The Catholic Thing

By John M. Grondelski Pope Leo XIV has joined the chorus of those lamenting the implosion of global fertility levels. Speaking after a visit with the President of Italy, the Pope urged action to implosion of fertility and the collapse of childbearing. Encouragingly, he specifically extolled gendered names for family members: "'Father,' 'mother,' 'son,' 'daughter,' 'grandfather,' 'grandmother'. . .[t]hese are words that in Italian tradition naturally express and evoke sentiments of love, respect, and dedication - sometimes heroic - for the good of the family, community, and therefore for that of society as a whole." They also express what is necessary to - and the result of - childbearing, something "parent one" and "parent two," as several countries now designate mothers and fathers, do not. Remedies for this state of affairs often focus on social reforms: parental leave, subsidies and tax breaks for families, childcare, and so on. There are indeed elements in our socio-economic structures that militate against families. It's good that the pope noted them. But methinks his focus might be somewhere else. As his predecessor, St. John Paul II (elected forty-seven years ago today), observed, culture lies upstream from both politics and economics. And our "blessed barrenness" is a cultural problem - both in the larger society and within the Catholic Church. As he said in Love and Responsibility: Neither in the man nor in the woman can affirmation of the value of the person be divorced from awareness and willing acceptance that he may become a father and she may become a mother. . . .If the possibility of parenthood is deliberately excluded from marital relations, the character of the relationship between the partners automatically changes. The change is away from unification in love and in the direction of mutual, or rather, bilateral "enjoyment. Human societies have always recognized that marriage and parenthood, though distinct, normally go together. In other words, in the ordinary run of things - absent disease, advanced age, or other impediments - spouses eventually become parents. This is not some esoteric Catholic doctrine but a natural law reality that human societies have long acknowledged. It's why procreation was understood to be normally connected to marriage - at least until the novel oxymoron of "same-sex marriage" appeared. This natural law fact, however, is elevated to a more significant level by Catholic theological teaching. Vatican II taught: "Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents." (Gaudium et Spes, 50) The Council also affirmed that spousal cooperation with the Lord through parenthood is part of God's work of Creation and Salvation. That's why the nuptial blessing in the sacrament of matrimony includes an invocation that age-appropriate spouses may "be blessed with children, and prove themselves virtuous parents, who live to see their children's children." Now: When's the last time you heard a priest - or even a bishop - talk about those things? Our secular society has broken the nexus between marriage and parenthood, treating the latter not so much as a "choice" as what former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit calls a "parental project" - an optional element of two people's identity package, tailored to their desires and achieved by whatever means they deem fit. The general social tolerance of out-of-wedlock childbearing, surrogacy, homosexual "adoption," and similar arrangements attests to a broader cultural acceptance of the idea that children are not necessarily connected with marriage, much less that a child has a right to be conceived, born, and raised within a permanent marriage. If you doubt that, consider whether asserting a child's right to live in a marital environment would jar modern ears. That more general cultural disconnection is now often mirrored within the Church. Catholics immersed in this dominant anti-culture - b...

By David G Bonagura, Jr. Christianity is a religion of paradoxes. One is the strange relationship between the natural world that we see and the supernatural world that we do not. The latter is where God resides and is our ultimate home. At the same time, it is ever-present to us: it sustains and penetrates the natural order while enveloping us in multiple ways. God is present in us through sacramental grace and before us in the Eucharist. He is also present in a different way in other people whom we encounter, an astonishing fact Jesus taught plainly: charitable acts transcend both worlds. "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:41) Serving others is as essential to Christian practice as Sunday worship, prayer, and keeping the commandments, and ways to serve are abundant. Rightfully, Catholic schools and religious education programs compel their students to perform charitable works in the hope that they will learn to cultivate a habit of serving. In Book X of The City of God, St. Augustine reminds us of another form of service. "If a man loves himself, his one wish is to achieve blessedness, which is to be near God. Thus, if a man knows how to love himself, the commandment to love his neighbor bids him to do all he can to bring his neighbor to love God. This is the worship of God; this is true religion; this is the right kind of devotion; this is the service which is owed to God alone." If the greatest act of charity is to give God to another person, why don't we regularly encourage this form of giving? Perhaps because it is easier to give money or material things. Perhaps because our view of service suffers from a false dichotomy imagined between worship and charity. Perhaps because deep down we don't believe that God is the ultimate good for our lives. This is not to say that we should cease material giving, which is necessary for all Catholics. Charity, like all things, is best understood in context. Catholic material charity in any form is not designed to be given alone; it is given along with the Gospel. Franciscans, for example, do not give food to the poor and then send them away. They sit with recipients and befriend them with the intention of inviting them to know God. Material charity serves as the channel to God, who is charity - that is, love itself. Hence, as an aside, attacks by states and the federal government against the Little Sisters of the Poor and other Catholic charity groups, on the grounds that the organizations perform social work, not religious work, strike at the essence of Catholicism itself. These government orders, therefore, are unlawful intrusions into the free exercise of religion. Closer to home, how can we give the supreme gift of charity - God - to others, short of teaching the faith directly? First, and perhaps greatest of all, we can bring someone to Mass who would not or could not go otherwise. This someone could be a fallen-away Catholic or an elderly person who needs help getting to church. The fallen away person requires courage to issue the invitation; the elderly person requires a significant sacrifice of time to get the person in and out of our car and then the church. "You received without pay, give without pay." (Matthew 10:8) Second, we can bring to Mass those who can no longer get there. That is, we can have a Mass offered for the repose of a deceased loved one or friend. Better still would be to attend this Mass and offer our prayers for the deceased, as the one sacrifice of Christ is offered on the altar. In fact, I would recommend this practice for all candidates seeking Confirmation: arrange for two Masses for deceased loved ones, pay the offering from your own pocket, and then attend each Mass. In this act, you anticipate the grace you will receive at Confirmation: the strength to bear witness to the faith and bring it to others. Third, and not far from the first two, we can invite - or prod, as the ca...

By Randall Smith. In the 2005 movie Cinderella Man, based on the life of boxer James J. Braddock, there is a touching scene in which Braddock, having had to take government assistance for a time to support his family, shows up at the public assistance office to give that money back. It was there when he needed it, so now he wants to give it back so it will be there for someone else. It is something nearly impossible to imagine today. Giving money back - so that it's there for others? At his 1961 inaugural address, John F. Kennedy famously declared: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." It would be unthinkable now, if not considered "fascist." In Plato's dialogue, the Crito, Socrates's friend Crito tells him that, although he has been condemned to death, government officials will look the other way if his friends bribe the jailers and sneak him into exile in another country. Socrates refuses, telling his friend that, since he was born in Athens, educated in Athens, and has benefited from Athenian law and culture, he owes his existence to Athens and cannot abandon her, even if it means his death. Consider now the common attitude of the modern college student. The military strength of their country has given them years of peace; its economic strength has made them members of the richest country in history; and that country has spent literally millions of dollars on their education, from free public schools to scholarships and low-cost loans to attend some of the finest colleges and universities in the world. How many live with the conviction that they now owe something - anything - to their country, their community, or their parents? It's not so much that they're opposed; the thought has never occurred to them. The bulk of today's young people don't go to colleges and universities because they want to develop skills to be of service to their families, to their neighbors, to their city, state, and country. Nor are they recruited that way. They are lured to college to "get ahead," to "be successful," to become "their bold selves," to "be all they can be," to be "the leaders of tomorrow." Would any contemporary college or university advertise itself as: "Training the servants of tomorrow"? It would be nice if a Christian college or university said something like: "We train our students to serve others, because Christ did." But I fear it would be less popular than, "Come, get yourself on CEO Street!" This sort of marketing is thought necessary in a culture of expressive individualism. "Expressive individualism," writes author Carter Snead, "takes the individual, atomized self to be the fundamental unit of human reality. This self is not defined by its attachments or network of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment. No object of choice - whether property, a particular vocation, or even the creation of a family - is definitive and constitutive of the self. In Michael Sandel's words, it is an 'unencumbered self.'" Expressive individualism "does not recognize unchosen obligations. The self is bound only to those commitments freely assumed. And the expressive individual self only accepts commitments that facilitate the overarching goal of pursuing its own, original, unique, and freely chosen quest for meaning." One sometimes hears the claim, "I'm spiritual but not religious." What this often means is that I don't want to be obligated to anything I haven't chosen. Can one be religious and not patriotic? That's possible, I suppose, if being "patriotic" meant "my country, right or wrong." But not if "being Catholic" means "I owe nothing to my country." There is nothing in Church teaching that would support such a view. Rather, as St. Augustine understood, although Christians are a "pilgrim people," they will often be - and are called to be - the best citizens, because they are not, like so many...

By Robert Royal Today is Columbus Day, or (among the alternatively oriented) Native Peoples' Day, both displaced in any case, as even major Catholic feasts now are, to a different date, so that people will have long weekends, or not be inconvenienced, or something. In any event, it's a day now redefined in terms that make it unclear what, if anything, we are celebrating, or deploring, in this booming, buzzing confusion that we still (kind of) think of as the twenty-first Christian century. So let us seek a little clarity. For most of subsequent history following his voyages, Columbus' reputation was strong and settled. It began to change, in the nineteenth century, in the United States, of all places. Washington Irving got the idea that Columbus must have been a Protestant and a Progressive - he opposed the council of learned theologians, you see, who told him (rightly) that the distance from Spain to China was greater than he was saying. But in an expanding and confident America, El Almirante became, in Irving's imagination, the precursor of American initiative and vision. Medieval Europe, another Columbus myth notwithstanding, knew the world was a ball (see Dante), not flat - what the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell rightly mocked as "the pizza theory." Columbus didn't "prove the earth was round" and no one thought so until ignorance of pre-modern times became widespread. The 19th-century American progressives, however, had still other plans for the Genoese Catholic sailor. Andrew Dickson White, a founder and president of Cornell University, enlisted him in the Darwinian cause - for reasons similar to Irving's, as a maverick who broke with religious obscurantism to "follow the science." Other appropriations and mis-appropriations followed. The Knights of Columbus, mostly Irish, around the same time, saw the explorer as a model Catholic American. And the growing number of Italian immigrants - well, just look at Columbus Circle in Central Park. In recent decades, of course, all that has become the case for the prosecution. A significant swath of American elites has chosen to repudiate its own history, ironically based on cherry-picked Christian principles that Columbus helped bring to the Americas. He's now also often charged with bringing all the evils that have allegedly plagued the Americas since 1492 - slavery, genocide, racism, inequality, patriarchy, rape, torture, war, environmental degradation, disease, etc. Contrary voices have asked (e.g., the present writer): if we're going to attribute all these evils to that man, doesn't he also deserve credit for the many good things that have also followed on these shores? Besides, he didn't have to bring those bad things here because they already existed among the various native peoples also being "remembered" today. Few ever really look at native cultures and practices, which also included colonialism, imperialism, territorial conquest, a warrior ethos, human sacrifice, and - dare one say to our LGBT-ified elites - overwhelmingly, binary views of human sexuality. Prior to the Great Columbus Reversal, in 1892, Pope Leo XIII praised Columbus in Quarto abeunte saeculo: "For the exploit is in itself the highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man; and he who achieved it, for the greatness of mind and heart, can be compared to but few in the history of humanity." Leo added: he brought Christianity to "a mighty multitude, cloaked in miserable darkness, given over to evil rites, and the superstitious worship of vain gods." Amidst all these vagaries, the man himself has largely been lost. The Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, the well-known - almost fanatical - "defender of the Indians," noted the "sweetness and benignity" of the admiral's character. And even while criticizing some things that he did, remarks, "Truly I would not dare blame the admiral's intentions, for I knew him well and I know his intentions were good." Las Casas attributed C...

By Anthony Esolen Pope Leo issued an encyclical on poverty this week. Perhaps he should recommend it in part as a cure for our ills. "Blessed are the poor," says Jesus, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The only time I met the saintly Father Benedict Groeschel, he was too frail to walk on his own. He was one of several of us giving lectures to a Catholic group in Boston, in Faneuil Hall itself, if I remember right - in the belly of the secular beast. "If you want to die a happy death," he said, "be near the poor." He had lived among the poor all his life, so I trust he knew what he was talking about. That it is true, I can well believe. Why it is true is the question. I've worked hard all my life so that my wife and my children, one of whom will never be able to live on his own, will be provided for when I die. I don't spend money on myself. Even with this deliberate holding of material goods at arm's length, I worry sometimes that I'm missing the good that Jesus holds out for us by poverty. It's why, when I pray the Beatitudes, I don't say, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," because for me that would offer an evasion. Nor do I think only that the poor will be blessed by compensation, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. For Jesus was an exemplar of poverty here and now. The sparrows had their nests and the foxes their dens, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. He went into the desert to pray, without food, without drink. On the Cross, He was stripped to the skin, and all His Apostles except for the young John abandoned Him. If I think of the Aramaic in which Jesus addressed the crowds, the identification of poverty with blessedness seems the more immediate and powerful: Blessed the-poor / [for] to-them the-kingdom [of] Heaven. It is a line of Semitic poetry. We may suppose that the kingdom of Heaven will be given to them as a consequence of their poverty, but we may also say that poverty is a condition of their receiving the kingdom of Heaven, not by the arbitrary will of God, but by the nature of the two terms. To be poor as Jesus was poor is to welcome the kingdom of God. If we know what poverty and the kingdom of God are, we know they are inseparable. I do not wish to be misunderstood, though I feel I am groping toward a truth only dimly perceived. We would go wrong, I think, to view this poverty as strictly material, since the materially poor can be as grasping and as hardhearted as any Scrooge. We would also go wrong to spiritualize it completely, so that people can rest content with their full granaries, and look forward to an easy old age, assured by God that they are good, or good enough to get by. Nor can it be half of one and half of the other. Somehow we must cultivate a noble and free disparagement of the goods we own for a brief time on earth, as if they did not matter; or our poverty must be the material sign of, or the embodied discipline for, that humility which alone admits God into our hearts. Somehow we must work at poverty, and that will be easier to do if, as Father Groeschel said, we rub shoulders with the poor. I cannot claim to know how to do this. Nothing in the life that surrounds me will give me the least clue, let alone encouragement. Obviously, the destitute must be cared for, and poverty entangled with moral chaos must be fought on fronts both material and spiritual. The state can do a fair job with the former; is helpless with the latter, and sometimes worse than helpless; sometimes it sows the moral evil that impoverishes body and soul. But I wonder how much of the harm of poverty among us can be alleviated by a general embrace of poverty, or at least by a distaste for wealth, flash, power, glory, and the ceaseless noise of the licentious. There are partial precedents. Mink coats once commanded prices that, expressed in constant dollars, would stagger us now. But those same coats are now disdained. You can pick one up at an antique store for peanuts. A similar thing...

By Dominic V. Cassella In Herodotus' Histories from the 430s BC, we read of a wise Greek philosopher and political thinker, Solon. While traveling, Solon met the King of Lydia, Croesus, who was known for his immense wealth. Croesus asked the philosopher what he thought about his great riches and whether such wealth meant that he, Croesus, was the happiest man alive. To that, Solon replied that you can "Call no man happy until he is dead." Solon's point is that as long as someone is living, though they may be happy today, fortunes change, and bad decisions are made that can result in the fall of even the most well-off and mighty. Now, we should ask: Is Solon right? Is it only the dead whom we can call happy? To this, the Christian says "yes." It just depends on how you are dead. For if you are dead to sin (Romans 6:11, 1 Peter 2:24), having been crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20), then your true life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). This is because, if we die with Christ, "we will also live with Him" (2 Timothy 2:11), and in this life in Christ we find true happiness. But what, concretely, does all this mean? How can we live this new life in Christ? And what is it to take up the Cross (Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, and Luke 9:23) and be crucified with Him? In Fr. Thomas Joseph White's latest book, Contemplation and the Cross: A Catholic Introduction to the Spiritual Life, we are given a comprehensive answer to these questions. Originally put together as a spiritual retreat for a Catholic religious order, Contemplation and the Cross also serves as a sequel to an earlier work of Fr. White's The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (reviewed by Robert Royal here). In this new book, the same perspicacity and readability are present as they were in the prequel. Fr. White - a Dominican and now Rector Magnificus of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (the Angelicum) in Rome - has written with the express purpose of offering the reader two different resources, which are evident in the body of the text and the footnotes. This is a book that can be read through for its own lucid exposition of the Catholic tradition, or scanned for its rich references for further study in figures such as Thomas Aquinas, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, as well as modern magisterial texts. Each chapter identifies and explores a "cause" of the Catholic spiritual life. The primary source and efficient cause of the spiritual life is God Himself. So the first chapter begins with the "final" cause - the "why" or "goal" of the spiritual life. In this unusual opening, we immediately see the difference it makes to view things in the light of Christ. Man, by nature, gropes in shadows as he reaches for the truth. In the covenant of the Old Testament, the Law served as a guardrail to prevent God's chosen people from holding on to what is self-destructive. With the coming of Light, who is Jesus Christ, we are no longer in darkness but have been offered "grace and truth." (John 1:16-17, John 17:17) But what is this spiritual life and what are the means by which we live it? Here we find the relevance of the Cross which, as the new tree of our redemption, repairs the damage done by the old tree at the Fall. In emptying Himself, the Son of God has taken on the poverty and slavishness of human nature and has become obedient "even unto the Cross." (Philippians 2:7-8) It is through His assumption of human flesh and crucifixion that He redraws "the lines of our humanity from within and [reorients] us toward God anew." The Cross, then, is where we find the exemplar of obedience to God. In contemplating Christ crucified, we find as our model the virtues of righteousness. And in Mary, His mother, we see the exemplar of what it means to live our lives with eyes upon the Cross. In grace and truth, we possess the means by which we unite ourselves to Christ and "become recipient of the mercy of God and a servant or steward of divine mercy." Cen...

By Casey Chalk There was a time when German Catholics fought for the faith. One hundred and fifty years ago, half the bishops of Prussia were imprisoned, as were hundreds of parish priests, leaving more than a thousand parishes orphaned. All of them had refused to cooperate with various Prussian laws, often called "May Laws," intended to suffocate the independence of the Catholic Church in favor of an "ecumenical" brand of Protestantism. German lay Catholics responded by providing hiding places for clergy, paying fines clergymen incurred from the state, and purchasing bishops' furniture at auction. And they were just getting started. As Roger Chickering explains in his recent book The German Empire, 1871-1918, this battle between the German State and Catholics was years in the making, and shows a Catholic Church in Germany that was orthodox, pious, and deeply fervent. It is not only a demonstrable difference from a German church today, which is hemorrhaging members, but also likely explains why the German-American experience - which included such a large percentage of Catholics - was itself so vibrant, giving us such saints as St. John Nepomucene Neumann and St. Marianne Cope. The conflict in Germany began in 1837, when the Prussian government incarcerated the archbishop of Cologne over a dispute regarding mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants. In the decades that followed, German Catholicism was reinvigorated. In 1844, more than half-a-million Catholics made a pilgrimage to an exhibition of the Holy Coat in Trier. There was also a dramatic increase in the number of religious organizations: between 1837 and 1864, the number of monasteries in Bavaria quintupled. This concerned many German Protestants, particularly liberals and those in positions of government, who believed that the fulfillment of German unification and the Protest Reformation required the destruction of Rome's power in Germany. To disempower the Catholic Church in Germany, these parties reasoned, would remove a foreign intruder from the German body politic, a relic of a superstitious past, and usher in a single Protestant German national church. Unfortunately for Catholics, Protestant liberals and their allies enjoyed a majority in the 1871 Reichstag of the new imperial Germany, and exploited that power to introduce a new provision to the federal penal code, stipulating imprisonment of up to two years for any clergyman who addressed affairs of state in a manner likely to disturb the public peace. The "pulpit paragraph" was the opening salvo in what came to be known as the "culture war" or Kulturkampf. A suite of further anti-Catholic legislation followed. One law empowered the state to remove clergymen from positions they had previously held as local school inspectors. Another forbade religious orders from teaching in state schools. Yet another banished the Jesuits and several other orders from Germany altogether. Still others demanded that German clergy be educated at German universities, and that clergy pass a "culture test" that was not required of Protestant theology students. Papal disciplinary actions were made subject to Prussian state oversight. In response, Pope Pius IX declared that the duty of Catholics to obey secular authority was valid only so long as the state "ordered nothing against God's commandment and the Church." In 1873, the bishops forbade Catholics from complying with the May Laws. This did not deter the Prussian parliament, which banned all Catholic religious orders from Prussia and introduced compulsory civil marriage. Chickering observes: "The liberals abandoned their political ideals, this time religious toleration, freedom of assembly, and the equal protection of the laws." By 1876, all of Prussia's twelve Catholic bishops were either in prison or exile. Approximately 200 clergymen were fined or imprisoned, along with more than a hundred Catholic newspaper editors. Twenty Catholic newspapers were closed down. That sa...

By Michael Pakaluk. But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, October 9 at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss 'Dilexi te,' Pope Leo's first Apostolic Exhortation, the pope's planned trip to Lebanon, and his comments on Gaza, as well as other issues in the global 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... Ask an educated Catholic what the two leading teachings of Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum are, and, if he knows anything at all about this foundational text of modern Catholic social teaching, he will likely say that it endorses labor unions and articulates the principle of a living wage. The doctrine of a living wage is indeed important, even if it cannot be followed in the United States today, given current mores and employment law. The doctrine is that to hire a father, who is the head of a household, is to hire in effect a family, not a mere individual, and therefore he must be paid a wage sufficient for supporting a large family, and sufficient too for him to save something, so as to acquire "substance" over time - on the assumption that his family lives modestly and thriftily. As for the worker's associations envisioned in the encyclical, they do not exist primarily for collective bargaining, and "they must pay special and chief attention to the duties of religion and morality." (n. 57) Despite our praise of Rerum Novarum as a fundamental founding document, one might reasonably judge that these two teachings have been pervasively abandoned. But these are not the two leading teachings of the encyclical, which are rather that: (1) socialism is a disastrous mistake which chokes the sources of wealth and subverts the family, and that (2) no solution to "the problem of labor and capital," or to any other grave social problem, is possible without a revival of Christianity. Leo XIII did not define socialism as "State ownership of the means of production," but rather, as a philosophy that denies that the individual in his economic activity is prior to the State, and denies also that the family is a true society prior to the State. In particular, it denies the authority of the father, who, Leo says, has a claim over the resources of his household at least as weighty as the State's. Leo grapples with socialism in several of his encyclicals. He clearly regards it as the great menacing problem of our time. It would be foolish to suppose that such a deep challenge to Christian civilization, as he thought it to be, was put to rest by Fabian-style reforms in the direction of a Welfare State. Rather, in our use of fiat currency, in our Great Society initiatives (which have undermined the family), and in the State's claim to redefine marriage, one sees this very philosophy of socialism. Does anyone today suppose that limits to the taxing power of the State are fixed by natural law in the prior claims of the family as a true society? Or is it part of our public consciousness that the giant wealth transfer, which is Social Security, is a matter of free gift rather than putative "right" - a claim of right by the retired elderly over the resources of growing young families? So, no, it seems we have not put to rest the "socialism" that Leo worried about. As for the second, genuinely leading idea, it would be hard to claim that it conditions our interpretation of "Catholic Social Doctrine" today. I urge readers to read paragraphs 16-30 of the encyclical and ponder them anew: "No practical solution will be found apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church," Leo insisted, and "All the striving of men will be vain, if they leave out the Church." (n. 16) Do we believe this? Leo draws attention indeed to the glory of the Ch...

By Francis X. Maier Every few years, I reread a couple of my favorite authors. George Orwell, despite his disdain for things Catholic, has always been on my list. This time I paid special attention to his essay, "The Principles of Newspeak." He appended it to his dystopian novel 1984. As Orwell noted in his text, Newspeak - the language of Oceania's Airstrip One (formerly the UK) - had three distinct vocabularies; A, B, and C. The B vocabulary "had been deliberately constructed for political purposes." Its words "had, in every sense, a political implication." They were designed to impose a desired mental attitude upon the user. A perfect such B-word was duckspeak. It meant "to quack like a duck." Ultimately, for Newspeak's linguists: it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. . . .[Thus, like] various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker, it was paying a warm and valued compliment. On the other hand, duckspeak could also be used to describe and vilify any opinion seen by the Party as crimethink. In effect, words meant whatever, and only whatever, the Party wanted them to mean in any given circumstance. The other author I've returned to this year is the philosopher, Augusto Del Noce. After flirting with the Italian Left as a young man, Del Noce later reverted to his Catholic faith. In the aftermath of World War II until his death in 1989, he wrote a series of brilliant reflections (collected here and here) critiquing Marxist thought, technological civilization, the sexual revolution, progressive politics and theology, and the emerging contours of the postmodern world. Of special interest, given our current environment, is his essay from the late 1960s, "On Catholic Progressivism." In it, he argued that: Whereas a discussion with a rigorously Marxist intellectual is possible, it is not so with a Catholic progressive. Not because we despise him, but because he despises his critic, treating him already from the start as somebody who stops at mere formulaic intellectualism. Therefore, one does not discuss with a Catholic progressive, but in front of him, just hoping that our arguments may provide an opportunity to stimulate his critical reflection. If Del Noce's frustration sounds familiar, it should. Internal Catholic debate has been fractious since the close of Vatican II, with renewed tension in the last 12 years. Whatever its strengths, the Francis pontificate, despite its purported openness, was the most authoritarian in more than a century, resistant to even faithful criticism, loose in matters of Church law, and marked by a studied ambiguity in various issues of doctrine. We now have a new pope who's taken the name "Leo." His predecessor, Leo XIII, worked tirelessly to bring the modern world into line with eternal principles through his personal leadership and encyclicals like Rerum Novarum. We can hope that Leo XIV will do the same. We need that kind of faithful leadership urgently, because per Del Noce's essay above, today's Catholic progressivism - renascent during the Francis years - represents the "exact inverse" of Leo XIII's efforts. In contrast, it seeks "to bring Catholicism into line with the modern world." This is most obvious in, but not limited to, matters of sexuality. There's a gulf between respecting persons with same-sex attraction and their God-given dignity, and affirming morally destructive sexual behaviors. Channeling Del Noce at Rome's 2018 synod of bishops, Archbishop Charles Chaput, among others, stressed that "what the Church holds to be true about human sexuality is not a stumbling block. It is the only real path to joy and wholeness." He went on to argue that: There is no such thing as an "LGBTQ Cathol...

By George J. Marlin In the summer of 2014, Yohana Al-Zebbaree was a 12-year-old boy when his world turned upside down. From his home in Duhok, a city in northern Iraq, he recalls the whispers spreading across neighborhoods, saying that ISIS was moving closer. "There was this huge scare," says Al-Zebbaree, now 23. "I remember the night when they said that ISIS was approaching the northern cities, like Erbil and Duhok. Everyone was watching the news, and we got multiple phone calls from our relatives telling us to leave town and go further north." While Erbil and Duhok never fell, Mosul - the second-largest city in Iraq with almost 2 million inhabitants and just a short drive away - was taken. And the Nineveh Plain, with Mosul as its regional capital, home to some of Iraq's most ancient Christian communities, was overrun. Hundreds of thousands fled, swelling Erbil's refugee camps. Churches became shelters; classrooms turned into dormitories; streets filled with families who had left everything behind but their faith. The Christians who lived in the provincial capital of Mosul on the Nineveh Plain - in ancient times the City of Nineveh - have ancestors whose roots go back to the very beginning of Christianity. The region had been the traditional home of Assyrian Christians and gave birth to the monastic movement. But on June 11, 2014, the city's Chaldean Catholic Archbishop, Emil Nona, announced that the last Christians had fled the city. Describing reports of attacks on churches and monasteries, Archbishop Nona said: "We received threats … [and] now all the faithful have fled the city. I wonder if they will ever return here…. My diocese no longer exists; ISIS has taken it away from me." Open Doors, a religious freedom advocacy group, agreed with the archbishop. "This could be the last migration of Christians from Mosul," its representative said. "The Islamist terrorists want to make Iraq a 'Muslim only' nation and as a result they want all Christians out." Amid this chaos, the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil, led by Archbishop Bashar Warda, recognized that those refugee families needed more than shelter and food. They needed education, both religious and secular, and hope for the future. In 2015, the Catholic University in Erbil (CUE) opened its doors as Iraq's first private non-profit university. Next week, as the university graduates its fifth class, it will also celebrate its 10th anniversary - a milestone born of resilience and faith in the face of what once seemed overwhelming odds. CUE's first academic building was funded by the Italian Bishops' Conference. Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), a papal charity, followed with funding for new wings for the study of subjects such as architecture and medicine, and the provision of laboratories and a modern library. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, ACN-USA contributed more than $1.8 million. An educational initiative that began in hope with only eleven students has grown to more than 760. About 65 percent of the student body now studies on full scholarships, most of which are funded by ACN. And today, the Christians of Iraq are reaping the fruits of that carefully targeted generosity. The entire people of Iraq will as well. For a community that now accounts for less than 1 percent of the population, because of years of persecution, Iraq's Christians can and must have significant influence on the direction of the nation. CUE is providing a major contribution to that war-torn country in that regard. While CUE is rooted in the Catholic tradition, its doors are open to all. About 60 percent of its students are Christian, 30 percent are Muslim, and the rest belong to smaller groups such as the Yazidis. In a country where religious and ethnic divisions often run deep, the campus offers a rare example of daily coexistence and common purpose. "When you go to the villages, you see the Christians on one side and Muslims on the other," says John Smith, a university trustee. "But at the ...

By Brad Miner Honestly, I've had it. I'm now all but certain there has never been a movie about exorcism that has had Christ at its heart. Thanks to Catholic author William Peter Blatty, the original Exorcist was good. Director William Friedkin deserves credit for a fine assist. It comes close but misses. No reverence. I asked Grok3 to list all the movies about exorcism. It hedged a bit: While it's impossible to list every motion picture ever made about exorcism due to the vast number of obscure, international, and low-budget films produced worldwide (including many direct-to-video releases), below is a comprehensive compilation drawn from major film databases, critic rankings, and horror genre resources. It's almost comforting to see an AI bot use the word "impossible." In five seconds, it churned out a 1200-word list with descriptions of 51 films. Despite how it sometimes feels to me, this proved I haven't seen them all. The Grokster ended helpfully: "If you'd like expansions on specific eras, countries, or sub-themes (e.g., non-Christian exorcisms), let me know!" Oh, no! I don't want that. I'm just here to say ave atque vale to the Conjuring franchise that, in some ways, set a standard both high and low. There are nine films in what is now called The Conjuring Universe. Why do producers add "Universe" to their sequel-isms? To make lofty what is repetitive and often banal? Perhaps they don't care for the actual universe they're living in. This franchise consists of four films in the main series: The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025). Additionally, there was Annabelle Comes Home (2019), which also features the Universe's main protagonists, Ed and Lorraine Warren. That means four Conjuring films are Warren-less. I sort of reviewed #s 1 and 2 here. The thing is this: Patrick Wilson (as Ed) and Vera Farmiga (as Lorraine) are very fine performers. (Both can sing, by the way, Mr. Wilson especially well.) It's a rare actor who doesn't sign on to some projects for no reason other than the paycheck. For Last Rites, Wilson and Farmiga have been doing a kind of Conjuring farewell tour, complete with a New York Times interview ("Horror's Mom and Dad Say Goodbye to the 'Conjuring' Movies"), but I suspect they're relieved, paychecks notwithstanding. And I'm relieved, because one hates to see talent wasted. Anyway, on to The Conjuring: Last Rites, which is the burden I carry (lightly) today. It cost $55 million to make and has already brought in more than $400 million worldwide. (The current #1 in the world in an animated feature, Ne Zha 2. I didn't know there was a Ne Zha 1, but #2 has hauled in a respectable $2 billion, although a mere $23 million in the US of A. The are a lot of people in China. Still, those Chinese communists sure know how to pick our American pockets.) The Warrens were real people. I don't know if they were either entirely sane or honest (possibly sane if dishonest), but they catapulted to fame in 1975 via a case known as the Amityville Horror (books, movies, collectibles, sequels), and the Warrens were just getting started. It must be mentioned, however, that the whole Amityville shebang was a tissue of lies, which we know because the attorney who represented the haunted Long Island family - and netted them several hundred thousand dollars from book and movie deals - later admitted they made it all up with a writer and a couple of bottles of wine. But The Warrens - he died in 2006, she in 2019 - always maintained it was all true. The Warrens were Catholic. People in Connecticut, where they lived, have attested to the Warrens' regular Mass attendance. The estimable Jimmy Akins has suggested that, as paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine may have consulted with exorcists. They may have been nice folks. But neither of the Warrens was a priest, so they were not and could not be exorcists for the Roman Catholic Church. As t...

By Anthony Esolen My family and I spend a few months out of the year in Nova Scotia, in a part of the province that was once overwhelmingly Catholic. The congregations are aging, partly because a lot of young people leave the island for work far away, and partly, I think, because all the motions and accouterments at Mass say, "There is nothing for the mind to search out here." At Mass at one church, everybody stands after the Sanctus, but for just the first sentence of the ever-used second Eucharistic prayer. We are supposed to kneel once the priest calls down the Holy Spirit upon the gifts. What this means, in practice, is that the clomp-clomp of kneelers and the shifting of bodies breaks up the prayer and interrupts the priest. Ideas about liturgical gestures, such as this one from the Canadian bishops, may sound good in the abstract, but gestures are not abstract. They derive most of their power from the realities of human bodies. Only someone insensible to human bodies in motion can have failed to predict what would happen, and only someone obtuse in the art of human gesture could fail to see that the physical interruption would confuse the prayer, separating one sentence from the next, when no such separation in meaning or action is called for. Such obtuseness characterizes their approach to liturgical gesture generally. At the end of the consecration, everyone is supposed to stand, and again you have the rumbling and tumbling, just when the priest is saying, "The mystery of faith." Again the disruption, the discontinuity, and again the likelihood that in the awkwardness you will not be paying close attention to your reply to the priest. If the Eucharist is a great mystery, we want then of all times to direct our attention wholly toward it. Nothing else should obtrude. Communion is received standing up, as almost everywhere else in the world since the Great Liquidation. I suspect the posture is imposed not for what it is, but for what it is not: kneeling. Again, you cannot impose a meaning on a bodily gesture which it does not in itself possess, or which it does not lend itself to. You wait in line, vaguely aware of the person behind you, and you cannot pause after you receive, as you cannot pause after you get your burgers at the fast-food counter, or after you load your luggage on the conveyor belt at the airport, or after any of the many things we stand in line for, usually with faint impatience or irritation. You get out of the way, and you return to your seat. Banal already, but in Canada, again by directive, you remain standing until everyone else has received, thus prolonging the impatience. At this particular parish, it causes confusion, not conducive to prayer. A few people do kneel. Some people sit. Most people stand, as the Canadian bishops insist is best. It is supposed to be a sign of solidarity. That's nonsense. You might pray, but mostly you are waiting for the last person to sit down, so that you can sit too. You are not self-collected; you can't be. People waiting for a cue can do little else but watch. Try to lose yourself in prayer while you wait for everyone to receive Communion - a dozen now in each line, now four or five, now two, then one - at last! It is difficult also to pray while you are shuffling in line, because you must think about when to move your feet and where to put them, so as not to step on anybody's shoes. I do not say it is impossible. With God, all things are possible. It is unlikely. We are bodily beings, and what we do with our bodies instructs our minds. When I was a boy, we knelt at the Communion rail in our church, a work in Italian marble, inlaid with mosaic symbols of the Eucharist. After that Great Liquidation, I did not ever kneel for Communion, until one day, around 1988, my wife and I went to Mass at a large cathedral with a Communion rail in use. We knelt beside one another to receive the Sacrament. And the bodily gesture struck me like a powerful electric shock. I h...

By Daniel B. Gallagher Pope Leo XIV recently reaffirmed a conviction Christians have held for centuries: "institutions need people who know how to live a healthy secularism, that is, a style of thinking and acting that affirms the value of religion while preserving the distinction - not separation or confusion - from the political sphere." Leo gets at the heart of Saint Augustine's understanding of saeculum, which can be roughly translated as "time," "age," or "era." According to Augustine, we are living in an era when all human institutions are embraced by an ultimate sacred history that will be fulfilled in Christ's second coming. Christians, therefore, enlightened by the Gospel, are obliged to act within those institutions and exert influence upon them in a way that attests to, upholds, and promotes not only the dignity of the human person as created in God's image and redeemed by Christ, but - as Russell Hittinger has argued - also the dignity of society. In short, for Christians, "secular" is not a bad word. Far from it. It is indeed the proper way of describing reality as having already been redeemed but awaiting the full revelation of what that redemption has wrought. Because the current saeculum is not man's ultimate horizon, secular institutions enjoy a legitimate autonomy, but only in the sense of a "distinction," not a "separation." Pope Leo's recent comments are better understood if we turn back to Benedict XVI's pithy recapitulation of the same idea in 2006. Speaking to a group of Italian jurists, the late Pontiff said that it is the task of believers: to formulate a concept of secularity which, on the one hand, acknowledges the place that is due to God and his moral law, to Christ and to his Church in human life, both individual and social; and on the other, affirms and respects the "rightful autonomy of earthly affairs," if by this phrase, as the Second Vatican Council reaffirms, is meant man's "gradual discovery, exploitation and ordering of the laws and values of matter and society." (Gaudium et Spes, 36) Benedict uses the medieval conception of saeculum as a foil against which to contrast the post-modern conception. In the Middle Ages, "secular" simply designated a distinction between civil and ecclesiastical powers. Man's ultimate destiny lies outside of time, so his ultimate destiny should be the concern of the Church. But man lives in time nonetheless, so secular institutions are necessary to oversee matters concerning man's temporal needs. The focus of politics must be the goods of this temporal order, primarily the earthly peace that Augustine calls tranquillitas ordinis, the "tranquility of order." The focus of the Church must be on safeguarding the contents of divine revelation and the dispensation of the sacraments that lead souls to Heaven. There is a need for both princes and bishops, though there were many times in the Middle Ages when one would usurp the other. Attempts to resolve such conflicts, however, always relied on a proper understanding of the secular as defined by Augustine and explained by Benedict. In this sense, as Larry Siedentop writes, "secularism is Christianity's gift to the world." Robert Reilly explains: "Christianity itself supported and defended the secularization necessary for the development of constitutionalism. The distinction between God and Caesar, so essential to the separate sovereignties of Church and State, has only one font (i.e., Christianity)." Clearly, Pope Leo XIV, in one form or another, wants to advance the crucial project Benedict XVI undertook of reminding the world of this gift. Benedict was keen on reminding the world that the post-modern notion of the secular has completely overturned the medieval conception. "It has come to mean the exclusion of religion and its symbols from public life and confining them to the private sphere and to individual conscience," he said. It is this attitude that turned "secular" into a bad word, at least for Christians. I...

By David Warren Let us begin by remembering Covadonga, the great Christian victory in Spain, A.D. 722, and the beginning of the Reconquista. This was a decade before the Battle of Tours, when Charles Martel, "the Hammer," repelled the "unstoppable" Umayyad cavalry, preparing the ground for the Carolingian Empire that saved, or one might say, invented, Europe. For all of Christendom had been laid waste, including the civilized centers in Egypt and Syria, except for the shrinking "Rome" (Byzantium), and the largely pagan wastelands in the far, far, far, far West. Miracles alone saved France, for instance, from falling prey to the aggression. Yet the vanquishing of Iberia by the desert savages was, like their progress through the Middle East and North Africa, a catastrophe for the Christians, who had ruled, fairly peacefully. Fourteen centuries of annihilation had begun, with other Arab stormings preceding Islam. Zoroastrian Persia was also pulverized, and massacres were also perpetrated deep into Hindustan and even to Tibet. Islam has bloody borders, as Samuel P. Huntington wrote a decade before 9/11, and it always has. Wherever Islam meets non-Muslims, there is bloodshed. This is not the modern condition, only. It was true from the beginning. Islam spread by terrorism, by utter surprise, out of the blue. Nine-elevens were its constant strategy. Non-Muslims generally have a history of enmity with Muslim neighbors, and most have been slaughtered by Muslims in their turn. But Christians and Jews have been the principal victims, as both were psychotically identified in the Koran and the Hadiths. To learn about the realities of Islam, one must study these foundational texts, as one must read the Bible to access Christianity. Finding accurate translations is necessarily a challenge, for Arabic to English must be nearly impossible; there are wild disparities between any two versions. At least a third of the Koran is senseless blather, even in the original. Good luck. Questions such as who was Mohammad, and if he existed in fact, or if Mecca was even built by the seventh century, cannot be resolved by using evidence in the Western sense. There is nothing like the scholarship that buttresses both Old and New Testaments. For good reason, investigation of Islamic texts and claims is prevented in all Muslim countries and endangered when attempted in the West. By contrast, Christianity and Judaism can be studied openly, even by sceptics, and have been available for destructive disassembly over a very long time. Archaeology has shown all Bible traditions to be sound or plausible. Whereas, all the ancient archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia have been thoroughly bulldozed and scoured. Huge efforts have been made to keep the history of Islam away from scrutiny, or restrict it to official authorities. Indeed, virtually all attempts to study the Islamic past have been conducted in, and limited to, institutions in the West. This may sound like exaggeration, and a scandal to the "multicultural" happy-face liberalism of today. But check, for it is fact. Moreover, if one consults the older academic literature, up to a few decades ago, one finds that all agree on the indigence of Islam. Our older historians did actually master the field. The more recent have been, almost always, "politically correct," and timid apologists, for fear of Muslim reprisals. I was myself commissioned to write on this state of affairs, by Peter Collier at Encounter Books, just after the subject became current in the wake of the Islamic terror attacks of 9/11. I did not accept the advance, and declined until I could be sure the task was doable. Alas, it wasn't, by a person who can't read Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and several other languages. Too, I think I was a coward. But braver and more learned have since emerged. Perhaps we have got beyond President George W. Bush's uttering fatuous nonsense about "the religion of peace," and regretting the use of the word "crusade."...

By Stephen P. White But first a note: TCT's Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal will join host Raymond Arroyo on 'The World Over' tonight (October 2, 2025) at 8:00 PM to discuss the ongoing controversy over the decision of Chicago's Cardinal Blase Cupich to honor pro-choice Sen. Dick Durbin. It's all you need to know about the scandal. 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... "Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here. Ever this day be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide. Amen." I don't know how many times in my life I have prayed these words. Many thousands, no doubt. It was among the first prayers I ever learned, being part of the nightly routine of my childhood, and I have taught it to my own children as we say bedtime prayers. It is not only a bedtime prayer, to be sure, and bears frequent repetition at any time of night or day. If any further inducement were needed, devout recitation of this venerable prayer carries a partial indulgence. The prayer itself is surprisingly ancient, originating at least as early as the eleventh or twelfth century. Reverence for angels, of course, is much older, as even a passing familiarity with both the Old and New Testaments will show. Particular devotion to the guardian angels, whose feast day is today (October 2), dates to the earliest centuries of the Church. St. Basil the Great taught in the fourth century that, "each and every member of the faithful has a Guardian Angel to protect, guard and guide them through life." Pope St. John XXIII (whose devotion to angels may have had something to do with his baptismal name, Angelo) exhorted the faithful to pray to their guardian angels and often. "Everyone of us is entrusted to the care of an angel," he said, "That is why we must have a lively and profound devotion to our own guardian angel, and why we should often and trustfully repeat the dear prayer we were taught in the days of our childhood." For many of us, the Guardian Angel Prayer is so closely associated with childhood that it can sometimes be easy to associate the devotion to angels with childishness, a mistake made all the more common by the gauzy depictions of guardian angels which are regularly found in Catholic kitsch. But guardian angels are not the spiritual equivalent of Lassie. The Catechism reminds us, quoting St. Augustine, that, "'Angel' is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is 'spirit'; if you seek the name of their office, it is 'angel': from what they are, 'spirit', from what they do, 'angel.'" In Greek, an angel is a messenger. The center of the angelic world, this world of messenger servant-spirits, is none other than Christ Himself, because, as the Catechism continues, "They are his angels. . . They belong to him because they were created through and for him." Immortal beings, pure intellect and will, who eternally behold the face of the Father (Mt. 18:10) and who perfectly serve Christ the Lord are not to be taken lightly. Which is to say, real guardian angels are not at all like the bumbling, though lovable, Clarence from "It's a Wonderful Life." They are creatures, but they are not bumbling and they are not human. Not human and also higher than humans. Translations of Psalm 8 differ, but the author of Hebrews cites the psalm thus, "What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels." (emphasis added.) St. Thomas Aquinas asked whether angels are more to the image of God than man is, to which he responded, "we must grant that, absolutely speaking, the angels are more to the image of God than man is, but that in some respects man is more like to God." The mystery of the Incarnation sheds the fullest light on the implication of the Imago Dei for human creatures, but the mag...

by Luis Lugo Chesterton once said that there are two ways of getting home. One of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place. Since the Church is our true home, we could say that the first is a good description of a cradle Catholic, the second of a revert like me. But there is a third way of getting home: to discover it for the first time. That describes converts to Catholicism who were reared in other religious traditions. That is the road the eminent Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft travelled into the Church, as he delightfully recounts in his recently released autobiography, From Calvinist to Catholic. As it happens, Kreeft's turning from Reformed Protestantism to the Catholic Church describes the last leg of my own return journey into the Catholic Church as well. I have added reason, then, for taking such keen interest in this recounting of his spiritual journey. Kreeft and I share another important connection - to Calvin College (now University), where I taught for almost a decade and where he attended as an undergraduate many years before. The roles were reversed with respect to Villanova University, where I was a master's student in philosophy and Kreeft began his illustrious teaching career. Commendably, Kreeft demonstrates profound respect and gratitude for his Reformed upbringing. A deep personal affection for his family and friends is an important contributing factor. But he also displays a genuine appreciation for that tradition's many strong points. Foremost among these is the Evangelical emphasis on the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In that connection, Kreeft offers that he appreciates this aspect of Protestantism more now than when he was a Protestant. He makes a similarly interesting point with respect to the Protestant emphasis on the authority of Holy Scripture. In discussing the teaching of sola scriptura, Kreeft argues persuasively that one cannot get to an infallible Bible without an infallible Church to authenticate it. He thus writes, somewhat paradoxically, that to be a Bible-believing Protestant, he first had to be a Church-believing Catholic. Despite his generally irenic approach, Kreeft does not hold back in his critique of major Protestant teachings, from Luther's Three "Solas" (faith alone, scripture alone, grace alone) to the Five Points of Calvinism. It's clear throughout, however, that what propelled him toward Rome was not the deficiencies of Protestantism so much as the pull of the fullness of the faith that he was gradually discovering in Catholicism. As he describes it, it was like moving from the appetizer to the main course. The main course included the beauty of the liturgy and the power of the sacraments, the Eucharist most especially. It also involved a growing sense of the sheer grandeur of the Catholic Church. In a particularly moving passage, he writes that the moment of decision for him came while he was a student at Calvin, sitting alone in his room. It was then that he "sensed the greatness of the Church as a gigantic Noah's Ark with my two favorite saints, Augustine and Aquinas, on the deck waving to me to come aboard." Kreeft declares that his heart was open to conversion before his mind and will were. But the mind eventually had to follow, especially for someone so philosophically inclined (the above reference to the two great doctors of the Church attests to that). Along the way, he had to confront several anti-Catholic objections, which he takes up and deftly answers in a separate chapter. One of the last and hardest obstacles Protestant converts face is Marian devotion. Kreeft sensitively explains the stages he and others typically go through before they discover that Mary, like the Church, makes one more Christocentric, not less. In the end, the main course simply proved too appetizing for Kreeft. Having taken a seat at the rich banquet table, he now clearly saw tha...

by Randall Smith. So, Cardinal Cupich has decided to honor pro-abortion Senator Dick Durbin. The chancery office says that they are honoring him for things other than his support for abortion, but that's like honoring Bill Cosby for the wonderful things he did other than his mistreatment of women. No one would accept that. The obvious conclusion would be that you just don't care about the mistreatment of women - or at least not as much as you should. But there should be no real mystery about what the Cardinal has done. He is like the unfaithful steward in Luke 16 who, realizing that he is soon to be out of a job, does some favors for his master's debtors to gain their favor after his dismissal. You still want to be invited to the good parties and hang with the people with money and influence. And it's another good example of "synodality." You don't really need to talk to anyone else; you don't consult or even listen to anyone else, even your fellow bishops; you just command what you, the imperious cleric, desire. But this is all too obvious. What makes it possible is a broader cultural problem. I heard recently that the pro-choice governor of New Mexico went to a Catholic campus where she proudly announced herself as a "pro-choice Catholic." This isn't something unknown or entirely unusual. There are dozens of politicians who proudly call themselves "pro-choice Catholics." So, although I wasn't startled by this announcement, it did make me wonder. What if she had shown up on a Catholic campus and proudly announced, "I am a pro-segregation Catholic" or "I am an anti-racial integration Catholic"? What would the organizers have done? Would they have ignored the comment? Would they have smilingly had their pictures taken next to her and posted on the Internet? Or would there have been some objections? Do you suppose someone might have said something like: "Yeah, you know, that thing you say you are. That doesn't exist." It is, of course, likely that our self-proclaimed "pro-segregation Catholic" would be offended by this and say: "How dare you judge me and my Catholic faith." But we wouldn't be judging this person's soul or her faith. We would merely be pointing out that you can no more be a "pro-choice Catholic" than you can be a "non-Trinitarian Catholic" or a "pro-Arian Catholic." If we were to allow the term "Catholic" to be used this way, the term would mean nothing. All categories "define" a group that includes certain things and excludes others - or the category is meaningless. If we were still living in 1960, and if it was a university in the South, calling oneself a "pro-segregation Catholic" might have passed muster. But it is unlikely it would be allowed to go unchallenged now. But if we had a record of it going unchallenged at a Catholic university in 1960, it would be an occasion for embarrassment now, not a matter for pride that we let people "speak their minds" and "follow their own consciences." I'm not claiming that such a person should not be allowed to speak at a Catholic university. I am simply asking whether, if someone announced, "I am a pro-segregation Catholic," we wouldn't feel a serious obligation to correct the record, to make it clear that this position isn't in accord with basic Catholic teaching. Catholics can have a vast array of opinions on different moral and political questions. One Catholic could say, "I'm in favor of raising taxes" and another "I'm opposed." But what if someone says, "I'm a pro-slavery Catholic"? There were plenty of Catholics who made that claim in the early nineteenth century, but we look back upon that with embarrassment, wishing that the Church authorities and laity had done more to counteract the notion that one could be a "Catholic" in good standing and " pro-slavery" at the same time. Or that one could be a "Catholic" in good standing and at the same time think black people have lesser dignity than whites. We are proud that Archbishop Rummel excommunicated several Cat...

By Robert Royal. But first a note: The following is excerpted and adapted from an address given in Chicago on September 25, 2025, at the annual benefit dinner of the Aid for Women Pregnancy Centers and Maternity Homes. Now for today's column... People often ask me what they can do - or what should we all be doing - to deal with the many challenges we face, not only the obvious ones like wars, injustices, poverty, and so forth, but fundamental questions about what human life is and what our lives mean. There's no simple answer because the world is complicated, as is every human life. And that's not a bad thing. It's how God has chosen to arrange things for us. There's a famous passage in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where Frodo laments that the Ring ever came to him and that the fellowship has been called upon to destroy it: "I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." There's no simple answer, but there's an easy one, easy to understand anyway, if sometimes hard to put into practice. Then again, no one ever said living a Christian life would be easy. I believe the first answer for all of us is to recognize that there will be - and need to be - innumerable initiatives of various kinds to respond to our situation. And given how things are these days, we shouldn't expect the government, the Vatican, the hierarchy, or other large entities to start them. Aid for Women was founded right after Roe v. Wade. A lay initiative like this is not only a very Catholic thing, it's a very American thing. We see something that needs to be done, and roll up our sleeves. There are at least two large categories of such initiatives, one a ministry of action, and the other is like it, a ministry of truth. We need to work at both as much as the gifts God has given us allow. Here's St. Paul to the Ephesians: But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. . . .Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. That wasn't just intended for back then. It's the life-giving truth now, if also a daunting task. One way of viewing all that, however, is that God has a high opinion of us, higher than we have of ourselves. HE believes we can do things that WE don't believe we can. (And in truth, a life without significant challenges would be a boring life.) So even as we feel the immense gap between what we can do and what we think needs to be done, we can also recognize that we're in training for something we can't really imagine. The kind of perfect peace, illumination, love that God originally intended for us. C.S. Lewis called this the "weight of glory," a great phrase that reminds us that we are going to be weighed down by challenges so that we can rise up - a typical paradox of Christianity.Lewis describes this as "a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken." What we're faced with today is the re-conversion of our whole society, something like how the early Christians converted the Roman Empire. We know that Christians practiced conspicuous charity, caring for the elderly, the sick, the poor, the marginalized, those in prison, babies no one wanted. Many came to Christianity because of those corporal works of mercy and love. You are continuing that tradition. But there were other factors. One I think especially important for us to recall is that as a result of these Christian ministries more Christians simply were born and survived - they weren't aborted or exposed or allowed to perish. The original Hippocratic Oath, taken by a...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia. The haunting story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is perhaps best understood in reverse, through the lens of where we find them at the end of the story. The status of each in the afterlife - the rich man's suffering and Lazarus's peace - reveals the reality of who they are. Without the trappings and clothing and disguising of this world, we see the rich man's poverty and Lazarus's wealth. We see most keenly the peril of riches. It's a parable about the danger of wealth. Not about the evil of created goods or possessions. Worldly goods obviously have their place. God created the material world to show forth and communicate His glory. We are to use the goods of Creation to glorify Him and to benefit others. Our Lord is not a Marxist, and property is not theft. So, the problem is not the rich man's wealth per se. But we would be foolish to think that there is no danger in wealth. In a fallen world, created goods take on an outsized importance. We come to trust in them rather than in their Creator. Indeed, they demand a kind of allegiance, as the rich fool discovered. (see Lk 12:16-20) This is why our Lord never praises wealth but only warns us against its dangers. The first danger is intemperance. Our fallen nature inclines us to use our goods not for the glory of God and the benefit of neighbor but for our own comfort and luxury. So the rich man pampered himself. He "dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day." So in the first reading, Amos rebukes the indulgent - "Lying upon beds of ivory, stretched comfortably on their couches" - who "drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the best oils." (Amos 6:1, 4-7) Their possessions have become an end in themselves, not the means by which they glorify God and do good to others. Intemperance leads us to use God's gifts not for their purpose but for our own indulgence. The glutton eats only for pleasure and not for the good of his body. The lustful man seeks sex only for gratification and not for procreation or union. Intemperance leads inevitably to complacency. Again, the prophet Amos: "Woe to the complacent in Zion!" This complacency is a kind of numbness and blindness, a deadness of the soul to nobler and higher things. It's hard to raise one's heart and mind when the belly is weighed down by rich food and drink. So the rebuke from Amos is not only for luxury but for its effect, because it has rendered them numb to what is important. They "are not made ill by the collapse of Joseph." That is, they don't care about the suffering of their own people. So also in the Gospel, the rich man doesn't even notice Lazarus. There's no mention of any interaction between them. His wealth has blinded him to the very existence and suffering of a fellow man at his doorstep. This complacency is revealed most of all when the rich man begs to return to his brothers and warn them, lest they suffer the same fate (as they seemingly had similar wealth). Abraham answers, "If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead." Something kept them from listening to - from hearing - Moses and the prophets. Indeed, their wealth and luxury numbed and blinded them to the witness of Scripture, and it would make their minds resistant even to one risen from the dead. Wealth numbs us not only to other people but also to the truth. Attachment to created things keeps the mind pinned down. Clarity of thought requires detachment from worldly goods. Again, the parable of the rich fool shows us how the mind of the wealthy is focused on maintaining and increasing material goods rather than on permanent things and eternal truths. It's said that Aquinas once visited Bonaventure in his study and asked which book gave him such great theological insights. Bonaventure pointed not to a book but to the crucifix as the source of his insight. That's more than a pious story. It reminds us that ...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza. How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God! Is that true? Jesus said it (Mark 10:23) to His Apostles after the encounter with the rich young man, so it must be true. In affluent countries where everyone, even the poor, is rich in relative historical terms, Christians are inclined to think that Jesus did not really mean it. Or that it is not really true, and that Jesus was employing the hyperbole ("cut it off", "pluck it out") that marked Biblical preaching. If it were true, and Jesus really meant it, it would follow that vast numbers of materially prosperous parishioners will not be counted in that number, when the saints go marching in. Two of that number, their relics marching through St. Peter's Square a few weeks ago, were rich. It must have struck Pope Leo XIV that both St. Pier Giorgio Frassati and St. Carlo Acutis were from rich families, since he held up in his homily other rich young men from history, too. He started with perhaps the wealthiest man in the history of Israel, King Solomon: It was precisely this great abundance of resources that raised a question in his heart: "What must I do so that nothing is lost?" Solomon understood that the only way to find an answer was to ask God for an even greater gift, that of his wisdom, so that he might know God's plans and follow them faithfully. . . .Yes, because the greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God's plan. That sums up the encounter with the rich young man, who "went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions." (Mark 10:22) He seemed already to know that he was going to "waste" his life, refusing God's specific call. "Many young people, over the centuries, have had to face this crossroad in their lives," Leo continued. "Think of Saint Francis of Assisi, like Solomon, he too was young and rich, thirsty for glory and fame. But Jesus appeared to him along the way. . . .From there, he changed his life and began to write a different story: the wonderful story of holiness that we all know, stripping himself of everything to follow the Lord (cf. Luke 14:33), living in poverty." Leo included his own patron, St. Augustine, in those "many similar saints who gave themselves [to God] completely, keeping nothing for themselves." Is it necessary to renounce worldly riches to be saintly? Solomon did not and became corrupt, though he later repented. Francis and Augustine turned away from worldly wealth, the former so radically that Pope Innocent III was initially sceptical as to whether it was possible to live the new rule proposed by il Poverello. On the other hand, there is Abraham - with pride of place in the Roman Canon as our "father in faith" - who was very wealthy, as was his grandson, Jacob, father of the twelve tribes. Pier Giorgio belonged to one of Turin's most prominent families. His father, Alfredo, irreligious like his mother, was a senator and ambassador, as well as founder and director of the prominent newspaper La Stampa. Frassati did not renounce his wealth, but shared it so abundantly, as Leo recalled in his homily, "that seeing him walking the streets of Turin with carts full of supplies for the poor, his friends renamed him Frassati Impresa Trasporti (Frassati Transport Company)!" A deep sacramental and prayer life accompanied Pier Giorgio's corporal works of mercy. He was a great friend, even a bon vivant in an entirely wholesome way. Carlo Acutis depended upon his family wealth to become a practicing Catholic. If Carlo's family had not been rich, he may not have been a disciple at all, let alone a canonized saint. Before Carlo was born in 1991, his mother had only been to Mass three times - for her First Holy Communion, Confirmation and wedding. His parents manifestly failed - and likely never intended to keep - the promises made at Carlo's baptism, namely that they would strive to raise him in the faith. The Acutis family was rich enough, however, to employ domestic servants in thei...