The Catholic Thing

By Dmitri Solzhenitsyn But first a note: This summer, the Faith & Reason Institute held its first "Enrichment Days" – conversations about the relations between Eastern and Western Christianity – in Kosice, Slovakia. We're hoping to make this a regular activity in order to promote the presence of all orthodox Christians in the world. We're delighted to have this first column in what will be a serie...

By Stephen P. White Everyone who knows anything about Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" "knows" that it is about sex. Anyone who knows more than a little about the theology of the body understands that to say it is about sex is a bit like saying the book of Genesis is a treatise on the morality of fruit consumption. The theology of the body is an extended exercise in incarnational anthrop...

By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg Sitting atop his ivory wall, the pedantic egghead Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that any word he uses means "just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Humpty Dumpty deflects: "The question is. . . .which is to be master – that's all." Humpty Dumpty means master in the...

By Randall Smith Fulton Sheen, officially to be declared "blessed" in a few days, began his wonderful book Three to Get Married with these four sentences: It takes three to make Love in Heaven – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It takes three for Heaven to make love to earth – God, Man, and Mary, through whom God became Man. It takes three to make love in the Holy Family – Mary, and Joseph, and the c...

By Casey Chalk Earlier this year a meta-analysis in Advances in Psychological Science found a correlation between having a heightened sense of self-righteousness and what is called "third-party punishment," meaning punishing someone for a perceived infraction, even when you are not the victim of that infraction. An earlier study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people...

By Anthony Esolen In the pilot episode of the old television show The Waltons, the six Walton children have gathered outdoors in the cold and the snow, where a lady from a religious charity is handing out Christmas presents to the littler ones. The presents have been donated by people better off than almost anybody in their mountain village. She gives a present in exchange for a Bible verse. Mary...

By James P. MacGuire In 1896, Episcopal clergyman John Byron Diman founded St. George's School in Newport, R.I. It became one of the so-called Saint Grottlesex schools, that name being a portmanteau of St. George's, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Groton, and Middlesex: Protestant prep schools that fairly defined the Gilded Age But then the Rev. Diman had a change of heart. He converted to Catholicism and...

By Auguste Meyrat With many members of the Gen Z cohort (b. 1997-2012) coming of age and entering public life, it behooves older generations to understand them better. I can recall the many essays, books, and movies examining my own generation, the millennials (b. 1981-1996), as well as those assessing Generation X (b. 1965 -1980) before that. While they were not always accurate or entirely enligh...

By Michael Pakaluk "We know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good" (Romans 8:28). Disasters must come in this fallen world, and maybe they will come to us. There are relatively few sayings of Jesus which the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve. But one of these addresses the fact of disasters. About those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, or the 18 vict...

By Francis X. Maier For three of my 27 years on diocesan staff, I had the attached duty of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs. It was great work. We had good relations with local Protestant and Latter-Day Saint communities; cordial discussions with local rabbis; and personal friendships with local Greek Orthodox and American Jewish Committee leaders. With Islam, the story was different. Over t...

By Amy Fahey A little over a year ago, I took my aged father for a specialist visit. The appointment, which I still recall with painful clarity, put me in mind of the Anglo-Saxon poem known simply as "The Ruin." The manuscript is damaged, so what remains is itself a kind of ruin, a meditation on former splendor contrasted with brokenness and fragmentation. It struck me then, as it does now, as a f...

By St. Pope John Paul II Through work, man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstance...

By Brad Miner There was once a monument in Rome called Milliarium Aureum: the Golden Milestone. The Emperor Augustus erected it in the Forum in about 20 B.C. All distances in Ancient Rome were said to be marked from (or to) that spot. There's still a round remnant of it in the Roman Forum. It gave rise to the phrase, "All roads lead to Rome," for the very good reason that they did. The 12th-centur...

By Robert Lazu Kmita In a world where formal pronouns have disappeared from almost every language, and where good manners are not merely rare but actively ridiculed, we are gradually turning into grotesque versions of Shrek. Even the dwarves from Tolkien's tales, as portrayed in films of recent decades, are boorish creatures who grunt and scrape the mud from their boots against the edges of one of...

By Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF Cardinal Robert Sarah's address this summer to the European Parliament identifies a foundational problem in contemporary bioethical discourse: the widening gap between language and reality. Words that once conveyed stable meanings – "healthcare," "rights," "dignity" – are increasingly deployed with ideological elasticity. Sarah warns this linguistic instability constitu...

By Stephen P. White Today the Church marks the feast of St. Gregory the Great, pope and doctor of the Church. He was born around 540, just a few years before the death of another great European saint (and co-patron of Europe) Benedict of Nursia. The lives of these two men are similar in interesting ways. But the ways in which their lives ultimately diverge also reveal something about how the Lord...

By Joanna Bogle In London, on the corner near the Marble Arch, there's a noteworthy medallion on a traffic island commemorating Tyburn Tree. When English Catholics think of Tyburn, they think of the martyrs who died there – dragged through the streets after torture in the Tower of London, hanged, racked, and disemboweled, denied mercy unless they were prepared to deny loyalty to the Catholic Churc...

By Randall Smith The Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes says that the Church has the duty of responding to "the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other," in "language intelligible to each generation." So too, one often hears that the Church should be "in dialogue" with the modern...

By Robert Royal In 1945, Louis Budenz – a Communist activist and managing editor of the party's newspaper The Daily Worker – was received back into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen. The two men had met earlier because Sheen had been publishing devastating critiques of Communism. The Communist Party USA sent Budenz to Sheen to try to turn him – presumably because Sheen had also expressed some cr...

By Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky At times it's enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to question whether we need priests, bishops, and popes – or even the Church. (Protestants have, for 500 years.) Why not dismiss them...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza This summer I got a new favorite song – Bob Dylan's Chimes of Freedom. It's not a new song; it dates from the early 1960s. It remained entirely unknown to me until a few months back at Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen used it as the final song on his Land of Hope and Dreams tour. He used it, too, on his European tour last year. I am not the only one who oft...

By Msgr. Charles Fink Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something such that it has the remarkable capacity to evolve into the complex yet orderly universe we behold, so orderly that predictability and science are possible? Why do even the simplest living cells contain genetic information analogous to complex computer codes? These are not meaningless questions. Nor is it obvio...

By Michael Pakaluk Search the Catechism, the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, indeed the entire Vatican website – search all you want – for teaching about what we call the "national debt." You will not find it. You can find teaching about the debt that poorer nations owe to wealthier nations, "foreign debt," but not about the debt that a government accumulates through financing deficits. So...

By Francis X. Maier One of my favorite, if cynical, figures from Reformation history and Europe's Wars of Religion is Henri de Bourbon. Raised as a committed (Calvinist) Huguenot, he succeeded to the French throne as Henri IV. But in a dominantly Catholic nation, he faced fierce resistance. So he did the pragmatic thing. He converted. His motives may have been dubious. But a line attributed to him...

By Kristen Ziccarelli There are few things more foreign to the modern imagination than the idea of a Christian king. We are accustomed to separating the sacred from the political, faith from public life, and the Church from the ordering of society. But for much of Christian history, these divisions would have seemed all but impossible. Today's feast of King St. Louis IX of France (August 25) offer...