The Catholic Thing

By Auguste Meyrat

Friedrich Nietzsche is notorious for his theory of the Übermensch, the superior man who rises above the constraints of morality and mediocrity. But his theory of the "last man" has proven to be far more prophetic – and relevant. A kind of counterexample to the Übermensch, the last man is lazy, weak, incurious, and lives for pleasure. He is the product of an overly civilized, Christianized, and complacent culture.

While literary examples of the Übermensch abound, there are relatively few depictions of the "last man" in all his non-glory. Perhaps such a character hits a little too close to home and might make more than a few readers uncomfortable, or perhaps most writers like to imagine themselves as an Übermensch creating and commanding imaginative realms, not last men confessing their weaknesses.

Or most likely, last men are by definition so passive that they pose a serious challenge for any writer trying to put together a compelling narrative about them.

But just because something is challenging does not mean that it isn't worth trying. In his debut novel The Rhinelanders, Catholic essayist Alan Schmidt takes on the problem of the last man by telling his story and envisioning his destiny. In doing so, he portrays the mundane, quiet despair in which so many people today live, including people of faith. His novel reminds readers not to forget these lost souls since they, too, are children of God, people with a notable past and a potentially notable future.

The story takes place in Westphalia, Michigan, a small rural town founded by German Catholic settlers. The hero of the story is Stephen Koenig, a middle-aged, unmarried, and unremarkable man who lives with his mentally handicapped sister, Sarah, and ne'er-do-well brother, Thomas. Unlike most of the Koenig clan, Stephen never left his hometown, lacking the ambition that would inspire such a change. He lives comfortably, working a nondescript office job at a financial consulting firm, attending Mass, praying his rosary every day, and maintaining good relationships with his siblings and neighbors.

Certain forces intervene, however, to disrupt Stephen's placeholder existence. At night, he is periodically visited by ghosts of his ancestors along with two menacing wolves who deny him peace of mind. During the day, he is offered a job opportunity that would finally take him out of Westphalia, and is confronted with a romantic relationship with a woman who essentially initiates every meetup. Meanwhile, he uses his sister's disability and his brother's failure-to-launch as excuses for putting off any meaningful action.

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Schmidt introduces each chapter with a passage recalling a moment in the history of Stephen's ancestry. From a tribe of pagan Goths to the generation of German Americans immediately preceding Stephen and his family, the juxtaposition illustrates the gradual loss of will and inner strength that once propelled the Koenigs. Well before he is explicitly identified as "the Last Man," it is apparent that this is who Stephen is meant to represent.

Even so, Schmidt refrains from offering a mere Nietzschean allegory set in modern rural America. Certain redeeming factors complicate Stephen's character. Yes, he is indecisive, noncommittal, and insecure, but he is also charitable, pious, and wholesome. This happens to make him much more sympathetic than his brother Thomas, who is the inverse, a man of great energy and will, but also abrasive and rebellious.

The modern world shows its preference for men like Stephen by granting them a frictionless existence full of easy opportunities, while it actively punishes men like Thomas who must fight for everything they have.

Moreover, even as Stephen and Thomas make their way in the world, Schmidt makes it clear that their choices do not happen in a vacuum. They are the product of their local surroundings, their German lineage, their church, their upbringing, and the life-altering tragedies that occur without warning...

By Michael Pakaluk.

The New York Times reported the words, but the Wall Street Journal didn't. When Bam Adebayo, two days ago, was asked to describe the moment when he scored 83 points in an NBA game, second only to Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points, he said, "Man, I wish I could relive it twice. I credit God, my family, my teammates, this crowd."

A wag commented that, right after God, he should have credited the Washington Wizards, the team ostensibly defending him.

But credit, too, to Bam. The first question most sportscasters ask is "How did you feel?" On the classical view of the passions, this is like asking someone to describe the agitation of his guts, either his viscera or heart. "Describe to me what your guts felt like when you did this."

Who cares? But Bam sensibly externalized the question and turned first to God.

Others credited Bam's hard work, recounting the long hours he put in as a boy, practicing. Others played up the fact that he had just surpassed Kobe Bryant's record of 81. But Bam sprinted right past the four species of pride identified by Pope St. Gregory. He attributed his excellence to God, not himself. He did not claim that he had merited it. He did not overstate it. And he did not draw comparisons with others.

Like all of us, he'll need to battle pride later. But just then, when the spotlight was on him and the cameras were rolling, he spoke with humility.

You've noticed that athletes often give credit to God first. Fernando Mendoza, the 2025 Heisman Trophy winner and quarterback who led Indiana to the college football championship, when he was in the spotlight said, "This moment is bigger than me. [sic] First, I want to thank God."

Kudos to Mendoza, who is said to be a devout Catholic. By mentioning God first, outside his intention he actually amplified himself. If he had said out loud what many think privately at such a moment, "First, I want to exult in how great I am," he would have drawn himself down in the eyes of others, deservedly so.

"I'm a faith-filled guy. I believe in a Creator. I believe in Jesus. Ultimately, I think that's what defines me the most." This was Scottie Scheffler after winning the 2024 Masters, another athlete side-stepping the four species of pride.

The interviewer then pressed him on his feelings. Scottie refused to introspect his guts and instead changed the subject, returning to the objective message he wished to convey: "It's hard to describe the feeling. I think that what defines me the most is my faith. I believe in one Creator, that I've been called to come out here, do my best, compete, and glorify God."

I've taught many athletes and can report that the conflict that some find between athletics and academics is a false conflict. Pursuing a sport seriously can make an athlete a better student. In the same way, pursuing some sport seriously should make us better Christians.

How do other achievers compare with the athletes? Over the last three years of Oscar winners, encompassing nearly 70 speeches, only two recipients referred to God, but how they did so fell short of the athletes.

Last year, Adrien Brody, when he took the stage to receive the Best Actor award (for The Brutalist) said, "Thank you, God. Thank you for this blessed life." But even then, he did not quite give credit to God for his achievement.

And two years ago, Da'Vine Joy Randolph (Best Supporting Actress, The Holdovers) began with "God is so good. God is so good." And she closed with "I pray to God that I get to do this more than once" – which sounds like greediness rather than gratitude.

Already in 2015, a writer for the Huffington Post wrote an essay on how Oscar winners were no longer thanking God. Reviewing almost 1400 acceptance speeches, Carol Kuruvilla found that Stephen Spielberg was thanked the most, with 42 mentions. Harvey Weinstein came in second. (Res ipsa loquitur.) While God received only 19 mentions, and many of these were goofy or off-key:

I'd like to thank the Academy first of all. ....

By Francis X. Maier

I'll get right to the point. Leigh Snead's new book Infertile but Fruitful is one of the finest personal testimonies I've read in the past decade. It's a "simple" story in the best sense: concise, intimate, utterly frank, and memorable. It spoke, directly and beautifully, to my own family, as it will to many others. I'll come back to it in a moment. But first, some useful background.

In a general sense, a culture's fertility rate hints at its character. It also suggests its health. Bearing and raising children is serious business. It demands sacrifices. But for anyone with a generous spirit, it also creates love and hope, and trust in a meaningful future, because the instinct to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28, 9:1) is hardwired into the human species.

Rejecting that has consequences. And here's an example. The minimum replacement rate for a population is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. The total fertility rate across Western Europe was around 2.66 in the early 1960s. It had fallen to 1.46 in the late 1990s. It continued dropping to a historic low of 1.34 by 2024. That's a fertility decline of 50 percent in barely two generations. Muslim Europeans tend to have somewhat higher fertility on average, but the broader story is nonetheless a massive, sustained collapse in childbearing across the continent.

As for the United States: In the early 1960s, its fertility rate was around 3.5, sharply higher than Europe's at the time, because the American postwar Baby Boom was larger and lasted longer. But the subsequent drop off was steeper. The U.S. total fertility rate shrank to 1.59 by 2024. Thus, the net fertility decline over the past six or so decades is actually larger for the United States than Europe in absolute terms.

Why the collapse? The factors are fairly obvious: easy access to contraception and abortion; more women in higher education and the workforce; the rising costs of living; a consumption-driven economy; and the decline of religious belief.

Christianity strongly encouraged permanent marriages and large families. As Europe secularized, that moral pressure disappeared. Today, most children grow up seeing small families as normal. Their own fertility adjusts downward accordingly. What makes this reality so hard to reverse is that a modernity rooted in the sovereign self and its material appetites has taught so many of us to value these features.

The end result is a culture's loss of meaning, an aging population with escalating health care costs, supported by a shrinking workforce. The necessary economic response to demographic decline is immigration, filling the labor gap with working-age people from higher-fertility regions. But the kind of mass immigration needed to compensate for low fertility typically sparks a bitter political backlash. This creates constant friction between economic need and grassroots popular anxiety that has impacted the life of nearly every Western nation.

So much for all the social data. How does any of it relate to Infertile but Fruitful?

One of the (wonderfully) ironic responses to all of the above is the number of women today, many of them religious believers, who deliberately choose to have large families. Again, fertility – the yearning to be part of bringing new life into the world – is inherent to being human. That can mean children, or a celibate life of service to others.

But everyone, without exception, has the need to be fruitful, and ignoring that need deforms the heart. Our own daughter is the mother of seven. For my wife Suann, some of the hardest years in our marriage were those early eight or ten when she was unable to conceive or had multiple miscarriages; this, while friends all around her birthed child after child.

Husbands can provide love and support. But they can never fully understand the suffering and sense of loss felt at a cellular level by the woman longing to bear a child, but can't. Especially when the inability to conceive prove...

By Casey Chalk

I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" of science fiction. I shrug my shoulders at Star Wars and Star Trek, and became so frustrated with Frank Herbert's Dune that I barely finished it. Nevertheless, I confess a certain guilty fascination with futuristic dystopian works.

The imagery of the Australian bush and the attendant storyline of the revised Road Warrior series haunted my imagination for weeks. Much the same happened with the Blade Runner revamp. Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange. I gobble up such books up and wonder: How could human society become like that?

Surely escapism explains much of this, but there is also a human desire to imagine, even anticipate, what the future holds for us and our descendants. It's a means of grappling with the most acute moral and political questions of our time, but with a certain personal and emotional distance. It's not us or our children suffering at the hands of post-apocalyptic Australian motorcycle gangs or humanoid robots with automatic weapons.

This much, and far more, can be said of Ross McCullough's The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster, an enchanting book that straddles a variety of genres: epistolary novel, pastoral handbook, and theological science fiction.

A sort of sci-fi Screwtape Letters, the reader cannot help but be drawn into McCullough's dystopian (if frighteningly imaginable) world, in which the vestiges of liberalism accommodate an ascendant global Islam, while humanity escapes deeper into an all-consuming artificial intelligence called "IR." Yet like C.S. Lewis's classic, it's also a text bursting with spiritual and theological insight.

The letters of the late archbishop certainly paint a sobering picture of a future in which the Church's influence has waned. Citizens' behaviors are carefully documented beginning in school to exert maximum control over the populace. Technological firms promote transhumanism and "transfiguration procedures" to "transfer consciousness from brain to brain."

The underlying irony is that in "metamodernity," the modern Baconian quest to control the natural order is realized by fleeing nature.

Priests have accommodated themselves to the new reality, leveraging IR in order to visit with more of the faithful, even if the bishop admits "there is little friendship with someone who is in IR, whether they are in the withdrawn catatonia of passive consumption or the excited catatonia of erratic and unexplained motion."

It's an admirable description of the dehumanizing tendencies of social media. Or how about this:

Think only of how much more control the government has over us on these platforms. Think only of those who control the platforms themselves. This is the problem when reality itself goes up for sale, when we place ourselves in a marketplace of realities. For we are not the hunters in the marketplace but the hunted.

The archbishop's reflections on sexuality are equally incisive. One letter argues that AI-generated porn – presented as a means of protecting the human participants from degrading behaviors – only further encourages dehumanizing tendencies, because users of such material are free to do whatever they want within the "safe" world of IR. It's not real, though the effects on the human brain and character certainly are.

Elsewhere, the archbishop describes a "second Pill" that was developed to allow sexual partners to not feel any attachment to one another. In a twisted way, that makes sense. Obviously, a baby complicates sex, but so does the unitive quality of the sexual act, which binds people together in complicated ways, even if both tried to keep things "casual."

McCullough hints at a panoply of terrifying future possibilities. He describes a procedure ironically titled "transfiguration" that involves removing the patient's eyes and entering the orbital cavities, which subjects "generally come to approve of." The result is "lobotomized rebels" similar to what (lapsed Ca...

By Daniel B. Gallagher.

The 250th birthday of the United States is a good time to remember that 1776 was the year of a new nation, not a new government. It would take another eleven years for the Founders to formulate what the government would look like, and two more to elect the first president.

This sequence of events reminds us that it is not a government that makes a nation, but a nation that makes a government. Even peoples who lack a sovereign territory, such as the Kurds or Basques, conceptualize themselves in some way as a nation before devising some sort of governing apparatus. You need something to govern before you can figure out how to govern it. The Vichy regime in France is an example of what can happen if one attempts to establish a government with no true nation behind it.

Having been around long enough to celebrate both, I can't help but feel concern about the disquietude surrounding this year's Semiquincentennial celebration in comparison with the Bicentennial fifty years ago. Last summer, a White House task force appointed to plan and to implement the celebrations was already butting heads with a congressional commission established for the same purpose.

John Dichtl, president of the American Association for State and Local History, has a point when, referring to plans to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at the White House, asks, "What does a (UFC) fight have to do with America's greatness?" Writing in The Hill, Myra Adams confesses that she feels "less pride" in this Semiquincentennial year, lamenting that "dangerous trends threaten what our Founding Fathers envisioned."

Back in 1976, virtually no one hesitated to wave a flag, march in a parade, and join in singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." And all this not even two years after an American President voluntarily stepped aside for the first time. Fifty years later, students no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the elementary school I attended.

That said – and especially in light of recent chaos in Minneapolis – I do understand how people could lack enthusiasm for the event if they forget we are celebrating the founding of a nation and not a government. The former is much more worthy of celebration if we take it as the primary locus of the shared values and ideals inspiring a diverse people to form a Union.

Chief among those is obviously freedom, including the freedom to vote Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, or even Communist or Socialist, if you like. If you want to know what a one-party celebration looks like, look no further than the Tian'anmen and Kim II Sung Squares.

The need to revisit the distinction between a nation and a government became clearer to me when, while interviewing political theorist Patrick Deneen, Bishop Robert Barron asserted that, according to the classical view, the purpose of "government" is to cultivate virtue in its citizens. He claimed to have learned this from philosopher Robert Sokolowski at the Catholic University of America.

Msgr. Sokolowski was my professor too, and I don't remember him saying this. I do remember him saying that, according to the classical view, the purpose of the polis was to make citizens virtuous and good. That's not to say government has no role, but the polis is a richer and more expansive concept than "government," even though the extent to which the ancient Greek polis resembles the modern state is debatable.

In any case, a polis, according to Aristotle, is a natural community where individuals come together to pursue the good life. The politeia is the way a polis is organized, including – but not limited to – its system of government. Politeia also encompasses the values and practices that make a polis possible.

Though much more can be said about the distinction, it is enough to draw attention to the myopic view of "politics" we have today. If we limit politics to what happens inside the D.C. beltway, we easily fall into the trap of thinking that it is primaril...

By Dominic V. Cassella

In the season of Lent, the Church enters the wilderness to fast and abstain. It is a time of testing. The number forty often indicates this throughout the Scriptures. "Forty days" signals a time when God tests the hearts of His people, so that what lies hidden within might be revealed.

In Genesis, the deluge that washed the world of living creatures – except for Noah and those on the ark – lasted for forty days. Moses fled Egypt for his life after murdering a man and spent forty years in Midian as a shepherd before God appeared to him in the burning bush. After forty days, the ten spies that Moses sent into the land convinced Israel to distrust God and despair of their ability to take it. For forty years, the Israelites were sent to wander in the wilderness before they could occupy the Promised Land. For forty days and nights, Goliath taunted Saul and his army before David slew him. And Jonah gave the Ninevites forty days to repent before they would be overthrown by God.

And in the most famous case of all, of course, Jesus spent forty days in the desert and was tempted by the Devil.

These periods of forty days or forty years are not random spans of time. They reveal a pattern in how God deals with His people. As Moses tells Israel:

The LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not. (Deuteronomy 8:2)

God does not test human beings because he needs to learn about the fidelity of his creatures. He already knows the human heart. (1 Samuel 16:7) The test exists so that the man himself may learn what is inside of him. Abraham was tested by God, and came to learn of his complete trust in the Lord. In contrast, Pharaoh was tested by God and he hardened his heart.

Now that we are in the midst of these forty days of Lent, we have entered the same Biblical pattern of trial and purgation. Lent should not be just like any other season in life. During this time, we should especially have our eyes turned toward the heavenly Promised Land, and most especially toward the Way that leads to it: Jesus Christ.

Yet Lent often passes in vain. Our hearts are not easily moved. They grow dull and indolent when left unattended. In the stagnation of idle thoughts, the heart becomes a wilderness thick with thorns and thistles, tangled with brambles and covered with stones.

This inner wilderness is a consequence of sin, both actual and original. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and attempted to decide for themselves what was good and evil, the curse of that wilderness was the natural consequence.

St. John Henry Newman describes this condition:

We have stony hearts, hearts as hard as the highways; the history of Christ makes no impression on them. And yet, if we would be saved, we must have tender, sensitive, living hearts; our hearts must be broken, must be broken up like ground, and dug, and watered, and tended, and cultivated, till they become as gardens, gardens of Eden, acceptable to our God, gardens in which the Lord God may walk and dwell; filled, not with briars and thorns, but with all sweet-smelling and useful plants, with heavenly trees and flowers.

A careless and frivolous heart gradually becomes a hardened one. But the desert fathers teach that the remedy for such a heart is meditation on the Cross.

For instance, St. John Cassian describes this remedy and tells us that we Christians must be "daily and hourly turning up the ground of our heart with the Gospel Plough, i.e., the constant recollection of the Lord's Cross."

The hard ground of the heart cannot cultivate itself. The wilderness of the heart must first be cleared of vain thoughts, and then the heart can be broken up with the Gospel Plough, the Cross. As the plough tears into the soil, so the Cross breaks up the hardened heart. Meditation on the Lord's Cross during this season of Lent, and the formation of a habit of frequ...

By Anthony Esolen

In one of the great ironies of linguistic history, the English word "bedlam," suggesting frenzy, madness, chaos, and noise, comes from what was then the common British pronunciation of the sacred name Bethlehem, in the Hospital of Saint Mary in Bethlehem, a monastery dedicated in 1402 to the housing and treatment of lunatics.

Hence we have "Tom o' Bedlam," the name that Edgar assumes in King Lear in his disguise as a madman; first to escape the ministers of law that pursue him, unjustly, as a traitor to England and to his father, the Duke of Gloucester, but second, to remain close to the action, so he can do whatever he can for justice, for his father, and for his country.

For the truly mad are those souls devoured with ambition, while the faithful and loyal are called fools.

How do you preach the word of God to madmen? How do you preach it in Bedlam? For everyone in Bedlam is going to be afflicted with the twitch. If everyone around you is shouting, you will be led to shout too, if only to be heard at all, but eventually it may come to be a matter of course.

If everyone around you howls at the moon, gathering in packs to lift up their hearts and eyes and hollow throats to that satellite, you will likely steal a glance that way too, and maybe join in, at first because you want to meet the madmen where they are, but eventually because you too fall in love with the howling.

I ask the question, because Bedlam is where we are, a political, social, educational, and religious Bedlam of distraction in the most literal sense – as of someone condemned to death by horses pulling him apart limb from limb.

Let me illustrate. Bishop Robert Barron notes that the Somali welfare scam in Minnesota is a crime against the needy. At a moderate assessment, $1,000 has been filched from every man, woman, and child in the state. He does not launch into a diatribe about it, since he has more important things to do. But for this, I have seen him accused of being as wicked as a Vichy collaborator with the Nazis.

Now that, frankly, is not sane. Whatever one may think about what American immigration laws should be (I have yet to hear anybody suggest any specific emendations to the laws in question), it is bizarre to draw any equivalence between American immigration officers and the Gestapo.

And as far as an American Kristallnacht is concerned, those bricks smashing the windows of businesses during "mostly peaceful demonstrations" do not have the fingerprints of policemen on them.

Nor is it "Nazism" to say that schoolchildren should be taught, first and foremost, to be proud of their country and their culture – whatever of it still remains after the inundations of mass media. It is a part of the virtue of piety, required by the commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother."

I expect that Italian schoolchildren will be taught the glories of their artistic and literary heritage, and I would be deeply disappointed to learn that it is no longer so.

It was not Matteo Ricci who demanded of the Chinese that they should despise their ancestors. That was the Communist, Mao Tse-Tung. This, too, did Bishop Barron call to mind when he criticized, gently enough, a rather loud but dopey congresswoman who seemed to insist that material goods were all that really mattered to people. For at base, the Marxist, along with too many secularists who consider themselves conservative, really does believe that man doth live by bread alone.

But we need to pull back from the madness. Bedlam, even for sinful and addle-pated mankind, is not a normal state of affairs.

I appeal to this rule. If political division causes you to break charity with a fellow Christian, if you are pleased to learn that such a person has done or said something bad, if you are eager to magnify its badness rather than to interpret it in a less damning light, if you are the Eternal Oculist, so eager to remove specks from other people's eyes that you delight in gouging them out altogether, ...

By Joseph. R. Wood.

It's Lent, when our mortifications and the Church's readings give us a sharper opportunity to think about what we love, and whether we are loving the right things.

James Patrick was a wise man and a good friend. I met him after he had founded a tiny post-secondary educational institution, St. Thomas More College in Fort Worth. I say "institution" because even aside from its size and situation in a few residential houses near Texas Christian University, it bore little resemblance to anything we'd recognize as a university today.

He had previously taught at the University of Dallas, the University of the South at Sewanee, and the University of Tennessee. He had studied architecture, theology, philosophy and just about everything else. He was an Episcopal priest before entering the Catholic Church.

Jim was one of the many wise people who have shared with me much of their time and goodness. He was a man of letters, an exemplar of Western civilization. You might say in many ways he was another Fr. Jim Schall.

He knew of my interest in philosophy and provided one of the greatest gifts I received as I began formal studies. He warned me, gently but clearly, that when philosophy gets off its knees, it gets into trouble.

That's a pithy way of saying that when philosophy, the use of human reason to know the whole truth of "what is," divorces itself from faith, bad things happen.

While failure to love God above all throws any life awry, the intellectual life seems particularly vulnerable to losing one's way. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals are very smart and can indeed make considerable progress in knowing reality, so they become overambitious and proud.

A paradigmatic modern case was Martin Heidegger, a truly brilliant mind who produced much great philosophical work, jettisoned his Catholic faith, and became a Nazi (the degree of his cooperation with Hitler's regime is disputed).

The original case study, though, must be the geniuses who came up with the idea for the Tower of Babel. I'm always struck that God did not say, "Look at those fools, trying to do something impossible." He stopped them because they might have succeeded. He disrupted their logos, confusing their reasoned speech so that such collective endeavors would be less likely thereafter.

Reason as used by the Babel builders might have accomplished something that, presumably, God knew would not be their true good. They sought Heaven without depending on God.

What does it profit us to gain the world and lose our souls?

"Philosophy" is derived from the Greek for "love of wisdom." It's very easy for philosophers to focus on the "wisdom" – the truth of things – and forget about the "love" part. St. Augustine and other Christian philosophers knew this danger and accepted the notion of "I believe in order to understand." I am given faith as my first love – love of God – then I use my reason to seek truth within that love.

Jim Patrick and Fr. Jim Schall understood that approach.

Some philosophers, including Leo Strauss, who helped revive the study of ancient philosophical wisdom in recent decades, would disagree. He thought it was impossible for a man of faith to be a true philosopher, as faith would constrain the search for the truth, which is itself unconstrained.

I wonder whether that kind of thinking brought the poet-philosopher Dante to the point where he begins his Divine Comedy. The beginning of Inferno is one of the most famous starts to any journey in Western literature:

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

for the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell

The nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh –

the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.…

How I came there I cannot really tell,

I was so full of sleep

When I forsook the one true way.

– Inferno I.1-12 (Hollander trans.)

Dante knew philosophy well, including St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and bits of ...

Hamnet, the 2025 film that has already won a slew of awards and is a favorite to win Oscar "Bests" for Picture, Director (Chloé Zhao), and Actress (Jessie Buckley), deserves its accolades. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's novel, it reimagines the genesis of The World's Most Famous Play. (Spoiler alert ahead, although at the very end.)

Hamnet begins with the meeting and mating of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, called Agnes in the book and film, because her father's will refers to her by that name. O'Farrell, who came across Richard Hathaway's will, sees "Agnes" as a kind of revelation about the way, historically, the fame of fathers, sons, and husbands has subsumed female identities.

There's truth in that, although probably not in this case. In O'Farrell's novel, the playwright's surname never appears. He's just "Will." So, in a fair exchange for "history's" marginalization of Anne Hathaway, Farrell and Zhao place William Shakespeare in the margins of the book and the film.

And, twee as I think that is, it doesn't diminish the movie's power. Besides, we know perfectly well who's wooing Agnes.

Hamnet moves slowly through their courtship: a kind of midsummer-night's-dream of wonder in what's probably the Forest of Arden. Agnes is an almost pagan figure, gathering medicinal plants and cavorting with her falcon. Is she a witch? Will, his father being a glover, presents her with a hawking gauntlet. He tells her the story of the ill-fated love between Orpheus and Eurydice. Will and Agnes have sexual intercourse. They marry and have three children. By and by, Will leaves for London.

At the heart of Hamnet, of course, is the boy, Hamnet, the Shakespeares' only son, born with his twin sister, Judith, in 1585. (Their oldest, Susanna, had come two years earlier.) The real Hamnet would die of bubonic plague at age 11, and is buried (as are his father and mother) at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The loss of a child is devastating. It was even in the 16th century when infant and childhood deaths were commonplace. The film does not explicitly suggest that Will retreated to London out of grief, but it seems that way, especially because we are given no hint that this young, grieving father will dominate the literature of the English-speaking world as no one ever had, or has since.

Perhaps his success, his fortune, and his work don't justify "abandonment." But, perhaps, there was no abandonment.

After all, Agnes was no poor child. When they married, Will was 18, and she was 26. We don't know when Shakespeare left Warwickshire for London, but it was certainly after the births of the twins and may have been after Hamnet's death. Anne would then have been in her early to mid 30s.

Coincidentally, Hamnet has appeared within months of the release of scholarly work by Prof. Matthew Steggle that refutes the premise of Hamnet, which is that Shakespeare abandoned his family for London and fame. Steggle has found (and not he alone) that Mrs. Shakespeare likely visited and even lived with Will in London, and that their connection was strong.

Of course, that's history, not drama – and new history at that. And it does not matter, in a way, since O'Farrell and Zhao are not engaged in fact but fiction, placed in a historical setting. That said, the premise that Hamlet was inspired by the death of Hamnet is also dismissed by scholars. And it matters not that they don't address the "authorship" or "recussant Catholic" questions.

But in a brilliant bit of casting, perfectly aligned with the film's premise, the Prince of Denmark is played by Noah Jupe, the real-life older brother of Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet. Thus, when Agnes travels to London with her brother and they join the groundlings to see a performance of Hamlet, she is doubly shocked to hear a name and a face so like that of her dead son.

More about the performance of Jessie Buckley in a moment, but I pause to praise Jacobi Jupe's portrayal of Hamnet.

He resembles no one...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.

The small but growing Catholic Church in Norway is blessed to have two bishops now, native Norwegians, under fifty-two years old. Bishop Frederik Hansen, appointed the Bishop of Oslo in July 2025, joins the Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden, appointed Bishop of Trondheim, in October 2019.

Plans are currently underway to celebrate the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Olaf, the canonized King of Norway, spearheaded by Bishop Varden. It would not be inaccurate to say that the Catholic Church in Norway, with 2030 in sight, is being reinvigorated by the leadership of these two comparatively youthful bishops.

Bishop Erik, or Erik of Trondheim, to give him an accurate, though more medieval title, is a gentle Viking, although that moniker might sound warlike. The former Abbot of the Cistercian Monastery of Mount St. Bernard in England, he is also a former professor of Syriac, a man already highly regarded as a spiritual writer, teacher, and exemplary bishop.

Yet now, after having been chosen by Pope Leo to give the annual Spiritual Exercises for the Pope and the Roman Curia in the Vatican during the first week of Lent, his stature, principally because of the wisdom and depth of his short reflections, has risen considerably. There is much conjecture that he may be called to lead a dicastery in Rome, something that he would undoubtedly not wish for, and would be a great loss for the Church in Norway.

Almost any line or paragraph of Bishop Erik's words would make an excellent subject for Lenten reflection. But there were one or two phrases that speak strongly to a theme that has been much discussed recently in the media, both religious and secular: namely, the appearance of a religious revival, albeit still small, in the West.

One of the questions that has yet to be answered is that, despite evidence that attendance has been much higher at celebrations such as Ash Wednesday in many countries, and that baptisms will be up this year at Easter, how many of these people, predominantly young, are returning to regular practice?

It's unlikely that a young seeker, quite possibly unbaptized and with little, if any, knowledge of the Christian faith, is crossing the portal of the local Church to hear of either synodality, immigration, or debate over altar rails.

Still less will they be seeking music, or something very like it, that was popular when their parents were teenagers, but as Bishop Erik put it sharply, is now distinctly "sounding last-season."

More likely, if they are initially searching for beauty to lead them to the experience of the divine, the season they seek will be one long before the advent of bell-bottoms.

Varden rightly and perceptively focuses on the reality that, in a highly confused and technocratic age, people are echoing the question of Pilate: "What is truth?"

The Church, and ancient wisdom, has long taught that, along with truth, beauty and goodness are paths to God. Bishop Erik warned his audience, with Pope Leo prominently seated in front, that the Church, or certainly many churchmen, imagine that they must ape fashion in order to be 'relevant' and "attract the youth."

But this is a great danger for any religious revival. And Bishop Varden echoed, in a sense, Chesterton's belief – which is probably shared by many seekers: "We do not want a Church that will move with the world, we want a Church that will move the world."

Bishop Erik, a profoundly cultured man, knows well of which he speaks, both as a university professor and Abbot. Is there anything more embarrassing than a Churchman who is trying to be fashionable? One thinks of Dean Inge's line that a Church that "marries the spirit of this age will be a widow in the next." Bishop Varden gives the Church and, I would argue, every parish, a program for the seeker.

In the first place, he argues that those seeking the truth are asking the "question [What is truth?] earnestly – we cannot let it go unanswered." This is the function, not only of the ...