By Robert Royal

But first a note:

Friends: I want to thank all of you who gave generously to our end-of-year fundraising campaign - for both your material and moral support. It means a great deal to us to hear from you about how much you appreciate our work. We strive to make TCT as good as it can be, every day, 365 days a year. Your encouragement helps keep us at our tasks. And we hope to do even more and even better in the year to come. (As a bit of a foretaste, I've written a more extensive column this morning that I hope will help shape several conversations in the Church, here and abroad, in 2026.) We're in basically good shape financially now, looking ahead, and given the continuing gifts we expect to receive between now to the end of the year. So thanks to all our readers, donors and not, for keeping TCT alive and flourishing. Keep reading. Spread the word about The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

Offering advice to a pope is a presumptuous thing - for anyone. In the Church of synodality, however, where everyone is supposed to have a voice - and be listened to - perhaps not so presumptuous as once upon a time. Still, such counsel should be offered in a spirit of loyalty and concern, as a kind of aide-memoire - in the classic diplomatic sense of providing a leader with information and analysis. Not about dogmas, Creeds, and long-settled matters such as any pope should already know. But as a help in understanding how things, important things, stand, which a pontiff may not be adequately aware of, shaped as he is by what the French elegantly call a déformation professionelle, and what we Americans, more technologically minded, regard as an "information silo."

So let me embark on this diplomatic task, just as a personal exercise (as if one had been asked), made slightly more complicated by the fact that Pope Leo is an American who has mostly lived abroad for much of his adult life. And half-sees, perhaps half doesn't, what I'm about to say.

I start from the recent controversy over the relationship between Europe and America, because it's about much more than politics - and is revealing. I'm in perfect agreement with the pope's recent remarks that the Transatlantic Alliance is of the utmost importance. And I concur that some of the ways that the Trump Administration has couched its recent National Security Strategy (NSS) might give an unsympathetic or hasty reader the impression that America is about to give up on Europe.

But this would be to overlook a deeper commitment to Europe, indeed to something cultural and - dare one say - religious, far more important than political, economic, and military policies, which come and go. As the NSS says early in a section titled "What Do We Want": "We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe's civilizational self-confidence and Western identity." (Emphasis added.) And, therefore, what the NSS is seeking to promote, as well as to warn about, is - more properly understood - something about which the Roman Pontiff himself should be concerned. Deeply.

Where the NSS is critical of "Europe," it's mostly speaking of the progressive and unaccountable European Commission, which is the real policy-maker in the European Union. The EU is a body developed over decades in the aftermath of the disaster of World War II with the hope of forever banishing such intra-European destruction. And to a large degree and for a long time, it worked, thanks to the influence of three heroic Catholic figures: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy (the latter two now up for formal sainthood, not just for their political contributions, but the holiness of their lives).

And behind them all stood the Christian Democracy elaborated by the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, which exposed and rebutted the anti-human principles of the twentieth-century totalitarianisms - Communism, Fascism, Nazis...