The Catholic Thing

By Alden Abbott

But first a note from Robert Royal:

So, we're back at our fundraising – and need to be. We're well into the campaign but need to pick up the pace. I know this isn't a great economy at the moment, but we have to ask you to pray and dig deep. It's a good deal. I'm told the reward for generosity will be even greater in Heaven.

Now for today's column.

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas thoughtfully speaks to one of the great anxieties of our moment: whether artificial intelligence, data platforms, robotics, and global capital will serve the human person or reduce us to a disposable input. Its concern for workers, the poor, families, and the marginalized is recognizably Catholic. The economy exists for man, not man for the economy.

On that much, Catholics should readily agree.

But good moral ends do not guarantee sound economic means. The encyclical criticizes market economics for allowing profit, technological efficiency, and concentrated ownership to outrun solidarity. It warns that automation may displace workers, data may become an instrument of control, and the benefits of innovation may be captured by a narrow elite.

It therefore calls for stronger public oversight, redistributive taxation, social criteria for innovation, protection of workers, and regulation of AI and data so that economic life becomes more inclusive from the beginning rather than corrected after the fact.

The moral worry is serious. Yet the policy instinct is less convincing. Historian Thomas E. Woods, in The Church and the Market, makes a distinction that Catholic social thought badly needs: the Church speaks authoritatively on moral principles, but technical economic analysis is a matter of prudence, evidence, and reason.

A pope may rightly condemn indifference to the poor; it does not follow that wage controls, industrial planning, redistributive schemes, or technology regulation will actually help them.

Markets are often caricatured as cold machines for rewarding greed. At their best, they are systems of social cooperation.

Prices communicate information that no official can fully possess. Profit and loss discipline production by showing whether resources are being used to serve real human wants. Competition limits power more effectively than many regulations, because it gives customers, workers, and entrepreneurs alternatives. When property rights, contracts, sound money, and the rule of law are secure, markets draw dispersed knowledge and talent into productive service.

This matters, especially for labor. Wages are not simply the result of employer benevolence or employer oppression. Over time, wages rise when workers become more productive, when capital per worker increases, when firms compete for labor, and when people are free to move, learn, start businesses, and bargain with multiple potential employers.

Policies that make hiring more costly or innovation riskier may protect some visible jobs today while preventing the creation of better jobs tomorrow.

[caption id="attachment_357703" align="aligncenter" width="614"]

Leo XIV signs Magnifica Humanitas [Vatican News via YouTube screenshot][/caption]

Automation offers a clear example. A robot or AI system may replace a particular task. That loss is concrete and painful. But productivity gains also reduce prices, improve quality, create new firms, and free labor for uses no planner could have specified in advance.

The poor often benefit first from cheaper necessities: food, energy, transport, health tools, education, communication, and financial services. When regulation slows innovation in the name of protecting workers, it may instead preserve stagnation and deny low-income families the gains that innovation makes possible.

The same caution applies to AI and data rules. Some law is necessary: fraud, coercion, theft, privacy violations, and genuine abuses should be punished. But heavy, vague, or premature AI regulation may entrench the very corporate power Catholics fea...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

A Good Friday death – even for a Catholic giant of the last fifty years – meant that less attention was paid than deserved. On the other hand, it was fitting for the author of Patì sotto Ponzio Pilato? – Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate?

Vittorio Messori, a few days shy of his 85th birthday, died on Good Friday evening last month, drawing to a close one of the most important Catholic lives of recent generations, a life that shaped how people think about Christ and about His Vicar on earth. Messori gave definitive shape to how the voices of popes are heard, and thus to the papacy in our time.

Catholics know well the impact that the convert-journalist can have, even more than the gifted theologian. English-speakers have G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge and Richard John Neuhaus, and French-speakers Andre Frossard.

Messori grew up in a Communist and anti-clerical Italian family, a student of rationalism who professed agnosticism. In 1964, during the summer break from his university studies, he had something of an instantaneous conversion after reading Matthew's Gospel.

He applied his rationalism to his newly professed Catholic faith. What could reason tell us about Catholic claims, and their coherence? At a time when apologetics was falling out of fashion, Messori devoted himself, with a journalist's frame of mind and skills, to a project that would consume more than a decade.

In 1976 he published Hypotheses about Jesus in Italian, the fruit of his work, appealing to history, reason, data, and experience to make arguments for the faith. It was a sensation, selling more than a million copies in Italy – and translated all over the world. (English here.) It made Messori a major cultural figure – a Catholic journalist, not just a journalist. He became the Church's leading apologist in the 1970s, a lay witness who engaged atheists, materialists, and Communists on the reasonableness of the faith.

In 2002, he adopted the same approach to the passion, examining the extra-biblical evidence for the crucifixion and death of Jesus in Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate?

Messori's greatest influence, however, was not made in his own voice, but in two book-length interviews he conducted, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church (1985) and, with Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994). The interview book format, now routine for senior prelates, was a genre that Messori did not invent, but elevated.

In 1984, Andre Frossard had published Be Not Afraid (in French), the fruit of lengthy conversations with St. John Paul the Great. The book had little impact.

At the same time as Frossard's book was being released, Messori persuaded Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to sit over several days for interviews on the state of the Church, some twenty years after Vatican II. The prefect of doctrine, and most important figure in the Roman Curia, was unsparing in his frank criticisms of a range of lamentable trends, rejecting what he would later call the "hermeneutic of rupture," and even using the combustible word "restoration".

John Paul had summoned an "extraordinary synod" for October 1985 to evaluate the lights and shadows of the post-conciliar period. It would give rise to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Messori's interview with Ratzinger set the terms of debate – to the frustrations of those progressives who realized that Ratzinger's book was a turning point.

"This is a synod about a council, not a book!" protested Cardinal Godfried Daneels of Belgium. It was, but the book provided the synod's script.

Messori proposed an unprecedented television interview with John Paul for the fifteenth anniversary of the pontificate in 1993. The Holy Father agreed but the interview never came off. John Paul kept the questions Messori wanted to ask and gave him written responses to do with as he thought best. Crossing the Threshold of Hope was the result, a publishing phenomenon tha...

By Kristen Ziccarelli

But first a note from Robert Royal: We've reached the end of another week in our mid-year funding campaign and we're about two-thirds of the way to our goal. We can't slack off now. What we do in these days makes a difference between TCT continuing and – well – let's not think about that. Don't make me beg, please. We need your help, today, to make the coming days all they can be at The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

On her Feast Day today, May 30, Joan of Arc is remembered as one of the greatest saints of not just her time, but all time. The Maid of Orleans inspires us all with her military victories for France, fearlessness in battle. and extraordinary trial and martyrdom.

And yet, the most important thing about Joan was none of those things, but the fact that she was obsessed with the will of God. As Alexandre Havard writes from her perspective in Coached by Joan of Arc: Lessons in Virtuous Leadership, "my love for France was not the fruit of an extreme patriotism. It is true that my father was a patriot. However, what obsessed me was the will of God. My patriotism did not give birth to my visions; my visions gave birth to my patriotism. My voices advised me to do things I could not imagine; they commanded me to do things I found repugnant. I felt sorry for the French because God felt sorry for them. I loved France for God."

At her canonization in 1920, Pope Benedict XV's Divina disponente declared that St. Joan of Arc would be added to "the number of Saints, so that, from her example, all Christians may learn that obedience to the will of God is holy and devout, and obtain from her the grace to convert their fellow citizens to obtain heavenly life."

At thirteen years old, Joan began receiving visions from God and the saints. France at the time was fractured by the Hundred Years' War. England had claimed much of northern France, including Paris, and the French throne itself stood empty. As the English laid siege to the city of Orléans along the Loire River, the nation appeared close to collapse.

Illiterate and barely more than a child, eighteen-year-old Joan sought the help of her uncle to bring her to the Dauphin, the future Charles VII. She told him that she had been sent by God "to raise the siege of Orléans and to aid you in recovering your kingdom. God wills it so."

Against every worldly expectation, Joan helped lead French forces to a series of victories against the English and safely escorted Charles to Reims, where he was crowned at the cathedral King of France in 1429. On May 30, 1431, she was put on trial and burned at the stake for "heresy" in Rouen.

Both in 1431 and now, nearly 600 years after her trial, the distinction between patriotism and obedience matters enormously. Her response to serve God faithfully in the concrete circumstances He placed her in changed the course of history.

Many devoted faithful are often tempted toward one of two extremes. Some withdraw from public life altogether, convinced that retreat is more noble or exhausted from the civic decline they witness around them. Others immerse themselves in political identity so completely that faith becomes secondary to partisan allegiance. Reading her trial documents or the many accounts of her life, it is clear St. Joan of Arc did not possess a partisan soul, nor did she fight for the nation as an end in itself.

That is a kind of patriotism that is profoundly Christian, because it does not ignore a nation's failures, nor does it idolize national identity. Instead, it asks what God's will is: discerning our duty toward our own (the ones closest to us in our neighbors, our communities, and our country). Saint Joan of Arc understood that love of country could become a form of Christian service when it was ordered properly by a prior love of God.

St. Joan of Arc's life also helps us to recover a richer understanding of the virtue of piety. St. Thomas Aquinas describes piety as the virtue by which we render "duty an...

By Joseph R. Wood

But first a note from Robert Royal: As Professor Wood lucidly explains today, the choice of path - between a desire for comfort and doing what's right - is not new. And in several ways the stakes are even clearer now. Which reminds me that we're well into our finding campaign now. And I need to urge more of you to choose what's right and support our work. There are no guarantees for a venture like The Catholic Thing. No endowment, no government grants, no assurances about the morrow. All we have is you. Please, if you're here, you know why you're here. Just do it. Support TCT. Today.

Now for today's column...

Much is already being written at the moment about AI and the suitable Catholic response to it. So this column will not be about AI.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov has been driven, by his revulsion to evil in the world, to "rebellion" against God, and perhaps to the edge of insanity. He has written a poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," which he recounts to his brother, the devout (if perhaps a bit naïve) Alyosha.

The poem is set "in Spain, in Seville, in the most horrible time of the Inquisition, when fires blazed every day to the glory of God." Ivan does not admire Western rationalism and science, nor the Roman Church.

After centuries of pleading from Christians, Christ has appeared in Seville, and he is immediately recognized by all. "All" includes the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, the aged Jesuit responsible for determining which heretics will be turned over to civil authorities for immolation. Just after Christ had raised a girl from the dead on the steps of the Seville cathedral, the Grand Inquisitor orders his arrest and confinement.

Ivan paints the people of Seville as "so tamed, submissive, and tremblingly obedient to his will" that the Grand Inquisitor can lead the Savior to prison without protest. He enjoys a totalitarian grip on the people, who will not oppose him even in the presence of the One they know to be Christ.

The Inquisitor proceeds to interrogate his prisoner, though the interrogation turns out to be a monologue of recrimination aimed at the silent man of sorrows. "You may as well not come at all now, or at least don't interfere with us for the time being."

The Inquisitor's case against Christ centers around the question of human freedom and our capacity to endure it. Christ, claims the Inquisitor, often said that he wanted to make men free. "But we have finally finished this work in your name. For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished and well finished." The Inquisitor doesn't want any disruptions to his work, not even from the One in whose name he conducts it.

"These people [in Seville] are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet." He and his colleagues "have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy."

Such is the usual trade-off proposed by totalitarians: hand us your freedom, and we'll secure your happiness in peace and safety.

This happiness does not consist in the Aristotelian and Catholic understanding of the human telos as contemplation of the divine, an activity of soul in accord with virtue. It's rather a version of pleasure-seeking, with material needs met and no need for difficult choices. No inconvenience, just pacified ease and comfort.

The Inquisitor sees in the three temptations of Christ "three questions [in which] everything was so precisely divined and foretold, and has proved to be so completely true, that to add to them or subtract anything from them is impossible." In answering those questions as He did, Christ chose freedom over obedience to the "dread and intelligent spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-being."

But in offering such a possibility of freedom to humanity, Christ erred, charges the Inquisitor. He greatly ove...

By Stephen P. White

But first a note from Robert Royal: We're moving along nicely with our mid-year fundraising and we're grateful to all who have already donated. But we still have a way to go, and the time grows short. Please help me to stop annoying you daily. Make your contribution and let's get this done for the sake of The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

Pope Leo the XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, was released earlier this week. It is long for an encyclical, and unexpected in some ways. It is worth reading, worth sitting with. What follows is not a summary, still less a "review" of the document, but some reflections provoked by the encyclical.

First a story: At a conference some while back, I met a man who works for a large, Catholic, charitable organization. During our conversation, he made an important point about the work he and his colleagues do every day. Reading this encyclical brought that conversation back to mind.

The goal of their efforts, he said, is not simply to serve the poor; the goal is to meet Christ in the poor they serve.

And to illustrate the point, he told this story. An enterprising and well-meaning manager of a local branch of his organization had implemented a new distribution system by which someone could pull up in their car, receive their allotment of charitable contributions without leaving their car, and be off again in a matter of seconds.

And that, my interlocutor insisted, was a huge problem.

It was enterprising, efficient, and totally impersonal. What was distinctively Christian, or even distinctively human, about such "drive-thru charity"? Where was the opportunity to meet Christ in another or to be Christ to them?

It is not too difficult to see how such a critique of efficiency at the cost of interpersonal (that is, human) interaction could be applied to artificial intelligence. And Pope Leo does just that in Magnifica humanitas, for example, when he writes:

When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.

Technology that removes human imperfection and brokenness – or leads us to remove the broken person altogether – removes a privileged place to encounter Christ Himself. In the suffering of Jesus, man's weakness, his frailty, and even his poverty take on an entirely new dimension. The difference between entering into human frailty and eradicating it has profound implications:

Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited 'upgrades,' in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people's wounds.

Notice, while such warnings are appropriate to the uncritical use of artificial intelligence, they are hardly unique to the looming challenge of AI. Many of the critiques of AI in this encyclical are of this kind: more generally applicable to modern technology and less specific to the challenges of AI than some readers (myself included) may have expected.

This encyclical declares its subject to be "On Safeguarding the Dignity of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." And while this encyclical certainly deals with AI, the heart of the document is much more a positive defense of human dignity than it is a thoroughgoing or definitive critique of AI.

Which brings us to the next observation about this encyclical: Magnifica humanitas is, in a way, as much an encyclical about Catholic Social Teaching as it is a contribution to that corpus of teaching.

Pope Leo spends the first 15,000 words or so, laying out ...

By Matthew Walz

But first a note from Robert Royal: Professor Walz reminds us today of a fundamental truth: that underneath all the challenges we face, it all comes down to trusting the One who deserves our trust. This evening, we'll be starting a short course on the Augustinianism of Pope Leo, which will look at some additional home truths that our world ignores at its peril. Please join us by enrolling (click here). And please, also, remember why it's important to support everything we do at The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column...

During this past academic year, I was honored to hold the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College. (This was especially an honor since this same Chair was held initially by TCT's own Robert Royal and then by Joseph Pearce.) Soon after accepting this appointment, the Church announced that she was going to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor or Teacher of the Church, which she did last November. For me, this was a happy coincidence or a "God-incidence," as a priest once suggested I call such a happening. I was being asked, I thought, to ponder the significance of Newman as a Doctor.

The "of" in "Doctor of the Church" (the genitive case of Ecclesia) certainly expresses a relationship of possession: a Doctor belongs to the Church; he or she worked and still works on behalf of the Church's evangelistic mission. The "of" also suggests, it seems to me, the object of a Doctor's teaching (in Latin, Ecclesiae can be read as an "objective genitive"). Thus a Doctor not only represents the Church, but also teaches the Church herself, bringing her to a greater realization of revealed truth.

The Church learns something new from Newman. Newman mined the depths of the Church's Scriptures and Tradition in illuminating ways, and in turn he articulated novel insights that have now become part of the Church's intellectual treasury. Newman taught the Church a whole host of things, ranging from the development of doctrine to the primacy of truth to the nature of conscience.

But I want to consider here something that the newest Doctor teaches the Church by reflecting on a captivating phrase that he uses, a phrase altogether pertinent to those who desire to be sanctified in truth. The phrase comes from a meditation written by Newman called "Hope in God – Creator," one of the most powerful of his numerous Meditations on Christian Doctrine.

God the Creator, Newman says, "knows what He's about." God knows what He's about! Perhaps more than any Doctor, Newman teaches us how to take this phrase as a touchstone for our lives. Do we know what we are about? Do we trust that God knows what He's about? What does it even mean to know what one is about, especially since we encounter so many shadows and images on our way toward and into truth? (Newman had the words Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem cut on to his tomb).

Humanly speaking, to know what one is about is an achievement, perhaps of a lifetime. Great minds have long recognized it as such, though not as pithily as Newman. Consider, for example, Socrates, undoubtedly a man who knew what he was about. The Delphic oracle revealed that none is wiser than Socrates. Thus provoked, Socrates probes this assertion, eventually seeing that its truth lay in Socrates' knowing-that-he-does-not-know.

As Plato recounts it, moreover, Socrates' knowing-that-he-does-not-know stood at the heart of his apologia, his defense against those fellow Athenians who accused him of spreading harmful teachings.

Newman, of course, also delivered an Apologia in response to similar accusations from his fellow countrymen. Like Socrates, Newman narrates just how far he probed his own knowing-that-he-does-not-know in pursuit of the fullness of truth. It was a relentlessly honest probing that led him into the arms of Mother Church and the intellectual sanctuary of her infallibility.

We know, of course, that there exists an even greater model o...

By Randall Smith

But first a note from Robert Royal: Pope Leo has issued the first encyclical of his pontificate, Magna humanitas, and we'll be bringing you some carefully considered reflections on it in the days to come. In the meantime, the Prayerful Posse did a quick read and taping on some of the main points, good and neuralgic, for further discussion. To access the discussion, click here. And please remember that it's only because of your support that we're able to bring you these kinds of things at The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

Some people have trouble reading Dante's Commedia. For a "comedy," it doesn't seem all that funny. Teachers will tell you it is a "comedy" in the sense that it has a happy ending in Heaven. Some people might chuckle at some of the punishments Dante envisions for certain souls in the Inferno, but others would consider this callous. Who would be so heartless as to laugh at the misfortune of others? It's so medieval. And yet, I wonder whether we are as self-aware as we often assume.

Let's say you were in Dante's place, and you were trekking with your guide through the Inferno. You happen upon a dark space illuminated solely by a dull blue glow. As your eyes get accustomed to the dim light, you realize that the dull blue glow is radiating from box-shaped computer monitors, each of which is sitting on top of what looks like a combination human body and old telephone operator's plug board, with wires running in and out of various holes.

"Where are we?" you ask your spirit guide, Mike Judge, writer and director of the movie Office Space. "This is the dark valley where pitiless, unhelpful IT technicians and bureaucrats go who have not repented for their crimes against humanity." At that moment, you hear voices saying to each poor soul as he tries to put the right plug into the right hole to "connect" his system: "I'm sorry, sir, but the system is currently unavailable." Or "We're sorry, but you don't have the correct software to connect to that port." Now, be honest. Tell me there wouldn't be part of you that would have to stifle a chuckle.

And then let's say you go on, and in another valley, brightly lit with incandescent light, you find an intellectual-looking white woman with glasses in a business suit sitting in a chair marked "safe space" being poked by demons on each side. One says, "not those pronouns, these."

Another shouts, "minorities are enslaved because of you, and if you don't say you're sorry, you're as guilty as a slave owner, and if say you're sorry, you're worse."

A third pokes with another sharp stick and says, "You're a woman, so you are a disadvantaged minority. But don't claim to be a disadvantaged minority because that would be insensitive to real disadvantaged minorities."

A fourth pokes her and says: "Children are disgusting. But aren't you feeling ashamed because you don't have any children?" The woman in the chair seems determined to please each demon that pokes her, saying, "Yes, that's right. No, absolutely." Flying above her head are harpies that swoop and scream repeatedly "racist, racist, racist!" She screams, "Not me, them!" But the harpies take no notice of her.

When your spirit guide turns to you as if to tell you about the woman, you just shake your head and say: "No need. I know who this is." Now, in this instance, you might not laugh, but by the same token, would you not say to yourself: "That's unfortunate, but it kind of makes sense." When you ask your guide, "Isn't there something that can be done?" he merely looks away into the distance and says: "We must be moving on."

Lower down, you find the CEO of the company who put thousands of your fellow workers out of a job ("reduction in force" is what they called it). Though he nearly bankrupted the company, he walked away with $40 million in a "golden parachute." He is pushing an expensive BMW out of gas up a steep hill to what looks like a gas station at the top. But when he gets to the top, the car...

By Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

But first a note from Robert Royal: A happy Memorial Day to all our readers. As we remember the heroes fallen in war, let us all recommit ourselves to the battles that must be fought in our own day – both on real battlefields and in daily life – against the many current threats to human life, liberty, and Godliness.

Now for today's column...

The great French preacher Lacordaire once said the vocation of a soldier is next in dignity to the priesthood, not only because it commissioned him to defend justice on the field of battle and order on the field of peace, but also because it called him to the spirit and intention of sacrifice.

Generally, respect for groups varies with their number; the more numerous they are, the less they are esteemed. But it is not so with the fighting forces. No group equally large is so revered. It is their high calling to the defense of justice and freedom that makes them loved.

It was a soldier who first uttered the words recalled by the Church at Communion: "Lord, I am not worthy to have Thee come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed." (Matthew 8:8) The Breviary, which priests read daily, praises Judas Maccabeus, who refused to surrender to superior enemy forces and died saying: "Far be it from us to do such a thing as to flee from them. If our time has come, let us die bravely for our brethren, and leave no cause to question our honor." (I Maccabees 9:10)

Isaiah heard the Seraphim around the throne of God address Him as the Lord of Armies. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory." (Isaiah 6:3) Life is a battle. St. Paul himself said: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." (II Timothy 4:7)

In a similar spirit, he enjoined Timothy: "This charge I commit to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophetic utterances which pointed to you, that inspired by them you may wage the good warfare." (I Timothy 1:18) "Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus." (II Timothy 2:3)

The soldier's armor in the great battle of life is as follows: "Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take also the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." (Ephesians 6:14-17)

There is a war inside me: the flesh against the spirit. "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members." (Romans 7:23) If He who valued life more than anyone else did not consider death too great a price for Him to pay to defeat evil, why should I not be prepared in His name to suffer the hardships of armed service so that evil may be conquered?

If the Cross of our Savior was a proof that there was something wrong in man that could be righted only by a sacrificial death, why should not this war be to me a proof that there is something so wrong with the modern world that it can be righted only by my sacrificial life? I am not fighting for a freedom that means the right to do whatever I please but for a freedom that means the right to do whatever I ought.

Oughtness implies Law; Law implies Intelligence; and Intelligence implies God. I am not fighting merely to make the world safe for democracy; I am fighting to preserve the roots of democracy – the moral law rooted not in Power, but in God. I am not fighting for freedom from something; but for freedom for something: the glorious freedom to call my soul my own and then to save it in cooperation with God's grace.

I am not fighting to preserve the kind of world we had just before this war. If I were, I would be fighting to preserve a world that produced tyrants and dictators. The n...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Philip Neri had the custom of rising late at night or in the first hours of morning, making his way through the sleeping city of Rome, outside the city walls, to the Basilica of Saint Sebastian. There he would descend beneath the church, to the ancient catacombs, where the first Christians of Rome met for Mass, where so many martyrs slept. In that sacred place he would spend time in prayer.

On one such occasion, the Apostle of Rome went to those catacombs on the vigil of Pentecost. As he prayed, the Holy Spirit appeared to him as a globe of fire that entered his mouth and settled in his heart. He felt his heart expand. From that moment on, as people would later testify, there came from his heart a mysterious but perceptible warmth, indeed a heat. After his death an autopsy revealed that two ribs had broken to form an arch, to accommodate the enlarged heart.

It's fitting that the feast of Saint Philip Neri (May 26, this Tuesday) often falls so close to Pentecost. For his experience in the catacombs is a great lesson on how we should receive the Spirit this day. As is the case with every miracle, his encounter with the Holy Spirit reveals in an extraordinary manner what should be ordinary for every Catholic. And, lest we think Saint Philip's experience was odd, we should recall that we pray often for the same thing: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Namely, heartburn and broken ribs.

First, heartburn. That the Spirit settles in the heart – the center of love – tells us a lot about Who He is and what He does. The Holy Spirit is the Love of God. That's not just a pious saying but the profound theological truth. Nor is the Holy Spirit only love from God. He is the love of God – that is, the love within God, between the Father and the Son, the love that exists from all eternity. He is the Person Whom Saint John Paul II called the "uncreated Love-Gift."

As the Person Who is Love, the Spirit is given to us so that we can love. For "the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us." (Romans 5:5) All His gifts and graces are given so that we can be perfected in love. All His fruits are ultimately the effects of love. The Holy Spirit effects holiness, which is perfection in love.

Further, the image of fire reveals how this Person accomplishes His work of love within us. The Holy Spirit is like fire, a love that purifies, enlightens, and energizes. He purifies our hearts from the lesser loves that hold us. He enlightens our hearts to know God, to know ourselves, and to know how to love. He gives us the power to love others with God's own love.

For those around him, the heat radiating from Saint Philip's heart manifested God's love within him. Again, this extraordinary event reveals what should be normative. Our union with the Spirit should produce in us a warmth that radiates to others by our words and deeds. In fact, what is most amazing is not that the Spirit's warmth was manifested through Saint Philip Neri but that it is not so evident in us.

Second, the broken ribs. Now, it should be noted that this injury did not impede Philip's life. He lived a busy apostolic life for 50 years after the incident. Obviously, there was some pain involved in this gift of the Spirit. But we should think of it as the "gentle violence" of the Spirit that Saint Francis duh Sales speaks of. Or as a salutary correction, as we ask the Spirit in today's Sequence to "Bend the stubborn heart and will."

In short, to receive the Spirit, something within must give. We typically want to shoehorn God into our lives, to make Him work for us. But the Spirit does not fit into our worldly lives. He's not, if you will, designed for that. Rather, like a driving wind that brings in fresh air but also sometimes upends things, He dislocates aspects of our lives so that there is more room for Him to work.

Point is, there is nothing conveni...

By Anthony Esolen

But first a note from Robert Royal:

Reports out of New York say that the state's Department of Health has issued warnings to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, whose order has, for over a century, run a hospice for patients dying of incurable cancer. Indeed, the village where their hospice is located was renamed Hawthorne in their honor. The state, however, without giving it much thought, passed a law requiring all nursing homes to accommodate women who insist that they are men, and men who insist they are women, and other permutations of sexual expression that that factory of illusions, the human fancy, can invent.

As Anthony Esolen makes clear today, it's almost a radical act these days to speak obvious truths that no one - until the past few troubled years - would have even thought to deny. At TCT, we're committed to pursuing many subtle and complex truths, but also those simple, blunt truths necessary to bring a world badly out of kilter to something like sanity again. In fact, there's room for similar work inside the Church as well. We're moving along nicely with our funding, but we've still got a way to go. Tomorrow is Sunday, when no one should fundraise. So let's do - today - what needs doing. If you come here regularly, I'm sure you know. Keep TCT going this year and well into times to come.

That, of course, is not how they put it. It is as a sensible person may put it. So might a sensible person affirm other biological facts evident to anyone with eyes or a clear mind, such as that dogs can only be either boy-dogs or girl-dogs, regardless of whether they have been neutered, or that the developing child in the womb is human, individual, alive, a complete organism, and exactly where it is natural for him to be.

Now for today's column...

The sisters have gotten no complaints from their residents, so that the state's warnings appear to be motivated by sheer gratuitous enmity. For the sisters are Catholic. They have responded as did Peter in Acts: "We must obey God, not men."

The ironies abound. Their hospice is located in a village called Hawthorne, renamed for their order in the days when New Yorkers were grateful to them for undertaking work, at no expense to the state, that no one else was eager to do. Their foundress, Sister Alphonsa Mary, was none other than Rose Lathrop Hawthorne, the daughter of that titan of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, certainly no Catholic, though he bore no Puritan animus against the Church.

Nor did Rose, a convert, dishonor the memory of her mother and father. Far from it. Literary scholars owe to her a great debt of gratitude, for preserving, editing, and publishing their correspondence. I have read some of the letters they wrote when they lived for a few years in Italy and became close friends of Robert and Elizabeth Browning.

Rose remarked that all the great English and American writers and artists of that time, regardless of their faith, made their way to Italy to drink from the springs of Catholic culture.

Hawthorne himself, half-Puritan in sensibility, was acutely aware of his ancestry, even ashamed of it, as he was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, the most aggressive of the judges in the Salem witch trials. Those trials brought together the worst of both sexes.

In men like Cotton Mather, who died still believing there was witchcraft in Salem, the matter was set afire by the ferocity of intellectual warfare; he was fighting against a recrudescent materialism. If devils are real, materialism is false.

The victims of Salem were chewed up in the wheels of his acute and relentless mind. I hope God forgave him before he died, but if not, a present-day Dante might find a way to place him beside Lenin, two murderers by abstraction.

The girls come off no better. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine a group of boys getting together to faint, jabber, shriek, writhe, and set a whole colony by its ears with visions of the occult, catching the habit by s...