The Catholic Thing

But first a note: Friends: We're heading into Advent tomorrow - a Sunday when we don't fundraise. But we really need more to pick up our pace. Today. We're about halfway to where we need to be, and a lot is riding on your contributions - nothing less than our ability to continue our work into 2026. Many people have asked me over the years how we manage. And I tell them that it's easy. I have great confidence in our readers. Please make that a reality again this year. These are challenging days in the Church and the world. Let's do all we can to face them. At TCT, we will. Are you ready to join us. - Robert Royal Now for today's column by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza. Only a few years ago - more than twenty years into my priesthood - I discovered the Eucharistic Prayers for Reconciliation. They have been in the Roman Missal for decades now, but many of us priests leave unexplored the treasures of the Missal - votive Masses, Masses for various needs and occasions, solemn blessings, etc. The story of those reconciliation prayers is linked to the Holy Year 1975, and marks a fruit of the liturgical reform at a tumultuous time. That story itself is worth recalling about the prayer that is at the heart of the Mass. For some 1600 years, the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I) was the only "anaphora," as it is properly called. The liturgical movement of the 19th and 20th centuries expressed some longstanding concerns about the prayer, namely the strange absence of the Holy Spirit, and that its literary structure was less than cohesive. Yet it had been consecrated by more than a millennium of use, venerable on that ground alone. In any case, the rubrics of the Tridentine missal had it recited sotto voce, so it was not heard by the congregation. Depending upon the Latin fluency of the priest, it was quite possible that even he was unconcerned with such matters. After Vatican II, the decision to have the anaphora recited aloud and in the vernacular languages raised a question. Was the Roman Canon suitable for such at every Mass? The view that prevailed was that it would be burdensome for priests and people alike, and so new eucharistic prayers were drafted, some from ancient sources, others composed latterly. The Church, as she often does, found it difficult to strike a balance in the new usage, and so the Roman Canon disappeared almost entirely in practice, though the anaphora itself remained in its primary place, largely untouched. There are a few priests who still choose to use it in all Masses, which remains an option. The new missal of Paul VI included four anaphoras. The briefest of them (II) attracted the most enthusiasm in use, likely for that reason. The third, to my mind, is of superior literary quality, with its soaring opening - invoking all persons of the Trinity, the work of Creation, the enduring covenant of salvation, with a "pure sacrifice" being offered "from the rising of the sun to its setting" - and its concluding image of the Church as a "pilgrim on earth" constantly offering its "oblation" of the "the sacrificial Victim" by which she is "nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son and filled with his Holy Spirit." The fourth anaphora presents a sweeping account of the history of salvation, rendered in language suffused with Biblical language and images. In the "fullness of time," one can almost hear Jesus preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth. (Luke 4) The relevant rubrics restrict its use to Ordinary Time, and I find it suitable particularly for Sundays during the year. The additional prayers are, to my eyes and ears, welcome additions. From a strictly literary point of view, I find that the Roman Canon is euphonious in Latin in a way that it is not in English; famulórum famularumque is pleasing to the ear in a way that mere "servants" or even "servants and handmaidens" is not. It retains its venerable status, and I use it when that is the desirable criterion, but more often prefer the other options. Options were abo...

by David Warren But first a note from Robert Royal: So, you're feeling thankful after turkey day. And I won't badger. But we still depend on you. So please, be generous. There's you. There's The Catholic Thing... Now for today's column... Good news! Owing to a combination of demographic realities and public scandal, universities are progressing into a phase-out, around the United States and the world. The cause of their extinction will be that they are no longer attractive to anyone, and too expensive even to consider. Their former beneficiaries are thus abandoning them out of self-interest, and with luck, they should soon cease to clutter our educational landscape. They are not, of course, completely worthless. Nothing is truly worthless in God's green world, and much can be recycled. But they are nearly worthless in comparison to the extraordinary "investments" poured into them from public (taxpayer) and private sources. Indeed, not even a degree from, say, Harvard University, is entirely worthless, for it will be printed on one side only, so that the reverse side will serve as superior notepaper. These are developments that were devoutly wished for - although not by quite everyone - at least since the beginning of the XIIIth century, when Oxford and the University of Paris were being officially incorporated. Bologna (or "Baloney" as we say in America) was founded more than a century before that, but only as the pre-eminent medieval law school. Its pretensions were thus limited, at first. To seek the deeper sort of wisdom, one generally became a monk. Thus, "objectivity" was encouraged, nay imposed, by the Church. To look more completely into truth, one had to stand with one's mind outside it. That's why the "higher" education of the learned took place outside the catastrophic mess in which the world was always entangled. Colleges were confined within cathedrals and monasteries, where seminarians could be guided, and not left loose to become a public danger. Heresy was not to be encouraged. While daggers and swords date (according to the archaeologists) to several thousands of years before the medieval past, cannons had not yet been invented (in China!), and the outer world was at least free of the noisier sort of anthropogenic explosions. But secular universities put the world on the path to A-bombs. Learning was put at the service of psychotics, seeking political power, and has been increasingly dedicated to their convenience, in the time ever since. It was discovered that the young, when partially and later completely freed from religious discipline, were truly "kids," who tended to run wild on university campuses. Then, as now, they became the psychological playthings of the worst kind of professors. We have had eight centuries or more of student riots, as even a casual review of the history will affirm. But we have had as much experience of morally corrupt faculty. These universities were, again, from the beginning, secular institutions, even though some of the better ones fell under the influence of the Church, and were told sometimes to follow religious, and Christian, decrees. Or to be perfectly candid, they were created by liberals, often within the Church, bent upon experimenting with young minds, and with the confidence that this would serve a liberal agenda. "Reactionaries," i.e., those without a liberal agenda, were slower off the mark, crippled by the fear of hubris. This agenda hasn't changed very much since the Xth century. It will not change until the original cause of decline has been removed: the reckless spread of "learning." This was a departure, in spirit, from the intentions of the old "Black Monks" of the Benedictine tradition, and even of the first Cluniac reformers, who longed for nothing more than actual reform, which, as the literate used to know, is a return to first principles. By comparison, the sometimes dangerously proud, "cool" men in black from the new monastic orders, could be damnably...

But first a note from Robert Royal: Today is a day specially set aside for giving thanks. And all of us at TCT - Dominic Cassella, Brad Miner, Karen Popp, Hannah Russo, and myself - thank each of you personally for being readers and supporters of our work. It's such a joyful time that we bring you two reflections on the day - Stephen White about feasting properly in spite of everything, and Michael Foley, in a lighter but still important vein, about being worthy of using other living things for our food. Enjoy and Happy Thanksgiving! Now for today's columns. Feasting at the End of the World By Stephen P. White... There is something fitting about the date of Thanksgiving. I don't mean that there's anything particularly special about the fourth Thursday of November except that it invariably falls in the last week of Ordinary Time. And so our secular holiday corresponds with the close of the liturgical year. This produces an interesting juxtaposition in which a celebration of God's bounty and blessings is set amidst a liturgical barrage of readings about the end of the world. Take, for example, the readings for today: Thursday of the 34th week in Ordinary Time. In the first reading, we see men break into Daniel's home, denounce him before the king, and have him thrown to the lions. We know the story ends happily for Daniel, but not for his accusers or their wives or their children. "Before they reached the bottom of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones." The Gospel for the day is taken from Luke, and it's apocalyptic from start to finish. "Jesus said to his disciples: 'When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, know that its desolation is at hand.'" and it gets worse from there: Woe to pregnant women, people falling by the edge of the sword, being trampled underfoot, or dying of fright. The Lord promises to return in glory and exhorts the faithful to stand erect, but the whole scene sounds awful, and one gets the distinct sense that Jesus fully intends for it to sound awful. When the Son of God warns of "terrible calamity," and "wrathful judgment," and "nations in dismay," it is prudent to take him seriously. In the United States, of course, we generally hear the readings for Thanksgiving Day, not for Thursday of the 34th week in Ordinary Time, and these readings are much less likely to sour one's stomach before the turkey is even in the oven. The readings for Thanksgiving Day are all about gratitude for God's blessings. We hear from the Book of Sirach how the Lord tends the child even in the womb, and of joy and peace and the Lord's enduring goodness. We hear from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians how God pours out his grace and every spiritual gift. In the Gospel (also from Luke), Jesus heals ten lepers and the Samaritan alone among them returns to give thanks: "Stand up and go; your faith has saved you." No lions; no crushed bones; no terrible calamity or wrathful judgment. Just grace, healing, and glory to God for blessings bestowed. This juxtaposition between these two sets of readings, the wide variance in tone, might seem jarring, even contradictory. But we Christians know that the futility of this world, which is passing away - both in the transience and material corruption we experience every day of our short lives, and in the tumultuous, terrible, no doubt awesome end to come - in no way negates the goodness of this world or of this present life. These are extraordinary gifts, given to us by a loving God, for our use and enjoyment. He made this world for us, and He made us capable of enjoying it. Of course, being a stiff-necked, ungrateful race, we tend to make a hash of these gifts. We worship the gift to the exclusion of the Giver. We lose sight of the proper end for which all these wonderful means are intended. We hoard and waste His gifts, both of which are species of ingratitude. We even, some of us, teach ourselves to despise His gifts in a misguided attempt to compensate for ...

By Robert Royal. But first a note: There's an old French saying: reculer pour mieux sauter, which means "to step back to jump better." It's got many uses, not least in the Church. When we find ourselves at an impasse, it's wise - and often more effective - to look carefully at what we've done in the past as we confront the future. Today's column tries to recover some often misunderstood things about St. Francis of Assisi who lived at a time of political and religious turmoil different than our own. But he faced them with an attitude and a spirit that is worth getting to know better because it's something quite different than the remedies that don't seem to be doing much in our day. At The Catholic Thing, we're all in favor of aggiornamento, the term Vatican II used for the Faith facing up to contemporary challenges. But that won't succeed without something we also pursue, ressourcement, the Council's wish to recover the ancient sources. We're committed to pursuing both of these necessary paths today and into the future. Please join us in these endeavors. We can't do it without you. Make a donation - there's a monthly option if a one-time lump sum is too much. But do something. The work is urgent and the time is short. Now for today's column... Pope Francis left the Church with multiple controversies, some that he inherited, some that he induced. Indeed, amid the complaints about clericalism and "backwardists," the considerable presence of LGBT and feminist concerns in recent Church pronouncements, we might ask where to find a more robust, dare one say militant and masculine Catholicism - much needed given the challenges from renascent Islam and Western decline. Much of this might be viewed in light of the late pope's decision - as a Jesuit! - to take the name of the little poor man of Assisi, St. Francis. I've been thinking about these questions while reading Augustine Thompson O.P.'s Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, which is "new" not only because it's relatively recent, but in that it takes an interesting path towards identifying the "historical Francis." Which is to say, insofar as we can reconstruct him from the more reliable sources, amid the traditional myths and recent "Francises": the hippie Francis, the Francis of a poor stripped-down Church, the environmentalist Francis, etc. And while Thompson doesn't entirely dismiss the old stories or modern romanticized versions, he offers correctives worth the attention of any reader concerned for historical truth. To take a prominent instance, most people believe that the saccharine "St. Francis Prayer" ("Make me a channel of your peace") is by St. Francis. It was actually composed around 1912, in French. And more significantly, "Noble as its sentiments are, Francis would not have written such a piece, focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the pronouns 'I' and 'me,' the words 'God' and 'Jesus' never appearing once." Thompson reports that the discovery of all this is quite often very painful for his students, who have been led to believe otherwise. As this example shows, Thompson is meticulous about sources and clears up numerous misunderstandings. In fact, this biography is also "new" in that it has a curious form. It's - nominally - just under 300 pages, but only the first half is biography. The second half consists, not of footnotes, but of brief discussions about questions raised, chapter by chapter, among the scholars. As such, it's an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to approach the real St. Francis instead of the one often concocted to serve contemporary agendas. Clearly, it's not easy to map what Francis did in the thirteenth century onto our current age. But there are multiple interesting points of contact. For instance, as per the "Francis Prayer," the saint did seek "peace" among the Italians of his day, who were almost perpetually at war, not only among the different city-states (in which Francis had fought himself), but also betwee...

By Randall Smith. But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: God calls to His people through many means, even within His Church. Professor Smith, who teaches theology - one of the harder disciplines - is without doubt correct that many people have to be well on the way to Christianity even before they get to theology proper. Given the situation that we're in, we need to be laying out all avenues for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. At TCT, we take that to be a central part of our charism. The Thing is many things and more than things. Please, join us in this great work. Make your contribution to The Catholic Thing. Today. Now for today's column... There are many reasons people come into the Catholic Church, but a common one is their experience of its beauty: the beauty of the art, the architecture, the music, and the liturgy. Too often, those whose goal is "evangelizing" ignore the beauty expressed and embodied in the Church's artistic tradition. Why? There are few more effective tools for encouraging people to take the Church seriously than hearing the angelic sound of Monteverdi's Vespers of the Blessed Virgin or Josquin des Prez's Missa Pange Lingua; appreciating the superb paintings of Fra Angelico and Caravaggio; or contemplating the transcendent beauty of the Cathedral of Chartres and the Duomo in Florence. Experiencing any of these would be a good first step, but there is so much more that this step would be like dipping your toe in a vast ocean stretching out beyond the horizon. I teach theology. I believe in the importance of helping young people gain an "understanding of the faith." But I can't do what great art and architecture can do to inspire the awe appropriate to the transcendent mysteries of our faith. A STEM colleague of mine couldn't understand why the university required so many literature courses. He was a devoted Catholic and a daily communicant at Mass, who understood why we had theology courses, but not why we had so many required literature courses. I told him that I preferred that our students take more courses on Dante, Chaucer, and the poetry of John Donne than simply taking yet another course to satisfy a theology requirement. "No, no, no," he said. "All they need is a course on composition and writing." He saw no need for any formation of the Catholic imagination to help move the passions and fill the hearts of our students with the glories of the Christian artistic tradition. Even many "conservative" Catholic institutions spend precious little time introducing their students to the artistic treasures of their tradition. "Let's read a few more books," seems to be the guiding principle. Reading is great. But people in universities, professors and students both, can get "lost in their heads." We need to be "brought back to earth" - not in the sense of becoming less idealistic and more "pragmatic." This rarely brings people "back to earth" in the right way. A better way arises from a deeper appreciation of the Incarnation. And there are few better ways to help students understand the mystery of the Incarnation - of what it means for the Word to become flesh with its mysterious marriage of the eternal and the material - than to introduce them to the beauty embodied in the best Christian art and architecture. We wonder why young people leave the Church. Could it be because we haven't connected them emotionally and spiritually to her beauty? Young couples come back to beautiful churches when they want to get married. They travel to places around the world and visit the great art and beautiful churches. When universities want to recruit new students and build a sense of devotion to the school, they make sure to take them to the beautiful traditional buildings on the campus. Those are the ones the students will proudly keep coming back to visit. They will bring their friends and say things like, "I had several classes in that building," knowing that their friends will consider them fortunate...

By Brad Miner. But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: Dostoyevsky made one of his characters say, "Beauty will save the world." There are many days when it seems doubtful that he was right. But it's worth always keeping in mind that there are deeper realities than the day-to-day controversies - even in the Church - which may ultimately decide what happens in this world and the next. Today, Brad Miner takes us through a masterly account of some of the works of a man who may have been the greatest Catholic artist ever - and in multiple media. Here at The Catholic Thing, we've always said that part of our mission is to recover the Catholic cultural tradition, the richest in the world, both for its own sake and for the light it brings to our world. There's so much that needs doing in our circumstances that we have to do more, better, longer than perhaps ever before. If you find that prospect challenging, please help us take The Catholic Thing to even greater days. Just click the button. Do your part. Now for today's column... There's another basilica called St. Peter's in Rome, located near the Colosseum. San Pietro in Vincoli ("St. Peter in Chains") is a minor basilica that gets its own share of visitors, many of whom come for just one reason. Therein lies the "tomb" of Julius II, although the late pope is not interred there. Julius (Giuliano della Rovere) now lies in the other St. Peter's, the world's greatest church, next to his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV. Julius, who had no small opinion of his august self, wanted a grand memorial to his life and papacy, so he brought Michelangelo Buonarroti to Rome to design it. The great, 30-year-old artist accepted with gusto, visualizing it as his life's great work. And it's to see this (especially its central sculpture) that people come to San Pietro in Vincoli. What they see, however, is a work very much diminished from the original vision of Julius and Michelangelo because problems arose. Julius decided that, having Michelangelo in his employ, the artist was just the man to illuminate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo had begun to work on the tomb in 1505 but was forced to put the project on hold in 1508 to climb the scaffolding in the Chapel and begin painting what many consider the greatest achievement of the Renaissance (if not in the whole history of art), a project he worked on for four years, completing the ceiling on October 31, 1512. Julius was relieved. Now, he assumed, he'd live to see the tomb that would be a monument to his monumental life. Michelangelo's original plan was for an enormous, free-standing, three-tiered sort of wedding-cake structure featuring 40 statues. It would be 23 feet wide, 26-1/4 feet tall, and 36 feet deep, and fairly dominate the interior of the new and equally enormous St. Peter's at the Vatican, then under construction. And it might have worked if sited there, but it was not to be. Because it was at this point that the project came to a halt. Why is not entirely clear. To be sure, the construction of the new St. Peter's was a drain on the Vatican treasury, and its then-chief architect, Donato Bramante, was no friend of Michelangelo, and he may have convinced Julius that overseeing the construction of one's own tomb was bad form for a holy man. And there were wars, of course - with Julius leading the army of the Papal States. And, on the gloomy horizon, religious dissent that would lead to the Protestant Reformation. The Vatican balance sheet was sliding into the red. But Julius would not abandon the tomb project. In fact, he issued a bull (February 19, 1513) declaring that Michelangelo would be the only one to craft his tomb - a very high-powered back-to-work order. Michelangelo had finished his work on the Sistine Chapel a few months before. So now, Julius must have thought: Now he can finish my tomb! Two days later, the pope died. Michelangelo did finish the "tomb" in 1545, just two years before Pope Paul III would name him Chie...

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...