By Joseph R. Wood.

As I convert, I've heard some wonderful stories of other people's conversions. Many warrant publication because of the unexpected ways that God's grace often reaches us. And interest in conversion, at least among Christians, is widespread, real, and often touching.

My own story is mundane, a version of Walker Percy's explanation of why he chose Catholicism: What else is there? But some conversion journeys are much more riveting. What is conversion, and what does it demand?

In the second part of the Divine Comedy – Purgatorio – Dante and his guide Virgil have emerged from Hell, which presented trials for them and eternal tribulations for those who will never emerge. It was a rough journey through Inferno: hostile demons, treacherous terrain, and worst of all, the horrors Dante sees the damned undergo with no hope of salvation.

Only Dante's poetic genius, aided by the virtuous direction of his fellow poet and mentor Virgil, allows him to convey something of the wretchedness he has observed. Now he looks forward to an easier progress through Purgatory, which will bring its own challenges, including a challenge to Dante to deliver even better poetry than he had in Inferno. Only a better poetic product suits the better place.

Now, the prospect of eternal salvation, however distant but ultimately assured, replaces the despair of eternal damnation.

To run its course through smoother water

the small bark of my wit now hoists its sail,

leaving that cruel sea behind.

Now I shall sing the second kingdom,

there where the soul of man is cleansed,

made worthy to ascend to Heaven.

Here from the dead let poetry rise up,

O sacred Muses.

(Purgatorio Canto 1 1 through 8, Hollander trans.)

Dante opens this second cantica with a comparison of his work to a second, smoother voyage. He trips quickly along to another metaphor, his poetic work as singing, bringing forth a song that will carry the reality of this kingdom of the saved to his reader-listener.

This new song of voyage actually seems to begin at the end of Inferno, with a change in Dante himself. In the final canto of that volume, Virgil has escorted Dante to Dis, the frozen floor of Hell, where Satan, "the creature who was once so fair of face," rests unrestfully after his fall from Heaven:

Then how faint and frozen I became,

reader, do not ask, for I do not write it,

since any words would fail to be enough.

I did not die, nor did I stay alive.

Imagine, if you have the wit,

what I became, deprived of both.

(Inferno 34 22 through 27)

At this moment, Dante is not "dead or alive," as the saying goes, but neither. He is suspended between the only two states of being that we attribute to men.

As Robert Hollander explains in his notes, many commentators see this as a moment of conversion for Dante, when his "fear of Hell becomes the fear of God." Dante passes "from the state of death to the state of living in God's forgiveness." Other commentators describe this moment as "the culmination of the penitential imitation of Christ in the descent into Hell, symbolically the pilgrim's death to sin, that is, the death of the 'old man.'"

Dante's descent to Dis now becomes an ascent, first to Purgatory, then on to Paradise.

Only that conversion readies Dante for his second voyage through the cleansing of Purgatory to the happiness of Heaven, and prepares him to report that second journey poetically and musically. Dante went through Hell to turn to God and be given the poetic gifts to complete the Comedy.

In his book, Into Your Hands, Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God Who Loves Us, Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen begins with St. Augustine and moves through St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross (and a few other residents of Paradise) to offer a beautiful account of conversion as abandonment to divine will. In his conclusion, he turns his account over to a Flemish priest who describes a radical turning to God:

For years. . .I had a dream. I sat completely alone on the earth. Compl...

By Daniel B. Gallagher

There will be a lot of talk about freedom during this 250th anniversary of our nation. Intellectual elites are already debating whether the Constitution envisions limitations upon citizens' freedom, and if so, what those limitations are. The Bill of Rights ostensibly places limits on government, while subsequent interpretations of the First Amendment place limits on – for example – freedom of speech, curbing obscenity, incitement to violence, and defamation.

Running up to this Semiquincentennial celebration, some have even been questioning whether the political project of liberalism itself presents a false conception of human freedom. If Patrick Deneen's 2018 Why Liberalism Failed didn't make us uncomfortable enough with the Lockean ideas underlying the American founding, his Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, published five years later, made us really squirm. "Liberalism has failed," Deneen writes, "not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself." In other words, liberalism "has failed because it has succeeded."

If there is any hope for a counter-case to Deneen's "postliberalism," it must rely on a robust conception of the relationship between freedom and truth. To put it simply, it's not entirely correct to say that the role of truth is to "limit" freedom, as if the main consequence of a moral imperative against killing, for example, is that it narrows the range of permissible actions towards other human beings; or that the immorality of sexual acts outside of marriage simply restricts what we can do with our bodies and what we can do with the bodies of others.

The recent activities of ICE have provoked vigorous debate over the Fourth Amendment, which acknowledges our right "to be secure. . .against unreasonable searches and seizures." The primary purpose of that Amendment is to limit the power of government, but it also implies limits to a citizen's right to resist the actions of law enforcement. If the search is reasonable, the one being searched is obliged to comply.

These are crucial issues, but they can easily cloud our perception of a deeper relationship between freedom and truth. That is why recent popes have reminded us that truth, properly understood, doesn't narrow our horizons, but broadens them. To say that freedom – be it political or moral – is "bound" by truth does not so much mean that the human will is intrinsically dangerous apart from truth, but rather that the human will is fundamentally ordered to an end, and that end cannot be achieved if not chosen freely.

The difference is subtle but critical. In the moral life, it is the difference between acting only to avoid evil and acting wholly to achieve the good. In political life, it is the difference between refraining from breaking the law and placing oneself wholeheartedly at the service of the common good.

The difference is even more important when we place the relationship between freedom and truth within the context of Christian faith, which, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, allows us to perceive the "'grammar' written on human hearts by the divine Creator." Faith empowers us to understand better that:

the norms of the natural law should not be viewed as externally imposed decrees, as restraints upon human freedom. Rather, they should be welcomed as a call to carry out faithfully the universal divine plan inscribed in the nature of human beings.

The liberating force of truth is all the more apparent if we contrast a democratic republic with an authoritarian state. The real problem for Chavismo in Venezuela, for example, has not been human freedom, but truth. And Chavez's successor, Nicolás Maduro, learned as well (as had Mao, Stalin, Fidel, and other socialist leaders) that you can detain political prisoners, but you cannot deprive them of their will. Figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Viktor Frankl, Yeonmi Park, Jimmy Lai, and scores of others prove this again and again.

What you can do is substitu...

by Stephen P. White

It snowed last week here in the nation's capital, and everything shut down. This storm was unusual, not so much for the amount of snow (about five inches where I live) but for the several inches of sleet that piled on top of the snow and then promptly froze into a solid mass, like concrete.

The storm dumped much more snow farther north and much more ice farther south and west, causing massive power outages, taking down trees, and the like. The storm even spawned a handful of tornadoes. Well over 100 deaths have been attributed to the storm, which already has its own Wikipedia page.

Chances are, unless you live out West or in Southern Florida, you have your own stories about this storm.

In my neighborhood, the storm was a significant inconvenience, but hardly rose to the level of a catastrophe. Almost two weeks later, much of my street still has not been plowed. Sidewalks are mostly un-shoveled and impassable. Street parking is nearly impossible except after great excavations. My children were out of school for a solid week, followed by several days of delayed starts. They are only just now returning to something like a normal schedule.

Meanwhile, the piles of snow and ice stacked everywhere give every indication that they intend to hang around well into March.

But this is not really a column about the weather, however noteworthy that has been.

Scheduled holidays – Christmas break, for example – have a way of filling up with the usual business of carefully planned activities. But the unplanned suspension of the rhythms of ordinary life that we've had, this past week and more, had the opposite effect. Instead of our days filling up with long-planned activities, these days have been a time of extended and delightful spontaneity.

The night before the snow began to fall, Mass at the local parishes was unusually crowded as families and neighbors who rarely attend Saturday night anticipatory packed in to meet their Sunday obligation before the weather set in. One local parish even added an extra Saturday night Mass at the last minute to accommodate everyone.

It is one thing to see the usual faces at your usual Sunday Mass time. But to see the whole parish crowding into the church as if it were Christmas Eve created a palpable sense of real solidarity. There we all were, at an unusual hour, to do the last but most important thing in preparation for the coming storm.

Neighbors, at least where I live, got an extra opportunity to help one another out. Checking in before the storm, chiseling one another out from the ice afterward. Friends trudged down the half-cleared street to share an impromptu happy hour while the kids sledded down the hill. Our hoard of supplies (mostly snacks and hot cocoa) was quickly depleted.

There's something wholesome in the way a community shows its character when the comforts and self-sufficiency of modern life are threatened (just gently, but enough to notice) by the forces of nature. The need for solidarity – in the parish, between neighbors, etc. – rises to the surface. There is a delight in being consciously aware that my neighbor needs me and I need him – and that we are in this together.

When reminders of this sort come without too much danger to life or limb, it is a grace. The superfluous nature of so much that fills our everyday lives becomes evident. So much busyness, even busyness about good things, comes to a halt, and we suddenly see what we must have and what we can do without.

One of the joys of having a wood-burning fireplace is that, when the weather turns really nasty, simply remaining inside, toasty and warm, feels like an achievement. One is accomplishing a feat of survival. It is also an incitement to gratitude for things otherwise taken for granted; things like a roof over one's head, electricity, and central heating.

But there is also a kind of excitement in having to do without all our usual comforts and conveniences (again, so long as the danger is not too great...

By Auguste Meyrat

What is a feminist? This used to be an easy question to answer. When feminism simply meant equal rights and opportunities for women, most people felt comfortable identifying as such. After all, who could be against women having the right to vote and owning property?

Even as feminists have broken glass ceiling after glass ceiling, however, it has become less clear what their goals are anymore. Worse still, the rise of transgenderism has undermined the core claims of feminism by questioning the objective reality of womanhood.

Perhaps the touted benefits of the movement were overblown, and its history and underlying principles deserve more scrutiny. Perhaps those currently embracing this movement should reconsider what exactly they have accepted.

One person to guide this reconsideration is Dr. Carrie Gress, a sometime TCT contributor, in her new book Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can't Be Fused With Christianity. Far from being an unalloyed good that has empowered and liberated women, without any tradeoffs, Gress exposes the very roots of the feminist movement, which make it incompatible with the Christian Gospel. As she dismantles the many myths of feminism, she opens up much-needed inquiries into what a true Christian feminism would look like for people today.

Gress begins her case with the founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, who applied the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality in her celebrated pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In line with her rationalist unitarianism, Wollstonecraft believed "that priests, pastors, or any kind of male authority – even Jesus – were an obstacle to female potential and divine life. Instead, reason. . . was women's access point to God." Thus, from the very beginning, the main goals of feminism were liberation and empowerment, and the main obstacle was Christianity.

Even so, Wollstonecraft and other like-minded feminists often made common cause with Christian social reformers like Hannah More, combating the evils of slavery, child exploitation, and mass alcoholism. Secular feminists, however, eventually came to dominate the movement, readopting a generally hostile view of Christianity. Many of them, including American heroines Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were even involved in spiritualism and the occult.

This in turn laid the groundwork for feminists afterward to equate true feminism with a total rejection of sexual boundaries and roles. Luminaries like Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Sanger, and Betty Friedan all concluded that sex was a social construct that was fabricated and reinforced by patriarchal institutions. Therefore, it was their job to dismantle these institutions, disempower men, and become their own gods. Autonomy, the "new idol" of the feminist movement, demanded nothing less.

Thus, a movement once associated with temperance, suffrage, and protecting the family degenerated into one dedicated to promiscuity, misandry, and witchcraft. Whenever this inevitably resulted in further misery and exploitation for women at large, feminists would reflexively blame systemic sexism and demand still more privileges for women to remedy the issue.

Beyond leading so many women astray with false promises and incoherent arguments, Gress shows how modern feminism has completely obscured the deeper realities of womanhood. Instead of compromising with this ideology, Gress recommends reframing the issue with non-ideological language:

Words like woman, anthropology, male and female, common good, complementarity, equal in dignity, subsidiarity and solidarity, and even patriarchy could be used with precision. It would also have the advantage of forcing us to find new ways to describe complex realities beyond sound bites.

In other words, women should stop trying to deny their own femininity by closing their eyes and trying to be the same as men.

Gress fits this idea within the Christian context as she confronts the effort...

By Randall Smith.

Philosophers since the time of Plato have spoken about the "transcendental" properties of being – properties that all beings have, such as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Something we might learn from this list is that truth is a good.

No one wants to be lied to. We want bread; we want the truth. We may even want the truth more than we want bread. The truth is desirable, like beauty. The truth moves us the way beauty does. We are happy when we get the right answer in math or figure out how to solve a problem. But we are also drawn to things that seem true but aren't. These are illusory goods. Pursuing them is like running after a mirage of water in the desert.

Christians believe that the ultimate source of truth is God, since He is the ultimate source of all being, goodness, and beauty. We might describe this as the vertical dimension of truth: truth as it exists in the mind of God. But since, apart from the important bits we get from divine revelation, we cannot know the mind of God, we must have recourse to what I will call the "horizontal" source of truth.

We gain knowledge through our senses and by reasoning about the created world. But contrary to the hyper-individualism of thinkers like Descartes, who imagined he could build up a store of knowledge by himself through his own deductive logic, we come to know things in communion with others. We learn by conversing with others and by having our thoughts, presuppositions, and conclusions challenged.

According to Thomas Aquinas – following an idea he found in the works of Cicero and Aristotle – human beings have an inclination proper to their nature to know the truth about the highest things and to live in society. They are related. We gain the truth by living with others.

And we can only live successfully with others if we have a common dedication to the truth. But a common dedication to the truth means that I cannot merely rest in "my" truth. If I want the truth, I must be open to correction, and I must resist the temptation to rest in the comforts of an illusory "truth."

To fail to do justice to the truth would be an offense not only against my neighbor, but also against God, the source of all truth. We are commanded in the Decalogue not to lie, but we must also be positively devoted to the fullness of truth. It would be foolish to imagine that this devotion to God and the truth would not require much from us – no patience, no sacrifice, no discipline. It almost certainly will.

In this spirit, let me recommend a book with some useful, practical advice: May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans. Edmans reviews some of the biases that divert us from the truth.

One common one is called confirmation bias. This is when we accept a claim uncritically if it confirms what we'd like to be true, even if there might be alternative explanations. We also do the reverse: we reject claims we dislike and invent alternative explanations to justify our initial convictions and dismiss contrary evidence. It is common in contemporary disputes that someone who doesn't like information will find a reason to ignore it, while a supporter will view it as the gospel truth.

Not only is bias found in the interpretation of evidence, it is also found concerning what information we gather in the first place. We only look for evidence that confirms our initial hunch and don't dare poke around for something that might contradict it. Studies suggest that more knowledge rarely makes people more aware of the need to consider both sides; rather, it often gives people more reasons to praise opinions they share and deride those they don't.

Edmans perceptively analyzes the different problems that arise when we mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof. People accept statements as facts, even if the information behind them is unreliable or if the statement is broad and vague...

By Robert Royal.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Dear TCT Readers: You may notice, starting with today's column, a new look for The Catholic Thing. We've redesigned the home page in a way that we think makes it both fresher and even more elegant. We encourage you to click around in it a bit and let us know what you think

Now for today's column..

Several friends have recently asked for prayers as mothers, friends, even distant acquaintances are seriously ill or lie on their deathbeds. News comes, too, for those of us with memories of storied moments in sports that the great Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz (undefeated in 1988 and a national championship) has entered hospice care. We talk a great deal these days about the loss of the "Christian anthropology," which is to say the deeper meaning of being human in this world. But one reason for that loss, surely, is that we've also lost the main part of the story, the truth that there's an afterlife, in the next world. And that, therefore, what we do has meaning here and eternal consequences.

The recent prayer requests happened to coincide, for me, with seeing, by chance, on an overladen shelf, Seamus Heaney's lively translation of Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid. And pulling it down for yet another re-reading. It's where Aeneas enters the underworld and learns things about souls in the afterlife and the future of Rome.

I've loved Virgil since I first read him at fifteen, and when I discovered Dante a few years later, it was easy to appreciate their deep natural affinity. Dante is probably the only poet whose portrayal of the afterlife surpasses Virgil's. But that's because the "Christian anthropology" tells a larger story about life after death than even the best of pagan speculations (e.g., Plato and Cicero).

St. Augustine, too, loved the Aeneid and felt guilty, as a Christian, about an attachment to a pagan poem. But he was, maybe, over-scrupulous. The phrase anima naturaliter christiana ("a naturally Christian soul") was early applied to Virgil. That was just one of many reasons why Dante (in the Divine Comedy) could take Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory (though, out of respect for Virgil's paganism, Dante has him depart before Paradise).

In fact, before Dante and Virgil enter the underworld, Dante wants to beg off. He tells Virgil that it's understandable why St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, went to Heaven and came back. As St. Paul himself had said:

I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows), was caught up to the third heaven. And I know that this person. . . .heard ineffable things, which no one may utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)

And Aeneas, says Dante, was worthy to go there, too, since his travels (at least in Virgil's telling) led to the founding of Rome, which was to become the capital of an Empire and seat of the Catholic Church.

Yet Dante, understandably, sputters:

But I? To travel there? Who grants that?

I'm not Aeneas, nor am I Paul.

For that, neither I nor any other thinks me worthy. (Baxter trans.)

Virgil explains: this is willed in Heaven, and a whole series of saints – including the woman Dante knew as Beatrice on earth – has set it all in motion.

And as other indications suggest in that greatest of Christian poems by the greatest of Christian poets, this is a journey that we all must make. Worthiness or unworthiness is not the main point. How we live here in the brief time allotted us has a deep historical significance and an eternal destiny – for some, as even Virgil's pagan vision of the underworld made clear, eternal punishments, for others perpetual joy.

Indeed, the phrase anima naturaliter christiana, which was said especially of Virgil because of his leanings, even as a pagan, towards Christian truths, was used even more broadly in the early Church.

I only discovered this recently, but it was the early Christian theologian Tertullian who coined the phrase – and...

by James Patrick Reid.

Greater than the roar of mighty waters,

more glorious than the surging of the sea,

the Lord is glorious on high.

Truly thy decrees are to be trusted (Psalm 92/93:4)

Destructive floods might tempt one to question the Lord's governance of Creation or the trustworthiness of his decrees. But water holds a lesson for us, a lesson that was not lost on Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings and notes explore the potential of moving water for good or ill. Leonardo discovered order within the apparent chaos and force of rushing water.

The association of water with chaos dates to the dawn of Creation: "And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep." (Genesis 1:2) In Scriptural imagery, deep water is the bastion of demons. Water represents all matter insofar as it is shapeless and chaotic, prone to rebellion, waiting to be formed and made luminous. In the beginning, the Spirit of God moved over the waters to bring order out of chaos, but then man's sin stirred back up the dark depths of rebellion.

In the end, the Lord will banish this abyss of darkness from the earth; the sea will be no more. (Apocalypse chapter 21: verse 1) Meanwhile, in His Passion and Resurrection, the paschal mystery into which we are baptized, the Lord divides the sea by His strength; He breaks the heads of the dragons in the waters. (Psalm 74:13)

Christ sanctifies the waters by His descent into the Jordan, an anticipation of His death whereby He defeats the devil. The illumined water becomes an instrument of salvation; and, as the Eastern Church sings on the feast of the Lord's Baptism, "today mystical waters water all creation."

In the victory of Christ, the dark, formless abysses are filled with light, and the transformation of all creation is revealed: "Behold, I make all things new." The redemption of man begins with the purification and redemption of matter, in the blessing of the water in which he is baptized, as the Lord "works salvation in the midst of the earth." (Psalm 74:12)

The work of artists imitates the Lord's forming and transforming work. An artist plunges his hands into rudimentary matter to transform it, drawing forth a higher and more luminous form. Form, in nature and in art, always results from movement and expresses movement.

Hence, the key to good drawing is the gesture, the movement of a form, and the choreography of thoroughly coordinated movements in any composite form or group of forms. Look, for example, at this landscape drawn by Thomas Gainsborough (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The artist feels the movements of the hills and valleys like rolling waves, sweeping down from the right, recoiling and rising on the left. The rightward surge of the mountain is repeated and amplified by the bright shape in the sky and balanced by the left-leaning tree.

Or consider this watercolor by John Sell Cotman (in the British Museum).

The foreground sweeps in and back toward the factory whose rising smoke rhymes with cloud shapes that move across the sky toward the left, until these meet nearly vertical clouds set within a triangular zone of blue sky that brings us down to the pair of clouds, one gray and one bright and warm, that reach in from the left to balance and interlock with the large gray cloud that pushes from the right.

The bright cloud is augmented by the bright reflective river below it, reaching down and forward towards us on the left in balanced tension with the backward movement of the land on the right. The ship's tall mast, entrained by the mighty sweep of that land on the right, leans in its direction, threatening to unbalance the entire scene.

The bright cloud, however, grabs a hold of it to keep it from tilting any further. (Note that all the layers of space interact within the picture plane, just as near and far, past and present, interact in consciousness.) Balanced tensions manifest thorough organization of powerful forces.

In each of these artworks (as in thousand...

By Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky

Reverence and contempt for the rule of law exert a reciprocal and formative influence on both Church and secular leadership. When religious leaders exhibit implicit contempt for legal order, they weaken respect for the rule of law among secular authorities; when secular leaders disregard the rule of law – particularly by distorting the meaning of words – they erode moral seriousness within the Church. Genuine cultural renewal, therefore, depends on restoring reverence for truth in language and for the rule of law, both in personal conscience and in public governance.

The teachings of the Catholic Church are grounded in the Deposit of Faith as handed down from the Apostles. This Deposit is preserved and transmitted through Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium. Priests, bishops, and popes, by the grace of Holy Orders, serve as authoritative guardians of this faith. They are stewards, not authors. The laity, in turn, receives the faith through the Church.

Clergy teach principles of faith and morals. The laity then apply those principles to the concrete circumstances of their lives through prudential judgment properly their own. The faithful act as moral agents as free members of the Mystical Body of Christ. The Christian moral life begins with the question, "What does God, via the Church, teach?" It continues with a second, equally demanding question: "With God's grace and through my encounter with the sacraments, how am I to live accordingly?"

A parallel structure exists in the governing framework of the United States. The Declaration of Independence, followed by the Constitution and amendments, forms the philosophical and legal foundation of American law. Congress is charged with enacting laws in a manner consistent with the Constitution. The president executes those laws within constitutional limits. The Supreme Court adjudicates disputes concerning the constitutionality of laws and governmental actions. Like the Church's Deposit of Faith, the Constitution is something received and interpreted, not reinvented anew by each generation.

Ideally, a legislator approaches proposed laws with disciplined moral and constitutional reasoning. First, a wise legislator must ask whether a proposed law or spending plan is constitutional. If it is not, the law must be opposed, regardless of its popularity. If it is constitutional, the next question is whether it advances the policies preferred by constituents. If it does, the legislator should vote in favor; if not, the legislator should oppose it.

A legislator may vote, however, for a constitutional law that does not immediately serve constituent interests. This may support a broader political vision that ultimately benefits both the nation and its constituents. Legislators may rightly invoke conscience and the requirements of natural law (the law of God written on our hearts) and legitimate political exigencies for guidance.

In practice, the American political system has drifted from its constitutional moorings. Legislators rarely oppose measures on the grounds that they exceed constitutional limits. This erosion is most visible in war powers: although the Constitution assigns Congress the authority to declare war, America has not deferred to that authority since World War II, engaging instead in major conflicts – from Korea and Vietnam to the Middle East – without formal constitutional debate.

Similarly, politicians often do not oppose large government spending programs on constitutional grounds. These patterns suggest a significant breakdown in the rule of law, replaced by power politics. Power politics is increasingly rooted in financial influence rather than constitutional principle. Empirical studies consistently show that candidates who significantly outspend their opponents win congressional races at a markedly higher rate.

Meanwhile, a significant portion of voters increasingly expect their leaders to dispense government benefits detac...

By Mary Eberstadt.

But first a Note to readers in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia: TCT's Editor-in-Chief, Robert Royal, will speak about "The Heart of Saint John Henry Newman" at St. Raymond of Peñafort tomorrow after the 9 AM Mass. See the flier for details.

Now for today's column...

In his excellent recent book, Strange New World, Carl Trueman cautions Christians against naïve optimism in our "chaotic, uncharted, and dark era." It's a judicious point. There is plenty in today's culture to shock anyone into sobriety, religious believers most of all. At the same time, there's a case to be made for "informed optimism," or rational grounds for believing that Christianity will receive a more serious hearing in the West in years to come.

For over sixty years, after all, we have lived under the tyranny of a collective declaration that I am my own, and no one else's – that I decide matters of life, and the giving, taking, or preventing of life; that I, and no one else, have the right to do with my body whatever I see fit.

And this repudiation of the truth that we are not our own can now be judged by its fruits, which are everywhere around us. The declaration that I am my own, the fundamental battle cry of the sexual revolution, has rendered life radically different, and in several respects, worse for us than for any other human beings in history.

That is a large claim. The record bears it out.

Living by the credo I am my own, and no one else's has created massive suffering unnoticed until recently by anyone but the believers. That ingrained denial is now changing – and it is changing precisely because the damage out there has become unavoidable.

The toll of the idol of autonomy can be found all over: in today's legions of unhinged young people, in rates of psychological problems that have been rising for decades, in academic studies of loneliness, in social unrest, in the increasingly expressed wistfulness of a world missing its children. The verdict is in.

Further, the declaration that I am my own when it comes to sex and sexual pleasure has resulted in the single biggest impediment to romance and family and marriage today: the compulsive consumption of pornography by large numbers of young men, and some young women.

As therapists know, one result of that obsession is individuals rendered incapable of real-time romance. This terrible outcome, which may be the most terrible of all the revolution's outcomes, turns that declaration I am my own, and no one else's, into an epitaph for love itself.

This brings us, paradoxically, to a first ground for hope. So patent and inarguable is the damage out there that voices outside religious orbits have finally started calling attention to it.

New skepticism, and new indictments of unbridled sexual autonomy, are now issuing – including from writers who say they would rather not align themselves with traditional Christian teaching, but that logic and evidence led them to the same vicinity, nonetheless.

This turn toward revisionism, too, is all to the good. To have secular voices align with Church teaching on social issues, however reluctantly, and regardless of whether they credit Christians or Christianity at all, is a clear win for the Cause.

This points us to one more source of hope. In another turn that would not have been predicted even ten years ago, religious conversion and observance are no longer unheard of, even on the most elite and secularized campuses. In fact, they are on the increase – as liberal intellectual Mark Lilla noted last year (and uneasily) in an essay for the New York Review of Books about his own campus, Columbia University.

"In the past decade," he observed, "interest in Catholic ideas and practice has been growing among right-leaning intellectual elites, and it is not unusual to meet young conservatives at Ivy League institutions who have converted or renewed their faith since coming to college."

Columbia is not alone. Last spring, I gave talks at...

By Michael Pakaluk

Loyalty is a republican virtue, and more than that. "The American people have been chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the correlative of royalty," Orestes Brownson says, in his great work on our country, The American Republic, "but loyalty is rather the correlative of law."

That fact pops up from a cursory glance at the components of the word. It clearly comes from the French for law,loi. Loyalty is loi-alty. In Medieval Latin, it was simply legalitas. Loyalty is most fundamentally lawfulness.

But loyalty is not simply "a" virtue, if Brownson is correct. Recall he was writing in 1865, just after disloyal men, the "rebels," had been put down, and hundreds of thousands of loyal men gave up their lives for their country. Let us hear him out:

Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment of the law. It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice, and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most Godlike. There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a truly loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal, criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people.

So, the stakes are high for this virtue, loyalty.

And yet, it seems correct to say, our Catholic tradition in its system of ethics at least does not give direct guidance in it. I say "in its system" because who can be a better instructor in the nature of loyalty than St. Thomas More with his martyrdom and "the King's good servant and God's first"?

And yet there is no classical virtue in St. Thomas that quite corresponds to it, and the Catechism is just about silent about it. "Each man rightly owes loyalty to the communities of which he is a part" (§ 1880), the English translation has, but the Latin and French say, more simply, that he needs to be devoted to those communities, which is something else.

Brownson seems to have believed that it was impossible for what we would call "a liberal" to be loyal at all. Define a liberal as someone who believes that we are under no obligation that we have not contracted into. A mother's obligation to her child, then, comes from the fact that she has agreed to bear him to term. A Christian's obligation to believe comes from his commitment to the faith as a mature adult. A citizen's obligation to obey the law comes from the fact that he somehow has participated in a social contract by which he has "alienated" certain claims to a government. He is loyal and lawful only in the sense that he wishes to be true to himself and his word.

But Brownson places loyalty first among human virtues because it is a recognition of the authority of God and his law, flowing down from above, through a government responsible for the common good of some definite people, rooted in some definite place. We are bound by God's law because He is our Creator, and He is true and just, quite apart from what we have agreed to. That is why the self-sacrifice of a soldier on the field of battle in a just cause can be so admirable and even fruitful, because it is a return back to God of the gift of one's life.

Loyalty so understood ethically requires personification. It is for the motherland or fatherland, or for the nation in relation to the Father of the Country.

St. Pope John Paul II's famous homily in Victory Square, Warsaw, before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, is a hymn to loyalty, "I wish to kneel before this tomb to venerate every seed that falls into the earth and dies and thus bears fruit."

And then he generalizes and, without quite saying so explicitly, makes loyalty the animating virtue for the entire life of a citizen and patriot:

It may be the seed of the blood of a soldier shed on the battlefield, or the sacrifice of martyrdom in concentration camps or in prisons. It may be the seed of hard daily toil, with t...