The Catholic Thing

By Stephen P. White

Everyone who knows anything about Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" "knows" that it is about sex. Anyone who knows more than a little about the theology of the body understands that to say it is about sex is a bit like saying the book of Genesis is a treatise on the morality of fruit consumption.

The theology of the body is an extended exercise in incarnational anthropology. It is about human embodiedness. Because of this, it has a great deal to teach us beyond the realm of human sexuality.

To the point, the theology of the body offers a striking and underappreciated relevance for our thinking about Artificial Intelligence.

Much of our fascination with (and anxiety about) AI has understandably focused on the ability of AI to simulate the human mind. And so much of the discussion about AI focuses on our ability to reliably distinguish AI "thinking" from human thought.

In his encyclical Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV distinguishes some of the tantalizing capacities of artificial intelligence from the authentically human capacities that AI is designed to mimic:

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. (MH, 99)

Pope Leo mentions the human body right at the outset, but he focuses on distinguishing AI's capacity to simulate human language and learning from our human capacity for the same.

These are all important distinctions, to be sure. But the evident, objective differences between AI and the human mind are not the only – and perhaps not even the most important – distinction between humanity and AI.

The old Scholastic categories of form and matter are suddenly relevant again. To be human is to be body-and-soul, not simply a soul in a body. Our souls are the form and principle of our bodies. The one cannot exist independent of the other, except by supernatural means. This is why we are mortal and why we are made for resurrection.

To be human means to be, in a way, incomplete in ourselves. We were made for communion, a reality of which our very bodies, male and female, are a sign. To be human is to be a social and political animal, both of which require bodies. To be human is to be, as it were, a matrimonial animal. None of this could be accomplished simply by uploading a mind into a machine (even a biological machine) even if such a thing were possible.

It's worth noting that we humans also learn language through imitation. We learn "behavior and analytic skills," "empathy and understanding" in much the same way. If we are to identify what separates us from AI, we will have to dig deeper than the assertion that AI's abilities are a mere "simulation" of human qualities, however accurately imitated.

Our consciences are formed (or disfigured) by learning through imitation. Through conscience, we can distinguish good from evil, but we do not always do so. We can feign moral judgment and conviction.

In fact, we humans are so good at feigning certain judgments and behaviors that we can deceive others, and even ourselves, about our true motives and feelings. While we may be good judges of our own authentic intentions (provided our conscience is well formed), we are often quite bad at judging the same in others.

Each of us is intimately aware of our own personal experiences of both consciousness and conscience. But these experiences in others, while somehow communicable, remain in some way utterly inaccessible to...

By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

Sitting atop his ivory wall, the pedantic egghead Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that any word he uses means "just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Humpty Dumpty deflects: "The question is. . . .which is to be master – that's all." Humpty Dumpty means master in the sense of ruler, the one who holds power over the word. But "master" carries an older sense that he has discarded: the ancient term for teacher (magister), whose authority ought never to be power, but the conformity of his mind to reality.

In this scene with Humpty Dumpty, Lewis Carroll gives us a portrait of a certain kind of Oxford academic: pompous, contemptuous, and confident in his own authority. He subordinates the true source of speech, which is reality, to his will. Humpty Dumpty is the prototype for a veritable army of modern professors, convinced that in controlling the meaning of words, they control the world. Sit through an accreditation review, or a staff development day, and you'll encounter Humpty's prolific progeny. The radical abuse of speech is no isolated phenomenon; it is the new norm in "education."

What Carroll conveyed through Humpty Dumpty has now proliferated throughout the entire profession. Even the most vital words in teaching, "school" and "education" have lost their grounding in reality, a crisis academia fails to address.

We ought to follow, instead, St. Augustine's thought in De magistro "On the Teacher"; a word's meaning is never ours to invent. Augustine gives us a dialogue with his son on what a teacher's words can actually do when they pass from one mind to another.

Augustine demonstrates that words cannot put truth into another human soul; they can only prompt the hearer to accept or reject the truth of what is said. He asserts that it is only the "teacher within," the Logos Himself, who is the one true teacher. In Augustine's own borrowed wisdom, we are "not to call anyone on earth our master because there is only one Master of all who is in Heaven." A teacher who arrogates to himself the right to have his words mean whatever he wants them to mean has abandoned the source of all truth.

We are apt to think that "school" is a building where children go for instruction. Our modern notions of "school" differ radically from ancient exemplars like Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, or the gymnasium where bodily discipline accompanied the contemplation of philosophical truth.

The word "school" once conveyed a surprising meaning. In antiquity, school meant leisure, not in the modern sense, but as an interior disposition of the soul: at rest, still, and yet wide awake to receive all of reality as it truly is. School, or leisure, is the proper interior state of being to hear a good lecture or to receive from a master teacher what is real and true. In past ages, if one was gifted with leisure time, it was the proper response to spend that time cultivating the interior life.

The word "education" is as much abused as "school." A few years ago, I interviewed top teachers, school leaders, and county administrators to ask them to define the word "education." The answers were noteworthy in at least two concerning ways.

First, I received as many different definitions as the people I asked.

Second, none of the answers conveyed a concept of education rooted in reality.

In the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, to educate has always meant to educe, to lead a student forth, out of the darkness of error and sin, and into the light of truth and virtue. Education is the formal cause of a nation, or as Chesterton put it, "education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." This understanding of education is nowhere to be found in modern schools.

It's no small irony that leisure and "leading a student forth" are now conspicuously absent from the very institutions we call "schools." Th...

By Randall Smith

Fulton Sheen, officially to be declared "blessed" in a few days, began his wonderful book Three to Get Married with these four sentences:

It takes three to make Love in Heaven – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It takes three for Heaven to make love to earth – God, Man, and Mary, through whom God became Man.

It takes three to make love in the Holy Family – Mary, and Joseph, and the consummation of their love, Jesus.

It takes three to make love in hearts – The Lover, the Beloved, and Love.

This was a brilliant summary of the relationship between the threefold communion of love that binds the three persons of the Triune God and the love that should bind the spouses and children within a family.

How can we begin to understand the Triune God, a reality that transcends our human reason? We begin with what we know concretely in our own world: human marriages.

So too, we begin to understand God as "Father" in relation to our own fathers. "He is not merely an angry, distant God," we say, "He loves us like a Father." But upon reflection, we come to understand that the relationship really operates in the reverse.

God is the paradigm "Father," and our human fathers merely participate in His "fatherhood." Our human fathers are partially responsible for our existence, but not fully, as is God. Our human fathers care for us, but not perfectly, as does God. So, as we reflect upon the fatherhood of God, we better understand what human fatherhood is meant to be.

The closest we come in this life to understanding the loving communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is the family. It begins with a man, a woman, and the love that binds them. But then the love they share becomes incarnate in an actual person – a child.

Anyone who has married friends has probably experienced a slight awkwardness spending time with one but not the other. It may be that you were close friends with one of them before the marriage, so you just mix more naturally with that spouse.

But if you know that these parents love their children, then you will also probably know that there are few things better you can do for your friends than to love and support their children. Loving and supporting their children is loving and supporting them – the fruit of their union as a couple. It is not his child or her child; it's their child. The child is the embodied union of their love.

So we start with human marriage, but upon reflection, we realize that we can understand marriage and the family best as modeled by the Triune God: a unity of love that does not destroy their distinctness, and a distinctness of persons that does not make impossible their true unity. And this is a unity of persons that is not closed in on itself, but is expressed outwardly, abundantly inviting others into communion and fellowship.

The love of a great family never stops at the door of the house. It goes out to invite others in.

What makes this sort of love in marriage possible? As Catholics, we believe that we are given the grace to love this way by the Holy Spirit. Since the Holy Spirit is the Love shared between the Father and the Son instantiated as a distinct divine person, when we share in the gifts of the Spirit, we participate in the very Love shared between the Father and the Son.

In Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, Konstantin Levin, an unbeliever, marries Kitty, a woman he has loved deeply for years. At the wedding ceremony in the Church, Levin is led through what are to him a series of awkward steps he barely understands. But he does them anyway because of his love for his bride, and he is delighted.

At one point in the service, he hears these words: "Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace and help, O Lord, we beseech Thee." Tolstoy writes: "Levin heard the words and they impressed him. How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants? thought Levin, recalling all his recent fears and doubts. 'What do I know? What can I do in this fearful business,' he thought, 'without h...

By Casey Chalk

Earlier this year a meta-analysis in Advances in Psychological Science found a correlation between having a heightened sense of self-righteousness and what is called "third-party punishment," meaning punishing someone for a perceived infraction, even when you are not the victim of that infraction. An earlier study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are eager to express outrage and punish wrongdoers even when there is no identifiable personal benefit, because moralistic behavior signals our moral character to others.

Worrying contemporary factors aggravate this phenomenon. We live in a culture that diminishes the role of sin and personal culpability while amplifying our sense of self. Social media encourages the creation of curated versions of ourselves that foreground our "best version of ourselves" while concealing our vices or shortcomings. We inhabit a deracinated, atomized society in which we know and are known by few people, but, ironically, are beholden to an obsession with celebrity – not only actual celebrities, but the cult of celebrity, where we aspire to be celebrated through "likes" and "shares." Much of this digital culture primes us for both virtue signaling and participation in "cancel culture."

It's alarming, not only because of the likelihood of unjustly ruining reputations and careers, but because of what this paradigm does to the souls of those who participate in it. We don't know these online people, and are rarely privy to sufficient context to effectively evaluate them. Yet we caustically comment on the public, viral misdeeds of others – parenting decisions, relationship choices, appearance, or social etiquette. How could such behavior not do bad things to our souls?

The Church offers a different way of understanding correction, a truly Christian ethic based on a proper anthropology, an understanding of human weakness, of repentance, forgiveness, and redemption that enables us to overcome errors. It does good, both for the one being corrected, as well as the one correcting.

At Sunday Mass earlier this month, we read: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone." (Matthew 18:15) This is a method of correction that is discreet, respectful, and premised on the existence of a relationship, someone we know, with whom there exists a degree of trust and social currency. That correction, in turn, is not a way of burnishing our own moral credentials, but a desire for metanoia and the strengthening of personal bonds. We admonish the wayward because we love them and desire their good.

Another component of the Christian conception of correction is the prudential evaluation of circumstances. Is the person we perceive to be in the wrong capable of receiving correction? If not, attempting to do so may very well retard that person's ability to receive correction later.

Even if we think someone capable of listening to us, we may be rebuffed, and must prudently judge whether the error is so egregious as to be raised in a broader setting, which could very well also provoke evils worse than the first one. Perhaps, the offense is simply worth patiently suffering and praying over. It's dissatisfying but often the best option, because many wrongs, though censurable, risk causing far more harm if they are publicly exposed.

The sacrament of penance provides another proper forum for confrontation and repentance, because all Catholics are expected to regularly examine their consciences according to an objective standard of justice, and confess sins to a priest offering absolution in persona Christi. Many Catholics do not avail themselves of this incomparable gift. But those who do, even those stubbornly resistant to perceiving their own sins, enter into a framework where they are humbly willing to be instructed and strengthened by sacramental grace.

I knew a laywoman serving in a variety of authority roles in the Church who became incen...

By Anthony Esolen

In the pilot episode of the old television show The Waltons, the six Walton children have gathered outdoors in the cold and the snow, where a lady from a religious charity is handing out Christmas presents to the littler ones. The presents have been donated by people better off than almost anybody in their mountain village. She gives a present in exchange for a Bible verse. Mary Ellen, the oldest of the Walton girls, knows a lot of verses, not because she is pious, but because Mrs. Walton makes her memorize them when she has misbehaved or talked back to her elders, which is often. She's the one to go to when you need a verse.

"That's too long!" says one of the local boys. "Give me a shorter one."

"Jesus wept," says Mary Ellen.

That earns the boy a gift, and a look of pious ecstasy from the charitable lady. But things are not all well. When the smallest Walton, Elizabeth, about five years old, opens her present, it's a porcelain baby doll with a crack and a large hole in the face.

"She's dead!" the little girl cries in horror and dismay. We are to feel the shame of it, and indignation, that someone would donate a dead baby doll for the poor. Not from malice, but from sheer thoughtlessness.

Fifty years later, the feminist claptrap called Barbie opens with a group of little girls playing with their baby dolls, when a goddess-like Barbie shows up, stylish and gigantic and as feminine as a mannequin in a couturier's shop. Then, to Richard Strauss's fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra, one of the girls, in awe, smashes her doll's head on a rock, and another throws hers up in the air, spinning in space, just like the bone one of the apes has tossed in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It becomes the sign: BARBIE.

So our "evolution" is from little girls playing with baby dolls, as the narrator tells us, to Barbie – or, as I'd put it, from something warm, natural, self-giving, and productive, to something cold, unnatural, self-worshiping, and sterile. Sure, I know, it's a joke. We're not to take it seriously. So goes the bait-and-switch.

Yet somehow, I cannot see the humor in a dead baby.

"Did you hear the one about the dead baby flying in the air?" said nobody at a bar, ever.

The odd thing about it, what the film's makers somehow managed to miss, is that without babies there is no evolution. That is the Darwinian imperative. In mammals, the mother must suckle the babies, and the longer the period of immaturity, the greater the dependence of the offspring on the parents. Without a strong maternal instinct, mammals do not survive.

We need not accept Darwin's account of the origin of species in order to admit this much. It is the inexorable logic of survival. You must play your cards most wisely to beat the house. Toss away your aces, and you die. Not immediately; but the house, Nature, has all the time in the world, and you do not.

Only the spiritually exhausted Western world would make a joke about little girls smashing their baby dolls. But the joke is on the West. We are contracepting and aborting ourselves to death.

Nor are we healthy apart from those obvious evils, since we have sown confusion in our children and suspicion and recrimination between the sexes, supposing even that we humble ourselves to acknowledge that there are two sexes. And only two. The dealer looks at your winnings and shrugs. The pile will dwindle to nothing. It must.

"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing," says the aged Moses to the people. "Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." (Deuteronomy 30:19) The terms are not ours, but God's. Man can no more create a moral law than he can summon a grain of sand into existence from nothing, or invent and impose a new law of gravitation.

And the people of Israel would have the choice of death right before them as they entered Canaan. Worship of the Canaanite god Moloch, accompanied by child-sacrifice as a quid pro quo, turns the public square int...

By James P. MacGuire

In 1896, Episcopal clergyman John Byron Diman founded St. George's School in Newport, R.I. It became one of the so-called Saint Grottlesex schools, that name being a portmanteau of St. George's, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Groton, and Middlesex: Protestant prep schools that fairly defined the Gilded Age

But then the Rev. Diman had a change of heart. He converted to Catholicism and joined the Benedictine Order at nearby Portsmouth Priory, a community founded from Fort Augustus in Scotland.

As now Father Hugh Diman, O.S.B., and ever the energetic educator, he founded Portsmouth School on the priory grounds in 1926. (Hugh was his name "taken in religion.")

In his original prospectus, Fr. Diman noted that the Portsmouth school would be the first Benedictine school in the United States belonging to the English Congregation and cited such characteristics of Benedictine education as:

a general appreciation of scholarship, thoroughness in work and a belief in broad and liberal education as opposed to narrow specialization….Religion enters into the warp and woof of the School's daily life. The chapel for the religious community and the School is the same. Students may enter or leave it at will. Thus, while religion is not thrust upon them, the daily spectacle of the Mass, the occasional presence of sung Vespers or some other part of the Office, the sight of the quiet and ordered routine of the Community often reach the mind and soul of even the most light-hearted looker on, where calculated effort would generally fail.

English boys' preparatory schools such as Ampleforth College and Downside School served as its models, and, like Portsmouth Abbey, both are co-educational today.

Eighteen students enrolled in the school's first year. Among them was Christopher Wyatt, brother of actress Jane, whose mother's name, Euphemia van Rensselaer Waddington Wyatt, was the longest in the Social Register. The school's enrollment doubled in the second year, and by the early 1930s "Father Diman's School" had a national reputation, six forms, and students from across the country. By 1939, the school could count 118 graduates since its first Commencement in 1931. Of these, thirty had gone to Harvard, nineteen to Yale, thirteen to Georgetown, and eight to Princeton.

Father Hugh died after a second heart attack in March of 1948. Alumni of all his three schools attended the Pontifical Requiem Mass for his soul in the Priory chapel. Headmasters served as pallbearers, a fitting tribute to an extraordinary educator and priest.

In more recent years, the now Portsmouth Abbey School has undergone changes of development and crisis.

Most of the present campus was designed by the Italian-American architect Pietro Belluschi in a modernist redwood-and-fieldstone motif; the octagonal church at its centerpiece modeled after the Justinian Revival church of San Vitale in Ravenna, and often referred to by architectural historians as a "mid-twentieth-century masterpiece."

But Portsmouth Abbey has experienced the shock of several faculty sex abuse cases and consecutive abbots who resigned for troubling personal lapses. But under the Headmastership of Matthew Walter and his dynamic wife Paula, Portsmouth Abbey School is entering what St. John Henry Newman would call a "Second Spring," with record applications, a much-strengthened faculty, and ever-improving college placement.

Along the way, Portsmouth has known some wonderful characters. Librarian Brother Basil Cunningham, for instance, a leading tournament bridge competitor who could recite entire genealogies of European royal families but had such a deathly fear of lightning that he would summon a cab from Newport eight miles away to drive him during a storm the two hundred yards from the library to the monastery. Or the polymath eccentric genius Dom Andrew Jenks, who seemed never to sleep, seldom showered, computed the school's entire daily class schedule in his head, and produced day-old pancakes from...

By Auguste Meyrat

With many members of the Gen Z cohort (b. 1997-2012) coming of age and entering public life, it behooves older generations to understand them better. I can recall the many essays, books, and movies examining my own generation, the millennials (b. 1981-1996), as well as those assessing Generation X (b. 1965 -1980) before that. While they were not always accurate or entirely enlightening, they helped ease tensions between generations.

Unfortunately, with Gen Z, the differences may be so vast and deep that understanding them will prove more difficult. So much of their formative experience is unprecedented. Not only have they grown up with smartphones, high-speed Internet, and now AI, but they have also experienced a number of widespread social disruptions, including the Covid lockdowns. Altogether, this makes their integration into adult life especially challenging – and I say this as a teacher who has worked closely with Zoomers for decades.

As my friend and fellow teacher-writer Jeremy Adams explains in his book Hollowed Out (which I reviewed here), much about Gen Z is a paradox. On the outside, they have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips (theoretically: many will not even be aware of what today's date, 9/11, signifies). And they enjoy countless amenities. On the inside, many of them still feel empty and resentful. In response, Adams calls for a nation-wide intervention to help these youths discover the blessings of American democracy and Western wisdom.

While this solution makes sense to older generations, Zoomers would likely scoff at the very idea. As Joey Oliver makes clear in his new book American History Z: Gen Z's Journey to the Far Right, the situation for Zoomers has deteriorated well beyond Adams's modest proposal. A Zoomer himself, Oliver gives a detailed account of how these ostensibly privileged people have grown up to despise their cultural patrimony and embrace radicalism. The account is hard to read at times, but sheds light on a host of blind spots that everyone who hopes to improve the outlook of today's young adults should understand.

Far from growing up in an idyllic culture of stability, respectability, and technological advancement, Oliver and his peers witnessed firsthand the great crumbling of every narrative that had earlier defined the West. Race, immigration, feminism, free speech, economic opportunity, public health, American history, or democracy – all these subjects were reopened and recast despite inherent contradictions, corrupt leadership, and online polarization in Zoomer circles.

This was not all bad. Secular leftist narratives tend to target Oliver's own demographic – white conservative males – making them a scapegoat for all the world's ills. For decades, the great majority of institutions had thoughtlessly reinforced this toxic messaging while simultaneously lamenting the sudden rise in political and cultural polarization in American life.

But other voices arose to challenge these narratives and restore a degree of sanity to public discourse, bravely running through the gauntlet of censors and cancellers. While some of these advocates held steadfast in their positions, many were either silenced or pressured to recant, leaving much of their Zoomer audience to fend for themselves.

This collective abandonment of Zoomers makes up the darkest aspects of Oliver's story. Yes, secular leftism (popularly known as "woke culture") was slowed down by countervailing forces, but it has not gone away. The conflict between right and left simply became more intense as political violence became common and public discourse degenerated into hate-filled propaganda. The revival of democratic virtues that Adams recommended in his book was replaced with partisan tribalism.

In the end, Oliver loses faith in the whole American project. All the people he followed have let him down, making him a cynic before even reaching age 30. What's even more striking is his overwhelming scorn fo...

By Michael Pakaluk

"We know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good" (Romans 8:28).

Disasters must come in this fallen world, and maybe they will come to us. There are relatively few sayings of Jesus which the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve. But one of these addresses the fact of disasters. About those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, or the 18 victims of what we might call "the Tower of Siloam disaster": ". . . think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem? No, I say to you; but except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish." (Luke 13:4-5)

As is his wont, Our Lord here uses visible realities as signs of the invisible. He knows human nature, that disasters invite us to feel, to our shame, that we the living are somehow "better" than those who died. This reaction is telling, because it shows that we inevitably interpret disasters as moral events. No matter what some may say intellectually, we cannot succeed in interpreting them as meaningless chance events.

And this propensity is fundamentally correct. Our Lord teaches us its meaning: visible disasters are not meant to winnow out, the way the Last Judgment does. They are mere images of the only true disaster, damnation. And should stimulate us to repent.

We soften Leon Bloy's saying, that the only tragedy in human life is not to be a saint, if we neglect to consider that there is only one eternal alternative to sainthood.

Many of us alive in the days following the 9/11 attacks watched videos of the planes going into the towers again and again, not yet believing it. We liked to shock ourselves repeatedly, first, by provoking the feeling that "if only" this or that had not happened, we could have avoided it. "If only" the flight school had reported them; "if only" that suspicious airline official in Portland had not let them on). And then, second, with the feeling that "but it really did happen," which is the same as "it really was permitted by God." And this is shocking.

But did you and I repent? Was each episode of such self-inflicted shock followed by a commensurate, passionate cry for mercy? Did Catholics adopt new mortifications in atonement? People did return to church, it was noticed, but such good impulses were soon swallowed up by vengeance and warfare.

St. Paul speaks to the difference between the "permissive" and the "perfect" will of God. How do we know whether a disaster is the one or the other for us? You might look at the day before disaster.

Twenty-five years ago, September 10, 2001, Todd Beamer returned from a five-day trip to Rome with his wife, Lisa, who was pregnant with their third child. He was sent there by Oracle with a group of 500 other employees and guests, as a reward for his excellence in sales.

Todd was an Evangelical Christian. When in Rome, did he and his wife go to hear the man widely reputed to be a saint, John Paul II, who gave a General Audience in St. Peter's Square on Psalm 47? Even if not, surely the saint's words spoken then articulated God's meaning for their lives:

Until the coming of the Messiah, hope of the nations, the Gentiles did not adore God and did not know who he is. Until the Messiah redeemed them, God did not reign over the nations through their obedience and their worship. Now instead, with his Word and his Spirit, God reigns over them because he saved them from deception and made them his friends.

Once they got home, Todd needed to travel to San Francisco to do a favor for a friend by being present at a meeting with Sony. To spend more time at home with his wife and young children before leaving again, however, he decided not to take an evening flight, which was his usual practice, to get there the night before, but to take a morning flight, September 11. Was this choice a fatal mistake?

To summarize: He was a believing Christian. He did his work well. He and his wife were generous in welcoming children. He was a good friend to a co...

By Francis X. Maier

For three of my 27 years on diocesan staff, I had the attached duty of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs. It was great work. We had good relations with local Protestant and Latter-Day Saint communities; cordial discussions with local rabbis; and personal friendships with local Greek Orthodox and American Jewish Committee leaders.

With Islam, the story was different. Over the years, we had a total of two contacts: one letter from a local imam insisting that we convert, and one visit from a young, formerly Catholic imam eager to explain how all the good in Christianity was really derived from Islam, the (allegedly) original divine revelation. Alas for him, he picked an unreceptive audience.

I mention this for a reason. During those same years, I remember at least one night sitting through a parish presentation on the three "Abrahamic" faiths. In it, the parish DRE repeatedly, with the best of intentions, compared "the Bible" and "the holy Qur'an." I then had the delicate task of explaining that, in Christian belief, the Bible is holy and inspired by God. The Qur'an – whatever its beautiful elements might be – is neither.

Christians do not recognize Muhammad as a true prophet. Nor is Islam the product of divine revelation, much less the original one. And the three "Abrahamic" religions – as Rémi Brague, Jacques Ellul, and many others have noted – have far deeper differences than similarities.

Simply put, inter-religious dialogue, including with Islam, is an admirable goal. But confused irenicism serves neither the truth nor a healthy mutual understanding.

Brague, the distinguished French Catholic philosopher and Arabist, describes the limits of Christian-Muslim dialogue:

For Islam, the survival of the Christian religion is an anachronism. Islam presents itself. . .as the true Christianity, given that, according to Islamic thought, Christians have disfigured the authentic Gospel, just as the Jews, for their part, have sold out the authentic Torah. Thus it is out of the question to appeal to common Scripture. This means, from the Muslim point of view, the "Islamo-Christian dialogue" is a dialogue between true Christians (that is, the Muslims themselves) and people who imagine themselves to be true Christians, but are not. This is why dialogue interests Christians more than it does Muslims.

In practice, Islamic ignorance of, and chronic disinterest in, the actual content of Christianity can be astonishing. Bernard Lewis, the great Jewish scholar of Muslim civilization, noted that over the centuries and into the modern era, most Muslims have believed that "the Trinity, the worship of which Islam condemns as near-polytheistic blasphemy, [consists] of God, Jesus, and Mary."

Most Christians know that they don't know Islam. But the opposite is not true. Most Muslims tend to assume that they already know everything they need to know about Christianity since the Qur'an speaks of Christians. The result is a gulf made unbridgeable by Islam's claim to be the original, and the only pure, divine revelation, superseding all others.

None of this need preclude honest attempts at mutual respect and understanding. But it should preclude Christian naïveté. Catholics pray the Nicene Creed at every Sunday Mass. It's the constitutional expression of what we believe. Across 17 centuries, men and women have died defending it. With the exception of the Creed's first line, Islam rejects every key element of the text.

Historically, in Muslim-dominated cultures – as Rémi Brague notes, and we too often forget – "Jews and Christians were subjected to various measures explicitly designed to make them understand, by humiliating them, that it would be in their interest to adopt Islam." Similar forms of Muslim behavior continue today. Christians face prejudice, persecution, abductions, and forced conversions in various Muslim states.

This week we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Blaming an entire religious community for the actions of...

By Amy Fahey

A little over a year ago, I took my aged father for a specialist visit. The appointment, which I still recall with painful clarity, put me in mind of the Anglo-Saxon poem known simply as "The Ruin." The manuscript is damaged, so what remains is itself a kind of ruin, a meditation on former splendor contrasted with brokenness and fragmentation. It struck me then, as it does now, as a fitting metaphor for the current state of healthcare in our nation.

The receptionist hands me a tablet and stylus and tells me to register my father. There are a series of questions on the screen, all related to his bladder. In addition to recently losing his vision, my father is now hard of hearing, so I begin: "How many times a day do you have to." But I stop myself as I realize how embarrassing, even dehumanizing, this will be in a crowded waiting room. My father waves his hand in the air and says with his characteristic midwestern bluntness, "Just answer down the middle for all of them. They don't read that sh*t anyway."

The wife of a couple nearby cups her hand to her mouth in a repressed giggle. Her husband turns to her and says sharply: "Well, he's right."

When we make it to the appointment room, the good doctor (I have heard from my father that he is a good man, a Catholic) breezes in with his own hand-held screen, followed by a young woman in a white coat, who presumably is following the doctor on his rounds to learn the art of healing. He begins scrolling rapidly, reviewing my father's records.

Meanwhile my father, summoning up all his courage, launches into a well-rehearsed declaration of independence: "I'm not getting any shots today. I don't want any more of that crap put into my body. I've had enough chemicals – they've totally messed up my system."

I'm sure the doctor listened attentively. But I'm also sure his mind was working – working fast. It had to: as he told us, my father was one of seventy patients he would see that day.

I did rapid calculations. Say the doctor arrived at the clinic at 7:00 am and didn't leave until 6:00 pm, with a break somewhere to eat or to discuss a patient's clinical notes with that young woman, or to voice-to-text those clinical notes or even just to relieve himself. That would mean an average of about eight minutes per patient.

My father's weeks of agonizing anticipation, reduced to an eight-minute appointment.

Still, my father hands the doctor one of his favorite cigars: a Rocky Patel Decade. The doctor is effusive in his thanks. Decades, he says, are his favorite too. He is golfing later that week and will smoke it then. The good doctor then simply says, "Your numbers have been coming down. We'll give you a break and reevaluate." And that is that.

I think it's too generous to say that American healthcare is at a crossroads. It is, like the once-glorious city in Roman Britain contemplated by that anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet a millennium ago, in ruins.

Fears that AI might depersonalize healthcare seem to have missed the glaring reality that healthcare has been increasingly depersonalized for years now. When was the last time a doctor spent more time looking at you than at a screen? Who hasn't had the experience of feeling like the doctor is just one Google search ahead of you (or sometimes behind) in diagnosing or determining treatment options?

I'm not suggesting there aren't excellent, dedicated, and humane people in the medical profession. There are, and I've been blessed to know some of them. Yet even as studies warn us of the "cognitive overload" of overworked medical personnel, and prognosticators predict the "cognitive debt" AI will usher in, it seems obvious that both overload and debt have already crossed the threshold of our clinics and hospitals. As in education, COVID only exposed and accelerated a problem that was already there.

Yet there are signs of hope. For several years, my family and I have belonged to a Christian health share, an alternative to conventional insurance ...