By Francis X. Maier.

Earlier this month, I returned from two weeks in Rome covering the run-up and conclusion to the recent conclave. It was an extraordinary experience. On the day before Cardinal Prevost was elected, a friend and colleague - the excellent Jayd Henricks - asked me what I thought a new pope should take as his pontifical name. I said Augustine. More than Benedict or Dominic or any other saint, Augustine is the obvious patron for our age. Of course, we didn't get a "Pope Augustine." But we did get an Augustinian. I think - and I hope - that's significant. And I'll try to explain why.

Looking back on the Francis pontificate, I wonder if one of its main, if unintended, functions was to provide a clean break between the immediate post-conciliar period and its conflicts, and something living, organic, and new in the Leo papacy. We live in a turbulent time. It's similar to the Reformation - not in its historical details, but in its underlying impulses and dynamic. It's a deep re-formation of how we think about the world, the organization of society, and what it means to be human - all driven by technologies that make Gutenberg's printing press look like a toy.

In effect, we're at the end of one age, and the start of another. And that's exactly where Augustine found himself as bishop of Hippo, as the ancient Roman world fell apart. Augustine was always a realist, but also a man of hope. He pastored, encouraged, and faithfully served his people in a bitterly difficult time, while producing some of the most brilliant and fruitful thought in human history. If Leo XIV can deliver a fraction of that richness through his Augustinian formation, the Church will heal and thrive.

We need that new life. We need it because many of us - too many of us in my generation - live our faith mainly as a practical code of everyday behavior and good social ethics. But that's not Christianity, and we don't really need Jesus Christ or his Cross for any of it. Catholics in this country have historically been outsiders and unwelcome. So we've worked very hard over the past century to be accepted into American culture. In a sense, that's become our real religion. And we've succeeded exceptionally well at it - so well that many of us are much more faithfully "American" than we are "Catholic." The result is predictable.

A lot of American life today is a blend of vanilla spirituality that doesn't make many demands on our time and attention, and a pervasive, practical consumer atheism that does. The decline in our Catholic numbers nationwide is simply the truth forcing its way to the surface through layers of self-deception that we've accumulated as a Church over half a century or more. The truth can be painful, but it's never bad. The truth makes us free: free to change; free to remember who we are as Catholics and why we're here; and free to do better.

My point is this: What we choose or don't choose, what we do or don't do, does matter. Augustine said that being faithful in little things is a big thing, and the little things we do can have very big consequences. Our job isn't to succeed, but to witness. Recovering a humility about our own silent apostasies, the need for our own deeper conversion, and clarity about the challenges for Catholic life in our country that lie ahead - these things begin the renewal of our Church and our nation. And we can thank our current media and political leaders, in both parties, for pushing that process along with the unintended gift of their mendacity.

History is a great teacher, and one of its lessons is this: Under pressure, the tepid leave. But the faithful grow stronger, more committed to the truth, and thus more profoundly free. That's always been the story of the Church. And God always wins. Always. Despite all the malice directed at the Church down through the centuries; despite her own worst periods of bumbling and corruption; despite our own sins and failures and most ingenious acts of self-sabotage ...

By Amy Fahey.

Today marks the birth, in 1882, of Norwegian novelist and Catholic convert Sigrid Undset, whose sweeping medieval sagas, Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, deserve to be read by every serious Catholic. Tomorrow I will walk a portion of the Olavsleden, the medieval pilgrimage route to the tomb of St. Olav in Trondheim.

These two events - her 1882 birth and my 2025 pilgrimage - are not unrelated. My discovery of Kristin Lavransdatter nearly two decades ago set me on a journey deeper into the life, works, and landscape of this remarkable and neglected literary artist, and into the heart of her own devotion to Norway's patron saint. Great works have the capacity to do that: to captivate you, challenge you, awaken something in your soul and spirit. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken." (Keats on reading Chapman's Homer)

When I first looked into Kristin Lavransdatter, the translation I read was the one authorized in Undset's lifetime, by Charles Archer. In recent years, it's been eclipsed by Tiina Nunnally's version, which many readers consider more approachable and authentic. But I am glad that Cluny Media has brought Archer back into print, and not simply for nostalgic reasons.

Since the novel is set in medieval Norway, Archer chose a kind of pseudo-medieval diction for the characters' speech, rendering that world simultaneously familiar and distant. The "thees" and "thous" and "'twas's" may at first seem a tad ridiculous. Rod Dreher calls the translation "fusty"; other commentators are even less generous. But it is helpful to recall that Undset herself was taken with Middle English prose from a young age, even translating Malory's Morte D'Arthur into Norwegian. The "artificiality" of the Archer translation, like that of Malory's prose, soon falls away, so much so that the reader may even find himself beginning to think in such cadences.

In contrast, Nunnally almost always chooses a pared-down and simplified diction, often to the point of prosaicness, sometimes even in contradiction to the original. Where Kristin assesses her failings at the end of her life and accuses herself of being lat (literally lazy), Archer chooses "slothful" while Nunnally chooses "indolent"; where trådte is lyrically translated as "trod" by Archer, Nunnally chooses the more pedestrian "walked" (I am grateful Hopkins in "God's Grandeur" doesn't make a similar choice by telling us that generations "have walked, have walked, have walked.")

Slothful, trod, heartily, deemed, belike, bade - there can be too much of a good thing where poetic diction is concerned, and Archer is sometimes guilty of the charge. But an attentive Catholic reader also detects a pattern of theological downgrading in the newer translation, or at least of ambiguity and imprecision. A "sick call" in the Archer translation becomes "visiting a sick parishioner" in Nunnally. The priest carrying the Eucharist in a silver pyx shaped like a dove is, in Undset's original, literally bearing "the silver dove with God's body." This is exactly how Archer translates it, while Nunnally renders it "the silver dove with the Holy Host."

When a Catholic priest goes on a sick call, though, he is not paying a friendly visit or even simply praying with a sick parishioner. He's administering a Sacrament. Perhaps Nunnally wished to spare readers confusion; no one knows what a sick call is anymore, and frankly, calling the Eucharist "God's body" (though Holy Host is also technically accurate) might puzzle even Catholic readers, since, apparently, two-thirds of them no longer believe in the Real Presence anyway. But again and again, Nunnally's choices tend to sacrifice something rich, lyrical, and true for the sake of something that might best be described as "relatable."

Fran Maier recently expressed concern about Emily Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey, which jettisons the familiar grand summoning of the muse to "sing" for so...

by Robert Royal.

Benedict XVI often prayed a phrase that he'd noticed in Augustine's Confessions: "da quod iubes, et iube quod vis," "O give what you command, Lord, and command what you will." (Bk. ten, xxix) Worth reciting daily, because it's both short and rich. And typical of how great thinkers can say much in a few words (multum in parvo, as the old Romans put it). Surprisingly, Benedict/Ratzinger was sometimes criticized for using those words, as Augustine himself has been. The context - Augustine was praying for continence, which the dictionary defines as "self-restraint, especially with regard to sex" - is clearly part of it. But there's doubtless, more - a lot more.

We've been laboring under a misconception for decades in the Church. Many people believe that God would never be so undemocratic as to "command" anything. Ironically, those very same people often believe that He does very much command ordaining women, accepting LGBT ideology, Communion for the divorced and remarried, etc. In this context, another pithy phrase of Augustine's is often cited - "Love and do what you will" (Serm. 110) - though his name is usually not attached to this quite modern-seeming sentiment.

But Augustine never said what people think he said in that sermon. Right before the famous phrase, he draws some clear distinctions:

we find people made fierce by love; and by wickedness made seductively gentle. A father beats a boy, while a kidnapper caresses him. Offered a choice between blows and caresses, who would not choose the caresses and avoid the blows? But when you consider the people who give them you realize that it is love that beats, wickedness that caresses. This is what I insist upon: human actions can only be understood by their root in love. All kinds of actions might appear good without proceeding from the root of love. Remember, thorns also have flowers: some actions seem truly savage, but are done for the sake of discipline motivated by love.

We all know this in theory - especially when observing other people - and ignore it in practice when it clashes with some cherished goal of our own.

For the mature Augustine - i.e., the Christian thinker after he freed himself from the confusions of Manicheanism and his personal lusts - everything is moved by love. Good loves or bad loves, but loves all the same because the Creator created the world out of a selfless love. And everything he made is worthy of our love, properly understood. But there's the difficulty. Since the Fall, our loves are disordered. So much so that Augustine explains evil itself as a lack of a proper love in the right place, at the right time, to the proper degree. Love rightly ordered lifts us up. Wrongly ordered love weighs us down.

As he puts it in another celebrated passage from Confessions:

All things pressed by their own weight go towards their proper places . Oil poured in the bottom of the water, is raised above it : water poured upon oil, sinks to the bottom of the oil . They are driven by their own weights , to seek their own places. Things a little out of their places become unquiet : put them in their order again , and they are quieted. My weight is my love [pondus meum amor meus]: by that am I carried , whithersoever I be carried. (Bk. XIII, ix)

I have scandalized certain friends who are overly attached to the Thomistic elements in Dante's Commedia (which are very much there and very important) by claiming that the Augustinian concept of the order of loves is what gives us a more fundamental and global image of sinners, penitents, and saints spread out across Dante's cosmos. This is undeniable and entirely understandable because Augustine was a deep influence on both St. Thomas and Dante. And should be on us as well.

Because Augustine also helps us to understand how it is that we are made in the image and likeness of Love Himself. In On the Trinity, he compares the Three Persons of the Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - with three powers in the ...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.

People of a certain age may remember the words of Pope St. John Paul II reminding the Western Church, in particular, that the Church is a body with two lungs, the West and the East. And to be fully itself and spiritually healthy, it needs to breathe with both those lungs. While for years he was speaking of the Eastern Churches behind the Iron Curtain, he often also referred to the truly ancient Churches of the East - in the lands where the Church was born.

Is it coincidence or providence that in the very first week of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, one of his first addresses was directed to the Eastern Churches? Coincidence, because it was the week already long-scheduled for the Jubilee Year to celebrate those Churches. Yet providence can be seen in his words - not bland generalizations or weak words of affirmation, but a profound appreciation of the importance of the Eastern Churches. He spoke of the necessity of their survival for the life of the whole Church, a direction for their life in the diaspora, and the witness of those, especially in the Middle East, who have suffered for the Faith.

In this 1700th anniversary year of the Council of Nicaea, at which the majority of the bishops attending were from the East, Pope Leo reminded the whole Church of the "glorious history and bitter suffering" of Eastern Christians. And he declared, as Supreme Pontiff, that they were "precious in God's eyes."

Having visited the Christians of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt many times in the last ten years, I can state with certainty that this is what many there have wished to hear for years, and it is deeply appreciated. Time after time on my visits - with ISIS just a few miles away, churches destroyed, burned, and desecrated, and thousands of Christians driven from their homes - priests and bishops have drawn me aside and told me, quietly, that, deep down, they felt the Church of the West was unconcerned at their suffering.

Some of the specific points Leo XIV accentuated in one of his first addresses are likely to change this sense of neglect.

Quoting two of his predecessors, Leo XIII and St. John Paul II, the pope's most pointed words were to remind the Church of the West that it "needs the East," because, among many reasons, the "work of human redemption began in the East" (Leo XIII), and the East was the "original setting where the Church was born"(JP II).

This is no light matter. Leo XIV told the gathered Eastern Christians that the reason the "Church needs you" is because of the gifts the Churches of the East have to offer, in liturgy, mystery and witness - teaching an impoverished Western Church that, in both leadership and laity, is often woefully ignorant of its Eastern roots. A tree cut off from its roots will not be healthy.

Closely linked with that truth is the witness of the suffering Church, and the lack of attention and care it often receives from the Church of the West. Pope Leo highlighted the Christians of the Middle East who "persevere and remain. . .resisting the temptation" to abandon their ancient homelands. He was speaking of the Christians of Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and other places.

These fellow Christians are persevering and remaining in their historic homelands after centuries of persecution, including many recent travails, with the temptation to leave exacerbated by economic hardships and their experience of dhimmitude, or second-class status. All these are issues that both the Church and governments in the West can and must address.

Calling for their rights to be fully guaranteed is both a consequence of genuine peace, a word constantly on the lips of Pope Leo, and justice, without which true peace cannot exist. Those who have lived in the Middle East since long before the rise of Islam can no longer be treated as though they were interlopers.

Leo had a word of warning, and the first directive of his pontificate during this address, that the "priceless heritage of the Eastern Ch...

By Jason M. Baxter.

Flannery O'Connor once said this about writing novels: "Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." I don't know of a better description of what it's felt like as I translated Dante's Purgatorio, which was just released by Angelico Press.

Every morning, during the final six-month stage of this project, I followed the same routine: wake up, get coffee, and build up some psychic reserves of energy for the massively depleting experience. Then I went upstairs, spread out my Italian text and commentaries, and attempt - over and over again - to render in English Dante's dense web of music and meaning. And, for this reason, for six months (maybe longer: ask my wife), I've been a zombie, looking with eyes that don't see, listening with ears that don't hear.

Why is translating Dante so psychically depleting? Everyone knows that his poem is an inspiring journey from a "dark wood" that soars up to the Beatific Vision and God Himself. But his language is always working in multiple dimensions. On the most basic and obvious level, Dante is a musician, who wrote in hendecallyables (eleven-syllable long lines) captured well, by iambic verse that's not too stuffy. Dante also uses rhymes, of course, which Dorothy Sayers went all out to capture. In addition to the rhymes, however, Dante used all kind of dense word play, which he can do, in part, because he's working with an inflected language: he can leave the root stable - like an Aristotelian substance - while varying the accidents of his inflections.

But then, he also loves to use, on occasion, a maddeningly difficult syntax, a gnarled, thorny wood of grammar often made even more complicated because of the learned circumlocutions he employs. In all fairness, he warned us about such maddeningly difficult syntax and entangled cosmological grammar:

Reader, I know you see that I am raising

my subject, and thus you will not marvel"

if now I use more art (più arte) to reinforce my poem.

(Purgatorio. 9:70 72)

And what does this look like? Dante loves word play and word art. Those rhetorical tropes and schemes from classical rhetoric that we find repellent, he adores. For instance, at one point, when Dante is being interrogated by Beatrice, "when, by her eyes, my eyes were struck" (33:18), the figure Dante quite deliberately uses is anadiplosis (a rhetorical "doubling back"). A modern translation, to make this line feel more natural for us, kills the rhetorical scheme by translating it: "when her piercing eyes met mine."

Elsewhere, Dante uses chiasmus, an X-like pattern that sets one word on one side of the scale and then balances it out by putting a variant of it on the other side. For instance, at one point, Virgil has intuited that the pilgrim had within him more questions, and then generously proceeds to encourage him to speak forth those hidden doubts. Dante puts it this way: he "by speaking made me bold to speak." (Purgatorio. 18:7-9). That chiasmus becomes this in one recent translation: "that true father. . ./ spoke and gave me courage to speak out."

But what is extraordinary is that Dante has the inverse tendency as well. After passing through the "refining fire" that cleanses the distorted love of the lustful, for instance, Dante, Virgil, and Statius have to pause to wait out the night, resting on the steps of a steep stairwell that goes right up the mountain:

And just like goats in tranquil rumination,

who had been rowdy, capricious among

the hills before they'd found repast,

but now in shade are quiet while the sun is hot,

now guarded by the shepherd, who leans upon

his staff and stands to watch their rest;

or like the watchman who sleeps outdoors

and spends the night beside a somnolent herd

and watches lest a beast should scatter them;

just so were we, all...

By Joseph Wood.

Aristotle has given much to the Catholic understanding of "what is," of reality. Among his gifts were three axioms about man:

• All men naturally desire knowledge.

• All men are by nature rational and political animals.

• All men want to be happy, and by nature are supposed to be happy.

We are, by the given order of nature, beings who want to know, do, and be something. Those desires form our human nature. They are closely related, and when one desire is frustrated, there are consequences for the other desires and for our capacity to be fully human.

Aristotle claimed that in wanting to be happy, we are really meant to use our reason and intellectual excellence to contemplate the divine. We want the wisdom of knowing the causes and truths of the highest, metaphysical things, which don't change and exist beyond the naturally changing world we sense.

But he concludes, we can't live our telos, or our proper end of knowing the divine things, the fullness of our human nature - mainly because we are occupied with taking care of the needs of our bodies. We're composites of body and soul, always animals yet always with a uniquely human capacity for reason.

Yet no need for despair. Aristotle advises us that we can have good lives in politics. We can cultivate human excellence in political communities, which come to exist by nature to know the common good of the community and to do it.

So the knowing and doing of being human are closely linked. That linkage shows up in other philosophical thought as well.

Aristotle's teacher, Plato, in his dialogues Republic, Gorgias, and Statesman, shows Socrates (or a stand-in) using reason to discuss justice and governance in political communities. In the Republic, Plato devotes time not just to politics but to how we know truth, through reason, in his famous "divided line" explanation of the range of human understanding and the allegory of the cave.

But in these dialogues, wisdom or knowing the "what is" of politics requires that the philosopher turn to myths involving the nature and action of the divine as sources of truth. Socrates warns that his opponents will think of these myths just as old wives' tales, but we should take what they offer until a more reliable source of truth is found.

Modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke also ground their political thought on their own epistemological theories. In both cases, our understanding of what is outside of us is very limited, so interior reason (rather than nature or God) becomes the dominant source of truth.

We can expect, then, that when we are frustrated in our knowledge, we are frustrated in our politics. Our knowing the truth of the genuine common good precedes the political choices of doing that good.

In his book The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis surveys medieval literature in order to discern the model by which medieval man viewed the world, which shaped how he knew what he knew. That model was less empirical or "evidence based" than the modern "paradigm." It encouraged a vertical outlook - towards the heavens, the divine, and was open to truths that could not be empirically certified but could be known through a broader reason.

Our modern horizontal view, already dominant by the 17th or 18th centuries, tends to be restricted to the findings of physical science, discarding the contemplation of the divine that Aristotle thought to be the fullness of human nature. It has produced enormous material progress based on industrial and now digital methods. But it leaves out much of reality, as Pope Benedict XVI brilliantly pointed out.

Many people have felt uneasy about this modern way of knowing. Father Paissy in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov captures this distrust:

The science of this world, having united itself into a great force, has. . .examined everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in sacred books, and after hard analysis, the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left of ...

By Stephen P. White.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, May 15th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the election of Leo XIV, his first week as pope, and 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...

Now for today's column...

The election of Leo XIV comes at a significant moment in the life of the Church in the United States. Though Leo spent much of the past four decades outside the United States - primarily in Peru, but also in Rome - it would be hard to overstate the opportunity (and challenge) that comes with having a pope who is a native son of these United States.

Trying to predict how a pontificate will play out this early in the game is a fool's errand, but there is good reason to suppose that Pope Leo is reluctant to appear more preoccupied with the affairs of the world's only superpower than the responsibilities of his office require. In short, he won't want to seem like a homer. Nevertheless, the energy and interest his election has created here is remarkable.

A 30,000-foot view of the cultural and ecclesial landscape provides some general sense of what this pontificate might mean for the Church in the United States.

Americans under the age of 40 mostly do not remember a time when the large institutions that form the pillars of our common life had been working well. Distrust of institutions is now widespread, and for understandable reasons.

The most fundamental institution of society, the family, has been in trouble for decades. Since the advent of the sexual revolution, we have seen widespread divorce, ubiquitous contraception, industrial-scale abortion, collapsing marriage rates, the legal redefinition of marriage, and sub-replacement birth rates.

The carnage and confusion this has produced are widespread and manifest. Young people are dissatisfied and disheartened, and have a hard time imagining how things might be otherwise. A shockingly high percentage of them no longer see marriage and family as important sources of meaning and happiness.

Our political life is not exactly a model of stability and civic-mindedness. Polarization has become a chronic problem. There is little consensus about the existence of the common good, let alone anything approaching a consensus about how to pursue it.

Both parties seem convinced of the righteousness of their vision of the American past and future, but neither seems able to find a way to govern on behalf of the whole. Perhaps worse, neither party seems particularly interested in doing so, each defining themselves at least as much in opposition to the failings and sins of the opposition as to some positive, coherent vision of a future together.

We are going on three generations of Americans - Millennials (who are approaching middle age), Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha - who have little or no memory of a Catholic Church unsullied by the abuse crisis and its fallout. The public moral authority of the Church, and especially our bishops, has waned.

We have also just lived through a contentious pontificate in which debates about how best to engage and evangelize the modern world have revealed even deeper divisions in which not just the means of proclamation but the substance of the message to be proclaimed have been called into question from within the Church.

The Church in every age faces obstacles to the proclamation of the Gospel, but a Church that lacks confidence in the truths it would proclaim would struggle to gain traction in any age.

One could go on: our popular culture seems stuck in an oscillation between transgressive vulgarity and nostalgia; the post-war international order is cracking if not actually broken; our educational institutions have lost sight of what edu...

By Robert Royal.

The world is still a bit giddy over what happened in Rome the past few weeks. And rightly so. I've been present in the Urbs Aeterna over decades, for a couple of conclaves, and many Vatican events. As I recently confessed (here), these past dozen years I've felt great weariness and distaste, for obvious reasons, at all that Church business. But I have to record that the emotion that greeted Leo XIV when he stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter's was - in both intensity and quality (whoever expected to hear Italians shouting il papa americano!) - like nothing I've ever seen. I felt it myself, deeply, too. And yet my own most intense experience in Rome this trip came prior to the papal election: at an Eastern Rite Catholic liturgy, which I think says something not only about the current form of the Mass but about some fundamental questions now facing our new Pope Leo.

Thanks to Bob Moynihan, who writes Inside the Vatican, for publicizing that liturgy at Santa Maria in Trastevere, which is celebrated Sunday evenings. The church itself is one of the earliest in Rome (the original layout probably goes back to around 340 AD, with some elements even a century earlier). And its many beauties were augmented in the High Middle Ages with radiant mosaics in gold and various colors. I'd been there many times for the usual Masses in Italian and appreciated it as a solid local parish with large numbers of children. But this Eastern Rite Mass floored me, literally, in the sense that it brought me to a grounded yet exalted place that I don't think I've touched since the pre-Vatican II high Latin Masses I remember witnessing as a young boy.

One of the things that many of us have noticed about Pope Leo is the way he seems grounded - "based" in the current slang - in his spiritual formation as an Augustinian and in what seems a manly and genuine serenity. One Chicagoan who knows him a bit told me, "At least he's not crazy." That is probably setting too low a bar for the successor to Pope Francis, but we're right to expect some great things given the more traditional way Leo has conducted himself - his traditional vestments on the loggia, his careful celebrations of the liturgies, and his well thought-out and delivered remarks at every event to date. Even if he continues some of the rather messy things Francis set in motion, there's a good chance that he will bring to them more discipline, substance, and - dare one say - Catholicity.

But he has some steep hills to climb. Several commentators have expressed the hope that he will bring back Pope Benedict XVI's openness to the Traditional Latin Mass, which there's reason to think he might. Given the calmness he seems to be deliberately cultivating - not an artificial media strategy but something that seems to radiate from his basic personality - I'd be surprised if he were to do that right away. But early indications are that he seems to believe that Francis moved too far into simplifying liturgies, which inspired no one, despite the intention to suggest humility. We know that many young people have been coming to the Church lately for firmer teaching about how to live their lives and, often enough, for the very Latin liturgies that were allegedly diving a synodal Church.

It will be interesting to watch how Leo handles all this as well as how he intends his papacy, which has deliberately reached back to the great Leo XIII, to engage our postmodern world. Even in his early remarks, the American pope has shown a remarkable grasp of what we're facing - not only the longstanding rejection of religion as untenable and irrelevant in a scientific and technological age - but a time marked by the breakdown of belief even in science and technology and all the institutions that make civilization possible.

As many Catholics know, Leo XIII basically inaugurated modern Catholic Social Doctrine with his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum. The very title of that work suggested two things. It can be...

By Randall Smith.

"Oh, so you're using logic," said the young man when I pointed out he had contradicted himself. "I'm not confined by logic." And Lord knows, he hadn't been. That was one thing we could agree on.

If your math teacher asks, "What is 2 + 2?" and you answer "10," and she says, "No, that's not right," it won't help to say, "Oh, so you're using mathematical logic? I don't wish to be confined by that."

Whatever "philosophy" you may have studied, two dollars plus two dollars does not equal ten dollars. And statements can't be both true and false at the same time in the same respect. These aren't just made-up "rules" that you can bypass like the rule against chewing gum in school. They are expressions of reality.

What's at stake here isn't merely an abstract "academic" debate about "logic." The tragic result of rejecting logic is that it insulates you from taking seriously any meaningful critique of your views. One can always take refuge in the claim, "Oh, that's just logic." But that's like saying: "Oh, so you think statements should make sense?" Well, yes, actually, I do. And quite frankly, so does everyone else!

Now, to be fair, this isn't the only way people insulate themselves from meaningful critique. An even more common way is to commit a logical fallacy, mistaking it for a real argument.

There is, for example, the Fallacy of Relevance: citing evidence or arguments that are irrelevant to the conclusion they are supposed to support. During the Second World War, the commander of German Reserve Police Battalion 101 told his men, as he was giving them the order to slaughter 1500 Jewish women and children in a small Polish village, that they should "remember that Germans were being killed by bombs back in Germany."

Yes, but these Jewish women and children had nothing to do with those bombs, and murdering them would do nothing to make the bombing stop. It may sound like an argument, but it's not. People cite evidence and arguments all the time that have precious little relevance to the dramatic conclusions they wish people to embrace.

And then there is the famous Ad Hominem Fallacy: thinking that an attack on the person is enough to refute his argument. Politician X may be a lying shyster, but that doesn't make his argument wrong. If we could convince people that ad hominem arguments are empty and invalid, most of what passes for political discourse would simply vanish. Even if Republicans are "greedy," and even if Democrats are "hypocrites," that tells us nothing about their specific arguments about taxes and the budget - unless their only arguments are that Republicans are greedy, and Democrats are hypocrites.

Then there are Fallacies of Ambiguity: arguments that rely on vague or ambiguous language. What does it mean to say, "We should tax the rich"? Maybe we should, but who is included in the category "rich"? Who are "the poor" and how will taxing "the rich" help them? It might, but we would need to know how, and then we would need to verify whether it is actually helping.

Straw Man arguments are also common. This is when people misrepresent the arguments of the other side to make them easier to attack. It's usually done by re-stating the argument without the supporting evidence or by using different, more emotionally laden terms. "They're trying to destroy the country!" Really? That would be an odd motivation for anyone living in this country.

Then there are slogans, repeated like mantras until they become nearly impossible to dislodge from the mind. "If men got pregnant, abortion would be sacred." Well, if women were white and living in the South in 1850, slavery would be sacred. Either way, slavery is wrong, and if men got pregnant, it would still be wrong to kill a living human being.

Many of these fallacies serve the partisan tribalism that currently bedevils our political discourse. People blind themselves to the illogic of their arguments because they take themselves to be supporting "the good guys." Th...

By Fr. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J..

While most of the world's attention was focused on the election of the new pope in Rome, another major spectacle was taking place in the city as well. "If there is a single painter with whom the new millennium has identified, it is without a doubt Caravaggio," begins the catalogue for Caravaggio 2025, an extraordinary exhibition of twenty-four of the artist's works, gathered at Rome's Palazzo Barberini from museums and private collections across the world. Judging from the crowds and the hype, the event's organizers have it right. Caravaggio is in.

This hasn't always been the case. After falling into obscurity for several centuries, Caravaggio's (1571-1610) star began to rise again in 1951 thanks to a similar exhibition organized in Milan by the great art historian Roberto Longhi. Another art historian I know told me years ago that her colleagues had run out of things to write about Michelangelo and so fixed on Caravaggio. But there's more to it than that.

The painter's life fits the post-Byronic template for a tragic artist - salacious liaisons, murder, exile, and an untimely death on the unforgiving (but romantic) Italian coast. Romanticism put a premium on artistic self-expression, and Caravaggio's work was undeniably original because of the inner tumult that gushes from his figures. Those figures are not always conventionally beautiful, but they are compelling.

Yet these considerations don't quite explain Caravaggio's magnetic draw. Perhaps above all, Caravaggio was a great religious painter and something about his style resonates with the spiritual aspirations and shortcomings of our age. His works on secular themes are clever, but don't convey the power of his later religious works. And none of those works are quite so powerful as the Flagellation, Supper at Emmaus, and Ecce Homo with Jesus Christ at their center. One feels a yearning for redemption in the darkness of the artist's life.

Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon locates the roots of Caravaggio's style in the reforms of Milan's great archbishop St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584). Borromeo was the dominant cultural and religious figure in Caravaggio's native Lombardy at the time of the artist's birth. Guided by the Council of Trent's emphasis on the sacraments and the imaginative prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, Borromeo favored an intense, dramatic, devotional style Graham-Dixon describes as "populist."

These characteristics - alongside Borromeo's awareness of the darkness that original sin casts over our existence - are distilled in Caravaggio's mature work. In the Flagellation or the Conversion of St. Paul or St. Francis contemplating death, one feels no scholastic abstraction, but salvation worked out achingly in wounded flesh.

Another art historian, Alessandro Zuccari, points out that all available evidence indicates that Caravaggio's religious beliefs were conventionally Catholic. He confessed and received Communion at Easter and participated in forty-hours Eucharistic devotions. The fiery temper that caused the artist so much grief is evidence of concupiscence, not heterodoxy.

Exiled from Rome after killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio spent the rest of his life seeking papal forgiveness instead of fortune in the Protestant principalities of northern Europe. When his self-portrait appears in scriptural scenes, it has a haggard, yearning look. But feeling the difficulty of faith is not the same thing as unbelief. And that's, I suspect, why the artist's work so resonates today.

In Michelangelo's muscular figures, we witness the robust marriage of faith and Renaissance humanism. The inky darkness of Caravaggio's scenes anticipates an age when faith no longer feels so inevitable. At Caravaggio 2025, I was struck by the arrangement of St. Francis in Ecstasy - the saint, reclining in soft angelic arms, fills one side of the painting, but its center is all shadow. If you look closely, you can make out figures in the distance,...