The Catholic Thing

By Carrie Gress

In P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster, Lady Glossip, mother of an eligible daughter, asks Bertie Wooster how he would support a wife. His answer: "Well, I suppose it depends on whose wife it was. A little gentle pressure beneath the elbow while crossing a busy street usually fits the bill."

Misguided youth is nothing new, as Wodehouse knew well in 1923. His Aunt Agatha's reproach rings true about many men today: "Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures."

Bertie Wooster and men like him emerged in the post-French Revolutionary world that left men adrift, bereft of purpose and authority. The godless egalitarianism that sparked the transformation in 1789 France hasn't slowed throughout the centuries. It has beheaded every structure of authority in its path, particularly those scented with patriarchy, starting with La Révolution and The Terror.

It's no small coincidence that as the heedless Jacobins, who were cutting off the Church's authority at the head in favor of their (allegedly) more rational heads, they were also decapitating tens of thousands of French citizens.

A century later, James Cardinal Gibbons (1834–1921), Archbishop of Baltimore, watched closely as the Revolution gave way to toxic offspring: socialism, communism, and feminism. These all rejected moral authority and hierarchy in favor of egalitarianism.

"There is a tendency," wrote America's second Cardinal, "in our nature to chafe under authority. Thomas Paine published a well-known work on 'The Rights of Man.' He had nothing to say on the rights of God and the duties of man."

Cardinal Gibbons cited a similar theme by a clergyman who "wrote a volume some years ago on 'The Rights of the Clergy.' From the beginning to the end of the work he said nothing on the duties and obligation of clergy. The majority of mankind are so intent on their rights that they have no consideration for their responsibilities." The antidote to the growing list of rights, the Cardinal explained, is "a deep sense of our sacred duties." With these, "we should not fail to come by our rights."

The problem, of course, as we have recently witnessed in the "woke" movement, is that it's impossible to make everything and everybody equal. This impulse, the Cardinal explains, is fueled by envy, not by God:

From the order of nature to the order of grace, we know there is not only variety, but that there are also grades of distinction among the angels in Heaven. The angelic Hierarchy is composed of nine distinct choirs. . . .One order of angels excels in sublimity of intelligence, or in intensity of love, or in the dignity of the mission signed to them.

This ordering, arranged by God, may not always seem too fair to us, but, as the Cardinal notes, "If you complain of God's discrimination, Christ, will answer: 'My friend, I do thee no wrong. . . .What claim have you on my justice? Is not all that you possess of nature or of grace the gratuitous gift of my bounty?"

In my book, Something Wicked, which is appearing this week, I explain how Cardinal Gibbons also saw the Church's undermined authority to be dramatically affecting women. In 1902, in Ladies Home Journal, he wrote an article entitled "The Restless Woman," saying:

I regard the leaders in the new school of female progress as the worst enemies of the female sex. They teach that which robs women of all that is amiable and gentle, tender and attractive, and which gives her nothing in return but masculine boldness and brazen effrontery. They are habitually preaching about women's rights and prerogatives, but have not a word to say about her duties and responsibilities. They withdraw her from those sacred obligations which properly belong to her sex.

Feminism's shibboleth, the Cardinal concluded, is that "masculinity is greater than motherhood."

After decades of belief that women are bett...

By Robert J. Kurland

It's been thirty years since I entered the Church, but I am still learning more about what the birth of Christ (Christmas) really means, including that the Christmas Season only ended yesterday officially. Reading the Gospel of John, I find that before Christ became man, He was the Word (λόγος – "logos"). So, I wonder, can I translate that Greek word to physics-speak, relate it to logical concepts that I'm familiar with as a scientist? Here's what I've found.

First, about light, since Scripture gives many references to Christ as light: "This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5) Can we relate the physics of light to its theological significance?

In the early 20th century, Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect gave light a new character, that of a particle (photon), rather than its classical formulation, an electromagnetic wave. Since a photon travels at the speed of light, special relativity requires that time does not exist for it. Why? A fundamental assumption of special relativity is that a light signal (the measurement agency) can't measure itself.

What are the theological implications that time does not exist for photons? Here's a thought: If we say that God is light implies that time also does not exist for God. As St. Augustine pointed out, God does not exist IN time; God's Word is always there, without time, no beginning, no end. And as we see below, God's Word, our Lord, is light: "Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." (John 8:12)

There's more in the Gospel of John in the very first words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. What is the connection between the Word and light?

The Greek word in the New Testament that translates as "Word" is "λόγος" ("logos"). In addition to the meaning "word," other general meanings are "principle," "reason," "logic," etc. What do we mean when we say, "I see the light!"? We see the reason, truth, rationale, and principle of what is said. Thus, "Word" implies both light and reason.

For St. Augustine, this means: "The eternal light which is the unchangeable Wisdom of God, by which all things were made, and whom we call the only-begotten Son of God." (City of God, XI, 9) But light is only one aspect of how things work. What about "λόγος" in the sense of the overall scheme of the universe? Do proposals from contemporary physics admit a governing entity for how things work, an agency that we could identify as God, the Creator and Sustainer?

There are two main scientific visions: 1) the Participatory Universe proposed by the physicist John Wheeler ("It from Bit"); 2) the Holographic Universe. Wheeler poses three questions:

1. How come existence?

2. How come the quantum?

3. How come "one world" out of many observer-participants?

Wheeler's answer to the first question and implicitly the others was: "'it from bit' symbolizes the idea…that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses."

The notion that an observer has to measure, something has to be perceived to be real, is not new. Three centuries ago, Bishop Berkeley made essentially the same proposal, that for something to be real it has to be perceived. And thus, for a universe to have existed before man, the agency of God the Logos is required.

Or as Msgr. Ronald Knox's Berkeleyan limerick "God in the Quad" puts it:

There was a young man who said, "God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad."

REPLY

Dear Sir:

Your astonishment's odd:

I am always about in the Quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by

Yours faithfully,

GOD.

And as to that second scientific view, you m...

By Msgr. Robert J. Batule

Pope Saint John Paul II begins his encyclical letter on the missions (Redemptoris missio, 1990) by citing Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians. The Apostle to the Gentiles writes there: "Woe to me if I do not preach the [Gospel]." (1 Corinthians 9:16)

This is exactly what we expect Saint Paul to say. After all, he was the Church's greatest evangelist in the ancient world, and he remains the example par excellence of what we are to do ourselves in light of Baptism and our desire for Heaven. But there could be some hesitation in accepting the Gospel if all we do is understand the word "woe" from one vantage point. And by that, I mean that "woe" only pertains to calamities.

Indeed, there were enough calamities in Paul's ministry. He was beaten with rods and imprisoned in Philippi. (Acts 16:22-23) Later on, while at sea, he was shipwrecked. (Acts 27:41-44) When he got to Rome, he was placed under house arrest. (Acts 28:16) Yet not even this lessening of immediate peril could prevent his beheading and martyrdom in c. 68 AD.

Woe has another meaning that we need to recognize. Its second meaning is found in Saint Luke's presentation of the Beatitudes. (Luke 6:20-26) Like the version by Saint Matthew (Matthew 5:3-12), there are the blessings. But Saint Luke's account contains four woes: woe to you who are rich, woe to you who are filled now, woe to you who laugh, and woe to you when all speak well of you. (Luke 6:24-26)

Woe in the Lucan version of the Beatitudes suggests a divine disfavor or judgment against precisely those attitudes that stubbornly oppose the Gospel. These would be the desire for opulence, pretentiousness, unseriousness, and an unprincipled malleability in personal relationships. In our time, we could especially add to this list an attitude of embarrassment when it comes to the truth. In point of fact, it's this attitude that deters a lot of people today from accepting the Gospel.

What I am thinking of here is the deeply entrenched cultural phenomenon of relativism. Pope Saint John Paul II refers to the phenomenon of relativism in Redemptoris missio (36) and calls it a "difficulty" when it comes to the proclamation of the Gospel. It is, he says, a widespread indifference which leads us to the belief that, even for those who believe in God, one religion is as good as another. (RM, 36)

It seems to me that ecclesiastical leaders have to exercise great caution regarding terminology, including the use of a word like "path" in light of the reigning cultural and religious relativism. For it can very easily be understood in a climate of indifferentism that all paths to God are the same. And if that is the case, then religion is just a matter of de gustibus, whatever suits your fancy.

Pope Saint John Paul II's notion of "difficulty" owing to the religious indifferentism all around us points towards obstacles to conversion. To change religions is not just for the purpose of maintaining spousal or familial harmony. Often, conversion comes down to whether there will be a personal commitment to the truth and how it is expressed in one religion over another. To make this personal commitment to the truth today takes both insight and courage. It asserts that feelings are not the arbiter of everything. Truth matters.

Twenty-five years ago, there was considerable consternation in ecumenical circles when, in the Declaration entitled Dominus Jesus (2000), the Catholic Church pushed aside any embarrassment about the truth and dared to assert that the fullness of truth can be embraced personally. That embrace is obviously of the One Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. (John 14:6) And by the means of divine grace, the Lord endowed his Church with the fullness of the means of salvation.

The proper attitude for us to have then is humility. More and more, our prayer must be like that of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Visitation. In the Magnificat, Our Lady prays thus: "My soul proclaims the greatn...

By Brad Miner.

In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that Christ invited St. Peter "to the supreme followship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied. . .thereby forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship are inseparable." (p. 49)

In Bonhoeffer's famous reckoning, this was a case of costly, as opposed to cheap, grace. Bonhoeffer, of course, would come to embody the former. On his way to be executed by the Nazis at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945, Bonhoeffer told a fellow prisoner, "This is the end – but for me it is the beginning of Life!"

That's the attitude of all true martyrs when their time comes.

Bonhoeffer was hanged. The deaths of the original Twelve Apostles were often more excruciating.

So: how, when, and where did the Twelve meet their deaths? And how have artists imagined each man's martyrdom?

To begin, we know that Christ's betrayer died by his own hand (cf. Matthew 27:3-5 and Acts 1:18-19). Judas was a suicide, not a martyr.

We also know John (December 27 is his feast day) was not martyred. And he is the only one, according to tradition, not killed for preaching the Gospel.

Scripture (Acts 12:1-2) tells us that John's brother, James the Great (feast on July 25), was the first apostle-martyr, c. 44. He was "killed with the sword," presumably in Jerusalem. Luke, the author of Acts, may have got the story from John himself, and the facts are corroborated by Irenaeus (c. 125 – 202), who knew Polycarp (c. 60 – 155), who knew John, whom we believe died as late as the end of the 1st century. Luke prefaces his account of James' death by indicating it was King Herod Agrippa who gave the order, using the same method his uncle Antipas had chosen to murder John the Baptist. James' body, they say, now resides in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

The order of subsequent martyrdoms is largely unknown, but all (save John, of course) were likely gone by the year 80. What we know comes from early Church historians (Eusebius, Tertullian, the aforementioned Irenaeus and Polycarp, and others, including St. Jerome), some apocryphal "gospels," and a scattering of ancient local traditions. Many of these were gathered in the 13th-century Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. The dates given here are approximate, debatable, and by no means gospel. As to place, I have simply chosen the city that claims to be the site of martyrdom. (And I have included in parentheses, as in John and James above, the date of each saint's feast.) I also note where relics are claimed to reside. Relics were often separated to be used in other altars. They still are.

Between 60 and 70:

Andrew (November 30) was crucified on an X-shaped cross, called a saltire (or crux decussata), in Patras, Greece. He was put to death because of the number of Greeks he converted, including the wife of the pagan governor. It took three days for him to die, and he never stopped preaching. Andrew's remains, they say, reside in the Cattedrale di Sant'Andrea in Amalfi.

Bartholomew [Nathanael] (August 24) was flayed alive and beheaded in Albanopolis, Armenia. From that, we get a macabre association: he is the patron saint of tanners. And, again, his murder resulted from his conversion of the local Roman satrap. His relics reside at the Basilica di San Bartolomeo all'Isola, Tiber Island, Rome.

James the Less, known to the Early Church as "the Just" (May 11), was defenestrated, then stoned, and (perhaps) clubbed to death in Jerusalem. He was condemned by the Sanhedrin and thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple, survived, and began praying for his attackers. The coup de grâce was delivered by a laundryman with his clothes beater. His relics, they say, are in Santi Apostoli, Rome. That is, unless, as some say, they reside at the Cathedral of Saint James, Jerusalem. Maybe they're in both places.

Matthew took the Good News to North Africa and was martyred in Ethiopia. His preaching converted Ephigenia, daughter of Kin...

By Joseph R. Wood

A good friend and long-time prominent Catholic commentator called me this week to ask my perspective on current American foreign policy. Not for the first time, I had nothing coherent to offer. This has been the situation for some 15 years now. A Cold War-trained American military and foreign policy functionary, I have found myself unable to adapt to the realities of the 21st century.

I realized around 2012 or 2015 that if you marched me into the Oval Office (whose decor was different then than in the Bush 43 Administration, but not yet gold gilt-saturated) and said, "OK, smarty-pants, tell the President what to do about [name your region or policy problem]," I would have had nothing to say. Same today.

In 2017, the French embassy in Washington awakened in early January to realize that after eight jolly years with the Obama crowd, they knew no one who was likely to be installed in the new Trump Administration. Those Rolodex entries had been thrown out in comfortable, even joyful anticipation of a permanently "transformed" America, to use Obama's phrase. For the French, un problème sérieux.

The embassy apparently sent an emergency cable to Paris asking if anyone knew of Republicans from yesteryear who might be open to recultivating contact. In a clear signal of desperation, they invited me to an Inauguration party (I wasn't actually a Republican, but you get the point). The star that night was Rudy Giuliani. I saw a few familiar faces as surprised as I was to be suddenly à la mode again.

I subsequently declined a very tentative inquiry about a possible Trump Administration position. No more invitations to the French embassy.

I declined not because I was a high-minded never-Trumper, but because in a rare moment of self-awareness, I knew that I no longer had anything to offer the Washington policy world.

In the Bush Administration, I had realized that my foremost contribution was to ask occasionally, "Remind me what we're trying to do?" By 2017, even posing that question seemed out of reach.

I was by then well into my doctoral work in philosophy. My military and foreign policy jobs had, over the years, had the effect of sustaining my interest in fundamental questions about what unchanging truths might be had in this life.

That's to say that my active life only intensified my desire for a contemplative life. And not just a retirement from gainful employment with material advantages, but retirement in the French sense of the verb retirer, to withdraw or pull away from the world.

So, halfway here through my TCT allocation of 1000 words, dear reader may well be asking: So, where does this Epiphany-season autobiographical reminiscence lead?

It leads to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the works of other philosophers about whom I like to scribble.

But perhaps a bit surprisingly, it leads also to Dante. At this point, our editor's eyebrows may be raised, since he knows a good bit about Dante. So I'll be careful.

My friend and CUA School of Philosophy mentor Dr. Kevin White has taught courses on Dante and philosophy, and I was fortunate to take one of those courses. A distinguished Thomist, he has taught at CUA for over three decades.

White (who, incidentally, owns a complete collection of the journal Idler, the great project edited by TCT contributor David Warren) encourages his students both to learn Italian and to read Dante daily. In this new year, I'm taking at least the second part of his advice.

I'm re-reading the Divine Comedy and am now a few cantos into the Inferno. I'm trying not to hurry, but also not to tarry because White also informs his students of the legendary dictum that where you stop reading the Comedy is where you go after you die. I need to get to Purgatorio quickly, and Paradiso promptly. You never know.

Besides, it's a pleasure to read and re-read. And Dante knew his Thomist philosophy. He invokes a vast range of references, making notes essential for those ...

We Americans have a thing about freedom. We didn't invent freedom – even in the limited sense of political freedom – though we sometimes like to think (and occasionally act) as though we have an unbreakable monopoly on it. Land of the free, and all that.

Still, the American difference where freedom is concerned is not a difference in human nature. The deepest wellsprings of American freedom are not ours by virtue of being American but by virtue of our being human. And if there is a genius in our political traditions, it lies in a remarkable political system that we have not devised ourselves but only inherited.

Citizenship always has a custodial character to it. We are responsible for the maintenance and transmission of something precious we did not create. For most Americans, our citizenship is not even something we chose; we were born to it. You might even say that, for most Americans, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were imposed upon us at birth. Not all impositions are unjust; some impositions are tremendous gifts.

Gifts can be taken for granted. Complacency and entitlement can slowly, even imperceptibly, choke out the virtues necessary for self-government. For a people to be free, they must be willing and capable of living freely.

And so the Church has always insisted that true freedom is more than the unfettered exercise of the will. Such freedom is not worthy of the name. It is a false freedom, which the ancients knew to be slavishness, however veiled by power it may be. This same false freedom, a disobedient freedom, alienates us from one another and from God as the third chapter of Genesis makes clear.

The Christian faith insists on another way to freedom, not through power, pride or mastery, but through obedience. Jesus himself lays this out plainly in the Gospel of John:

Jesus then said to those Jews who believed in him, "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How can you say, 'You will become free'?"

Jesus answered them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin."

Many modern popes have warned about the consequences of divorcing freedom from truth, making it one of the perennial themes of Catholic social teaching, from Pope Leo XIII right through to today. As John Paul II wrote in 1991, the teachings of Leo XIII:

called attention to the essential bond between human freedom and truth, so that freedom which refused to be bound to the truth would fall into arbitrariness and end up submitting itself to the vilest of passions, to the point of self-destruction. Indeed, what is the origin of all the evils to which Rerum novarum wished to respond, if not a kind of freedom which, in the area of economic and social activity, cuts itself off from the truth about man?"

It goes without saying that this "truth about man," to which our freedom is so intimately tied, has implications that extend far beyond questions of how we ought to order our economic, political, or social activity. Indeed, it has implications that go well beyond what we might ordinarily think of as ethical or moral considerations.

The "truth about man" proclaimed by the Church includes innumerable fundamental realities: that we are created and loved by God; that we exist as a union of mortal body and immortal soul; that we share a nature with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who suffered and died to save us from sin; that we exist within and experience time and space; that we are both dependent upon and responsible to others; that we are contingent beings who are profoundly shaped by both our surroundings and our own actions; and so on.

Some of these truths, like the Incarnation, are known through revelation. Some of them are so plainly obvious through ordinary experience that it is almost impossible to imagine how they might be otherwise (e...

by David G. Bonagura, Jr.

What hysteria-creating, Wall Street-swirling, media-obsessing New Thing awaits us in 2026? It was COVID in 2020, ChatGPT in 2022, Generative AI in 2023, DOGE in 2025. The next New Thing is anyone's guess, but if it is like its predecessors, it will consume our attention and generate fresh anxieties over how it will upend our lives.

Today, we rarely perceive these Newfangled Things as trials sent by God to test our fidelity, and certainly not as chastisement for sin. The New Testament God, we are told, is too loving for that.

Such enlightened theories are at odds with St. Augustine, who argued vehemently in The City of God that God sends trials to the good and the evil alike, not because He is vengeful, but because He has ordained suffering as a means for spiritual growth. During the "universal catastrophe" that was the fall of the Roman Empire, Augustine asserted that "the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with the eyes of faith." (I.9)

As Newfangled Things became part of ordinary life, we learn that they are no different from Any Other Thing. What they do for us, and to us, depends on our attitudes toward them and how we use them. They may well be trials or chastisements – if not for our culture, then for some of us as individuals. Negative outcomes, alas, are likely: new things come to be in a world weakened by sin and are destined for human beings inclined toward selfishness. A New Thing promised to make our lives better, paradoxically and simultaneously can undermine them.

Augustine, advising citizens of the Heavenly City still here on earth how to navigate the world's most recent problems, did not appeal to technology or influencers. Rather, he offered eternal advice from the Bible, which contains the tools his contemporaries needed most. He listed them in Book XV.6:

1. "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2)

2. "Admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil." (1 Thessalonians 5:14-15)

3. "If a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted." (Galatians 6:1)

4. "Do not let the sun go down on your anger." (Ephesians 4:26)

5. "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." (Matthew 18:15)

6. "As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear." (1 Timothy 5:20)

These Scripture verses command three types of action: self-regulation, moral correction of others, and forgiveness. Only the first, in the form of dieting or exercise, has hope of making a twenty-first-century New Year's resolution list. But the great Bishop of Hippo saw what we, consumed with the world, cannot: "So many precepts are given about mutual forgiveness and the great care needed for the maintenance of peace" because without them "no one will be able to see God."

To see God is the purpose of our existence. All other things, including the great goods of family, of religious life, of charity, are ordered to this. Self-regulation, moral correction, and forgiveness, writes Augustine, are "how the citizens of the City of God are restored to health while on pilgrimage on this earth, as they sigh for their Heavenly Country."

Newfangled Things tend to work in the opposite direction and therefore can be dangerous: their shiny allure draws us into them. In our desire for them, we look away from God and His Commandments. So went Adam and Eve before the Tree in Eden, so go we before the latest New Thing. In pulling us away from God, Newfangled Things do not generate peace, a fruit of the Spirit that allows us to see God. They create angst in the soul. When angst reigns, God feels absent, for the anxious, albeit unwittingly, have set themselves up in God's place.

How can we re...

By Daniel B. Gallagher

During a decade of service at the Vatican Secretariat of State, I was constantly perplexed by the Holy See's unwillingness or inability to utilize already existing ecclesial structures for effective governance. As the Cardinals meet in Rome over the next few days, it's worth taking a hard look at some recent ways in which the Church has been operating.

A financial problem? Establish a new commission to solve it. Then create another one to oversee the work of that one.

A question about deaconesses? Appoint a group of experts to study it (2014). Then appoint another to study it again (2020), all the while ignoring the International Theological Commission's comprehensive study on the permanent diaconate in 2002.

Perhaps most baffling was Pope Francis's establishment of a "Pontifical Commission for Reference on the Organization of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See," a body designated to collaborate with a Council of Cardinals that had already been crafted by his predecessor Benedict XVI.

Ballooning bureaucracy is a sure sign of organizational dysfunction, something the Roman Curia has suffered from for years. One way of curtailing it is to reinvigorate the very body whose canonical purpose is to "assist the Roman Pontiff. . .in the daily care of the universal Church." (Code of Canon Law, 349)

There are two reasons for the underutilization of the College of Cardinals: (1) a lack of appreciation for the connection between the occasional task of the College of Cardinals in electing a new pontiff and its ongoing role of assisting him in the daily care of the universal Church; and (2) a misconception of what constitute "serious questions" (quaestiones maioris momenti) and "grave affairs" (graviora negotia).

Regarding the first, non-residential Cardinals (i.e., those not assigned to permanent curial positions in Rome) understandably find it frustrating when their role of caring for the universal Church is limited to casting ballots in the Sistine Chapel. It would be reasonable for them to expect some follow-through so that they can accompany the man they've chosen in the work of implementing the vision they expressed for the Church during the General Congregations preceding the Conclave.

As for residential Cardinals, I always found it odd that the Holy Father "grants" them audiences in a way no less formal than any other visitor he happens to receive. The Holy See's daily bulletin announces consultations with heads of dicasteries, as if the pope were meeting a run-of-the-mill ambassador or some external dignitary.

The Cardinals' consultative role could be exercised more efficiently – if not more pleasantly and fraternally – through occasional phone calls and lunch meetings. The Holy Father should have the numbers of all 252 Cardinals saved in his cellphone contacts, and each of them should have a direct line to him. It would be a healthy step toward the kind of collegiality that could underpin whatever synodality he has in mind. I have anxious memories of escorting lost Cardinals through the Apostolic Palace as they hopelessly tried to find whatever office they were supposed to visit that day.

The second problem is a gross overestimation of what constitutes a "serious question" or "grave affair" (cf. canons 349 and 352). When I worked in the Curia, I took that to mean practically anything that couldn't be routinely resolved through the policies and procedures of the Roman Curia.

Yet every time I suggested that some specific matter would best be handled by a Consistory, my colleagues would dismiss it as not "serious" or "grave" enough. In their minds, "serious" or "grave" meant sexual abuse, financial fraud, or public scandal. In my mind, it meant anything worth consulting your closest collaborators about, precisely because they know better than you how to treat it.

From my experience in the Secretariat of State, non-residential Cardinals were always a step ahead and could have prevented maj...

By Robert Royal

Pope Leo has summoned the world's Cardinals to a Consistory this week, a return to normal practice that was mostly sidelined for the past dozen years in favor of "synodal" gatherings. So now that the Jubilee Year has concluded, the current pope is doing something new – and old – in any event, a departure from his predecessor's ways, in the very first days of 2026. What might that mean?

A Consistory is an opportunity for Cardinals to be real collaborators with the Holy Father, to speak with him – and with one another – about a globe-spanning divine mission. What they discuss and how it influences Leo's papacy can set the course of the Church over the next decade and more. And there's much that needs saying, and let's pray will be, beyond the tired journalistic obsessions with immigration, climate, LGBTs, women. Because a chilling question faces us, pointedly now, which a Certain Person raised long ago: "But when the Son of Man comes [again], will he find faith on earth?"

Christianity in various forms won't disappear from the world any time soon. But the full truth of faith, the one that saints and doctors, missionaries, martyrs, and confessors have labored and suffered and died for, is teetering. This, of course, for many reasons, not least that it is attacked, both inside and out, by people who wish it ill.

We shouldn't avert our eyes from this fact. It was unfortunate (in the present Christian's view) that the Holy Father said in the closing days of the Jubilee Year: "Christians have no enemies, only brothers and sisters." We understand what he intended, of course, and can even second that, in a way. But it's true only at a very high level of abstraction, and not the whole, which is to say the Catholic, truth. Failure to follows the whole truth leads, as we've seen since Vatican II's virtual abandonment of the notion of the Church Militant, to misreading the world we're living in, with disastrous effects.

When Voltaire famously said Écrasez l'infâme, it was far from the beginning – or the end – of hatred of the Catholic Faith. The French Revolution and its totalitarian offshoots demonstrated that. In the Sermon on the Mount no less, Jesus taught, "love your enemies [ekthrus]." (Matthew 5:44-45) Even before Christ was born, Zechariah, invoked much earlier Hebrew wisdom:

Through His holy prophets He promised of old

That He would save us from our enemies [ekthron],

From the hands of all who hate us.

Pope Leo's spiritual father, St. Augustine, wisely wrote, "That your enemies have been created is God's doing; that they hate you and wish to ruin you is their own doing. What should you say about them in your mind? 'Lord be merciful to them, forgive them their sins, put the fear of God in them, change them!'"

And of course, as any true Christian should believe, there's THE Enemy – who hates God and tempted Eve to bring ruin on the whole human race.

So the whole Judeo-Christian tradition – no less than ordinary human experience – tells us that we do and will have enemies, whether we want to acknowledge that or not. And we should not only pray for them, but take strong steps – in ways that St. Augustine was crucial in helping the Church and the whole Western world to think out via just-war theory.

We have a duty, for instance, to prevent harm to individual Christians and others (thousands have died recently in Nigeria, in addition to several other nations); or to churches (France is currently losing two religious buildings to arson per month); or to the very presence of the Christians throughout the world, especially in places like China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Muslim-dominated nations, about which the Vatican remains largely silent.

So here's a simple proposal that might stimulate cardinatianal thinking at this time of Consistory. Pope Francis starkly claimed that we should be building bridges not walls. A bridge is a good thing – in its proper place. But so are walls, because we may wish to "live at peace with...

By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas

As should be obvious by now, the Solemnity of the Epiphany (celebrated in the Extraordinary Form and in all the Eastern Churches on January 6 and on January 4 in the United States this year in the Ordinary Form) is the day for the Gentiles at the Crib. Mary and Joseph represent believing Jews; Herod, stiff-necked or faithless Jews; the wise men, Gentiles with open minds and open hearts. A charming, ancient legend says that these wise men actually became the first Christian missionaries, their efforts meeting with both success and failure as they encountered both belief and unbelief among the Gentiles to whom they preached.

Surely, the point of this celebration is that "the Gentiles are now co-heirs with the Jews," but how does this happen? St. Paul gives the answer: "Through the preaching of the Gospel." If the barrier between Jew and Gentile is to be broken down, it will happen as both are brought into contact with the saving truth of Jesus Christ. That occurs through the process of evangelization, the sharing of the Good News, the Gospel. The day's solemnity, then, would have us reflect on the awesome task of evangelizing the world.

Therefore, a fundamental concern of the Church in every age must be the spread of the Gospel. For that very reason, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council (appropriately enough), taught: "The Church on earth is by its very nature missionary" [Ad Gentes n. 2]. This truth was highlighted some years later in Pope Paul VI's landmark exhortation, Evangelii nuntiandi. It is important to keep that fact in sharp focus because it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Catholicism.

Judaism, for instance, has no interest as such in making converts; they are not turned away, to be sure, but it is not a major thrust of that religious tradition. Nor is it so for the various Eastern religions, like Buddhism or Shintoism or Taoism. Even Eastern Orthodoxy and most of mainstream Protestantism have not had an evangelistic drive to them. What makes us different? Nothing less than taking Christ at His word in His great commission: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19).

And from Epiphany's Magi to the modern missionaries, the Gospel has been shared and taken root on every continent. Thus, Germany has Boniface and Ireland Patrick. And 500 years ago, the so-called New World received the great blessing of being put into contact with the saving message of Jesus Christ through the selfless labors of dedicated clergy and religious.

Evangelization, however, is not a work of the past; nor is it the responsibility of a chosen few; nor is it restricted to what we generally consider to be "mission territories." On the contrary, evangelization is the obligation and privilege of every baptized Christian at all times and in all places. Indeed, Pope John Paul called for a "new evangelization" aimed primarily at those lands which were among the first to hear and accept the Gospel, but who have regrettably strayed from it through indifference or secularization. Certainly, this theme has been stressed at all the continental synods of the John Paul era.

In 1990, the Holy Father gave the Church the gift of an encyclical entitled Redemptoris missio, on the permanent validity of the Church's missionary mandate. Why was that encyclical needed? A look at the topics reveals the answer. Many people in the Church, through a confused and confusing form of ecumenism, had come to the position that one religion is as good as another and, therefore, that no one should attempt to bring anyone else into the Catholic Church.

Most astounding of all, however, was that many full-time missionaries had bought into that mentality, reducing themselves, their work, and the Church to mere conveyers of social services at best or political and even vio...