By Auguste Meyrat

With many members of the Gen Z cohort (b. 1997-2012) coming of age and entering public life, it behooves older generations to understand them better. I can recall the many essays, books, and movies examining my own generation, the millennials (b. 1981-1996), as well as those assessing Generation X (b. 1965 -1980) before that. While they were not always accurate or entirely enlightening, they helped ease tensions between generations.

Unfortunately, with Gen Z, the differences may be so vast and deep that understanding them will prove more difficult. So much of their formative experience is unprecedented. Not only have they grown up with smartphones, high-speed Internet, and now AI, but they have also experienced a number of widespread social disruptions, including the Covid lockdowns. Altogether, this makes their integration into adult life especially challenging – and I say this as a teacher who has worked closely with Zoomers for decades.

As my friend and fellow teacher-writer Jeremy Adams explains in his book Hollowed Out (which I reviewed here), much about Gen Z is a paradox. On the outside, they have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips (theoretically: many will not even be aware of what today's date, 9/11, signifies). And they enjoy countless amenities. On the inside, many of them still feel empty and resentful. In response, Adams calls for a nation-wide intervention to help these youths discover the blessings of American democracy and Western wisdom.

While this solution makes sense to older generations, Zoomers would likely scoff at the very idea. As Joey Oliver makes clear in his new book American History Z: Gen Z's Journey to the Far Right, the situation for Zoomers has deteriorated well beyond Adams's modest proposal. A Zoomer himself, Oliver gives a detailed account of how these ostensibly privileged people have grown up to despise their cultural patrimony and embrace radicalism. The account is hard to read at times, but sheds light on a host of blind spots that everyone who hopes to improve the outlook of today's young adults should understand.

Far from growing up in an idyllic culture of stability, respectability, and technological advancement, Oliver and his peers witnessed firsthand the great crumbling of every narrative that had earlier defined the West. Race, immigration, feminism, free speech, economic opportunity, public health, American history, or democracy – all these subjects were reopened and recast despite inherent contradictions, corrupt leadership, and online polarization in Zoomer circles.

This was not all bad. Secular leftist narratives tend to target Oliver's own demographic – white conservative males – making them a scapegoat for all the world's ills. For decades, the great majority of institutions had thoughtlessly reinforced this toxic messaging while simultaneously lamenting the sudden rise in political and cultural polarization in American life.

But other voices arose to challenge these narratives and restore a degree of sanity to public discourse, bravely running through the gauntlet of censors and cancellers. While some of these advocates held steadfast in their positions, many were either silenced or pressured to recant, leaving much of their Zoomer audience to fend for themselves.

This collective abandonment of Zoomers makes up the darkest aspects of Oliver's story. Yes, secular leftism (popularly known as "woke culture") was slowed down by countervailing forces, but it has not gone away. The conflict between right and left simply became more intense as political violence became common and public discourse degenerated into hate-filled propaganda. The revival of democratic virtues that Adams recommended in his book was replaced with partisan tribalism.

In the end, Oliver loses faith in the whole American project. All the people he followed have let him down, making him a cynic before even reaching age 30. What's even more striking is his overwhelming scorn fo...

By Michael Pakaluk

"We know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good" (Romans 8:28).

Disasters must come in this fallen world, and maybe they will come to us. There are relatively few sayings of Jesus which the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve. But one of these addresses the fact of disasters. About those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, or the 18 victims of what we might call "the Tower of Siloam disaster": ". . . think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem? No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish." (Luke 13:4-5)

As is his wont, Our Lord here uses visible realities as signs of the invisible. He knows human nature, that disasters invite us to feel, to our shame, that we the living are somehow "better" than those who died. This reaction is telling, because it shows that we inevitably interpret disasters as moral events. No matter what some may say intellectually, we cannot succeed in interpreting them as meaningless chance events.

And this propensity is fundamentally correct. Our Lord teaches us its meaning: visible disasters are not meant to winnow out, the way the Last Judgment does. They are mere images of the only true disaster, damnation. And should stimulate us to repent.

We soften Leon Bloy's saying, that the only tragedy in human life is not to be a saint, if we neglect to consider that there is only one eternal alternative to sainthood.

Many of us alive in the days following the 9/11 attacks watched videos of the planes going into the towers again and again, not yet believing it. We liked to shock ourselves repeatedly, first, by provoking the feeling that "if only" this or that had not happened, we could have avoided it. "If only" the flight school had reported them; "if only" that suspicious airline official in Portland had not let them on). And then, second, with the feeling that "but it really did happen," which is the same as "it really was permitted by God." And this is shocking.

But did you and I repent? Was each episode of such self-inflicted shock followed by a commensurate, passionate cry for mercy? Did Catholics adopt new mortifications in atonement? People did return to church, it was noticed, but such good impulses were soon swallowed up by vengeance and warfare.

St. Paul speaks to the difference between the "permissive" and the "perfect" will of God. How do we know whether a disaster is the one or the other for us? You might look at the day before disaster.

Twenty-five years ago, September 10, 2001, Todd Beamer returned from a five-day trip to Rome with his wife, Lisa, who was pregnant with their third child. He was sent there by Oracle with a group of 500 other employees and guests, as a reward for his excellence in sales.

Todd was an Evangelical Christian. When in Rome, did he and his wife go to hear the man widely reputed to be a saint, John Paul II, who gave a General Audience in St. Peter's Square on Psalm 47? Even if not, surely the saint's words spoken then articulated God's meaning for their lives:

Until the coming of the Messiah, hope of the nations, the Gentiles did not adore God and did not know who he is. Until the Messiah redeemed them, God did not reign over the nations through their obedience and their worship. Now instead, with his Word and his Spirit, God reigns over them because he saved them from deception and made them his friends.

Once they got home, Todd needed to travel to San Francisco to do a favor for a friend by being present at a meeting with Sony. To spend more time at home with his wife and young children before leaving again, however, he decided not to take an evening flight, which was his usual practice, to get there the night before, but to take a morning flight, September 11. Was this choice a fatal mistake?

To summarize: He was a believing Christian. He did his work well. He and his wife were generous in welcoming children. He was a good friend to a co...

By Francis X. Maier

For three of my 27 years on diocesan staff, I had the attached duty of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs. It was great work. We had good relations with local Protestant and Latter-Day Saint communities; cordial discussions with local rabbis; and personal friendships with local Greek Orthodox and American Jewish Committee leaders.

With Islam, the story was different. Over the years, we had a total of two contacts: one letter from a local imam insisting that we convert, and one visit from a young, formerly Catholic imam eager to explain how all the good in Christianity was really derived from Islam, the (allegedly) original divine revelation. Alas for him, he picked an unreceptive audience.

I mention this for a reason. During those same years, I remember at least one night sitting through a parish presentation on the three "Abrahamic" faiths. In it, the parish DRE repeatedly, with the best of intentions, compared "the Bible" and "the holy Qur'an." I then had the delicate task of explaining that, in Christian belief, the Bible is holy and inspired by God. The Qur'an – whatever its beautiful elements might be – is neither.

Christians do not recognize Muhammad as a true prophet. Nor is Islam the product of divine revelation, much less the original one. And the three "Abrahamic" religions – as Rémi Brague, Jacques Ellul, and many others have noted – have far deeper differences than similarities.

Simply put, inter-religious dialogue, including with Islam, is an admirable goal. But confused irenicism serves neither the truth nor a healthy mutual understanding.

Brague, the distinguished French Catholic philosopher and Arabist, describes the limits of Christian-Muslim dialogue:

For Islam, the survival of the Christian religion is an anachronism. Islam presents itself. . .as the true Christianity, given that, according to Islamic thought, Christians have disfigured the authentic Gospel, just as the Jews, for their part, have sold out the authentic Torah. Thus it is out of the question to appeal to common Scripture. This means, from the Muslim point of view, the "Islamo-Christian dialogue" is a dialogue between true Christians (that is, the Muslims themselves) and people who imagine themselves to be true Christians, but are not. This is why dialogue interests Christians more than it does Muslims.

In practice, Islamic ignorance of, and chronic disinterest in, the actual content of Christianity can be astonishing. Bernard Lewis, the great Jewish scholar of Muslim civilization, noted that over the centuries and into the modern era, most Muslims have believed that "the Trinity, the worship of which Islam condemns as near-polytheistic blasphemy, [consists] of God, Jesus, and Mary."

Most Christians know that they don't know Islam. But the opposite is not true. Most Muslims tend to assume that they already know everything they need to know about Christianity since the Qur'an speaks of Christians. The result is a gulf made unbridgeable by Islam's claim to be the original, and the only pure, divine revelation, superseding all others.

None of this need preclude honest attempts at mutual respect and understanding. But it should preclude Christian naïveté. Catholics pray the Nicene Creed at every Sunday Mass. It's the constitutional expression of what we believe. Across 17 centuries, men and women have died defending it. With the exception of the Creed's first line, Islam rejects every key element of the text.

Historically, in Muslim-dominated cultures – as Rémi Brague notes, and we too often forget – "Jews and Christians were subjected to various measures explicitly designed to make them understand, by humiliating them, that it would be in their interest to adopt Islam." Similar forms of Muslim behavior continue today. Christians face prejudice, persecution, abductions, and forced conversions in various Muslim states.

This week we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Blaming an entire religious community for the actions of...

By Amy Fahey

A little over a year ago, I took my aged father for a specialist visit. The appointment, which I still recall with painful clarity, put me in mind of the Anglo-Saxon poem known simply as "The Ruin." The manuscript is damaged, so what remains is itself a kind of ruin, a meditation on former splendor contrasted with brokenness and fragmentation. It struck me then, as it does now, as a fitting metaphor for the current state of healthcare in our nation.

The receptionist hands me a tablet and stylus and tells me to register my father. There are a series of questions on the screen, all related to his bladder. In addition to recently losing his vision, my father is now hard of hearing, so I begin: "How many times a day do you have to." But I stop myself as I realize how embarrassing, even dehumanizing, this will be in a crowded waiting room. My father waves his hand in the air and says with his characteristic midwestern bluntness, "Just answer down the middle for all of them. They don't read that sh*t anyway."

The wife of a couple nearby cups her hand to her mouth in a repressed giggle. Her husband turns to her and says sharply: "Well, he's right."

When we make it to the appointment room, the good doctor (I have heard from my father that he is a good man, a Catholic) breezes in with his own hand-held screen, followed by a young woman in a white coat, who presumably is following the doctor on his rounds to learn the art of healing. He begins scrolling rapidly, reviewing my father's records.

Meanwhile my father, summoning up all his courage, launches into a well-rehearsed declaration of independence: "I'm not getting any shots today. I don't want any more of that crap put into my body. I've had enough chemicals – they've totally messed up my system."

I'm sure the doctor listened attentively. But I'm also sure his mind was working – working fast. It had to: as he told us, my father was one of seventy patients he would see that day.

I did rapid calculations. Say the doctor arrived at the clinic at 7:00 am and didn't leave until 6:00 pm, with a break somewhere to eat or to discuss a patient's clinical notes with that young woman, or to voice-to-text those clinical notes or even just to relieve himself. That would mean an average of about eight minutes per patient.

My father's weeks of agonizing anticipation, reduced to an eight-minute appointment.

Still, my father hands the doctor one of his favorite cigars: a Rocky Patel Decade. The doctor is effusive in his thanks. Decades, he says, are his favorite too. He is golfing later that week and will smoke it then. The good doctor then simply says, "Your numbers have been coming down. We'll give you a break and reevaluate." And that is that.

I think it's too generous to say that American healthcare is at a crossroads. It is, like the once-glorious city in Roman Britain contemplated by that anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet a millennium ago, in ruins.

Fears that AI might depersonalize healthcare seem to have missed the glaring reality that healthcare has been increasingly depersonalized for years now. When was the last time a doctor spent more time looking at you than at a screen? Who hasn't had the experience of feeling like the doctor is just one Google search ahead of you (or sometimes behind) in diagnosing or determining treatment options?

I'm not suggesting there aren't excellent, dedicated, and humane people in the medical profession. There are, and I've been blessed to know some of them. Yet even as studies warn us of the "cognitive overload" of overworked medical personnel, and prognosticators predict the "cognitive debt" AI will usher in, it seems obvious that both overload and debt have already crossed the threshold of our clinics and hospitals. As in education, COVID only exposed and accelerated a problem that was already there.

Yet there are signs of hope. For several years, my family and I have belonged to a Christian health share, an alternative to conventional insurance ...

By St. Pope John Paul II

Through work, man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family.

And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself.

Man is made to be in the visible universe an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth.

Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. . . .

The Church is convinced that work is a fundamental dimension of man's existence on earth. She is confirmed in this conviction by considering the whole heritage of the many sciences devoted to man: anthropology, paleontology, history, sociology, psychology and so on; they all seem to bear witness to this reality in an irrefutable way.

But the source of the Church's conviction is above all the revealed word of God, and therefore what is a conviction of the intellect is also a conviction of faith. The reason is that the Church – and it is worthwhile stating it at this point – believes in man: she thinks of man and addresses herself to him not only in the light of historical experience, not only with the aid of the many methods of scientific knowledge, but in the first place in the light of the revealed word of the living God.

Relating herself to man, she seeks to express the eternal designs and transcendent destiny which the living God, the Creator and Redeemer, has linked with him.

The Church finds in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis the source of her conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth. An analysis of these texts makes us aware that they express – sometimes in an archaic way of manifesting thought – the fundamental truths about man, in the context of the mystery of creation itself.

These truths are decisive for man from the very beginning, and at the same time they trace out the main lines of his earthly existence, both in the state of original justice and also after the breaking, caused by sin, of the Creator's original covenant with creation in man.

When man, who had been created "in the image of God. . . .male and female," hears the words: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it," even though these words do not refer directly and explicitly to work, beyond any doubt they indirectly indicate it as an activity for man to carry out in the world.

Indeed, they show its very deepest essence. Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth. In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe.

Work understood as a "transitive" activity, that is to say an activity beginning in the human subject and directed towards an external object, presupposes a specific dominion by man over "the earth," and in its turn it confirms and develops this dominion. It is clear that the term "the earth" of which the biblical text speaks is to be understood in the first place as that fragment of the visible universe that man inhabits.

By extension, however, it can be understood as the whole of the visible worl...

By Brad Miner

There was once a monument in Rome called Milliarium Aureum: the Golden Milestone. The Emperor Augustus erected it in the Forum in about 20 B.C. All distances in Ancient Rome were said to be marked from (or to) that spot. There's still a round remnant of it in the Roman Forum.

It gave rise to the phrase, "All roads lead to Rome," for the very good reason that they did. The 12th-century poet-theologian Alain de Lille was the first to use the phrase, as Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam: Qui dominum toto quaerere corde volunt ("A thousand roads lead forever to Rome, the men who desire to seek the Lord with all their heart."). Chaucer (A Treatise on the Astrolabe in 1391) was the first to recast de Lille's proverb into English as "Right as diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome."

And, my friends, this was never about geography.

Jump ahead to the 16th and 17th centuries (and later), and artists found their many ways to the Eternal City along earthly roads to discover ways of expressing the glory of God. Some – painters especially – were merely talented copyists; others were visionaries who found inspiration in the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other greats of the Renaissance, but also the Baroque greats, and the greatest of those was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

I wrote here recently about my favorite work of art, Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage, but that is not the painting I consider the greatest. That dubious honor (dubious because it's simply my opinion and because no serious art historian would ever plant such a flag) belongs to Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas. I'm merely an art lover and have my reasons for esteeming this great work.

The painting was commissioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1627), a successful banker, financier to the Vatican, and a patron of the arts, who acquired 15 paintings by Caravaggio.

(An interesting aside: Giustiniani's first Caravaggio purchase was Saint Matthew and the Angel after it was rejected by the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, intended for the Contarelli Chapel there. Giustiniani bought the painting to protect Caravaggio from a financial loss, and the painter did another, more glorious version, The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, which is now the center panel in the Chapel, flanked by The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. Years later, Saint Matthew and the Angel ended up in Berlin, where it was destroyed by fire near the end of WWII.)

Rome is clearly the place Caravaggio wished to call home. It was the center of the Faith he loved, and it was where the money was. He first came to Rome at 21, and he was on his way back to Rome when he died at 38.

Giustiniani must have found this moment in Scripture utterly fascinating. He didn't commission the painting for a church but for his own villa.

We all know the moment Caravaggio is capturing because John tells us (20:24-29). Christ had appeared to the Apostles, but Thomas was not among them. So, when they told him the Lord had returned, Thomas said, "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe." And then:

Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!"

It's interesting to me that Caravaggio puts Peter in the painting. It makes sense that John would be there: he's the one who has given us the story. For me, the extraordinary scene (a proof for "doubting" Thomas of the divinity of Jesus) is frozen in the moment when Thomas believes – so much so that his proclamation of faith trumps Peter's earlier one. The Rock upon which C...

By Robert Lazu Kmita

In a world where formal pronouns have disappeared from almost every language, and where good manners are not merely rare but actively ridiculed, we are gradually turning into grotesque versions of Shrek. Even the dwarves from Tolkien's tales, as portrayed in films of recent decades, are boorish creatures who grunt and scrape the mud from their boots against the edges of one of the beautiful chests belonging to the Baggins family. We should not be surprised that educating children and adolescents today is more difficult than cracking open a coconut. But who is to form the younger generation when most adults themselves are ignorant of the art of conversation and manners?

Do not think that I have installed myself onto the bench of a self-appointed judge of a decadent world. Not at all. Everything I have said above comes from the bitter experience of my own failures. I will not mention them here. In most cases, they would be downright embarrassing. Suffice it to say that, at fifty-five years old, I possess enough memories that make me blush to seriously question my own manners and, at the same time, ask how I might become better. For one can never guide either children or grandchildren unless one knows oneself the path they ought to walk through the world – i.e., with grace and dignity.

Aware, therefore, of my own shortcomings, I have spent many years reading not only treatises on theology and philosophy, or comforting works of literature and poetry, but also old, tattered volumes in which authors from centuries past tell the story of a better world, one in which people knew what it meant to be well-mannered. One such book, written by an anonymous British duke, provided me not only with some of the finest lessons in practical Christianity but also with a great surprise. The central principle stated from the very beginning by this aristocrat, whose name we may never know, sounds strikingly evangelical:

"Treat others as you would wish others to treat you."

A faithful echo of the crucial teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ: "All things therefore whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them" (Matthew 7:12). The duke's maxim translated the essence of eternal morality into an ethical principle. In doing so, he laid the foundation for every rule, from how we dress and speak, to how we eat and welcome guests.

Of all the chapters in the book, however, none impressed me more than the one devoted to concealing one's own ill humor. Who among us does not know what it means to feel irritable, depressed, sour – in a word, upset? But how many of us know that we should not allow any of these emotions to cast a shadow over others?

Contrary to the current mania of wildly telling whoever will listen in person or online every detail about ourselves, the gentleman, our unknown author tells us, just like the lady of the house, should never allow personal gloom or sorrow to darken the lives of others. For example, in the case of a difficult situation involving a family member, such as illness or injury, it is better to avoid a social engagement than to burden one's interlocutor with a long chain of sighs and complaints.

"How can that be?" I immediately asked myself. Are not such expressions of a troubled heart the best way to seek help and solidarity from one's neighbor? "Yes," the duke would reply, "but on one condition: that help is genuinely possible." Otherwise, the person exposed to our suffering, embarrassed and helpless, would not know what to do.

Therefore, the best course is to ask explicitly for help whenever such help can realistically be given. Otherwise, one's distress should be carefully concealed, and when that is impossible, social encounters should be avoided until the difficult moment has passed. This kind of concealment, through which we disguise the storm within, may be called, surprisingly and oxymoronically, holy hypocrisy.

No one would likely doubt that hypocrisy is among the gravest of...

By Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF

Cardinal Robert Sarah's address this summer to the European Parliament identifies a foundational problem in contemporary bioethical discourse: the widening gap between language and reality. Words that once conveyed stable meanings – "healthcare," "rights," "dignity" – are increasingly deployed with ideological elasticity.

Sarah warns this linguistic instability constitutes a "crisis of the logos or of reason," a breakdown in the relationship between words and the realities they signify. Language ceases to correspond to reality; reason loses its footing, and moral judgment becomes vulnerable to sentiment, ideology or political coercion.

Sarah's thesis rests on three philosophical principles deeply rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition.

First, language must correspond to reality. For Sarah, language is not a neutral tool but an instrument of truth. Words are meant to reveal reality, not obscure it. Once medical discourse employs euphemisms or ambiguous terminology, it becomes difficult to identify the moral nature of medical actions. When terms such as "healthcare," "choice," or "medical aid in dying" conceal the underlying reality of direct killing or murder, the loss of linguistic clarity spawns a loss of moral clarity.

Second, reason is the basis of ethical judgment. Sarah's critique presupposes a classical and Christian understanding of reason as the faculty capable of discerning truth. In turn, ethical judgment is directly dependent on reason's ability to apprehend the nature of the human person and the goods proper to human flourishing. Rather than rational inquiry into human goods, many bioethical debates today become mere contests of sentiment or political power.

Third, human dignity is objective and intrinsic. Sarah insists human dignity does not depend on "autonomy," utility, or political consensus. It flows from the nature of the human person as an imago Dei, a being created in God's image.

The consequences of ignoring these principles are particularly acute in bioethics, where, as Sarah argues, the stakes involve human life, embodiment, and dignity.

For this reason, Sarah's lectio evaluates coherently four major bioethical issues: abortion, in vitro fertilization, transgender ideology, and physician-assisted suicide. In each case, he demonstrates how linguistic distortion functions as a precondition for moral confusion and policy error.

Referring to abortion as "health," for example, is a linguistic manipulation that conceals the elimination of life. Sarah cites American, European, and international policy documents where "sexual and reproductive health" is routinely used to include abortion. He argues this egregious "reversal of the logos" reframes the deliberate termination of a human life as a form of healthcare, conditions human dignity on maternal choice, and treats the unborn baby as an object whose existence depends on external approval.

Sarah insists the linguistic distortion of "health," "choice," and "rights" normalizes abortion by embedding it within the language of medicine and the Constitution.

But if abortion is described as "healthcare," the unborn child becomes a pathology, the moral reality of direct killing is obscured, and reason is subordinate to political expediency. Within this conceptual framework, warns Sarah, it becomes difficult – if not impossible – to recognize the gravity of the act of abortion.

Sarah also contends that the language of "reproductive rights" justifies in vitro fertilization, embryo cryopreservation, selective reduction, and embryo disposal. While the term "rights" is employed to frame the baby and its laboratory production as entitlements, it clandestinely obscures the moral implications of creating and destroying human beings at their embryonic stage.

And when IVF is framed as a "right," the child becomes a product of technique rather than the fruit of a unitive act of marital love. The genesis of a new human being is relocated from...

By Stephen P. White

Today the Church marks the feast of St. Gregory the Great, pope and doctor of the Church. He was born around 540, just a few years before the death of another great European saint (and co-patron of Europe) Benedict of Nursia. The lives of these two men are similar in interesting ways. But the ways in which their lives ultimately diverge also reveal something about how the Lord provides for his Church.

Gregory was born into one of the great families of Rome. Among its members were many senators, consuls, and more than one emperor. Gregory's father was a senator and his great-great-grandfather was Pope St. Felix III.

Rome, in Gregory's day, was a shell of its former self. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 (which spurred Augustine to write The City of God) had been followed by an even more devastating invasion at the hands of the Vandals in 455. The Western Empire collapsed in 476.

Rome itself, which at its imperial peak boasted a population of more than 1 million, had shriveled to just 30-40,000 inhabitants by the middle of the sixth century. War, plague, and the other miseries of imperial collapse had transformed Rome terribly.

At the time Gregory was born, much of the Italian peninsula had been under barbarian control for nearly a century and the forces of the Emperor Justinian (who still ruled in Constantinople) were in the midst of a two-decade long campaign to wrest the remains of the Western Empire back from the Goths. It was an effort that would never fully succeed.

That was Gregory's Rome: plague-ridden, hollowed out, poorly defended.

Gregory served in his youth in the administration of the city, rising to the rank of Prefect of the City, but he longed to retreat into the monastic life of prayer and care for the poor. After the death of his father, he did just that, establishing (and entering) a monastery on the site of his family villa on the Caelian Hill. He spent his inheritance serving the poor and lived with such strict asceticism that he suffered from poor health for most of the rest of his life.

If Gregory's story had ended there, we might still be telling the story of a saint: at a time when civilization was crumbling around him, a rich young man left a promising career and retreated to a monastery to focus on prayer and service to the poor.

That, in rough strokes, is the story of Benedict of Nursia who wrote his Rule and founded his first monasteries in the decades preceding Gregory's birth and who died when Gregory was a young child.

Much of what we know of the life of St. Benedict comes from the pen of Gregory himself, who dedicated a lengthy section of his Dialogues to recounting stories of Benedict's own holiness, miracles, and way of life.

These two men, Gregory and Benedict, thus provide an interesting pair for comparison and study. Benedict, we know, transformed Europe through his revival and reform of Western monasticism. The monasteries he founded grew and spread into some of the greatest and most enduring institutions of the medieval world.

Gregory, for his part, understood the essential value and importance of the monastic project. But God had a different path for Gregory.

Gregory was plucked from the monastic life he loved so dearly and sent as a papal representative to the imperial court in Constantinople. The pope needed a reliable advocate to plead for the military protection of the empire, but he needed someone who could handle ecclesial disputes as well. The confusion in the empire was exacerbated and complicated by confusion and division within the Church. The Second Council of Constantinople had led to a great controversy and even led to schism.

Gregory, the pope decided, was his man.

Whereas Benedict was allowed his monasticism, Gregory was deprived of it and shipped East to deal with politics and administration. He returned to Rome only to be once again deprived of his monastery.

Gregory was elected Bishop of Rome in 590. His administration of alms and the good...

By Joanna Bogle

In London, on the corner near the Marble Arch, there's a noteworthy medallion on a traffic island commemorating Tyburn Tree. When English Catholics think of Tyburn, they think of the martyrs who died there – dragged through the streets after torture in the Tower of London, hanged, racked, and disemboweled, denied mercy unless they were prepared to deny loyalty to the Catholic Church and Peter's successor in Rome.

Their names have come down to us with honor: Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin, John Stoughton, and more. Today there are churches and schools named after them, and pilgrims flow steadily to Tyburn where nuns at a thriving convent nearby hold a 24-hour vigil before the Blessed Sacrament.

The shrine, and the site of the gallows itself, have undergone a notable change in my lifetime. From being a slightly obscure shrine, known to devout Catholics, but not to the general public, they are now widely publicized, not least with an official Transport for London sign at the Tube station (Marble Arch).

The English Martyrs, as they are collectively known, were canonized by Paul VI in 1970. It was done with wisdom and with tact – the pope referred briefly and in a generous spirit to those Protestants who also lost their lives in the grim years of the English Reformation. And Catholic devotion to the 40 Martyrs (there were many more, of course, and it seems likely that there will be future canonizations as historical research is completed and miracles reported) has grown steadily. Today their stories are spread by new websites, videos, and TV features, taking over from the booklets and leaflets of my youth.

But Tyburn is also the name of a river – one of the half-forgotten rivers of London that still flow beneath us as we hurry about on everyday business or relax in a park or café.

There were two branches of the Ty – the old word "burn" for a river, still used in Scotland, is linked to bourn, meaning a spring (as in place names such as Eastbourne or Bournemouth). One branch flowed through what is today called Marylebone (Mary-le-bourne), the other through what is, today, Hyde Park, along Park Lane and the Bayswater Road.

I say "flowed" but of course a river never really ceases to exist. You can still hear the Tyburn if you stand above the Thames Water Authority's manhole cover in the park – and just occasionally the water rises to flood, and the river makes a brief reappearance as a large and spreading puddle.

London is full of lost or, rather, forgotten rivers. Their names are still with us – the Falcon that runs down from Clapham Junction to Battersea, giving its name to the street that now covers it, and to the local pub – the Beverly Brook that flows through the suburbs of New Malden and Raynes Park, partly through local public gardens, partly between the backs of houses and blocks of flats.

The Westbourne flows through Kensington and Paddington. The Fleet, which famously gave its name to the street of newspapers, flowed into the Thames at Blackfriars and fed a great Dominican monastery still honored in the name of the pub and the tube station.

The hidden or half-forgotten stream is not a bad analogy for the extraordinary revival of the Catholic Faith in England in the modern era. St. John Henry Newman spoke of the "Second Spring" in 1852 when he addressed the gathering of newly appointed bishops following the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850. He was speaking, of course, of the season rather than of bubbling water, but both make an interesting analogy for the unfolding events.

"Oh yes," you will say, with the sad shrug of the modern Western Catholic, "There was a revival in the 19th century, and it lingered into the 20th – but what about now?" And it is true that the fastest-growing religion in Britain is Islam, and the Catholic Church is running desperately short of priests, has merged many parishes, and runs schools that are notable for producing students who are non-practicing long before they leave.

An...