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The Catholic Thing
By Michael Pakaluk. But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, March 28, 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 Pope Francis' health, ongoing controveries about the handling of financial and sexual scandals in the Church, reactions of bishops to political changes in America, 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... One way to tell whether one person knows another well, is whether he is familiar with what that other person likes and does not like. Aristotle said it was a mark of friendship to like and dislike the same things. Maybe those who do, can spend more time together, with less conflict. At very least, to know what someone likes is a test of friendship. Country music or classical? Fast cars or punting on a lazy river? Ethnic food or mac n' cheese? Therefore, if we are friends with Jesus, we should have an idea of what He likes and dislikes. I mean, in His human nature - those likes and dislikes which have the character of tastes, or visceral reactions. Jesus loved mercy and hated sin, of course. Did He react viscerally to sin, in His human nature? Presumably so. And yet perhaps, even here, He did so more viscerally to some sins than to others. He had to have had likes and dislikes, like all of us, if He assumed a genuine human nature. When we think of such things, we often begin with food. Let's start there. Do we know anything about the food He liked? Newman said that He preferred simplicity. After the Resurrection, on the shore, when Peter and His friends were in the boat fishing, He could have prepared for Himself, by His infinite might, any meal that He wished. It was an Easter meal, after all. You or I might have chosen filet mignon and fine wine. Yet Jesus roasted one small fish and some bread over a charcoal fire. (Jn 21:9) On the other hand, He had a taste for fine wine, "thou hast kept the good wine until now." (Jn 2:10) And with magnanimity, He recognized the place for it, in abundance, at the celebration of a wedding. In clothing He seemed to despise luxury, "But what did you go out to see? a man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings." (Mt. 11:8) And yet He loved good workmanship, because He wore next to himself an exquisite garment, so well-wrought that even coarse soldiers declined to tear it. (Jn 19:23) He must have liked to walk. Hundreds of miles of journeys on foot are attributed to Him in the Gospels. He clearly loved being outdoors, for days on end. From His teachings, we know he loved nature, flowers, birds, fish in the sea, the seasons, the sky. He liked climbing mountains. He liked the solitude and quiet of nature. His earthly father, Joseph, picked where He was to grow up. But in doing so, Joseph was only following the Lord's own providence. It was Jesus who selected the place of His own childhood. What did He like? Not a city, but a small village on a lake, remote from any city, a full two days' journey from Jerusalem. The lake is beautiful and self-contained, a place that a small boy can easily view as his home. He loved going through life with family and relatives. He could have told them to stay behind but, clearly, He invited them to follow Him around. He liked hospitality; His was an open household. We think of His instructions to the Apostles, "You find them something to eat," in the face of the 5,000 and 4,000, as a special test of their faith. But what if He was merely saying what He usually said when many guests would be joining them for dinner? In politics, He expressed no liking for democracy, when He might have. His own government was a mixture of monarchy (Peter), aristocracy (the Apos...…
By Francis X. Maier. Here's a fun fact: In December 1990, the planet had exactly one website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. A year later, total global websites numbered 50. By December 1993, there were 623; by January 1996, 100,000; by April 2008 (around the time The Catholic Thing started), 162 million. Today the number is north of 1.1 billion. About 4 percent of those websites are pornography-related. Predictably, given the potholes in human nature, porn-related web searches are sharply higher. But overall, for better or worse, it's now almost impossible to imagine (or remember) a world without Google search, Amazon shopping, and unhinged YouTube videos like The Sound of Music: Action Recut. I mention this because we humans have a genius for wandering into problems we should have seen coming. Here's an example. One of the men who helped shape my adult thinking was the media scholar Neil Postman. In 1996, as the Internet exploded, we had the first of several conversations. A neophyte tech addict - I'd taught myself Linux and the joys of the command line interface (CLI) - I bubbled on about the web's democratizing impact; how it would horizontalize power structures; how everyone could now have a voice in world affairs, national governance, etc. Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, listened patiently. Then he suggested that too much information, too raw, too loose, too loud, from too many sources, might not have happy results. The greater and faster the flow of information, the more opportunities for confusion and conflict. The more confusion and conflict, the more the need for curators. And curators - elected or expert or not, he said - come in all flavors, including unpleasantly controlling, deceitful ones, as the COVID experience later proved. Postman was far from authoritarian in politics. He was classically secular and liberal. He simply foresaw the potential for anarchy in a culture overwhelmed by new tools and unable to digest the tsunami of new ideas, ambiguities, and appetites they create. He understood that fragmentation inevitably breeds anxiety and the need for centralized power to offset a culture's turmoil. Postman died in 2003, before the birth of Facebook (2004), Twitter now X (2006), Substack (2017), and Bluesky (2019). The information torrent that triggered his concern has only increased - exponentially. To be fair, much of it is good. Facebook connects families and friends. Thousands of excellent religious resources are available online (including publications like this one). Substack hosts the work of terrific new and established voices like Matthew Crawford, Iain McGilchrist, N.S. Lyons, Paul Kingsnorth, Nathan Pinkoski, Mary Harrington, and many others; writers who can say what they want, whenever and however they want. The trouble is that all these information formats also host a generous share of nutcases, liars, and haters. . .who also say and argue whatever they want in the same space. Tracking real reality - the news and views that comprise a truthful understanding of the world - becomes a challenge of catching facts in a hurricane-strength wind tunnel. The result is fatigue, tribalism, and (too often) grievance. Grievance culture is venomous. It's also self-sustaining, like a colony of ticks in the secret places of the heart, because there's always another oppressor to expose and indict. It's true that anger is not always a bad thing. It's a natural response to wickedness and corruption. In Luke 19:45, Jesus himself shows a righteous anger toward the Temple's moneychangers. But anger is, by nature, corrosive. It feels good in an ugly sort of way because it so often involves a moralizing exercise that subtly reinforces the self: I was mistreated, or I see others mistreated. So I want justice. I demand justice, now. I don't care about the cost. And I want the transgressors punished. So let me tell you all about it - online. Resentment is ad...…
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The Catholic Thing
By Dominic V. Cassella. Before St. John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism, he gave a series of sermons to the students of Oxford. The last of these University Sermons provided a brief theory of developments in religious doctrine, and he took for his model Mary, the Mother of God. Quoting Luke 2:19 - "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart" - Newman offers Mary as a model of faith since when she was provided with the Angel's message, she does not question it like Zacharias; she accepts without question, but ponders it. Our Lady "is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it. . . .she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel." In this way, Mary the Seat of Wisdom is a clear and evident model for all who want to arrive at the Truth. It's no surprise then that several faithfully Catholic, and even lapsed Catholic, universities are dedicated to or named after Mary. Jesus Christ is the "big t" Truth, and He took on human flesh in the womb of Mary, where He grew from conception until birth. Similarly, the "little t" truth conceived in our own minds, often finds its conception and growth in the classroom, through great books, and with good teachers - all part of a healthy university. But being named after our Lady does not guarantee that truth (big or little "t") is treasured there. As Anne Hendershott carefully lays out in her recent book A Lamp in the Darkness: How Faithful Catholic Colleges Are Helping to Save the Church, some once grand institutions are less interested in being the Seat of Wisdom and more akin to wisdom abortionists. Throughout the book, Hendershott profiles many of the Colleges she refers to as the "faithful few," those colleges and universities recognized as truly Catholic Institutions by the Newman College Guide. And alongside these, she provides an account of the shortcomings and failures of other institutions that were once "Catholic" in a meaningful sense. One of the most frequent guises for shedding one's Catholic Identity is the "Academic Freedom" claim, which itself echoes the pro-abortion movement: instead of "my body, my choice," the relativist proponents of loose academic freedom proclaim, "my mind, my truth." Catholic Institutions have been struggling with the embarrassment of their fidelity to Church teaching since Charles W. Eliot (Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909) wrote that the Catholic university curriculum was "the most backward educational system of religious fundamentalists." Such criticisms of Catholic education continued both from within and without Catholic universities, finding its institutional expression on June 20, 1967, when Notre Dame president Theodore M. Hesburgh and a small group of Catholic academic leaders declared "independence" from Church authority in what is known as the Land O'Lakes statement. Almost sixty years later, Notre Dame, the ring leader of Land O'Lakes, is hosting a self-described "transgender man" and "abortion doula" and describes DEI as something "equally important" to Catholicism.. Contrast this with one of the faithful few that Hendershott profiles. In early 2024, an "abortion doula" was invited to speak by a teacher at The Catholic University of America. Within the week, the school's president, Peter Kilpatrick, dismissed the professor. In responding to the event, Kilpatrick wrote, "As a Catholic institution, we are committed to promoting the full truth of the human person. . . .we do so fully confident in the clarity given by the combined lights of reason and faith, and we commit to never advocate for sin or to give moral equivalence to error." For a Catholic institution ...…
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The Catholic Thing
By Robert Royal. "NUNC et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death. . ." So begins the celebrated modern Italian novel, Il Gattopardo - in English, The Leopard, though the animal in question is, accurately translated, the "ocelot." But that name wouldn't have adequately conveyed the grandeur of the protagonist, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an imposing Sicilian nobleman, as the island is being invaded in the 1860s and absorbed into the emerging nation of Italy. That the author, himself the Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, thought to place the passing of the old monarchic order and birth of a new one amid those large realities in the Ave, however, is noteworthy. I know of no other significant work of fiction that starts in a similar way. And it's even more surprising in that Lampedusa wasn't an especially Catholic writer, though he was an admirer of novelists like Graham Greene and, in complex ways, several Christian currents in history. The greatest Italian Catholic novel, and perhaps the greatest Catholic novel ever, is Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, a book on the order of War and Peace. But it's just one indication of the subtle richness that has made The Leopard a classic that it almost imperceptibly frames earthiness and world-historical events in light of eternity, via what to many might seem just the most conventional of Catholic devotions. The Prince is a passionate man with a mistress, a streak of religious skepticism, and a manner that intimidates people. But he also has a shadowy Catholic conscience in the family chaplain, Father Perrone, who's deferential but, at times, a true spiritual counselor. Netflix has just brought out a six-part "adaptation" of the novel, which does not start with the Rosary or bring to life the large human questions. Like most modern stories, it overdoes sex and romantic intrigues, and it even fails to capture the great beauties of Sicily. Better to watch the older Visconti film - at half the running time - with Burt Lancaster (a real-life "leopard") as the prince. (Normally, I'd defer to noted film critic, one B. Miner, for such judgments, but I've been living with this novel since my early Italian studies, many moons ago.) It describes a period like ours in some respects, when the whole way of life of a people is being threatened by "progress." The line most often cited from the book is pronounced by the Prince's reckless, romantic nephew, Tancredi, as he's going off to join the revolutionaries: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change." I've never been quite sure about what that means, and neither is the Prince. It may simply mean that Tancredi, intoxicated with radical politics, just doesn't know what he's talking about. Because things are certainly not the same after the change in regime. Even today, some still lament that radical change. I was driving in Palermo once with a Sicilian art historian on Via della Libertà and was surprised that, like the Prince, this sophisticated man, too, deplored the conquerors from the mainland (a century-and-a-half earlier!). He claimed that they had substituted deep personal loyalty to a man (king) with shallow adherence to abstractions. Like Libertà, I asked? Yes, he said. The Prince appears to have much deeper historical intuitions than his wild nephew: the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery. . . .Do you really think. . .that you are the first who has hoped to canalize Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem imams, how many of King Roger's knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin Barons, how many jurist...…
By Fr. Paul D. Scalia. The famous Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil is often credited with the saying, "All politics is local." Now, I'm not particularly interested in the political part of that statement. But I am interested in how it applies to my line of work. You could say that all salvation is local. It happens in particular souls. And you don't get any more local than that. Our salvation - yours and mine - does not happen out there, in some other place or in someone else's life. It doesn't occur in the media or latest gossip, online or otherwise. It doesn't depend on our knowing the latest political intrigue or celebrity news. It depends on our personal and interior adherence to the Lord. But we love to be distracted because this reality can be daunting. We fear that God is too close, too personal. Too local. So we distract ourselves by looking elsewhere, to other people, places, and things. But salvation doesn't happen somewhere else. It happens locally, where we are. And we shouldn't choose to be elsewhere. That's precisely what's going on in today's Gospel. (Luke 13:1-9) The crowd is fascinated with current events: Some people told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. Clearly, they're reporting a recent news story. It has all the elements of good copy: politics, religion, violence, death. The people have the mistaken belief that bad things only happen to evil-doers. And that gives them the nice, warm feeling of moral superiority. Well, we're not as bad as those Galileans. . .because those things didn't happen to us. But the deeper problem is that their attention is elsewhere. The Lord Himself stands in front of them, and they just want to dish the latest news. Yes, there's an ugliness to the gossip. But what's worse is that their attention elsewhere creates an obstacle to the Gospel. They lack the necessary presence, self-awareness, and reflection to hear our Lord. So He corrects them. Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! He even goes further and mentions another event that seems to have been in the news: Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them - do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! By these rebukes our Lord focuses them - and us - on what's most immediate and important, on their own souls. Twice He directs their thoughts and concerns to their own status: I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish! In effect, Don't spend time worrying about people and events that do not concern you. Tend to your own soul and to the penance you need to do. Now, we might not share the crowd's flawed theology that disasters only befall evil doers. But otherwise, we bear a great resemblance to them. We are fascinated and distracted by events that don't concern us. We have an entire media industry that depends on our desire for distraction and for the intimate details of celebrities and others. We're only too willing to oblige. Eighty years ago, Father Edward Leen wrote of the modern world's "cult of unreality." Obviously, that cult has only grown since. Our technology gives us the constant ability to flee reality. We can always be somewhere else, distracted from the here and now, not present to ourselves or to Him. This caters to our fallen nature's penchant for distraction. Man has always tended toward distraction, but we've made an industry of it. And much of this distraction is picking through the lives of complete strangers. Because it's much easier to pore over the sins of others than to repent of our own. Plus, we can enjoy a little moral outrage and superiority. We omit any reflection on our own faults because those people over there have done ...…
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The Catholic Thing
By Stephen P. White During this season of Lent, we make it a point of discipline and charity to pray, fast, and give alms. It has long been my practice to make a special effort during this season to pray, with more consistency than I manage during the rest of the year, the Liturgy of the Hours. For anyone looking to structure his day around prayer - rather than being content to fit prayer within the allowances of a busy day - the Divine Office is particularly beneficial. To pray this prayer is to join the countless priests and religious (and a growing number of lay men and women) for whom the praying of the Divine Office sets the rhythm of daily life throughout the year. It is a privileged way of praying, as St. Paul exhorted, unceasingly. The Second Vatican Council touched on this point in Sacrosanctum Concilium: "When this wonderful song of praise [the Divine Office] is rightly performed. . .then it is truly the voice of the bride addressed to her bridegroom; It is the very prayer which Christ Himself, together with His body, addresses to the Father." At the heart of the Office are the Psalms, which have been the hymns of God's people since the days of the Old Covenant. We sing from the Psalms at every Mass, of course, but I never appreciated the beauty and power of the Psalms until I learned to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. There is something about the recitation of the verses, and the repeated recitation of the verses, which I have long found more conducive to meditation and prayer than listening to a cantor or singing only a response, as at the Mass. That said, the Psalms are meant to be sung. Chanted with reverence, or set to an appropriate melody, the Psalms take on an entirely different dimension. Anyone who has heard Allegri's haunting polyphonic setting for Psalm 51 will understand this. Perhaps more than any other book in the Bible, the Psalms are meant to be prayed or sung not just heard. St. Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria and great opponent of Arianism, was particularly eloquent in his advocacy of praying the Psalms. His Letter to Marcellinus concerning the Psalms is a neglected classic. "The whole divine Scripture is the teacher of virtue and true faith," writes Athanasius, "but the Psalter gives a picture of the spiritual life." There is a Psalm for every purpose and occasion, as St. Athanasius notes: "We are bidden elsewhere in the Bible also to bless the Lord and to acknowledge Him: here in the Psalms we are shown the way to do it, and with what sort of words His majesty may meetly be confessed. In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls' need at every turn." Herein lies another particular beauty of the Psalms. Not only is there a Psalm for every occasion - from rejoicing to desolation - but these inspired hymns are the self-same hymns of the People of Israel, of Moses and Solomon, of King David, and of the Lord Jesus Himself. In praying the Psalms, their words become our own, and our prayers become as their prayers. When we pray or sing the Psalms, we are singing and praying in our own voice, from our own perspective. The Psalms are, in this sense, Scripture in the first person. There is tremendous power in that. St. Athanasius elaborates on this point: In the other books of Scripture we read or hear the words of holy men as belonging only to those who spoke them, not at all as though they were our own; and in the same way the doings there narrated are to us material for wonder and examples to be followed, but not in any sense things we have done ourselves. With this book, however, though one does read the prophecies about the Savior in that way, with reverence and with awe, in the case of all the other Psalms it is as though it were one's own words that one read; and anyone who hears them is moved at heart, as though they voiced for him his deepest thoughts. Surely it is no coincidence that Athanasius, th...…
By David Warren. We still do not know - anything, really - about the "coronavirus pandemic" that passed through the news five years ago. We agreed to a fortnight to "contain the spread," on Dr. Birx's advice, now 130 fortnights ago. Needless to say, her official mission seems to have ended, along with Dr. Fauci's, and for the moment we do not endure arbitrary public health instructions. Things like churches are open again; and restrictions on prayer are only in effect near abortion clinics, or in communist jurisdictions, such as England. We have "experience" now, I read in the media. Perhaps the main thing we have "learned" is that lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates, travel restrictions, quarantines, social distancing, contact tracing, &c, were either useless against the Batflu, or made it worse - the medical versions of "the process is the punishment." I wrote "learned" sarcastically. In fact, the worthlessness of each of these proposed remedies was fully known and demonstrated in all previous "pandemics." The public health "experts" were in a position to warn us against each of these old wives' tales, but falsely promoted them in the name of "science." As to whether the "vaccines" were any more use than other pharmaceuticals - or the infamous ventilator machines - I have no special insight. My skepticism, which did not require a medical degree, has been growing quite radically, since the "Batflu" was first announced. Too many untruths were told about it. And by the summer of 2020, the "experts" were supporting mass political demonstrations, cheered on by hospital staff in every "progressive" urban environment, that contradicted their own explicit medical instructions. In view of this obvious and total hypocrisy, people like me became convinced that expert views on public health should be ignored. Nevertheless, they were legally enforced, in all those theaters where human freedom is held in contempt. By coincidence, this was about the time my spiritual master died, at an advanced age, and not from the COVID virus. (Fr. Jonathan Robinson, 3 June 2020.) His funeral could not be attended. The "old world," in which the life of Christian nations could be taken for granted, was now over. As, imperfectly enough, an "old Christian," I had the new feeling of being entirely on my own. This was subtly confirmed by various environmentalist pronouncements, coming from the Vatican. The Church herself seemed to be surrendering to the public health authorities. And even the pope, apparently, was no longer Catholic. How could this be? But this was a panic as indefensible as the Batflu response. For there is God, there is Christ, there is the Spirit; and the created universe does not change like a transient political event. My own learning, about the best and also the worst of medical procedures in my little corner of the world, happened a year later when I suffered a heart attack and stroke: also quite unrelated to the Batflu. It was my first sudden acquaintance with life in a "world-class" public hospital, where I would encounter the abilities and efficiencies of doctors and nurses. Several happy truths would be illustrated. Yet I would also come up against the influences that were undermining, possibly destroying, what had been one of the most splendid features of Western, Christian civilization. For Western medicine, its clinics and hospitals, were the creations of the Church, and patronized almost exclusively by the Church, over many centuries. Even today, in non-Christian countries, medical services and investments are largely in the hands of Christian missionaries (in the broadest sense) or are modeled on Christian institutions (e.g. the Red Crescent after the Red Cross). In the West, however, the healing art has been mostly nationalized, or crudely commercialized, and tax monies have replaced the work of charitable religious orders. A conscious effort to desanctify the hospitals has accompanied the heathen and atheist move...…
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1 Processes, Accompaniment, Implementation: Synodality Forever! 6:14
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedBy Fr. Gerald E. Murray. But first a note: TCT's three-week online course on St. Bonaventure's "The Soul's Journey into God" starts TONIGHT! Don't miss this opportunity to enrich your spiritual life this Lent. Just click here for more information about the course and how to register. Now for today's column... The unending process that is the Synod on Synodality has taken a new and unexpected turn. The current "Implementation Phase" of the three-year synodal path, following the conclusion of last Fall's Synodal Assembly in Rome, has now become the preparatory phase for something no one has ever heard of in the Catholic Church, namely an "Ecclesial Assembly." In a March 15 letter to the bishops of the world, the General Secretariat of the Synod announced that it will now "start a process of accompaniment and evaluation of the implementation phase" of the conclusions of the Synodal Assembly's Final Document by the dioceses of the world. "It will ultimately culminate in the celebration of an ecclesial assembly in the Vatican in October 2028. For now, therefore, a new Synod will not be convened; instead, the focus will be on consolidating the path taken so far." So, the synodal path now leads, ironically, to the canceling of the next synodal assembly, which will be replaced by a new and improved type of assembly that will stand in judgment over the whole synodal process: "the celebration of the ecclesial assembly in October 2028 will be structured in such a way as to offer adequate and sustainable times for the implementation of the Synod's indications, while also providing some significant moments of evaluation." It seems, remarkably, that a synodal assembly itself is not an "adequate and sustainable" time to evaluate the work of implementing the synodal path. Naturally, the question arises: What is an ecclesial assembly? Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the General Secretariat of the Synod, was interviewed on this question by Andrea Tornielli, Editorial Director of the Dicastery for Communications. Grech cautioned that "as we are dealing with the first time there will be an ecclesial assembly at the level of the entire Church, there are many things which have yet to be determined." He is, however, perfectly clear on one point - it will be different from the synodal assembly: "the Assembly is ecclesial, which is meant to stress its distinct nature and function with respect to the synodal Assembly which we have just celebrated, which is and remains substantially an Assembly of Bishops." [Emphasis added.] Insofar as this statement has any discernible meaning, Grech seems to be suggesting that, even with the inclusion of non-bishops, the bishops were, unsurprisingly, the majority at the assembly of the Synod of Bishops. This, apparently, is not synodal enough. So, the Ecclesial Assembly will not be "substantially" an assembly of bishops. It will be substantially an assembly of non-bishops, which means that most participants will be lay people. The Ecclesial Assembly will more or less mirror the demographics of the Ecclesia (Church) in which the clergy, let alone the bishops, make up a tiny fraction of the number of baptized Catholics. Here we see the trajectory of the not-so-slow-motion revolution that goes by the name of synodality: The Second Vatican Council's call for the creation of a Synod of Bishops to assist the pope in his governance of the Universal Church, primarily through periodic assemblies in Rome to discuss determined topics, became in Pope Francis' pontificate a forum in which a select group of lay people, deacons, priests, religious men and women were joined together as equal participants, in voting but not in number, with the bishops at the synodal assembly. Now, that way of proceeding has been judged to be inadequate for carrying out the work of synodality. A new gathering called an Ecclesial Assembly, in which bishops will not be the majority, will now have the final word on what synodality means and...…
By Casey Chalk. "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church," famously opined Venerable Servant of God Fulton Sheen, "but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be." I'd go a step further: if there's one thing that people, regardless of their religious affiliation, feel competent and confident to speak on, it seems to be the Catholic Church. Everybody seems to know what it teaches and why, and, by extension, why it's dead wrong. Rarely does one hear people speak so dismissively about other religious traditions or institutions, say Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Islam, all of which our culture has decided to various degrees are deserving of a certain deferential respect. Given the prominence of Catholicism even in 21st-century America - as well as the tens of millions of "former Catholics" (the second largest religious group after Catholics themselves) - one could say that familiarity breeds contempt. Yet familiarity does not necessarily breed accurate knowledge, as Catholic writer and podcaster (and former Episcopalian priest) Andrew Petiprin argues in his new book, The Faith Unboxed: Freeing the Catholic Church from the Containers People Put It In. Over eight chapters discussing eight of these inaccurate "boxes," Petiprin sets the record straight in ways that even long-time, practicing Catholics may find surprising. Petiprin begins by noting that the Church is not an ideology such as liberalism with its specifically progressivist and individualist bent; nor is it conservative in the sense that it is strictly traditionalist or perfectly aligned with the Republican Party. Christ Himself repudiated those who placed their faith in the traditions of men. (Mark 7:1-13) As much as the Church upholds Holy Tradition as a source of divine revelation, she also possesses a certain revolutionary impulse in her repudiation of even long-standing cultural norms if they are opposed to the Gospel, whether we are talking about ancient Rome or indigenous peoples in the Americas. Moreover, as Petiprin observes, the word "Catholicism" never appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nor is it in any official Catholic document: "The Church is not a way to navigate reality, but rather the experience of reality. The Church is not a collection of ideas to lay atop human society, but the organization of humanity." The Church is also not a "denomination." While Protestant denominations "come and go, come together, and break apart," the Catholic Church asserts herself as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and history has borne out that identity. The Catholic Church does not even recognize "denominations" as such, but rather ecclesial communions that, via their sacraments ,enjoy various degrees of communion with her. Petiprin cites St. Paul as perhaps the earliest critic of this idea that the Church could be divided into denominations: "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul." (1 Corinthians 1:13) Is the Church an institution? Petiprin thinks not: "Human beings create institutions, whereas God created the Church." I might quarrel with denying the Church is some sense an institution (she is, after all, composed of humans), but he has a point that the Church is not solely a this-worldly institution, one whose role is strictly defined by her various social programs rather than the salvation she offers. Such a conception neglects the fact that the Church is the body of Christ, with the Eucharist at its center: "The Catholic Church is the experience of the common destiny of man - eucharistic man - transformed into Christ by Christ, living in a present that intersects with eternity." People may join clubs, but "joining" doesn't apply in the same sense to the Church. Though similar to a club, the Church demands a certain doctrinal and liturgical uniformity; she is also, to cite a phrase of James Joyce's, "here comes ev...…
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The Catholic Thing
1 Saint Bonaventure's Journey of the Mind into God 6:16
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedBy Randall Smith. One of the hardest goals to achieve in Catholic education is an embodiment in practice of the vision Pope John Paul II laid out in Ex corde ecclesiae and in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: an education animated both by the truths of faith and the truths of reason. As John Paul II expressed beautifully at the beginning of Fides et Ratio: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know Himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves." In the modern world, we seem to be fans of divorce: separating things meant to be kept together in a fruitful communion. In education, we depend on disciplinary divisions and teach our students to compartmentalize their minds as well as their lives. Contemporary education teaches them about work and little or nothing about marriage and family. It teaches them technical knowledge without imparting wisdom about its use in a full, flourishing human life lived in communion with others. As T. S. Eliot warns in The Waste Land: Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images. Catholic education is not immune from this fragmentation. And to the common fragmentation between the academic disciplines, it often adds its own divorce between the life of the mind and the life of the soul, between the truths of faith and the truths of reason. For some, a Catholic education is about "getting young people to Heaven," and so the focus is on piety rather than on educational excellence. Others view a "Catholic" education as essentially no different from a non-Catholic or secular education, directed primarily at "success" as the secular world understands that term, involving some combination of wealth, power, status, in the realization of one's creative self-expressive individualism. What both approaches to education miss is that a Catholic education could be of the highest quality and lead people to God, and vice versa, that an education leading people to God could produce the highest quality education. If we need to be reminded of this, we can turn to the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church, such as Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, and St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventure in the West, men who combined great intellect with great faith and devotion to God. A profound example of the marriage of intellect and faith, academic learning and creative imagination, can be found in St. Bonaventure's Journey of the Mind into God. The Latin title is Itinerarium mentis in deum, and that little word mens, mentis can be translated either as "mind" or "soul." Itinerarium is obviously the precursor to our word "itinerary." It is a guide for the journey. Bonaventure's itinerary of the ascent of the mind into God was inspired, he tells us, by St. Francis's vision of a six-winged seraphic angel with two wings covering its feet, two in the middle of its body, and two over its head. In its center, Francis saw a vision of the crucified Christ that imparted to him the stigmata, the wounds of Christ in his own flesh. Bonaventure associates the two wings of the angel pointing downward with the vision of God we get from our contemplation of creation. The two in the middle of the angel's body, he associates with the vision of God we get from looking within ourselves. And the top two wings pointing above, he associates with the glimpses we get of God from reflecting on God as the Source of all Being, on the one hand, and the Source of all Goodness, on the other. But what is above all that? Remember that at the center of the six-winged creature is the crucified Christ. What completely transcends the mind? What goodness and love is so great that we cannot even begin to grasp it by our intellect alone? The fact that God has become flesh and ...…
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The Catholic Thing
By Mary Eberstadt. But first a note from the Editor: The following remarks were delivered in slightly different form at a conference on "Catholics and Antisemitism: Facing the Past, Shaping the Future," co-sponsored by the Catholic Information Center and the Philos Project, March 10, 2025, in Washington, D.C. A link to the video of the conference can be found by clicking here. Now for today's column... Simone Rizkallah, PhilosCatholic: Mary, just two weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, you delivered the keynote address at a conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville titled "Nostra Aetate and the Future of Catholic-Jewish Relations at a Time of Rising Antisemitism." That same week, you published an article in the National Catholic Register titled "Catholics Against Antisemitism: Now More Than Ever." You pointed to Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965: the Church's official rejection of collective Jewish guilt; and to the personal efforts of Pope John Paul II and others to strengthen Catholic-Jewish relations. How has your understanding of antisemitism evolved since then? Mary Eberstadt: My understanding of antisemitism has not evolved. As noted in my keynote at that historic conference, "anti-Semitism is a unique evil. It has nothing to do with individual Jewish people. No, it can insinuate itself, and does, into souls with peculiar, invisible cracks of some kind. These souls needn't ever have encountered actual Jews." What has evolved is an understanding of just how crucial it is to speak to Catholics right now, especially young Catholics, about what their Catholicism means when it comes to our "elder brothers in faith," as St. John Paul II put it: the Jews. I want to share three points with my fellow Catholics today. We've all read the Catechism. Evil walks among us. Evil is real. And for Catholics to turn a blind eye to that reality in the specific case of antisemitism is just morally unacceptable. This point demands emphasis - because we Catholics, and many of our friends who are not Catholics, so frequently miss it. One often hears, for example, "What is the Catholic hierarchy doing about this or that problem, including antisemitism?" One often hears, "What has the Pope said?" - as if a billion Catholics can check their powers of prudential reason at the door, just because we have a pope. Let's leave it to the theologians among us to explain the doctrine of infallibility. Let us non-theologians just stick with the non-theological facts. A long line of teaching instructs the laity that we have a unique role on earth, and in salvation history. And if that teaching applies anywhere, it's here, pertaining to Catholics, and the need to step up against antisemitism. Catholics can't duck our individual responsibility toward Jews - or anything else. When you believe, as the Catechism and other Catholic texts teach, that you are made in the image of nothing less than God; when you believe, as some of the greatest Catholic teachers in history have instructed across the centuries, that you have been gifted with faculties of reason that allow you to approach the truths of God; you cannot avoid the injunction to "perfect the temporal order," as it says in the 1965 Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, among other places. That includes combatting hatred and violence against Jews. Simone Rizkallah: How would you persuade Catholics who might initially dismiss these concerns about antisemitism to recognize the reality of the issue?" Mary Eberstadt: That's a second point. Since October 7, 2023, two malignant ideas have quietly if unstably hovered over the Western landscape. One is that the Jews somehow brought that infamy upon themselves - classic, blame-the-victim antisemitism. It is not true, any more than it is true that the United States brought 9-11 on itself. But this smear continues to make the rounds in memes, and elsewhere online, and wherever stupid ideas are sold. A second, pseudo-sophisticated, and even ...…
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by Luis E. Lugo On the Saturday before the second Sunday of Lent in 445, Pope Leo, whose pontificate spanned more than twenty years, preached a powerful sermon on the Transfiguration. It is one of the nearly one hundred sermons that have been preserved from the first bishop of Rome to have been called Leo (twelve others would follow). The sermons hold the distinction of being the first papal homilies that have come down to us that were preached to the people during liturgical celebrations. This was the same Leo who would earn the title "the Great" because of his many notable accomplishments. One such was his decisive intervention at the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon of 451, which cemented the Christological doctrine of the three previous councils. This came by way of a letter (known as the Tome of Leo) that was read to the hundreds of assembled bishops, who, upon the completion of its reading, acclaimed in unison: "Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo." Another memorable episode took place the very next year when Leo was instrumental in preventing the sacking of Rome by Attila the Hun. When the latter entered Italy in 452, he began to sack and burn cities while winding his way to Rome. The frightened Roman population begged Leo to go out and try to persuade the fierce Hun to spare the Eternal City. Leo courageously accepted the challenge, met with Attila, and convinced him to withdraw his forces. Leo also successfully fought heresies and carried out diplomatic missions, but he was foremost a pastor to his flock. And it's in that capacity that he preached his sermon on the Transfiguration, which he based on Matthew 17:1-13. Leo sets the context by referring back to the previous chapter in Matthew, specifically to Peter's famous confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah. This Christ, Leo explains, was indeed the only begotten Son of God, but also the Son of Man: "For the one without the other was of no avail to salvation." Here Leo echoes the words of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who died shortly before Leo was born. "The Theologian" had referred to Jesus' "thick corporeality" while famously proclaiming that "that [part of man's nature] which is not assumed, is not healed." Leo argues that "it was equally dangerous to have believed the Lord Jesus Christ to be either only God without manhood, or only man without Godhead." Thus, with one fell swoop, he lays waste the main heresies that had troubled the Church during the prolonged period of Christological controversies. Although Peter's confession had rightly exalted Christ's higher nature, Leo observes, the apostle needed to be instructed on "the mystery of Christ's lower substance." Peter's imperfect understanding of this mystery is evidenced by his rebuke of Jesus when the latter speaks of his approaching Passion. This reproof makes clear, Leo declares, that although Peter and the other apostles "had recognized the mystery of God in Him, yet the power of His body, wherein His Deity was contained, they did not know." Leo maintains that the "kingly brilliance" Jesus manifested in the Transfiguration was something as "specially belonging to the nature of His assumed Manhood." It is in his humanity, he contends, that the Lord "displays his glory. . .and invests that bodily shape which He shared with others with such splendor." The Transfiguration was intended "to remove the offense of the cross from the disciple's heart, and to prevent their faith being disturbed by the humiliation of His voluntary Passion by revealing to them the excellence of His hidden dignity." It is by means of Christ's punishment on the Cross, Leo states, that God "opens the way to heaven" and prepares for us "the steps of ascent to the Kingdom." Jesus' transfigured body reveals the nature of that Kingdom and the culmination of salvation history. In fact, Leo is of the view that Jesus' promise that certain of his disciples standing by Him would not taste death until they saw th...…
By David G. Bonagura, Jr. "Drain the swamp!" is one of today's more passionate political cries. The swamp, of course, is Washington, D.C., which oozes all sorts of contaminations: slimy politicians, rancid deals, foggy lies, sink-holes of money, hazy procedures. The people demand a champion, a DOGE, to clean it up: to drain its political and social sins so the government can function smoothly, and America can be great again. "Swamp theory" assumes that the governmental system is broken and that a properly functioning reform will bring in a kind of political salvation. There is some truth in this contention, but Catholics must avoid seeing "the system," and not sinful individuals, as the real problem. As Pope St. John Paul II taught, "such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins." (Reconciliatio et paenitentia, 16) When constant media coverage hypes fixing "the system," this system can easily become the speck in the other's eye that shifts attention from the beam in our own. For as St. John Paul continued, if any structural and institutional reforms do occur, they will be "of short duration and ultimately vain and ineffective, not to say counterproductive, if the people directly or indirectly responsible for that situation are not converted." Lent recalls us from the hype, from the structures, and back to God so that we can pull out that beam each of us has lodged in his eyes. Lent challenges us to drain the swamp that concupiscence generates within us lest our lives become submerged in sin, selfishness, and ego. That inner swamp conditioned by concupiscence, the irregular desire for sin that weighs down all children of Adam, is real, and it is the cause of so much evil in ourselves, in Washington, and beyond. Unchecked, the swamp's slow, sometimes imperceptible crawl can overtake us and weaken our wills to resist even greater sins. This happened to King David, who forsook his duty to lead his army into battle so he could stay home, on the couch. (2 Sam 11:1-2) His sloth became an occasion of lust, which then led to his adultery, which then led to his conspiracy to murder. Lent provides three tools - fasting, prayer, and almsgiving - that help us drain the swamp of concupiscence within us. Each one counters one of the three chief manifestations of concupiscence: sensuality, pride, and vanity. Repentance, sorrow for sins, is the executive order issued on the federal level (the Church) and the local level (the individual) that sets the work in motion. "The discipline of fasting," writes Adalbert de Vogüé, O.S.B., in his soul-jabbing book To Love Fasting, "is man's first step in pursuit of perfection." Fasting has an "afflictive aspect" that serves "as punishment for faults." It is also a "liberating practice" that "should be felt as the suppression of useless and burdensome excesses." Abstinence from food, and from other burdensome excesses of which we are not short, frees us from these worldly concerns. Each hunger pang or twitch toward the goods we have forsaken has to be redirected toward God with a conscious prayer: "Lord, I'm sorry for my sins, for which I deserve these pains. Grant me the grace to desire you more than these perishing things." Dom de Vogüé adds that mastering our appetites by fasting "permits a greater mastery of the other manifestations of the libido and aggressiveness. It is as if the man who fasts were more himself, in possession of his true identity, and less dependent on exterior objects and the impulses they arouse in him." Unrestrained libido and aggressiveness have created swampy conditions in many a soul - and times beyond number, in Washington. Fasting also facilitates Lent's second tool, prayer. In the Bible, fasts "obtain the maximum intensity and efficacy for prayer," Dom de Vogüé teaches. Authentic prayer curbs pride as we creatures submit ourselves to our Creator, beg His forgiveness, and implore Him to increase within us and to decreas...…
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The Catholic Thing
By Daniel B. Gallagher. But first a note from Robert Royal: So it's Lent. Would you like to energize your spiritual life under the guidance of one of the great Catholic spiritual masters? Of course you do. And that's why you should enroll in TCT's course on St. Bonaventure's The Soul's Journey into God, which starts next week. Your professor is TCT's own Randall Smith. So Lent, Bonaventure, Smith. What are you waiting for? Click the button below and make the rest of your Lent an even richer spiritual experience. Now for today's column... William Sitwell, praising the decision of the British Department of Education to cease funding the Latin Excellence Programme (LEP), recently wrote in London's The Telegraph that "the loss of Latin from schools is a triumph, not a tragedy," explaining that "the ancient language has little relevance in today's society." No one in America would have been more eager to join Sitwell than John Dewey (1859-1952), arguably a greater influence on American public education than anyone else. In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey wrote that literary culture was "aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men" and nothing more than an "alleged humanism" that "bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class." Members of this culture "reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which tend to shrink to 'the classics,' to languages no longer spoken." Although Dewey acknowledged a place for Latin and Greek based on "the important contributions" those civilizations have made to our own, he also wrote that to regard the classics "as par excellence the human studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery." In short, the classics - and the languages in which they were written - were not only impractical but because they were inaccessible to the masses, therefore, in no way preeminently "humanistic." I don't know how strong the influence of Dewey's pragmatism has been on the other side of the Atlantic, but Sitwell certainly represents it. "What those Latin classes did do," Sitwell writes, "was fill my childhood with countless hours of pointless education when I should instead have been forced to study the likes of economics, business [and] entrepreneurialism." I have nothing against economics, business, and entrepreneurialism. In fact, I'm all for them. But I don't think they ultimately make us human. What makes us human is the capacity to probe what lies beyond such practical endeavors and the willingness to ask "big questions." What makes us human is not the ability to come up with the best business model, but to understand why we even engage in business in the first place. What makes us human is ultimately not what we make, but who we are and who we become. Such was the thinking of Erasmus of Rotterdam, among many other eminent humanists, whom Sitwell dismisses as "a gloomy Dutchman with a propensity to contract lumbago. . .before succumbing to dysentery." Perhaps. But Erasmus also dedicated his life to education, and more specifically to the bonae litterae ("good letters"), which he believed not only dealt with the "big questions" but empowered us to acquire virtues that would make us excel both in public life and in the life of contemplation. As for "economics, business, and entrepreneurialism," Erasmus issued a perennial warning: "Anyone who actually admires money as the most precious thing in life" and believes that "as long as he possesses it, he will be happy, has fashioned too many false gods for himself." (The Handbook of the Militant Christian, 1514). For all his "lumbago" and "dysentery," Erasmus was a far less gloomy figure than Sitwell's teachers, who seem ultimately to blame for his deep distaste for Latin. Mr. Scott, Sitwell's instructor at Maidwell Hall, wrote that if the ten-year-old Sitwell could only "understan...…
By Michael Pakaluk. But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, March 13th 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 Pope Francis' ongoing health crisis and its implications, the status of the case against disgraced former Jesuit Marko Rupnik, Washington D.C. protests against Cardinal Robert McElory - 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... The earliest day that Ash Wednesday can fall is February 4th. The Christmas season most liberally construed lasts until Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation, on February 2nd. Therefore, it would be possible for the Christmas season to go directly into Lent with just one day in between, Mardi Gras. This is not common. The last time it happened was 1818, and the next will be 2285. In any case, we see that it is possible for Christmas and Lent to be conjoined but impossible for them to overlap. This fact is important, I think, and I believe it is by design. Because the arrangement gives due place to the two great mysteries of our faith, while keeping them distinct: the mystery of the Incarnation and the mystery of the Passion - that of the birth of the Lord, with all its consequences, and that of his death, which is our redemption. If we ponder the liturgical year as potentially compressed in this way, then the Church gives us about two months to ponder the Incarnation, followed by another two to ponder the Passion - and then the rest of the year, after celebrating Easter, to live in the newness of life in Christ. The seasons of Christmas and Easter are made for each other, even when some weeks of "ordinary time" usually separate them. The liturgical year interpreted in this way presents us with what we might call the "sacramental gospel." The sacramental gospel thinks of the Good News as something that God did to human nature and the entire human race. Divinity interacted with humanity and did not leave it the same. He took our nature. Having taken our nature, by dying he paid a price on our behalf. This sacramental gospel is as it were the antithesis of "Jesus the great moral teacher." It can be preached without preaching any "great moral teachings," as in the Creed: for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven. . .was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried. The Creed in one sentence asserts the Incarnation and in the next the Passion, conjoined mysteries yet distinct. It is human flesh that is assumed in the womb, human flesh that is buried. What about the biography of Christ? Does it show a similar structure, divided between the two mysteries? At first, one would say no. He spent thirty years in a hidden life, and one week giving himself over to suffering and death. Simply in terms of length of time, in the life of Christ, the Incarnation seems the dominant mystery. And yet metaphysically the Incarnation was for the sake of the Passion: "And she shall bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus. For he shall save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:21) Indeed, one Gospel writer, Mark, starts with the John the Baptist, omitting anything about the Nativity, after which his narrative rushes with increasing speed to Our Lord's capture and death. But Matthew sees the division and the complementarity. Peter's profession, "You are the Christ," if one counts Greek words or verses, is found at almost exactly the half-way point. It is as if the first half of Matthew's Gospel is an argument that "Christ" means God incarnate - with its various accounts of angels, magi, healings, and authoritative law-giving - while the second half explains what ...…
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