The Catholic Thing

As the liturgical year comes to an end, the Church's readings become decidedly eschatological, focusing on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. A recent Sunday reading from Daniel tells us, "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some shall live forever, others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace." (12:2)

Why does God judge on the basis of good and evil?

In a world overdosed on the dictatorship of relativism and allergic to objective moral standards, perhaps some think even God needs to explain, "Who am I to judge?" Presuming, however, that we recognize a fundamental distinction between God and man, why does God judge by criteria of good and evil?

Is it arbitrary, a capricious choice that God could have made in some way? Is it a "power thing" that God imposed, impinging on our "autonomy?" At the very least, couldn't God have made "loving" a more explicit criterion, e.g., like the Beatitudes discussed in the General Judgment?

No.

It does all come back to Love. "Love," first of all, is not some thing. It is Someone: "God Is Love." (I John 4:8) And because Love is inherently a social virtue, it already points to the Trinity-in-Unity: three Persons, One God.

Love is not, therefore, primarily a feeling or an emotion. It is not a reaction. It is a reality shared by persons in relationship. The relationship of the Triune Persons is shared Good: Each loves in the other what is perfect in Himself - Life, Fidelity, Truth. The relationship of the Trinity is their Shared Goodness.

Man, made in God's image and likeness, is made to share relationship: Genesis 1 makes that clear when it says, "male and female He created them," while Genesis 2 affirms that "it is not good for man to be alone." They are called to share relationships on the model of their image and likeness, i.e., shared goodness. St. Thomas Aquinas and Karol Wojtyła (in Love and Responsibility) speak of this as the true essence of love: amor benevolentiae, the wanting for another of the true good.

Wojtyła is clear that, in the man-woman relationship, other realities can color the picture, e.g., attraction on the basis of pure sexual appeal and emotional compatibility. He does not deny these elements can or do enter into that relationship. What he does deny is confusing them with what is essential to love, i.e., a shared common good (and not just a shared feeling or compatibility), a wanting of the objective good for the beloved.

When God invites human beings into relationship with Him, what can they share? God is infinite; man is not. God is perfect; man is not. God is all wise; man is not. What we can share is goodness, albeit within our created, limited capacity. But that is still real goodness.

That goodness is not a feeling, not a wish. It is real: the life of God in us was once clearly spoken of as "sanctifying grace." It is the shared Life of God that cannot be shared when one is attached to what is anti-God and anti-divine-life, i.e., mortal sin.

Salvation is not about a proposition. It is also a proposal for a relationship, in and with Love, based on the shared objective good of grace. God, as a true lover, proposes. But the beloved always remains free to turn down the proposal. Life, leading to the ultimate choice of Heaven or Hell, is the story of that love proposal.

So, God could not have made the criterion for our judgment anything else but good or evil because, otherwise, there is no point in the shared Good between us and Him.

Genesis already registered this when God speaks of sin as leading to death, not because God has established some arbitrary connection between the two, but because, in turning from God as the Source of Our Life and Being, the only reality left is death and non-being.

Judaism and Christianity both made an enormous contribution to the history of religion in connecting God's relationship with man to moral responsibility. Consider the account of Moses and the Flood. Many cultures, particularl...

I recently saw a request on social media for people to say why they were Christians in five words or less. I was tempted to paraphrase Chesterton's reason for his Catholicism and use three words: "It is true." Then I remembered novelist and Catholic convert Walker Percy, when asked why he had converted to Catholicism, responded: "What else is there?"

Is there any greater mission statement, which every parish seems to require, or a better blueprint for evangelization? There is, of course, only one real mission statement, the "Great Commission" of Christ in St. Matthew's Gospel. When you view the alternatives offered to twenty-first-century man - the green religion, sexual revolution, nihilism, or a return to Communism, indeed any false hope in a political solution to man's needs - "What else is there?" stands up well as expressing the truth of the Catholic faith.

The "what else is there" of Catholicism implies a passionate belief, not only in the dogma but, as Dorothy L. Sayers would have it, in the "drama." At the heart of the drama is the liturgy, the Divine Mysteries. Without the dogma, there is no drama. So robust orthodoxy, as Chesterton described it, is the fuel that lights the fire.

Without getting into polemics, after sixty years since the opening of the Council, we should honestly examine the effect secularization has had on both the drama and the dogma.

Benedict XVI, in one of his writings, referred to the words of the writer Eugène Ionesco, one of the founders of the Theatre of the Absurd. Writing in 1975, Ionesco described the secularization he experienced in the Church as "truly pitiful." He added that while the "world is losing its way, the Church is losing herself in the world." Words from nearly fifty years ago that sound remarkably contemporary.

Benedict XVI proposed a solution, answering Ionesco: the contemporary Church needs the "courage to embrace what is sacred," and not, what he called, "banal officiousness."

The response from much of the Church to the Coronavirus pandemic revealed much "banal officiousness." It exposed what had been lurking below the surface for some time, in the sacred and secular worlds.

In the secular world, the ever-encroaching State expanded its control with draconian laws over every aspect of life in what many had naively believed were liberal democracies. Sadly, in the Church. there is also much that seems mundane and superficial. Ionesco described the world then, as now, as "in flux," "nothing is left to us; nothing is solid," but what we need is a rock."

When the world is in flux, when nothing is solid, the Church must be the rock, presenting the dogma and drama of Catholicism to those seeking the truth.

On another occasion, Walker Percy remarked that the Western world was "so corrupt and boring" that, eventually, young people "will get sick of it and look for something else." The true peripheries in modern secular society are to be found among those seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is unhelpful to offer gruel when strong meat is called for, as it is to deny there is a problem.

In Edward Pentin's book, The Next Pope, Cardinal Willem Eijk is quoted (are we allowed to say "I like Eijk"). The Cardinal compares the work of the bishop today as rather like a meteorologist: "a bishop has many duties, but pretending good weather is coming is not part of it." He continues, "a real storm front is coming."

Yet he goes on to say that we should not encourage a passive retreat into obscurity, or an admission that the mission is defeated. Rather, the very opposite must happen; the Church must once again be proposed in all its truth and beauty.

A storm front may indeed be coming, certainly for much of western Europe, and increasingly in the United States. But the Cardinal's word of prophecy, if faced realistically and with discernment and apostolic zeal, provides the Church with a perfect moment to convince the world there really is an answer to the question, "What else is th...

By Michael Pakaluk But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, November 21st at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the Vatican's new Mayan rite, the U.S. bishops on President Trump's position on the deportation of immigrants, and other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for the column...

For Catherine Ruth

The Virgin Mary's mother was called "Hannah" in Hebrew, but we know her as "Anne" through the Latin via the Greek. This Hannah and her husband, Joachim, according to old tradition, confirmed since by popes, brought their daughter, Mary, to the temple when she was a girl, to dedicate her to God. The commemoration of this "Presentation of Our Lady" is the feast which the Church celebrates today.

You probably have given the feast no attention whatsoever. Maybe you have thought in the back of your mind, "Oh, Mary was presented in the temple the way Jesus was," and left it at that. But of course there was no ritual presentation of first-born female offspring. If Mary was "presented," and this fact was so important that the Church still commemorates it, what was the reason?

I won't say that the most ancient written document in this tradition filling out the story, The Proto-Evangelium of James, is reliable, yet it certainly is very interesting and worthy of your attention. According to this "apocryphal gospel" and others like it, Hannah was barren and for over twenty years begged God for a child.

One day she went to the garden to walk, sat under a laurel tree, and seeing specifically a sparrow's nest in the tree (see Ps. 84:3), prayed this poignant lament:

Alas! Who begot me? And what womb produced me? . . .

Alas! To what have I been likened? I am not like the fowls of the heaven, because even the fowls of the heaven are productive before You, O Lord.

Alas! To what have I been likened? I am not like the beasts of the earth, because even the beasts of the earth are productive before You, O Lord.

Alas! To what have I been likened? I am not like these waters, because even these waters are productive before You, O Lord.

Alas! To what have I been likened? I am not like this earth, because even the earth brings forth its fruits in season, and blesses You, O Lord.

It is a Laudato si' of fertility. She looks upon every part of nature and sees fecundity there. Yet she herself, by her barrenness, is made an alien, an outcast from this "common home." (Observe how different all this is from our "environmentalism"!)

Then an angel appears to her, tells her that she will conceive - which Hannah believes and accepts immediately - and in response she echoes the words of her namesake: "As the Lord my God lives, if I beget either male or female, I will bring it as a gift to the Lord my God; and it shall minister to Him in holy things all the days of its life." (See 1 Samuel 1:11. Note that in Greek infants and young children are referred to with the neuter, "it.")

The Proto-Evangelium is typically quite earthy but about Mary's conception it comments with beautiful simplicity, as regards the father after he came in from tending his flocks: "And Joachim rested the first day in his house." The husband rested in his house and became a father.

After Hannah gives birth, she asks the midwife "What have I brought forth?" The midwife tells her, "A girl." Without any sign of disappointment Hannah, taking up the child, looks at her and exclaims, "My soul has been magnified this day!" And, whatever the worth of this account, it's completely plausible that Hannah knew and later repeated her namesake's song (1 Samuel 2:1-10), and that Mary's Magnificat is her own appropriation of her mother's song.

The tradition continues that Joachim and Hannah wai...

In the late 1960s, the University of Notre Dame was still an all-male institution. The Vietnam War was in full swing. So were the campus protests. The draft still applied. Illegal drugs were just starting to make an appearance. And South Bend winters had all the charm of a Soviet gulag camp in the Arctic.

Into the bleak wasteland of February 1969 - my junior year - came a ray of implausibly weird light: a hardcore ND pornography conference. Somehow it had managed to get organized without being killed by the school's administration. For thousands of desperate, women-deprived male students (including me at the time), it had the magnetic pull of a Star Trek tractor beam.

Not for long, though. It was raided by police with pepper spray. Then it was canceled.

Over the next few decades, I married, had kids, and found a good job. And I marveled that so many of us in my class, despite the turmoil of the 1960s, had actually grown into reasonably responsible, happy adults. But of course, we weren't lucky. We were blessed. We had the benefit of being formed in a culture that was still, in many ways, healthy and sane; a culture biased toward intact marriages and families; a culture with a more or less biblical moral sense.

What my age cohort did with that culture is another matter. We now have a nation where a female Supreme Court justice is unable or unwilling to define what a woman is.

We're now a very long way from the (relative) innocence of the 1960s. Which is why a tool like The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters is so valuable. We live in a moment of intense cultural confusion and relentless noise. For exactly that reason, the Playbook primarily targets young, college-aged adults, though it makes essential reading for parents as well.

It's quite literally a practical roadmap to shaping a meaningful life in a world of career anxiety, emotional anarchy, and constant material distractions. In the words of the authors, Playbook "offers a hopeful vision of a good life and the courage to walk a new path;" a path more mature and fulfilling than relentless work, escalating but empty appetites, and relationships without intimacy. And they deliver on that promise.

The authors know their material from long personal experience. Each is a spouse and a parent. Each is a veteran, university-level educator. Anna Moreland is a Villanova University professor and director of its honors program. Thomas W. Smith, a former Villanova professor and Moreland colleague, is now dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the Catholic University of America.

Each is deeply committed to the Catholic faith, its moral wisdom, and its intellectual tradition. Each was an articulate resource for the local Church and Archbishop Charles Chaput during his Philadelphia tenure. And each has the skill to communicate vital things clearly, simply, and engagingly - a gift on display throughout the Playbook and critical to keeping the interest of a young adult reader.

Structurally the book is broken into three areas of focus: work, leisure, and love. Key questions emerge: What constitutes real success? How should one pursue it? How can one use time intentionally - for work, rest, and renewal - without wasting it? How does one cultivate real intimacy? The authors approach each area through "compelling stories, sound practical advice, elevated expectations, and renewed habits," along with specific journal exercises.

Briefly put, the Playbook is a concise, accessible, and effective workbook designed to help young adults reorient their aspirations and habits toward a life of real happiness. In other words, it's a small book with a very big impact on those who - to borrow a thought from the authors - want to connect with their deeper hopes and dreams, and uncover what they really want out of life.

The American character has a deep streak of individualism. When that combines with a consumer economy dependent on creating endlessly new appetites, we get a 24/7 catechesis i...

I am an inveterate rummager in the ruins of an ancient civilization. Our own. But I am only one man. That is why I believe that the Church must take up this task of preservation, or rather must seize the opportunity to become, once again and in the broadest sense, Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) to a barbarian world.

Let me suggest one means for doing this.

Recently I found, online, a copy of Wordsworth's famous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," re-published in Boston in 1884 by Daniel Lothrop and Company, long after the poet wrote it. It contains two portraits of the poet, furnished by the Wordsworth Society, and ten additional illustrations by a variety of artists.

Appended to the poem are notes from the secretary of the Wordsworth Society, taken from an edition of the poet's collected works. And in these notes, we find the bulk of an important letter describing an incident the writer witnessed when the poet said he had, when he was young, sometimes to grasp something hard like a tree or a wall to persuade himself that the material world really existed.

In this discussion, the annotator is careful to point out what similarity there was - and was not - between Wordsworth's idealism and that of Plato. For Wordsworth was somehow still Christian, and indeed his nephew Christopher became an Anglican bishop and a hymn writer of some importance. From him we get the mighty hymn for Epiphany, "Songs of Thankfulness and Praise."

This slim book was not intended for college professors, but for any lover of poetry; I imagine it might be presented as a birthday gift. The publisher, Daniel Lothrop, had devoted his life to bringing good and great literature to the common people, and especially to children.

A brief glance at his life gives us a look into a lost world. At age 14, Lothrop was ready to enter college, but he decided to wait a year, and during that year he was pitched instead into business concerns, helping his brother run a drug store, and selling books at the store too, on the side.

Three years later, still as only a 17-year-old boy, he bought and stocked another store, this one devoted more to selling books than nostrums, to be run by another brother.

At age 19, he bought out a bookstore in New Hampshire and built it up into one of the most important in New England, a center of literary culture. That became the source of Lothrop and Company, which specialized in books for children - as Lothrop himself put it, books that would encourage them in right living and right thinking.

The man's tastes were neither sectarian nor prissy. They were, shall we say, catholic. I am looking at another of his firm's works, a book he himself put together, Ideal Poems, from the English Poets (1883), containing poems by Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, both of the Brownings, and others.

Apparently, Lothrop and the people who bought such books believed that "A Man's a Man for A' That," "To a Skylark," and "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" were perfectly fit for children to read, to understand, and to take into their hearts.

I have often done my rummaging in antique stores and, well, junk shops, where I have found, among thousands of individual books, a complete and original set of The Catholic Encyclopedia, itself an immense compendium of cultural, historical, linguistic, philosophical, and theological learning; hard-cover classics in Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian; complete hard-cover sets of the works of Moliere, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray, George Eliot, and Somerset

Maugham; invaluable bound copies, six or twelve months' worth at a time, of old literary and cultural magazines such as The Century, Harper's, and Scribner's.

These are things I have myself acquired, and for every one such that I have culled, I have left countless books and collections where they were. For most of these, I have paid very little, and sometimes nothing at all: the sets of Irving and Eliot were at t...

The Dante's post-election crowing and whinging are both already wearying. The race is decided. What matters now is not endless analyses of how or why the winners won (that's best left to journalists, political consultants, and other practitioners of dark arts), but what they will do. I expect a lot. But before the recent campaign passes into the merciful mists of time, it has uncovered some more interesting and longer-lasting matters, Catholic matters, about our democratic peoples just now and several recent developments in the Church.

Something we heard a lot about during the long years of the Synod on Synodality was the need to "listen," especially to the poor. Indeed, Pope Francis says that when he was elected, his friend, Brazilian Cardinal Hummes embraced him and told him "Don't forget about the poor."

As if. . . .

But what secular politicians and, sorry to say, many Catholic prelates usually mean when they talk about "the poor" is not real people living in hard circumstances, but something already turned into an ideological concept.

What if, when they're asked and listened to via the crude tabulation of the ballot box, growing numbers of "the poor" prefer an opportunity society rather than the "social assistance state" that Pope St. John Paul II warned us about in Centesimus Annus? Do we - and the Church - listen? And perhaps rethink our idea of who the poor are and what they need, other than more government programs?

Or are poor people who think that way - like the black Americans Joe Biden instructed "ain't black" if they didn't vote for him - not really "poor"? Are they suffering from what the Marxists called "false consciousness"? Who decides whether to "listen" to them - or not?

Or why is it, if capitalism is as rapacious as many in the Church hierarchy seem to think, that the most capitalist society on earth - the United States of America - is the desired destination of hundreds of millions of "poor" people around the globe? Do they, too, just want to be rapacious and greedy, or are they mistakenly willing to subject themselves and their families to the running dogs of capitalism? In either case, does anyone listen to them?

All this is somehow connected in my mind with another phrase that we heard during the elections - and by a strange synchronicity - during the Synod, too: "We aren't going back." This slogan expresses belief in a single-lane superhighway to progress, by people who are sure what the future should be and what is deplorable "backwardism."

But as Chesterton says somewhere - and the dark wood at beginning of Dante's Commedia also confirms - if you've gone off the right road, going back is the most progressive thing you can do. You, of course, don't go back to following that road in the direction that got you into the ditch in the first place. You go back a sadder and a wiser person, with eyes open to where you really need to go.

It's curious that it's not only in America that the people have chosen a different path than what has been presented to us as the shining progressive pathway. In several European countries, peoples tired of being ignored - and denigrated - by their own elites have sought another way.

Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands already have governments that reject the immigration schemes and woke policies of the European Union. In addition, Austria, Germany, and France have growing, strongly populist parties - "far-right" in the journalese, which means they are now far distant from the progressive rulers who have moved to the far-left.

The elite apologists have been trying to impose a kind of cordon sanitaire around the populist movements by claiming that they are "fascist." Yet they only grow the more they are denounced. There's plenty to criticize about any political or social movement, to be sure, but maybe they ought to be listened to, really listened to, first.

I'm sorry to have to say that almost no one in the Church pays any attention - "listens" - to these voices now emergin...

By David G Bonagura, Jr.

Rummaging through my desk last month, I uncovered a single sheet of white paper. A dozen names were written in black ink. I knew immediately what the sheet was for.

Each November, my high school and college almae matres invite their alumni to submit names of deceased loved ones to be remembered at Masses in their chapels. This lost page was my attempt some years ago to list my cloud of witnesses who, for reasons I cannot recall, did not make it to the chapel. But Catholicism is the religion of second chances. With the discovered sheet, the Holy Spirit inspired a new idea.

I scheduled time to visit the Blessed Sacrament, with a black pen and three white sheets of paper. I genuflected, knelt, said a prayer to the Holy Spirit and to my guardian angel to help me recall those who had gone before me and need my prayers. I began to record names.

I proceeded by category. Family first: grandparents, the three great-grandparents whom I knew, great aunts and uncles, my cousin Andrew. Then friends, both my own and those of my parents. Then priests from my parishes and schools. Acquaintances from the town of my youth. Acquaintances in my current town of seventeen years. Victims of September 11 whom I knew. Students. Colleagues. Neighbors. Teachers. Mentors. One hundred and ten people in all.

With each person surfaced a memory, an image of the deceased in action in my life. None of these were overly profound. My five-year-old self hiding under the kitchen table from my grandfather. Everyday actions of colleagues and neighbors. Smiles of students in class. Meals with friends.

These memories bind me to them, and them to me, across the chasm of time. In this month dedicated to the faithful departed, I am fulfilling my duty to each one, which is the final act of our relationship this side of eternity: I pray to God to have mercy on them and to take them to Himself.

At the end of the Apostles' Creed, we profess in succession the Communion of Saints and the forgiveness of sins. The latter, wrought by Christ's blood, makes possible the former. Through baptism we enter the Communion of Saints, for God adopts us as His children. We may not feel very saintly, but we march in that number not because of what we do, but because God has chosen us. Baptism, then, is not an end. It is the beginning of a journey that ends in unmediated union with God, one that we can enter only after we have been purged of every stain of sin.

This is not a task we can complete alone. "The God who created you without you," St. Augustine taught us, "will not save you without you." To this thesis, without meaning any disrespect to the Doctor of Grace, we can add, "And without your brethren."

Our cooperation with God's grace always falls short. We need our fellow Christians, brothers and sisters through baptism, to contribute to our salvation too. They do so in this life through the countless ways they interact with us, for good and for the trying of our patience. And they do so after our deaths through their prayers.

Memento mori, be mindful of death, and indeed we should be this month, as the end of the year and the coming of winter intone the refrain that our ends, too, will come, so we should act accordingly. But at the same time a second command beckons: Memento mortuorum, be mindful of the dead, of those who have gone before us. Our prayers are salutary for them. They are also salutary for us.

With each prayer comes a memory, and with each memory we feel our membership in the Communion of Saints that transcends time. "Society," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Born of God rather than the will of men, baptism into the Communion of Saints confers a deeper relationship, for in Christ all - living and dead - are a family together on pilgrimage. Some have already arrived at the destination. Some have barely begun. And ...

By Auguste Meyrat

The Catholic Church recently celebrated the feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, in which "hundreds of British men and women died for their [Catholic] faith in wake of the dispute between the Pope and King Henry VIII during the 16th century," forty of whom were selected to represent people who made the mistake of contradicting their king's decision to break with the Catholic Church.

Almost all of this had to do with politics, not religion. Because the British king's authority was legitimized and administered by the Catholic Church, Henry treated British Catholics as dissenters from his rule even if they never publicly dissented or rebelled against it. Presumably, Henry believed that imprisoning and beheading Catholics, including his friend and Lord High Chancellor St. Thomas More, would help safeguard his rule.

Instead of a prosperous time of peace, the threat of a Catholic usurpation along with a foreign invasion from a Catholic monarch loomed large in those decades, and a civil war erupted between the Anglican Royalists and non-Anglican Parliamentarians nearly a century later. In brutally suppressing would-be dissenters, Henry cultivated a multitude of actual dissenters who in time really did overthrow the monarchy.

As Joseph Pearce discusses in his excellent history, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, the English Catholic community went underground during this time, yet reemerged under the influence of some of the Church's most eloquent and powerful voices such as John Henry Newman, Ronald Knox, and G.K. Chesterton. As they did in the medieval era, modern British Catholics largely worked to conserve the faith and British culture, not disrupt it or overturn its political order.

This short history of religious persecution and its aftermath illustrates a few key truths. First, murdering and imprisoning Catholics will not make a non-Catholic government stronger, but weaker. Second, the systemic persecution of any community sets a dangerous precedent that inevitably results in more persecution, as happened in Ireland and most of the British colonies. And third, there is no valid reason, moral or political, that justifies the persecution of any Christian community.

Nevertheless, the U.K. is currently in the process of reviving the persecution of Christians (Catholic, Anglican, and every other denomination of "Easter worshippers").

In a recent essay, provocatively titled "She Was Arrested for Praying in Her Head," Madeline Kearns reports that British police are arresting Christians for praying in the vicinity of abortion clinics: "the UK's brand-new 'Safe Access' law, which came into effect September 24 and made it a criminal offense to do anything within 200 meters of an abortion facility that could 'influence' someone's decision to access, provide, or facilitate an abortion."

Rather than address the problem of violent protesters, this law seems tailor-made to target the quiet ones who simply stand nearby and offer a peaceful witness to life.

British legislators and law enforcement may try to compare this law to others that discourage loitering and public intimidation of private citizens, but this comparison is completely false. Pro-lifers who pray are not loitering, but peacefully objecting to abortion. Moreover, they are doing so in the least intimidating way possible, internally appealing to God for redemption and justice.

Contrast these "threats" to public order with the hundreds of thousands of protesters in England supporting Hamas by chanting antisemitic slogans and defacing property. Not only do British authorities largely allow this, but they will even discourage counter-protesters who dare to fly a British or Israeli flag.

This suggests that the real reason for British police arresting people for praying near abortion clinics is not to promote law and order, but to crack down on dissenters. It's not about what they're doing, but about what they are. Thus, much like King Hen...

By Brad Miner

It's odd and wonderful that these things happen. I'm speaking of the discovery or re-discovery of paintings by great artists. In some cases, they are complete surprises (a masterwork previously unknown or, anyway, lost to history); in other cases, a work well-known, but misattributed. I've written previously here about two such occurrences involving the Baroque master Caravaggio. This column is about a third.

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew was found in a Hampton Court Palace storeroom, forgotten for hundreds of years, after having been purchased by King Charles I in 1637. Then came the Commonwealth and Charles' execution in 1649, at which point the painting was sold.

English history being what it is, then came the 1660 Restoration and Charles II, who re-purchased The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew. And then . . .

I pause for clarity: The House of Stuart's Charles I, ostensibly Protestant, married Henrietta Maria of France, definitely Catholic. This did not sit well with English Protestants, who were also angry at the king's tolerance of Catholics. Thus, the English Civil War, at the end of which the king was beheaded. Then came the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy following the line of succession, meaning Charles II became king.

Then, two years later, came the exile of Charles II, who was rumored (correctly) to be a secret Catholic, and, not so many years later, the Act of Settlement that banned anyone Catholic (or a Protestant who simply married a Catholic) from ascending to the throne. Charles II did return to England and died at Whitehall. Thus, the uneasy, brief Restoration followed by the enduring Glorious (Protestant) Revolution. Clear as mud, right?

This is how The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew by a Catholic artist ended up in a royal closet gathering dust.

The English are more tolerant of Catholics today, of course, except when it comes to the line of succession. Whenever someone in that line acknowledges and embraces the Four Marks of the Church, that person's name is erased from the line. (A 2013 law did eliminate the previous disqualification for just marrying a Catholic, but it remains the case that no Catholic may be king or queen.)

It's not entirely certain how the notion arose that the painting was just a copy of a lost original: a Caravaggisti's imitation of the master's work. In any case, it sat in storage for three-and-a-half centuries until conservators began removing dust and grime in 1987, and the restored, 4 ft. x 5 ft. painting was confirmed to be by Caravaggio himself.

Among other revelations, cleaning showed Caravaggio's attention to detail in rendering the hands of the three figures. Peter and Andrew have the tanned and weathered hands of fishermen. The beardless Christ, in Caravaggio's mind a much younger man, points the way forward, and his fingers seem unnaturally long, especially his left thumb.

The scene is from Mark 1:16-18:

And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men." And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

It's fair to ask if Caravaggio got the scene just right. Peter's face is shrouded in shadow. He holds a fish in his right hand and the gesture of his left seems to suggest either Wait or Lead on. Andrew seems to be indicating, You want ME?

But in the fourth Gospel, John relates a different version of the calling of Andrew - and of himself - and it's an eyewitness account (1:35-37):

The next day John the Baptist was standing with two of his own followers. Jesus walked by. John looked at Him and said, "See! The Lamb of God." John's two followers heard him say this and followed Jesus.

From this, we might suppose Caravaggio meant to indicate that Andrew is telling his older brother either, This is the man I told you about or I'm going; you should come too. But tho...

By Stephen P. White

No one esteems a man for having lived an easy life. No one thinks more of a man for never having faced hardship, trials, or want. We pray that we might be spared such trials ourselves. We are grateful when those we love are spared such sufferings. But we do not admire them for it.

There are certain kinds of ease - the ease that comes with inheriting great wealth, for example - that we generally hold in suspicion, if not outright contempt. We may occasionally envy those who live such lives of unmerited luxury, but no one ever mentions a silver spoon by way of a compliment. Still, we know what it is to desire for ourselves what we do not admire in others.

By contrast, we often admire those who have suffered much. We admire those who have overcome great adversity, seeing in their perseverance proof of some virtue or other. The suffering of others can move us to compassion, which is natural and good. There are even some forms of suffering that inspire not just compassion but a certain awe or reverence for the sufferer.

Such people have endured or faced evils the rest of us tremble to contemplate and they grow in our estimation for it: a young widow, a patient facing a terminal diagnosis, a combat veteran. In this last case, our admiration is often combined with gratitude. Our veterans chose to stand in the face of danger - physical and moral danger - for the sake of the rest of us. We honor them accordingly.

We set aside the anniversary of the armistice, which brought the Great War to its close as a yearly remembrance.

This week we celebrated Veterans' Day. We honor most those who have given most. We honor them for their sacrifice, and they honor us by receiving the gratitude and esteem of their nation.

To borrow a line from Lincoln, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But it is not just remembrance and gratitude that we owe to our veterans. We honor them, which is something different and something more than offering thanks or rewarding virtue and sacrifice. We don't speak of honor much these days, at least outside of the military, but it is a vitally important part of social life. What honor adds to gratitude is worth closer consideration.

To honor someone is to confer upon them some measure of our own esteem. One cannot give what one does not possess, so in a real sense, one cannot honor another unless one is himself, in some sense, honorable. The more honorable, the more dignified, the more prestigious (in the best sense) the one conferring honors, the greater the significance of the honor conferred.

Thus, the greatest honors are bestowed on behalf of a whole people, not simply as a sign of private appreciation. The highest formal honor conferred by the United States is given in the name of the institution that represents the sovereign people of this nation: the Congressional Medal of Honor.

We bestow honors as much for the sake of ourselves as for those upon whom we bestow them. We honor a soldier, it is true, for his own bravery and gallantry. But we also honor him because we want to publicly associate ourselves with those virtues and with the one who possesses them. In bestowing an honor, we elevate for ourselves, and for all, an example of those merits and virtues to which we aspire.

An honor bestowed is not a wage, not a compensation for services rendered. Which is why an honor, well bestowed and well received, usually elicits from the honoree, not a sense of a just remuneration, but a very different response. Honor has this strange quality: it is the source of mutual pride and humility, for both the honoree and the one by whom he is honored.

This mutuality also explains why refusing an honor can be such a stinging rebuke to the one who offers it. There are honorable (as it were) ways to decline an honor, but refusal of an honor sometimes constitutes a public insult, that is, a declaration that the person or group bestowing honor lacks the honor and dignity to confer an honor ...