By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza.

The big Newman moment of the summer was the declaration by Pope Leo XIV that St. John Henry would soon be declared a Doctor of the Church. I had another Newman moment a few weeks beforehand in a cinema watching, of all things, The Life of Chuck.

A Stephen King novella adapted for film, it's not a horror flick but the tale of an accountant, Chuck Krantz, who dies at 39. Chuck has led an unremarkable life, quietly admirable but not inspiring. No one much noticed him when he was alive; few would remember him when dead. The movie moves backward through a 39-year tale of Chuck learning how to live in and getting ready to die.

Learning how to live meant, for Chuck, in part, learning how to dance. As a boy, Chuck's grandmother taught him; from her he learned the confidence, the shared emotion, the sheer fun of dancing. Dancing broke into the monotony, brought a bit of color to a monochrome world.

Tom Hiddleston plays Chuck, and the actor loves to dance; clips of his exuberant dancing delight viewers on the Internet. He was cast as Chuck because his dancing makes people smile and shift and shuffle, and feel better about things. It is possible that the entire screenplay was written to allow Hiddleston to dance in a splendid five-minute number, evocative of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. It is the heart of the film.

The narrator explains that Chuck, already suffering from a terminal diagnosis and from the enervating emptiness of his professional life, experienced an evanescent ecstasy in that moment of spontaneous dancing in the street:

Later [Chuck] will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife's name. What he will remember - occasionally - is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

I heard that and thought Cardinal Newman would agree.

It is possible that all of Creation was for one moment, one moment of joy, one moment of dance?

Trinitarian theologians might be inclined to answer: Yes. They have a fancy word, perichoresis, which aims to describe the relationship and of love and life, harmony and intimacy, glory given and glory received among the three Persons. A long time ago my professor summarized perichoresis in one word: dancing.

The Trinity dances, which is harmony and intimacy, round and round in glorious celebration and expressive joy. If creation extends the love and life of the Trinity outside of the Godhead, why shouldn't it all exist for a moment of dance?

I was likely the only person in the theater who heard "that is why God made the world" and thought of Newman. The passage that came to mind is well known, from his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, where Newman insists that "the Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest."

How evil is man's rebellion against God? The Church must "anathematize it" with such severity that Newman was pleased to repeat a formidable formulation he had earlier fashioned:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

About a year before he died, Christopher Hitchens debated Tony Blair in Toronto on whether religion was a force for good in the world. Hitchens, a more able debater than Blair, took the position that religion is "twisted and immoral" and is plagued by "essential fanaticism."

To that end he introduced - as evidence from "no mean source" - the Newman quotation above. Newman was no jihadi suicide bomber, but the most refined intellect of his time. Nevertheless, he wa...

By David G. Bonagura, Jr.

Consider the parallel lives of John and Bill, who each have three children, reside in the suburbs, and commute to the city to work. John is agnostic and indifferent to things religious. Bill is a practicing Catholic; he attends Mass each Sunday and prays daily.

The two do essentially the same things each day. Is there a substantive difference between their lives, given their faith - or lack of it?

On Monday, both get caught in traffic. En route, John is listening to the news, Bill to the Bible in a Year Podcast. They both arrive late and flustered. Bill, having heard Matthew 11 recited in the car, prays that God will make light the burdens that come with being late for work.

At their desks, they open their emails. Each receives a note from his boss assigning an odious task. Each is aggravated. Bill asks God why He is testing him. Then, though still unsettled, he stammers a silent, "Thy will be done," and digs in.

Taking a break, each runs into an exasperating co-worker with whom he does not wish to speak. Each cuts his interlocutor short and scurries away. Bill realizes immediately that he was rude. He asks God for forgiveness and resolves to go to Confession on Saturday.

At lunch, they sit at their desks and eat from brown bags. Bill silently says grace and makes the sign of the cross before he eats.

The day ends, and they drive home. The roads are clear; each arrives home in a good mood. They morph into "Dad mode" immediately: each drives one child to practice, another to scouts, picks up the first, eats dinner, goes back out to get the second, cleans the kitchen, checks one child's homework, and watches 15 minutes of sports on television. Exhausted, John bids his children good night and passes out. Just as tired, Bill gathers his family; they pray one decade of the rosary together. Bill passes out in the chair, rosary in hand.

Tuesday morning comes. John rises at 6:00. Bill rises at 5:45. The latter spends fifteen minutes in prayer next to his bed before preparing for the day.

How is Bill's life different? Is it "better" than John's when they are doing the same things, living the same family life, enduring the same trials?

John has a wonderful wife, healthy children, friends, and a good job. Yet all these are discordant notes in a cacophony. They have neither rhyme nor reason. He occasionally feels overwhelmed. In his few quiet moments, he asks himself what he is doing with his life. Things are going well, but they don't make sense. He muddles through - there is no other choice. The years pile up, and he wonders how many he has ahead. He has worldly goals for himself and his children. Focusing on these keeps his mind from wandering toward bigger, more vexing questions.

The Catholic faith allows Bill to see realities that John cannot. Bill knows God is always present right next to him. He knows his blessings come from Him, and he gives thanks; he knows He sends trials to stretch him, and he tries to grow from them. His life is not easy, yet he realizes God has willed his existence for many ends, even when he does not understand what God intends in most situations. But knowing God is in control gives him both purpose and a sense of adventure: wherever he goes, and whenever he comes home, God has a new set of circumstances waiting for him. In his better moments, he smiles, imagining that he is part of an epic action film without knowing its ending.

Bill is also grateful that he has something that John does not: accountability and structure for his life. God's laws, as directed in the Ten Commandments and distilled into their multiple dimensions in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, tell him plainly what he should do and what he should avoid. Since Bill loves God, he sees these laws not as an unpleasant imposition, but as a gift to help keep him on the straight and narrow. In more recent years, he has learned from the Catechism about virtue - about how to do good, beyond just avoiding evil. He h...

By Michael Pakaluk.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, August 28 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 Leo XIV's continuing impact, as well as other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

St. Augustine's conversion began, on his own telling, when, as a nineteen-year-old boy - roughly the age of a college sophomore today - he encountered a dialogue by Cicero called the Hortensius:

Quite definitely it changed the direction of my mind, altered my prayers to You, O Lord, and gave me a new purpose and ambition. Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upwards by which I was to return to You. (Confessions, III.4)

Later on, after years of seeking, and still in the grips of Manicheism and fleshly desires, he would judge his progress against that earlier event:

I was much exercised in mind as I remembered how long it was since that nineteenth year of my age in which I first felt the passion for true knowledge and resolved that when I found it, I would give up all the empty hopes and lying follies of vain desires. And here I was going on for thirty, still sticking in the same mire. (VI.11)

Even the saint's famous half-hearted prayer for chastity comes up in connection with Cicero: "Many years had flowed by - a dozen or more - from the time when I was nineteen and was stirred by the reading of Cicero's Hortensius to the study of wisdom; and here was I still postponing the giving up of this world's happiness to devote myself for the search for that of which not the finding only but the mere seeking is better than to find all the treasures and kingdoms of men, better than all the body's pleasures though they were to had merely for a nod. But I in my worthlessness. . .had begged You for chastity, saying: 'Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.' For I was afraid that you would hear my prayer too soon." (VIII.7)

As St. Pope John Paul II summarized in his Apostolic Letter, Augustinum Hipponensem, on the 16th centenary of the conversion of St Augustine, "He awoke at the age of nineteen to the love of wisdom, when he read the Hortensius of Cicero."

This great convert from paganism, materialism, and a life of fleshly pleasure, would go on to become one of the two surpassing theological masters of the Church alongside St. Thomas Aquinas. The author of The City of God, and On the Trinity, and also of many richly illuminating shorter works, homilies, and letters, he would be proclaimed "The Doctor of Grace" - a teacher to the world, really, and, in his way, a savior of civilization.

One might think that a practical lesson to be drawn from Augustine's conversion is that Catholics should foster the reading of Cicero's Hortensius, on the grounds that what so inspired Augustine would likely inspire many others.

But, sadly, the Hortensius was lost in the 6th century.

What do we know about it from fragments and reports? We know that it was a "protreptic," that is, it contained a carefully constructed argument, intended to persuade the reader to seek wisdom above everything else. (The word protreptikos in Greek means "exhortation.")

Plato has various "protreptic passages" scattered throughout his dialogues. Aristotle wrote an entire dialogue, once lost but now reasonably reconstructed, called Protrepticus. Cicero probably used these as models. The Hortensius, we also know, was composed as a dialogue among a poet, a rhetorician, and an historian, with Cicero, the fourth participant, taking the side of philosophy. But otherwise, we do not know its contents.

And yet are there books like the Hortensius which Catholics can use tod...

By Francis X. Maier.

July 2026 marks the 250th birthday of the United States. Alas, the celebration next year will come in the midst of yet another election cycle, and at a time of deep cultural divisions. We need a "common good" politics more than ever. But that's easier said than done. Here's why.

In Catholic thought, the political realm is primarily the responsibility of the laity - complicated and distracted people like you and me - not the clergy. But the civil war inside the Church over what Vatican II really meant, and the resulting confusion about which issues should have priority in working for the common good, are not over.

Quite the opposite: During the Francis pontificate, the frictions took on new heat. And the course of the Leo pontificate, while promising, is not yet fully clear. Additionally, the bureaucratic mass of the U.S. bishops' conference, with its need for collective buy-in from its members, creates inertia. This makes any quick, clear, and decisive action by the body of bishops difficult to achieve. Plus, the risks for the Church of being co-opted and used by the political left and right are always present, and always expensively high.

Thus, the "political" role of the Church, in her national and diocesan structures, rarely amounts to more than providing basic principles of morality and justice, and interfacing and lobbying at the bishops' conference level with government offices on a range of issues.

Very broadly speaking, that's how the Church in the United States operates institutionally, as an organized community of believers. But it's worth considering a few added points, most of them obvious to the alert observer:

1. The Church always seeks a modus vivendi with public authority - in every nation, in every century. This get-along strategy has both practical and Scriptural grounding. But it also has its weaknesses. The desire to minimize conflict with secular authority predisposes the Church to make compromises and avoid confrontations in a way that's not always prudent. Additionally, given her minority status in our own country, the Church has always been eager to fit in and prove her loyalty. The result of that eagerness today, sustained over generations, is that most Catholics are now more thoroughly American than they are Catholic. Many bishops are, in their own words, "generals without armies." This reduces Catholic political muscle as a distinct and coherent community.

2. Many American Catholics, and even a few Church leaders, still assume that we live in a country that (in reality) no longer exists - at least, not in the form they imagine. Demographic, technological, legal, and cultural changes have transformed the United States over the past 70 years. But this delusion of America as somehow implicitly Christian, or at least Biblically grounded, persists. And it's strongest among boomer-aged practicing Catholics like myself who still have a reasonably accurate knowledge of the Founding. In many dioceses, this is exactly the age group, now dying out, who are most actively involved with the Church, and the most generous.

3. We have a duty to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. But that duty requires a healthy degree of Catholic prudence. Whatever governmental form Caesar takes, he always has three defining characteristics: (a) his legitimate zone of authority is very limited; (b) he thinks it's a lot bigger than it is; and (c) he's never a trustworthy friend, no matter how cordial he seems. This suggests that while issues like protecting the unborn and defending religious freedom are vitally important and must be pursued, the more fundamental task for the Church is educating Catholics to develop a healthy distance between themselves and their allegiance to the American experiment and its culture.

4. As Catholic numbers and practice decline, so does the influence of Christian moral thought. The "common good," according to secular thinkers, can be very different from that same idea ac...

By Robert Royal.

In spite of all the fuss over "education" and the enormous amounts of money spent on it in America, as students are returning to school this week, how much real learning goes on these days? My parents had only public high-school diplomas, long before the Federal government got into the business of promoting "education." But between the local classrooms and instruction in the parish, they read and wrote well, did math properly, understood the American system of government, the Church's prerogatives, and the truths necessary for salvation.

How often does that happen today?

The U.S. Constitution sought to form "a more perfect union" (the merely "perfect" isn't enough for Americans). Part of that perfection involved reducing the chances of tyranny and misgovernment by limiting the Federal reach to certain "enumerated powers." Education, a sensitive activity in a pluralistic society, wasn't among those powers. It was, predictably, the beginning of a steeper educational decline than was already evident when, in 1980, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, an unconstitutional agency.

The DOE website today invites you to "Find educational resources for parents, students, and families from birth through high school." Given the politicized and ideologized nature of schools in recent years, we should be very wary of these "educational resources."

America spends well over a trillion dollars every year on education, compared with around $750 billion on defense. We haven't managed to win wars lately, so there's good reason to question the defense budget. We didn't do too well in the war on poverty either. And though the monies spent on schooling are, perhaps deliberately, hard to trace, who these days would conclude that the enormous sums at the Federal level alone (over $200 billion) have been well spent and producing desirable outcomes?

Only 37.6 percent of Washington D.C. students, for example, read "at grade level" - what is called "grade level" being already a fairly modest goal, to be sure. But The Washington Post recently touted this as an encouraging sign, also reporting that "More than 26 percent of [D.C.]students performed on grade level in math, the highest proficiency rate recorded since students returned to classrooms in 2021, but still lower than pre-pandemic performance." (Pre-pandemic was a whopping 30 percent for math and 37.5 percent for reading in the capital city of the greatest, most powerful nation on earth.)

Pundits are currently agitated over the president sending the National Guard into Washington to control crime (and are further agitated that it seems to be working). But what about the crimes being perpetrated in the city school system, which is leaving basically two-thirds of young people unprepared for the simplest adult responsibilities?

And this although D.C. spends about $29,000 annually per student, roughly the tuition of a semester at Harvard. Meanwhile, we're regularly told that schools need more money. But the problem is not money. Almost half of the children in D.C. are born out of wedlock (77 percent among D.C. blacks, 55 percent for Hispanics). "Chronic" truancy, not surprisingly, is over 30 percent. And D.C. is hardly unique. Among the many problems affecting young people today, spending on schools isn't the main problem. The crisis of marriage and family, a direct consequence of the sexual revolution, very much is.

The Church, as it has for centuries, could help here.

In the Catholic perspective, the family is the primary cell of society, not the individual. Schools and other institutions are supposed to be a help to parents. When we talk about the Catholic social principle of "subsidiarity," we usually are thinking of the distribution of political powers. Long before we get to those arrangements, however:

As those first responsible for the education of their children, parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This r...

By Jayd Henricks.

During his recent "Address to the Participants in the Social Week of Peru," Pope Leo made some observations well worth noting: "Let us understand that all social action of the Church must have as its center and goal the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ, so that, without neglecting the immediate, we always remain aware of the proper and ultimate direction of our service. For if we do not give Christ in his entirety, we will always be giving extremely little."

That's already a very useful clarification. But he added: "Dear brothers and sisters: it is not two loves, but rather one and the same, that moves us to give both material bread and the bread of the Word that, in turn, by its very dynamism, will give rise to hunger for the Bread of Heaven, which only the Church can give, by the mandate and will of Christ, and which no human institution, however well-intentioned it may be, can replace. And, for our part, let us not forget the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles: 'Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up.'" (Galatians 6:9)

I cannot tell you how refreshing I find it to read this from the Holy Father. In the first months of Pope Leo's pontificate, there has been a pronounced Christocentric vision of our faith, articulated clearly and with evangelical vigor. And it is not confined to the spiritual life of the Church but, as the above quote makes clear, also at the heart of the Church's charitable work.

For many years, I worked at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops engaged in public advocacy for the Church's charitable work. I'm proud of our efforts, and yet there was always the haunting concern that the goal of the work was "extremely little" compared to the real mission of our faith: salvation.

Our work was about creating space for the Church to compete with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or with the strong arm of government itself. This is a worthy goal. Millions of poor and marginalized have been served and continue to be served by the generosity of the Church. The value of this should not be dismissed. And yet, if we truly believe the Nicene Creed, it's extremely little compared to eternity, and the Holy Father's words should be a call to reexamine how the Church understands her mission in society as a leaven for the common good.

The common good is not just material well-being: food, shelter, jobs, physical and mental health, and so forth. All of this is good and should be part of the mission of the Church as an agent of charity. And yet the ultimate common good is that which we will all face one way or another in the coming years (for some tomorrow, for others seventy years from now, but it is coming for all of us), which is our eternal destiny. Anything short of that consideration, albeit important, is extremely little.

The work of so many Catholic charitable organizations, as well as the public advocacy work of the USCCB, can sometimes be shortsighted. I can't tell you how many letters to Capitol Hill or the Administration I either drafted or edited that read like any other NGO. Yes, Members of Congress are not especially concerned about the Church's eschatological mission, so it perhaps was not appropriate to lead with that sort of language. But to intentionally ignore the salvific purpose of the Church's work in our communication seemed to be a failure to advance the Church's essential mission.

The purpose of the Church is to be united to Christ for the salvation of souls, first our own and then to aid others on their own path. The charitable work of the Church falls under that but is deficient if not united with salvation.

For if we do not give Christ in His entirety, we will always be giving extremely little.

From my experience working deep within the bureaucratic Church, the idea of giving Christ in his entirety was not a focus of our work. It's hard to say if it was even an afterthought.

I wonder how things woul...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Is our Lord avoiding the question? At first glance, it appears so. The man in today's Gospel (Luke 13:22-30) asks a simple yes/no question: "Will only a few people be saved?" Jesus doesn't answer, doesn't say yes or no. Perhaps to the man's disappointment, He doesn't give the stats on the population of Heaven relative to that of Hell. Instead, He gives a stern warning and tells an ominous parable.

Maybe our Lord is abiding by the ironclad rule of public relations: Don't answer the question that was asked, but the question that should have been asked. Instead of a direct response to the questioner's concern, He answers what should have concerned him - and us. Namely, complacency.

For there seems to be a kind of smugness about the questioner. He appears pretty sure about his own salvation even as he remains curious about others. Instead of asking about others, he should have asked about himself: What must I do to be saved? And it is this unasked question that our Lord answers: "Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough."

The Greek here for "strive" is literally "agonize" or "be in agony." Point being, Heaven is not easily entered. God's grace does not bear fruit in our lives unless we strive - agonize - to cooperate with it. We cannot sit back, relax, do nothing - and then expect to enter Heaven. You can't coast uphill.

So our Lord tells a parable about those who do not strive. They are the ones who know Him only in passing and become satisfied with that insufficient knowledge. When He returns, they will say, "We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets." As if mere proximity to Him is sufficient for salvation. As if simply being near Him, in the crowds that followed Him, would suffice. He was in their company, but they never took the time to know Him directly and personally.

Nor did they make an effort to be known by Him. Indeed, the parable's strong words of condemnation focus on just that fact: "I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!" Or as He says more bluntly on another occasion, "I never knew you." (Matthew 7:23) Apparently, allowing ourselves to be known by Him is every bit as important as knowing Him. This shouldn't surprise us, for both knowing and being known are necessary in a relationship. The human heart desires both.

It's interesting to note how Saint Paul associates salvation with knowing God and being known by Him. Indeed, they are caught up with one another: "[I]f one loves God, one is known by him." (1 Corinthians 8:3) The Apostle looks to heaven, where "I shall know fully, as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12) He reminds the Galatians how they were once in darkness. But now it is different, "now that you have come to know God" - and then he corrects himself - "or rather to be known by God." (Galatians 4:9)

It's significant that this warning and this parable are directed not to those who don't follow Christ but to those who do - people like us, who follow Him. . .but perhaps not as intimately as we should. It's directed to us who might know about Christ because we've been raised that way, because we attend Mass and say our prayers and observe all that's asked of us. . .but who don't know Him. In the end, it's not knowledge about Christ that saves but knowing Christ Himself - and being known by Him. To be satisfied with anything less is dangerous.

All of this can be seen as the difference between a personage and a person. A personage - someone of notoriety and fame - is apart from us. We know about him, perhaps even a great deal. He might even inspire us. We might even shape our lives according to his example. But we don't have a relationship with a personage. He remains an historical or cultural figure. We can put him on a shelf where he we can admire him from afar and without fear that he will intrude.

A person, on the other hand, is more than reputation and ...

By M.D. Aeschliman.

Much of our knowledge is inevitably quantitative and additive, but sometimes a good book contains such necessary, valuable forms of human knowledge while also touching, and being graced by, such qualitative insight that it registers as human wisdom. Such is the case with University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox's ambitious Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.

Wilcox is a strong statistician, and his book is full of exceptionally valuable, detailed information and analysis about contemporary social and economic phenomena in the USA and the West. It's particularly insightful about catastrophically declining birth rates, marriage rates for different demographic groups, and surveys of several negative social indicators such as unemployment of men, drug abuse, loneliness, and "deaths by despair."

His thoughtful and judicious grasp of these phenomena and their dynamics puts him among the outstanding public intellectuals and commentators of our time, and merits the name social philosophy: a tradition of over two centuries which includes Burke, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber, and more recent figures such as Robert Nisbet, Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Philip Rieff, David Martin, Peter L. Berger, and Wilcox's Virginia colleague James Davison Hunter.

An excellent example of this social-philosophical insight is found near the conclusion of Get Married when Wilcox writes that his research "reveals this paradox regarding the pursuit of happiness in contemporary America: individual happiness is most likely to be found not by directly pursuing it for oneself but by opening your heart to love, marriage, and living for your spouse and family."

Wilcox here vindicates an argument or thesis that has been intermittently meditated in the philosophical, political, religious, and poetic literature of the West, what Plato and Aristotle first articulated and that we have come to call "virtue ethics" or eudaemonism. It has also been the stock-in-trade of centuries of moralists and clergymen.

The Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) identified "the paradox of hedonism" in a famous sermon and the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) wrote about it in his Methods of Ethics. Their point, writes the contemporary philosopher Simon Blackburn, is "that agents who consciously attempt to maximize their own pleasures are more likely to fail than those who have concerns for other things and other persons for their own sakes."

A particularly poignant case is found in the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873), the great Utilitarian philosopher, most of which is exceptionally dry, leading Thomas Carlyle to call it the "autobiography of a steam engine."

But one chapter records Mill's mental breakdown. Mill, a child prodigy and successful public intellectual, records a mental collapse, not apparent to the public world in which he continued to live and work. From 1821 to 1826, he had been the companion and inheritor of the growing political prominence of his own Utilitarian father, James Mill, and of Jeremy Bentham: his "object in life was to be a reformer of the world," and he seemed to be succeeding in journalism and politics.

But Chapter V reports an increasing gloom at the realization that his direct, successful pursuit of Utilitarian ideological aims left him more and more unsatisfied and depressed. He came to credit "the anti-self-consciousness theory of [Thomas] Carlyle" with helping him shape a new "theory of life."

He "never wavered" in his Utilitarian conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life." But he "now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind. . .followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else,...

By Joseph R. Wood

We're a few days into the Novena to St. Augustine for his feast on August 28. To my mind, any excuse will suffice to talk about the thought of that great saint. His feast day in the first year of Augustinian Leo XIV's pontificate simply can't be passed up.

During a pause in the conversations on faith and reason at this summer's 2025 Free Society Seminar in Slovakia, our editor-in-chief and I shared the mutual sense that, after a fair amount of philosophical engagement over the years, maybe the greatest pleasure and light come from reading St. Augustine and one of his influences, Plato.

Augustine thought the Platonists were, of the pagan philosophers, the closest to the greater truths of Christianity. As I read Augustine's City of God, it seems apparent that he was also familiar with Aristotle. The influences were indirect: he knew Plato through "Neo-Platonic" writers who came centuries after Plato himself, and he had Cicero's work on Greek philosophy.

Pope Benedict XVI sought to bring elements of Augustine's theology back to prominence, emphasizing the relational aspects of our being human as equal in importance to our reason. The rational nature that we are given in the image of God had received great attention in the Thomistic tradition, but other aspects of the divinity for which we are built sometimes became obscured.

In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas quotes Augustine constantly, more than any other Church Father and (depending on whose word count you trust) more than Aristotle. We can leave the exact accounting to others, but Thomas's reliance on these two sources is evident.

He seems to have at least two projects in mind. First, to correct the many misinterpretations of Augustine that had sprung up in the eight or nine centuries between the two.

Second, to reconcile the thought of Augustine and Aristotle. Both figures had much to say about the natural life of man and the divine or supernatural aspects of the cosmos.

That reconciliation does not align the two perfectly, and sometimes Aquinas seems to overreach a bit in pressing his case. But it demonstrates that Aristotle's reason (and ours) can take us a long way towards the truths that ultimately Catholic teaching, based in no small part on St. Augustine's gifts of faith and reason, can best grasp and express.

As Augustine explains in On Free Choice of the Will, we use our reason to understand better the revealed precepts of the faith, though the Christian mysteries ultimately are beyond us.

Aristotle was not the only pagan philosopher to draw Augustine's attention. In City of God, he deals with the Stoics.

While some people think of Stoicism as a "cult of suffering," that's far from true, if you think of "cult" as worship or love of suffering for its own sake. The Stoics were concerned with peace of mind, which called for accepting suffering as part our "fate" and part of the way we build necessary virtues. We accept suffering, but we don't love it just to suffer, and that acceptance contributes to peace of mind.

The gods of the Stoics were made of matter, like us. They believed that the suffering we endure is sent or permitted by the gods for our own sake; our mistake comes in thinking it's an evil, and that shakes our peace.

What Stoicism lacked was an eternal and spiritual meaning to our suffering in this life. With no afterlife, suffering might help us be more virtuous in this life, but it could not lead to spiritual salvation and resurrection of the body.

St. Augustine particularly criticized the Stoics for their approval and even admiration of suicide. Catholic Christianity offered a better way to a true and final peace of mind.

In our day, Stoic resignation appeals to many who, lacking faith, have no hope of the great gifts of Christian surrender. Reading St. Augustine, especially his Confessions and seeing his guilt for his sins transformed into faith, hope and love, might help them open themselves to those gifts.

Again in City of God, A...

By Stephen P. White

One sign of our improbably ludicrous times is that the question, "What is a woman?" has become a point of political contention in recent years. The obvious answer (obvious, that is, until just yesterday) has proven unsatisfactory to the keepers of the Zeitgeist for whom the connection between nature and meaning has been thoroughly dissolved.

A world that doesn't know what a man or a woman is, let alone what it means to be a man or a woman, is going to have a very difficult time figuring out what it means to be a good man or a good woman. It is difficult for a world so thoroughly confused about nature to discern the presence and action of grace. Grace, after all, builds on and perfects nature.

There is reason to hope that the fever of gender ideology is breaking - or at least that the stranglehold it has held on our politics and social discourse is loosening. But even if it were to subside completely, there is still reason to worry about what would follow in its wake. The failure of one bad set of ideas is no guarantee that what replaces it will be any better.

Disentangling modern science and medicine from gender ideology would be a very good thing. But it would be a mistake to assume that a more biologically grounded account of male and female would solve the underlying anthropological confusion. It turns out that the meaning of the human person - male and female - is not easily definable in naturalistic or material terms.

Any attempt to account for human nature in purely material terms, even without the thumb of ideology on the scale, will tend to exclude God. Such an account would be inherently a-theistic.

In Gaudium et Spes, the Fathers of Vatican II took direct aim at a kind of atheism "which anticipates the liberation of man, especially through his economic and social emancipation." The Council goes on to declare that the Church, "has already repudiated and cannot cease repudiating, sorrowfully but as firmly as possible, those poisonous doctrines and actions which contradict reason and the common experience of humanity, and dethrone man from his native excellence."

The Council Fathers clearly had Communist ideology in mind with this condemnation, but the fundamental anthropological error of that ideology was rooted in an atheistic-materialist conception of man.

And as Pope John Paul II would later argue, Communism is hardly the only system that is susceptible to such an error. A consumerist society, he insisted, can make the identical mistake, effectively agreeing with the Marxist system, "in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs."

Material science alone, useful as it can be, can't tell us much about what it means to be human. It cannot answer the question of what it means to be a good man or a good woman. The Church offers answers to those questions, but she also forthrightly acknowledges that the questions themselves touch on a mystery.

Here's Gaudium et Spes: "Meanwhile every man remains to himself an unsolved puzzle, however obscurely he may perceive it. . . .To this questioning only God fully and most certainly provides an answer as He summons man to higher knowledge and humbler probing."

All of this may seem rather abstract, or at least incomplete. But the "higher knowledge and humbler probing" to which man is invited and by which man comes to know himself in the light of the Incarnation is fundamentally personal and concrete.

The longing to know oneself, to know one's own origin and purpose, is present in every human heart. And it is a longing often expressed far better in literature and poetry than in philosophical or theological prose.

What does it mean to be a good man? What does it mean to be a good woman? These are pressing questions in every age. They are all the more pressing today for the confusion about what it simply means to be, simply, human. They are not likely to become less pressing as our technology and affluen...