The Catholic Thing

By Joanna Bogle The Catholic cemetery at Mortlake in South West London has an agreeably rural feel, and is worth a visit: it's about 20 minutes from Waterloo on the line going down to Richmond, and a short walk from the station. It is chiefly famous for the large stone, tent-shaped tomb of the 19th-century explorer Sir Richard Burton. This brings numbers of tourists and historians each year. Other notable people buried here include the architect John Francis Bentley, who designed Westminster Cathedral. There is one grave, however, with a story that is of particular relevance for today. Sir James Marshall (1829-1889), through volunteer effort and great generosity, helped to ensure Catholic missionary efforts in Africa. But perhaps his equally great achievement was as an official in a secular role. Appointed Chief Justice of the Gold Coast and neighboring territories – today's Ghana and Nigeria – he was responsible for ending a particularly vicious form of slavery and liberating large numbers of men, women, and children. Gravely disabled as a young man – his right arm had to be amputated after a boating accident – Marshall had to abandon plans to join the Army, and instead followed his father and took holy orders in the Anglican church. After some years of ministry and much study, he joined the Catholic Church, and went to teach classics at the Oratory School founded by John Henry Newman. It was Newman who suggested that he read law, and in due course he became a barrister. In 1873 he was appointed Chief Magistrate to the Gold Coast and later in 1887 to Nigeria. In Asaba, he encountered the grisly local custom in which a tribal chief would acquire large numbers of slaves who would in due course be publicly slaughtered at a great public gathering amid noisy ceremonial. This was rooted in the tribal chief's belief that the slaves would thus be available to serve them in the next life. In Ghana, Marshall had become a respected and popular figure who could engage with the local communities and their leaders, and the appointment to Asaba had come specifically because the slavery issue needed to be resolved. In a letter home, Marshall described how he had told the tribal chiefs that the savage practice of ritual slaughter was to end, "that the strongest measures would be taken to put it down; that I should let it be known, among the slaves, that they might look to us for protection, and that whenever it was known that murder was going to be held, the soldiers would be at once sent and that chiefs…would be liable to be hanged." He spoke with the full authority of the law. Not only had slavery been outlawed across the British Empire back in 1833, but murder in itself was a crime and would be treated as such with the most severe penalty. The slaves awaiting slaughter, kept in grim conditions, included women and small children, and were captured during inter-tribal battles. Describing how he addressed the chiefs, Marshall wrote that he told them, "'You think that the great God, who made the white man and the black, and all the world, and who wished us all to live happily together here, will keep those slaves you murder to be your slaves in the other world, bah!' I then held up my finger to them and said, 'You must all die, and when you die, you will see who is right.'" Backed with military force, Marshall could impose the law, and the odious practices were finally crushed. Meanwhile, in addition to his official role, he had become active in the small missionary church that was being established. And in due course it was his efforts, including a personal appeal to the pope, that brought substantial numbers of missionaries to the Gold Coast. Victorian Britain honored the men who served in the colonial empire that was emerging. The justices and administrators who worked to ensure that slavery was banned were rightly regarded as upholding the noblest and best of the law and Christian civilization. Meetings and rallies in London raised mon...

By Robert Royal The large crowds that turned out for Pope Leo everywhere in France surprised everyone – not least, sad to say, the French bishops. Let's hope that his visit has even greater effects. But just days later, France is gripped by widespread rioting and arson, being misreported as "student unrest," but actually a far-left operation with Islamist collaborators. In the message the pope read at his reception by French President Emmanuel Macron, Leo proposed what can only be called "corrections" to the three terms (liberté, égalité, fraternité) that marked the French Revolution. It was a bold move, but he needs to be even bolder, to remedy what's ailing France and much of the West. If one were asked (one is not holding one's breath), one would say that Leo would do well to go much further, and make this a project for his whole papacy. Because as Blessed Fulton Sheen – also recently in the news – already saw in his 1938 book Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, underneath those seemingly simple and good words, perverse developments rose from the very start. The French revolutionaries began using the guillotine and other instruments of mass terror on religious figures, and then – as the night follows the day among those radically crazed by politics – on one another. It didn't stop there. In the first years of the twentieth century, a radical socialist government under Emile Combes took possession of all of France's cathedrals, monasteries, convents, shrines, and other religious structures, closed 10,000 religious schools, and drove many priests and religious into exile. In some accounts, this is described merely as the "separation of Church and State" in France. But as the great Charles Péguy put it, it was actually a betrayal of what French socialism itself claimed – greater respect for human beings than had existed previously – in effect, persecuting people "for saying their prayers." And today, as Leo pointed out, the "humanistic" interpretation of the three ideals has led, among other evils, to the monstrosity of abortion being inserted into the French constitution as a fundamental right and the Orwellian euphemism "right to die" (i.e., lethal medication). Just for the record, wherever abortion – the deliberate killing of human life in the womb – is confused with "liberty" and made a fundamental right, we put ourselves on a moral level with the worst of human history: Canaanites, Ammonites, Aztecs, Soviets, Maoists, Khmer Rouge, and more. No égalité or fraternité for those unborn innocents whom we kill, year after year, in numbers far greater than the historic monsters. Fulton Sheen already understood decades ago that things like these follow wrong notions of "liberty." The American Founders, too, warned of "license," the false belief that liberty means doing whatever you want. Sheen: "Liberalism destroyed liberty by dispensing the individual from social responsibilities; Communism and Fascism destroy liberty by enslaving the individual to the will of a dictator." True liberty, Sheen argued, is akin to Aristotle's (and the Church's) Golden Mean, not just something midway between the two, but a "both/and" that is something quite different than either. Similarly, "equality" in the untethered modern sense inevitably turns into what our DEI gurus call "equity," whereby individual people are not just treated equally, but the industrious and the lazy, the virtuous and the vicious, one "race" or group or another, have to be made statistically equal via state tyranny and social ostracism. The remedy lies in the right understanding of "fraternity" – brother and sisterhood as God intended, not the ideological substitutes: citoyen, tovaritsch, compañero, the "woke" – which would also help correct mistaken modern notions of liberty and equality. Leo put it this way to modern France: May your liberty grow in constant concern for the common good. May your fraternity embrace the entire human family. And may the equality to which yo...

By Brad Miner Late last year, my wife began carefully, meticulously planning a week-long trip to Paris for the whole family. She did so, as she noted to the other eight of us, because she meant to celebrate in style her upcoming "significant" birthday. She wisely decided on late September: the weather would be cooler and the crowds smaller. So, flights and hotel reservations were made, and restaurants and tours were booked. And then it was announced that, during our dates, Leo XIV would be in Paris; Fashion Week Paris would get underway; and Celine Dion would begin her "residency" at the Plenitude Arena. All that meant a plenitude of people in Paris. Oh, well . . . Still, the only real difficulty this caused us was on a private boat ride up the Seine. It was a glorious Friday afternoon, and the Eiffel Tower was as dramatic as you can imagine against the bright blue sky. But just as we were about to reach Notre-Dame and the Île de la Cité, a police boat appeared and demanded we turn the boat around. (Nothing dramatic, mind you – just a signal our "captain" understood.) The pope would soon be at the cathedral. Indeed, on September 24, 25th, and 26th, many places in Paris were designated périmètres de sécurité. Guides, drivers, and others often told us, "The pope is to blame." But that, of course, was untrue. He was a guest and a great boon to Catholic France. And Paris appeared as it must have before the 1905 institution of laïcité. In principle, that means France is (and the 1958 constitution states ) un État laïque, a secular state, although I'm told it's better to say France is neutral towards all religions. But that's the government, and the French people appear to be enthusiastic about Catholicism. The papal Mass at the Place de la Concorde filled the area around Avenue des Champs-Élysées with between 700,000 and 800,000 people. That is an impressive number, although in 1997, Pope St. John Paul II's closing Mass for World Youth Day (at Longchamp racecourse) drew over 1 million. Before, during, and after the papal visit, one saw clusters of Dominican sisters, sundry priests of various levels of ecclesiastical dignity, and many images of the Holy Father, so that Paris again seemed, if only briefly, the capital of the "Eldest Daughter of the Church." That phrase has its roots in the late 5th century, when St. Rémi baptized King Clovis. Throughout subsequent history, the Catholicism of France was unquestioned until the French Revolution of 1789-1799, and the nation has been sliding into deeper levels of secularism ever since. Thus did John Paul II, during his first papal visit to Paris in 1980, ask, "France, fille aînée de l'Église, es-tu fidèle aux promesses de ton baptême?" ("France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?") In 2026, it remains an important question, one I can't answer. But in recent days, we certainly saw reasons for hope. I took a morning for myself, partly to visit churches and partly to wander the streets that Ernest Hemingway haunted in the 1920s. Hemingway had become a Roman Catholic but, by his own admission, was not a very good one. He was, after all, part of what his friend Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation," a comment made directly to Hemingway. He'd become Catholic (apparently after receiving catechetical instruction) so that he could marry Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Catholic from Arkansas. This, of course, is where the "difficulty" of his Catholicism begins. He had been married previously in a civil ceremony, and it's unclear if his union with Pauline was strictly canonical, according to, ironically, the Pauline Privilege. Hemingway was a troubled person, no doubt. He would divorce Pauline and have two more wives after her. He was a distant parent to his three children. He would commit suicide (as his father had), and a Catholic priest would officiate at his funeral, although that cleric, Fr. Robert J. Waldmann, believed (as the press had repo...

By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas I am writing within the octave of the beatification of Fulton J. Sheen, and find myself still basking in the glow of that blessed and long-awaited event, which had many personal associations for me. As a schoolboy, I was quizzed every Wednesday morning by Sister, who routinely would ask the class, "What did 'The Bishop' say last night?" (In those days "The Bishop" didn't mean the local Ordinary, but Sheen!). In third grade, he autographed my First Holy Communion prayer book, declaring to my father, "Sir, someday this young man is going to be a priest." On the brink of priestly ordination, I wrote him a note confirming his "prophecy" of nearly two decades earlier, to which he graciously responded with a promise of prayers and best wishes for my priestly life and ministry. I concelebrated his Funeral Mass. The recent event in St. Louis was a veritable tour de force, worthy of the man who was a first-order clerical showman, in the best sense of the word. What impressed me most was the youthfulness of it all. One thousand priests (95 percent of whom were not even born when Sheen died) and 850 seminarians in cassock and surplice, along with many young families. Meanwhile, out of nearly 450 bishops in our country, only 89 deigned to attend (of course, Sheen was envied by the bishops in his own day). That element of "youthfulness" led me to connect some dots from recent personal observations and musings. The Mass of the Holy Spirit to open the academic year at The Catholic University of America in Washington was most impressive: All sung parts of the Mass in Latin; an outstanding homily by our new papal nuncio; the profession of faith and oath of fidelity by new faculty members; the palpable reverence of the more than a thousand students. All of this from an institution that wallowed in heresy from 1968 through the 1980s! The Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame was the site of the final profession of vows of four young members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Once more, the liturgy was inspiring, as well as the demeanor of the students who filled that beautiful worship space. And recently, the University was consecrated to the Sacred Heart – an act of piety that came about through the initiative of the students themselves. The Diocese of Wichita opened a new college seminary (yes, "opened," not "closed") owing to the vocations glut they have been experiencing over the long haul. Can this be explained because it is the only diocese in the country with a totally free Catholic school system? Youthful American Catholicism has even crossed The Pond. Ave Maria University has established a beachhead in the Irish Diocese of Waterford on the land of the once-legendary Cistercian Abbey of Mount Melleray. Yet again, the inaugural liturgy was characterized by beautiful music and reverent participation, topped off by a stirring homily by the diocesan bishop on the importance and meaning of Catholic education. We know that Ireland's faith has been in the doldrums for a long time now. Will this spark of American Catholicism reignite the flame of faith in what once was known as the "Isle of Saints and Scholars"? In all these liturgies, certain commonalities were apparent: Traditional forms, accompanied by generous servings of Latin, Gregorian chant, and Renaissance polyphony; the young people attired to encounter the King of Kings; and, especially, reception of Holy Communion with great devotion – the vast majority receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, and many kneeling. The ecclesiastical Cassandras in our midst, I thought, should recall Mark Twain's quip: "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." It also made me wonder how the "Lefebvrists" can behold such phenomena and conclude that the Faith is dead? Admittedly, we still have a lot to work on, but that's why we have the mantra, Ecclesia semper reformanda ("The Church is always in need of reform"). Which was also in ful...

By Casey Chalk The man was at the top of his game. His professional career was at full throttle, moving from one success to another. Yet he was also admired for his love and sacrifices for his family. Though many disagreed with his religious convictions, no one questioned his virtue or sincerity. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. Then, without warning, a debilitating illness struck. His wealth and prestige assured him quality medical care, but availed the man little. His condition kept deteriorating. In short order, the man expired. Perhaps you've known such a person. I've known some, and their stories are undoubtedly tragedies, especially when spouse and children are left to grieve a dramatic, unexpected departure. You can't help but wonder if you might become that person, despite relative youth or good health. "That won't happen to me," we say. But many people whom we thought it could never happen to . . . well, it happened to them. The great seventeenth-century French polymath Blaise Pascal could very well have wrestled with such thoughts. He made impressive contributions to math, science, and philosophy before his thirtieth birthday – including creating a calculator that has been called the first "computer." The horse-drawn carriage system that he developed for the city of Paris earned him recognition as the father of public transportation. Yet as he was making these incredible contributions, Pascal was suffering a painful, progressively debilitating illness, with intense migraines, hypersensitivity to light and sound, severe abdominal pains, dental abscesses, and eventually partial paralysis. After four years of this torment, he died in 1662. During that period Pascal wrote "Prayer Asking God for the Good Use of Illness," a striking and spiritually penetrating Catholic reflection on human suffering. Pascal's Prayers, a new book by philosophy professor William C. Hackett, features both the prayer and illuminating commentary, as well as offering a valuable counterweight to the health and longevity obsessions of modern America. One of the most arresting qualities of Pascal's Prayers is how the French savant comprehends suffering as an extension of God's gracious providence: "Not only the blessings but even the misfortunes that befall your chosen ones are effects of your boundless compassion. . . You are no less God whether you afflict and discipline or console and show mercy." Even if we recognize God's hand in our suffering, we moderns – votaries of a catechesis of comfort – want the suffering to end, to get back to the way things were. Pascal pushes us even further. He perceives his sickness as a form of divine discipline to help him to detach himself from worldly things: "Render me incapable of enjoying this world either by weakness of the body or by the zeal of charity so that I may find my joy in you alone. For you have made me unable to enjoy the comforts of health and the pleasures of the world; you have already annihilated for my benefit the deceptive idols." It leads one to wonder: if God so obviously blesses us with material goods – natural beauty, delicious food and drink, beautiful art – does it make sense that He asks us to be detached from them for His sake? Part of the answer seems to be that, though creatures are indeed designed for our happiness, they are also intended to generate gratitude and worship: "Yes, Lord, I confess that I esteemed health as a good. Not because it is an easy means to serve you with utility, to dedicate more care and vigilance to your service, and to help others, but because through it, I could abandon myself with less restraint to the abundance of life's pleasures and better savor its destructive joys." Pascal realizes that his appreciation of good things often obscured God. But there's even more. Lesser, contingent goods present us with an opportunity to see them properly in relationship to God, the infinite, eternal good. "Take away from me, Lord, the sadness that ...