The Catholic Thing

By Christopher Kaczor Who is Notre Dame's MVP? I don't mean the Most Valuable Player on the football team. I mean the Most Valuable Professor on the faculty. If there is any justice on earth, John Cavadini deserves that honor. At a time when many complain of poor university teachers and defections from Catholic truth, he has excelled not just for one season, but for over thirty years. More than an...

By John M. Grondelski The Institute for Family Studies just released "The Demographic Dead End: Without Action, American Population Will Soon Decline," the most recent of many studies pointing to the impending cataclysm for Western societies from extended periods of below-replacement fertility rates. The IFS study is hardly unique: more and more people and institutions are talking about population...

By Robert Royal I've been in Central Europe for the past few weeks for two educational projects, one that will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2026 and another that's just beginning. Both of them, though I left Washington thinking I was too tired to keep it up and really should be taking some vacation time, gave me – to put it simply but truly – hope. I've been teaching in and running th...

By Brad Miner In the Mile End Road, opposite to the London Hospital, there was . . . a vacant greengrocer's which was to let. The whole of the front of the shop, with the exception of the door, was hidden by a hanging sheet of canvas on which was the announcement that the Elephant Man was to be seen within . . . – from The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Frederick Treves (1923) I am not he...

By Francis X. Maier In late July, some 60,000 migrants surged into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. The migrants were mainly young males. And since 99 percent of Moroccans practice Islam, most were almost certainly Muslim. Ceuta is not a Spanish colony. It's an "autonomous city" integral to the Spanish state, with Spanish sovereignty dating back to 1580. It's thus a (hoped...

By K.E. Colombini On a trip back home to Southern California, I had the opportunity to visit the church of my baptism, my "mother church," as they say. When I became Catholic at the age of twelve, in April 1976, Holy Family, in the city of Orange, had just the previous month become the cathedral for the new diocese south of Los Angeles. Not much seemed different with the passing of nearly half a c...

By Daniel Guernsey The state of Florida is threatening to pull over a billion dollars of school choice funds from Catholic schools because those schools refuse to admit unvaccinated children in obedience to the policy of the Florida Catholic Conference. The Florida Attorney General's notice to the Conference urges it to respect the conscience rights of those Florida citizens who do not want to giv...

By Stephen P. White Next week, my wife and I will celebrate our 20th anniversary. We were just out of high school when we first met – barely a year older than our oldest daughter is now. It's enough to give even a somewhat cynical middle-aged man a case of feelings. Mostly, though, I am grateful for all the unmerited blessings that have shaped our lives over the past two decades. As is always the...

By Kristen Ziccarelli Today, August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, commemorates one of the most mysterious moments in Christ's public ministry. Ascending Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John, Jesus is transfigured before them. His face shines "like the sun," and His garments become dazzling white, Moses and Elijah appear beside Him, and the Father's voice declares, "This is my beloved Son...

By Casey Chalk Earlier this month, Orlando-based evangelist and social media influencer Whitney Lynn posted a video of herself offering a brief preaching session as passengers prepared to debark an airplane in San Diego. Below the clip – in which most people seemed either oblivious or trying to ignore her – Lynn wrote: "I just love a captive audience." On 30 July, Lynn was even bounced from a San...

By Randall Smith There was a bit of a kerfuffle a few years back over the phrase in the Our Father: "Lead us not into temptation." It was suggested that the phrase be changed to "do not let us fall into temptation," reasoning that the original wording incorrectly implies God pushes people into sin, whereas it is Satan's domain to tempt. It is certainly true that God does not lead people into sin,...

By Robert Royal This is the first summer in quite a while that circumstances have prevented me from taking a walking pilgrimage, usually something like the Camino de Compostela (here) or the Via Francigena (which nearly killed me a few years ago between the heat and distance (here). My favorite, however, is still St. Cuthbert's Way, which runs from Melrose in Scotland over the mountains on the bor...

By Joanna Bogle This summer, as in so many summers past, I will be making a pilgrimage to Walsingham. This Norfolk village is the home of England's national shrine to Our Lady, and I'll be on a coach from London, and telling the story of the shrine along the way. One result of our country's complicated history is that many Catholics – here at home but also abroad – don't know the story of some of...

By David Warren One of the best ways to keep everybody angry, and thus to let us share in the modern experience, is to use words in a left-brained sort of way. I refer, of course, to Iain McGilchrist, the writer who has given us the most thorough and accessible account of our two brains. For we, like the other senior animals, have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. Both are in use for ordin...

By Stephen P. White I am in Poland, as I am every July, for the Tertio Millennio Seminar, a three-week meeting on Catholic social teaching and the thought of John Paul II. As we often do, we began our seminar with Mass in the St. Leonard's chapel. It was there that a newly ordained Karol Wojtyla offered his first Mass on November 2, 1946. The chapel dates from the 11th century. Built in the Romane...

By Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino As everyone knows by now, the ordination of bishops carried out by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has resulted in the automatic excommunication of the six bishops involved. No matter how it may spin its canonical status, the Society is now definitively outside of the Catholic Church. Insofar as the SSPX denies the authenticity of Vatican II, this outcome was inevitable...

By Randall Smith Magnifica humanitas has been widely discussed for its approach to artificial intelligence. Pope Leo emphasizes the importance of the schools for training people to retain their humanity in the face of these challenges. If we took the encyclical as a guide to education, what sort of education would that be? An essential goal would be to educate students about the dignity of the hum...

By Michael Pakaluk When J.D. Vance's memoir of his path back to Christianity, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is described at a high level of generality, we see immediately that it is a book of the highest importance. Here is a leader on the world stage who grasps, and is not afraid to say, that Christianity has been the source of social unity for European – that is, Western – civilizatio...

By Msgr. Charles Fink There are terrible injustices in our country. There are people in jail who don't belong there and people on the street who belong in jail. But there is no country on earth where one is likely to get a fairer trial or where one will have a better chance of having a wrong righted or an injustice undone. There are glaring inequalities in our society. There are very rich and very...

By Robert Royal and Brad Miner and Francis X. Maier and Michael Pakaluk and Joseph R. Wood In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo invokes the Biblical story of Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem as a poignant alternative to the Tower of Babel's effort to reach Heaven without God. It's a good reminder – but of something more than the pope indicated. In the days of walled cities, rebuilding walls...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza In the early days of July 1826, Thomas Jefferson "marshalled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July." So writes Jon Meacham in his marvelous biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Jefferson did, repeatedly asking in his final agony in the evening hours of July 3: "This is the Fourth?" He finally heard the...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray The canonically illegal consecration/ordination (the terms are interchangeable) of four new bishops by two Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) bishops who were themselves illegally ordained by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre 38 years ago is a renewed wound upon the Mystical Body of Christ. This schismatic act of disobedience carried out in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV's public warni...

By Francis X. Maier The historian Henry Adams once described politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds," and that's often where we seem to be in these last days before our nation's 250th birthday. As a Wall Street Journal column noted earlier this week, chronic Democratic hatred of Donald Trump, along with Trump's own many "genuine sins and imagined ones, handed the left permission to co...

By Robert Royal But first a note from Robert Royal: In line with the column below, we call your attention to the series of brief commentaries on the Catechism of the Catholic Church that Fr. Gerald Murray is doing for the Faith & Reason Institute. Click here for details. You'll be happy you did. Now for today's column... Like many Americans, I've been refreshing my knowledge of the American Revolu...

By Brad Miner The Anglo-American poet, T.S. Eliot (born in St. Louis), wrote "The Hollow Men" in 1925. The poem concludes with this haunting quatrain: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. The poem appeared two years before Eliot joined the Church of England. (He had grown up in Unitarianism.) Eliot had a kind of...