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By Brad Miner In 2019, I wrote here that, "When I was a 4-year-old, I sat on the fire escape of our apartment and thought: 'What if there were nothing?' (But I'm sure, back then, I didn't use the subjunctive.) And then thought: 'I'm here.' I stared into the slate-gray sky and knew or sensed that 'nothing' is the one thing that cannot be." It was that slate-gray sky, of course. I don't suppose I've ever seen anything else that so suggested emptiness, nothingness. I don't remember which of my parents was home at the time. Likely it was my mother, and perhaps she had shooed me from the kitchen so she could begin dinner preparations, and I may have been feeling lonely. That was my normal state, and it would not change until we moved from the city to the suburbs, and home became a ranch-style house in a newly built neighborhood in what had once been a park or, as we kids called what little greenery remained, the woods. Once I was old enough for school, my loneliness evaporated, which was not entirely a good thing, because all I wanted to do was play (there were always playmates), and that was mostly the case all the way through college, after which I began to worry about my soul – and it was about time I did. According to the Council of Vienne (1312), the rational soul is "per se and essentially the form of the human body." And the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 365) explains that "spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature." So, the "I" about which I was contemplating at age 4 anticipated my later, adult understanding of my immortal soul. I was not, of course, any sort of theological Mozart. I was never any kind of prodigy, except for my fearlessness in climbing the sycamore tree in the lot next to the old apartment all the way to the top – something that gave terror to my parents and caused admiration among the older boys (and the girls we used to call tomboys). Plus, I wasn't raised Catholic. Even after I became Catholic at 25, I still had a lot of growing up to do. Something to do with maturation of the prefrontal cortex, probably. But at 35, I'd fully embraced the Faith and its demands. Now, 40+ years later, it's time to get ready for the endgame. When I die, I must go to Heaven. I say that not as an imperative, as though it were God's rule that all go to Heaven, for God does not have such a rule. Being a sensible sinner, I'll happily take Purgatory along the way. But the corollary is: I must not go to Hell – again, not an imperative statement. This is an occasion to recall the famous Léon Bloy quote: "The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint." So, I (and you) must stay focused on that, which, arguably, is the hardest thing for any man or woman to "achieve." Without grace, of course, it will not happen. Thinking about this has got me wondering about Heaven, which is the end for the soul and, later, the body. What is Heaven like? What will the blessed see when they arrive? Well, we begin with a caution – St. Paul (1 Corinthians 2:9) quoting Isaiah (64:4): But as it is written: "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him"— So, neither I nor anyone else can describe this ultimate glory. Some mystics have claimed to have had a glimpse, but that just leads to another caution. After such a mystical experience on December 6, 1273, St. Thomas Aquinas abruptly stopped writing his Summa. According to his secretary/companion/confessor, Reginald of Piperno, Thomas said all his work now seemed to him like "straw" compared with what he had seen. He refused to speak of it again. Other saints (almost always women), from Hildegard of Bingen to Faustina Kowalska, have had visions of Heaven, and they seem to converge on joy and light and love. (You can check here to read what the Catechism says.) It's living in the perfect "communion of life and love ...

By Michael Pakaluk I read Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country backwards, chapter-wise, and I'd recommend you do the same. The end of the book tells us about Samuel Alito, the great-hearted man and patriot, while the beginning of the book, academically more respectable, to be sure, dives right into the state of the debate over textualism and originalism, which are not everyone's cup of tea. The final chapter, "The Real Counterculture," is an address commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California. In this essay, as in almost all the other essays, Justice Alito's exquisite historical sense is on display. I take it that a true originalist must be a true historian, since the originalist's aim is to let Chesterton's "democracy of the dead" exercise its merited authority. Justice Alito refers to the 30,000 hippies who gathered in San Francisco for the Human Be-In in 1967; the first Earth Day in 1970; and the student protests against Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. None of these storied counter-movements from around the time of the college's founding, he points out, has proved to be a lasting counterculture, and yet the college's devotion to truth and civil disagreement remains countercultural, different, and vital. What follows includes a chapter on the necessity of faith in a secular and materialistic age; another, "Four Men of the American Experience," which weaves the story of Theodore Roosevelt together with those of the Justice's grandparents and Clarence Thomas's family, attempting to define the distinctively American character; and an astonishing chapter on "Achievements of Italian Americans." After recounting the terrible prejudice that Italian immigrants faced, he asks whether we know, for instance, that at least twenty-seven Italian Americans have been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Many have been great artists such as Constantino Brumidi, the "Michelangelo of the United States Capitol," operatic composer Gian Carlo Menotti, and the singer Frank Sinatra. "In religion," he says, "think of Mother Cabrini, the first American saint, who overcame enormous obstacles to aid suffering Italian immigrants. Think of Rita Antoinette Rizzo, better known as Mother Angelica, who founded EWTN." And that's not all. "Is it possible to think of the history of baseball without Joe DiMaggio or Yogi Berra?" Indeed. In the midst of reading the essays on threats to the Constitution and the primacy of the right to religious liberty, I began saying to myself, "How did we come to deserve a high-ranking government official with such extraordinary character? How is it even possible that this man has attained a seat on the highest court? If we fail at this project, will we have anyone else to blame but ourselves?" Conveyed throughout the book is the relentless workload of a contemporary Justice. Writing on Learned Hand, Justice Alito yearns for the days when a judge enjoyed the leisure to practice judging as a craft: "If Learned Hand's opinion writing is akin to producing a custom-made garment, the judges who sign off on fifty opinions per day are more like factory managers." A striking humility about the role of a judge is also evident throughout this book. Again and again, Justice Alito insists that he isn't a philosopher. Dealing with abstract questions in the way that might make a law professor celebrated has little to do with the practice of judging. Judges, he observes, are not trained to decide deep questions; most of their work is extremely narrow and technical. Certainly one should not seek praise and fame by judging; done rightly, it ought to draw little of either. A judge on a state supreme court and a low-level administrative judge differ in scope and in the reach of their decisions, but the nature of the task is the same. I confess to being puzzled by the absence of any essay in the volu...

By Francis X. Maier Readers with a taste for history may remember the story of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). For those who don't, it was a high-end military simulation from a couple of decades ago, run by the now defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Described as "the key to military transformation," it cost about $250 million – a huge expense for such a thing at the time. The game's premise was an armed conflict with a rogue Persian Gulf state. The Blue team was a combined American force testing the concept of RDO – "Rapid Decisive Operations." It was based on the doctrine of "network-centric warfare" and supported by a wide range of information technologies, analytical tools, and electronic sensors. The Red team – the bad guys – was largely a one-man show run by a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, Paul Van Riper. He was given complete freedom in conducting his side of the conflict. The war game commenced, and Red team promptly sank an aircraft carrier, several cruisers, and much of the Blue fleet with low-tech swarm attacks. It killed thousands of simulated U.S. servicemen in the game's first two days. It also consistently evaded Blue team surveillance by using unconventional, unpredictable tactics and exploiting Blue team's technical vulnerabilities. Red team did so well that the simulation was halted, reset, and – according to a very public and very angry Van Riper – forced to conform to a computer-projected framework and outcome favoring Blue. The military disputed elements of Van Riper's account, but MC02 remains a lasting embarrassment and a lesson in the costs of our tech addiction. Worse, it is a lesson imperfectly learned. Today – 24 years later – our technologies, including most notably AI, are much more sophisticated, powerful, and precise. They're also more expensive. And they still have technical vulnerabilities. They can do vastly more damage in war. But they can't – by themselves – destroy a determined, low-tech adversary, no matter how wicked the enemy and how deserved the punishment might be. Iran is Exhibit A. High tech weaponry, no matter how "intelligent," never takes the place of mature, morally informed human command. It's true that killing an enemy remotely makes one's own safety more secure. But it also makes both the act of killing more impersonal, and the choice to kill much easier. Autonomous combat drones choosing their own targets is not an edifying thought. But exactly that reality is already a part of today's battle space. Here's the point: The more advanced our tools, the more two-edged they become. George Parkin Grant, the great Canadian Christian philosopher, noted that North American civilization is uniquely addicted to technology in a manner resembling a secular religion. This flows from the continent's European settlers and their Calvinist roots, drained of their original Christian framework. Fundamentally, we are a people of conquest – the conquest and remaking of nature, including human nature. This explains our genius for innovation and tools. But as we use our tools, they use and reshape us, ending in a kind of hubris that involves a blindness to nature, a refusal of limits, a skepticism toward anything "sacred," and a slavery to the power of technique. This needn't be so. We can choose otherwise. But too often, too easily, we sleepwalk ourselves into catastrophe. MC02 reminds us of the cost of failing to see beyond our tech-dominated assumptions and the consequences that ensue. Thus, when it comes to artificial intelligence, if we don't want a real-world version of Skynet, we can never dispense with rigorous human foresight and rigorous human control of AI, its development, and its applications. AI is here and it's not going away. So how should we proceed? Scripture tells us dozens of times to "be not afraid." That's not a suggestion. It's a command. There is a God; He loves us; and He's intimately involved in our affairs. Words like "apocalypse" and "crisis" pepper our pu...

By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg Few criticisms of modern education have aged as well as C.S. Lewis's 1943 The Abolition of Man. In "Men without Chests," Lewis explains, "we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. . . .We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." The chest, in this context, is the trained heart that subordinates the appetites to the right use of reason. While Lewis focused on the chest, we can extend the analysis to the head, where the same surgery is performed on both the "mind" and "intelligence." Lewis presaged the current crisis of intellect when he described the men that a debunking education produces. He called them Men without Chests; we call them "critical thinkers." Of them he wrote: "It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence." Today, "intelligence" has suffered the same fate as the "intellectual." "Mind" and "intellect" are words that point to realities that are immaterial in nature. Consistently eradicating all immaterial things from educational theory leaves these concepts especially vulnerable to abuse. Ask any school faculty to explain "intelligence," and you will likely hear modifiers like multiple, emotional, and artificial. The noun they modify has become an organ donor. The word "intellect" comes from the Latin intus legere – to read the interior. Our senses perceive outward qualities; the intellect grasps what things are, conceptually. A man sees and recognizes a particular dog, but his intellect grasps the nature it shares with all dogs. Unlike sight, it is not tied to a bodily organ; schools should cultivate its use and proper end. Aquinas teaches that the intellect's end is truth, the conformity of mind to reality, and thus our intellectual nature bears the image of God, a likeness that finds its fulfillment in Christ the Logos who is Truth Himself. Intellect is a power of the soul with two operations Aquinas calls intellectus and ratio. Josef Pieper, in Leisure, the Basis of Culture, describes intellectus as "simply looking," the mind at rest receiving reality. The student who grasps the structure of a fugue, a proof, or a proverb is doing more than perceiving: he is apprehending what the thing is. Ratio, or reasoning, is the active capacity to move from what is known by first principles to what was previously unknown. Reasoning becomes rootless when it is not preceded by the intellect's apprehension of the first principles. Yet we still demand "higher-order thinking" after we have banished the receptive mode of intellectus. By this removal, we produce an army of men without minds, well trained to criticize but rendered incapable of begetting higher culture. Severed from the truth it exists to know, intelligence becomes simply technical skill, leaving no room for true erudition. St. Paul described a generation such as ours as "ever learning, and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth." (2 Timothy 3:7) Three modern notions illustrate St. Paul's words, and each takes the name of the mind and gives it to something lesser. Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligences" splits the unity of intellect into eight or more capacities, such as mathematical, kinesthetic, and musical; the intellect exercises these abilities, but they are not the intellect itself. "Emotional intelligence," the premise of the social-emotional learning programs, inverts the order of intellect and passions. Artificial intelligence is no more like intelligence than fake flowers are like flowers; it simulates its effects, not the thing itself. Only the habit of judging by appearances lets us confuse the two. Dante, passing through the gate of Hell in Canto III of the Inferno, learns from Virgil that he will see the sorrowful who have "lost the good of the intellect," not the power to think, but its object, the truth that is God – the Goo...

By Robert Royal Today is the Feast of the North American Martyrs, a group of French Jesuits and religious – Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Jean de Lalande, Antoine Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, Noêl Chabanel, and Br. René Goupil. It's worth recalling each of them by name as a reminder that they were individuals like us (though holier and more heroic), not merely some distant historical band. They were brave and dedicated men who suffered the most unspeakable horrors – fire, torture, mutilation – on the way to death as they tried to carry out the Lord's command to preach the Gospel to all nations. France, modern France, is herself now undergoing a fiery agony. It's difficult to sort out exactly who's responsible. It's being said to have started as a "student" protest over too few teachers and poor school facilities. But how such protests could have erupted in multiple places all over the nation among "student groups" without some extensive coordination remains unexplained. And whatever the origins, it's clear that the violence and destruction are coming now from the far-left and the worst elements in France's large Muslim population. There are reports that even Notre Dame is under potential threat as is the Élysée Palace, the French White House. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, however, and should call greater attention to the simmering attacks on French institutions in recent years, not least against the Church. Many people took heart at seeing the enthusiastic crowds that turned out during Pope Leo's visit to France just a few weeks ago. It's also difficult to sort out exactly what all that meant. It was very moving to see people kneeling on the sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées making their Confessions. But that's just the happy part of the story. For many years now, the French Church has been under attack, literally, from various quarters. The Faith & Reason Institute, the parent institution of The Catholic Thing, has been working on a project in co-operation with Aid to the Church in Need USA, that we've named "Faith under Siege." We mostly look to the clear cases of persecution and, yes, modern martyrdom in Muslim nations these days – Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Yemen, etc. – and totalitarian states such as China, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and more. But in the course of our research, we've also discovered that there's a subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Christian current even in Western Europe, though it's hardly reported on. When there's an obvious case like the 2016 murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel by two radicalized young Muslims (and the less-reported murders of Catholics at Mass shortly thereafter) the world notices for a week or two, then moves on. But there's a pattern beneath the most flagrant events. The world has been shocked over the weekend by images of the historic Limoges town hall burning and its tower collapsing after being torched by rioters. But French authorities have been saying for years that, on average, two religious buildings burn down per month in France. And that despite considerable efforts by the government to protect them. Everyone, of course, still recalls the mysterious 2019 fire that almost destroyed Notre Dame de Paris. But the Saint-Maclou/Saint-Jacques Cathedral in Rouen also caught fire, in 2024. That same year, the Basilique de l'Immaculée Conception in Saint-Omer was also damaged by a blaze that was deliberately set. The list goes on and these high-profile events are only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of smaller churches, shrines, statues, etc., have suffered similar attacks or serious vandalism. Now, to be sure, there are multiple reasons for the fires. Some are accidental, maybe a third owing to poor wiring, aging infrastructure and the like. But French authorities estimate that two-thirds are deliberately set. It's not difficult to speculate – because some perpetrators have been caught in the act – that large parts of this are perpetr...

By John M. Grondelski This Sunday's Gospel showcases one of those teachings people can always quote and think they understand what Jesus meant – until you talk to them about it: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." (Matthew 22:21) The context of Jesus's teaching was, of course, attempted entrapment: the Pharisees were seeking a "gotcha" moment where they could use Jesus's words either to alienate him from the Jews or to get Him into trouble with the Romans. Asked about the "lawful[ness]" of paying taxes to the Romans, they knew that an affirmative response would divide Jesus from the vast majority of Israel chafing for almost a century under Roman occupation, while a negative one would be to challenge Rome's government. Jesus evades the trap by speaking of the things of Caesar and the things of God – without explicitly saying what belongs to whom. Jesus's words were social teaching: a recognition of civil government and its autonomy. In that sense, they perdure as keystones of Catholic social ethics. But just as the words left behind a certain ambiguity in first-century Israel, so today – in a different world – many hearers read their own context into them. Jesus recognizes that both God and Caesar are rulers who govern and whose subjects owe them certain obligations. Jesus is not saying that God and Caesar are the same kinds of rulers or that their relationship is symmetrical. It is not. There are things due God and things due Caesar. But recognizing that some things are owed to Caesar does not mean they are not also owed to God. God and Caesar are not divvying up things in mutually exclusive ways. There is nothing that belongs to Caesar that did not first and still belongs above all to God – including Caesar himself. To say otherwise is to fall into the errors of pagan Rome where, at various times, the emperor himself was turned into a god. Caesar is not God's competitor or an alternate "power base." In antiquity, what we today call "church" and "state" were not separated. The ruler was often regarded as God's representative, though his all-too-frequent apotheosis was idolatry. The idea of the ruler as divine representative is not far-fetched. The reason Israel did not have a king for so long was that God was its king and Israel His people. This was the essence of the Covenant. Of course, Israel eventually demanded a king so that "then we shall be like all the other nations." (I Samuel 8:19-20) The demand was prophetic: with few exceptions, the kings of Israel and Judah dragged the people down to a moral level "such as all other nations." (I Samuel 8:5) But at its best, kingship in Israel was seen as representing God because the king was to lead Israel in God's ways: that is why Solomon prays for wisdom "to govern your people, [so] that I may discern between good and evil." (I Kings 3:9) The same concept is operative in the Western notion of the divine right of kings. The king is appointed by God not to exercise his own arbitrary will but to lead the people in the ways of righteousness. But both in Israel and the West, the reality rarely corresponded to the ideal. Jesus's response to the Pharisees was intended to recognize temporal authority, but not to the exclusion of divine primacy. Even kings, even Caesar, are subject to the Ten Commandments. Admitting the limited scope of what is due to Caesar is to recognize the legitimate autonomy of created things, a concept affirmed at Vatican II. (Gaudium et spes, no. 36) The created world has its own proper, intrinsic order: in that sense, God is something of a divine watchmaker who inputs the working mechanisms into His creatures. But – it's important here to distinguish legitimate autonomy of earthly things from Deism – God does not then walk away from Creation or history. The autonomy of earthly things is not an autonomy separate from, independent of, or ultimately not rooted in God: it is God's design. The "privacy" dri...

By Mary Eberstadt Cornell University is my alma mater. I spent four years there in a scholarship house known widely as a redoubt of nerds. As it happened, Telluride House had as its neighbor one of the most raucous fraternities on campus – a juxtaposition not without occasional levity, including when the brothers banded together outdoors and chanted, "Hey Telluride! E equals mc squared!" in our direction. One Saturday night, as I was studying with a friend and distracted by noise from one of the frat's epic parties, I suggested that we go over to see what these fabled soirees were like. He was skeptical, but the booming speakers were making study impossible, so he indulged me and off we went. Within two minutes of entering, as he left to get drinks, I was accosted by a tall, plastered brother in possession of what he thought was a winning proposal: if he could guess my weight within five pounds, I should go upstairs with him. I laughed in his face, amused both by his ethanol-fueled chutzpah and by his swaying in the air above me like a mighty oak about to be felled. I motioned to my friend and we left the place, never to return. And that was the only thought I gave the episode until years later, when I was reading Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. A slew of memoirs of Greek life resulted in a column for TCT, urging Christian boys against joining fraternities. The lesson learned on that far-off Ithaca night – that frat parties are no place for an unescorted young woman – might seem obvious. But that is exactly the pregnant point: not anymore. Two years ago, at another Cornell fraternity, a young woman would make a different choice, and the resulting sordid tale would come to ricochet around the world. And though the details may be disputed in court from now until kingdom come, one fact is clear: she did not see it as ridiculous to acquiesce in what some smashed young men were up to. At least in the beginning, she saw acquiescence as her preferred choice. What has changed between then and now? This brings us to the answer that's gone missing in the commentary exploding everywhere over Cornell's "Jane Doe." In December 2008, thanks in part to forward-looking philanthropist Sean Fieler, a first-of-its-kind conference on "The Social Costs of Pornography" was held at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J. That conference had a major impact, including on my own thinking. It resulted in two critical books, also the first of their kind, summarizing evidence from doctors, therapists, neuroscientists, and other experts. That evidence pointed to a truth that overrules today's idolization of sexual autonomy: Pornography is poison. It alters brains, kills romance, and leads to intense loneliness. It creates addicts and destroys families. The empirical record has been well-documented since that landmark conference, and thereafter. The data are in. What should we do about them? Here are thoughts I shared with a conference of women organized to discuss "A Better Way Forward" just last month: If I could reduce years of meditating on this subject to one single action memo aimed at bettering the human condition, it would read like this. We need to re-stigmatize pornography. We – meaning not only those of us present, but also people across the West – need to understand that pornography today is like tobacco was yesterday: ubiquitous and toxic and in need of social reform. It is the enemy of romance. It licenses perversion. And pornography is also a major factor in today's cratering rates of marriage and babies. Those are the sad facts about a porn-drenched culture. And they call for a radical response: We need something like a movement and manifesto Against the Acceptance of Pornography. It should include secular as well as religious people, and as many of the walking wounded as can be rallied – as well as the heads of faithful Christian universities and colleges, and celebrities, and therapists, and anyone else committed enough to sig...

By David G Bonagura, Jr. We have come to an incredible cultural moment. The seemingly unstoppable drumbeat for unlimited progress that has long characterized Modernity has lost its rhythm. Technological advancement and social engineering have not delivered the promised yet still elusive "good life." Instead, rapid change without a compass has generated widespread dissatisfaction, distress, and disenchantment. This latter adjective has lately been the favorite of more than one cultural commentator. The ancients would have used a different word to describe the predicament of our secular world: disordered. For St. Augustine, peace is the aim of all creatures, and peace, he writes in The City of God, is the "tranquility of order – and order is the arrangement of things equal and unequal in a pattern which assigns to each its proper function." Disorder occurs when the facets of life are disjointed so that lesser things or even evil things crowd out the goods proper to life and community. When societies exalt sins as goods, when politics become all-consuming, when technology swallows every dimension of human living, disorder reigns not with peace, but with anxiety, angst, and asphyxiation. For individuals, the suffering is internal. As Augustine writes in his Confessions, "every disordered mind is its own punishment." Sin is the primary cause of disorder, and the disorder of our age stems from violations of the First Commandment. The secular world speaks and acts as if God did not exist. Without God as both the foundation and the goal of order, man and his sinful will take God's place as the supreme good. Man's fallen will is consumed, in Augustine's memorable phrase, with the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate others, which is the source of all conflicts and all disorders in this City of Man. The only way to correct our current disorder, short of the second coming of Christ, is to reorder our lives and societies upon God. This requires, first, that we acknowledge God as our rightful king and open our hearts to His grace, which alone can redirect our wills away from dominating others and toward serving others. The noticeable uptick of conversions to Catholicism these last few years testifies that men and women are increasingly finding the antidote to secular disorder in the saving truths and divine grace housed in the holy Catholic Church. Yet this large cohort of converts comprises only a fraction of a broader population that is disenchanted with today's disorder, but is not inclined or not ready to seek remedies in religion, and certainly not in the Church. How might we convince them to move from secular disorder to Catholic order? First, we ought to dispel any fears that "Catholic order" is somehow synonymous with tradwives, The Handmaid's Tale, authoritarian government, theocracy, oppression, or social uniformity. It is none of those things. Catholic order is not a political program or a societal intervention. It is rather, in the words of the great historian Christopher Dawson, the arranging of "the whole of life towards unity, not by the denial and destruction of the natural human values, but by bringing them into living relation with spiritual truth and spiritual reality." The goal of Catholic order is not the establishment of structures. It rather transcends existing structures of many kinds to harmonize them with divine prerogatives. In St. Paul's language, Catholic order aims "to unite all things in Christ," for "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come." (Ephesians 1:10; 2 Corinthians 5:17) Catholic order is a way of living that allows the Holy Spirit, who is intimately close to us, to penetrate all aspects of life and direct them into communion with God. It helps the individual bridle his wayward will and it leads society to elevate the common good over factional divisions. With its steadfast faith in God, Catholic order offers renewed enchantment, that is, h...

By Stephen P. White The death of Pope Paul VI on August 6, 1978 – the Feast of the Transfiguration – was not a great surprise. The pope had been in poor and declining health for some time. He had retreated to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo a month before and had been bedridden for several days when he suffered a massive heart attack. Twenty days later, the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, was elected to succeed Pope Paul. The death of Pope John Paul I, after just 33 days in office, was a tremendous shock to a Church already reeling from some very turbulent years. The Church, most especially in the developed world, had been tossed about in the wake of the Council. It had been more than a decade since the last papal encyclical, Pope Paul VI's Humanae vitae. The reception (or the opposite, as the case may be) of that papal teaching was emblematic of the era. The Church seemed to be teetering between self-inflicted irrelevance through wholesale accommodation to the spirit of the age, on the one hand, and on the other, the obsolescence that comes from a stubborn refusal to have anything at all to say to a rapidly changing, modern world. For Catholics of a certain age, these are familiar events in a familiar story. To those with faith, or at least the advantage of hindsight, it might be clear that neither was likely to be the ultimate fate of the Church. As the second conclave of 1978 opened in Rome, one can imagine the uncertainty and disquiet that loomed over both the Church and the world in those tumultuous days. Yet it was precisely at that moment in history that Karol Wojtyla, a man "from a far country" behind the Iron Curtain, was elected to the See of Peter, and the history of the late 20th century and the post-Conciliar Church took an unexpected and dramatic turn. These events are on my mind just now because of the proximity of the dates of Pope John Paul II's election and his Feast Day (October 22) but also because I have recently been re-reading George Weigel's magisterial first installment in the biography of the Polish pope, Witness to Hope. If you have never read Weigel's magnum opus, or if you have not read it in many years, I encourage you to take it up again. For one, if you begin now, you might finish it (along with the second installment, The End and the Beginning) in time for the 50th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's election in October of 2028. On a more serious note, for those of us who know the story so well, it helps to be reminded now and then of just how dramatic and improbable were the series of events that formed the man, Karol Wojtyla, and that led to the election of Pope John Paul II. For those who don't know the story – and a majority of Catholics, at least in the United States, are too young to remember – the life of John Paul II is a powerful testament to Divine Providence. Which brings us back to those days in the early autumn of 1978. I don't know if Karol Wojtyla slept well after the first day of the year's second conclave or not. He probably had some sense of what the next day would bring. Was it a sense of foreboding? Of trepidation? Of resignation? Of peace? What is clear, and what Weigel is so adept at teasing out, is just how well matched were the man and the moment. John Paul II was not dropped into history like some ecclesial superhero. He had been formed by a very particular, if extraordinary, set of circumstances. Here was a Pole who understood in his bones the role of culture in shaping history at a level deeper than politics or economics. Here was a man who understood the roots of human freedom through the harrowing experience of living under successive totalitarian regimes. Here was a man with experience as a laborer, as a university chaplain, as a pastor, an intellectual, a mystic, a polyglot and a bishop – all before the age of 40. Here was a man schooled in the fundamentals of Thomism yet convinced that modernity needed to be engaged on terms it coul...

By Brad Miner On December 3rd, Nidal Mailk Hasan will be executed by a firing squad. This will take place at the site of his crimes, the Ft. Hood U.S. Army base near Killeen, Texas, where, on November 5, 2009, Hasan, an Army doctor, fatally murdered 13 people and injured more than 30 others. There is no doubt about his guilt. From death row, he wrote to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi asking to be made a "citizen" of the caliphate, and he said he had renounced his U.S. citizenship. Baghdadi died in 2019 when he was cornered by U.S. operatives and self-detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and two of his own children. Dr. Nidal never married and has no children. As he attacked his victims, Hasan was heard to call out, "Allahu Akbar!" The Army and the Defense Department initially classified the shooting as "workplace violence." Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says Hasan's execution will be livestreamed. (I use the word "Defense," not "War," because no statutory change has yet been made to the Department's name.) My own view is that, by Catholic tradition (and notwithstanding the catechetical tinkering of Pope Francis), the execution of Hasan is justified. After all: Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind. (Genesis 9:6) And: Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God's servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. (Romans 13:3-4) No need to go on about that. Opinions differ about the morality and efficacy of capital punishment. Pope Francis, in his August 2018 revision of the Catechism (no. 2266/2267), referred to the death penalty as "inadmissible" because it's "an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person." In some sense, that may be true. That the death penalty has had the Church's approval for two thousand years is indisputable. In any case, my concern is with the "broadcast" of the "event." I agree with the estimable Gavin Ashenden that the planned livestream "is undesirable and tragically tasteless." And Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin (at an event honoring St. John Henry Newman) said: "It is truly incomprehensible that anyone would want to use this method in this day and age. . . . It is certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle." I will add that it is impossible to know the consequences of broadcasting an execution, except to say they may well be volatile: among the American people and among jihadis. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), Thurgood Marshall argued that the American people, if they were fully informed about the process of execution, let alone if they were witnesses to one, would reject the death penalty. A livestream firing squad will test the "Marshall hypothesis" in ways he never imagined. It might even lead to the abolition of executions in the United States – a consequence I suspect "conservatives" such as Mr. Hegseth haven't considered. Hasan's situation is already well known to Islamic extremists, who cheered his murderous rage and have kept him in mind ever since. I'd be surprised if counterterrorism experts haven't been listening to renewed jihadi chatter about retaliation against the Great Satan, and you can be sure the livestream of Hasan's execution will be put to good use by ISIS, al-Qaeda, or Al-Shabaab, leading to the deaths of more innocent people. That justice should be done to Nidal Mailk Hasan is indisputable; that it needn't come with a chest-pounding, canine desire for publicity should be just as obvious. When U.S. Special Forces captured and killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Al-Qaeda vowed revenge on the American homeland. That never happened. But they did retaliate – on Pakistan: On May 13, 2011, two suicide bombers struck a Frontier Constabulary training ...

By Randall Smith I was reading the work of a modern, progressive moral theologian the other day. And he gave what has become a disturbingly common response to the classic moral conundrum: whether you can lie if you are hiding Jews in your house and Nazis knock on your door to ask whether you are hiding Jews in your house. "The Nazis don't have the right to the truth, so you can lie to them." Now, although you are not obligated to say everything you know to anyone who asks, the easygoing acceptance of outright lying troubles me. My first reaction to all such classic moral riddles is to question the premise. "Nazis don't knock on your door and ask whether you're hiding Jews. They break down the door and search." There's another famous story about a man who is exploring caves with his buddy when the water begins rising. The only escape is through a small hole, and your friend, who is fat, gets stuck in it. You have some dynamite. Do you blow him up, or let yourself drown? I always ask, "Wait, you went cave exploring with dynamite? Why? Just in case you might need to blow someone up? Who goes into a cave with that guy? Most of these stories are crafted precisely to undermine a moral principle. If I can lie to the Nazis, then not all lying is wrong. If I can dynamite my chubby buddy, then killing an unborn child endangering the mother's life must be okay. Unless both are wrong. My question about lying to the Nazis is this: Where does someone get the right to the truth? Students say things like, "I have a right to play my music in my dorm room!" The proper response is: "No. You don't." There is no such "right." Where would such a "right" come from? Was it imparted by God? Is it a requirement of human nature? Perhaps we ought to let you play your music, depending upon how it affects the common good of the community. But there is no absolute "right" that trumps all other considerations, such as the ability of others to sleep and study. So too, perhaps I ought to tell you things you want to know, but perhaps not. I don't see how it helps to claim that this person has or doesn't have a "right" to the truth. This only confuses the matter, especially in American culture, where we take rights to be "absolute," where rights are "trumps" that outweigh a utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits. It was for this reason that utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham described natural rights as "nonsense upon stilts." If someone has a right to life (as the Declaration affirms), then we would need a compelling interest to deny someone that right. So too, if there is a right to the truth, then we would need a compelling reason to deny someone that right, even by remaining silent. Even if we could supply a convincing account for this particular situation of Nazis at your door, my concern is that this little tale will result in an easygoing assumption that you can lie whenever you think that people do not have the right to the truth. Okay, so maybe (and notice I said "maybe") you can lie to the Nazis about the Jews hiding in your house, but does that mean I can lie to my mother about where I went last night because, let's be serious, does she really have a right to the truth? If I witnessed a crime, do the police, the judge, and the jury have the right to the truth? I knew a case in which a car of four law students hit and killed a young woman as she walked along the side of the road on a dark, rainy night. They did not stop, likely because they had been drinking. The driver's story was that he knew he had hit something, but he didn't know what. Let's say the verdict depended on the testimony of his friends in the car. Did the judge and jury have the right to the truth? I ask my students how they would testify if they had been the friends in the car. Tell the truth about what happened? Or not? They are torn. What good would it do? It won't bring back the girl. It will simply destroy this young man's life. Oh, but don't her parents deserve the tru...

By Robert Royal I wouldn't have taken a more than average interest in Christopher Columbus if ill-informed and sometimes ill-intentioned people hadn't made it necessary. Fairfax County, Virginia, where I've lived for more than thirty-five years, abolished Columbus Day in 2020 as a paid holiday, but schools are closed today anyway – to celebrate "Indigenous Peoples' Day." The state legislature did the same for all of Virginia, as have other states, in effect replacing our Western Christian heritage with – frankly – they know not what. Now, Columbus, like all of us, was an imperfect human being. But unlike most of us, he was also a great human being, who carried out one of the most daring feats in history, which remains of central importance to the Americas, the Church, and the whole world. The more you know about him, the clearer that becomes. It's a symptom of our current moment that few people bother to learn – or teach – about him, beyond the blanket condemnations of Columbus as the origin of virtually everything bad that's happened in the Americas since 1492. (Somehow, by the same illogic, he gets no credit for the good things that have happened on these shores.) And while there's much to admire in some native groups, and to lament in the way they've been treated, there's also much to deplore. Columbus was partly motivated by the desire to "preach the Gospel to all nations.' He was right to do so. You don't have to turn to the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures built on human sacrifice to understand that. Anyone who looks, for instance, at how the North American Martyrs (Catholics and others used to, and should again) were brutally tortured and killed – the way all prisoners, native and European, were treated by several Northeastern tribes – may wonder why Europeans are regarded as brutal villains and Indigenous as peaceful environmentalists. So, a necessary question: Why are the Indigenous celebrated today? Columbus didn't bring slavery to the Americas. It was already here and widespread. As were indigenous forms of imperialism and colonialism. As for the acknowledgement of "stolen lands," here's a sad case for those who want to know the truth beyond the current ideological battlefield. As I've recounted in my book Columbus and the Crisis of the West (a new edition of my very first book, 1492 and All That), Native Americans were themselves guilty of genocide and "stolen lands." Take the controversy over the American presidents on Mount Rushmore and even about the U.S. government's ownership of the site. The history of the place tells a melancholy tale, in fact several. In 1776, the year the American colonies declared their independence, the Lakota Sioux conquered the Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore is located. They wiped out the Cheyenne, who held it previously; the Cheyenne had taken it from the Kiowa, who took it from. . .no doubt some other tribe. As one historian pointed out: "The Lakota-Sioux arrived in the West after being on the losing end of a war with other tribes in Minnesota in the late 1700s.They waged genocidal war on other tribes before they took over the Black Hills from the Cheyenne. . . .They did the exact same thing that the United States did to drive the Lakota out." And this was only one example of a series of "stolen lands" – among indigenous peoples themselves. So how should we sort out these historical entanglements? Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Athens this past week and gave a stirring speech about the value of our Western civilization. He touted the impulse Greece gave to philosophical and scientific thought, which sought to know the nature of the world, as well as to democratic institutions. He even identified Plutarch – not modern Enlightenment figures – as the writer most quoted by the authors of The Federalist Papers, the articles that were influential in the adoption of the American Constitution. All this needed repeating and not only as a history lesson, but to remind a world tha...

By Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap. Psalm 57:8 declares: "Awake, my soul, Awake O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn!" This is a poetic verse, but does it make sense? Normally, we think of the dawn awakening us as the first light comes through our bedroom window. But we never think that we must get out of bed when it is still dark so that we will awake the dawn – that if we do not awake the dawn, the dawn will not arrive. The Old Testament temple faced east. It did so that it might symbolize the light of God's presence within the temple. Each day, without failure, the dawning day manifested that God dwelt, in a unique manner, within the temple. What was prefigured in the Old Testament finds its fulfillment in the Incarnation. In the prologue to his Gospel, John declares that, before the beginning of Creation, the Word was with God and was God. God created everything through his Word: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:4-5) The Word is the life-giving light that shines in the darkness of sin and death, so that they could not overcome the saving life-giving light of the Incarnate Word – Jesus. Later Jesus echoes what was declared in the Prologue: "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." (John 8:12) If we follow Jesus, who is the life-giving light, we will never walk in the darkness of sin and death, rather we will enjoy the light of unending life. The dawn will have awakened within us, never to be overcome by darkness. Upon Jesus cleansing the temple, the Jews asked for a sign indicating by what authority he did this. Jesus responded: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." For the Jews, "this" referred to the physical temple before which they were standing. Jesus was not, however, referring to the temple, but to Himself: "But he spoke of the temple of his body. When, therefore, he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken." (John 2:19-22) Thus, Jesus is the ever living and life-giving temple. To abide in him, the new temple, is again to dwell in his life-giving light – the risen Jesus is the dawning of the everlasting day. When Jesus was crucified, darkness covered the earth. It appeared that the darkness of sin and death had won the day. Darkness had overcome the life-giving light of God's Incarnate Word. It is not by chance, however, that Jesus rose from the dead at the dawning of a new day. In His Resurrection, Jesus awoke the dawn. As John describes it: "Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away. So, she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.'" (John 20:1-2) Although it was still dark, it was Mary who was truly in darkness. She went to the tomb of what she thought was that of the dead Jesus. The tomb was empty, and she concluded that someone had taken the body. What she did not realize was that the darkness of night had given way to the light of the gloriously risen Jesus. The darkness of sin and death could not overcome Him. Again, in His Resurrection, Jesus awoke the eternal day. Vatican II's "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" (Lumen gentium) begins: "Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, to bring the light of Christ to all men, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church." As risen, Jesus Christ is the light of all nations. No nation or people are exempt. Because of this, the Fathers at Vatican II, in union with the Holy Spirit, wished to bring t...

By Alden Abbott The Catholic bishops of Arlington and Richmond, Michael Burbidge and Barry Knestout, urged Virginians to reject Ballot Question 1 next month, a proposed constitutional amendment that would expand legal access to abortion. The bishops warned that the measure would establish a so-called fundamental right to abortion "all the way up to birth and for every individual," including children; endanger women's health and safety; exclude parents from decisions affecting minor daughters; and protect those who assist in abortions from legal consequences. Their conclusion was blunt: the proposal is "extreme, dangerous, radical, and horrific." That statement is a much-needed reminder that the culture of death is not an abstraction. It appears whenever the law treats the deliberate destruction of innocent human life as a right, a service, or a form of compassion. It appears in the normalization of abortion and in the growing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide. It also appears when disability, dependency, age, and illness are made to seem like reasons why a human life has become less worthy of protection. The bishops' intervention, therefore, raises a question reaching far beyond Virginia: Is it time for the Vatican to renew the Church's public proclamation of the culture of life? Saint John Paul II answered that question in 1995 with extraordinary clarity in Evangelium vitae. Human life, he taught, is a gift from God, possessing a sacred and inviolable dignity from conception until natural death. The Gospel of Life is not a narrow political program. It is part of the Gospel itself because every person is made in the image of God and called to communion with Him. Abortion and euthanasia are not merely unfortunate social choices or matters on which the Church happens to have a distinctive preference. They are grave violations of the moral law because they directly attack innocent life. No government can transform such an attack into a genuine human right. Evangelium vitae also insisted that defending life requires more than condemning particular acts. A culture of life must protect mothers, children, the disabled, the elderly, and the dying; support families facing hardship; provide genuine care rather than abandonment; and resist the temptation to measure human worth by productivity, independence, or health. Public authority has a duty to defend the common good, and the right to life is the foundation on which all other rights rest. The encyclical thus joined moral truth to mercy, and legal protection to a civilization of solidarity. Nearly three decades later, the need for that teaching has become more urgent. In many jurisdictions, abortion has moved from being tolerated under limited circumstances to being described as a fundamental constitutional entitlement. Chemical abortion and abortion tourism have made the destruction of unborn life easier to conceal. At the other end of life, euthanasia and assisted suicide have spread from exceptional proposals to accepted features of public policy. (Five percent of Canadians already die of MAID – "Medical Assistance in Dying" – a number that's only going to increase.) In some places, families are increasingly asked to regard death as a solution to suffering, cost, dependence, or social inconvenience. The language of autonomy can obscure the reality that vulnerable people may feel pressure to choose death so that they will not burden others. In light of all this, Pope Leo XIV should issue an encyclical devoted specifically to renewing Evangelium vitae for the present age. There is a venerable precedent. John Paul II's Centesimus annus revisited and updated Leo XIII's Rerum novarum a century after its publication, applying enduring principles to changed economic and political circumstances. A new encyclical could do the same for the Gospel of Life. It could reaffirm the central teachings of Evangelium vitae while addressing new technologies, constitutional claims, medic...

By Francis X. Maier 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.' It's a line typically attributed to Josef Stalin, an accomplished veteran of mass homicide, though it probably predates him by decades. The words are nonetheless true. The mind can only grasp so much suffering. The bigger the crime against humanity, the quicker it becomes a mere number – and the more unreal the personal savagery behind it seems. Ninety years after Stalin's murderous Holodomor famine in Ukraine, eighty years after Auschwitz, and with dozens of "little" genocides and ethnic and religious wars since, we've just about lost our ability to be outraged at anything. We're accustomed to inhumanity on a grand scale. But it wasn't always so. The modern taste for mass murder had a beginning. It began in Turkey just over a century ago. To this day, it remains one of the great, unrepented crimes of history. By the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had reached a state of advanced decay. Politically, it was a junior player in the struggle for regional dominance among the French, British, Germans, and Russians. A corrupt sultanate stymied reform and ruined imperial finances. In the Balkans, once-conquered Christian peoples were winning their independence. Even among imperial loyalists, the need for reform became obvious. Amid this ferment, the place of Christians within the empire became more and more tenuous. Islamic law tolerated Christians and allowed them a certain degree of autonomy. But the price was a culture of permanent discrimination. This took the form of special taxes, arbitrary violence, humiliating dress and behavior codes, and exclusion from political power. Christians also endured the devshirme, or "boy collection," in which Ottoman officials would routinely take male children from their families, convert them to Islam, and force them into military or civil service. Armenians made up one of the empire's largest Christian communities. In the 1890s, their towns spread across the Anatolian plain, the heartland of the modern Turkish state. They had lived there for centuries, long before the arrival of the Turks. Ancient Armenia became the first formally Christian nation in the early fourth century. The Armenian King Levon II was a friend of Richard the Lionhearted, and like Richard, a Crusader. Medieval Armenia had strong links to Christian Europe until they were cut by its Muslim conquest in 1375. With the arrival of American Protestant missionaries and the rise of Orthodox Russia's regional power in the 19th century, contact with the outside world became more common but also more dangerous for the empire's Christian minorities. By the 1890s, alarmed by growing unrest and pressure for political reform among his Armenian subjects, the mentally unstable Sultan Abdul Hamid II decided to deal with the "Armenian Question" directly. In 1894-95, he encouraged the massacre of 100,000 Armenians and allowed another 100,000 to starve. Anti-Armenian violence continued for years, even after the establishment of a constitutional government. It ended in the brutal Adana massacre in 1909, in which an entire city was torched, including churches and schools filled with Christian children. But even this was just a prelude to the state's planned and sponsored extermination program that killed more than 1 million Armenians in 1915. Additional massacres in 1920 and 1922 murdered tens of thousands more. Many thousands of others converted to Islam to save the lives of their families. Turkish authorities deliberately set out to destroy the Armenian people and wipe away any memory of their presence. Erasing the cultural artifacts of Armenians – their churches, monasteries, and monuments – continues in the Turkish countryside even today. While political and ethnic resentments fed the genocide, it also had a religious dimension with a deep current of anti-Christian hatred. Muslim leaders encouraged the violence, calling for jihad "against infidels and enem...