The Catholic Thing

By Daniel B. Gallagher After two years of preaching the Gospel to the Guale people along the coast of modern-day Georgia, Friar Pedro de Corpa had much to be thankful for. Unlike other missionaries, he didn't need a military escort, for he was welcomed peacefully by the natives. He walked among them barefoot, learned their language, and enjoyed greater success than the Jesuits who had preceded him. The Guale even helped him build two mission settlements known as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Tolomato and Santa Catalina de Guale. Among the newly baptized was the presumed heir to the chiefdom, Juanillo. After marrying a woman sacramentally in the Church, Juanillo took another wife. Friar Pedro's public rebuke provoked Juanillo to organize an uprising in 1597. On September 14– the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross – Juanillo gathered a band of tribal warriors and bludgeoned Friar Pedro as he was preparing for Mass. The jubilant war party then severed the friar's head and raised it high on a pike for all to see. Today's Beatification of Friar Pedro and four other Spanish Franciscans in Savannah will be the first in the American South. Bishop Stephen Parkes highlights the significance of honoring men who shed their blood not only for Christ but "for the sanctity of marriage," adding that "we need to continue to promote marriage and family life as a priority for our country, for our communities, for our society." The message of the "Georgia Martyrs" is clear: marriage is worth dying for. The only way to promote peaceful coexistence is to defend marriage, even if it costs your life. It doesn't take a deep dive into Christian history to see how central this has always been to the preaching of the Gospel. Early martyrology shows that dying for Christ was often the act of an entire family. After Saint Getulius was martyred around 120 AD, his wife Symphorosa refused to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. Her disobedience to the emperor's command cost not only her life but those of her seven sons. A similar story is told of Saint Felicity who died in Rome around 165 AD. The concept of a "domestic church" was virtually indistinguishable from that of the family. "The family," Pope Benedict XVI taught, "is the domestic Church and must be the first school of prayer. It is in the family that children. . .learn to perceive the meaning of God" and "live in an atmosphere marked by God's presence." The message of the Georgia martyrs is integrally tied to that of the early Roman martyrs. The first step to creating "an atmosphere marked by God's presence" is the mutual promise of one man and one woman to "be faithful," "to love," and "to honor" each other "in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health." If it doesn't start there, it won't lead to the heroic witness of a Saint Symphorosa or Blessed Pedro. The beatification of the five Spanish martyrs is a magnificent reminder that marriage is worth dying for. If we think we'll never be called to shed blood to defend Christian marriage, we have only to recall how quickly the tables turned on Friar Pedro and his companions. Hardly anyone foresaw how serious the crisis would be running up to and following the promulgation of Humanae Vitae in 1968. The turmoil surrounding the formulation of magisterial teaching on artificial conception caused Saint Paul VI intense suffering, and it is providential that both miracles leading to his 2018 canonization had to do with the miraculous healing of prenatal life: one in California, the other in Verona. Saint Paul VI's heavenly intercession is no surprise given his relentless mission to promote marriage and family with remarkable vigor while still on earth. "Every attack on the fundamental value of the family," he preached in 1969, "meaning eroticism or violence, the defense of divorce or of antisocial attitudes among young people – is an attack on the true good of man." His words reveal that the polygamy opposed by Friar Pedro and his companions only ...

By John Melnikov There was a time not too long ago when coming into my classroom each day offered me the wonderful challenge of not only teaching my theology curriculum faithfully but in a manner that was energetic, dynamic, and engaging. Today, if I were to set my shoes on fire and ask the students to throw water balloons at me to put them out, there is a better-than-even shot I would become charcoal before the first balloon was tied off. Faces and voices that used to react with excitement, laughter, and genuine interest are firmly buried in the endless blue-light chaos of their devices. While my school has strict policies concerning tech usage in the classroom, teenagers, like water, are naturally adept at finding ways around obstacles. While I have recently been doing a deep dive into the spiritual aspects of tech obsession and addiction among teens, several other concerns have emerged. One of these dangers is that constant digital stimulation is making the real world seem insufficiently stimulating or interesting. The result is a strange kind of youthful listlessness that leads to an overall disinterest in everything. We are raising children with access to endless entertainment who increasingly seem bored by everything. Young children naturally possess a dizzying amount of enthusiasm for the most innocuous and mundane things. A new baseball, a snow day, or pizza all bring about wild fits of energy and joy. Teenagers are naturally more cynical. But even teenage cynicism used to conceal immense energy. Music, sports, romantic relationships, cars, movies, arguments, pranks, and hanging around doing absolutely nothing all used to be part of the teenage ecosystem. And when boredom or moments of meandering disinterest cropped up, they used to produce action. Now, they produce scrolling. Previous generations became bored and therefore did something. They explored, created, fell in love, got in trouble, and discerned who they were and what they wanted out of life. They considered the divine and questioned what role it played in their lives, and what they were being called by their Creator to do. After particularly long days in the trenches of high-school teaching, I naturally analyze what went right and what went wrong. The natural inclination of anyone in a position of authority over kids is to be introspective and mull over the methods employed to instruct. The fact of the matter is that kids today aren't withdrawing because of a lack of stimulation on our part, but because of an overabundance of stimulation. Kids today have access to every song ever recorded, every movie ever produced, every game ever engineered, comedy, sports, pornography, fights, news, and more. The modern American teenager commands a greater degree of entertainment and distraction than any emperor, king, queen, president, or historical figure throughout the history of mankind. And yet they are still bored. The problem is not that reality has become boring. It is that we have recalibrated children's senses of entertainment and expectations of stimulation. Teachers, coaches, and parents cannot tell stories that compete with TikTok's pacing. Sports can't compete with highlight reels, and conversations can't offer the same rush of endorphins as notifications can. Girls are forced to compete with thousands of digitally perfected women, while boys are learning how to be boyfriends by watching salacious material that offers everything except what a man ought to do in order to be a good partner. Even friendship has to compete with an endless stream of more engaging personalities. Kids can merely swipe away what doesn't hold their interest for more than a few seconds, and with each swipe, a bit of what makes being a teen so wonderfully dynamic and formative is eroded. And for a Catholic, it is sobering to realize that Christianity itself relies heavily on the capacities that are currently being erased by endless tech consumption. This situation, however, is not ...

By Stephen P. White October is racing to a close and, as is often the case in the federal capital at this time of year, the weather has taken a turn for the sublime. Cool, crisp mornings give way to bluebird skies and pleasantly warm afternoons. The light always seems to be golden for some reason. We haven't had a hard frost yet, but that can't be too far off. In the evenings, the scent of wood fires wafts around my neighborhood. I don't think I've seen a cloud in weeks. Halloween is a big deal in my neighborhood. For the last decade or so, we have hosted an annual potluck in our driveway. We grill a few dozen hot dogs and bratwursts; the other families bring their costumed little ones and a side dish. This year, Halloween falls on a Saturday. Between that and the wonderful weather we've been having, I'm expecting a particularly lively party. Our yard and driveway serve as basecamp for the marauding hordes of trick-or-treaters, and I get to supervise the beer cooler and tend the fire pit. If there's a World Series game to play on the radio, all the better. The kids think we do it all for them; I let them believe it. The truth is I am a reluctant partaker in Halloween festivities. Costumes aren't my thing. (I tell my kids: "I'm dressing up as a middle-aged dad this year.") I generally dislike the trend of elaborately decorating houses for Halloween – giant plastic skeletons, inflatable jack-o-lanterns, spider webs made of spun polyester draped across the landscaping, and other "decorations" of a more genuinely ghoulish sort. I am given to understand that, among a certain younger generation, Halloween celebrations have taken a somewhat gross and lascivious turn in recent years. No thanks. There is a fundamental difference between a festival guided by a spirit of transgression and a night when mischief is more widely tolerated. My idea of a good All Hallows Eve looks something like the one depicted in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), where packs of feral children run around the neighborhood perpetrating all sorts of pre-approved and socially sanctioned acts of minor vandalism. The hijinks are summed up in this brief exchange as the younger daughters of the Smith family prepare for their evening revels: Mrs. Smith (the mother): "Now, children, when people answer the doorbells, don't throw too much flour. Just a small handful right in their face." Agnes Smith (the daughter): "Mama, that was Mrs. Wilkins. Said she'll leave the hammock on the porch, and will the children please return it…when they're through stealing it?" In the film, the neighborhood children make a bonfire in the middle of the street from old furniture (and intentionally derail a trolley car) so not everything translates well to the suburbs of today. The point is, there exist some forms of mischief that are more wholesome than depraved, and it requires a robust and healthy society to distinguish one from the other and treat each with justice. A less healthy society will privilege the wrong sort of mischief or condemn them both equally. Be that as it may, our own Halloween celebration is one I have learned to love, as I said, somewhat reluctantly. It was my wife's idea, and I confess I did not think it a good one at first. I'm happy to say she was right. The scores of friends and neighbors who end up in our driveway every October 31st would, I think, tell you the same. The gathering provides enough social cohesion (and a critical mass of adult supervision) that young revelers can be afforded more freedom – and perhaps a little more candy-fueled mischief – than they might be allowed on any other night. And that is an important part of Halloween. The macabre side of the holiday, even down to the pseudo-pagan trappings which sometimes attend it, is not about celebrating darkness. Nor is it simply a chance to let off some steam and eat a bunch of sugar. Halloween, when celebrated in the context of the great feasts which follow – All Saints and All So...

By John M. Grondelski Many commentators identify the origin of politicians' (especially Catholic Democrats') "personally opposed but" approach to abortion as John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, particularly his September address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Carl Anderson, former Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, insists that's not quite right – at least not in a straight line, though there are similarities. His book, Conscience as a Political Problem, helpfully explains why. Kennedy knew that there was a "Catholic vote," Democrats needed it, and JFK could deliver it. The problem was that the United States had never had a Catholic president. Could a Catholic candidate overcome Protestant prejudices and make the delivery? Kennedy believed he could by invoking "conscience" as his guarantee of freedom from papal interference in the nation's affairs. Anderson argues that, in the context of the time, Kennedy was right. Most Protestants who opposed Kennedy did so out of fear that a Catholic president would send an ambassador to the Holy See and push parochial school aid. But as Anderson notes, those were questions of prudential politics: Catholics were not bound to do either. To the degree that JFK asserted his independence in such policy matters, he was within Catholic bounds. And Kennedy, in Houston, was not parsing theological principles, but just saying what it took to get elected. Where "conscience" became a more serious problem was when issues were not prudential policies but involved permanent moral questions – abortion in particular. That wasn't an issue for Kennedy in 1960; it would be for Ferraro in 1984, Kerry in 2004, and many others since. The main contribution of Anderson's book is not, however, the history – important as that is. It's his recognition that the crucial questions are anthropological and still central: Whom do you say man is? He wrestles with this problem in his final chapter. But far from being the end of the story, I take it as the beginning, an unfinished idea that merits ongoing, comprehensive Catholic engagement. The anthropological problem is twofold. First, it involves a proper definition of conscience. Anderson seeks to do that by invoking John Henry Newman's distinction between a "Christian" and a "secular" or "counterfeit" conscience. For Newman, a Christian conscience is what Catholics rightly understand conscience to be: a power that examines objective good and evil and, guided by the first principle of practical reason ("good is to be done and pursued; evil to be avoided"), makes judgments in light of objective reality. A secular or "counterfeit" conscience gives the appearance of conscience but is, in reality, self-will with an admixture of pious-sounding rationalizations. When 1960s Protestants heard JFK invoke the term "conscience," they heard the hymn's praise of "Our fathers chained in prisons dark / Were still in heart and conscience free." But by the 1980s, the Protestant Mainstream was collapsing, and Evangelicals assumed the mantle of defending that old-time religion. Traditional Protestants began recognizing that the Catholic notion of conscience – accountability before preexistent moral good and evil – was also their own. And many Protestants also began to understand that the political invocation of "conscience" was, often enough, being used to bypass that proper understanding, actually ignoring moral good and evil, and instead substituting a secular counterfeit that imagines that a radically free person actually creates rather than encounters moral truths. Kennedy never tackled the larger conscience question of when political choice and objective moral good clash, at least not in any systematic or thoughtful way. It remains a phantom, haunting how a true Catholic acting in the political realm should bear witness to Catholic principles (and not just pander for Catholic votes), especially since Vatican II insisted on the laity's crucial role ...

By Randall Smith At Mass the other day, the priest said, "Today, we face a pivotal choice." He was referring to the challenges of artificial intelligence. AI presents a challenge, but it's important to understand that the challenges we face and the pivotal choices we must make are the ones mankind has faced repeatedly – ever since the beginning. It is often said that we are in a "new age" where "everything has changed." This is a tendency exacerbated by the way remarks in the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) have been interpreted by some. In Gaudium et spes 4, it says: "Today, the human race is involved in a new stage of history. Profound and rapid changes are spreading by degrees around the whole world." Contrary to the oft-made claim that Gaudium et spes was overly optimistic, the Council fathers warn: "As happens in any crisis of growth, this transformation has brought serious difficulties in its wake. Thus while man extends his power in every direction, he does not always succeed in subjecting it to his own welfare." They then go on to mention some of the serious problems: continuing starvation, lack of educational resources, the destructive force of atomic weapons, increased atheism – and its consequences in a lack of respect for the dignity of the human person. In retrospect, I think the Council Fathers can be excused for being amazed at the changes that had taken place in their lifetimes. If you were a Council Father born in 1900, when you were young, you would have mostly seen people traveling at the speed people had traveled since the time of Christ: on foot or by horse. But when you traveled to the Second Vatican Council in 1965, you likely would have traveled on jet plane, and your interviews on radio and television could be beamed around the world. Mankind was just four years from landing men on the moon. You would have seen two destructive world wars, the Holocaust, the murder of millions in Russia and China, and the creation of atomic weapons. We think we face changes, but they are nothing compared to the changes faced by that generation. Although we shouldn't discount the startling developments that took place in the twentieth century, we might wonder whether there was ever an age that didn't consider itself "pivotal." The ancient Greek world took itself to be "pivotal" culturally, moving past the "barbarian" cultures that did not know Greek philosophy and culture. The Romans took themselves to be "pivotal," civilizing the world with law and public works. Charlemagne saw himself as a "pivotal" figure pushing back against the Muslim invasions of Europe. Theologians in the thirteenth century described their style as "modern" to distinguish it from their predecessors. The thinkers of the Renaissance saw themselves as "pivotal," as did the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the Marxists of the twentieth century. But we're all very "modern" now, whatever that means. According to some, modernity began with Galileo and Descartes in the sixteenth century; others claim it was with Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century; and still others say "modernity" began with Darwin, Marx, and Freud in the late nineteenth century. Read Paul Johnson's classic work Modern Times and you'll find that the "modern world" began with Sir Arthur Eddington's experiments validating Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. So what does it mean to be "modern"? People used to claim we're "postmodern." But that was a while ago. I don't know what we are now. In each age, the claim was made that "it's a new age," so "everything will be different now." When America was discovered, they called it "the New World," and many imagined that in this "new world," everything would be different. It was, and it wasn't. The old diseases, both physical and spiritual, traveled with them. But this question about "pivotal moments" – when we face "a fork in the road" – can be traced further back...