by Fr. Benedict Kiely .

Anecdotal evidence, while not necessarily without value or verity, needs solid facts to become confirmed as reality. For the last several years, there has been much talk of increasing numbers of young people, particularly men, coming to orthodox Christianity and, in particular, to the Catholic Faith. These stories now have a factual basis. More than 10,000 people were baptized or received into the Church in France last year. In other European countries and the United States, more people came into the Church at the Easter Vigil than has been the case for decades.

Something that is being talked about is actually happening.

It might, perhaps, be too soon and too dramatic to talk of a "religious revival" in the bleakly secular West. But the desire, among many who know little or nothing of Christ, to discover the ancient truths of the Christian faith is - if the Church is meant to read the "signs of the times" - something not only to be welcomed, but to be fostered, with the treasures of beauty, truth, and goodness, which the 2000-year old history of the Church possesses.

Familiarity, as the old phrase goes, "breeds contempt." But Chesterton, writing more than eighty years ago, spoke of the "fatigue of familiarity." He wrote in a time when, even if there may not have been widespread practice of the faith in Britain, there would have been, for anyone with a modicum of education, indeed even with an elementary school education, a general knowledge of the simple facts of the Christian faith.

As the American novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, the "constant reading of the Bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under language as a whole, and under the English language."

Chesterton's point, in what he called the "specially Christian case," was the near impossibility of making the "facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen man it is often true that familiarity is fatigue." He continued that, if Christ were presented as a Chinese hero (in other words, as an esoteric figure) people would be more ready to respond.

That familiarity simply does not exist anymore, and not just in Britain. Across the Western world, as three or four generations have been successfully educated into ignorance, not only of the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity, but of the works of literature, music, and art which are the products of that civilization.

Quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, the knowledge of which could be assumed in the time Chesterton was writing, are now as unfamiliar as Sanskrit verse. To speak of "seeing through a glass darkly," or the "blind leading the blind," will not register with people who are the product of four years of expensive brain deprivation, known as a bachelor's degree.

All this, however, should not be seen as an obstacle, but rather as a magnificent opportunity, indeed, a providential moment.

There is no longer the "fatigue of familiarity," because the facts of Christianity are not only unfamiliar, they are unknown.

The Catholic sociologist Stephen Bullivant has spoken of the need for a "herd immunity" to the Gospel, before the faith can once again be proclaimed with better prospects of success. Unless I am misunderstanding him, it seems to be exactly the other way around. The masses, particularly the young, are not immune to a Gospel they have never heard; they are ripe for infection.

St. Paul walked into the Areopagus, where the Acts of the Apostles tells us, people did "nothing except telling or hearing something new." So, in this new Areopagus moment, the Gospel, ever ancient and ever new, can ignite the same fire for a surprisingly similar group of people, divided by time but not desire.

It is true that many, as at that time, will mock. But others will, and are, saying "we will hear you again about this." We know that a Dionysius and a woman named Damaris were converted by Paul's preaching of the Word to them, ...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray.

When Pope Leo XIV spoke from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on the day of his election he said: "we want to be a synodal Church." The significance of this depends, of course, on how Pope Leo understands synodality. The notion of a Church that is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic - and now Synodal - isn't clear to most, because synodality is a largely unknown concept. Its meaning will emerge as Pope Leo guides the "synodal path" with the help of the General Secretariat of the Synod. That secretariat's latest contribution to the ongoing definitional saga is not encouraging.

If you're wondering about the purpose of the Synod on Synodality, the General Secretariat, in Pathways for the Implementation Phase of the Synod 2025-2028, has provided this answer: "to build a synodal Church."

If you are also wondering what synodality is, Sister Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ, Undersecretary of the Synod Secretariat, answered in a recent interview:

I often quote an Australian theologian who was at our Synod, Ormond Rush, who states "Synodality is the Second Vatican Council in a nutshell." And all our documents, and still in these pathways, in the Final Document, highlight that what we are doing is really referred to the vision of the Second Vatican Council. We can say synodality is the way to understand the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council in this stage of the reception of the Council. So, it's nothing else but just continuing the reception of the Second Vatican Council. Because the council is not yet implemented everywhere, in a way.

Nowhere in the Council documents, however, is such an idea put forth.

Sister Becquart continues:

So it's a way to be Church. That was a way, from the early Church, that we retrieve from the Second Vatican Council as a fruit highlighting that, first of all, we are all baptized; and as baptized together as people of God, we are called to carry on the mission together. So, it's calling every baptized person to be a protagonist of the mission, to help us understand that we are called to work together, exercising co-responsibility for the mission - of course, a differentiated co-responsibility because we don't all have the same vocations. There is a diversity of vocation, of charisms, of ministries. But we are people of God, journeying with the other people.

How will this "way to be Church" come about? The Synod Secretariat, referring to the Final Document [FD] of the 2024 Synodal Assembly, offers this wearisome, jargon-filled justification of a revolutionary program [jargon emphasized]:

the dynamism that animates the FD, and which the implementation phase is called to take on, derives from the continuous articulation of certain polarities and tensions that structure the life of the Church and the way in which ecclesiological categories express it. Here are some of these polarities: the whole Church and the local Church; the Church as the People of God, as the Body of Christ and as the Temple of the Spirit; the participation of all and the authority of some; synodality, collegiality and primacy; the common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood; ministry (ordained and instituted ministries) and participation in the mission by virtue of baptismal vocation without a ministerial form. Implementation of the FD requires addressing and discerning these tensions as they arise in the circumstances in which each local Church exists. The path to advance is not to seek an impossible arrangement that eliminates tension in favour of one of the sides.

Rather, in the here and now of each local Church, it will be necessary to discern which of the possible balances allows for a more dynamic service of the mission. It is likely that different decisions will be reached in different places.

The Council of Nicaea would not pass the test of synodality as it in fact accomplished the "impossible arrangement" of "eliminating tensions" by deciding "in favour of one of the sides," that is, orthodoxy was af...

By Michael Pakaluk

What is the meaning of life? I shall tell you.

That life should have "meaning" is a distinctively modern concern. In the classical world, it was enough if a life were good, successful, and reasonable. We all strive for happiness, it was said: what could "meaning" possibly add?

In the classical outlook, however, it was taken for granted that any natural reality, such as human life, inherently has a telos (i.e., an end towards which it tends). Take away that telos and one looks for a meaning distinct from that thing. In a Christian culture, testimony to the truth becomes paramount, and therefore signs, such as the crucifix.

We must define terms. Let us say that if something is such that it should point to something, then that to which it points, when it points as it should, is its "meaning." The question of whether a human life has meaning is therefore the question of whether it is such as to point.

An example may clarify. A working weathervane points in the direction of the wind. A weathervane, then, by our definition has a meaning: its meaning is the wind's direction. That is "the point of a weathervane."

It is necessary to qualify and say that something has meaning "if it is such that it should point," because a weathervane might be broken, or impeded. In such cases, it still has a point, indeed, but it does not succeed in pointing.

Human life is such that it should point, but we through sin and ignorance ruin it and impede it from pointing. Christ, however, is the Savior of life's meaning as well. Christ makes even a life of sin and death a life that can point. And Christ endows us with new ways of pointing, too, in the "order of grace."

A human life can point, and therefore it can have meaning, in each of the three ways that anything at all can point to something else.

First, something which is tending towards another points to that towards which it tends. An arrow, for instance, points to that towards which it was set flying. That is why an arrow on a sign means the direction to which the arrow would be flying, if it were a real arrow.

We were made such that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. In creating us, God let us loose towards Himself. Therefore, by nature a human life is such as to point to that which gives it rest. But more than this, through deliberate choice we can make this fact about ourselves salient, by living in such a way that it is clear that we take our final home to be union with God and the peaceable communion of angels and saints.

The clearest way of showing that a life tends to this goal, is by making sacrifices which would make no sense except for this goal. Newman calls these "ventures of faith." We might call them "pointers." Those who sacrifice their very lives in this way are called "witnesses" by the Church, "martyrs." A martyr is someone who by deliberate choice has saliently made Christ the meaning of his life.

Second, a part points to the whole of which it is a part. One vertebra found by a clever paleontologist signifies to him the whole dinosaur. An American in Paris stands for and represents his country, whether he wishes to or not. A footnote completes the meaning of a cited sentence by giving its full context.

A human life can acquire meaning in this second way insofar it shows itself to be a part of, and therefore it points to, each of the three institutions of which it is meant to be a part. These are the natural institutions of country, family, and the supernatural institution of the Church. That is why an unchurched atheist, who conceives of himself as belonging to a global network mainly - and who is childless besides, and alienated from his parents - has completely deprived his life of this second kind of meaning.

Third, that which resembles something, points to that which it resembles. A life of imitation is, to that extent, a life with meaning, since it points to what it imitates. We moderns searching for meaning have gotten it completely wrong...

By Francis X. Maier

When an ambitious man is young, his thinking is a race car. It runs full throttle toward the target of success, however he imagines it. Men of more senior years, with fewer ticks left on the clock, think differently. The mind turns to making sense of things; to getting to the heart of the matter of one's time in the world. The task becomes ordering a riot of random memories into a coherent story; the fabric of a life that has meaning.

What's needed is an experience that, like a needle, sews the past and present together, because seemingly unconnected things often aren't. Here's an example.

I've been a C.S. Lewis fan for more than fifty years. I've read nearly everything he wrote. But the Christian heart of the man himself was at least as interesting as his work.

In 1993, Anthony Hopkins played the longtime bachelor Lewis in the film Shadowlands. It's the story of Lewis's late-in-life friendship with, then love for, and then marriage to, the American poet and convert Joy Davidman Gresham. Joy died of cancer barely four years after they married, and Hopkins does a masterful job of capturing Lewis's intense suffering at her loss. It's a beautiful film. But an even better telling of the same story preceded it by nearly a decade.

In 1985, BBC Wales produced the television film C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands (available on Amazon Prime), starring Joss Ackland. On his death in 2023, age 95, Britain's The Guardian newspaper described Ackland as "a beacon of power" as an actor, "part of the backbone" of British drama, and a man of "modest goodness."

His career spanned more than 130 stage, film, and radio roles from Shakespeare to Evita to Lethal Weapon 2. But the special force of his role as a tender and suffering C.S. Lewis grew from two not-so-obvious roots. Unlike so many others in his profession, Ackland was married for fifty-one years, until her death, to the love of his life; and with her, he fathered seven children. He was also a believing Christian, and not shy about his faith.

This made his role all the more memorable as a senior demon in the HarperAudio version of Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. Ackland gives a brilliantly devilish performance precisely because his Screwtape is simultaneously so urbane, bureaucratic, condescending - and cruel. Ackland brings an exquisite purity, a relentless logic, and an ingenious, unsleeping tactical mind to the demon's loathing of "the human vermin" and "hairless bipeds."

Screwtape's contempt for God in debasing the "high dignity" of the spiritual world, by polluting it with half-breed creatures of the flesh, is equally fierce. And Ackland delivers it with icy clarity. God sees humans as sons and daughters destined to share in his joy. Screwtape sees them as cattle for food.

The reader can, of course, sense all of these things on the story's original printed page. But when Ackland gives them voice, they take on a new and vivid reality.

What lives acutely in my memory is the moment when Ackland's Screwtape - in counseling a junior devil - stresses that good intentions in a human target's soul should never be feared. Quite the contrary. Hell is full of the amusingly desperate damned who intended well in life, but never did anything about it; never took the smallest step to make their fellow-feelings real.

That's the goal of a really accomplished tempter: a well-meaning paralysis in the human heart. Intentions are reassuring, but they have the substance of a mist. An unselfish act in the service of another, and the inconvenience it costs, has weight.

Christianity, as C.S. Lewis himself learned, is more than a matter of intellect. It's a matter of love. It's concrete. It sanctifies the world. Which is why the Epistle of James urges Christians to "be doers of the Word and not hearers only."

So what's the point of mentioning any of the above? Just this. I suggested at the start that sometimes an experience, like a needle, can sew together the past and the present; memor...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

The floodplains of the Guadalupe River in Texas seem to be a place of elevated Biblical literacy. I imagine then that when the raging waters brought death and destruction, more than a few turned to Psalm 69:

I am sunk in the abysmal swamp

where there is no foothold;

I have reached the watery depths;

the flood overwhelms me.

But I pray to you, O LORD,

for the time of your favor, O God!

In your great kindness answer me

with your constant help.

That psalm will be prayed at daily Mass today. And more than a few congregants, and perhaps a few preachers, will think about those who were overwhelmed by the floods in Texas.

The twentieth anniversary of the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 fell last Christmas, a reminder of the ferocity of the waters, which killed more than 225,000 people, displaced millions more and ravaged coastal towns for hundreds of miles in fourteen countries.

Floodwaters remind us that the prevailing Biblical view of the waters is one of chaos, disorder, danger, and death. That's hard to appreciate in an affluent 21st-century country.

The waters have been domesticated. In the summer, they are for recreation, sailboats, and jet skis; in winter, floating hotels cruise the oceans. Year round, unimaginable quantities of freight are shipped serenely downriver - and upriver - and across the oceans.

In the ancient world, contrariwise, there was fishing and transport and gentle rains to soften the fields, but always in the context of waters that could kill. The Biblical view is obscured when waters are yet another part of nature conquered by human ingenuity.

A typical Catholic couple, asked about the symbolism of water in the Sacrament of Baptism, say it means that their baby will be washed spiritually clean. A good answer in a culture where daily bathing is the norm. It's also a true answer, for baptism washes away all sin, original and actual.

Few parents will recall St. Paul: "When we were baptized into his death, we were placed into the tomb with him." (Romans 6:4) Who thinks of the baptismal font as a tomb? What parents would lay their newborn in same?

Baptism by immersion makes "the tomb" clearer. We die if held underwater long enough; even a short time can be fearful and anxious. A priest who performs baptisms by immersion takes care precisely to avoid such fear and anxiety. The baby (or adult) is only under water briefly.

When St. Paul wrote of the waters of baptism as a tomb, it would have resonated. A watery death was not rare. Paul himself knew the mortal danger of shipwreck. When the late Pope Francis would refer to the Mediterranean Sea as a vast "cemetery" for migrants, he was evoking ancient Biblical imagery.

The response to the flash floods on the Guadalupe River illustrated the dominant view now: that the waters should be domesticated, under our control. Leave aside the particulars of what should or should not have been done by whomever, the premise is that we can control the waters. Or at least we think we can.

There are implications for baptism as the ordinary path to salvation. If, in the natural order, we can and ought to save ourselves, is there need any longer to pray Psalm 69? If we can tame the natural waters, do we need saving from supernatural perils?

Today's Old Testament reading introduces us to Moses. (Exodus 2:1-15) A Levite woman puts her three-month-old son into a papyrus basket and leaves him among the reeds at the riverbank. The mother would have chosen a safe place, where the basket could easily be found, rather than setting the baby hurtling along the main current.

The animated film, Prince of Egypt, imagines something different. Baby Moses was threatened by crocodiles and hippopotami and the churning oars of Pharaoh's ships. The animators knew that the Biblical waters were fraught with dangers.

In due course, Pharaoh's daughter discovers the baby-laden basket when she comes to bathe and decides to adopt the child, calling him "Moses, for she said, 'I drew him ou...

by R.J. Snell.

Elon Musk recently promised to improve his version of an AI chatbot, nicknamed Grok. The fix did not go well, to put it mildly. In one description, Grok was intentionally designed to be "an 'anti-woke' competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT." But Grok seemed indistinguishable from its competitors. The fix, as was widely noted in recent days, whatever else it was, certainly was "anti-woke," with Grok turning into a holocaust denier, casting aspersions against Jews, threatening the Turkish president, and Grok giving itself the new nickname of "MechaHitler."

More than anything, the episode reveals, as sober-minded people know, that artificial intelligence is not intelligent. Large language models scour pre-existing texts and are highly efficient at pattern recognition. But they entirely lack the capacity for judgment or an experience of reality allowing them to engage in those second-order reflections typical of rational entities to see if a statement corresponds in any meaningful sense with primary reality as reality presents itself for our understanding and judgment. The so-called "hallucinations" of AI are good indicators of this fact.

Even more importantly, the failure of AI to exhibit intelligence provides an opportunity to tackle the actual elephant in the room. It isn't so much that AI is failing, but that the materialist, physicalist, and reductive visions of intelligence, which guide and govern AI boosters and coders, fail as an account of consciousness and intelligence.

As Adam Frank notes, "the current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw" infecting not only AI but most of the relevant disciplines, namely, it has overlooked "our experience." Modern science, he argues, has swiveled between two competing accounts of consciousness - physicalism or idealism - with physicalism reducing consciousness to the "physical mechanics occurring in the neurons" that (supposedly) generate consciousness itself. Idealism, on the other hand, attempts to free mind from matter and allow it a free-floating existence.

For anyone formed in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, these are not, and cannot be, live options. As rational animals we are entirely animal and entirely rational; we are not two distinct substances of body and self, nor do we simply have bodies or have minds. Instead, we are one being with two distinct principles, body and soul. And while the soul is the form and act of the body, it isn't a distinct entity from the body, and certainly the body cannot explain its own existence, operations, or life.

So, when a philosopher like Thomas Nagel suggests that our experience of subjectivity defies attempts to reduce it, or when Frank insists that experience, or "what it is like to exist," surpasses thinking of the mind as if it were an electromagnet, we are not surprised.

"The soul is the form of the body," but the soul is embodied. The soul does not hover above the body, nor is it a ghost haunting the machine somehow. The brain does, in fact, function when we think, and this is not at all odd or surprising. What would be surprising is if an MRI showed no brain activity while we were thinking.

At the same time, the brain does not explain the experience we have of ourselves as thinking, or feeling, or imagining, or tasting. Whatever the MRI notes does not even attempt to explain the experience. It points to something other than the experience, namely, the material substrate conditioning the experience. But the operations of the intelligence are not reducible to that substrate, and certainly consciousness of those operations - what we call self-consciousness - isn't what a material explanation even tries to articulate.

In the 1930s, Edmund Husserl was already exploring the crisis in science, where the contents of consciousness were thoroughly misunderstood and treated as if they were equivalent to the empirical objects of modern science, and thus reduced to what could be treated as measurable, quantifi...

by Msgr. Robert J. Batule.

When I was ordained a priest in 1985, my first pastor was about to turn 50 years old; he was a member of the Ordination Class of 1962. He saw himself and others saw him too as a "Vatican II" priest. There were meetings galore, a lot of "co-ministry" with women Religious, and, in discussions, frequent references to the marginalized and minorities of various kinds. But I don't recall that we had a single Holy Hour in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament in my five-year assignment there, nor do I remember hearing a word against co-habitation in the parish Pre-kayne-ah program. Moreover, I have no memory of any notices in the weekly bulletin announcing seminars on the topic of natural family planning.

There are always going to be different pastoral emphases, even in what might be regarded as not particularly ideological parishes. What developed, however, in many post-conciliar parishes are what we now call "safe spaces," meaning places you could go and not be reminded of words and ideas you don't like. When the "safe space" is breached after decades in some cases, you can well imagine the displeasure in certain quarters. But it was bound to happen at some point.

Over the last few years, men ordained priests in the 1970s have been marking their fiftieth anniversaries and are retiring from the active ministry. They are being replaced by men who weren't even alive in the 1970s! Indeed, the men in the cohort of younger priests now were only ordained in the last two decades. These younger priests are doctrinally more conservative than the priests they are replacing. This is not just anecdotal; the survey research bears this out too.

This has produced not a little bit of friction as the "spaces," to use the parlance invoked above, have gone from "safe" to "unsafe." Again, not in every instance, but changes are apparent in the pulpit, at the altar and in the Confessional, and in the classroom where there are parishes with elementary and high schools. In contradistinction to the examples I used from my first assignment, Holy Hours are regular occurrences in many parishes now, Pre-kayne-ah presentations are more apt to point out not just the incongruity but the sinfulness in cohabitation, and, relatedly, that marital chastity is not attained so long as contraception is practiced.

We always have to be careful with the words we place immediately before "Catholicism" in our speech or in our writing. We are, after all, referring to our faith, which is not, taxonomically, a political phenomenon. Nevertheless, there is a clear pertinence to conservatism since faith has attributes that most definitely tend in the direction of preserving whole and undiminished what is being "handed on." In this sense, then, there are distinctive biblical and ecclesial correlatives with conservatism.

Bishop Robert Barron, in the aftermath of the National Eucharistic Congress last year, commented that "liberal Catholicism could never have pulled off what happened in Indianapolis." What impressed him the most about the Congress was the sight of the outdoor procession with the Blessed Sacrament throughout the city streets of the Indiana capital.

Seeing so many thousands and thousands of Catholics take part in this devotion, along with their reverence and piety was deeply moving to Bishop Barron and no doubt countless others who saw what he saw. This caused Bishop Barron to observe that against the reverence and piety for the Eucharistic Lord, liberalism in religion tends "to reduce the supernatural to the natural."

If the Eucharist is merely a symbol, as a majority of Catholics think and believe it is, what you would want to do is re-define the meaning of the Real Presence and transubstantiation. For the transcendent and ontological character of these terms would need to be re-interpreted so that they focus on ourselves and not on the Lord.

That, unfortunately, is the trend that got started decades ago. It began with catechesis in the 1...

By Jeffrey Dirk Wilson.

Across hundreds of miles in Poland, the land is flat. Likewise, Częstochowa, though the monastery which houses the miraculous icon of the Black Madonna sits atop a hill. The choice of the site probably had much to do with its defensibility. It's the only monastery that I have visited which has ramparts.

The one hundred Pauline monks - named for St. Paul the Hermit c. A.D. 345 - who live there, as well as an extensive cadre of sisters, staff the premises. The monks are responsible for the many Masses each day. The sisters mind the museums and the tourist souvenir booths. How does one resist an elderly sister who looks you straight in the eye and smiles her very sweetest smile when she asks, "Would you like to buy something?"

There is a large church, but the icon, which is the centerpiece here, is in a smaller chapel. A Pole might consider it heresy to hear that as icons go, this one is not especially remarkable. In fact, one sees very little of the icon itself, only the faces and hands of Our Lady and her infant son. She is called the "Black" Madonna because of the darkness of the image. Centuries ago, before a million candles had been burnt in her presence, the tone might have been lighter.

The reason that one sees so little of the actual icon is that she is dressed in elaborate, even spectacular clothes.

The official guidebook says that there are two stories of the icon's origin, one of pious legend, the other of the art historians. The guidebook only tells the first of these stories. The board on which the icon is painted was (supposedly) taken from the table used by the Holy Family when they were at home in Nazareth. St. Luke got hold of it, cut out sections and painted portraits of Mother and Child. One hangs in Florence; the other is the Black Madonna.

Empress Mother Helena (c A.D. 246-330) - who went to the Holy Land, then under the rule of her son, Constantine (c. A.D. 227-337), the Roman Emperor - had it brought to Constantinople.

Meanwhile, in A.D. 476 the Roman Empire fell in the West but continued in the East with Constantinople as its capital until A.D. 1453. During that millennium, the emperors felt little but disdain for the rulers in the West, where once their predecessors had ruled. But occasionally, circumstances constrained emperors to seek help from rulers they despised.

In such a moment, the Black Madonna left Constantinople. Through the several hands of Eastern European rulers, she arrived in Częstochowa, where she has remained ever since.

It is nearly certain that St. Luke did not paint the icon. Art historians suggest it dates back to the ninth century, at least. In any event, the veneration of the faithful has hallowed this icon for a thousand years - and perhaps for a few centuries more.

The Poles - the ones whom I have met anyway - can recite their history over the past thousand years. They might slight the Lithuanians, though for some centuries, the Poles and Lithuanians formed the Commonwealth, sometimes just called, with great pride, "The Republic." But Polish lands, too, exchanged hands multiple times over the centuries.

Whatever importance Our Lady of Częstochowa has had for Polish national awareness before the sundering by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the centrality of her shrine for Polish nationhood increased with every year from the tripartite division of Poland in A.D. 1795 through the period of Soviet hegemony.

Cardinal Karol Wojtyła (later as Pope John Paul II) underscored that importance as he plotted and philosophized over modern Polish freedom.

Poland is basically a conservative, Catholic country. Crucifixes hang in train stations. At this holiest of Polish Catholic shrines, the reverence is profound.

There is a brass railing around the edge of the chapel where the icon hangs over the altar. People queue behind that railing. When they come to the altar area, they kneel and then walk on their knees behind the altar. Only when they emerge from the altar area ...

By Joseph R. Wood

My summer philosophical reading includes two Thomases: St. Thomas Aquinas, who needs no introduction here, and Thomas Nagel, New York University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus. He is an atheist of Jewish descent.

Whatever you read in the next few paragraphs, don't believe that Nagel is a quasi-Catholic philosopher. His book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, has to be enjoyed on his own terms.

Nagel succinctly rejects the "reductive materialism" - the notion that all of reality can be explained by material processes moving through time with no given end (telos) - that is "widely assumed to be the only serious possibility."

The natural sciences are dominated by the insistence that "the physical sciences could in principle provide a theory of everything." Under this view (often acting as an ideology), all reality can be reduced to matter and the principles by which its interactions unfold.

Nagel admires the physical sciences as they seek to understand reality within their domains. But he rejects the possibility that material causes alone could bring into being animals with consciousness and reason. He labels such theories "causal" explanations of what is.

He sees in the universe a place where "mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature." Consciousness and reason are not outcomes of strictly material Darwinian evolution. Rather, they point to a telos in the order of things that guides or directs evolution and the development of the universe.

This is a "teleological" explanation of reality. One kind of teleological view is theist, with God invoked as the propagator of the telos, or as the telos Himself.

Nagel is sympathetic to the arguments of those theists who, accepting an intelligent design of creation, point out logical and evidential flaws of materialist reduction theories. These arguments are often dismissed as unworthy of consideration merely because they are religious.

The reigning material Darwinists "are armed to the teeth against arguments from religion." The objections to material reductionism are, says Nagel, worthy of consideration on logical and philosophical grounds. But the materialists close their ears for no sound reason.

Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems these iconoclasts [critics of materialist reductionism] pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.

When I see an atheist philosopher referring to the "orthodox scientific consensus" as an icon and its religious critics as unfairly maligned "iconoclasts," I know I'm reading an interesting book. I'd like to have listened to Nagel chat with Chesterton.

Nagel says a great deal about why the materialist explanations fail to explain consciousness and reason. But he's circumspect about why the theist teleological explanation - God - doesn't convince him. He comments that he lacks "the sensus divinitatis that enables - indeed compels - so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purposes as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling." He himself is even "strongly averse to the idea" of theism.

That is one example of what a lovely book this is. Nagel writes with clarity, occasional humor, and generosity. He treats those of different views seriously and respectfully, often having interesting arguments. He acknowledges the importance of individual inclinations in how we see the world. The book moves along with charity and humility.

His penchant for common sense is welcome.

If causal and theist explanations of reality don't work for Nagel, what explains "what is"? He is drawn to a natural (versus supernatural) teleology in which the telos of the universe is embedded within nature itself (but not put the...

By Stephen P. White

Human beings, having a rational nature, are free to choose between good and evil. This freedom constitutes, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, "the highest of natural endowments." We are not only free to choose between good and evil, but we are also responsible for those choices. We are responsible for the intentions by which we act, for the actions themselves, and, to some degree, for the consequences of those actions.

Our laws account for all three of these facets of moral action, which is why we distinguish, for example, between murder and manslaughter in criminal cases, and sometimes award damages in wrongful death cases even if no criminal offense was proven.

Even outside of the legal context, we Christians often think of moral actions in terms of culpability, that is, in terms of guilt or innocence. And there is good reason for this. We know that we will be judged by our actions and judged by One who knows not just our outward actions but our very hearts: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

There is much more, however, to our moral actions than culpability. Our free choice to do good or to do evil does much more than impute guilt or innocence on account of which we are liable to judgment.

Our moral choices, in a limited but crucial way, make us who we are. Man is not only capable of choosing between good and evil, he is capable of choosing to make himself good or evil.

God does not change, though we do. We are never simply static. Of course, we change physically over time. Our bodies grow, age, and die. Some changes are irreversible: our coming into being as a unique and immortal creation, for example, is irrevocable (though not of our own choosing). Grace changes us, too. Some sacraments even bring about a permanent change in the very nature of the one who receives them, what the Church calls an "ontological" change. Baptism accomplishes this. So does Holy Orders.

But we change in mind and spirit, too. We learn (and forget) things. We change in our moral habits as well, growing in virtue or chaining ourselves to vice. These are changes within ourselves that we do choose. Grace aids us, of course, but by the free choices we make, we become more and more (or less and less, as the case may be) the men and women we were created to be.

The whole drama of every human life plays out between the person one is and the person one is becoming. Human freedom is precisely that gift by which, through obedience to the truth and with the assistance of grace, man is able to act in such a way as to grow in the excellence for which he was made.

This teleological understanding of moral action and human freedom lies at the very heart of the Church's teaching about the human person and her understanding of the vocation of every person. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor:

Human acts are moral acts because they express and determine the goodness or evil of the individual who performs them. They do not produce a change merely in the state of affairs outside of man but, to the extent that they are deliberate choices, they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits.

This understanding of moral action is hardly new. The ancient Greeks understood it. The Church Fathers understood it. In fact, to underscore his earlier point, Pope John Paul II cites the great 4th-century saint, Gregory of Nyssa:

All things subject to change and to becoming never remain constant, but continually pass from one state to another, for better or worse. . . .Now, human life is always subject to change; it needs to be born ever anew. . . .But here birth does not come about by a foreign intervention, as is the case with bodily beings. . .it is the result of a free choice. Thus we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as...