The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal So, I was in Rome recently chasing down information for a book and noticed that, at the time I'd be heading back home, a National Conservatism Conference was being held in Brussels. I decided to stop in to see how NatCon would fare in the "capital" of the European Union. As has been widely reported, under pressure from "antifa" forces, Brussels' mayor foolishly forced Concert Noble, the initial venue, to cancel. And again, with the Sofitel. Ultimately, we gathered at the Claridge, where the Tunisian Muslim owner was (unsuccessfully) pressured by the mayor, his wife threatened, and warned that his business would be destroyed (kudos to him for standing up for free speech). Then, during the first day, the Brussels police, under mayor's orders, arrived to shut the whole thing down. The conference was allegedly advancing "exclusion" (i.e., controlling illegal immigration) and Euroscepticism (the horror!), harboring elements of "fascism" and "homophobia." Which, translated from the Globalese into the vernacular, means it was mostly advocating the kind of normalcy that existed since the beginning of time, until just a few years ago. All right-thinking persons are now supposed to classify mere sanity as "far-right," "dangerous populism," and a threat to "democracy," even when democratic majorities (the populus) vote - as they are likely to do in European elections this June and America later in the year - for just such normality. I was sick with what turned into something like the flu and left the conference at noon the first day in search of something hot to clear a stuffy head, just as the police were arriving. They told the organizers that they had fifteen minutes to clear the room. But then looked around and perhaps thought the optics were not great of rounding up a tranquil slate of academics and democratically elected officials, and an audience of political junkies, almost all in suits and dresses - and in their twenties. As a compromise, for the rest of the day, no one else was to be admitted. People could leave, but not get back in - because of "security concerns." A former candidate for the French presidency arrived late and was denied entry. Cardinal Mueller was smuggled in by a side door. The event carried on bravely, but with a cordon of police outside. (When I first arrived, the venue itself had set up a security perimeter - a big truck was parked in front of the entrance, and a heavy barred gate was raised and lowered as participants were checked through.) That such a thing can happen in a Western country - the center of Europe - beggars belief. It tells us something about what our public life has become, however, not only that it happened (though the restrictions were reversed by a Belgian judge for the following day), but that news outlets like the New York Times tried to spin the whole fiasco as something welcomed by conservative extremists as a way to play the victim. You have to be very deep into the victim/oppressor framework of much current public discourse to see - let along report - it that way. I don't entirely know what to think about National Conservatism, though I am an admirer of Yoram Hazony, the Jewish founder who has written several interesting books, and of John O'Sullivan, a longtime friend and past counselor to Margaret Thatcher. In my view, NatCon doesn't entirely know what it thinks about itself, which is all to the good, and why it hosts a variety of reasonable positions, long central to our western nations - and well within the proper democratic spectrum: religious beliefs, traditional social mores, national sovereignty, without excluding international co-operation - where appropriate. This is hardly political bomb-throwing, except to a fragile segment of our deeply disturbed elites. Brussels is at Level-3-Alert about Islamic terrorism, but makes a large public move against a few hundred conservative thinkers? The mayor had earlier warned about the threat of growing "Catholic fu...

By Brad Miner We need to talk about something, and I've already told you what it is above. Here are the remaining obligatory Holy Days in 2024 Thursday, May 9, 2024 - The Ascension of Jesus Thursday, August 15, 2024 - The Assumption of Mary, Solemnity Friday, November 1, 2024 - All Saints' Day Wednesday, December 25, 2024 - The Birth of Our Lord, Christmas Let's add in the remaining Solemnities (attendance optional but encouraged): Thursday, May 30, 2024 - Corpus Christi Friday, June 7, 2024 - The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Monday, June 24, 2024 - The Nativity of St. John the Baptist Saturday, June 29, 2024 - Saints Peter and Paul Saturday, November 2, 2024 - All Souls' Day Monday, December 9, 2024 - The Feast of the Immaculate Conception There are some good liturgical calendar apps available for Apple, Android, and whatever, so consider downloading one. And relax! Before Pope St. Pius X reduced the number of Holy Days of Obligation to eight - via the motu proprio, Supremi disciplinae (1917) - there were thirty-six of them! I gather many of the Catholic faithful hadn't minded the extra trips to church. (I can't tell you exactly what's in that document, because it's not listed among the motu proprios of Pius X on the Vatican website, which is odd. Maybe the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments doesn't want to remind Traditionalists of what used to be.) Now, there's a reason why I've not mentioned some well-known and very significant feasts that always fall on Sundays, and it's a bombshell, which - sad to say - is a fact too many Catholics refuse to acknowledge or don't even know: every Sunday is a Holy Day of Obligation. I don't need to repeat that, but here's the proof, as stated in the Code of Canon Law: Canon1246 §1. Sunday, on which by apostolic tradition the paschal mystery is celebrated,must be observed in the universal Church as the primordial holy day of obligation. The following days must also be observed: the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Epiphany, the Ascension, the Body and Blood of Christ, Holy Mary the Mother of God, her Immaculate Conception, her Assumption, Saint Joseph, Saint Peter and Saint Paul the Apostles, and All Saints. §2. With the prior approval of the Apostolic See, however, the conference of bishops can suppress some of the holy days of obligation or transfer them to a Sunday. Canon 1247 On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are obliged to participate in the Mass. And as the Catechism explains: 2193 "On Sundays and other holy days of obligation the faithful are bound. . .to abstain from those labors and business concerns which impede the worship to be rendered to God, the joy which is proper to the Lord's Day, or the proper relaxation of mind and body." (CIC, canon 1247) We Americans, of course, work hard, and some like to sleep late on weekend mornings. But that doesn't matter. We all have to be in church every Sunday. Have. To. Be. Of course, if you are sick or have another serious reason for not attending Mass, you may be entitled to a dispensation. There's no reason to come to Mass if you are suffering from influenza, and you should not, since you might infect other parishioners - even if you come masked and wearing surgical gloves. Now the nuclear bomb: If you do sleep in and blow off Mass, you have committed a mortal sin. Again, the Catechism: 2181 The Sunday Eucharist is the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice. For this reason the faithful are obliged to participate in the Eucharist on days of obligation, unless excused for a serious reason (for example, illness, the care of infants) or dispensed by their own pastor. Those who deliberately fail in this obligation commit a grave sin. Note that you can excuse yourself from the obligation as a matter of your own conscience and commonsense (knowing you have an infectious disease), or you may receive a dispensation from your pastor. I once asked a priest friend if he get...

By Eduardo J. Echeverria In his recent book, LIFE: My Story Through History, Pope Francis advocates for legal support of same-sex civil unions of "[homosexuals] who experience the gift of love." In what sense, if any, is homosexual love a gift? The mind of the Church is that it certainly cannot be a gift of God, neither natural (creational) nor supernatural (sacramental). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the ultimate source of love is God himself. Quoting John Paul II's 1981 Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, the Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts: God is love and in himself he lives a mystery of personal loving communion [eternally united in being, relationship, and love]. Creating the human race in his own image . . . , God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman [Genesis 1:27] the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Francis' remark, on its face, does not seem to regard homosexual "love" as an inherently disordered form of love. Does he think that the homosexual is able to live the vocation to chastity, and hence, of love in a same-sex relationship? How could the homosexual do so? The vocation of chastity involves sexual differentiation between a man and a woman, which according to Christian anthropology, means "the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being." The Catechism explains, "Sexuality, in which man's belonging to the bodily and biological world is expressed, becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman." Chastity, therefore, presupposes the sexual differentiation of male and female, such that only a sexual union of male and female persons makes bodies in any real sense "one flesh" (Gen 2:24), with the latter organic bodily union being a necessary condition for the existence of authentic conjugal love. Homosexual love is not a gift, indeed, it is a false love, because it is incapable of fulfilling the vocation to chastity, of perfecting the being of the person and developing his existence; and hence of being ordered to the natural law, the order of Creation, and hence to God. As a disordered form of love, it not only lacks integration but is a counter-integration by virtue of being an offense against the vocation to chastity, making it unable to realize the integrity of the person and the integrality of the gift of self. Christian anthropology must consider the reality of the human person, of man and woman, in the order of love. Why? Because, as Karol Wojtyla rightly states in his philosophical magnum opus, Love and Responsibility, the "person finds in love the greatest fullness of his being, of his objective existence. Love is such action, such an act, which most fully develops the existence of the person. Of course, this has to be true love. What does true love mean?" Love is an analogical concept, meaning thereby that there are different kinds of love: paternal love, the love of brothers and sisters, friendship, and, last but not least, the love between a man and a woman. ("The love of a man and a woman is a reciprocal relation of persons and possesses a personal character.") Briefly, love involves attraction to the sensory-sexual values, and spiritual or moral values, of the other person, for example, says Wojtyla, "to her intelligence or virtues of character." There is also "need love," or love as desire, and "benevolence." "Need love" desires "the person as a good for oneself." Love as benevolence is about desiring the other person's good. "Benevolence is simply disinterestedness in love: 'I do not long for you as a good', but 'I long for your good', 'I long for what is good for you'." Wojtyla then turns to the problem of reciprocity, which brings about a synthesis "of love of desire and of benevolent love." Reciprocity involves the relati...

By David Warren Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian economist (and amateur humorist, 1869-1944), wished to justify his choice of the academic profession when he could perhaps have become a successful businessman. "In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a businessman knows in his whole life. I thus have what the businessman can never enjoy, an ability to think, and what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time." God, in my opinion, can be blamed (indirectly) for the success of the capitalist system of investment and returns, for He designed the human race with free will, on stochastic principles, such that anyone who puts his mind to something consistently can get good at it. The Devil, on the other hand, played the larger role in the invention of socialism, in which all investment decisions must be made by a bureaucracy. This is the system in which the State picks winners. It works because the State also picks police. But is capitalism any better? I, and Mr. Leacock, too, noticed that some very sub-prime intellects get rich in unquestionably vulgar ways, not simply because their minds are vulgar (though in a mass market, it helps), but because they use their wits day and night only for the purpose of money-making. It is the system of "try, try again," and if you play enough times, your score may accumulate. This can be statistically demonstrated by the fact that hardly anyone is trying to lose; and the banks punish the players who are. (Socialist banks do just the opposite.) Under the capitalist system, this sort of behavior - busy-ness - is praised, and down there in the States you celebrate the "American Dream," in which everyone makes a lot of money. While I have emphasized production, there is also the flip, consumption side to this great wheel of fortune. It increases with production - or decreases, once socialism has been achieved. For if you are not an investor yourself, but a worker under either system, you get what the boss is paying. Under capitalism, this will resemble what you are worth to the company, but under socialism, what you are worth, abstractly. ("We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us," as they used to sing behind the Iron Curtain.) In California, for instance, the State has recently ruled that everyone who works in a restaurant is entitled to $20 per hour (less the State's considerable taxes). As a critic of fast food, I don't think this is a very good idea, for it will make unskilled workers too expensive, and close down perhaps half the trade. The capitalists in this "mixed economy" will still be able to keep a few expensive restaurants open, however. That's why I would prefer a minimum wage of $50, or perhaps $1,000 per hour, for it would eliminate restaurants entirely. While this would be all to the good, it does not address the "root" of the problem: people frying, or at least dreaming of frying, fast food. There are environmental objections if anyone tries to eat the stuff, but they wouldn't anyway because, under our commercial arrangements, you are either a customer or a server. And once service has been priced out of existence, everyone can starve. We will have achieved socialism! The only complete equality is death, which, as the economist J.M. Keynes argued, can be anticipated "in the long run." But back to present-tense capitalism, provision is made for everyone to live, while they are unequal. Indeed, capitalism has made it possible for more and more people to live, and eat ever more extravagantly, all over the planet. The trouble is, that while it favors consumers in slightly broader ways, it only rewards producers with money. This is especially a problem for the people who must work for money, alone. All the other avenues of human creativity and expression are cut off. In fact, capitalism does not encourage productive work, except during the brief moments when that proportion of the population that is in the labor forc...

By Stephen P. White For the better part of two generations, the pro-life movement in the United States was galvanized by a shared commitment to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Thanks to the Dobbs decision of 2022, Roe is now gone, and abortion policy in the United States has been returned to the democratic process. If Dobbs represented a generational legal victory for the pro-life movement, the ensuing two years have also revealed some of the massive political and cultural obstacles facing the pro-life cause. Just a few months after Dobbs, a pro-life amendment to the state constitution was defeated in Kansas setting off a string of similar defeats on various amendments and ballot measures in California, Michigan, Vermont, Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana. A predictable loss in, say, California is one thing. A string of losses in heavily Republican states is something else entirely. Not surprisingly, these trends have made many politicians skittish. If principled commitment to defending life (or at least to overturning Roe) was once seen as a winning position for many Republicans, some of those same politicians (including, it seems, Donald Trump who has said he would not sign a federal abortion ban if elected) have more recently discerned that restricting abortion through the democratic process is something of a political liability. How all of this will play out in the months between now and November's election remains to be seen. At least three more states have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot for November. For now the pro-life cause seems to be on its political heels. What seems clear is that, to recover its footing in the post-Dobbs environment, the pro-life movement has its work cut out for it. Catholics, of course, have a great deal to contribute to that work. One issue of particular importance will be inevitable (and inevitably messy) questions about how to balance an unequivocal commitment to the defense of every innocent human life - to which there can be no exceptions in principle - with the practical need to work through a democratic process in which the enactment of such total legal protections might be impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. In his 1993 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II was unambiguous: to posit a supposed "right to abortion" as an expression of human freedom is to negate human freedom itself. To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom: "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin." (John 8:34) For years, this declaration was sufficient to demonstrate the illegitimacy of Catholic support for a "right" to abortion as imagined by Roe and its defenders. (Obviously, it didn't convince all Catholics, and many simply rejected the Church's defense of life in principle, but that is a different matter.) Insofar as Roe short-circuited the democratic process - moving responsibility for abortion law from elected legislatures to judicial fiat - efforts to contain the abortion license legislatively, at the state or federal level, were severely curtailed under Roe. Principled opposition to the fiction of abortion as a right remains the only option for Catholics, but the work of writing and passing actual abortion legislation admits of no such easy clarity. And so in the complicated and shifting post-Roe era in which we find ourselves, it is worth remembering that in the same encyclical in which Pope John Paul II categorically rejected support for "a right to abortion" he also endorsed the prudence of a kind of incrementalist approach to protecting life through the (always imperfect) political process. It's worth quoting him at length. A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage ...

By James V. Schall, S.J. and Joseph R. Wood But first a note: Today is the fifth anniversary of the death of our friend, priest, philosopher, and TCT contributor, Fr. James Schall, SJ. In tribute, we publish here one of his pieces from 2019, as well as a column by one of the many whom Father Jim inspired to take the risk of studying philosophy. Dr. Wood refers to three philosophers - the ancients Plato and Aristotle, and a contemporary, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski - all of whom Father Jim held in particular esteem. We remember him with the greatest affection, admiration, and gratitude. Requiescat in pace. Now for "Who Are You?" by Fr. James V. Schall... At least four famous, not-often-enough-repeated Aristotelian questions can be asked of any given thing when we try to figure out what and why it is. They are: 1) "What is it?" - a tree, a rabbit, a planet? 2) "Is it?" That is, does it exist rather than not exist? Does it stand outside of nothingness? 3) Who or what put it into motion or into being? 4) "Why is it in existence?" What is the reason for which it now exists? Of human beings, we can add a further question: "Who are you?" That is, each of us has a particular, singular, unrepeatable existence unlike any other being that ever existed, but we are still human. Each human "what" is a "you." We have a formal cause, a material cause, an efficient cause, and a final cause. We see that these different causes are needed to explain something real about what we encounter in the things that are. We are not gods, nor do we blend into some "all" wherein we no longer exist in our singular identity. It is precisely the abidingness of our singular identity that is the most important thing about us. "I" am the one who did/did not do this or that. It is that singular, unique identity by which John is not Joseph, Suzie is not Sally, which enables us to identify the specific cause of things that come to pass in this world. Every "you" can listen to another "you" and reply. Did you or did you not do this? In one sense, the history of the world passes through the choices of unique, particular human beings. Their choices and deeds make visible what and why they are. The history of the world re cords the judgments, wise and unwise, made by the human persons who live in this world for however brief or long a time. In the eighth chapter of John, Christ tells the Pharisees that He is going where they cannot find Him. Some think He is going to kill Himself. But Christ tells them that they will die in their own sins unless they believe that "I am." This same "I am," the Pharisees suddenly recall, was a name that the Pharisees recognized. It was the one that Moses heard when he asked God His name. In frustration, the Pharisees then logically ask: "Who are you then?" Needless to say, they are not prepared for His answer. Christ was speaking to them of His Father. He added that when they see Him raised up, they will then know that "I am." He does nothing of His own. He does what the Father taught Him. What He has heard He will "tell the world." The one who sent Him is with Him. He only speaks of what is pleasing to the Father. Because He spoke with authority, many came to believe in Him. But most did not believe Him. What is striking about these scenes is the puzzlement of the Pharisees. They have their own ideas about how some promised Messiah will appear among them. They are cagey and cautious. They are pretty sure that this person before them is a fake. They try their best to catch Him blaspheming. But He always seems to be one step ahead of them. He makes pretty startling statements that seem to have legitimate foundations in their own traditions. He backs them up with what can only be called miracles. He identifies Himself with the Temple, with Jonah, with the Suffering Servant, and with someone greater than the Sabbath. They ask Him to explain Himself: "Who are you, then?" In 1988, Joseph Ratzinger recalled the famous remark of the Dutch jurist, ...

By Randall Smith "The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, conformed the truth of a new theory of the universe." This is how historian Paul Johnson began his remarkable book Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. I had the privilege of viewing the recent total solar eclipse. I found it somewhat interesting. But I imagine Sir Arthur Eddington was more excited when he viewed one on the island of Principe in 1919, because the photographs he took helped demonstrate the truth of Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein had predicted that the light from stars behind or next to the sun, visible only during a total solar eclipse, would be bent a certain amount by the sun's gravity. Eddington photographed those stars and when he measured the arc of the light, he found they matched Einstein's predictions. The news went round the world, Einstein became a global star. And science had a new paradigm. This story is fascinating for those of us interested in science, but why does Paul Johnson say that it marked the beginning of the modern world? One of the unfortunate consequences of Einstein's theory was that many people thought it had proven that "everything is relative." In other words, they mistook relativity for relativism, something Einstein never envisaged and a connection he never embraced. And tracing the tragic results of that moral relativism in the twentieth century was one of the underlying themes of Johnson's book. But as Johnson points out, "It was a measure of Einstein's scientific rigor that he refused to accept that his own theory was valid" until all the experiments he had proposed to test it were met. "What impressed me most," philosopher of science Karl Popper would write, "was Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory untenable if it should fail in certain tests. Here was an attitude utterly different from the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, Adler and even more so that of their followers. This, I felt, was the true scientific attitude." So perhaps we can take two lessons from this little story. The first is the danger of deriving facile cultural or moral conclusions from scientific explanations of the physical world. It simply does not follow from the Theory of Relativity that "everything is relative" - in fact, what the theory says is that the laws of physics will be the same in all inertial frames of reference - not that all moral principles are "relative." The second lesson is the danger of trusting "popularizers of science" rather than examining rigorously what the scientific evidence really shows or doesn't show or shows only as likely but not certain. Like Popper, what impresses me about Einstein is his insistence that his theory had to be tested and proven with solid, empirical evidence. Popper would later claim that the difference between authentic science and pseudo-science or "quackery" is precisely the possibility of this sort of "falsifiability." If a theory can never be proven wrong, then it can also never be proven right, so it's not real science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"). We need more good science and less trumpeting of the results of pseudo-science. Indeed, as someone who studied and admires science, I often think we need to bring a more "scientific" outlook to administration and politics. By this, I don't mean that decisions should be "data-driven," although getting good data and interpreting its meaning properly is an important first step. What I mean is that I would like to see more administrators and politicians state up front what results they believe will occur if their proposal is adopted. Then, in three months, six months, and a year, an assessment should be made to see whether the results matched predictions. If not, then the original proposal should be rejected or revised. But it is irrational to keep doing the same thing expecting...

By David G Bonagura, Jr. "Christian Nationalism" has fast become a favorite boogeyman term of the cultural Left. Its precise meaning, as many have noted, is intentionally ambiguous so it can tar as many believing Christians as possible with toxic intentions. The most overreaching definition, which rocked the Internet before a minor retraction, claimed that Christian Nationalists are those who "believe our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any earthy authority. They don't come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God." That is, Christian Nationalists are guilty of believing the truth of our nation's Declaration of Independence ("men have been endowed by their Creator"), which is neither a Christian nor a nationalist document. Such a fatuous description betrays a seemingly paranoid fear that Christianity might again become a public force that shapes laws and customs. A restoration of how America used to function would inaugurate, in the words of a longtime opinion writer at a supposedly responsible newspaper, "the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling." In calmer words, "Christian Nationalism" concerns the role that Christianity plays in American public life, culture, and law. Those lamenting it care nothing about Christian claims for the Triune God, the Virgin Birth, or the Resurrection. They fix their disdain on Christian moral teachings that oppose their creed of expressive individualism, which enshrines the Sexual Revolution as the first article. Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, are the final obstacles preventing total victory. Yet, from the rewriting of marriage and family law to the sudden rush to enshrine IVF as a human right, it's clear that expressive individualism has long had "Christian Nationalism" on the run. Beleaguered Christians of all denominations, appalled by America's moral collapse, have been seeking various ways to stem the tide. Public life, culture, and law are all expressions of a deeper vision, whether religious or secular, that a people hold in common. For Christian morality to again direct American life, Americans would need not only to call themselves Christian, but they also would have to believe what they claim. For that, we need the slow, grinding work of guerilla evangelization. Top-down impositions by a "Christian government" or otherworldly power will not work. Plus, given the GOP's meager post-Dobbs opposition to abortion and its instant capitulation to IVF, progressives need not fret: "Christian Nationalists," Twitter blusters aside, have little appetite for a government takeover. As America severs more of its Christian roots, Catholics need not lose hope. We have been doing our "Catholic thing" - living out our universal faith in the particular historical context of America - for centuries, and almost always under duress. We forget that even when American law and culture embodied Christian morality - abortion was illegal, divorce was fault-based, pornography curtailed, adultery criminalized - Catholics were not entirely welcome in these United States because the reigning culture rejected their religious sensibilities. Working within the law, Catholics responded by building their own neighborhoods, churches, schools, and universities where they could live their faith unencumbered. At the same time, Catholics found ways to participate in the general culture as Americans - through military service, civil and public offices, and working in industry. Discrimination was rampant and nasty, yet Catholics fought the hostility as a creative minority. They prayed, they imagined, they built, they stuck together, they engaged rivals, and they offered charity to all. "Creative minority" is a term coined by British historian Arnold Toynbee, who recognized how a small group's spiritual vision can breathe new life into a dying civilization. Twenty years ago, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger baptized the term to articulate...

By Fr. Jeffrey Kirby It's a peculiar era in the Church that witnesses the rise of ultramontanism. Sound theology has laid that heresy to rest many times and yet it keeps popping up. Regrettably, there will always be popes who welcome ultramontanism and the unconditional adherence that comes with it, just as there will always be those souls who are more than eager to kowtow to the man who happens to be pope. Ultramontanism is the false belief that everything a pope says is without error. Everything a pope decides must be right. Everything a pope speaks or does is paramount and cannot be questioned. The shocking rhetoric of the ultramontanists is found in such slogans as, "If you don't believe everything the pope teaches, then you're not Catholic." Ultramontanism has been with the Church since her beginning. The first ultramontanist was the catechumen, Cornelius. Saint Peter, our first pope, was called to Caesarea. When he arrived, we're told: As Peter entered the house, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet in reverence. But Peter made him get up. "Stand up," he said, "I am only a man myself." (Acts 10:25-26) Cornelius' actions went beyond the filial reverence of the believers (cf. Acts 5:15-16), who saw the chief apostle as a reflection of God's presence and saw the divine power working through him. In Cornelius' case, he sought to circumvent God and saw Saint Peter himself as some type of demigod. The apostle saw the abuse and was right to correct Cornelius. As a man of virtue, Saint Peter would allow no wiggle room for ultramontanism. In Cornelius' instance, however, we can understand his actions since he was still a pagan and had not yet been taught the way of the Lord Jesus. Since the early Church, however, we have seen many people who do not have that excuse, ultramontanist Catholics who should know better. The Fathers of the First Vatican Council had to humble the ultramontanists of the nineteenth century. Contrary to popular belief, Pastor Aeternus, the decree on papal infallibility, did not enhance the power of the papacy but actually tempered and limited it. Prior to that decree, it was never clear where the teachings and thoughts of a pope stood in terms of his authority. For instance, when Pope Gregory XVI first saw a steam locomotive, he cursed it and called it the "road to hell" (a play on the French chemins de fer). Some then wondered exactly where trains stood in Catholic doctrine. With Vatican 1, however, clear formulae emerged; the faithful could know when the pope was speaking infallibly. And not. Ultramontanists, especially the current neo brand, blur levels of authority and give supreme credence to everything a pope might utter. They so exaggerate the authority and power of the papacy that they become confused about the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ even as they live and work within it. They become papal fideists, claiming some special virtuous loyalty to the pope, even as they morph the man holding the papal office into some type of leviathan, beyond divine revelation and sacred tradition. Ultramontanists claim merely to be showing reverence for the man holding the papal office. They refuse to roll up their sleeves and enter into the trenches of real theological reflection and work. The ultramontanists rally - in almost partisan political fashion - around one man claiming that everything he says is right and everything he even happens to whisper is true. They sadly become the custodial services to a single man, cleaning up his messes, veiling his exaggerations, explaining his mistakes away, while engaging in name calling and accusations against loyal sons and daughters of the Church who raise questions, pose challenges, and indicate possible errors. In Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, the Council Fathers were clear: But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of...

By Anthony Esolen One of my neighbors is a pleasant and apparently hard-working young man with a child by a marriage that smashed on the rocks. He has nothing good to say about his ex-wife, so he says nothing at all, though you can tell that he hasn't forgiven her. The little boy gets shunted from one bitter parent to the other. It doesn't appear to me that he goes to any church. I suppose it is possible. But I am guessing, if he is like countless others of his age, that he regards it not as a duty, or even as an invitation to a realm of wonder, but as a form of therapy, or of socializing; a kind of hobby with a little bit of special language and a couple of beliefs you are supposed to hold, though nobody would inquire too closely into it. If you said to him, "God loves you," he might smile and agree, but it would be a mere abstraction, and his life, which has settled into a state of personal failure and modest economic success, would be untouched. He knows that his son loves him. He can see that. He knows that his ex-wife used to say she loved him, and perhaps she did. He can remember that. But God? How do you reach that young man? Or how do you reach his son, who will be raised amid the confusion of a broken home, and who will find it difficult to believe in earthly fidelity and love, let alone the divine? If the year were 1954 and not 2024, I would not have to ask these questions. Most people, from the best of us to the worst, assumed that marriage was for keeps, and they tailored their lives and their expectations accordingly. Most people assumed that we owed praise and gratitude to God. It will be said that their faith must have been rickety, to have been smashed to sticks and mud by the tidal wave of the next decade. As if it is better to have no house at all, and as if the remaining faithful in our most blessed time of faithlessness all have houses made of solid rock! It will be said that their faith was shallow, "merely" cultural, which is a little like saying that a people's patriotism is "merely" an expression of the habits they have learned and preserved from the time that they were children. It will be said that their faith had little intellectual substance to it. But somebody made the Doubleday Image imprint so successful and profitable - mass-marketed paperbacks bringing the Church's wealth of intellectual, historical, and literary accomplishments to the people. Somebody made Fulton Sheen the most beloved man on television. In short, had my neighbor been born when my parents were born, he would have been like them and their siblings. With his personal virtues, he would be a pillar of the neighborhood, and we would hear the merry shouts of children from across the way, rather than the rushing of the brook alone, and in six years not one single child splashing about in it. How does the Church get that man's attention? I hear it said that the current pontificate is not about doctrine but about pastoral care. I do not believe that the two can be severed. The doctor who aims to heal you has to know the specifics of your ailment, and the specifics of the means he is going to use to treat it. Pleasant feelings do not a healer make. He might pleasantly give you a dose of belladonna, and you might softly and tenderly slip into a coma and cardiac arrest. I do not pretend to be deep into the cure of souls. All I know is that they must be cured. Somehow, the disease must be probed, and the corrupted matter must be cut away. The trouble with us sinners is that we get used to the sin. It is and it is not a part of us. It is not a part of us, because it is a lie, and it obscures even from our own hearts what God has intended for us to be. It is a part of us, because it sends its shoots and tendrils into all that we do, day after day, and all that we think about ourselves. Therefore to cut it away must require a kind of death. At some point, in some form, from some spokesman and subordinate, the sinner must hear the divine su...

By Michael Pakaluk "Infinite Dignity," the name of the recent Declaration on Human Dignity from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, is liable to confuse English speakers. "Infinite" means strictly "lacking a limit." We implicitly, however, supply in quantity, such as in time, power, or perfection. Already many have carped that only God in His nature can claim to be infinite in those senses. Is this Declaration, then, affirming some new humanism, based on the divinity of the human person? The Declaration is clear that it means "not limited by circumstances." That is, human dignity does not go away when someone is poor, weak, in the last throes of a fatal illness . . .or in the mother's womb. That is to say, the Declaration wishes to emphasize exactly the point that the pro-life movement has always wished to emphasize. The possession of human rights cannot depend upon one's location, whether one is in the womb or not, or upon whether someone else wants you or not, or has conferred standing upon you or not. Human rights depend upon human nature, and in virtue of that nature, we have an intrinsic and inviolable dignity. If it would be a gross violation of human rights to allow the dispatching of unwelcome, born children - or even to claim a right to do so! - then the same holds for unborn children. In dealing so frankly with the basis of human rights, the Declaration provides a needed foundation for the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration celebrates that other Declaration and assesses it (with St. John Paul II) as the attainment by humankind of a high level of clarity about the claims that follow from human dignity. And yet as Jacques Maritain made clear in his own reflections on the crafting of that earlier Declaration, it deliberately left unclear the philosophical and religious basis for the rights it was heralding. The drafters of the Declaration depended on the pragmatic method of what John Rawls would later call "overlapping consensus." In the aftermath of World War II, in the midst of a general recoil against the horrors of Nazism, it seemed enough simply to affirm rights, generally agreed upon, which were negated by the militarism and racism of the Nazi movement. This required some downplaying of analogous negations by the Soviet Union, a signatory. And, clearly, if atheistic Communists were joining in support, then the true basis of human rights, in the transcendent dignity of the human person created by God and redeemed by Jesus Christ could not be asserted. But how are things working out under the method of "overlapping consensus"? Simply look at the litany of violations of human dignity in the second part of the DDF's Declaration. The consensus has broken down. As the Declaration points out, spurious rights are now asserted, based on false ideas of human freedom and autonomy. These rights ("the right to choose") even enjoy the protection of law and are held to trump genuine rights. They can even claim for themselves the august title of "dignity" (such as "Death with Dignity"). One would think that in such a context "Infinite Dignity" would affirm, as do the U.S. bishops, that "the threat of abortion" is the "preeminent priority" for political guidance and policy. Isn't legal abortion in furtherance of a "right to choose" the clearest, most flagrant, negation of the truth that this Declaration wishes to assert? Indeed, it does take this position, in two ways. First, it does so in what it says. Quoting St. John Paul II, the Declaration observes that: "The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior, and even in law itself is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake." And quoting Pope Francis, it asserts: "this defense of unborn life is closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right. It invol...

By David Carlin But first, a note: Be sure to tune in tonight, Thursday, April 11th, at 8 PM Eastern to EWTN for a new episode of 'The World Over.' The Papal Posse - TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal, contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray, and host Raymond Arroyo - will discuss the new Vatican 'Declaration on Human Dignity,' as well as other recent developments in the Church, Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for today's column... In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, many Catholics, especially young priests and seminarians, were imbued with the so-called "spirit of Vatican II" - a spirit that hoped to carry reforms and improvements of the Church well beyond the reforms and improvements actually designated by the Council. I remember a young priest telling us from the pulpit one Sunday that the Church, despite having been in existence for more than 1,900 years, had never really understood the meaning of Catholicism until the arrival of Vatican II. Now, this was a good priest, and he still is a good priest (even though he is now a rather old man), and he has been of considerable benefit to me personally. I think very highly of him. All the same, I have never heard a sermon more foolish than the one in which he told us that Vatican II first revealed the meaning of Catholicism - and I assure you, I have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of foolish sermons. If he was correct, among those who failed to understand Catholicism were the Fathers of the Church, the Doctors of the Church, and a few hundred popes, not to mention the Apostles themselves. Among the things that earlier Catholics had failed to understand (according to the typical spirit-of-Vatican-II Catholic) was that the virtue of chastity, though a fine thing, was not nearly as fine a thing as we used to think it was. Prior to the Council, we thought that chastity was a virtue of supreme importance, possibly on par with the virtue of charity itself. But under the new dispensation, now we post-Vatican II Catholics know better. We see that chastity is a minor virtue in comparison to love of neighbor. And minor too in comparison with charity's sister virtue, justice, especially social justice. It's good (according to such progressive Catholics) for Catholics, perhaps even others, to shun bedroom partners who are not their spouses. But it is better - far better - to remember poor people and racial minorities, not to mention other minorities, including those sexual minorities, especially homosexuals. There are traces of that attitude in the Declaration "Infinite Dignity," just issued earlier this week by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith Where (according to post-Conciliar wisdom) did this undue emphasis on chastity come from? Not from Jesus certainly, who spoke frequently of love of neighbor, but only rarely of chastity. And on the most memorable occasion when He did speak of unchastity, He refused to join the puritans of his day in punishing a woman caught in adultery. And when He spoke directly to her, he reprimanded Her, but only mildly. If He was that temperate in responding to adultery, imagine how mild His attitude must have been toward the lesser sin of fornication. As for homosexuality, well, He never addressed that issue at all. Why then have we erroneously imagined that unchastity is a deadly serious sin? The spirit-of-Vatican-II folks had an explanation. American Catholicism has been unduly influenced by Irish Catholicism, which was perversely shaped by the heresy of Jansenism. Jansenism was the prevailing theology at the French and Belgian seminaries attended by would-be priests from Ireland, who, for 200 years prior to 1795 (the year of the founding of Maynooth Seminary), could not study for the priesthood at home because their Anglo-Protestant oppressors would not allow a Catholic seminary in Ireland. And who were the Jansenists? They were ...

By Msgr. Robert J. Batule But first, a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow, Thursday, April 10th, at 8 PM Eastern to EWTN for a new episode of 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the new Vatican 'Declaration on Human Dignity,' as well as other recent developments in the Church, Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for monsignor's column... In Evangelium Vitae (1995), Pope Saint John Paul II places contraception alongside of abortion, calling both of them "fruits of the same tree." - (13) The allusion to a tree takes us back to the Book of Genesis. There is an exchange there between the woman Eve and the serpent. The serpent asks the woman, "Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?" (Genesis 3:1) Eve answers, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die." (Genesis 3:2-3) The forbidden fruit of Genesis is enough to tell us that we are dealing with sin. The Bible teaches us plainly that sin opposes God. That stricture ought to be sufficient for us to avoid what alienates us from God, but we don't just live in our heads. Our desires overwhelm us at times, and we succumb to temptation. We give in to concupiscence. From the earliest times (The Didache, c. 90 AD), contraception has been regarded as sinful. Until 1930 and the Lambeth Conference, the Christian witness against contraception had been universal. Later in the twentieth century, along came the Sexual Revolution and the Pill. To borrow a term from Peter Berger (d. 2017), an influential sociologist, the sacred canopy had just been cracked. At first, there was pushback against the Sexual Revolution and the Pill. It came with the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), and the dominant reaction to it at the time was severe criticism. How could the Church be so retrograde? Why does the Church always get in the way of progress? There is a point, still in that early part of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, where the Holy Father posits an even deeper relation between contraception and abortion. And it would be that "the pro-abortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church's teaching on contraception is rejected." - (13) Not only are contraception and abortion fruits of the same tree as cited above, but one evil follows on the heels of the other. JP TWO knew this not through survey research the way some sociologists would, but as a philosopher whose own ground-breaking theology of the body helped to point a new way forward for the Church's teaching on sexuality. In late 1983, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin delivered a lecture at Fordham University introducing what would become known as the "consistent ethic of life." It had only been six months since the American Bishops approved and published their pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace. What the Cardinal sought to do in his address was show how the sanctity of life was at stake in more than just one issue, that one issue being abortion. In the address, Bernardin argued that a direct attack on life in the womb is similar to a direct attack on civilian population centers with a nuclear missile. In both instances, there is the intentional loss of human life. Both are obviously always wrong. There were also passing references in the address to hunger, homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and even to human rights in U.S. foreign policy in Central America. There are, he said, multiple issues having "an inner relationship" to each other. With that "inner relationship," the pro-life position must be seen as much bigger than abortion, say the proponents of the consistent ethic of life approach. Contraception however was never mentioned - even with its very clear "inn...

By Robert Royal Reading the Declaration on Human Dignity ("Infinite Dignity"), issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) yesterday, reminds me of an old teacher-student story. A student submits an assigned essay, and the teacher returns it with the comment, "What you've written here is both good and new. Unfortunately, what's good in it is not new, and what's new is not. . ." But let's break off the story there. And following the Christian rule of charity in all things, say of the Declaration, what's new in it is . . . yet to be determined. Because in roughly the first half of its sixty-six paragraphs, the document seeks to situate itself in line with recent popes and classical Catholic teaching. It cites Paul VI, JP two, Benedict, Francis (about half the citations, of course). And in a footnote even reaches back to Leo XIII, Piuses XI & XII, and the Vatican II documents Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et spes. At the press conference introducing the Declaration, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the DDF, made a point of opening with the observation that the very title of the text came from a 1980 speech St. John Paul gave to a handicapped group in Osnabrück, Germany. Indeed, said the Cardinal, it's not by chance that the document is even officially dated April 2, the 19th anniversary of JPII's death. All of this cannot help but make the alert reader think that the drafters - and those who approved the final text - wanted to frontload ample exculpatory evidence against any objections that might follow. And inevitably, objections will. Because in several respects this apotheosis of human dignity raises more questions than it settles. ("Infinite" human dignity in JPII's hand was one thing; now, it may mean something very different.) It's good to have a document, however, that affirms two fundamental Biblical notions "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him." Hence, "infinite" dignity. And propers to Cardinal Fernández that he emphasized during the presentation "male and female he created them." But much of the world already believes in human dignity and freedom well beyond those limits and responsibilities. And the takeaway from all this talk - what's communicated as opposed to what's actually said - may be quite different than the actual words. On the one hand, it's repeatedly affirmed that there's an ontological dignity to every human being from conception to natural death. (Ontological, here, means it's built into our very being and nature by God and therefore "cannot be lost.") So far so good. But there are other kinds of dignity - moral, social, existential as the Declaration properly recognizes. These may exist to a greater or lesser, proper or improper degree. Morally bad acts, for example, are not only an affront to the human dignity of others. They diminish our own moral dignity - and freedom - though never, we are told repeatedly, to the point that we lose our ontological dignity. This leads to a certain lack of Catholic realism - even basic consistency - in some of the arguments in the second half of the document. To be fair, specific matters were left in brief, general terms - something the Cardinal says was done deliberately to keep the document relatively short. Still, this leads to oddities. For some reason, for example, intrinsic dignity is the reason the death penalty is no longer "admissible." But not only has it been seen since the early days of the Church as "admissible" (on this see the definitive work by Joseph Bessette and Edward Feser). Capital punishment has even been valued at times as a matter of justice - and human dignity - for both perpetrator and victim. It takes human wrongs seriously in the way they are punished. The Declaration also affirms the right of self-defense, but goes on: "We can no longer think of war as a solution because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficul...

By Auguste Meyrat In terms of revolutionizing the world and pushing humanity forward, Elon Musk has easily been one of the most consequential figures in the last decade. Not only did he make electric vehicles profitable, but he somehow also did the same with rocket science. At the moment, Musk is busy developing self-driving cars, neural transmitters, and high-functioning androids. Thus, it is right and just that an acclaimed biographer like Walter Isaacson tells the Musk story. The example of a self-made visionary overcoming obstacles is nothing short of inspiring. More importantly, his experience as a member of Generation X (those between 45 and 60) is representative of many in his age group. Naturally, the biography emphasizes Musk's technical genius and indomitable will. At so many junctures in his life, Musk drives both himself and his employees to do amazing things, like produce thousands of Teslas in an impossibly short timeframe or design a reusable rocket that can safely transport astronauts to the international space station. These great feats, however, often come at great human cost, with Musk and his crew often hitting the breaking points of sanity and emotional stability. In such moments, Musk goes into "demon mode," brutally criticizing and firing employees, denouncing and mocking the competition, and desperately looking to distract himself from a deep internal darkness (usually through work). Although Musk and his biographer will attribute these manic episodes to his undiagnosed Aspergers Syndrome or his commitment to greatness, a Christian would rightly conclude that almost all of his personal turmoil stems from the absence of a spiritual life. Musk is one of the richest and most celebrated men in the world, yet he also has to be one of the loneliest and saddest, bereft of community, meaning, and love. At one point, he told admirers: "I'd be careful what you wish for. I'm not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount I torture myself is next level, frankly." Like many of his generation, Musk, 52, grew up in a broken household. He had a callous, emotionally abusive father and a vain, passive mother. Inevitably, they divorced as their children reached adolescence. Musk technically attended a Christian school in South Africa, but his family never went to church. Instead of learning how to pray and cultivate virtue, he learned how to fight and write programs. Upon experiencing "existential depression" as a teenager, he found solace in reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and playing video games. This background made him tough, resourceful, and well-positioned to thrive in America in the 90s and 00s, but it also made him temperamental and restless. Again, like many in his generation, he filled the hole in his heart with an addiction to work and video games. This led him to make his first fortune with Zip2, then another with PayPal, then another with SpaceX, and then another with Tesla. Each time, he would launch a project "surge," mandating long hours, maximizing efficiency, berating employees, and constantly taking risks. Rather than being motivated by fame or fortune, Musk was driven by something much greater: faith. Except that the faith he embraced was the nebulous idea of human "progress," not organized religion. Judging from his comments, his idea of heaven includes cyborg humans, friendly non-woke robots, spaceships going to Mars, and gloriously high birthrates. It's a vision somewhat like Ray Bradbury's short story, "Mars Is Heaven!," but without the tragic ending. Despite his uncompromising disposition, Musk has disciples who look up to him as a kind of messiah. As one might imagine, those close to Musk have the same outlook on life as he does. They go "hardcore" with their duties, dispense with personal attachments, and attempt to do the impossible. In a revealing exchange between Musk's longtime employees, one of them admitted, "I was burned out [working at Tesla]. But after ...

By Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap. All four Gospels tell of Jesus cleansing the temple. The Gospel of John, however, provides the most detail about what took place, which bears witness that the Evangelist was present at this event. (John 2:13-22) Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the feast that commemorated both the Israelites' passing out of slavery in Egypt and the covenant that God made with the Jewish people in the wilderness. "In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business." The scene that Jesus beheld was that of exploiting the temple and its sacrifices for monetary gain. Upon observing such roguish activity, Jesus made a whip of cords and drove them all out, even violently scattering the coins and turning over the tables. He told those selling pigeons: "Take these things away; you shall not make my Father's house a house of trade." By referring to the temple as "my Father's house," Jesus reveals that he is the Father's Son. Being the Father's incarnate Son, Jesus, then, is the custodian of his Father's house - the temple where his Father dwells. His very singular distinctiveness as the Father's incarnate Son gives him unparalleled authority over his Father's house, and so the right to cleanse the temple from all that is ungodly. The disciples later remembered the scripture passage: "Zeal for your house will consume me." (Psalm 69:9). Jesus has fulfilled that oracle. In response to Jesus' actions, the stunned and irate Jews, nonetheless, demand a sign that would authenticate his authority for performing such an unprecedented action, to which Jesus responds: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews immediately note that the temple has taken forty-six years to build, and "will you raise it up in three days?" The word "this" is theologically significant. On the one hand, "this" is the stone temple that is directly in front of them. On the other hand, as the Evangelist later grasps, Jesus was referring to himself. "But he spoke of the temple of his body. When, therefore, he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken." As the Son of God incarnate, Jesus is the new and living temple, "for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." (Colossians 2:9) To come into God's presence, one no longer needs to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and enter the temple. Rather, Jesus is the Word made flesh, and, therefore, God now tabernacles among humankind. Jesus is "the Father's house" in which his Son now abides. To be in communion with the Father, one must abide in his incarnate Son. The temple is now superfluous. It was a prophetic anticipation of the Incarnation, and now, with the coming of Jesus, it has lost the purpose for which it was built. Moreover, if Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, is the new and living temple, he must now offer the perfect Passover sacrifice wherein he will establish a new and everlasting covenant. Likewise, through this new covenant, Jesus must cleanse the world of sin and cast out death, for only by being cleansed of sin with its curse of death can humankind pass over to a new life of holiness. This Jesus accomplishes in his sacrificial death and glorious resurrection. The Jews do destroy Jesus, who is "this temple," by crucifying him. But as the living temple, Jesus, through his crucifixion, becomes the perfect high priest who offers the perfect Passover sacrifice of the new covenant. That the Passover sacrifice of himself was efficacious is found in Jesus raising himself gloriously from the dead on the third day. In so doing, Jesus, as risen-incarnate-Son of the Father, now becomes the glorious heavenly temple, the Father's new house, wherein all have access to his heavenly Father. St. Peter beautifully states the relationship between Jesus as the risen temple and those who abide in hi...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza The moon has people on the move. The solar eclipse on Monday, 8 April 2024, is expected to draw millions to good viewing spots in the "path of totality," stretching from Mazatlán to Montreal. Preemptive closures have been announced to deal with the logistical challenges. The moon rarely blocks the sun entirely, but every year the lunar cycle determines the date of Easter, and much else depends on that. So the Feast of the Annunciation is also on the move this year, transferred from its usual spot on 25 March - which fell during Holy Week - to 8 April, the first day after Holy Week and the Easter Octave, to no longer impede it. The coincidence of an eclipse with the Annunciation suggests that the meandering of the moon might be a matter for spiritual meditation. Mary is the woman with the moon at her feet and clothed with the sun. (Revelation 12:1) The moon is an apt Christian symbol for the Blessed Mother, as the moon has no light of its own, but only reflects the light of the sun; Mary reflects the light of her Son upon the face of the earth. But the moon is not purely ancillary much less merely decorative; its gravitational pull keeps the earth in balance, as it were. An intermediary between the sun and earth, the moon watches over the earth with its face turned always to the sun. The moon is not a star, like the sun, a fearsome source of light and warmth. It remains the more approachable light. It is not possible to look directly into the sun - face to face, as it were (Exodus 33:20) - much less to stand upon it. The moon can be contemplated easily, a friendly companion, a gentle reminder that the sun, though not seen, is working still and will return. If the sun is the glory of the Lord coming before the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:13), then the moon is the kindly light that guides us "o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent till the night is gone." The light of Newman's poem is Christ, the light, but if it serves as a guide during the night, then it is the light reflected by the moon, rather than the direct light of the sun. The source of light is the same in either case. An eclipse is a symbolic challenge. What to make of the moon when it obscures the sun, rather than reflects its light? Is that not the objection to Marian devotion, that it puts someone between us and the Son? Perhaps it even obscures the greater light with a lesser light, or that which is not even light at all? Does not the natural rarity of the eclipse teach us that the proper supernatural order of things is to prefer our sunlight directly? Why put so much stock in a moon which, for most of its cycle, only partially reflects the sun - and often enough - blocks it? All such objections are good reminders that Mary is never to obscure Jesus, and the cult of the saints is not to diminish, but enhance, the worship of God. There exist pious souls who ignore the Blessed Sacrament in a church while pouring out their hearts before a statue of Our Lady or an image of the Little Flower or Padre Pio. God likely looks kindly on misguided piety, but it remains misguided. The Annunciation gives a proper spiritual interpretation of a solar eclipse. For that singular moment in Nazareth, the moon determined whether the sunlight - the Son's light - would reach the world. This is how St. Bernard of Clairvaux puts it in a sermon excerpted in the Divine Office for 20 December: The angel awaits an answer; it is time for him to return to God who sent him. We too are waiting, O Lady. . . .The price of our salvation is offered to you. We shall be set free at once if you consent. In the eternal Word of God we all came to be, and behold, we die. In your brief response we are to be remade in order to be recalled to life. Tearful Adam with his sorrowing family begs this of you, O loving Virgin, in their exile from Paradise. Abraham begs it, David begs it. All the other holy patriarchs, your ancestors, ask it of you, as they dwell in the country of the s...

By David Warren To paraphrase Saint Paul, if Christianity did not give a reliable account of the Truth, then we, or more precisely I, would have no use for it. Or rather, I would just have the use of another "comparative religion," the way I use Shinto, or Zoroastrianism, or the way Richard Dawkins uses the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In which case, Saint Paul's hypothetical advice would be, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." (1 Corinthians 15:32). Verily: for "comparative religion" has always made me thirsty. But one thing follows from another, in the reasoning every Catholic can know in his bones. For Saint Paul had remarked, more starkly: "If the dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen again." We attend to this, hoping the converse may be true; and we begin to believe while we discover that it IS true, and that it must be true, for everything else to fit together. Thus faith is neither reasonable, nor unreasonable. It extends beyond the straightforwardly plausible. For the implausible account of Christ, found in the Church, in her Saints, and in the Scriptures, is that Christ has risen from the dead, and that He was, is, and will be Our Savior. He is Christ the King, at the right hand of God the Father, and one with the author of the universe. This was never a modest claim, and it did not immediately appeal to the sophisticates of the ancient world. It was in fact quite contrary to what every "normal" Greek or Roman believed - that the dead stay dead, consistently. (Otherwise, why bother to execute them?) The intellectuals, especially, believed this. It was their "settled science." They did not have the patience to revise it. Strangely, however, the news "dovetailed" nicely with what Jewish prophets already knew and had been preaching. That is why Christianity caught on first among the most radical Jews, and why the conservative Romans could dismiss them as a "Jewish problem." For the arguably civilized Roman rulers, it was a question of "Now what?" The Jews were generally a source of surprise: now what is going on? The Jews were "chosen," among all the ancient peoples, to prepare, spiritually, for the coming of Christ, by having the means, and the disposition, to understand He Who Is. This is part of the great train of historical Christianity, which left the station long Before Christ. Marks of the Messiah have been left throughout the Old Testament, which may be received as marks of preparation. And indeed, by resorting to comparative religion, we see anticipations of Christ throughout the world religions. It is in this sense that our Christian faith touches upon a faith from everywhere, and we see Christ "far off." So we should expect if, as Saint Paul makes very clear, Christ is in his extraordinary person the anticipated Messiah, of the Jews and of the whole cosmos. A significant part of the evangelical effort is directed towards what must be a reunion, with many yet unevangelized peoples, in communion with the divine. But this is to look along the historical chain, presumptively. Love is not to be hurried. While it is perhaps easiest to grasp history retrospectively, the historical chain of Church history is almost impossibly complex. But fortunately it is possible for a Catholic, in faith, to understand the main headings. From beginning to end, Our Savior is embodied in the Catholic Church, and to understand further what she is, and what she is not, there is communion, now. The reasoning is like this: Why would the God, in whom we find Christ, not vindicate his message through the world's history? Who would be capable of blocking him? How would he not have the power to correct those who deny him? This observation, of the position of the living Christ in continuous history, goes beyond shallow political doctrine, to natural history. We can espy this vindication in the works of extraordinary intricacy by which the countless worldly creatures assemble and grow - each of them from nothing, as the un...

By Stephen P. White in Humanae vitae Next week, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith will publish a document titled Dignitas infinita. According to the prefect Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the text will include, "a strong criticism of moral questions such as sex-change surgery, surrogacy, and gender ideology." There's no little consternation about the forthcoming document. The chaotic and confused rollout of Fiducia supplicans (on blessings for same-sex couples and couples in "irregular unions") just before Christmas, including that document's varied reception (or rejection, as the case may be) and the Vatican's hurried attempts to clarify and qualify, did not bolster confidence in the DDF's ability to handle divisive issues well. There's even reason to believe that Rome - or at least the prefect of the DDF - sees the new document as an opportunity to mollify those who were unhappy about Fiducia supplicans. Back in January, Cardinal Fernández himself implied that those most troubled by FS might find the follow up document more to their liking. "In this sense, the most worried people will be able to rest," he said. Meanwhile those who see FS as a theological muddle, a pastoral and ecumenical disaster, and a desperate strain on ecclesial unity have little reason to hope that Dignitas infinita will make up for it, no matter how hard a line it takes against gender ideology. At the same time, those who cheered FS now have reason to worry the pendulum might be about to swing the other way. Some Catholics, the sort who have always been uncomfortable with Pope Francis' frequent criticisms of gender ideology, have already begun hedging against disappointment. As one writer at Fr. James Martin's "Outreach" website put it: "Claiming that there is a 'gender ideology' is, in fact, the ideological position. And the claim that a gender ideology exists is not supported by a clear understanding of ideology itself." Now, I think that writer gets it exactly backwards. (And I think Pope Francis and Cardinal Fernández would agree with me there.) But the deeper point is this: the DDF is going to be touching upon questions about which there is profound disagreement within the Church. Questions like, "What is the human person?" And it will be worth paying close attention to how Dignitas infinita grounds its moral and pastoral considerations. Human dignity is a consequence of both our origin and our end. We are made in God's image and likeness, and we are made for communion - both here, albeit imperfectly, in this life, and forever with God in the next. To grasp human dignity is to grasp something of the whole order of Creation and of our place and purpose in that order. As Pope Francis writes in Laudato Si: "The universe did not emerge as the result of arbitrary omnipotence, a show of force or a desire for self-assertion. Creation is of the order of love." Creation is the order of love. When we cooperate with the order of Creation, we grow and become more like the one who created us. Sin, by contrast, arises from and causes the disordering of our loves. When we love the wrong things, or love them in the wrong way, we not only violate the order of things, we invite further disorder, for ourselves and others. Sin masks and diminishes our dignity, though never destroys it entirely. But what are the right things to love and the right ways to love them? In other words, how do we know what is good? Pope John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor, gave this answer to that crucial question: Only God can answer the question about the good, because he is the Good. But God has already given an answer to this question: he did so by creating man and ordering him with wisdom and love to his final end, through the law which is inscribed in his heart (cf. Romans 2:15), the "natural law." And here is why I say the theological lens through which Dignitatis infinita approaches the subject of human dignity is critically important. Without a proper sense of the o...

By Brad Miner There are seven men: a fleeing follower of Jesus, assumed by art experts to be St. John; the Incarnate God; His betrayer; three soldiers (one identifiable only by the gleam of his helmet); and, next to the left of that soldier, a man holding up a lantern, the light of which illuminates the scene. This last figure is significant because it's a self-portrait of the artist. That Caravaggio put himself in the painting surely tells us something about him, although not much. So, we're left to speculate. Perhaps he's touting his role as a soldier in the battle against the Protestant Reformation. It doesn't tell us that he saw himself precisely as the artistic leader of the Counter-Reformation (Controriforma or Contrareformatio), not least because that term is a 19th-century coinage. Therefore, two centuries in the future. But in commissioning work from him, his patrons - clerical and otherwise (all or nearly all Catholic) - likely did speak to Caravaggio of the need to forcefully assert Catholicism against the sullen iconoclasm of Luther, Calvin, et alii, and the Northern European artists who were their followers. And for Caravaggio, there was always the refutation of the rigidity and formalism of much Renaissance and post-Renaissance art of his Catholic predecessors. And I'm talking about the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and the rest. Caravaggio had a flair for drama; for scenes that capture not only images but also emotion and action - epochal moments, sometimes stark: beheadings and martyrdoms; callings and conversions. He was not alone in this, but he was best at it. The moment of Christ's arrest in Gethsemane - at the apex of history, as are all the events in Christ's life we commemorated in Holy Week - may not be as popular a subject in art as are the dramas of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, but it's a powerful moment, and many artists have painted it, usually in frescos or canvases crowded with soldiers, Apostles, disciples, Pharisees, and bystanders. Not Caravaggio. In The Taking of Christ, there are only those seven figures set against the night - figures we can see only because Caravaggio himself holds up a light. So forward are these figures in the picture frame, we almost become bystanders. Is this his greatest painting? To my mind, no. That distinction belongs to his Supper at Emmaus. But The Taking of Christ is superb. And nearly as remarkable as the painting itself is the story of its coming to Dublin's National Gallery in 1992. The work was commissioned by the Marquis Ciriaco Mattei in 1602, when Caravaggio was 31. The painting stayed in Rome for 200 years before it was sold. So much time had passed that the Mattei family had lost track of the painting's provenance and had come to believe it was the work of Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656), a Dutch follower of Caravaggio. Scholars at that time assumed Honthorst had copied the original, as other painters had, and that's what William Hamilton Nisbet thought when he bought the picture and took it home to Scotland. In Edinburgh, the painting was three times sold at auction in the early 1920s, coming finally into the possession of Marie Lea-Wilson (née Ryan), a deeply religious Irish woman. She bought the painting - for less than £10. Her husband, a Royal Irish Constabulary officer, had been assassinated by the I.R.A. during the Easter Rising of 1916, and she hoped Honthorst's depiction of the beginning of Christ's Passion would provide solace in her mourning. But mourning did not cause her to languish. She went to medical school at Trinity College, became a noted Dublin pediatrician, and attended Mass daily. And as the National Gallery of Ireland explains: Dr. Lea-Wilson forged a strong connection with the Dublin Jesuit community, receiving great spiritual support from Father Tom Finlay at the Jesuit House on Leeson Street, which may explain her subsequent gift of the painting to them in the 1930s. And this is where th...