By Robert Royal

But first a note: Today's column points out a serious problem and, towards the end, proposes a solution for readers interested in preparing themselves for the next year of runaway synodality. We're about halfway through our fundraising, more (perhaps) if larger donations come in. There have been some surprises. One donor wrote, "I do not read The Catholic Thing first thing in the morning, I save the best for last." Another, picking up on a suggestion I made last year, sent $365.25, a dollar a day including an allowance for leap year (2024 is one). Whatever your inspiration or donation level, we need you to act. Now. Evil never sleeps. We need to be awake and active all the time as well. You know what to do if you expect us to be here in what promises to be a crucial year in the Church and the world.

Now for Robert Royal's column...

The Devil likes to make us stupid, particularly those of us who think we're smart. He's had a very good run for quite a while in the secular world. But he's also done pretty well lately even in the Church. At present, his strongest game is to mesmerize us with simple oppositions: progressives/backwardists, tradition/development, synodality/rigidity, truth/mercy. Once that sort of thing gets up a head of steam, many people don't think about anything. They just join one party - or another.

The usual Catholic response is to say we're a "both/and" faith. And that's good - for a start. But it doesn't resolve an ever more urgent question: What do we mean by progress? Or tradition? Or mercy? Above all, by Truth? We need people to dig - and dig deeply - into such questions, people with learning and discipline, wisdom and consistency. Of which there are few, in any generation. Which is why we often need to resort to earlier, brilliant predecessors.

It's telling that in our present moment of confusion, the name of St. John Henry Newman is often cropping up, not only - naturally - among those who believe in his criticisms of liberalism in religion. But he's being invoked even among those who believe - much less plausibly - that "paradigm shifts" are somehow in a direct line of descent from Newman's brilliant exposition of "development of doctrine."

All that remains to be sorted. And fast. The present writer is willing to bet that we'll hear Newman's name repeated, and also taken in vain, often between now and next October's concluding session of the Synod on Synodality. The bishops of England and Wales, and our own American bishops, have in recent weeks petitioned Rome to name Newman a Doctor of the Church. So, like much else these days, even the great Newman is about to become a bone of contention.

The title of the present column - "Holiness rather than Peace" - is a phrase that Newman came upon in his teenage years while he was still a kind of evangelical. But that robust sentiment remained in him even as he progressed through later phases: to the established Church in England, to Anglo-Catholicism and its (fictional, as he came to believe) via media between Protestantism and Catholicism, and finally to the Catholic Church. It encapsulated his steady belief that true religion required definite truths, and not only "notional" truths entertained in the mind, but truths made "real" by being incorporated in Christian lives.

And strictness as well. That kind of universal call to holiness - long before it became explicit at the Second Vatican Council - meant not bending conscience or mercy or pastoral practice to personal experience, but transforming personal experience under God. Newman was quite aware of the psychological and personal factors in the difficult process of conversion. But the aim of the Faith was not to make us comfortable on Earth but to prepare us for eternal life in Heaven.

That calls for a deeply demanding, not a superficially comforting Faith because it confronts the toughest problem of all: Conversion - turning the human person from pursuing his/her own desires to following...