|
 |
 |
11.20.09
Matthew Hanley
|
|
11.19.09
James V. Schall, S. J.
|
|
11.18.09
Mary Eberstadt
|
|
11.17.09
Ralph McInerny
|
|
11.16.09
Robert Royal
|
|
|
|
|
ARCHIVES
|
Having funded groups that support abortion and “same sex marriage,” and funneled more than $7 million to ACORN over the span of a decade, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD)... |
|
Nine months of the Obama administration have prompted me to flee, not to New Zealand or Argentina, but rather to Blandings Castle. In such locations, considerable disarray exists. Blandings is more li... |
|
It is no exaggeration to say that Catholicism today, not only in America but across the world, resembles nothing so much as a gigantic pizzeria – one in which some people spend their days enjo... |
|
The hero of Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour, in the slough of despond in wartime Cairo, goes to a priest to confess that he has wished to be dead. “How many times?” the priest... |
|
I’m told by reliable people that there are readers of The Catholic Thing still struggling with mainstream-media addictions. If so, some of you may have been surprised to find your humble editor-... |
|
A good hearted and extremely well-connected Catholic came up to me at a Catholic event this week in Washington D.C. and said, “Now don’t you see the value of engagement? At the Ken... |
|
Some people, young and old, have trouble with tradition: older folks because they no longer remember where it came from; youngsters because they never learned it. It’s the way we’ve always... |
|
These days, it’s not easy being an Ordinary in America’s northeastern inner-city dioceses. These bishops have had to cope with rapidly changing demographics that have seriously impacted th... |
|
Election night: a good night for the conservative party, with the voters in Virginia and New Jersey evidently registering a rejection of the Obama Administration and its works. But one could watch eve... |
|
Today, the Pope Pius V University in Rome will be the setting for a day-long conference with the arresting title, “The Scientific Impossibility of Evolution.” The sponsors of the even... |
|
When I was a physics major in college, my father happened to be a professor of Medieval Philosophy at the same institution. One day, after lecturing on Dante and the Music of the Spheres, he happened ... |
|
Many Catholic converts speak of coming home. Not me. For years, I felt I had left home and cast my lot with strange, argumentative folks. I missed the incomparable language of Tommy Cranmer (most vaci... |
|
I have had occasion to mention before my boyhood friend who, when asked what he thought of the end of the world, answered, “Which end?”
People of my vintage have been inhabiting an esch... |
|
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 |
|
All Saints' Day
|
Print this article
|
Email this article
|
|
By James V. Schall, S. J.
|
|
As you may have noticed, the Mass readings on All Saints’ Day are among the most beautiful of the liturgical year. The first reading is from Apocalypse 7: “After that I saw a huge number, ... |
|
A Notre Dame professor reminded me this week of an old football saying: offense sells seats, but defense wins games. Painfully true about the problems of the Irish this year, but I’ve never thou... |
|
The government of France has fined the Church of Scientology almost a million dollars for the regular practice of their “religion,” which France says is not a religion at all but a crimina... |
|
For an American Catholic, it can be gratifying when U.S. policy converges with cherished goals espoused by the Church. Those occasions can bring together our love for two of the crucial institutions i... |
|
Throughout October there’s been plenty of fussing over the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Editorials world wide have saluted China’s growing ... |
|
Who would have imagined, at the beginning of the year, that we would find ourselves, in the fall, at a moment of desperation for a new administration of the far Left, supported by heavy congressional ... |
|
There are Catholics who believe in Christ but are agnostic about the other spiritual beings of Christian doctrine: angels (and demons). This may be why Anne Rice begins her new novel, Angel Time, with... |
|
As the Second Vatican Council developed, traditional Catholics in England were distressed because they saw Rome giving up the Old Latin Mass for a vernacular both shallow and shabby. Further, as Evely... |
|
An ex-student e-mailed me from Ireland. What he reported could have happened in many places, in many lands. His account follows: “I was walking down the street this Sunday in one of Dublin&rsquo... |
|
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 |
|
Can God Be Trusted?
|
Print this article
|
Email this article
|
|
By Thomas D. Williams, LC
|
|
The recent economic crisis has been above all a crisis of trust. Financial institutions have bent over backwards to convince us that they are trustworthy, since their entire enterprise depends on cons... |
|
Comparing two of the greatest religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, David Swenson wrote: “Newman was looking for the objectively true church so that he might join it. Kierkegaard was see... |
|
I stumbled on a discussion of religion in a major secular magazine the other day in which Catholicism came up. One of the participants in the conversation scoffed at the Church for thinking that you c... |
|
You are reaching for the gravy this Thanksgiving. Your family is gathered around the dinner table in a warm moment. Your freshman daughter is just home from her first semester in college, the one that... |
|
Thursday, 15 October 2009 |
|
The Feast of Faith
|
Print this article
|
Email this article
|
|
By David G. Bonagura, Jr.
|
|
Bowing low, the priest takes the host with the thumb and forefinger of each hand as he prays the words of consecration: “Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body, which will be given u... |
|
On September 15, “StandForMarriageMaine.com” released a television ad. In it, Scott Fitzgibbon, a professor at Boston College Law School (a Catholic institution), argued for the traditiona... |
|
At the height of the presidential campaign last year around this time, Professor Richard Epstein offered an estimate of his former colleague at the law school at the University of Chicago. Putting asi... |
|
Was there ever a more ambitious or successful book than St. Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei? Written in the aftermath of the Visigoths’ early fifth-century sack of Rome, The City of G... |
|
Twenty years ago, Ignatius Press published my Another Sort of Learning. My initial “short” subtitle to this book was: “How to Get an Education Even If Still in College.&rdquo... |
|
When he wanted to send a message to politicians worldwide, John Paul II declared Saint Thomas More the Patron of Statesmen and Politicians (October 31, 2000). He listed various reasons for making this... |
|
This Friday (October 9) will be the fifty-first anniversary of Pope Pius XII’s death. Last year around this time, when Benedict XVI was planning a trip to Israel, the old controversy about Pius ... |
|
Flying into Dublin, the North American whose business is in the west, retrieves his luggage, checks out his rental car, looks unfazed at the morning traffic, and decides to begin his westward journey.... |
|
Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, recently remarked that it is a “heresy” to believe "we can be saved as individuals." As... |
|
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar reacted to an August report that emissions from coal-fired power plants have led to widespread mercury pollution in our rivers and streams by saying: "this science ... |
|
Today more than a few baptized Catholics, for various reasons that include indifference, have not received the sacrament of confirmation. This is not the first time in history that growing numbers of ... |
|
Wednesday, 30 September 2009 |
|
JOHNSON
|
Print this article
|
Email this article
|
|
By James V. Schall, S.J.
|
|
Of the four greatest minds with whom I commune regularly, to wit, Aristotle, Aquinas, Samuel Johnson, and Chesterton, three were obese. Aristotle was merely solidly built. If modern campaigns against ... |
|
Those vexing hearings over Robert Bork, for his nomination to the Supreme Court, back in 1987, left enduring marks. They set lasting precedents for poisonous attacks on nominees to the Court, and they... |
|
Editor's Note: Many thanks to all of you who contributed to our Fall Fundraising last week. We met our goal and, owing to your generosity, look forward to continue bringing you The Catholic Thing. - R... |
|
Editor's Note: Today is the last day of the Fall Fund Drive. We're very close to our goal. Before you read Austin Ruse's encouraging words today, please, take a minute to do your part for The Catholic... |
|
Editor's Note: Okay, it's Thursday and our Fall Fundraiser is nearly done. Lots of readers have responded generously. Have you? Just take a look at this lovely reminiscence by Ralph McInerny. What m... |
|
Editor's note: Friends, if you missed our appeal on Monday, it's not too late to do your part in support of The Catholic Thing. Lots of your fellow readers already have, and we thank them all from t... |
|
Editor's Note: Thanks to all the generous readers who responded to our appeal yesterday. Your support will help keep The Catholic Thing alive -- and very much kicking. And how about the rest of you?... |
|
If you want a concrete picture of some of the deepest elements in America culture, you ought to look at Washington. Most people wander around the Mall and gawk at the monuments, the White House, and t... |
|
Alas and alack, the end of summer turned out to abound in the sort of personal news one really dreads hearing – especially the more one hears it. Several friends and acquaintances now have the s... |
|
The most dangerous political exercise is accurately to describe a deviant regime’s constitutional form, especially if it is one’s own. Aristotle outlined differing regimes in his Politics.... |
|
I first read In Praise of the New Knighthood, Bernard of Clairvaux’s instructions to the Knights Templar (written circa 1130), and thought it an embarrassment. One expects this when reading medi... |
|
The Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House was working at the time on the bill on partial-birth abortion, and I had given as a gift to the committee one of my best students from Amherst. He called me o... |
|
While the nation rightly watches the debate over health-care reform to ensure it does not promote euthanasia by stealth, a state court case in Montana may have a more significant effect in promoting t... |
|
Question I: Does Benedict XVI advocate world government in Caritas in Veritate?
It seems he does.
1. Benedict writes: “in the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is... |
|
My mother’s hands are cupped together, one hand gnarled and twisted tight by arthritis. She can’t walk the walk or talk the talk anymore. She is in her wheelchair or in bed now and is most... |
|
Agencies that promote works of charity on behalf of the Church should be particularly keen on putting Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) into practice – ... |
|
Blaise Pascal, eminent seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher, produced one of the great unfinished works of western culture, the Pensées. These notes, most short, some longish, were... |
|
For an American Catholic, one of the gratifying things about Labor Day is that it comes in September. In much of the rest of the world, it’s celebrated in May. And instead of affirming the digni... |
|
The death and funeral of Edward M. Kennedy set off yet another round in the confused arguments among Catholics about the place of abortion in Catholic social teaching. Yet that teaching is c... |
|
Americans, unlike the English, do not divide academic calendars into “Michaelmas,” “Hilary,” and “Trinity” terms. For us, it’s Fall or Spring Semester. We mea... |
|
Michael Novak, after considerable strain, decided to leave the seminary in Rome; he would head back home to America and to graduate work at Harvard. In time he would draw a worldwide audience for his ... |
|
Seventy years ago today, Adolf Hitler started the most horrendous war in the history of mankind by ordering the German Wehrmacht to invade and conquer Poland. The Polish army fought valiantly but they... |
|
The Catholic Church in America suffered another grave scandal this weekend. As was the case in the priestly abuse crisis, it was centered in Boston. If you are a Catholic and did not feel distressed a... |
|
When I think of Edward M. Kennedy (“Teddy” early on before the more respectful “Ted”), I first think of Terry Malloy, the character played by Marlon Brando in “On the Wat... |
|
First President Obama appointed Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who supports limitations on end-of-life care, as his top medical advisor. Now he has named John Holdren, another culture-of-death stalwart, as his ... |
|
Today most Catholics are in no great hurry to have their children baptized. In the past, the practice was to baptize children as soon as possible after birth. Now, medical technology has decreased dan... |
|
The first volume of the letters exchanged between Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon has just been published. To read it is to be reminded of Wordsworth on the French Revolution: bliss was it that day to... |
|
The American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, who helped craft the declaration on religious freedom at Vatican II, often said that it is difficult to arrive at genuine disagreement. People seem to disagre... |
|
Though social radicals blather on and on about it, they are almost complete phonies about dialogue. For them, dialogue either means radicals talking to the more radical, or radicals hassling bishops o... |
|
To Whom It May Concern:
I am a forty-three-year-old attorney from the Midwest, a typical American who grew up poor and worked my way up. When I was in college, “Women’s Liberati... |
|
Reflecting in First Things on the death of Father Richard Neuhaus, R. R. Reno recalled a pithy Neuhaus sentence: “Where orthodoxy is optional; orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.&rdquo... |
|
The mafia, we are told, brings forth its own version of charity in taking care of the dependents, the widows and children of those who have fallen in the service of “the common good&rd... |
|
NOTE: Karen Laub-Novak, wife of Michael Novak, one of the founders of The Catholic Thing, passed away last Thursday (see story under News). Her funeral will take place this morning at Blessed Sacramen... |
|
I suppose I’ve seen 3000 movies.
I’ve written about a couple here (Doubt and Death Takes a Holiday), and I’m not alone in believing that the evolution of this quintessentially Ame... |
|
Since the Second Vatican Council, mainstream Catholic theology has focused on the experiential dimension of faith. How do Catholics, as individuals and as a community, experience such things as God, p... |
|
In the past fifty years, the Catholic Church in America has found itself facing several national challenges. There was that divorce thing, the contraception thing, the abortion thing, the scandal thin... |
|
In two remarkable books, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, British historian Michael Burleigh, has traced the clash of religion and politics from the French Revolution to our own times. Burleigh shows... |
|
One hears that the cause of John Henry Newman’s canonization is about to move forward thanks to a miracle that occurred in Philadelphia. May it be so. In the post-Conciliar Church, just about ev... |
|
Gentle reader, I am in an undisclosed location, not in the way that Washington bigwigs get whisked away, we’re told, for some national security reason or other. And I haven’t entered the w... |
|
Father Tomislav Vlasic, the spiritual director to the six controversial visionaries at Medjugorje, has left the priesthood and been laicized by the Vatican. The charismatic Franciscan was under formal... |
|
Aconscience clause. A sensible conscience clause. A matter of conscience. With so much talk of conscience in the news these days, it would seem that the discussion is proceeding fully within the provi... |
|
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 |
|
Eyes That See Not
|
Print this article
|
Email this article
|
|
By James V. Schall, S. J.
|
|
The characteristic of orthodox Catholicism in the modern world is its claim to be true. We recall Aquinas’ “Omne ens est verum.” John Paul II spoke of the “splendor of truth,... |
|
As the late Henny Youngman told it, Moses came to the top of Mt. Sinai, looked about and said, “This would be a wonderful place to build a hospital.” But life in Mt. Sinai hospital in New ... |
|
When I was as a Protestant kid, mention of the Holy Ghost unnerved me; made we want to shriek and look behind me for the spectral form coming to . . . well, I didn’t know what it might be up to.... |
|
The United States is at a dangerous moment. There are always the threats to our security from the outside, or the maladies – political and economic, moral and spiritual – from the inside... |
|
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata begins with a conversation among passengers on a train about the growing permissiveness on divorce in Russian society. But it quickly turns into an extended philosophic... |
|
The national health care debate has elicited President Obama’s pledge that the proposed $1.3 trillion, 1,018-page government health insurance program is “not going to mess” w... |
|
Some years ago, a Catholic Great Books school asked me to speak to the faculty. The lecture room had Socrates’ saying over the door: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I expe... |
|
My colleague Otto Bird died a few weeks ago just four days shy of his ninety-sixth birthday. Otto came to Notre Dame in 1950 to inaugurate and act as first director of the Program for Liberal Studies,... |
|
Only a deliberate suspension of disbelief can lead you to take Barack Obama at his word that he wants to reach common ground on abortion. His history as a doctrinaire abortion advocate and his actions... |
|
Bishop William F. Murphy of the Diocese of Rockville Center, is a highly intelligent, articulate, and modest man. As Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Ju... |
|
Ignatius of Loyola teaches that man is created to “praise, reverence, and serve God and by this means to save his soul.” Modern man thinks little of saving his soul, if he has one. He want... |
|
Two weeks ago, in the run-up to the hearings over Sonia Sotomayor, I took the moment to sketch out a different strategy for the pro-lifers in these hearings. For thirty years, the Democrats have sou... |
|
Earlier this year, the American Secretary of State visited Latin America. At the basilica in Mexico City she was shown the image of Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, miraculously imprinted on the tilma (cl... |
|
Benedict XVI‘s Caritas in Veritate must be read in light of a debate going on in the Catholic Church for a century. It first arose in the mid-1800s with the social question, and new ideas like l... |
|
In a few weeks, millions of idealistic and enthusiastic teenagers will embark on or continue a time-honored and familiar American ritual: losing their religion. Granted, the rest of us don't usually p... |
|
When after years of ministering to the bodies and souls of the wretched lepers on the island of Molokai, Father Damien in a sermon used the memorable phrase, “ We lepers,” his listeners kn... |
|
In an interview published in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, revealed the purpose for legalized abortion: “Frankly I had th... |
|
A few weeks ago, I was in Colorado and hiked a trail in the Rockies that John Paul II hiked way back in 1993 before Denver World Youth Day. Yesterday, I hiked a similar trail in the High Tatras mounta... |
|
It may be difficult now to recall that when John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, there was no certainty about who would be chosen to be the next pope. There were those who c... |
|
Some very good things from the French mind are appearing among us. Daniel Mahoney brought Pierre Manent to our attention. He re-presents Raymond Aron, Charles de Gaulle, and the pertinent French backg... |
|
Last Saturday the greatest sporting event known to man began in Monaco. One hundred and eighty men mounted bicycles and began a race that will take them clockwise around the whole of France. The race ... |
|
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 |
|
Caritas in Veritate: A Symposium
|
Print this article
|
Email this article
|
|
By Michael Novak, James V. Schall S.J., Joseph Wood, Robert Royal
|
|
Editor's Note: Benedict’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”), appeared in Rome yesterday. Digesting this document will take no little time, but several of th... |
|
We await now the coming of Sonia Sotomayor. The hearings over her confirmation to the Court will open in another week, and the Republicans and pro-lifers are gnashing their teeth, for they see little ... |
|
President Obama sincerely believes he and a legion of functionaries can efficiently direct America from the White House, which over several presidencies has come ever more to resemble Mount Olympus. H... |
|
From the very birth of our republic, the American credo has been rooted in the tradition of natural law; it has been imbued with the belief that there is a higher standard by which all man-made rules ... |
|
Editor’s Note: David Bonagura will be writing a series of columns on the Seven Sacraments over the next several months, and a final one on Vatican II’s understanding of the Church as sacra... |
|
"The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus."
Pope Benedict XVI quoted these words of Saint John Vianney (1786-1859) in his Letter proclaiming a Year for Priests. This is a brillian... |
|
"The dean leaning on a gaunt spinster, his only child now living with him, a lady very learned in stones, ferns, and vermin, and who had written a book on petals. A wonderful woman in her way was... |
|
Imagine, if you will, just as a thought experiment, a nation that for two generations has been forming almost all its children in state-run schools. Imagine, further, that these schools started, at th... |
|
This is likely this first time you have ever heard of the Yogyakarta Principles. But have you ever heard of Roman Wieruszewski? Or Robert Wintemute? Dimitrina Petrova? What about Sunit Pant? Does Manf... |
|
In the Aristotelian tradition, virtue stands in the middle, between two extremes, a too much and a too little. Aristotle thought that a non-arbitrary middle could be found. Prudence arrived at it, but... |
|
The University of San Francisco (USF) recently awarded Bishop Kevin Dowling of South Africa an honorary degree. Dowling – alone among his fellow South African bishops – is known for his &l... |
|
What is Barack Obama’s position on same-sex marriage? It is governed by the same principle that applies everywhere else in his style of governance. It may be rendered more exotic in the Itali... |
|
In T.S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party, Celia Copelstone tells a psychiatrist, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, of her symptoms, which are two. For one, she has an “awareness of solitude,&rdqu... |
|
In a now well known episode, the Obama administration had Georgetown University cover a Crucifix lest the President of the United States be photographed in its presence. But less well understood is th... |
|
Rural upstate New York, where I grew up, offers unique evidence these days about some shifting demographics of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fifty years ago, the area was dominated by family farming, an Air ... |
|
When the U.S. Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito were confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2005, various groups and individuals were apoplectic that five Catholics s... |
|
Complaining about God has an impressive ancestry; we immediately think of Job, of course, but we should not overlook those many persuasive patriarchs who managed to reduce the evils threatened by God.... |
|
A few years ago, I was in Paris talking with Jean-Luc Marion, a distinguished French Catholic philosopher, so distinguished that last November he underwent an apotheosis: he was named one of &... |
|
Late-term abortionist George Tiller has been buried. His clinic has been permanently closed. It is being reported that candlelight vigils were held across America for him and that another late-term ab... |
|
After President Obama’s Cairo lecture to the “Muslim World,” we may be permitted to wonder if a corresponding “Christian world” exists. If a unified “Muslim World&r... |
|
It’s only natural that unbelievers and persons indifferent to religion should regret or fear death. Whenever life is the only and absolute good, the absence of life is the ultimate evil. Best no... |
|
Within the space of a week, two notable figures on the conservative side in our politics have come out in favor of same-sex marriage. In the case of Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, his daughte... |
|
Thinking about Mel Gibson, his trials and tribulations, one recalls Ernest Hemingway’s quip about his sometime friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. After describing all the things that made Scott... |
|
When Hillary Clinton was representing New York in the U.S. Senate, in order to placate her large Catholic and Jewish Orthodox and Hasidim constituencies, she called on Democrats to be more tolerant of... |
|
The secular and materialist understanding of nature and human nature seem to be everywhere and they have come to inform what has been called "a new post-Christian narrative of life." Witness... |
|
During his homily for Pentecost last Sunday, Benedict XVI referred to the mythological Prometheus and observed that:
having possessed himself of the energy of the cosmos - the 'fire' - man today ... |
|
I have read War and Peace more times than it would be decent to say, most recently in the new translation by a husband and wife team that is distinctive largely because of its inclusion of French in t... |
|
Readers of this site are by and large an unusually learned lot. But just in case your Latin is a little rusty, the title of this morning’s column means (literally) “things done.” And... |
|
Editor’s Note: Our colleague Father Schall wrote this column for Pentecost, which we bring you this weekend in addition to our regular publication schedule.
Sermon Nineteen of the second volume... |
|
A bevy of billionaires met in New York last week to discuss how they could more closely collaborate in their charitable giving. Calling themselves the “Good Club,” participants included so... |
|
In an interview at Thomas Aquinas College, Ralph McInerny praised the school because students there had no choice about what classes they were to take during their college years. Imagine encouraging s... |
|
When the recent news from Ireland appeared, my friend Robert Royal asked me to comment on the physical and sexual abuse scandal swirling around the Christian Brothers and other orders. Initially, I tu... |
|
Along with enduring truths, there are some remarkably enduring non-truths; certain slogans that curiously hold on over the years, treated earnestly as moral principles, but utterly wanting in substanc... |
|
The Cadet Prayer at West Point calls upon God, “Searcher of human hearts,” to help these future soldiers live above “the common level of life,” to chose . . .
. . . the ha... |
|
| |
