American social science viewed religion as a form of mystification and the traditional family as "the last stand of amateurs"; a breeding ground for authoritarianism, neuroses, and social disorders needing therapeutic intervention from properly educated specialists. That attitude subtly endures and infects the wider culture. It bleeds over into our politics. The American Founders presumed a citizenry of reasonably intelligent and productive adults; in other words, people capable of self-governance, engaging the community while managing their own affairs. Today, the nation is a very different creature. As early as 1962, John F. Kennedy claimed that "most of the problems, or at least many of them that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems. . .they deal with questions which are beyond the comprehension of most men." [emphasis added] Let that sink in. For Lasch, who quoted that line in his work, Kennedy simply - and inadvertently - expressed the spirit of America's increasingly elitist leadership class, a class too often suspicious of the very people it claims to represent. Since Lasch's death, the nation's "technical" and administrative problems have only increased. So has the thicket of complex professional bureaucracies meant to handle them. So has the army of therapists dealing with the inevitable social and psychic costs. And so has the gulf between America's expert class and the mass of citizens they manage. For Lasch, this pattern of governance creates new forms of character weakness and illiteracy in everyday life: People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of their country's history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights. The conversion of popular traditions of self-reliance into esoteric knowledge administered by experts encourages a belief that ordinary competence in almost any field, even the art of self-government, lies beyond the reach of the layman. For the individual, the result is a cocktail of anxieties, appetites, resentments, and a sense of being manipulated. A leader like Donald Trump is almost unavoidable, the product of populist blowback. Ironically, as Lasch writes in The Minimal Self (1984): A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism. . .not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it...

By Michael Pakaluk Pope Leo XIV took his name to signal his closeness to Leo XIII, and yet in his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, his statements sometimes seem at odds with his predecessor: on the root of social evils, the remediation of poverty, and private property. For Leo XIV, the root of social ills is inequality. Reaffirming Francis, he says: "I can only state once more that inequality 'is the root of social ills.'" (n. 94) But for Leo XIII, in his first encyclical, "On the Evils of Society" (Inscrutabili Dei consilio), the root of social ills is rather the rejection of Christianity by civil powers: "the source of [social] evils lies chiefly, We are convinced, in this, that the holy and venerable authority of the Church, which in God's name rules mankind, upholding and defending all lawful authority, has been despised and set aside." (n. 3) The difference is not small, because if Christianity is not necessary, then, to eliminate social evils, it would suffice for civil powers to eradicate "structures of sin," that is, structures of inequality. But if Christianity is necessary, then clearly the most important policy for a civil power would be for it to encourage, or at least provide the good conditions for, Christian belief and practice (for example, in making it easy, not difficult, for parents to send their children to religious schools). In Rerum novarum, Leo XIII taught that the quest for equality is an unreal dream of socialism: "the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition." (n. 17) If one were to say, in response, that the inequality meant by Leo XIV, following Francis, is not that of outcome and possessions, but of standing before the law and of respect for human dignity, then the nature of "poverty" changes radically, and immediately the poorest members of our societies are the unborn, because it is they whose equal human dignity is most pervasively denied, around the world. It would follow that the Church's "preferential option for the poor" must take the form of making the pro-life cause pre-eminent. As regards the remediation of poverty, remember that Leo XIII was well-briefed on contemporary economic science through his assistant, Fr. Matteo Liberatore, S.J. The work of Adam Smith begins exactly with the observation that some countries are working their way out of poverty, and others are not, and what explains the difference? Economics classes today will often begin with a presentation of the "hockey stick" graph of astounding economic growth worldwide in the last 300 years and pose the question, what explains it? The answer, accepted by both Fr. Liberatore and Pope Leo, is upholding of the right to private property by the civil power, and its recognition that individuals in their economic activity, and families, are prior to the State - that is to say, a free market and free society. The State has a role to correct abuses such as oppressively long work hours, but, in general, a sound administration of the State should be sufficient. (nn. 32-33) But Leo XIV's position seems to deny the importance of that hockey stick graph: "The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities,"(n. 13) Poverty must be defined, he insists, not absolutely, but relative to the standard of living of a particular nation. But if market processes for wealth creation have not diminished poverty (in that understanding), it follows that any confidence that they could continue to do so, in the future, must be the product of sheer "ideologies." And these are described in a straw-man fashion, so that they correspond to no position held by a...

By Auguste Meyrat Of all the arts, poetry is the most inherently religious. Although it is often defined by the use of figurative language, rhythm, and sound devices, what really separates poetry from prose is its subject matter, which transcends the literal and soars into the metaphysical. The techniques of poetry are secondary causes that serve the primary cause of exploring the deep nature of things. Of course, in a post-Christian, postmodern, and increasingly post-literate culture, few people appreciate poetry, let alone read it. It isn't useful, and it pertains to immaterial reality. Even the designated apologists for poetry (i.e., English teachers like me) do a poor job of communicating the power and beauty of poetry, choosing instead to focus their efforts on more marketable verbal skills such as conducting product research and writing business emails. Sad to say, this leaves people today, particularly people of faith, spiritually impoverished. Condemned to a prosaic understanding of the world, everything is consequently disenchanted, even religious devotion. Holy Scripture becomes inscrutable, the presence of God turns into absence, the sacred mysteries degenerate into irrational superstitions, and the devout life flattens into a mindless, if comforting, routine. Sensing this problem, Catholic poet and former nurse Sally Read put together a delightful poetry collection 100 Great Catholic Poems. As she notes in her introduction, "No other literary genre is so concerned with truth - not only in the sense of writing about true things. . . but in the scalpel-precise rendering of things that humans cannot otherwise articulate." Though poetry offers a means for knowing God and His Creation more intimately, Catholics rarely consult their own poetic tradition and likely wouldn't even know where to start. Thus, Sally Read went to the trouble of compiling some of the most excellent verses on the Catholic faith in one book. Beyond representing a brilliant range of experiences, reflections, and emotions that constitute the vast panorama of Catholicism, each poem stands on its own merits, prompting the kind of intense reading and thinking that one associates with prayer or contemplation. Read takes care to narrow her definition of poetry to preclude the vast compendiums of prayers and hymns as well as poetic exclamations of faith. Although some of the first entries in her list by saints of the Early Church seem to violate this definition, they contain enough elements to be read as poems. In addition to including Our Lady's famous words in the "Magnificat," this sufficiently flexible definition allows Read to feature works from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Clement of Alexandria. While some of the names in the collection will be familiar to readers acquainted with the Western literary canon, the anthology's greatest virtue is the much-needed attention it gives to lesser-known figures, particularly those from early medieval Europe. Despite the innumerable hardships of that time, or perhaps because of them, Irish Catholic monks wrote evocative and poignant accounts of the True Cross ("The Dream of the Rood"), romantic love ("Donal Og"), longings for home ("Columcille Fecit"), or their pet cat ("Pangur Ban"). The sheer diversity of expression is the other great virtue of this anthology, showcasing the very catholicity of Catholicism. No matter the age, the person, or the surrounding context of a particular poem, Christ's face appears. Sometimes He is a hunter seeking His beloved as in St. Teresa of Ávila's "About Those Words, "My Beloved Is Mine," or a bird as in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "As Kingfisher Catch Fire." Or there's this in "Still Falls the Rain" by Edith Sitwell: Still falls the Rain At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us On Dives and on Lazarus: Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one. The sacraments are a...

By Luis E. Lugo. The announcement of the appointment of Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury marks a historic first for the Church of England (CoE), which traces its origins back more than 1,400 years to the time of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. In addition to being the head of the CoE, the Archbishop of Canterbury also serves as the spiritual leader of the world-wide Anglican Communion, whose thriving churches of the Global South have become increasingly alienated from the mother church due to the latter's long-term drift toward theological liberalism. This appointment will surely widen that breach. Already in the 1940s proposals were circulating in the CoE in support of the ordination of women priests. Those early efforts provided the impetus for a 1948 essay by the well-known Anglican writer, C.S. Lewis. The arguments he lays out in "Priestesses in the Church?" are worth revisiting and seem as relevant today as when he first penned them - and for Catholics as well as Anglicans. As Lewis makes clear at the outset, his opposition to women's ordination is not based on the claim that women are any less capable than men with respect to the many qualifications associated with priestly ministry: "No one among those who dislike the proposal [for the ordination of women priests] is maintaining that women are less capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office. . . .[Women] may be as 'God-like' as a man, and a given woman much more so than a given man." Lewis further asserts that the Church's historical opposition to the practice of female ordination could not possibly have been rooted in a contempt for women's religious capacities. And that, for one simple reason. As he writes, "the Middle Ages carried their reverence for one Woman to a point at which the charge could be plausibly made that the Blessed Virgin became in their eyes almost 'a fourth Person of the Trinity." Despite this, Lewis continues, never "in all those ages was anything resembling a sacerdotal office attributed to her." Lewis lays out four arguments for his opposition. The first concerns the nature of the priestly office. In the more traditional understanding, the priest is seen primarily as a representative; in fact, he is a "double representative, who represents us to God and God to us." The latter function, in which the priest represents God to us, is something that only a man can perform: "Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to him." His second argument revolves around the authority of the Church. The practice of only ordaining men to the priesthood is something the Church has done as the bearer of divine revelation, as the guardian of the depositum fidei. If this claim for the Church's authority is false, Lewis contends, "then we want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests." For then the Church would have no authority to ordain anyone. Lewis' third argument centers on the fact that the Church's imagery and language reflect the proper order of things. The Church affirms, for example, that in the Eucharistic celebration the priest stands in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. But the second person of the Trinity is called the Son, not the Daughter. And the mystical marriage is between Christ the Bridegroom and the Church as his Bride; a reversal of these roles is simply unthinkable. Moreover, in the Lord's Prayer, we address ourselves to "Our Father," not to "Our Mother." For Lewis, this language carries great weight. Turning the male language into a feminine gender (or, by extension, into some gender-neutral variation) does violence to our understanding of God. Goddesses were worshipped in other religions, but not in Christianity, he points out. So, to feminize the godhead (or to neuter it) is to embark on a different religion. God Himself, L...

By Brad Miner. There's a show, To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum, at the Frick Collection in Manhattan (the entrance is just off 5th Avenue at E. 70th St.). It will run until January 5, 2026, and is well worth seeing. If you've not been to the newly renovated Frick, it's a treat, although beautiful as the space is, it lacks the elegant charm of the original, which remained very much like the home of the man who built it. Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) was a robber baron. At 21, he founded the Frick Coke Company, using what's called a beehive oven to turn coal into coke, which the company then sold to steelworks. In a decade, having bought out his partners and having received a loan from his friend Andrew Mellon, he launched H.C. Frick & Company. The next year, he formed a partnership with Andrew Carnegie. After some bitterness, that would lead to lawsuits and settlements. To have a place to relax and fish, Frick and some other rich men bought Lake Conemaugh, a reservoir that was supported by the earthenwork South Fork Dam just above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They lowered the level of the dam by 3 feet for better transit in and out of the area. On Friday, May 31, 1889, a torrential rainstorm caused the dam to overflow and collapse, sending nearly 4 billion gallons of water flooding into Johnstown and killing more than 2200 people. Frick was never sued, but he did donate "thousands of dollars" to help with Johnstown's recovery. As one poet put it at the time, "All the horrors that hell could wish, / Such was the price that was paid for - fish!" Needless to say, all these years later, the Frick Collection is free of any taint of Mr. Frick's union- or dam-busting activities. And although I'm unsure how much credit he deserves for his art acquisitions - for which he employed the advisory services of notable art experts - the man did know what he liked. He would have agreed with Oscar Wilde: "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best." Before turning to the Holy Sepulcher exhibit, I must mention that, for me, the Frick's highlight is the counterpointing of Hans Holbein the Younger's portraits of Sir Thomas More (1527) and Thomas Cromwell (c. 1532-33) on either side of the fireplace in the Living Hall. And over the fireplace is El Greco's St. Jerome (1590-1600). And, my goodness, the Frick has three Vermeers! To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum is a small exhibit with a big impact. As with all great stories of art and archaeology, there is mystery, as well as history, involved. The gist is this: After the Crusades, Franciscans came to the Holy Land, and one group of them took charge of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Obviously, it's a long and complicated history - from the Resurrection to St. Helena's building of a church at the site - but the Franciscans founded the Custodia Terræ Sanctæ. Indeed, it was begun by Saint Francis himself in 1217. That custodia (custodian) is now shared by Catholic and Orthodox communities. But as Alvar González-Palacios writes in the Frick exhibition catalog, much of what is held in custody by Franciscans and others was, until recently, unavailable to the public. His story of gaining entrance to Jerusalem's St. Savior Monastery and its treasures 45 years ago, while not exactly Indiana Jones-worthy, reveals why it was important to launch the coordinated Terra Sancta Museum project. As the Frick explains about the current show: This groundbreaking exhibition presents more than forty rare objects from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Largely unknown to the public until their recent rediscovery, the opulent works range from liturgical objects in gem-encrusted gold and silver to richly decorated vestments in velvet, damask, and other luxurious materials. These treasures were donated by European Catholic monarchs and Holy Roman Emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the church in Jerusalem, the religious center ...