The Catholic Thing

By David Warren In an effort to understand Hieronymus Bosch, I have been reading about the "movers and shakers" who first conceived of our modern world. Bosch presents the fantasies of these heretics, I think, without being entirely a heretic himself. It is easier to see a heresy from a mile off than when it is right up your nose. Or if you are an ingenious, astounding artist, like Bosch, you can examine it closely. In his book, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch (translated, 1952), the author Wilhelm Franger reconstructs that past age by visiting the episcopal courts, and in particular their records of former hippiedoms and heresies. Especially in the XIIIth and XIVth centuries, they were the paradisal, gnostic cults that flourished across what would become Germany, the Rhineland, and the Low Countries, being known generally by some variation on the theme of "Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit." These self-proclaimed "Homines Intelligentiae" met literally underground, and were the "Woke" or "Wokists" of that time, believing themselves incarnations of the Holy Ghost, and very devoted – to their own esoteric and changeable notions. But they were not truly creative. Their "paradise" would always, always depart, generally through corruption and lust, from what exists in a true paradise, or in the witness of the real Mother of God. They strayed from reality, just as modern communists compulsively dictate a parody of the Christian faith. A violent and evil parody, but an assurance nonetheless that there is an order to this world, and nature. Each deviant movement falls back upon the same cosmic or spiritual shapes and volumes that, I believe, are inevitably representations of immortal things. This is because we are in a world and nature that is, and thus was constructed, from reality. There is no alternative, in effect, to being a copyist, if there is only one reality to copy, vast and complex as that reality may be. And one may depict it accurately, in art and in science, or try to improve upon it, and thereby produce something that is definitively wrong. We thus discover alternative realities, but on close investigation we rather unearth a zero, a form of Nothingness. The mediaeval scholastics realized that this Nothing is like extreme cold. It is not really an alternative thing, but rather it is the absence of a thing, in this case heat or light. It does not add, but subtracts; and when it has taken everything away, everything is, as it were, frozen in darkness. And as heat is added – a little or a lot – we begin to see all of nature's effects coming to life, or being spontaneously exemplified. The same happens when we turn to theology, or even to politics (to present politics in its religious form). As heat is removed – the heat of the divine – everything instead begins to resemble everything else. To use the commonplace analogy of deep space, there is no such thing as taking a spacewalk, unless for a very short period one is supplied with warmth and everything else one will need within a hygienically sealed and fitted suit. Curiously, it is the same on moonwalks, or if one visits Mars. In practical terms, the expense of supplying everything we need to flourish upon earth is, and will always be, very, very expensive. The same goes if, instead of spacewalk or starwalk (even if we could get to the neighboring star in less than an eternity), we decide to replace our religion, and invent a new one more attractive to ourselves (and not just attractive to an ever-absent God), we get to the point where we are freezing. The Adamites and other heretical cells, from centuries ago or just the other day, found that they were dealing with a world in which there are two, and precisely two, "biological" sexes. And after one has decided on the quaint, nonsensical principle of making them equal and interchangeable, or inventing some others, or putting clothes on them or stripping them bare, and calling, for instance, nudity by the word...

By Stephen P. White I have what I like to think of as a healthy obsession with bulbs. I don't mean the kind you screw into an electric lamp. I mean flower bulbs: tulips, hyacinth, daffodils, crocuses, snowdrops, and the like. I bury them in the dirt in the autumn. And as soon as the frozen ground softens to mud, green things start to emerge. While the rest of the world (the lingering snow by the curb included) thinks it is still winter, the bulbs are having none of it. The bulbs are unstoppable. Once the bulbs emerge – those little green nibs, sometimes tinged wine-red – there's no going back. Winter is finished, and all the cold snaps and late-season snow showers are in vain. As we say in our family every year when the first crocuses appear, "Aslan is on the move." The arrival of spring, of course, is a metaphor for resurrection. Here we are in Lent and what we see around us in nature parallels our Lenten journey. The first flowers of spring are heralds of the coming joys of Easter. The bulbs that "died" and were buried have emerged more glorious and alive than ever. And so every child knows. At least, it used to be so. I hope children still learn such things. Right now, winter is losing the same battle it loses every March. And just like every year, the bulbs are pushing the sodden soil aside and emerging clean, startlingly green, and swollen with new life. Somehow the arrival of spring bulbs, the sheer newness of them, is always startling. I know from the calendar that spring is coming, of course. And I planted those bulbs precisely so that I could see them in the spring. Yet spring arrives and these living things that were not there before (at least not to my eyes) push up through the cold, sweet-smelling earth with a contagious, irrepressible vitality. One could almost believe that the spring sun grows warmer because of the emerging flowers rather than the other way round. Every spring somehow feels like the first. I recall lines about spring from Gerard Manley Hopkins: What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden… But it happens again and again, over and over. Every year, the bulbs drive winter away. Every year, these little floral gems emerge, looking like the newest things in all Creation. Every year, nature's metaphor for resurrection plays out in plain view. Every year, it is startling to see something so utterly new under the sun. And here is another metaphor, one that is subtler and harder to learn than the first. A metaphor that has taken me many springs – many Lents and many Easters – to understand. It is a metaphor about old things and new things. About things past made present. About grace and nature. About creation and repetition. About the shocking newness and gratuity of something utterly predictable and expected. The Lord said: Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. The seed goes down into the ground. It dies. But then it rises again to bear much fruit. The bulb is buried under dirt and snow and ice. From that death, a glorious new blossom emerges. So far so good. If we were to see this happen once, and only once, we would think it a miracle. If it happens over and over and over again, is it less miraculous? The Lord said: Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. An innocent man lays down his life. He dies. He rises again to new life, eternal life. A man takes bread and wine, blesses them, and gives them to his disciples; his body and blood. If it happens once, it is a miracle. But what if that same miracle is made present to us, not once, but over and over and over again? This metaphor, if you can follow me, gets closer to what I love about spring bulbs. This implacable repetition of the miracle, the outrageous made so commonplace we might hardly notice, is wh...

By Randall Smith. But first note: TCT's Editor-in-Chief, Robert Royal, will appear tonight on 'EWTN Live' with Fr. Mitch Packwa for a freewheeling discussion about issues in the Church. Information about rebroadcasts is available by clicking here. Now for today's column... Augustine admits in Confessions that when he was young, he did not like the Scriptures; he found the language ugly and uninspiring. He preferred Cicero and Virgil. Worse yet, some things in the Scriptures caused him to think Christianity was ridiculous. Who would be so naïve as to think that God has a right hand? God doesn't have a body! What a bunch of rubes Christians must be. It was not until he got older that he realized that the Scriptures made use of figures of speech, metaphors, analogies, and other poetic devices. Christians don't believe that God has a physical right hand; rather, this is an image suggesting the intimate union between the Father and the Son. He had been laughing at Christians when he was the ignorant one whose pride had blinded him to the richness of Biblical language and imagery. "My inflated pride shunned their style," he writes, "nor could the sharpness of my wit pierce their inner meaning. Yet, truly, were they such as would develop in little ones; but I scorned to be a little one, and, swollen with pride, I looked upon myself as a great one." It is not uncommon for people who pride themselves on their scientific sophistication to find the Church's manner of speaking, especially in the liturgy, bizarre, perhaps even childish, something acceptable only to unsophisticated people who believe whatever they're told, no matter how ridiculous. I can imagine someone of this mindset asking: "Do you really think that there are choirs of angels 'soaring aloft upon their wings," singing 'Holy, Holy, Holy'?" As an adult convert, I can understand how skeptics from outside the Church might view this sort of language. It seems like something out of a children's book, like talking about Harry Potter's "sorting hat" or flying on a Hippogriff. Fine for children, but not for serious adults. Since we live in what is largely a dull, unpoetic "information age," I understand why the Church's language might seem this way. But perhaps there are things that simply can't be said in ordinary speech of the sort one gets in the newspaper or the latest magazine article. Perhaps some things simply transcend our normal, everyday ways of speaking and require a different mode of discourse, one that communicates realities that transcend our usual ways of speaking and writing – as when Robert Frost says: The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. Or when T. S. Eliot writes that, We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Or when the Psalmist proclaims: The LORD is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. In verdant pastures he gives me repose; beside restful waters he leads me; he refreshes my soul. If you don't "get" the many ways language signifies – if, for example, you don't "get" poetic speech, and it seems like a bunch of meaningless twaddle – then you probably won't "get" the language of the Scriptures and the liturgy. Much of it will likely seem as silly to you as it did to St. Augustine when he imagined that Christians thought God had a physical body. I could say, the phrase "at the right hand of the Father" means that the Risen Christ is intimately united in the oneness of Being with the One from whom He, the second "person" of the Trinity, is eternally generated, being loved fully and eternally and loving fully and eternally in return. But that's not better. That language might have a useful role to play to help us better understand the language with which the faith has been expressed to us. But after we have used the more "scholarly" words to explain those Biblical and liturgica...

(As told to Jeremy Lott) You may have heard the legend that Saint Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, but I'm here to tell you it ain't, exactly, 100-percent true. Now it's true that Ireland has no snakes today and it's also true that Saint Patrick is the one that done it. But here's the thing: He didn't drive them snakes out. Nope, he outsmarted them. The snakes were always sinking their fangs into Irish people. And the people, well, they didn't like being bit one bit. So they all said, "Patrick, caaaan't you do something about it?" Back then, Ireland was crawling with snakes from Donegal to Cork and from Galway to Wicklow. But there was one place the snakes liked best, and that was on the banks of the River Shannon in Limerick. Them Limerick snakes were so thick on the ground that the fishermen couldn't cast their lines or launch their boats. If anyone so much as looked at them funny, the snakes would snap and hiss and generally start a stir. And that's what they done when Patrick came up on them and said, "Snakes, we have to talk." Patrick let them go on for a bit and then he snapped back, "I said talk, not hiss." "That ssssssilly human thinkssssss he can talk to ussssss," said one pit viper to the other snakes, who all had a good snake laugh at that. "Yes, that is what the silly human thinks," said Patrick. Them Limerick layabouts were stunned into shutting up. A human who could speak snake was a new thing to them. Finally, a large python cleared its throat. "Well what issssss it that you want to ssssssay to ussssss, human?" the python asked. "The Irish have been talking to me, and they think it's time for you to go," Patrick said. You may wonder why Patrick said, "the Irish" and not "we Irish." It's because he didn't come from here, but that's not what the snakes were wondering at that moment. They weren't wondering because they were coiling mad. "Then we'll bite them! We'll bite every lasssssst one of them," one rattler said. Many others joined in with threats and hisses. Again, Patrick let them get it off of their scaly backs for a minute before he spoke up. "My slithery neighbors, Ireland is a wet and chilly place for us humans, and we're warm blooded! Aren't you cold?" he asked. "Yessssss," a few snakes answered. "And wouldn't you rather go to where it's warm?" Patrick asked "Yessssss!" many more snakes said. "Rattler, wouldn't you like to slither through a nice Texas desert? And Adder, wouldn't you rather lounge on the banks of the Nile? And mamba, doesn't a sky island in an African rainforest sound good?" he asked. Many snakes nodded their snaky snouts. "Well then let us give you all a long vacation, and if you don't like it there you can always come back," Patrick said. Some snakes started to say "yessssss," but then the biggest, baddest one of them all spoke up. "You reek of liessssss, human. Why shouldn't I ssssssimply eat you insssssstead?" asked the anaconda. Now, I gotta give Patrick some credit here. He did not give into the fear that he must have been feeling. No, he told that great big snake, "I'm too much for you to swallow." And, well, that did it. "Ssssssurely you jesssssst, human. I can eat anything that movessssss, from a mousssssse to a rhinocssssserosssssss," the anaconda announced. So Patrick made a bet then and there. If he could name something that moved that anaconda couldn't eat, all the snakes would all go on that vacation. And if not, well then, he was supper. There must have been a twinkle in his eye when he said, "Eat the river." Anaconda hissed. Trapped by its own boast! Still, the great big snake gave it a shot. It slithered out into a ways into the river and opened its great mouth and tried to suck the water in. It wasn't long before the current carried it off. And I don't know much about snake religious notions. But if they have saints too then Patrick is one of them, because of what he did next. He'd won. The snake that was gonna eat him was a goner, but Patrick went right went i...

By Robert Royal When Notre Dame de Paris almost burned down in 2019, owing to a fire started (accidentally?) by workmen, the world was stunned by the near loss of one of the West's iconic monuments – and a religious landmark at that. But churches around the world are burned or subjected to other types of attack these days, year after year, not by accident, but deliberate anti-Christian acts. Never heard of it? Thereby hangs a tale. It's no surprise to anyone that Christian churches suffer frequent attacks in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They've been going on for years, with a sharp rise since 9/11 and the emergence of radical Islamic groups, as I've documented in my book The Martyrs of the New Millennium. And these attacks often add insult to injury by being timed to take place at major Christian feasts like Christmas and Easter. What is surprising, however, is how little attention is paid to the ongoing violence by Western media. In Nigeria, the wholesale slaughter of Christians – thousands in 2025 – and the assaults on churches and Christian schools, together with kidnappings and ransom demands – couldn't be ignored any longer by news outlets and governments. But the plight of Christians in a dozen other countries never draws serious attention. That failure clearly has a two-fold cause: reluctance among journalists – newsrooms are overwhelmingly progressive – to contribute to "Islamophobia," and a soft anti-Christian bigotry. The American political scientist Samuel Huntington asserted that Islam has "bloody borders," evident not just from recent times but the long interactions between Islam and Christians, Hindus, etc.) Modern analysts often try to deny that these conflicts are religious – in a materialist age political and economic causes are believed to be real, religious motives at best secondary. But the only way to believe that is to be ignorant of centuries of history – and the Koran itself. Still, it's surprising that those same media also manage to pass over quickly or, more typically, to ignore outright anti-Christian acts even in the West. We need not look far for striking examples. Earlier this month in "celebration" of International Women's Day, churches in Mexico – Catholic Mexico! – came under literal fire by feminist extremists (see video here). But it's not only there. Throughout Latin America, including Argentina during the reign of Argentine Pope Francis, similar things have happened owing to feminist rage and radical ideologies of varying kinds. In Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, we've even seen the continuing saga of Marxist repression of the Church – holdovers from the totalitarian nightmares of the previous century. And those regimes are supported by old-style state Communism in China, which notoriously persecutes religion. One Mexican feminist proclaimed, "I fear those who pray the Rosary more than I fear criminals." It's heartening to see, as in Mexico, Catholic men forming human shields around Church buildings. But where was the coverage – outside of Catholic news organizations – of something that is a clear public fact about our time? It's not mere Catholic special-pleading to point out that if the target had been a synagogue or mosque, our sharp-eyed watchdogs in the press would be investigating and relentlessly reminding us about systemic prejudice. Sad to say, the Church itself has sometimes been all-too-willing to blame Catholics for past misdeeds – sometimes when they didn't even happen. In 2021, reports in Canada surfaced that ground radar had discovered over 1000 graves – sometimes called "mass graves" – near "residential schools," government institutions often run by Christians, which took "First Nation" children from their parents and tried to integrate them into the Canadian mainstream. A sensitive subject, of course. But subsequent investigations have uncovered no "mass graves." Yet many people – including Pope Francis, who made an apologetic visit t...

By Fr. Robert P. Imbelli, However fervent or fitful, our Lenten journey is moving toward its culmination. Of the many symbolic riches of the Paschal Triduum perhaps none resonates so affectively as the raising high of the Paschal Candle in the darkened church. And the minister intones the ineffable saving mystery: "Light of Christ!" While the jubilant assembly responds in grateful wonder: "Thanks be to God!" Less dramatic, though equally significant, are the words pronounced just prior to the proclamation. As the celebrant lights the Paschal Candle, he prays: "May the light of Christ, rising in glory, dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds." Christ's light reveals not only our vocation to glory, but, inseparably, our dire need for salvation. So, St. Paul exhorts the Colossians to give thanks to the Father "who has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins." (Colossians 1:13-14) Only through Christ do we pass over from the domain of darkness into the promise of transfiguring light. Hence, in the patristic tradition, baptism was also referred to as "phōtismos" since it signified the new Christian's enlightenment by Christ. Thus, it is fitting that, on this Sunday of the second scrutinies of the catechumens, themes of light and sight permeate the readings. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, joyfully exclaims: "You were once darkness, but now you are light [phōs] in the Lord," thereby disclosing their new identity in Christ. But this is immediately followed by the imperative that governs this section of the letter: therefore, "walk [peripateite] as children of the light!" (Ephesians 5:8) In effect Paul exhorts the Ephesians: Be all that you are called to be! Fulfill your destiny in Christ. In the seven verses of today's second reading the word "light" appears five times. It becomes manifest in lives of "goodness, righteousness, and justice." And it displays stark contrast not only to the "darkness" [skotos] of believers' former lives, but also to the darkness of the surrounding culture. The Letter to the Ephesians is noteworthy in its emphasis on the ongoing growth of the Christian community, the building up of the Body of Christ. "Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ." (Ephesians 4:15) Baptismal renunciation and conversion are both the conclusion of a process of enlightenment and the beginning of an ever-renewed growth in the Lord. Saint Gregory of Nyssa famously characterized the Christian life as an ongoing dialectic of endings and new beginnings, every end [telos] giving rise to a new beginning [arche]. Hence the crucial importance of ongoing discernment – "discerning [dokimazontes] what is pleasing to the Lord." (5:10) The believer must carefully examine his or her own behavior, learning to put on the mind of Christ, not yielding to the spurious enticements of those who are "darkened in their understanding and distant from the life of God." (4:18) In many ways, then, the final chapters of Ephesians are an extended commentary upon what Paul had admonished the Romans. "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, discerning [dokimazein] what is the will of God, the good and well-pleasing and perfect." (Romans 12:2) Such discernment fosters an ever-greater realization of Christians' new life in Christ and what it entails in the everyday. Not only the newly baptized, but those who have lived the Christian life for some time, are called to realize ever more fully the glorious vocation that Paul celebrates in the great benediction with which his Letter begins. "God has called us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we might be holy and without blemish in his sight."(Ephesians1:4) Sons and daughters of light, Christians stand forth as a "contrast society," that will often require of them a countercult...

By Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, Like many people years ago, as a child, my brother and I, together with our dad, always prayed in our "night prayers" the traditional prayer to our guardian angels: "Angel of God, my guardian dear to whom God's love entrusts me here, ever this day (or night) be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen." I still ask my guardian angel at night when I go to bed and, in the morning, when I get up, to watch over and protect me. Moreover, before writing, I always ask my guardian angel to give me clarity of thought and expression and to whisper the right words into my ears. Sometimes when I am struggling to find the right word, he places exactly the right word in my mind. Prayers to one's guardian angel are Biblically based: • God instructs Moses, as the Israelites set off for the Promised Land: "Behold I send you an angel before you, to guard you on the way and bring you to the place which I have prepared. Give heed to him and hearken to his voice." (Exodus 23:20-21). • Psalm 91:11 affirms that one need not fear, "for he (God) will give his angels charge over you to guard you in all your ways." • Jesus himself states that we should not despise the little ones, "for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 18:10) • In the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter escapes from prison and knocks on the door where the faithful were gathered, his brethren wrongly think: "It is his angel!" (Acts 12:13-15) Although most of us will never see our guardian angels, many saints have. Padre Pio frequently conversed with his guardian angel, who would defend him against demonic attacks. Gemma Galgani was in daily contact with her guardian angel, who taught, protected, and corrected her. Sr. Faustina Kowalska spoke of her guardian angel accompanying her on her journeys. She also saw him when she was immersed in prayer, often asking her to pray for the dying. The point of the above examples is not to say that one has to be a "saint" to speak with or behold one's guardian angel. Rather, it is to illustrate that we, too, can converse with and be assured of our guardian angel's protecting and guiding presence. Moreover, we should dispel the romantic and "cute" notion that guardian angels are only relevant for vulnerable children. Adults are in as much need of their guardian angels – maybe even more so, for their temptations and affairs are often of a more serious nature. Our guardian angels are therefore present to strengthen, to encourage, and to guide us in living out our respective vocations, whether single, married, religious, or priestly. To dismiss them as only suited for what is childish is to place ourselves in harm's way. The question has been asked: After death, do our guardian angels cease to be with us once we enter into Heaven? Obviously, we no longer need to be guarded. Do they, then, get recycled to someone newly conceived? According to Catholic tradition, our guardian angels even remain with us in Heaven and together we give praise and glory to the most holy Trinity – to our heavenly Father who is the ultimate source of life, to the risen Jesus, the Father's incarnate Son, who is our loving Savior and Lord, and to the Holy Spirit who cleanses us of sin and makes us holy. With all of our brothers and sisters in Christ, along with our respective guardian angels, we will sing forever a glorious hymn of praise and thanksgiving. Here, we perceive the confluence of the earthly and the heavenly liturgy. At the conclusion of the Preface at Mass the following, or something similar, is said: "And so, with the Angels and all of the Saints we declare your (the Father's) glory, as with one voice we acclaim: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory." With one voice, our earthly human voices, the heavenly voices of the saints, and the host of angelic voices, we all together declare that both Heaven and earth are filled...

By Auguste Meyrat Friedrich Nietzsche is notorious for his theory of the Übermensch, the superior man who rises above the constraints of morality and mediocrity. But his theory of the "last man" has proven to be far more prophetic – and relevant. A kind of counterexample to the Übermensch, the last man is lazy, weak, incurious, and lives for pleasure. He is the product of an overly civilized, Christianized, and complacent culture. While literary examples of the Übermensch abound, there are relatively few depictions of the "last man" in all his non-glory. Perhaps such a character hits a little too close to home and might make more than a few readers uncomfortable, or perhaps most writers like to imagine themselves as an Übermensch creating and commanding imaginative realms, not last men confessing their weaknesses. Or most likely, last men are by definition so passive that they pose a serious challenge for any writer trying to put together a compelling narrative about them. But just because something is challenging does not mean that it isn't worth trying. In his debut novel The Rhinelanders, Catholic essayist Alan Schmidt takes on the problem of the last man by telling his story and envisioning his destiny. In doing so, he portrays the mundane, quiet despair in which so many people today live, including people of faith. His novel reminds readers not to forget these lost souls since they, too, are children of God, people with a notable past and a potentially notable future. The story takes place in Westphalia, Michigan, a small rural town founded by German Catholic settlers. The hero of the story is Stephen Koenig, a middle-aged, unmarried, and unremarkable man who lives with his mentally handicapped sister, Sarah, and ne'er-do-well brother, Thomas. Unlike most of the Koenig clan, Stephen never left his hometown, lacking the ambition that would inspire such a change. He lives comfortably, working a nondescript office job at a financial consulting firm, attending Mass, praying his rosary every day, and maintaining good relationships with his siblings and neighbors. Certain forces intervene, however, to disrupt Stephen's placeholder existence. At night, he is periodically visited by ghosts of his ancestors along with two menacing wolves who deny him peace of mind. During the day, he is offered a job opportunity that would finally take him out of Westphalia, and is confronted with a romantic relationship with a woman who essentially initiates every meetup. Meanwhile, he uses his sister's disability and his brother's failure-to-launch as excuses for putting off any meaningful action. \ Schmidt introduces each chapter with a passage recalling a moment in the history of Stephen's ancestry. From a tribe of pagan Goths to the generation of German Americans immediately preceding Stephen and his family, the juxtaposition illustrates the gradual loss of will and inner strength that once propelled the Koenigs. Well before he is explicitly identified as "the Last Man," it is apparent that this is who Stephen is meant to represent. Even so, Schmidt refrains from offering a mere Nietzschean allegory set in modern rural America. Certain redeeming factors complicate Stephen's character. Yes, he is indecisive, noncommittal, and insecure, but he is also charitable, pious, and wholesome. This happens to make him much more sympathetic than his brother Thomas, who is the inverse, a man of great energy and will, but also abrasive and rebellious. The modern world shows its preference for men like Stephen by granting them a frictionless existence full of easy opportunities, while it actively punishes men like Thomas who must fight for everything they have. Moreover, even as Stephen and Thomas make their way in the world, Schmidt makes it clear that their choices do not happen in a vacuum. They are the product of their local surroundings, their German lineage, their church, their upbringing, and the life-altering tragedies that occur without warning...

By Michael Pakaluk. The New York Times reported the words, but the Wall Street Journal didn't. When Bam Adebayo, two days ago, was asked to describe the moment when he scored 83 points in an NBA game, second only to Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points, he said, "Man, I wish I could relive it twice. I credit God, my family, my teammates, this crowd." A wag commented that, right after God, he should have credited the Washington Wizards, the team ostensibly defending him. But credit, too, to Bam. The first question most sportscasters ask is "How did you feel?" On the classical view of the passions, this is like asking someone to describe the agitation of his guts, either his viscera or heart. "Describe to me what your guts felt like when you did this." Who cares? But Bam sensibly externalized the question and turned first to God. Others credited Bam's hard work, recounting the long hours he put in as a boy, practicing. Others played up the fact that he had just surpassed Kobe Bryant's record of 81. But Bam sprinted right past the four species of pride identified by Pope St. Gregory. He attributed his excellence to God, not himself. He did not claim that he had merited it. He did not overstate it. And he did not draw comparisons with others. Like all of us, he'll need to battle pride later. But just then, when the spotlight was on him and the cameras were rolling, he spoke with humility. You've noticed that athletes often give credit to God first. Fernando Mendoza, the 2025 Heisman Trophy winner and quarterback who led Indiana to the college football championship, when he was in the spotlight said, "This moment is bigger than me. [sic] First, I want to thank God." Kudos to Mendoza, who is said to be a devout Catholic. By mentioning God first, outside his intention he actually amplified himself. If he had said out loud what many think privately at such a moment, "First, I want to exult in how great I am," he would have drawn himself down in the eyes of others, deservedly so. "I'm a faith-filled guy. I believe in a Creator. I believe in Jesus. Ultimately, I think that's what defines me the most." This was Scottie Scheffler after winning the 2024 Masters, another athlete side-stepping the four species of pride. The interviewer then pressed him on his feelings. Scottie refused to introspect his guts and instead changed the subject, returning to the objective message he wished to convey: "It's hard to describe the feeling. I think that what defines me the most is my faith. I believe in one Creator, that I've been called to come out here, do my best, compete, and glorify God." I've taught many athletes and can report that the conflict that some find between athletics and academics is a false conflict. Pursuing a sport seriously can make an athlete a better student. In the same way, pursuing some sport seriously should make us better Christians. How do other achievers compare with the athletes? Over the last three years of Oscar winners, encompassing nearly 70 speeches, only two recipients referred to God, but how they did so fell short of the athletes. Last year, Adrien Brody, when he took the stage to receive the Best Actor award (for The Brutalist) said, "Thank you, God. Thank you for this blessed life." But even then, he did not quite give credit to God for his achievement. And two years ago, Da'Vine Joy Randolph (Best Supporting Actress, The Holdovers) began with "God is so good. God is so good." And she closed with "I pray to God that I get to do this more than once" – which sounds like greediness rather than gratitude. Already in 2015, a writer for the Huffington Post wrote an essay on how Oscar winners were no longer thanking God. Reviewing almost 1400 acceptance speeches, Carol Kuruvilla found that Stephen Spielberg was thanked the most, with 42 mentions. Harvey Weinstein came in second. (Res ipsa loquitur.) While God received only 19 mentions, and many of these were goofy or off-key: I'd like to thank the Academy first of all. ....

By Francis X. Maier I'll get right to the point. Leigh Snead's new book Infertile but Fruitful is one of the finest personal testimonies I've read in the past decade. It's a "simple" story in the best sense: concise, intimate, utterly frank, and memorable. It spoke, directly and beautifully, to my own family, as it will to many others. I'll come back to it in a moment. But first, some useful background. In a general sense, a culture's fertility rate hints at its character. It also suggests its health. Bearing and raising children is serious business. It demands sacrifices. But for anyone with a generous spirit, it also creates love and hope, and trust in a meaningful future, because the instinct to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28, 9:1) is hardwired into the human species. Rejecting that has consequences. And here's an example. The minimum replacement rate for a population is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. The total fertility rate across Western Europe was around 2.66 in the early 1960s. It had fallen to 1.46 in the late 1990s. It continued dropping to a historic low of 1.34 by 2024. That's a fertility decline of 50 percent in barely two generations. Muslim Europeans tend to have somewhat higher fertility on average, but the broader story is nonetheless a massive, sustained collapse in childbearing across the continent. As for the United States: In the early 1960s, its fertility rate was around 3.5, sharply higher than Europe's at the time, because the American postwar Baby Boom was larger and lasted longer. But the subsequent drop off was steeper. The U.S. total fertility rate shrank to 1.59 by 2024. Thus, the net fertility decline over the past six or so decades is actually larger for the United States than Europe in absolute terms. Why the collapse? The factors are fairly obvious: easy access to contraception and abortion; more women in higher education and the workforce; the rising costs of living; a consumption-driven economy; and the decline of religious belief. Christianity strongly encouraged permanent marriages and large families. As Europe secularized, that moral pressure disappeared. Today, most children grow up seeing small families as normal. Their own fertility adjusts downward accordingly. What makes this reality so hard to reverse is that a modernity rooted in the sovereign self and its material appetites has taught so many of us to value these features. The end result is a culture's loss of meaning, an aging population with escalating health care costs, supported by a shrinking workforce. The necessary economic response to demographic decline is immigration, filling the labor gap with working-age people from higher-fertility regions. But the kind of mass immigration needed to compensate for low fertility typically sparks a bitter political backlash. This creates constant friction between economic need and grassroots popular anxiety that has impacted the life of nearly every Western nation. So much for all the social data. How does any of it relate to Infertile but Fruitful? One of the (wonderfully) ironic responses to all of the above is the number of women today, many of them religious believers, who deliberately choose to have large families. Again, fertility – the yearning to be part of bringing new life into the world – is inherent to being human. That can mean children, or a celibate life of service to others. But everyone, without exception, has the need to be fruitful, and ignoring that need deforms the heart. Our own daughter is the mother of seven. For my wife Suann, some of the hardest years in our marriage were those early eight or ten when she was unable to conceive or had multiple miscarriages; this, while friends all around her birthed child after child. Husbands can provide love and support. But they can never fully understand the suffering and sense of loss felt at a cellular level by the woman longing to bear a child, but can't. Especially when the inability to conceive prove...

By Casey Chalk I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" of science fiction. I shrug my shoulders at Star Wars and Star Trek, and became so frustrated with Frank Herbert's Dune that I barely finished it. Nevertheless, I confess a certain guilty fascination with futuristic dystopian works. The imagery of the Australian bush and the attendant storyline of the revised Road Warrior series haunted my imagination for weeks. Much the same happened with the Blade Runner revamp. Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange. I gobble up such books up and wonder: How could human society become like that? Surely escapism explains much of this, but there is also a human desire to imagine, even anticipate, what the future holds for us and our descendants. It's a means of grappling with the most acute moral and political questions of our time, but with a certain personal and emotional distance. It's not us or our children suffering at the hands of post-apocalyptic Australian motorcycle gangs or humanoid robots with automatic weapons. This much, and far more, can be said of Ross McCullough's The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster, an enchanting book that straddles a variety of genres: epistolary novel, pastoral handbook, and theological science fiction. A sort of sci-fi Screwtape Letters, the reader cannot help but be drawn into McCullough's dystopian (if frighteningly imaginable) world, in which the vestiges of liberalism accommodate an ascendant global Islam, while humanity escapes deeper into an all-consuming artificial intelligence called "IR." Yet like C.S. Lewis's classic, it's also a text bursting with spiritual and theological insight. The letters of the late archbishop certainly paint a sobering picture of a future in which the Church's influence has waned. Citizens' behaviors are carefully documented beginning in school to exert maximum control over the populace. Technological firms promote transhumanism and "transfiguration procedures" to "transfer consciousness from brain to brain." The underlying irony is that in "metamodernity," the modern Baconian quest to control the natural order is realized by fleeing nature. Priests have accommodated themselves to the new reality, leveraging IR in order to visit with more of the faithful, even if the bishop admits "there is little friendship with someone who is in IR, whether they are in the withdrawn catatonia of passive consumption or the excited catatonia of erratic and unexplained motion." It's an admirable description of the dehumanizing tendencies of social media. Or how about this: Think only of how much more control the government has over us on these platforms. Think only of those who control the platforms themselves. This is the problem when reality itself goes up for sale, when we place ourselves in a marketplace of realities. For we are not the hunters in the marketplace but the hunted. The archbishop's reflections on sexuality are equally incisive. One letter argues that AI-generated porn – presented as a means of protecting the human participants from degrading behaviors – only further encourages dehumanizing tendencies, because users of such material are free to do whatever they want within the "safe" world of IR. It's not real, though the effects on the human brain and character certainly are. Elsewhere, the archbishop describes a "second Pill" that was developed to allow sexual partners to not feel any attachment to one another. In a twisted way, that makes sense. Obviously, a baby complicates sex, but so does the unitive quality of the sexual act, which binds people together in complicated ways, even if both tried to keep things "casual." McCullough hints at a panoply of terrifying future possibilities. He describes a procedure ironically titled "transfiguration" that involves removing the patient's eyes and entering the orbital cavities, which subjects "generally come to approve of." The result is "lobotomized rebels" similar to what (lapsed Ca...

By Daniel B. Gallagher. The 250th birthday of the United States is a good time to remember that 1776 was the year of a new nation, not a new government. It would take another eleven years for the Founders to formulate what the government would look like, and two more to elect the first president. This sequence of events reminds us that it is not a government that makes a nation, but a nation that makes a government. Even peoples who lack a sovereign territory, such as the Kurds or Basques, conceptualize themselves in some way as a nation before devising some sort of governing apparatus. You need something to govern before you can figure out how to govern it. The Vichy regime in France is an example of what can happen if one attempts to establish a government with no true nation behind it. Having been around long enough to celebrate both, I can't help but feel concern about the disquietude surrounding this year's Semiquincentennial celebration in comparison with the Bicentennial fifty years ago. Last summer, a White House task force appointed to plan and to implement the celebrations was already butting heads with a congressional commission established for the same purpose. John Dichtl, president of the American Association for State and Local History, has a point when, referring to plans to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at the White House, asks, "What does a (UFC) fight have to do with America's greatness?" Writing in The Hill, Myra Adams confesses that she feels "less pride" in this Semiquincentennial year, lamenting that "dangerous trends threaten what our Founding Fathers envisioned." Back in 1976, virtually no one hesitated to wave a flag, march in a parade, and join in singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." And all this not even two years after an American President voluntarily stepped aside for the first time. Fifty years later, students no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the elementary school I attended. That said – and especially in light of recent chaos in Minneapolis – I do understand how people could lack enthusiasm for the event if they forget we are celebrating the founding of a nation and not a government. The former is much more worthy of celebration if we take it as the primary locus of the shared values and ideals inspiring a diverse people to form a Union. Chief among those is obviously freedom, including the freedom to vote Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, or even Communist or Socialist, if you like. If you want to know what a one-party celebration looks like, look no further than the Tian'anmen and Kim II Sung Squares. The need to revisit the distinction between a nation and a government became clearer to me when, while interviewing political theorist Patrick Deneen, Bishop Robert Barron asserted that, according to the classical view, the purpose of "government" is to cultivate virtue in its citizens. He claimed to have learned this from philosopher Robert Sokolowski at the Catholic University of America. Msgr. Sokolowski was my professor too, and I don't remember him saying this. I do remember him saying that, according to the classical view, the purpose of the polis was to make citizens virtuous and good. That's not to say government has no role, but the polis is a richer and more expansive concept than "government," even though the extent to which the ancient Greek polis resembles the modern state is debatable. In any case, a polis, according to Aristotle, is a natural community where individuals come together to pursue the good life. The politeia is the way a polis is organized, including – but not limited to – its system of government. Politeia also encompasses the values and practices that make a polis possible. Though much more can be said about the distinction, it is enough to draw attention to the myopic view of "politics" we have today. If we limit politics to what happens inside the D.C. beltway, we easily fall into the trap of thinking that it is primaril...

By Dominic V. Cassella In the season of Lent, the Church enters the wilderness to fast and abstain. It is a time of testing. The number forty often indicates this throughout the Scriptures. "Forty days" signals a time when God tests the hearts of His people, so that what lies hidden within might be revealed. In Genesis, the deluge that washed the world of living creatures – except for Noah and those on the ark – lasted for forty days. Moses fled Egypt for his life after murdering a man and spent forty years in Midian as a shepherd before God appeared to him in the burning bush. After forty days, the ten spies that Moses sent into the land convinced Israel to distrust God and despair of their ability to take it. For forty years, the Israelites were sent to wander in the wilderness before they could occupy the Promised Land. For forty days and nights, Goliath taunted Saul and his army before David slew him. And Jonah gave the Ninevites forty days to repent before they would be overthrown by God. And in the most famous case of all, of course, Jesus spent forty days in the desert and was tempted by the Devil. These periods of forty days or forty years are not random spans of time. They reveal a pattern in how God deals with His people. As Moses tells Israel: The LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not. (Deuteronomy 8:2) God does not test human beings because he needs to learn about the fidelity of his creatures. He already knows the human heart. (1 Samuel 16:7) The test exists so that the man himself may learn what is inside of him. Abraham was tested by God, and came to learn of his complete trust in the Lord. In contrast, Pharaoh was tested by God and he hardened his heart. Now that we are in the midst of these forty days of Lent, we have entered the same Biblical pattern of trial and purgation. Lent should not be just like any other season in life. During this time, we should especially have our eyes turned toward the heavenly Promised Land, and most especially toward the Way that leads to it: Jesus Christ. Yet Lent often passes in vain. Our hearts are not easily moved. They grow dull and indolent when left unattended. In the stagnation of idle thoughts, the heart becomes a wilderness thick with thorns and thistles, tangled with brambles and covered with stones. This inner wilderness is a consequence of sin, both actual and original. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and attempted to decide for themselves what was good and evil, the curse of that wilderness was the natural consequence. St. John Henry Newman describes this condition: We have stony hearts, hearts as hard as the highways; the history of Christ makes no impression on them. And yet, if we would be saved, we must have tender, sensitive, living hearts; our hearts must be broken, must be broken up like ground, and dug, and watered, and tended, and cultivated, till they become as gardens, gardens of Eden, acceptable to our God, gardens in which the Lord God may walk and dwell; filled, not with briars and thorns, but with all sweet-smelling and useful plants, with heavenly trees and flowers. A careless and frivolous heart gradually becomes a hardened one. But the desert fathers teach that the remedy for such a heart is meditation on the Cross. For instance, St. John Cassian describes this remedy and tells us that we Christians must be "daily and hourly turning up the ground of our heart with the Gospel Plough, i.e., the constant recollection of the Lord's Cross." The hard ground of the heart cannot cultivate itself. The wilderness of the heart must first be cleared of vain thoughts, and then the heart can be broken up with the Gospel Plough, the Cross. As the plough tears into the soil, so the Cross breaks up the hardened heart. Meditation on the Lord's Cross during this season of Lent, and the formation of a habit of frequ...

By Anthony Esolen In one of the great ironies of linguistic history, the English word "bedlam," suggesting frenzy, madness, chaos, and noise, comes from what was then the common British pronunciation of the sacred name Bethlehem, in the Hospital of Saint Mary in Bethlehem, a monastery dedicated in 1402 to the housing and treatment of lunatics. Hence we have "Tom o' Bedlam," the name that Edgar assumes in King Lear in his disguise as a madman; first to escape the ministers of law that pursue him, unjustly, as a traitor to England and to his father, the Duke of Gloucester, but second, to remain close to the action, so he can do whatever he can for justice, for his father, and for his country. For the truly mad are those souls devoured with ambition, while the faithful and loyal are called fools. How do you preach the word of God to madmen? How do you preach it in Bedlam? For everyone in Bedlam is going to be afflicted with the twitch. If everyone around you is shouting, you will be led to shout too, if only to be heard at all, but eventually it may come to be a matter of course. If everyone around you howls at the moon, gathering in packs to lift up their hearts and eyes and hollow throats to that satellite, you will likely steal a glance that way too, and maybe join in, at first because you want to meet the madmen where they are, but eventually because you too fall in love with the howling. I ask the question, because Bedlam is where we are, a political, social, educational, and religious Bedlam of distraction in the most literal sense – as of someone condemned to death by horses pulling him apart limb from limb. Let me illustrate. Bishop Robert Barron notes that the Somali welfare scam in Minnesota is a crime against the needy. At a moderate assessment, $1,000 has been filched from every man, woman, and child in the state. He does not launch into a diatribe about it, since he has more important things to do. But for this, I have seen him accused of being as wicked as a Vichy collaborator with the Nazis. Now that, frankly, is not sane. Whatever one may think about what American immigration laws should be (I have yet to hear anybody suggest any specific emendations to the laws in question), it is bizarre to draw any equivalence between American immigration officers and the Gestapo. And as far as an American Kristallnacht is concerned, those bricks smashing the windows of businesses during "mostly peaceful demonstrations" do not have the fingerprints of policemen on them. Nor is it "Nazism" to say that schoolchildren should be taught, first and foremost, to be proud of their country and their culture – whatever of it still remains after the inundations of mass media. It is a part of the virtue of piety, required by the commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother." I expect that Italian schoolchildren will be taught the glories of their artistic and literary heritage, and I would be deeply disappointed to learn that it is no longer so. It was not Matteo Ricci who demanded of the Chinese that they should despise their ancestors. That was the Communist, Mao Tse-Tung. This, too, did Bishop Barron call to mind when he criticized, gently enough, a rather loud but dopey congresswoman who seemed to insist that material goods were all that really mattered to people. For at base, the Marxist, along with too many secularists who consider themselves conservative, really does believe that man doth live by bread alone. But we need to pull back from the madness. Bedlam, even for sinful and addle-pated mankind, is not a normal state of affairs. I appeal to this rule. If political division causes you to break charity with a fellow Christian, if you are pleased to learn that such a person has done or said something bad, if you are eager to magnify its badness rather than to interpret it in a less damning light, if you are the Eternal Oculist, so eager to remove specks from other people's eyes that you delight in gouging them out altogether, ...

By Joseph. R. Wood. It's Lent, when our mortifications and the Church's readings give us a sharper opportunity to think about what we love, and whether we are loving the right things. James Patrick was a wise man and a good friend. I met him after he had founded a tiny post-secondary educational institution, St. Thomas More College in Fort Worth. I say "institution" because even aside from its size and situation in a few residential houses near Texas Christian University, it bore little resemblance to anything we'd recognize as a university today. He had previously taught at the University of Dallas, the University of the South at Sewanee, and the University of Tennessee. He had studied architecture, theology, philosophy and just about everything else. He was an Episcopal priest before entering the Catholic Church. Jim was one of the many wise people who have shared with me much of their time and goodness. He was a man of letters, an exemplar of Western civilization. You might say in many ways he was another Fr. Jim Schall. He knew of my interest in philosophy and provided one of the greatest gifts I received as I began formal studies. He warned me, gently but clearly, that when philosophy gets off its knees, it gets into trouble. That's a pithy way of saying that when philosophy, the use of human reason to know the whole truth of "what is," divorces itself from faith, bad things happen. While failure to love God above all throws any life awry, the intellectual life seems particularly vulnerable to losing one's way. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals are very smart and can indeed make considerable progress in knowing reality, so they become overambitious and proud. A paradigmatic modern case was Martin Heidegger, a truly brilliant mind who produced much great philosophical work, jettisoned his Catholic faith, and became a Nazi (the degree of his cooperation with Hitler's regime is disputed). The original case study, though, must be the geniuses who came up with the idea for the Tower of Babel. I'm always struck that God did not say, "Look at those fools, trying to do something impossible." He stopped them because they might have succeeded. He disrupted their logos, confusing their reasoned speech so that such collective endeavors would be less likely thereafter. Reason as used by the Babel builders might have accomplished something that, presumably, God knew would not be their true good. They sought Heaven without depending on God. What does it profit us to gain the world and lose our souls? "Philosophy" is derived from the Greek for "love of wisdom." It's very easy for philosophers to focus on the "wisdom" – the truth of things – and forget about the "love" part. St. Augustine and other Christian philosophers knew this danger and accepted the notion of "I believe in order to understand." I am given faith as my first love – love of God – then I use my reason to seek truth within that love. Jim Patrick and Fr. Jim Schall understood that approach. Some philosophers, including Leo Strauss, who helped revive the study of ancient philosophical wisdom in recent decades, would disagree. He thought it was impossible for a man of faith to be a true philosopher, as faith would constrain the search for the truth, which is itself unconstrained. I wonder whether that kind of thinking brought the poet-philosopher Dante to the point where he begins his Divine Comedy. The beginning of Inferno is one of the most famous starts to any journey in Western literature: Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell The nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh – the very thought of it renews my fear! It is so bitter death is hardly more so.… How I came there I cannot really tell, I was so full of sleep When I forsook the one true way. – Inferno I.1-12 (Hollander trans.) Dante knew philosophy well, including St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and bits of ...

Hamnet, the 2025 film that has already won a slew of awards and is a favorite to win Oscar "Bests" for Picture, Director (Chloé Zhao), and Actress (Jessie Buckley), deserves its accolades. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's novel, it reimagines the genesis of The World's Most Famous Play. (Spoiler alert ahead, although at the very end.) Hamnet begins with the meeting and mating of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, called Agnes in the book and film, because her father's will refers to her by that name. O'Farrell, who came across Richard Hathaway's will, sees "Agnes" as a kind of revelation about the way, historically, the fame of fathers, sons, and husbands has subsumed female identities. There's truth in that, although probably not in this case. In O'Farrell's novel, the playwright's surname never appears. He's just "Will." So, in a fair exchange for "history's" marginalization of Anne Hathaway, Farrell and Zhao place William Shakespeare in the margins of the book and the film. And, twee as I think that is, it doesn't diminish the movie's power. Besides, we know perfectly well who's wooing Agnes. Hamnet moves slowly through their courtship: a kind of midsummer-night's-dream of wonder in what's probably the Forest of Arden. Agnes is an almost pagan figure, gathering medicinal plants and cavorting with her falcon. Is she a witch? Will, his father being a glover, presents her with a hawking gauntlet. He tells her the story of the ill-fated love between Orpheus and Eurydice. Will and Agnes have sexual intercourse. They marry and have three children. By and by, Will leaves for London. At the heart of Hamnet, of course, is the boy, Hamnet, the Shakespeares' only son, born with his twin sister, Judith, in 1585. (Their oldest, Susanna, had come two years earlier.) The real Hamnet would die of bubonic plague at age 11, and is buried (as are his father and mother) at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. The loss of a child is devastating. It was even in the 16th century when infant and childhood deaths were commonplace. The film does not explicitly suggest that Will retreated to London out of grief, but it seems that way, especially because we are given no hint that this young, grieving father will dominate the literature of the English-speaking world as no one ever had, or has since. Perhaps his success, his fortune, and his work don't justify "abandonment." But, perhaps, there was no abandonment. After all, Agnes was no poor child. When they married, Will was 18, and she was 26. We don't know when Shakespeare left Warwickshire for London, but it was certainly after the births of the twins and may have been after Hamnet's death. Anne would then have been in her early to mid 30s. Coincidentally, Hamnet has appeared within months of the release of scholarly work by Prof. Matthew Steggle that refutes the premise of Hamnet, which is that Shakespeare abandoned his family for London and fame. Steggle has found (and not he alone) that Mrs. Shakespeare likely visited and even lived with Will in London, and that their connection was strong. Of course, that's history, not drama – and new history at that. And it does not matter, in a way, since O'Farrell and Zhao are not engaged in fact but fiction, placed in a historical setting. That said, the premise that Hamlet was inspired by the death of Hamnet is also dismissed by scholars. And it matters not that they don't address the "authorship" or "recussant Catholic" questions. But in a brilliant bit of casting, perfectly aligned with the film's premise, the Prince of Denmark is played by Noah Jupe, the real-life older brother of Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet. Thus, when Agnes travels to London with her brother and they join the groundlings to see a performance of Hamlet, she is doubly shocked to hear a name and a face so like that of her dead son. More about the performance of Jessie Buckley in a moment, but I pause to praise Jacobi Jupe's portrayal of Hamnet. He resembles no one...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely. The small but growing Catholic Church in Norway is blessed to have two bishops now, native Norwegians, under fifty-two years old. Bishop Frederik Hansen, appointed the Bishop of Oslo in July 2025, joins the Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden, appointed Bishop of Trondheim, in October 2019. Plans are currently underway to celebrate the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Olaf, the canonized King of Norway, spearheaded by Bishop Varden. It would not be inaccurate to say that the Catholic Church in Norway, with 2030 in sight, is being reinvigorated by the leadership of these two comparatively youthful bishops. Bishop Erik, or Erik of Trondheim, to give him an accurate, though more medieval title, is a gentle Viking, although that moniker might sound warlike. The former Abbot of the Cistercian Monastery of Mount St. Bernard in England, he is also a former professor of Syriac, a man already highly regarded as a spiritual writer, teacher, and exemplary bishop. Yet now, after having been chosen by Pope Leo to give the annual Spiritual Exercises for the Pope and the Roman Curia in the Vatican during the first week of Lent, his stature, principally because of the wisdom and depth of his short reflections, has risen considerably. There is much conjecture that he may be called to lead a dicastery in Rome, something that he would undoubtedly not wish for, and would be a great loss for the Church in Norway. Almost any line or paragraph of Bishop Erik's words would make an excellent subject for Lenten reflection. But there were one or two phrases that speak strongly to a theme that has been much discussed recently in the media, both religious and secular: namely, the appearance of a religious revival, albeit still small, in the West. One of the questions that has yet to be answered is that, despite evidence that attendance has been much higher at celebrations such as Ash Wednesday in many countries, and that baptisms will be up this year at Easter, how many of these people, predominantly young, are returning to regular practice? It's unlikely that a young seeker, quite possibly unbaptized and with little, if any, knowledge of the Christian faith, is crossing the portal of the local Church to hear of either synodality, immigration, or debate over altar rails. Still less will they be seeking music, or something very like it, that was popular when their parents were teenagers, but as Bishop Erik put it sharply, is now distinctly "sounding last-season." More likely, if they are initially searching for beauty to lead them to the experience of the divine, the season they seek will be one long before the advent of bell-bottoms. Varden rightly and perceptively focuses on the reality that, in a highly confused and technocratic age, people are echoing the question of Pilate: "What is truth?" The Church, and ancient wisdom, has long taught that, along with truth, beauty and goodness are paths to God. Bishop Erik warned his audience, with Pope Leo prominently seated in front, that the Church, or certainly many churchmen, imagine that they must ape fashion in order to be 'relevant' and "attract the youth." But this is a great danger for any religious revival. And Bishop Varden echoed, in a sense, Chesterton's belief – which is probably shared by many seekers: "We do not want a Church that will move with the world, we want a Church that will move the world." Bishop Erik, a profoundly cultured man, knows well of which he speaks, both as a university professor and Abbot. Is there anything more embarrassing than a Churchman who is trying to be fashionable? One thinks of Dean Inge's line that a Church that "marries the spirit of this age will be a widow in the next." Bishop Varden gives the Church and, I would argue, every parish, a program for the seeker. In the first place, he argues that those seeking the truth are asking the "question [What is truth?] earnestly – we cannot let it go unanswered." This is the function, not only of the ...

By Randall Smith I will begin with a statement that may seem like pointless virtue signaling, so I hope readers will stick with me. The statement is simply that I think we should care about how immigrants are treated, whether they are legal or not. Now, I don't think this statement is especially controversial – most people don't want immigrants to be abused. But it can seem controversial depending on the context. So why am I saying it? I have been concerned about the treatment of immigrants for a while. I was concerned, for example, when President Barack Obama was deporting 3.1 million immigrants over his eight years in office, a number far in excess of what the Trump administration has carried out. According to DHS, between Trump's January 2025 inauguration and December, the administration had deported 605,000 illegal aliens. ProPublica reports that ICE also detained 170 U.S. citizens during the year, which is true, but according to The New York Post, 130 of them were arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers. Only about 40 or so were detained accidentally or erroneously, and just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours. By contrast, in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (bookings), and four mistaken removals of U.S. citizens. When President Obama's Director of Intergovernmental Affairs was questioned about the Obama record on immigration and replied: "What the president is doing is enforcing the law of the land." To her credit, one person who noticed the problem back then was Maria Hinojosa, whose 2011 Frontline special "Lost in Detention" should be viewed to get a sense of how many of the same issues upsetting people now were happening then, but with much less bitter opposition or controversy. I don't remember hordes of people demonstrating violently then, putting themselves between ICE officers and immigrants. I don't remember masked citizens putting up check points to keep ICE agents out. Even if you lauded all those actions now, you have to admit they weren't happening back then. And back then, Obama was deporting millions more immigrants than Donald Trump has been able to deport. I don't remember the Democrats in Congress shutting down the government to force changes in ICE then. So too, I don't recall a host of Catholic bishops falling all over themselves to stand boldly against the Obama administration. A Google search turned up only one USCCB position paper done by a lawyer on immigration enforcement, a host of praises of Obama for delaying some deportations, and an article in America magazine titled "Catholic bishops urge end to Obama administration's surge of deportations." Which is less overwhelming than the title promises, because, as it turns out, "the bishops" were in fact one bishop and an auxiliary bishop. This was not exactly an overwhelming flood of criticism. Even the website of the Minnesota Catholic praised President Obama's "deferred action" executive order, but did so reassuring people that Obama wasn't too extreme. "Most people with whom I spoke," writes the author of the article, "who were initially opposed to the president's action, supported it when they heard what it did and did not do." The author continued: The confusion surrounding the executive action is emblematic of an immigration debate that has been distorted both by the impassioned dislike of President Obama and a media culture that, unfortunately, turns most political debates into either-or policy choices. . . .Commentary on and reaction to the president's action has generated more heat than light and has fit into the false parameters of the public immigration debate: Either open our borders to all comers and grant "amnesty," or deport all those who are here. The president's order is not "amnesty" in the popular sense of the term, which would mean forgiving undocumented persons, requiring no penalty of any kind, and providing t...

By Robert Royal. Nuclear weapons, like other modern technological developments, have placed great strains on traditional moral principles. Just as modern medicine has changed our appreciation of the beginning and end of human life, the tremendous destructive power of modern weapons, nuclear and not, has made careful thought about war not only urgent, but – to use the fashionable term – existential. That's probably the main reason why the Vatican has seemed quasi-pacifist in recent decades. But the Church has a well-developed set of criteria about just and unjust uses of force. Indeed, in the past, it even – rightly – called for crusades. (I'll explain another time.) But those criteria – still valid in themselves – need further elaboration to confront the conditions in which we find ourselves. I have immediate family members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, been active in U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, and worked in the Pentagon managing defense preparedness. Some of my grandchildren have been forced into air-raid shelters in Jerusalem; the others may someday face terrorism at home or, themselves, have to take part in foreign wars. Millions of Americans – and not only Americans – have similar stories. And unless we keep the human costs of warfare front and center in our minds, we may be tempted to take just-war theory as merely a political or intellectual exercise. That said, there are, of course, things worth dying for – and, regrettably, things worth killing for. That's precisely why just-war theory, a tradition of moral reflection that began in the ancient world, was developed – notably by Augustine and Aquinas, and is the common heritage of most modern militaries. Some of the best-informed students I've ever had on just wat over the years learned that tradition during U. S. military training. Academic types often scoff at this, but it's true. A good summary of just-war principles can be found here. (Our friend Phil Lawler has been re-examining them in strict fidelity to the Catholic tradition online here). But I want to look closely at just a few of them here to highlight some special circumstances that they now face. I'm not sure whether the U. S. attack on Iran these past few days is justified. A lot of people already claim to know, one way or the other. But I've seen enough similar situations to be willing to suspend judgment until we know more. (I've misjudged in the past.) Still, I am sure that the way to decide should be on Catholic just-war grounds, not just the wearying and utterly predictable pro- and anti-Trump tug-of-war. The first criterion is last resort. Resort to arms is a life-and-death matter. It should only be done when other means of addressing a threat have failed. But who decides when all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted? You can always claim that something else might be pursued. In the meantime, great evils may spread: Nature's polluted, There's man in every secret corner of her Doing damned, wicked deeds. The answer is that a legitimate authority has the responsibility to decide. But also must explain how everything reasonable has been tried, what the threat is, and why it's necessary, right now, to meet it. The president hasn't said nearly enough about this. There are rumors that Iran was planning a strike against U.S. forces. If so, we need an authoritative statement about that – and more. Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis (and maybe a few campus fellow-travelers) may lose sleep over the fall of the Islamic Republic. No one else will. Everybody has agreed that "Iran must not develop a nuclear weapon" (existential threat), but done little beyond talk – for half a century. So it's good that the president has put the attack in terms of defense, both immediate and long-term. But we still need to know much more. A second criterion is just cause: Wars of conquest, in our tradition, are never just. Our intention must be to achieve some good by righting a wrong, actual or imminent. We c...

By Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky. The Transfiguration reveals the mystery of Christ's Person. In His glorified body, He stands as the fulfillment of the Law with Moses and of the Prophets with Elijah. He is the beloved Son of the Father, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Yet Tabor cannot be separated from Calvary, nor Calvary from Easter morning. The Apostles could not grasp this at once. Comprehension required time, memory, and grace. What was revealed had to be received before it could be understood. This pattern is woven into human life itself: mystery first, then revelation, then understanding. And even understanding does not exhaust mystery; it opens us to still more. This same pattern governs ordinary experience. A young man may take up manual work without fully knowing why. Skill comes slowly – through correction, repetition, and trust in those who know more than he does. Eventually, he produces something solid and recognizable as his own – perhaps just a table. Yet even so, he did not create from nothing. His achievement rests on instruction, materials, discipline, and the wisdom of others. What he makes is truly his, but it is not his alone. Our vocations follow a similar path. We consider whether our lives should follow marriage, single life, or religious life. The answer rarely comes with initial certainty. Discernment requires observation and testing. Motives must be examined. Decisions arise from attention to circumstances and to God's direction. As understanding of one's vocation grows, it can reveal deeper questions about purpose, service, and God's plan. Clarity comes only through disciplined inquiry. Once a vocation is assumed, it requires continuity. Fidelity depends on discipline and consistent effort. The vocation is not our voice. Properly discerned, it is the voice of God. We manage His plan for us as stewards. Responsibility stems from our performing what is assigned, rather than imposing our personal agendas. The more we understand our vocation, the more we become aware of its depth and participation in broader mysteries. Intellectual inquiry, too, follows a comparable pattern. Integrating the sacraments with daily living, harmonizing faith and reason, is difficult. Atheists drive a wedge between faith and reason. Atheists commonly argue that the available evidence does not warrant belief in God. They argue that material processes, evolution, and chance explain existence. But the very existence of the universe raises questions. It is ordered and intelligible. Scientific investigation presupposes that reality is coherent. The question is not whether mechanisms operate. They do. But why is the world structured in such a way that makes rational investigation possible? Understanding in science does not exhaust mystery; it directs reflection toward the transcendent source of intelligibility. A clock does not assemble itself. Its ordered parts presuppose intelligence. So too the intelligibility of the universe points beyond itself. The questions raised by atheists, pursued honestly, lead not to the dismissal of a Divine Clockmaker but toward a deeper appreciation of Him. Acknowledging a Creator raises another question: Has He revealed Himself? The Christian claim is that He has: through Israel's history, through the life and teaching of Christ, and through the Church's witness. Faith relies on testimony. It allows understanding to develop without eliminating mystery, and each insight opens us to deeper truths of God's plan. Suffering, of course, presents a persistent challenge. Atheists commonly ask, "How can an all-good God allow the presence of evil?" A child with cancer presents the reality with terrible clarity. Suffering itself is not morally evil. It is our encounter with disorder, deprivation, and the effects of sin. No argument removes the fact of suffering. Even an atheist cannot explain away the mystery. The protest against suffering presupposes that things ought to be otherwise. How does an ath...

By Kristen Ziccarelli My generation, Gen Z, has been graduating from college for about ten years now, and is typically told some variation of the same message at Commencement: go forth and change the world. But not everyone can change the world. And perhaps it's worth considering that not everyone should. The charge to change the world presupposes something of a utilitarian calculus: try to maximize the greatest change for the greatest number of people. Many will invariably try and fail. Where are they left? Right after graduating from college, I was leaving Mass at a Jesuit Basilica, and I noticed a small flyer pinned near the exit. Beneath a photograph of then Blessed Carlo Acutis were the words: "You too can become a saint." The contrast was arresting. "You can become a saint" is radically different from "you too can solve the world's problems." The former is universal and attainable; the latter, though not inherently wrong, is neither the purpose of life nor achievable for most of us. The saints have, indeed, changed the world, but primarily as a consequence of their devotion to Christ. They lived through their faith in the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which is a Person. The Christian call is not to change the world, but to strive towards sainthood – and to let God change the world through you. As the Second Vatican Council's Lumen gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) declared, sainthood is not solely for the clergy or for the hardworking few: "All men are called to this union with Christ, who is the light of the world, from whom we go forth, through whom we live, and toward whom our whole life strains." Saint Irenaeus reminds us that the Glory of God is a man fully alive. Striving towards sainthood is the essence of living life fully. Doing this in the modern world, though, inherently means going upstream against a river that is not just agnostic about sainthood, but generally opposed to the radical centeredness on God required for the saintly way. Dedicating your life wholly to anything is not the way of today's world. The classical world better understood and, perhaps, also empowered the genuine striving of the obsessive, unrelenting soul. But God's call for us, even today, was never meant as anything but that. The saints are united in their passion for following the will of God. It was from this that their world-changing actions flowed. Despite modern hostility to the Church's teachings, the message of sainthood is finding new life in odd places, particularly among younger generations. Spain, for instance, has recently displayed some of the most fruitful examples of public figures receiving the call to holiness – seriously and openly. Last year, for example, Pablo Garna, a Spanish model and social media influencer, announced his decision to enter seminary, as did TikTok influencer Juan Manasa. Álvaro Ferraro, a businessman who founded four companies by the age of 30, left his professional life behind to pursue the priesthood. "My only dream and desire," he said, "is to be a saint." Public figures like these, and our "millennial" saint Carlo Acutis, are precisely the examples needed to ignite redeeming countercultural aspirations in an age of distraction and of mediocrity on demand. These cultural influencers are compelling for the radical upheaval they cause in their worldly lives, but also because they are quite obviously normal. They are not quiet monks, distantly praying daily on some mountain. As Bishop Robert Barron often says, "A saint is a person who knows they are a sinner." So, we need to help people understand that saints, like heroes, are not models of perfection, but instances of normal human striving toward holiness. Another message that resonates with my generation is that saints are people who believed wholeheartedly that their sins were not beyond redemption. The knowledge that one is deeply loved by God, redeemed by Christ, and made for Heaven is medicine for the wo...

By Stephen P. White. Lent is in full swing now. If you are like me, you enter this season full of determination and enthusiasm: My prayer will be deeper. My penance will be purer. My almsgiving will be richer. And may it well be so for all of us! But if you are like me, you also know that the Lenten journey doesn't always finish with the same fervor with which it began. I can remember Lents – more than I care to admit – in which my best laid plans for fasting or scheduled prayer were soon derailed. I recall one year, many years ago, beginning Lent on retreat with a small group in Rome. When we met for Mass on Ash Wednesday, I was asked to do the readings. Now, reading or speaking in public does not bother me in the least, but singing – that is a very different matter. On that day. I was so full of Lenten zeal that I resolved to swallow my pride, humble myself, and intone the Gospel acclamation. After all, I was on retreat! On Ash Wednesday! In Rome! And so I sang with gusto. I sang from my diaphragm. I belted out the Alleluia. I noticed the embarrassed faces about halfway through my triumphant, liturgical faux pas. They weren't looking at me. Their eyes were all fixed on the floor as they wondered if they should reply or not. I didn't have the heart to look over at the priest. I finished the offending tune, walked to my seat, and, in a mostly metaphorical sense, died. (I'm sure – and I mean this in the most serious theological way – that God was deeply amused. God exists outside of time, so I suspect all the embarrassing things we think "will be funny one day" are immediately funny to him. But I admit that is speculation.) That was about as mortifying a beginning to Lent as I can remember, but it set the whole tone for what was, in truth, one of the more fruitful Lents I can remember. Public embarrassment, it turns out, can have a bracing effect on the soul. When it comes to persistence in penance, I find that it helps to enlist others to keep me accountable. The Lord's admonition to fast in secret notwithstanding, the watchful eye of others can sometimes move us toward virtue in a way that mere willpower and good intentions cannot. Spouses are very good for this sort of accountability. Children are even better. In my experiences, siblings have a preternatural ability to know what their brothers and sisters have given up for Lent and are at least as enthusiastic about calling one another to account for slip-ups as they are zealous in keeping their own fasts. And hearing a 7-year-old comment, with something approaching innocence, "Dad, I thought you gave that up for Lent," is a powerful corrective to a weak-willed parent. Keeping up appearances does not do justice to the true purpose of Lenten penance – the Lord clearly warns about this – but it is not entirely a bad thing either. Better a penance kept with outside prodding than a penance shattered on the rocks of half-baked Pelagian zeal, however pure. Of course, helping one another to keep our fasts, to say our prayers, or to be really generous in our almsgiving need not be a form of moral scorekeeping. Supporting one another in our Lenten practices and having the humility to rely on such support in turn are both acts of charity. Lent is a communal journey as much as a personal one. Or rather, it is communal precisely because it is personal. The Church's own prescribed penances of fasting and abstinence (including on Fridays outside of Lent) were most efficacious when they were more uniformly kept. That may seem like a tautology, but it is not. It is easier to behave a certain way when you are around lots of other people who are trying to behave the same way. To be "normal" is to live according to the norms – the expectations and precepts – of the community to which one belongs. When the norms of the community are directed toward what is good, it becomes normal to be good. So surround yourself with other penitents. Do your friends and family the favor of holding them (gen...

By Michael Pakaluk Secretary of State Marco Rubio's speech two weeks ago at the Munich Security Conference has been praised for its conciliatory tone, and even for its putative revival of grand political oratory. Looked at from the point of view of recent papal commentary on Europe, its origin and destiny, Rubio's remarks were welcome, but incomplete. Yet he cannot be faulted for that; Europe has left him little choice in the matter. Gabriel Marcel used to say that life in general has an existential character. You must seize the moment, or risk being like some sad ticket holder on the platform who just missed his train. I think of Marcel's image when I look back to the debates, twenty years ago, over whether the new European Union should recognize its debt to Christianity in the Preamble to the EU constitution. A "constitution" is just what the word says – as the great Jewish legal scholar, Joseph Weiler, warned everyone then – it is a people's "constituting itself." What they say in that moment fixes who they are, and what they will become. The European Union had a chance to constitute itself as having a Christian heritage, and it deliberately turned against it, speaking instead in bland terms about its commitments to "humanism," "progress," and "transparency." Does it have any means now of going back to that missed train? In his speech, Rubio reiterated several items from the "What We Want" section of the Trump administration's recent National Security Strategy, wrapping these up in warm fuzzies about Dante, Beethoven, Christopher Columbus, and American settlers from the old country: • Europe must assume more responsibility for its own defense; • practice fair trade; • and not insist on a supposed "rules-based order," which cannot guarantee peace, and which is often manipulated to undermine U.S. interests. • Furthermore, Europe must not continue to undermine itself, out of an overwrought guilt, through mass immigration policies that erode nationhood. No diplomat there was surprised by the list. What they welcomed was Rubio's communicating, through all the warm fuzzies, that "we are in this together, because we have a shared heritage and civilization." Yet here precisely was where Rubio was incapable of addressing directly the fundamental issue – again, because of Europe, not because of us. "We are part of one civilization – Western civilization," he said. But Western civilization is Christian civilization. "We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry." Ah, yes. But Europe was incapable of acknowledging that history and heritage. It did not constitute itself with such language. "The alliance that we want," the Secretary said, "is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear – fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children." Not quite. "We" (and especially "they") are evidently confronted with the fear of simply not having children – the "demographic decline" not mentioned by the Secretary in his speech. Europe, having turned away from Christianity, seems to have lost any boldness for having children at all. It suffers from hopelessness. For a deep treatment of this problem, see Pope Benedict XVI Saved in Hope. I wondered as I was reading the speech: Exactly how clever is Rubio? Is he speaking with an awareness that he is a representative of a genuine nation, addressing an assemblage of nations which, except on one condition, has no real unity? Was his aim, without his saying it explicitly, actually to telegraph to the Europeans that their best hope for continued unity, as nations and among themselves, is unity with us – who, by contrast, are indeed a Christian nation, de facto? Pope John Paul II wa...

By Francis X. Maier. Remember the fabulous 1970s? The decade of Watergate, recession, gas lines, defeat in Vietnam, unemployment, inflation, and a failed Iranian hostage rescue? Add to that the advent of "whole language" theory in education. Whoever came up with that idea needs a one-way ticket to Svalbard. Check the map. It's not Las Vegas. Mention "whole language" to my wife, a 40-year veteran of teaching in Catholic schools, and she'll laugh you out of the room. Whole language theory held that learning to read through meaning and context was superior to traditional classroom methods. Also more "authentic." Teaching the young should thus reflect this. Children, it claimed, would naturally absorb sound-letter relationships through mere exposure to the printed word. Instruction in phonics – learning the relationship between sounds and the letter combinations that represent them – was downgraded, especially in public education. So too was grammar. The rules of grammar were seen as artificial and deadening. Consider the results. As early as the mid-1980s, national reading skills had clearly declined. Consequences followed. Christopher Lasch, the distinguished author and University of Rochester professor, felt forced to publish Plain Style, a manual to fix his elite students' inept writing. Today, more than half of American adults read at less than a sixth-grade level. Twenty-seven percent read no books annually. Twenty-one percent are functionally illiterate. Nearly a third of graduating high school seniors read below the basic proficiency level. Nineteen percent can barely read at all. Predictably, student reasoning skills have likewise declined. Whole language theory is far from the only factor that fed these problems. But it helped set them in motion. Modern digital technologies, heavily image-driven, have simply compounded them. Early in Plain Style, Lasch notes that [Today] even those who can write a passable sentence. . .often find it beyond their power to arrange sentences so that one follows another in logical order. To construct a coherent paragraph, let alone a coherent essay, dissertation or monograph, exceeds their command of language. . . .Every point [in a text should lead] logically to the next, and every paragraph, every sentence even, adds something to the last, carrying the argument firmly forward to a conclusion that seems both effortless and irresistible because it has been so carefully prepared. Bad writing suggests confused and lazy thinking. We fix, or at least improve, our reasoning skills by reading – books of substance, lots of them, varied and good. Screens have their uses (like sharing these words), but they fatigue the eye and brain. Books are tactile and silent; the print is still and permanent; the imagination thereby gets fed. Books demand focus. The best books also reward it, because in the process, they teach the fertile use of words and ideas. No single model of good writing exists. It can't. Histories, biographies, religious works, and fiction each need unique things from an author. Canyons of style separate Hemingway's short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" from Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle;" Graham Greene's "The Hint of an Explanation" from Terry Southern's "The Road Out of Axotle." All are little jewels of talent. Each has the stamp of the author's personality. But every good writer first grasps the power of words, and then masters the rules of grammar before violating them for best effect. So what constitutes "bad" writing? George Orwell was no friend of the Catholic Church, but he wrote a supremely useful essay – Politics and the English Language – for anyone who seeks to think clearly and write well. His main targets were the calculated lying and evasion that mark so much of modern politics. But the value of his essay goes well beyond politics. Vague, insincere, lazy, and confused language inevitably corrupts thought. A mass of complicated words, he wrote, can "[fall] upon the facts...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza State of the Union addresses consume copious energy in the White House speechwriting shop, which is odd, given how quickly they are forgotten. President Bill Clinton declared that the "era of big government is over" in 1996, but can anyone remember any other address? Thirty years on, President Donald Trump will deliver the State of the Union address tonight. In 1986, the State of the Union had been prepared; there was a midday luncheon to brief the media on what to watch for. President Ronald Reagan would speak to the American people that day, but at 5 p.m., not prime time, from the Oval Office, not the Capitol, and from a brief text quickly drafted. The space shuttle Challenger had exploded upon lift-off. Schoolchildren had been watching in their classrooms; a teacher had been on board. All seven astronauts had died. The State of the Union was postponed. Reagan instead delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his long career. And that speech launched a compelling Catholic voice on the national scene. Peggy Noonan had joined Reagan's speechwriting team, having honed her skills drafting daily radio commentaries for Dan Rather of CBS. She had worked on Reagan's 1984 speech at Pointe-du-Hoc for the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. But the Challenger speech was something else. The audience was far larger, the moment immediate and raw, not historic and nostalgic. Reagan spoke, in turn, to those who mourned – the families, schoolchildren, workers at NASA, the American people. He recommitted to the space program, despite the loss – praised the spirit of adventure and discovery, likening it to the great explorers in centuries past. He concluded with lines from John Gillespie Magee's poem High Flight, the national anthem of aviation. He did not mention Magee, nor name the poem. The lines were assumed to be part of the common literary patrimony of Americans. Magee was born in 1922 in Shanghai to an American father and British mother, both Anglican missionaries. He was the eldest of four brothers and won his school's poetry prize at age 16. In 1940, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force – the United States had still not entered the war – in order to fight overseas. He arrived in the United Kingdom in August 1941 and flew his first sortie over occupied France in November. He died in December not over France, but Lincolnshire, colliding midair with fellow airmen on a training flight. He wrote High Flight after a Spitfire training mission that went up to 33,000 feet. Exhilarated, he mailed it to his parents in early September. After his death, his father published it in his parish bulletin, and it spread through the church press. Archibald MacLeish, librarian of Congress, discovered it and gave it wider circulation, comparing it with John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, the definitive elegy of the Great War. Noonan knew the poem – and suspected Reagan did too. After the Challenger speech, Reagan told Noonan that it had been engraved on a plaque at his daughter's school. High Flight is now engraved on the Challenger memorial. A posthumously published poem from a brave aviator, testing the then boundaries of flight, was perfect for the Challenger. Magee begins with "I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth" and concludes with something of a prayer, having "put out my hand, and touched the face of God." The Challenger speech quoted those lines, and increased Noonan's renown, remarkable for speechwriters who are usually anonymous. She later wrote of a "kinder, gentler nation" for George Bush, Sr., made so by a "thousand points of light." She would write a lovely memoir of the Reagan administration, What I Saw at the Revolution (1990) – a book so popular that it had a twentieth-anniversary edition for the centennial of Reagan's birth in 2011. She followed with another book on Reagan, When Character Was King (2001), and one on another hero, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father (2005). She has writt...

By Robert Royal. The following is adapted from an address given at the Chesterton Academy, Vero Beach, Florida February 19, 2026. Those of you already engaged in this wonderful institution don't need me to tell you the inestimable value of reading great books even at an early age. And for those of you who may be discovering this academy for the first time, let me just say that I would have been grateful myself to have been able to attend such a place, which unfortunately did not exist when I was young. It was a great need back then, an even greater one now when we've lost even more of our religious and cultural heritage. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that without educational institutions like this one, the days will rapidly grow even darker and more chaotic for both America and Christianity. But there is a path out, as I've tried to suggest in the title above, which is drawn from a poem in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. Now, like all poems, this one bears multiple meanings, and like all good poems it has a significance beyond even those meanings, because it opens a door to the world, a larger world and some larger way that we must remain aware of if we're to remain fully human. That, it seems to me, is the crucial value of Chesterton Academies, even as they teach the more usual skills that we all need to manage our lives in our more mundane world. As I say, I did not have the benefit of a school like this, but I did have two key advantages in addition to growing up in an intact family: a Catholic Church that in its liturgies and schools conveyed a great deal implicitly. I've often joked that the young nuns who taught me as a child probably never read Aristotle, or even Aquinas. But the Church that formed them had, and they conveyed that rational sanity of those two great figures, a sanity that meshed perfectly with the ordinary virtues that we also were living out at home. And there was one more thing: Latin. Like a lot of boys my age, I memorized the responses to what we now call the Traditional Latin Mass – I could still rattle off a number of them today. Memorizing the Latin responses had the advantage that you could serve at Mass – and you could get out of school to serve at funerals, often almost the whole day, and you could get tips at those and weddings. So, Latin has always had a certain baseline affection, and even today Latin words have a certain aura for me. There was one other experience I had that set me on the larger way that I hope I am still on. It must have been in the late fall of my junior year, right after Thanksgiving, because I played football and the season was over. There were still autumn leaves on the trees. We'd been reading Virgil's Aeneid in Latin, last period. After school, I was walking with a few friends over to someone's house under those autumnal colors. Out of nowhere a sense of the long stretch of time and the recurring seasons and all the people that had lived and died since Virgil's day, which was also Jesus', came over me in ways that I still can't entirely express. But I knew and have known since that there was some larger way – and I have labored ever since to be worthy of it and to convey some portion of it to others. I wouldn't say that is the sole purpose of true education, but it's central. As our newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman once remarked, "The problem for statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution." Many people today assume that technical knowledge and government schools are all we need to form citizens and flourishing human lives, with science on the rationalist side and literature or the humanities more broadly on the humanist and emoti...

But first a note from Robert Royal: Fr. Scalia reminds us that the Devil divides: us from others and us from ourselves. And, because yesterday was the 225th anniversary of Saint John Henry Newman's birth, Amy Fahey pays tribute to that great saint and those saints and martyrs who may have made him possible. Now for The Limits of Salvation by Fr. Paul D. Scalia If God didn't want them to eat of the tree, why did He put it there? That question is not as adolescent and petulant as it might sound. God is not haphazard in His Creation. He must have had a reason to place that one forbidden tree in the garden. The Catechism explains it nicely: that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil "evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust." (CCC 396) Now, to "freely recognize and respect with trust" is one thing the Devil just cannot do. He wants his created gifts on his own, without a Creator or Giver. He refuses to recognize or respect his creaturely limits. Non serviam, he boasts. I will not serve. . . .I will not observe limits. Misery loves company, so the Devil wants to reproduce his mindset in others. His first victims are Adam and Eve. (Genesis 3:1-7) He asks, "Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?" He's not asking to get an answer. He's suggesting that limits are absurd and anyone who sets them is hostile. God is against you because He's limited you. Adam and Eve take the bait. They reach beyond their appointed place, and in their very grasping, they fall. The Devil has the same game plan when he approaches Jesus in the desert. (Matthew 4:1-11) Now, if the Devil cannot understand the blessings of creatureliness, then the limitations of the Incarnation are absolutely impenetrable to him. The Incarnation is not a fiction or make-believe. God really did confine and limit Himself to our human nature – to be born of a woman, to experience exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and sorrow. Even to be tempted. The Devil cannot grasp the eternal Son's joyful dependence on the Father: "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord. . . .I can do nothing on my own authority." (John 5:19, 30) Nor can he understand the Son's joyful embrace of our created human nature. For Satan, divine power means doing whatever you want – not serving anybody. It certainly doesn't mean setting limits for yourself by humility. So he nudges Jesus beyond the limits. If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread. Jesus experiences hunger in His human nature and joyfully trusts His Father to sustain Him. Nor will He use His divine power to create a shortcut in His ministry, to provide physical instead of spiritual nourishment. His response points to dependence, limits, and trust in God: One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God. Someday, Jesus will feed people miraculously with loaves of bread. Indeed, He will give Himself as the Bread of Life. Adam was deceived by a false hunger and grasped for the fruit of the tree. Hung on the tree of the Cross, the New Adam nourishes us with the Eucharist, His own Body and Blood. He does so not for Himself but in obedience to the Father's will for our good. Then the second temptation. The Devil proposes a daring display, that Jesus cast Himself from the parapet of the temple and presume that the Father will save Him. If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. In effect, Prove it. Jesus' divine power is boundless, but not pointless. It is, in a sense, confined by reason and purpose. He will one day work miracles. He will exorcize and heal, walk on water and multiply loaves of bread. But these miracles are not parlor games. He doesn't perform them to prove Himself. Indeed, He rebukes those who (like the Devil) demand signs. (Matthew 16:4; 12:39) His divine power is not wielded capriciously, but for our good – to reveal, instruct, and i...

By Eduard Habsburg When it comes to the joys of large families, there's more than just an ocean between Europe and the United States. This is what I discovered when I began to regularly travel between the two continents and give talks on the topic of the family. A full disclaimer first: I believe family is the greatest thing, and by family, I mean a large family. My wife and I were blessed with six children, and that experience has been life-changing, the greatest thing that ever happened to me (besides my faith, of course). So, naturally, I enjoy speaking about having many children. It will not surprise you to learn that being happily married and having a bunch of children is not the rule in old Europe. People are often shocked when I mention six kids. It is literally unheard of. It's considered unreasonable even among more traditionally-minded families. In Italy, where I lived for ten years until recently, it took me three years of driving a car through the streets of Rome until I saw a pregnant woman crossing the road. And this was supposed to be the Catholic country, the land of bambini. But then something very interesting happened a few years ago, when I crossed the pond to speak at an event in the United States. Before the talk, I was a guest at a dinner, where I was introduced to a lot of young Catholics. I spoke of being married and of my six children. Nobody was shocked. In fact, two young women who greeted me told me they had seven and eight kids respectively, and how great it was to have a large family. They looked at me with something approaching pity, and you could almost hear them thinking: "Well, perhaps the Lord will give him some more children." And I have to admit that, now, I was the one who was slightly shocked. The funny thing was, these were not super well-off families. They couldn't "easily afford" lots of children. No, I had the impression they were Catholics with a deep conviction that large families are what God loves and encourages in a marriage. As these testimonies multiplied, I discovered a whole world that would be very hard to find in Western Europe. I encountered dozens of families (with lots of children) queuing up at talks about faith and especially about Blessed Emperor Karl, the last ruler of my Habsburg family. He, of course, had eight children and was a pillar of the faith. Remarkably, he seems to be very inspiring to a fair number of people in the United States. It was this experience (and our own family history) that led me to write my second book, Building a Wholesome Family in a Broken World, which is a strong encouragement to having large families. Yes, I am very much aware that large families are not the norm, even in the United States. But in America, it seems at least possible to speak about that subject. In large parts of Europe, that is quite unthinkable. And sometimes I worry what will happen when my book will be translated into, say, German. What Americans can understand or at least respect may lead to outright hostility in the German-speaking world: a large family is not reasonable, it's not affordable, it kills my personal freedom, it ties women to the kitchen and turns back the wheel of progress (or it's bad for the environment). In such a climate (no pun intended), even someone as enthusiastic as I am has to choose his words carefully when speaking about the family. The worst part is that many Catholic pastors (and unfortunately also some bishops) play along with the secular game. They encourage couples not to have children too soon, to take their time, to "enjoy each other," to put off having children until you can afford them, etc. While I can understand that such Catholic leaders fear being labelled "radical", they should consider their responsibilities. Because – and this is my main contention here – I believe that you won't fully embark on the adventure of having a large family without faith. And if even your faith leaders discourage you, from where, then, should ...

By David Warren The founder of worldly Christendom, by Christianizing the Roman Empire, and ending at least for a moment the persecution of Christians in his realm, was famously a pagan until he finally converted on his deathbed. To the end, long after his victory under the Sign of the Cross in the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine was careful to maintain the secular signs of his power. In Eusebius of Caesarea, we read that the (self-appointed) Emperor of the West witnessed the Sign of the Cross, above the sun, on that battlefield, and the words τούτῳ νίκα – "By this, conquer" – radiating from it. That Christianity should spread by conquest was a (divine) paradox. In our liberal, modern worldview, it appears even more of a paradox than it did to Constantine's contemporaries. It is in conflict with our abstract Christianity, which cannot confess anything as vulgar and physical as military conquest. Balancing this, the modern is also unhappy with accounts of the physical persecution, which reached its peak under Diocletian. In his later Vita Constantini, Eusebius reported that in the night after, Christ appeared to Constantine in a dream, and told him to make a copy of what he had seen in the sky; and that this Cross would protect him against very physical attacks. Again, I look at this through eyes that are modern. The Church to which we belong owes its historical existence to events that are purported to have happened in the world. But then, adding to our perplexity, the Church of the very First Century also formed from an event that happened in the real world. For we acknowledge that Christ came down from Heaven, and ascended to Heaven conspicuously AFTER His death in the world. Mind touches matter in these matters, and is recorded in the annals of the world. And so long as we live in the world, we are compelled to acknowledge the acknowledgement, even if we deny or dispute the truth of what happened. That I neither deny nor dispute is, like faith in general, unlikely to convince anybody, after the passage of so many centuries, though the fact it is still plausible to many millions may seem at least startling. But when it is considered that the same argument can be made for Islam, and several dozen other "belief systems," we satisfy by dissatisfying the modern mind. I count "modern science" as one of those belief systems, or rather among them, for no two modern scientists will subscribe to exactly the same thing, even if what the propagandists say is true – that 97 percent of them subscribe to anthropogenic global warming. And men such as Richard Dawkins compare the Christian God to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and do this quite glibly. For modern Disbelief does not feel the obligation to be serious, which Christians and other sincere believers were constrained by, through this vast interval of time. It is the combination of a belief in casual, changeable things (like constantly updated "science"), with easy retreat into disbelief in anything, that characterizes our modern view. Not belief or faith, but a settled attitude of radical cynicism and skepticism has brought about an era in which the very existence of a fact is ground for methodical rejection in the academy and elsewhere. Our children are taught that nothing can be true, except what they choose to believe, or "my truth" specifically. Use the word "truth," and one is immediately at a disadvantage in most discussions I have had with moderns throughout my adult life, and, curiously, I quit high school when I realized that this was the attitude they were inculcating. Only in classics, math, and physics was this ever relaxed. The ancient Sophists were not so settled in their own rejections of reality, and tended to accept what they could see and taste. And so, the Constantinian miracle tends to be neglected, or actually mocked, when it must be confronted. For we are not Christians by philosophical abstraction, but in an historical frame; just as Christ must also...