The Catholic Thing

By Stephen P. White

One of the advantages of living in the suburbs of Washington DC – and, yes, there are some advantages – is that I am able to attend the March for Life almost every year. This year, while many would-be Marchers are wondering if their return flights are going to be cancelled by a massive winter storm, I have no such worries. I'll be there again this year, marching and praying and taking solace in the tens of thousands of smiling young faces, families, and not a few friends.

The March provides an opportunity to reflect on what has been accomplished in the defense of life, as well as a chance to reflect on what remains to be done. Often this work is understood in the context of our politics: pro-life politicians elected, laws changed, court cases decided, policies that are praiseworthy or blameworthy.

The pro-life movement, which sprang up in the wake of Roe v. Wade and which has persisted in this country for more than half a century, is a remarkable accomplishment of citizen activism. Few countries can boast such a broad-based and durable coalition in defense of the unborn as we have here in the United States.

Pope Leo recently underscored the importance of this work, both for the sake of the lives involved but also for the well-being of society as a whole:

The protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right. A society is healthy and truly progresses only when it safeguards the sanctity of human life and works actively to promote it.

Of course, the pro-life movement is more than political activism, as important as that is. Think, for example, of the enormous networks of crisis pregnancy centers that have done, and continue to do, such noble work for mothers and children across the country. Think of the Sisters of Life, who embody in a particular way the Catholic commitment to serving the very least among us. Think of the countless parish pro-life ministries where thousands upon thousands of rosaries are said every week for mothers in need and for the protection of their children.

These immense, broad-based efforts in defense of life are bolstered by the Church's witness to the dignity of human life in other arenas, too: in her defense of the elderly and terminally ill; her solicitude for the poor, the homeless, the incarcerated, and the stranger; her care for sinners.

Each of us is loved by God, a God who, though we were sinners, loved us first. To acknowledge this fundamental reality, this basic realization of the Christian life, is to know the twin consolations of gratitude and humility. From such grace flows the imperative to love in imitation of Christ.

The imperative to love – which ought to inform the whole of the pro-life movement and is certainly on display every January at the March – also leads us to reflect on the enormity of what abortion has wrought in this country. The cost in lives is almost incalculable – almost, but not quite: somewhere between 60 and 70 million abortions in the United States since 1973.

The cost to the relationships between men and women, the desolation of families, the pain of regret and loss, the poisoning of our politics, the coarsening of the soul of our nation. All of these are real costs to the sin of abortion. These are spiritual costs which affect all of us (even those never directly touched by abortion) because they profoundly shape and affect the families, communities, and even the Church to which we belong.

Mother Teresa, in her 1979 Nobel Prize speech, famously spoke in defense of the unborn. But her words were not just a lament for abortion or a call to defend the most vulnerable among us (though she did both). She also identified the poverty – the greatest poverty – of those nations which embraced the abortion license:

The greatest destroyer of peace today is the cry of the innocent unborn child. For if a mother can murder her own child in her own womb, what is left for you and for me to kill each other? To...

By David Warren

Among the thrills in being flat out immobile, or fairly close to it, is that it keeps one out of bookstores. One finally has an opportunity to read what one was putting off until retirement.

Irresponsible book-buyers have invariably collected works to read then, "when I will have lots of time." Unfortunately, with advancing age comes the revelation that one has not lots of time.

Indeed, as I begin this column, I learn that a close old friend, whom I have known since he was twenty-five, has died at what I once thought the ripe old age of eighty. We were just getting around to discussing certain things, and I reflect, "If Julian could die, anyone could die."

And believe me, the Canadian winter is a mortification. It is among the many advantages of living in this place.

Reading up here in my cell (I call it the High Doganate), like the author of the book that I am reading, "I spend as much time nodding into my books as I do in my bed." But unlike him, when sleep is most pleasant and I feel I could stay in bed for hours, the bell rings for Matins.

It is St. Aelred of Rievaulx I read, and I imagine that in north Yorkshire nine hundred years ago it could be just as cold as it gets in Toronto. The only difference is that not all of us need to go out in it, like the poor garbage collectors whose noisy truck suddenly disturbs me before seven in the morning.

There is work to do, out there, too, but unlike in a monastery, everyone doesn't have to do it. We don't have "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs," as they do in theoretical Marxism, or was actually the case in the Rievaulx Abbey. It was a worker's paradise: everyone worked.

In the Speculum Caritatis, or Mirror of Charity, which I try to read through the din of garbage trucks, Aelred is directly or indirectly addressing novices, or potential novices.

He dealt with a lot of them, and as he who was once sent by King David I from Scotland towards Rievaulx when it was still construction huts, he had much experience in the art of recruitment. He went on to be the most illustrious Abbot in that north Yorkshire precinct, while continuing in the same old gig, saving souls wherever possible.

And here he is explaining to a novice, who is perhaps settling in, the difference between life inside and life outside the monastery. Should you be flinching at the burden of work that may be necessary to save your soul, well, the Matins bell will go off around 3 a.m.

But remember, these were in medieval times – not quite the "High Middle Ages" yet – and most of Europe was then quite Christian, unlike today.

The splendid Romanesque and Gothic edifices, which our tourists like to ogle when any of them remain, were not only being built (to higher craft standards than we can imagine), but were not yet fully inhabited.

Our civilization was still on our "to-do" list, for the most part. Instructions for how to live and what to do were still accumulating. St Aelred was contributing to this "media job."

In contrast, look at Rievaulx today. It is a pretty ruin in its valley, and much shrunk since the stones that went to erect it were used in making the secular structures that now litter that particular landscape.

They were recycled when Henry VIII was wrecking the place to make room for Protestantism, except the choicest bits, which were privatized onto the property market.

No one actually lives in the ruin, for it has no central heating. You would freeze. Also, no water. And the "National Trust" won't even let you camp.

It follows that a guide to becoming, or staying, a novice, is no longer needed, except by academics and experts. The rest may comfortably waste their lives. There will be no "test" in any earthly sense. Your only instruction as a Christian is to rise, except that may now seem impossible. Gravity would be offended.

But according to Aelred, there will be no difference at all. The many things that concerned and afflicted you in secular life, will ...

By John M. Grondelski

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 13 in the cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., involving Idaho and West Virginia laws banning males who identify as female from competing in girls' sports. Most commentators think the Court will uphold the state laws.

Mainstream media paints the case as simply "girls' sports versus trans rights." That slogan is simplistic. Listening to the oral arguments reveals just how far-reaching the gender ideology agenda really is.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in these cases appear to recognize the headwinds they face. Public opinion remains skeptical, the senior federal judiciary is reluctant to invent new constitutional rights, and there is no longer a sympathetic exeutive branch committed to advancing transgender claims.

As a result, the plaintiffs advanced a novel argument: the laws are unconstitutional as applied. In other words, they are valid for virtually everyone else – say, "99.9999 percent" of the population, a figure cited in oral argument – but unconstitutional as applied to their particular clients.

Their claim is that these male plaintiffs are uniquely situated because they have not undergone full male puberty. Because they lack the physiological development that typically confers athletic advantages on males, their attorneys argued, the rationale behind sex-based sports categories does not apply to them. Therefore, the state must recognize boys' asserted female identity and permit participation in girls' sports.

The implicit argument is revealing. Sex-based sports categories are reinterpreted not as expressions of irreducible sexual differentiation, but merely as regulatory mechanisms aimed at preventing unfair competitive advantages. If no such advantage can be shown in a particular case, the prohibition encompassed by the hitherto all-encompassing category of "biological sex" must yield to self-identification. Heads, the ideology wins; tails, biological reality loses.

The lawsuits against West Virginia and Idaho thus seek to protect transgenderism. The states, by contrast, advance a more fundamental claim – one consonant with Catholic anthropology – that "male" and "female" name biological realities that cannot be altered by self-perception. They are not costumes, masks, or social roles. We do not merely have a body, we are a body, a body-soul composite in the technical language.

As Justice Amy Coney Barrett observed during oral argument, there are no corresponding cases of females seeking access to competitive boys' sports. The reason is obvious: sexual differentiation produces predictable physical disparities that render such efforts futile. "Trans boys" (i.e., medically enhanced girls) are not scrambling to join competitive boys' sports teams. That asymmetry exposes what the sports debate is really about. It is not inclusion, but the insistence that subjective identity must override objective embodiment – precisely where doing so confers advantage.

What is ultimately at stake is a question that courts and the political process are rarely called upon to decide: whether states may reject the sex/gender split that subordinates biological reality to psychological self-identification. Accepting sex-based sports laws entails rejecting that skewed metaphysical claim. For proponents of transgender ideology, that common-sense concession is unacceptable because abandoning the dichotomy undermines the entire framework on which "trans" ideology rests.

Catholic theological anthropology seems to stand squarely with the two states. Modern Catholic theology, especially after Vatican II, affirms the pervasive nature of human sexuality, extending even to the genetic level. It also insists that the body is a constitutive element of the human person, not a disposable instrument used by the mind. The person is not a consciousness temporarily inhabiting matter.

Gender ideology is built on the rejection of both principles. Personhood is constructed...

By Randall Smith

A few years back, there was some energy and zeal around something people called "the new evangelization." I never quite knew what it meant, but I am in favor of evangelizing, so anything serving that goal seems good to me. But as long as people are thinking about new kinds of evangelization, I would like to suggest one.

Allow me to begin, however, if I may, with what should be for all devoted Catholics a very disturbing statistic. Multiple studies suggest that 96 percent of deaf people, including those who are baptized Catholics, do not go to any church due to very limited services available to them in their own language (in the United States, American Sign Language or ASL). Indeed, fewer than 5 percent of churches in the U.S. offer outreach to the deaf.

There is frequently a basic misunderstanding about deafness and sign language. Often people will say something like this: "Well, the deaf can read the readings, so why would we need an ASL interpreter?" The misunderstanding is based on the belief that ASL signs merely represent English, just like a written word. That's not so. ASL is its own language with its own syntax, grammar, and vocabulary, which is visual, not written.

Consequently, people whose first language is ASL encounter specific challenges when learning to read English. For them, this is a second language, in a foreign medium. A friend of mine describes it this way. What if instead of A. Somebody wrote a 1, and instead of an F. he wrote a 6, and so on. Then you would be looking at a line of numbers trying to decipher what they meant.

Oral language users distinguish "cat" from "cab" when we sound it out. Deaf people don't learn to read that way. For them, the "t" is like the number 20 for you. If I write: "3, 1, 2" and then "3, 1, 20," you know there's a difference, but it you won't know what it is until somebody makes clear to you that "3, 1, 2" signifies a car that takes you to the airport and "3, 1, 20" signifies a soft, fluffy thing that our dog hates. Now think about "reading" a "sentence" that looks like this: 1 312 54808 343 878 45, 215 3558. That's what reading a written language can be like for the Deaf.

Reading English for a Deaf person whose native language is sign language is harder than if you tried to read a text in ancient Greek, not knowing any of the Greek letters. Granted, you could learn the Greek letters, and you could learn Greek, but anyone who has done it can tell you it's not the easiest thing in the world. It's not like learning your own language.

If hearing children never had anyone speak to them, they would never learn to talk. So too with deaf children. If parents learn to sign, many deaf children will start to sign before hearing children start to talk. But deaf children only learn when people communicate to them in their language.

Sadly, only a very small percentage of hearing parents of deaf children learn to sign. It is very rare, for example, for fathers to learn to sign. Without the support of family and the community, how many of those children do you suppose will end up in church at Mass?

Are we not warned in Leviticus 19:14: "You shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind; but you shall fear your God. I am the LORD"? Do we not have a Savior who fulfills the promise of Isaiah 29:18: "In that day, the deaf will hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind will see out of obscurity and out of darkness"?

When the imprisoned John the Baptist tells his disciples to ask Jesus: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?" the Lord replies: "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me."

Some people seem to think it is an "annoyance" to have sign language interpreters at Mass. Do they find ramps...

by Robert Royal

The late American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once remarked that the contemporary vision of a human being is a brain connected to a pair of "genitals" (the actual term he used is a bit salty for the present site). There seems to be nothing in between for us. C.S. Lewis, another great Christian writer, called us "men without chests." Other things that once made us human – wisdom, courage, self-discipline, sacrifice, loyalty, above all love (the whole spectrum, not just sex) – barely have names among us any longer.

Just last week, for instance, we were treated to two comic dramas in the capital of the world's sole superpower. Naturally they involved sex. Lawyers argued before our Supreme Court that "trans" girls (i.e., boys) have the "right" to play girls' sports. When asked how to define "boy" or "girl," the high-priced legal mouthpieces suddenly became tongue-tied. In some circles, it's now self-evident (i.e., needs no explanation) that "gender" means something other than the "sex assigned at birth," a ridiculous phrase that suggests some nefarious power is seeking to pre-empt a baby's right to choose its sexual identity.

Similarly, in a Congressional hearing last week, Senator Josh Hawley asked Dr. Nisha Verma, an ob-gyn specialist, whether men can become pregnant. She, too, immediately went doolally. If she said yes, she well knew she would be stating what everyone not brain-damaged by gender ideology knows is false. If she said no, she was risking her career, not least from her woke-subservient colleagues in the medical profession. So she punted, suggesting that raising the question was "divisive."

Walker Percy, who was a medical doctor with a wicked Southern sense of humor, satirized what he foresaw as the coming collapse of medicine, law, and the whole culture. Which is why he once explained that he converted to Catholicism, because, "What else is there?

The Church is the living embodiment of a tradition of both the great ancient philosophical heritage as well as the metaphysical vision of the Old and New Testaments. She's the only institution in the Western world that still retains enough substance and sheer life – despite spectacular failures – to counteract the emptiness and nonsense around us.

If our leaders, that is, are up to the challenge. Which is urgent. It's not the Church's business to "make the world a better place." That's best left to former student council presidents and graduation speakers. Her business is much larger: to get us to Heaven. Yet there are many things needed in the meantime to put us on the right road.

Pope Leo, in a recent address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, struck a new and much-needed note that, unlike many papal speeches, pointedly responds to our current plight:

It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking. At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.

The excluded are, often and notably, Christians and other sane people.

But the pope went even further, explicitly criticizing abortion and even surrogacy: "By transforming gestation into a negotiable service, this violates the dignity both of the child, who is reduced to a 'product,' and of the mother, exploiting her body and the generative process, and distorting the original relational calling of the family."

So have our American bishops, along with the trans assault on the very notion of truth and falsehood. In November, the U.S. bishops voted overwhelmingly to ban "gender-affirming care" from Catholic hospitals. And good for them. Because much of the world is paralyzed by the false claim that failing to "affirm" the current social madness will lead to many suicides.

But we need a follow-up. We have a pro-life movement, various ministries to people with same-sex attraction. Where is the like s...

By Dominic V. Cassella

With Christmas behind us and as we now proceed through "Ordinary Time," we have the opportunity to contemplate the full, extraordinary mystery of God's descent into human life and our ascent into the divine. The Church Fathers called this descent synkatabasis: literally, "with-down-walking," a lowering of oneself to the level of those beneath you. One of the clearest depictions of this divine condescension is found in the nighttime conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.

In the Gospel of John, Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark of night. Jesus tells him that he must be "born anew" if he wishes to enter into the kingdom of God. To which Nicodemus asks how it is a man can be born again, "can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Jesus explains: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man." And that this ascent is imaged in the death on the Cross. (John 3:1-15)

In this brief exchange, Baptism and the Cross are juxtaposed. They illustrate both the ascent into Heaven and the taking on of eternal life. The ascending and descending language that Jesus uses here has two bookends: birth and death on the Cross. In these few lines, the full mystery of our own life in Christ is revealed, since life in Christ is a mirror of the life of Christ.

The 13th-century theologian Nicholas Cabasilas taught that the ascending and descending of Christ – which begins with the mystery of His conception and Nativity, continues throughout His life and ministry, and culminates with His death and resurrection – is the very ladder by which we are to become "other christs."

Cabasilas describes this ladder as having three braces. If Jesus Christ is the eternal Word, His descent from Heaven begins with His Incarnation, and this is the top rung of the ladder. His life and ministry are the middle rung, and His death and resurrection are the bottom rung. The three-runged ladder can be paired with the classic Byzantine cross, which itself has three bars: one for Jesus's feet, another for his hands, and the third bearing the inscription "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews."

The ladder of ascent into Heaven is the Cross that we are each called to take up. (Matthew 10:38, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23) Consequently, if the ladder's bottom step in the life of Christ – the lowest bar of the Cross – is His death and resurrection, it's the first step on our path of ascension into Heaven.

This "death and resurrection," the first crosspiece to living a life in Christ, is Baptism and the new birth about which Jesus sought to instruct Nicodemus that night. Thus, St. Paul can say, "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?" (Romans 6:3) At the foot of the Cross, on the first bar, we can "stand again" as the Greek word for resurrection (ana-stasis) implies.

Having been reborn into Christ, we now must take on the "mind of Christ." This, of course, is accomplished through the gifts of the Spirit. (1 Corinthians 2:12-16) By the sacrament of Confirmation, the Church teaches that we are fortified and made mature and able to live a life of truth. This is the second crosspiece of the ascent into Heaven, by which "the Spirit of truth comes," and He guides us "into all the truth." (John 16:13) By it we live a life of evangelization, spreading the good news and being witnesses. We live our life in Christ and become witnesses to the life of Christ. Where Christ's hands are nailed to the Cross, we ascend to the task of doing the work of His hands.

The topmost crosspiece in the ascent (the first in the descent of the Only-Begotten Son) is the Word's becoming flesh, the mystery of the Incarnation, where Christ the eternal King is born and made man. In the order of our life in Christ, this is our participation in the body and blood of Christ. It is our reception and adoration of the Eucharist. Here at the top bar of the Cross, we are joined to the ...

By Tracy Lee Simmons

This column is slightly adapted from the introduction to the new Mount Titano Media republication of the classic novel.

Zealously celebrated and thoroughly thumbed by the literarily inclined up until, say, 1960, Quo Vadis held pride of place on living room bookshelves, back when living rooms still had bookshelves. Now the book is more likely to be found in second-hand bookshops than in corporate-owned chain bookstores. In other words, nowadays the book sits snugly out of sight, out of mind, and certainly out of fashion, but perhaps in part for that very reason, Quo Vadis makes a fair and fresh claim in our day on the consideration of educated people – and of people who would wish to be so. It is due for reclamation in an age of thinning literacy and little faith.

The source of the book's popularity over nearly 70 years, though, requires no explanation, particularly when we reflect upon the leisurely, readerly, tobacco-tinctured, and elocuted Victorian period out of which it arose, a time when attention spans were longer and more reliably mature. It's a well-paced – if not fast-paced – character-driven story, set in the thickets of a distant time and mixing, in equal parts, faith, history, and romance.

And during those earlier decades of the 20th century, when people knew more about both faith and history than we do now, enmeshing oneself in this novel must have been akin to binge-watching a mini-series online today. It's a page-turner. But for many Christians, and for many Catholics especially, familiarity with this book was also de rigueur. Not bad for a novel originally published in Polish.

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was born into a noble but penurious Polish family, schooled in the severe manner of the time and, on reaching his majority and feeling the itch to write, he set out as a journalist and travel writer with an eye for the picturesque and politically dramatic, trekking over Europe and as far as America to pen dispatches on all he saw.

And although later he would try his hand as a newspaper editor, in the end it was the art of fiction that drew out and harnessed his greater talents. It was also fiction that eventually brought him the financial security to practice his skills and fulfill his vocation full time. For this was the century of Dickens and the serialized novel, when readers the world over would wait with finger-biting anxiety for the next installment of epics to appear in popular journals and magazines, making the better novelists of that time something like celebrity filmmakers today.

They told the tales that people talked about. This was a vibrant literary culture. As entertainers, novelists tapped into the public taste, but as artists, they also sought to form that taste, both diverting and enlightening that public by the deft and expansive handling of words. In just this way did the intelligent amusement of one generation become the respected literature of the next.

Quo Vadis stands as one of Sienkiewicz's mature (originally) serialized works. Written in Polish and published in full book form in 1896, it achieved immediate success and was translated liberally into scores of languages as its fame grew. And grow it did. The novel spawned stage productions and, later, several film and television adaptations, making the story familiar even to generations who had never read the book. It is the author's crowning feat. In recognition of his long line of distinguished literary work for a larger public, Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.

While this book may be a work of fiction, not all contained herein is purely fictive. Sienkiewicz takes us back to the ancient Rome of the 60s A.D., days, weeks, and months when the Emperor Nero reigned. Rome was choked in debased corruption, the Great Fire destroyed large swaths of the city, and a small sect that had arisen in provincial Judea from Jewish roots called 'Christians' was slowly infiltrating the debauched cap...

One of the oddest things about my evangelical upbringing was the catechesis I received in creationism. Because of a certain hyper-literalist interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the evangelical churches that my family attended periodically preached on the errors of Darwin, seeking to equip congregants with talking points on dinosaurs, carbon-14 dating, and various phenomena that evolutionary theory struggled to explain. All of us eager evangelicals, ostensibly trained to speak authoritatively on matters of science.

Of course, few of us could actually do so. The idea that an evangelical who learned his science at church would go toe-to-toe with a hard sciences major or professional scientist and tell them that, in fact, the earth was 10,000 years old is ludicrous. Indeed, as much as Christians criticize religious skeptics for various philosophical assumptions – such as that miracles do not happen – an anti-evolution stance derived from a peculiar reading of Genesis is equally unfounded.

The more I learned about the contentious history of religion and science, the more I realized that the battle was largely the result of colossal confusion, often perpetuated by atheists and fundamentalists. Science deals with empirical data, with what can be observed and tested in the natural world; religion deals with metaphysical realities, some of which can be logically deduced and articulated, but cannot be empirically tested. To claim that natural selection somehow disproves the existence of God is equivalent to claiming that because human behavior is sometimes predictable, there is no free will.

I was thus thankful to learn that the Catholic Church understands evolutionary theory not as a villainous bogeyman, but, like every other aspect of modern thought, something to be considered in light of philosophical truth and a proper understanding of divine revelation. Darwin and Doctrine: The Compatibility of Evolution and Catholicism, by biology professor Daniel Keubler, falls squarely in this fair-minded Catholic tradition, carefully parsing philosophical and metaphysical claims. He writes: "Over the years, I have gone from wrestling with how evolution might fit with Catholicism to exploring how an evolutionary understanding can enlighten our understanding of how God relates to his creation."

The Catholic Church does not actually have a position on the science of evolution, because it is in the business of determining truth related to divine revelation, not adjudicating the validity of various scientific theories. When the Church has spoken on science, it has focused attention on what St. John Paul II called "[pseudo-scientific] theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter."

Catholics are therefore free to hold a range of positions related to evolution, from rejecting it outright as incompatible with Genesis, to accepting just about all evolutionary theory except for what denies formal Church teaching, such as claiming Creation can be explained solely via natural processes.

Keubler is persuaded that the available data is sufficient to conclude that life on Earth has evolved over the last 3.8 billion years. Yet he also believes that God has created a marvelous natural order, "a rare universe in which evolution via natural processes is indeed possible." Catholics, he argues, do not have to choose between the Church and evolutionary science, properly understood, particularly the elements that have strong evidentiary support, and those that remain debated within the scientific community. Keubler resoundingly succeeds on both counts.

He first presents an account of how the Church has understood Creation, and the philosophical confusion responsible for the common misperception that science and religion are incompatible. He explains the prevalence of scientism, the belief that science is the only means o...

When I taught CCD, I used to tell my kids, 'If everybody else is doing it, it's probably wrong.' The Christian life is difficult. The truth is difficult." So said Kelley (as we may call her) when I interviewed her, in January 1999, a few months after the death of my late wife, Ruth.

I interviewed, then, seven of Ruth's closest friends, homemakers, who used to gather to say the Rosary each week. In those years, I was busy writing books and papers for tenure. I had my professional contacts. But what was Ruth's circle like? Men typically don't have a glimpse. I wanted to learn, to make a record.

And so I did. But I promptly put the cassettes and transcripts away, not to look at them again.

If someone wondered why, I'd show him the interview with Alice Bernard, a hospice nurse, who counted herself fortunate that, without planning, she found herself at Ruth's bedside in her final hours. Alice's powerful account is nearly overwhelming to me even now.

But I have been as if compelled to go back to these interviews after the declaration, last September, by the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, that Ruth may be considered a Servant of God.

Let's return to what Kelley said. I asked, But why should the truth be difficult? She replied, "I ask myself that all the time." And what do you find?

It's not the job of the Church to make your life easy. Life in this world anyway. The job of the Church is to get you to Heaven. And if going to Heaven means that you have to be spiritual, then that means you have to be willing to see everything as tested from a viewpoint outside of this world: you have to see everything in a spiritual light.

"For instance," she said, "what are the reasons why people use contraception? Mostly, these are very worldly reasons. They say, 'I can't afford another child right now.' Or 'The house is too small for another child,' or 'We have a strong, uncontrollable sex drive,' – which is also a worldly reason. Or, they say, 'I don't have enough love' – but of course you do not have enough love, if you see love as constantly giving material things. It follows that, if it's the job of the Church to get you to Heaven, then the Church would be seriously erring if it allowed you to think in a worldly way like that."

But what is spiritual about having sex and a having a lot of babies? "I suppose having sex is not spiritual," she said, "But neither was death on the Cross – in a very bloody, human way – 'spiritual' in that sense. Sweat and blood and bodily functions or mucus or whatever are definitely not 'spiritual.' It is what grows from that and springs from that, which is the spiritual."

But why should things be like that? Kelley said, "The spiritual must be human and 'worldly' because of Original Sin. This is what moms do, when they wipe a kid's bottom for example. They take something very smelly and very gross and very human, and they turn it into something beautiful and something spiritual. That is what it is all about, for sure."

Kelley said she never wanted to go to college but simply to be a mom. The fact that Ruth lived in a modest house on the poorer side of town "showed me from the very beginning that Ruth had no ambition to be wealthy, or to look wealthy." Kelley would be at ease: "You'd go to her house, and somehow she'd manage to have fresh baked things, and apple pie, and great coffee."

But weren't you a little intimidated by the Harvard diploma that Ruth hung in the kitchen? Kelley answered with a story: "One day I got on the subject of her education. I said, 'Well, I saved a whole lot of money, because I didn't go to college – and I'm doing the same things you are doing!' Ruth laughed and said, 'Yeah, but I wouldn't have met Michael if I didn't go to Harvard!' " Kelley smiled at me: "So there you go. That's the only reason she could think of for going to college!"

In college. Ruth had sung Beethoven's Ninth and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms with the Boston Symphony. She played oboe, piano, violin, a...

A few years ago, I attended a conference given by a wise Benedictine abbot, who recounted an experience he had during a trip to the Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos. What he described was an episode directly related to the veneration of sacred images in the Eastern tradition.

A father on pilgrimage entered a church, holding his little boy by the hand. With steady, slow steps, he approached an icon of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He bowed before it, made the sign of the Holy Cross, and kissed the icon. Then he lifted his little boy, who kissed Christ the Savior loudly, as one does when giving a kiss on his mother's cheek.

The monk recalled this episode while emphasizing the naturalness of the gesture. We were all witnessing a true lesson in sacred manners, presented by someone who knew what it means to adore God the Son, represented in a holy image.

Against the iconoclasm of the Protestant reformers, the Church founded by our Savior Jesus Christ reacted with the most important event in its history: the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Amid its numerous sessions (twenty-five), the conciliar Fathers also discussed the role and value of sacred images. They reviewed the teaching concerning them, showing that there are two categories of religious visual creations. There are

• sacred images, which involve the representation of persons existing in the unseen world, and

• religious paintings, of a pedagogical character, which depict scenes from the earthly lives of holy persons.

There are, of course, many crucial "technical" differences between these two categories of visual representations. But perhaps the most important distinction, however, is the attitude one has before them.

"Sacred images" are always intended for worship. In other words, they truly place us in the presence of the persons represented. When we stand before an icon of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we must practice adoration with all the appropriate gestures. When we are before an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we must practice hyper-veneration and its corresponding gestures.

As for angels and saints, they must be venerated with the gestures suitable to them. After nearly fifteen years of providing catechesis in many Catholic parishes, I can say that – unfortunately – such distinctions are unknown to most believers.

As a convert from Eastern schismatic Christianity – of which the father and his little boy in the abbot's story were members – I noticed immediately when I began attending Catholic liturgies, the absence of gestures directed toward the holy persons represented in those statues and paintings that belong to the category of sacred images.

Over time, I attended Masses in Roman Catholic churches in which these were entirely absent. In Arizona, North Carolina, and New York, as well as in Italy and Scotland, I visited churches that seemed more like sports halls or auditoriums than sacred spaces. It's no surprise that the appropriate gestures before icons, where these still exist, are missing. We can observe this, moreover, by comparing the Church's two major catechisms.

The teaching about holy images is present both in the Roman Catechism (1566) and in the newer Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992). The essence of the teaching about icons is found, intact, in both. Here is what the Roman Catechism states:

The images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity or virtue is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or that trust is to be reposed in images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honour which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ; an...