The Catholic Thing

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...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia What is a thing worth? In economics, it's relative. Prices fluctuate. Markets rise and fall. A thing is worth what someone's willing to pay for it. Back in the 1980s, my LPs were worth a lot. With the arrival of CDs, they were worth almost nothing. Then, when vinyl became cool again, they had new worth. The problem is that we apply the same economic, relativistic thinking to...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza The Cardinals attending the extraordinary consistory in Rome will depart today, just as the customary delegation from the Patriarchate of Constantinople arrives for the solemn feast of Peter and Paul. It's an annual fraternal custom. A delegation from Rome visits Constantinople for the feast of St. Andrew on November 30th. Last year, Pope Leo XIV led the delegation perso...

By Joseph R. Wood A long drive recently allowed me to listen to the unabridged audiobook of Homer's Odyssey. It was worth all 780+ minutes. Hearing the poem helped me understand why it is foundational to the Western understanding of human life, and how archetypal it is of human experience. My reactions are not those of a well-versed critic, but only those of an amateur, who undertakes an activity...

By Stephen P. White As you surely know, not least because it has been mentioned repeatedly in these pages, the bishops of the United States, in preparation of the celebration for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence have consecrated the entire nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. No doubt you also know, faithful readers of The Catholic Thing, that the image of the Sacred Heart...

By Msgr. Charles Fink It's a commonplace observation that most people think more readily in pictures than in abstract concepts, and that stories move and transform us in ways that logical arguments often don't. God, who of course knows this, therefore has revealed Himself to us, as C.S. Lewis put it, by writing Himself into a part in our story – at once author of the whole and character in the pla...

By Randall Smith and Luis E. Lugo The next synod might or might not deal with the Church's "just war" doctrine. So, let me go on record as saying: I don't like war. It doesn't represent a great "profile in courage" to say that. I mean, who loves war? I suppose some tyrants do. But that poses a problem. If tyrants pursue wars in order to secure their positions of power, what are others who hate war...

By Robert Royal There's a strange ferment underway in American education. This week, two promising Catholic initiatives emerged: a gathering at Christendom College on K-12 education that resulted in the Front Royal Principles, and a high-level consultation in Washington D.C. organized by the Cardinal Newman Society, pursuing the renewal of everything from kindergarten to college-level Catholic ins...

By St. Pope John Paul II Excerpted from Address of John Paul II to the members of the Pontifical Council for the Family, June 4, 1999 The theme of fatherhood, which you have chosen for this plenary meeting, refers to the third year of preparation for the Great Jubilee, dedicated precisely to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is worthwhile reflecting on this theme, since in today's family the...

By Auguste Meyrat Among the greatest challenges that Jesus poses to His disciples are His prescriptions on wealth. On the one hand, Jesus extolls poverty. He begins the Beatitudes with the declaration, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Elsewhere in the Gospels, He tells a rich man to give away all his possessions since "it is easier for a camel to pass through...

By Richard A. Spinello There are many crises in the Catholic Church today, but one of the most serious is the dismal state of moral theology. That crisis has its roots in the confusion and intellectual ferment that ensued in the aftermath of Vatican II. Progressive moral theologians proposed questionable moral theories like proportionalism and the "fundamental option," while prominent scholars lik...

By Michael Pakaluk During the high point of investment clubs – back in the dark ages, long ago, in 1998! – mom and pop investors would gather and use a tool such as the NAIC's "Stock Selection Guide," to pick stocks based on a ten-year record of sales, earnings, and profitability. These sober "retail investors" wouldn't even look at a prospectus. A newly launched company was simply too speculative...

By Francis X. Maier On a cool October evening some years back, a young woman – let's call her Jenny, age 18 – checked into St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica and gave birth to a baby boy. Her friends had urged her to have an abortion. So did her boyfriend, Jack, also 18, who waited with us now outside the delivery room, his eyes red with feelings he didn't expect and couldn't put a name to. I sat...