The Catholic Thing

By Kristen Ziccarelli

"On October 7, AD 1571, the fleet of the Holy League under the command of one Don Juan de Austria defeated the Turkish fleet in the Gulf of Lepanto. That was how they would put it; that was how they would teach it to their children. And it was wrong. For what really happened was that God made use of a number of his servants to stop the progress of the Crescent in the holy name of the Cross."

Louis de Wohl, "The Last Crusader: A Novel about Don Juan of Austria"

Louis de Wohl's biographical masterpiece, written from the perspective of Don Juan of Austria, names the titular hero "the last crusader." The novel opens with his childhood, playing a game of "Moors against Christians," and closes on the evening of October 7, 1571, when he had achieved the miraculous victory at the Battle of Lepanto. His men invite him to leave the ship for dinner, reminding him that he fought all day eating only "a few biscuits and a goblet of wine."

Today we celebrate that victory, which is impossible to remember without God. Four hundred years ago, Christian Europe was embroiled in the Reformation as the Ottomans repeatedly threatened its Mediterranean frontiers.

Pope Pius V, an austere Dominican, responded to growing Islamic aggression with both the zeal of worldly action and heavenly petition. Using the convening power only he had, the Holy Father formed a coalition of otherwise rival and estranged military forces across the continent: the Spanish Empire under Philip II (including Naples and Sicily), the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Knights of Malta, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Order of Saint Stephen, the Duchy of Savoy, the Duchy of Urbino, and the Duchy of Parma. Their commander was twenty-four-year-old Don Juan of Austria, the half-brother of Philip II of Spain and illegitimate son of Emperor Charles V.

The Islamic Ottoman naval forces had captured Cyprus; their naval powers were virtually undefeated, threatening the Christian states of the Mediterranean and ultimately, Rome. Though confident in Don Juan's military genius and certainly aware of the exhaustive preparations, the pope called the faithful in Europe to pray the Rosary for victory.

He had sanctified the Holy League as an alliance and crusade, personally fasted for the cause of Christianity against Islam, and received a vision of the victory before the news reached Rome. He attributed the triumph to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Auxilium Christianorum ("Help of Christians").

Among those who fought and were wounded that day was Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, who remembered the battle as the "best day's work in centuries." Don Juan's men, who numbered over 100,000, received the Sacrament of Penance and boarded their ships (each affixed with a crucifix) armed with Rosaries. Don Juan himself wore a relic of the True Cross.

Outnumbered, and led by a 24-year-old commander, the Holy League decimated the Ottoman fleet, ending its naval supremacy. Ottoman commander Ali Pasha was killed after Don Juan rammed his ship; the crescent flag was captured. Many Christian slaves were freed from the enemy galleys.

G. K. Chesterton's poem, Lepanto retells that day's drama, and the miracle Our Lady brought. In 1571, Europe was a house divided:

And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,

And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,

And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,

But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.

The Church was living through the Protestant Reformation, beginning to fracture the continent. Catholic monarchies pursued competing dynastic ambitions and faced new religious and political antagonisms in Protestant territories.

Maximilian II, the Holy Roman Emperor, and France, under King Charles IX, declined to join the Holy League. There were quarrels among the men on the galleys at Lepanto, but Don Juan insisted they work together under penalty of death.

One powerful lesson ...

By Joanna Bogle

The Catholic cemetery at Mortlake in South West London has an agreeably rural feel, and is worth a visit: it's about 20 minutes from Waterloo on the line going down to Richmond, and a short walk from the station. It is chiefly famous for the large stone, tent-shaped tomb of the 19th-century explorer Sir Richard Burton. This brings numbers of tourists and historians each year. Other notable people buried here include the architect John Francis Bentley, who designed Westminster Cathedral.

There is one grave, however, with a story that is of particular relevance for today. Sir James Marshall (1829-1889), through volunteer effort and great generosity, helped to ensure Catholic missionary efforts in Africa. But perhaps his equally great achievement was as an official in a secular role.

Appointed Chief Justice of the Gold Coast and neighboring territories – today's Ghana and Nigeria – he was responsible for ending a particularly vicious form of slavery and liberating large numbers of men, women, and children.

Gravely disabled as a young man – his right arm had to be amputated after a boating accident – Marshall had to abandon plans to join the Army, and instead followed his father and took holy orders in the Anglican church. After some years of ministry and much study, he joined the Catholic Church, and went to teach classics at the Oratory School founded by John Henry Newman.

It was Newman who suggested that he read law, and in due course he became a barrister. In 1873 he was appointed Chief Magistrate to the Gold Coast and later in 1887 to Nigeria. In Asaba, he encountered the grisly local custom in which a tribal chief would acquire large numbers of slaves who would in due course be publicly slaughtered at a great public gathering amid noisy ceremonial. This was rooted in the tribal chief's belief that the slaves would thus be available to serve them in the next life.

In Ghana, Marshall had become a respected and popular figure who could engage with the local communities and their leaders, and the appointment to Asaba had come specifically because the slavery issue needed to be resolved.

In a letter home, Marshall described how he had told the tribal chiefs that the savage practice of ritual slaughter was to end, "that the strongest measures would be taken to put it down; that I should let it be known, among the slaves, that they might look to us for protection, and that whenever it was known that murder was going to be held, the soldiers would be at once sent and that chiefs…would be liable to be hanged."

He spoke with the full authority of the law. Not only had slavery been outlawed across the British Empire back in 1833, but murder in itself was a crime and would be treated as such with the most severe penalty. The slaves awaiting slaughter, kept in grim conditions, included women and small children, and were captured during inter-tribal battles.

Describing how he addressed the chiefs, Marshall wrote that he told them, "'You think that the great God, who made the white man and the black, and all the world, and who wished us all to live happily together here, will keep those slaves you murder to be your slaves in the other world, bah!' I then held up my finger to them and said, 'You must all die, and when you die, you will see who is right.'"

Backed with military force, Marshall could impose the law, and the odious practices were finally crushed. Meanwhile, in addition to his official role, he had become active in the small missionary church that was being established. And in due course it was his efforts, including a personal appeal to the pope, that brought substantial numbers of missionaries to the Gold Coast.

Victorian Britain honored the men who served in the colonial empire that was emerging. The justices and administrators who worked to ensure that slavery was banned were rightly regarded as upholding the noblest and best of the law and Christian civilization. Meetings and rallies in London raised mon...

By Robert Royal

The large crowds that turned out for Pope Leo everywhere in France surprised everyone – not least, sad to say, the French bishops. Let's hope that his visit has even greater effects. But just days later, France is gripped by widespread rioting and arson, being misreported as "student unrest," but actually a far-left operation with Islamist collaborators. In the message the pope read at his reception by French President Emmanuel Macron, Leo proposed what can only be called "corrections" to the three terms (liberté, égalité, fraternité) that marked the French Revolution. It was a bold move, but he needs to be even bolder, to remedy what's ailing France and much of the West.

If one were asked (one is not holding one's breath), one would say that Leo would do well to go much further, and make this a project for his whole papacy. Because as Blessed Fulton Sheen – also recently in the news – already saw in his 1938 book Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, underneath those seemingly simple and good words, perverse developments rose from the very start.

The French revolutionaries began using the guillotine and other instruments of mass terror on religious figures, and then – as the night follows the day among those radically crazed by politics – on one another.

It didn't stop there. In the first years of the twentieth century, a radical socialist government under Emile Combes took possession of all of France's cathedrals, monasteries, convents, shrines, and other religious structures, closed 10,000 religious schools, and drove many priests and religious into exile. In some accounts, this is described merely as the "separation of Church and State" in France. But as the great Charles Péguy put it, it was actually a betrayal of what French socialism itself claimed – greater respect for human beings than had existed previously – in effect, persecuting people "for saying their prayers."

And today, as Leo pointed out, the "humanistic" interpretation of the three ideals has led, among other evils, to the monstrosity of abortion being inserted into the French constitution as a fundamental right and the Orwellian euphemism "right to die" (i.e., lethal medication).

Just for the record, wherever abortion – the deliberate killing of human life in the womb – is confused with "liberty" and made a fundamental right, we put ourselves on a moral level with the worst of human history: Canaanites, Ammonites, Aztecs, Soviets, Maoists, Khmer Rouge, and more. No égalité or fraternité for those unborn innocents whom we kill, year after year, in numbers far greater than the historic monsters.

Fulton Sheen already understood decades ago that things like these follow wrong notions of "liberty." The American Founders, too, warned of "license," the false belief that liberty means doing whatever you want. Sheen: "Liberalism destroyed liberty by dispensing the individual from social responsibilities; Communism and Fascism destroy liberty by enslaving the individual to the will of a dictator."

True liberty, Sheen argued, is akin to Aristotle's (and the Church's) Golden Mean, not just something midway between the two, but a "both/and" that is something quite different than either.

Similarly, "equality" in the untethered modern sense inevitably turns into what our DEI gurus call "equity," whereby individual people are not just treated equally, but the industrious and the lazy, the virtuous and the vicious, one "race" or group or another, have to be made statistically equal via state tyranny and social ostracism.

The remedy lies in the right understanding of "fraternity" – brother and sisterhood as God intended, not the ideological substitutes: citoyen, tovaritsch, compañero, the "woke" – which would also help correct mistaken modern notions of liberty and equality.

Leo put it this way to modern France:

May your liberty grow in constant concern for the common good. May your fraternity embrace the entire human family. And may the equality to which yo...

By Brad Miner

Late last year, my wife began carefully, meticulously planning a week-long trip to Paris for the whole family. She did so, as she noted to the other eight of us, because she meant to celebrate in style her upcoming "significant" birthday. She wisely decided on late September: the weather would be cooler and the crowds smaller. So, flights and hotel reservations were made, and restaurants and tours were booked.

And then it was announced that, during our dates, Leo XIV would be in Paris; Fashion Week Paris would get underway; and Celine Dion would begin her "residency" at the Plenitude Arena. All that meant a plenitude of people in Paris. Oh, well . . .

Still, the only real difficulty this caused us was on a private boat ride up the Seine. It was a glorious Friday afternoon, and the Eiffel Tower was as dramatic as you can imagine against the bright blue sky. But just as we were about to reach Notre-Dame and the Île de la Cité, a police boat appeared and demanded we turn the boat around. (Nothing dramatic, mind you – just a signal our "captain" understood.) The pope would soon be at the cathedral.

Indeed, on September 24, 25th, and 26th, many places in Paris were designated périmètres de sécurité. Guides, drivers, and others often told us, "The pope is to blame." But that, of course, was untrue. He was a guest and a great boon to Catholic France. And Paris appeared as it must have before the 1905 institution of laïcité. In principle, that means France is (and the 1958 constitution states ) un État laïque, a secular state, although I'm told it's better to say France is neutral towards all religions.

But that's the government, and the French people appear to be enthusiastic about Catholicism. The papal Mass at the Place de la Concorde filled the area around Avenue des Champs-Élysées with between 700,000 and 800,000 people. That is an impressive number, although in 1997, Pope St. John Paul II's closing Mass for World Youth Day (at Longchamp racecourse) drew over 1 million.

Before, during, and after the papal visit, one saw clusters of Dominican sisters, sundry priests of various levels of ecclesiastical dignity, and many images of the Holy Father, so that Paris again seemed, if only briefly, the capital of the "Eldest Daughter of the Church."

That phrase has its roots in the late 5th century, when St. Rémi baptized King Clovis. Throughout subsequent history, the Catholicism of France was unquestioned until the French Revolution of 1789-1799, and the nation has been sliding into deeper levels of secularism ever since.

Thus did John Paul II, during his first papal visit to Paris in 1980, ask, "France, fille aînée de l'Église, es-tu fidèle aux promesses de ton baptême?" ("France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?") In 2026, it remains an important question, one I can't answer. But in recent days, we certainly saw reasons for hope.

I took a morning for myself, partly to visit churches and partly to wander the streets that Ernest Hemingway haunted in the 1920s.

Hemingway had become a Roman Catholic but, by his own admission, was not a very good one. He was, after all, part of what his friend Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation," a comment made directly to Hemingway. He'd become Catholic (apparently after receiving catechetical instruction) so that he could marry Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Catholic from Arkansas.

This, of course, is where the "difficulty" of his Catholicism begins. He had been married previously in a civil ceremony, and it's unclear if his union with Pauline was strictly canonical, according to, ironically, the Pauline Privilege.

Hemingway was a troubled person, no doubt. He would divorce Pauline and have two more wives after her. He was a distant parent to his three children. He would commit suicide (as his father had), and a Catholic priest would officiate at his funeral, although that cleric, Fr. Robert J. Waldmann, believed (as the press had repo...

By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas

I am writing within the octave of the beatification of Fulton J. Sheen, and find myself still basking in the glow of that blessed and long-awaited event, which had many personal associations for me.

As a schoolboy, I was quizzed every Wednesday morning by Sister, who routinely would ask the class, "What did 'The Bishop' say last night?" (In those days "The Bishop" didn't mean the local Ordinary, but Sheen!).

In third grade, he autographed my First Holy Communion prayer book, declaring to my father, "Sir, someday this young man is going to be a priest." On the brink of priestly ordination, I wrote him a note confirming his "prophecy" of nearly two decades earlier, to which he graciously responded with a promise of prayers and best wishes for my priestly life and ministry. I concelebrated his Funeral Mass.

The recent event in St. Louis was a veritable tour de force, worthy of the man who was a first-order clerical showman, in the best sense of the word. What impressed me most was the youthfulness of it all. One thousand priests (95 percent of whom were not even born when Sheen died) and 850 seminarians in cassock and surplice, along with many young families. Meanwhile, out of nearly 450 bishops in our country, only 89 deigned to attend (of course, Sheen was envied by the bishops in his own day).

That element of "youthfulness" led me to connect some dots from recent personal observations and musings.

The Mass of the Holy Spirit to open the academic year at The Catholic University of America in Washington was most impressive: All sung parts of the Mass in Latin; an outstanding homily by our new papal nuncio; the profession of faith and oath of fidelity by new faculty members; the palpable reverence of the more than a thousand students. All of this from an institution that wallowed in heresy from 1968 through the 1980s!

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame was the site of the final profession of vows of four young members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Once more, the liturgy was inspiring, as well as the demeanor of the students who filled that beautiful worship space.

And recently, the University was consecrated to the Sacred Heart – an act of piety that came about through the initiative of the students themselves.

The Diocese of Wichita opened a new college seminary (yes, "opened," not "closed") owing to the vocations glut they have been experiencing over the long haul. Can this be explained because it is the only diocese in the country with a totally free Catholic school system?

Youthful American Catholicism has even crossed The Pond. Ave Maria University has established a beachhead in the Irish Diocese of Waterford on the land of the once-legendary Cistercian Abbey of Mount Melleray. Yet again, the inaugural liturgy was characterized by beautiful music and reverent participation, topped off by a stirring homily by the diocesan bishop on the importance and meaning of Catholic education.

We know that Ireland's faith has been in the doldrums for a long time now. Will this spark of American Catholicism reignite the flame of faith in what once was known as the "Isle of Saints and Scholars"?

In all these liturgies, certain commonalities were apparent: Traditional forms, accompanied by generous servings of Latin, Gregorian chant, and Renaissance polyphony; the young people attired to encounter the King of Kings; and, especially, reception of Holy Communion with great devotion – the vast majority receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, and many kneeling.

The ecclesiastical Cassandras in our midst, I thought, should recall Mark Twain's quip: "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." It also made me wonder how the "Lefebvrists" can behold such phenomena and conclude that the Faith is dead? Admittedly, we still have a lot to work on, but that's why we have the mantra, Ecclesia semper reformanda ("The Church is always in need of reform").

Which was also in ful...

By Casey Chalk

The man was at the top of his game. His professional career was at full throttle, moving from one success to another. Yet he was also admired for his love and sacrifices for his family. Though many disagreed with his religious convictions, no one questioned his virtue or sincerity. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold.

Then, without warning, a debilitating illness struck. His wealth and prestige assured him quality medical care, but availed the man little. His condition kept deteriorating. In short order, the man expired.

Perhaps you've known such a person. I've known some, and their stories are undoubtedly tragedies, especially when spouse and children are left to grieve a dramatic, unexpected departure. You can't help but wonder if you might become that person, despite relative youth or good health. "That won't happen to me," we say. But many people whom we thought it could never happen to . . . well, it happened to them.

The great seventeenth-century French polymath Blaise Pascal could very well have wrestled with such thoughts. He made impressive contributions to math, science, and philosophy before his thirtieth birthday – including creating a calculator that has been called the first "computer." The horse-drawn carriage system that he developed for the city of Paris earned him recognition as the father of public transportation.

Yet as he was making these incredible contributions, Pascal was suffering a painful, progressively debilitating illness, with intense migraines, hypersensitivity to light and sound, severe abdominal pains, dental abscesses, and eventually partial paralysis. After four years of this torment, he died in 1662.

During that period Pascal wrote "Prayer Asking God for the Good Use of Illness," a striking and spiritually penetrating Catholic reflection on human suffering. Pascal's Prayers, a new book by philosophy professor William C. Hackett, features both the prayer and illuminating commentary, as well as offering a valuable counterweight to the health and longevity obsessions of modern America.

One of the most arresting qualities of Pascal's Prayers is how the French savant comprehends suffering as an extension of God's gracious providence: "Not only the blessings but even the misfortunes that befall your chosen ones are effects of your boundless compassion. . . You are no less God whether you afflict and discipline or console and show mercy." Even if we recognize God's hand in our suffering, we moderns – votaries of a catechesis of comfort – want the suffering to end, to get back to the way things were.

Pascal pushes us even further. He perceives his sickness as a form of divine discipline to help him to detach himself from worldly things: "Render me incapable of enjoying this world either by weakness of the body or by the zeal of charity so that I may find my joy in you alone. For you have made me unable to enjoy the comforts of health and the pleasures of the world; you have already annihilated for my benefit the deceptive idols."

It leads one to wonder: if God so obviously blesses us with material goods – natural beauty, delicious food and drink, beautiful art – does it make sense that He asks us to be detached from them for His sake?

Part of the answer seems to be that, though creatures are indeed designed for our happiness, they are also intended to generate gratitude and worship: "Yes, Lord, I confess that I esteemed health as a good. Not because it is an easy means to serve you with utility, to dedicate more care and vigilance to your service, and to help others, but because through it, I could abandon myself with less restraint to the abundance of life's pleasures and better savor its destructive joys."

Pascal realizes that his appreciation of good things often obscured God.

But there's even more. Lesser, contingent goods present us with an opportunity to see them properly in relationship to God, the infinite, eternal good. "Take away from me, Lord, the sadness that ...

By Stephen P. White

In his new book, A Catholic Guide to Being Human, Dr. John Grabowski offers a reminder that the term "person" is more freighted with theological implications than we often consider. Identifying and unpacking those implications is the first step toward answering what is, perhaps, the greatest question of our age: What does it mean to be human?

The Christian West once had a confident answer to that question, one rooted firmly in the mystery of the Incarnation. The strength of that confidence served as a foundation for a great and humane civilization. That is not to say a sinless civilization, but one in which even the most egregious failings prove the rule of its underlying humanity.

Understanding the human person properly requires that we think carefully about man as both a "what" and a "who."

Today, we seem to have lost confidence in our answers to the great question. Accordingly, as we have lost sight of both God and man, our world has become less humane, even as we have grown in power and technological mastery. Our sense of ourselves and our place in the world is distorted. We are in danger of becoming, as Grabowski puts it, both "technological giants and moral midgets."

As Pope Leo XIV made clear in Magnifica Humanitas, one of the great temptations of our technological age is, in fact, a very ancient temptation: the temptation to construct for ourselves, in all our hubris, a new Tower of Babel. A world "conceived without reference to God" must necessarily also be a world constructed without reference to man – a world that is quite literally inhumane.

The changing rhythms and patterns of our way of life shape the way we understand ourselves. Sometimes, threats to our self-understanding come about abruptly – as in the case of the advent of nuclear weapons or, today, the rise of AI – and so provoke a great deal of self-reflection. Sometimes the change is much more subtle and, particularly when the change is perceived as benign or beneficial, it proceeds almost unnoticed.

However profoundly our surroundings and circumstances shape us (and they do!), we are never merely the product of our circumstances. Human nature itself guarantees that, as Pope John Paul II insisted:

It cannot be forgotten that the manner in which the individual exercises his freedom is conditioned in innumerable ways. While these certainly have an influence on freedom, they do not determine it; they make the exercise of freedom more difficult or less difficult, but they cannot destroy it.

Even devout Christians sometimes need a reminder that our self-understanding is conditioned by the world around us, often in ways which are not easy to perceive. And even devout Christians sometimes need to be reminded that the threats and challenges which we do perceive – clear and present as they may be – are only a part of the story, and perhaps not the greatest part.

In short, when it comes to understanding ourselves and our place in the world, we must be careful to ensure we are seeing both the forest and the trees. And here is where Professor Grabowski's new book really shines.

"Some of the Fathers of the Church," writes Grabowski in his introduction, "saw man as a microcosm of the macrocosm – a miniature version of the universe as a whole. Human beings are both material (like the physical world and animals) and rational and spiritual (like angels and God himself). In this way, the human person stands as a summation of creation and in the center of salvation history."

It takes a mastery of many subjects to write intelligently about such a vast subject. Yet here Grabowski shows his long years of experience as a teacher and his command of the subject matter. He clarifies without oversimplifying; he condenses without distorting; he writes with precision without relying on jargon or overly technical terms. The result is a compelling account of Christian anthropology which is both eminently accessible and readable yet without any watering down.

Perh...

By H.W. Crocker III

Rod Dreher is hard at work on a book about "Weimar America." The disquieting trends that trouble Dreher – rising anti-Semitism and social alienation, the decline of Christianity, and the likelihood of civilizational war – are also the subject, in a different context, of Kruger's Korps, my most recent book, which I'd like to tell you about because there's more to it than its cover of spiraling Lugers might imply.

On the face of it, Kruger's Korps is a breathless World War II action-adventure story about American spies penetrating the German Afrika Korps. At that level, I'd like to think it offers high-caliber entertainment and has everything a reader would want from that genre: battles, mystery, a beautiful woman, shocking plot twists.

And it has some things – in fact, a lot of things – you would not expect to find, including references to Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger; a guest appearance by Fr. Marcel Lefebvre (!); and a good deal of humor.

But this is also, in some ways, a tragic book. The Fatherland plays a big role in it, of course, but so does fatherhood – both the nobility of fatherhood and the tragedy of it. Without giving too much away, the plot hinges, at least in part, on the misdoings of a prodigal son who grew up with every advantage and was well-tutored in duty, honor, and piety, in a family that lived those virtues, and who yet still went astray – badly and wickedly astray to an extraordinary degree.

I imagine that this part of the story will be painfully relevant to many Catholic parents.

The prodigal son in Kruger's Korps is a German who grew up during a pressure-cooker of a time, spanning the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi rule. If we think raising young men today is difficult, think of raising young men then.

The hero of the story is another young man, Rolf Kruger, born in Germany but raised in the United States – in Hollywood, of all places – where his father works as a carpenter/set-designer and Kruger himself works as an extra and fencing instructor.

The contrast between these two German-born young men – the prodigal son and Kruger – is a major theme of the book. The prodigal son has rebelled against the best of German culture (and against his father who represents it; "a Habsburg man, not a Hitler man" is a repeated line), while embracing the worst, losing his moral compass (and therefore his mind) completely in the process.

If America is going through its own Weimar moment, it's important not to make the common but serious category error that Adolf Hitler was a "traditionalist," as, for instance, former Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing recently did on his podcast.

Hitler was anything but a traditionalist. He was a radical, atheistic, anti-Christian (he much preferred Islam) modernist, which is why Evelyn Waugh could say that the Hitler-Stalin Pact represented "the modern age in arms."

It is a point emphasized not only in Kruger's Korps but in my history of the Catholic Church, Triumph, where I quote the great historian John Lukacs, who notes that the "greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century was not Lenin or Stalin. It was Hitler. . . His greatest reactionary opponent, Churchill," was the traditionalist.

The prodigal son in Kruger's Korps rejects traditionalism and his inherited Catholic faith in favor of political radicalism, first National Socialism and then Communism (a not uncommon occurrence, though it usually worked the other way round).

The young German-American Kruger, however, takes another path. He remains a Catholic and holds fast to his father's traditional values. He becomes an officer in the U.S. Navy and then a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (and doesn't neglect praying his rosary). He embraces all the heroic virtues that Hollywood once proclaimed in its films and becomes a hero himself.

For a book that appears to be a sheer adventure story, the intent is to give the attentive reader much to ponder. A few historical characters have passing ...

By Randall Smith

In Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus returns to Ithaca, disguised as a poor wanderer, he is given food and shelter by the swineherd, Eumaeus. The ancient Greek code for providing hospitality to strangers, xenia, was considered a sacred obligation overseen by Zeus. Eumaeus's obligation would be to take the stranger to the house of his lord to be cared for. But he knows that the suitors who have invaded Odysseus's house will treat him badly — a violation of xenia that could bring upon them the wrath of the gods. So he cares for this man himself, pronouncing those magnificent lines: "Stranger, it is not right for me to turn away any stranger, even one in a worse state than you are, for strangers and beggars all come in Zeus' name."

But the scene, as touching as it is, makes very clear that something is amiss; there is a fundamental disorder in Ithaca. A swineherd is taking upon himself the obligation of the lord, and the lords in the palace are acting like swine. The pen for pigs holds the noblemen, and the palace has become a pen full of pigs. The disorder of places reflects a deeper moral disorder.

Consider how a similar disorder of place is expressed and experienced in the modern world when a structure built over centuries by artisans and laborers as a place for sacred worship is used as a bar and discotheque (as in several recent British cathedrals). Some people may enjoy it. The suitors in Odysseus's palace were enjoying themselves. But they were living in a disordered state of affairs, and that disorder should have alerted them to their own corruption.

It's not only that the bar and discotheque fail to respect the sacredness of the space, although this is also true. The deeper problem is that the arrangement fails to respect the human spirit's yearning for a transcendent Source that surpasses the troubles and messiness of day-to-day life.

Bars and discotheques can provide a temporary relief from one's troubles, but they do little more than anesthetize people against the darkness and despair that arise in a seemingly meaningless life, especially since we bloom only for a short time, and all of us must eventually die. This is why bars and discotheques soon close, but cathedrals and other places of worship last for centuries.

So, given the dearth of understanding among some of the Anglican clergy of what a church is for, I have a "modest proposal" – not as gruesome as Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, but likely no less provocative. If the Anglican hierarchy has no more need for the Catholic churches they appropriated during the reign of that misogynist tyrant, Henry VIII, perhaps it is time to give them back. This would be a grand ecumenical gesture.

There is precedent. The Catholic cathedral in Utrecht, St. Catherine's, housed a Protestant congregation from 1580 to 1815, when Catholicism was outlawed in the Netherlands. It was returned to Catholics in 1815 as a garrison church. In 1842, it was permitted to become a parish church, and when the Catholic episcopal hierarchy was re-established in 1853, St. Catherine's was chosen as the cathedral. St. Martin's, which had been the cathedral before the Protestants took over, is still in Protestant hands but it was hit by a tornado in 1674 causing the nave to collapse, which has never been rebuilt.

Even in England there have been examples.

St. Etheldreda's Church in London, built in the late thirteenth century, was "absorbed into the Church of England in 1534" by Henry VIII. It was purchased at auction by the Catholic Rosminian Order in 1874 and restored. Mass returned in 1878.

The Black Abbey in Kilkenny, Ireland, was built in the thirteenth century for the Dominicans but confiscated by the Crown under Elizabeth I in 1558. The Dominicans managed to lease the property back in 1776. It was finally opened for public Catholic worship in 1864.

Why Catholics had to buy what was theirs in the first place, built by them for them, is puzzling. But basically, if there is ...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely

Jesus is asked by Jairus, an official of the Jerusalem Synagogue, to come to his house and heal his daughter who is gravely ill. As recounted in St. Mark's Gospel, Jesus hurries to his house, but is told on the way that she has died. Arriving, the Lord, who sees what others cannot see, and knows that God's glory will be revealed, tells them that the girl is not dead, only sleeping. They laugh at Him, as some translations say, "to scorn."

The Lord enters the girl's bedroom, holds her hand and, in Aramaic, says, "Talitha koumi – little girl, arise." She wakes immediately and gets up.

Only Christ can bring the dead to life, or revive what seems to be dead.

For centuries, tyrants like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin or the followers of Mohammed have claimed to have put the Church to death. But She has always arisen.

Viewing the scenes we saw in France this week during the visit of Pope Leo, it's only natural to think both of those proud words of the tyrants and demagogues, and of the story of the daughter of Jairus.

France, for centuries called the "eldest daughter of the Church," has been sleeping for a very long time. The horrors unleashed on that land with the regicide of the King and Queen, and the terror of the Revolution in 1789, seemed, in many ways, to have killed the little daughter of the Church. The further effects, we might say, of the revolution and the so-called Enlightenment have created a French society, as much of European society, that is, in Pope Leo's words, "deeply secularized."

Yet a million people lined the Champs Élysées in Paris to see the pope. Thousands of young people enthusiastically greeted him. And as we know, France is the very epicenter of what is called the "quiet revival" of Catholicism, though, in France last week it was rather loud.

A wise French commentator called it the "Advent of the Church" in France. Another friend, a journalist, said to me that a "page in history has been turned."

Advent, of course, means the coming of the King, the awaited arrival. This is precisely why the season before Christmas bears that name; we celebrate His first coming in the Incarnation and await His Second Coming in glory when, in the words of the great Advent hymn, "Ev'ry eye shall now behold Him/Robed in dreadful majesty."

The French commentator continued that the reawakened Church was rising to counter the deleterious and soul-quenching effects of secularism and nihilism. The militant atheists, the nihilists, the children of 1968 (the soixante-huitards as they are known in France), would laugh if they had been told that the little daughter would arise.

Leo XIV said in Paris that "people are rediscovering the Gospel and embracing the Faith," precisely because of the emptiness and dissatisfaction that a Godless society produces. He called it the "small flame the Holy Spirit has kindled in the darkness of the night."

Andrew Breitbart, it is said, coined the phrase that "politics is downstream from culture." True, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on circumstances. But even more significantly, culture is, or should be, downstream from religion.

Leo remarked that France was not only a secular society, but a "deeply secular culture." Abortion, now demonically enshrined in French Constitution, and a euthanasia law enthusiastically supported by the dollar-store Napoleon, Emmanuel Macron, were passed only weeks before the arrival of the pope.

Yet a culture once deeply formed by the Faith, imbued through the generations with the tradition of saints, artists, and scholars – so magnificently shown in the youth vigil with the pope at the Stade de France – can, even if its roots have been forgotten or deliberately obscured, be revived when its foundation is renewed.

In the last year, I have spent time with different groups of young, faithful French Catholics. Some are Latin Mass devotees; some are new converts to the Faith; some are from the charismatic or new communities; some are just ordinary,...