The Catholic Thing

By David Warren.

The road to Catholicism is not necessarily straight or smooth, and it may have been wiped out, for instance, by a mountain avalanche just when it was coming into view. In my case, even where there were no memorable avalanches, it took me half a century to get there, from my standing start in pre/post Protestantism.

For me, who had to convert even to become a secular Anglican, what kept me from Catholicism at the end was a combination of stubbornness (which I mistook for faith), and "family values," i.e., the need to prevent a divorce (mine). But when I was finally thrown out of my home, I became a free man.

Just like that, I then betrayed the Archbishop of Canterbury, and "poped."

This was a marvelous experience, for thanks to family law, I was also reduced to primitive poverty. This felt more authentic.

The Catholic Church herself seemed suddenly transformed. She no longer looked like a (rather flabby) sect. She actually began to detach herself from historical time, allowing me to wander freely and easily through her many periods, and to stand both inside and outside the centuries.

It just WAS, a complete THING, unlike any other thing or collection of things which I had ever seen. It no longer required an effort of imagination, for one could use one's eyes.

And I didn't need to judge, as I had been wont to do, and had been doing while keeping myself out. I realized the Church required prayer and not rebellion. She is not a "protest" against anything.

I thought it might restrain ME, for having been, as it were, white and English for too long (five centuries); yet I was freed from this anxiety, too, as well as lightened of goods. "My way is easy, and my burden is light." The need, or obsession, with material progress had disappeared.

We live in a world of efficient cooks, with their chopping blades. You are on one side or the other of a sharp knife, or a dull one in the case of Episcopalianism.

Heresies may be necessary to define a church, and blackguards to enforce the rules, but I think we can say that Christ's order is not the police order we see governing the world.

The question of what puts you in, or what takes you out, is like the other big questions. They may not be appealed to a "humane" court of law. If you have loved others as yourself, and put God atop your list of commandments, you are probably in.

And if you make peace, even in war, with the cause of justice, you may not survive, but have a chance of being right. Get rid of your modern prejudice against the free speech of Crusaders.

"We must have faith," which is something we can't check in immigration documents. But actually, one of the first things I learned, on the outside of worldliness, is that faith is not something one has. For that sort of thing cannot be mislaid, it can only be abandoned, to restore your faithlessness.

One could be "pro-" Catholic, and I certainly was, but what is a "pro-" unless edging towards membership in the divine body? And what is a genuine Catholic unless he is a bad Catholic? That's why the essence of Catholicism is now found when one is going to Confession.

It requires heroism, and of such a serene kind, that non-Catholics are actually embarrassed by it.

Faith isn't a physical thing, or we might claim to be faithful even to a set of antiquarian facts. Certainly, as a Protestant, I had this much "faith," and wished to have more.

I would join enthusiastically into arguments over whether Christ had even existed, whether the list of disciples was real, whether the "B.V.M." (the Anglican term for the Mother Mary) took part in the Dormition or Assumption, what was the third party of the Trinity. Or any other thing I now think plausible, but used to debate, usually from the atheist position in high school. But I found one could more easily stir things up by defending Humanae vitae.

That is what faith is not: gibberish. Nor is it "belief" in the facticity of anything at all, which we derive from history. It would not...

By Brad Miner

Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals."

Revelation 5:5

There's a story (likely a legend echoing the earlier Roman tale of Androcles and the lion) that one day in his study, St. Jerome (c. 342-420), hard at work translating the Holy Bible into Latin, had a visit from a lion. The lion had a splinter in its paw and begged the saint to remove it, which Jerome did, after which man and beast became inseparable.

Being a cat lover, I would very much like to have a lion as a friend, although not as a pet. I've seen videos of a South African "lion whisperer," who raised some abandoned lion cubs and stayed friends with them over the years, so that when he walks out into the veld and calls for them, they come running and jump up to put their paws on his shoulders and lick his face.

So, the story about Jerome and the lion could be true.

Many artists have depicted the scene, although, in earlier centuries, some of them did so without ever having seen a lion, and those lions resemble cats, dogs, or gargoyles. However, there were Asiatic lions in the desert in Israel when Jerome was living there, although by the time he was working on the Vulgate in Bethlehem, lions would have been a rare sight indeed.

But it could have happened. Because God was surely at work in Jerome's life, and maybe Jerome liked cats, and, as a reward for his sanctity, the Lord decided to give him the very biggest one.

In many Renaissance and later paintings, Jerome is shown in his cardinalitial regalia, but that's an anachronism. The cardinalate did not become a Church office until nearly three centuries after Jerome went to heaven. Memento mori images figure in some portraits of Jerome, as in the skull in Caravaggio's St. Jerome Writing (above).

In one of the earliest paintings of him, by Pinturicchio, the saint is half-naked, contemplating a crucifix that he has affixed to a branch of a small tree. On a rock to Jerome's left is another book that I'd like to think is his notebook. To his right is a nicely bound codex of the Hebrew Scriptures, perhaps. Or, more likely, it's a "first edition" of the Vulgate. In any case, it's slightly covered by his red cardinal's hat.

And next to the hat is the lion, who looks out at us warily. Or maybe it's a look of worry, because Jerome holds a rock in one hand, which he has been using to mortify his flesh. (So says the tradition.) His other hand gestures towards the open notebook as he gazes at the radiating image of Christ, fides quaerens intellectum. The lion hopes we'll pass by quietly and allow the saint to get on with his holy work.

My favorite painting of the saint and the big cat is St. Jerome in His Study by Niccolò Antonio Colantonio. Its composition is rich in detail. Here is Jerome

intent on removing a thorn from the paw of a melancholic and docile lion with a sort of scalpel. The wooden shelves behind him are crowded with a formidable still life of books, letters, scrolls, hourglasses, scissors, sealing wax, knotted cloths, ribbons, and writing instruments, carefully described and struck by the light. His cardinal's hat is prominently displayed on a table, and mice below, in the shadows, are gnawing on the papers that have fallen to the floor.

This suggests that, whether or not he kept a lion, Jerome would certainly have benefited from having a housekeeper. But at least Colantonio gives him a very regal lion.

This is all fanciful. But Jerome is truly among Catholicism's (and the world's) greatest scholar-evangelists. Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus - we call him Jerome - had been the confidential secretary to Damasus the first, pope from 366 to 384, and it was Damasus who tasked him to do a thorough revision of the Bible - both Testaments.

Jerome was the man for the job. A convert to Christianity, he had previously lived a life of indulgence not unlike the young St. Augus...

By Robert Royal.

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the point at which, because of variations in the way that the Earth orbits the Sun, night is longest, the "darkest day of the year." (It's also my birthday, and for some who have followed me over the years, I suspect, a dark day in a more than astronomical sense.) Maybe because of that accident of birth, I've always been struck by the line in Genesis, "And God said let there be light, and there was light." I've even, in my wavering efforts to learn Biblical Hebrew, memorized the original, וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, יְהִי אוֹר; וַיְהִי-אוֹר. Vayomer Elohim yehi or, vayehi or. Before that (if that's the right way to put it, since time has not been created yet), God is winding up to deliver the pitch, so to speak. And he does in what follows: "God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness."

Many things depend on that division - though, as we'll see below, not, ultimately, in the sense you might think. In a way, it's no surprise that it was a Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein, who first discovered the fundamental role of light in creation. Nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe. Einstein's personal religious beliefs are a matter of debate, but is it wholly an accident that someone steeped in the Jewish tradition could have worked his way to that truth?

That whole tradition is with us, deeply, in this season. The birth of a baby is - or always should be - a cause for celebration. But that this baby entered our world around its darkest days is also surely more than a coincidence. People today tend to dismiss such speculations as "medieval." But as in many of the paradoxes of the Faith, the darkness is not incidental or merely symbolic or even - we'll come back to this - something left behind. In a deep sense, the darkness is also the reason for the season. Would light be so important without it?

If you think about it, too, why is it that Jesus was born at night? We only know that because the good Luke includes this detail: "Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock." (Luke 2:8) It's fitting because the Jewish prophetic tradition suggests that night is the everyday reality in which we find ourselves.

In Handel's Messiah, which you should make a point of listening to every year at this time for your enjoyment but also edification, you'll hear a lot about God's glory and how we should be thankful to Him for redeeming us. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."(Isaiah 9:2) And why are they sitting in darkness?

At a live performance last week, the section that most went home was, "And who shall abide the day of his coming?" which Handel selected from the prophet Malachi (Chapter 3: Verse 2). You would think that after all the darkness and suffering in the world, we'd all be glad to see Him. But the murky world that Original Sin and individual sins have laid upon us - and that we're so attached to - is a world that we don't give up easily. The Christian tradition reminds us that many of us will fear Christ's Second Coming. Even at His First Coming, there were those, like Herod, and later the Pharisees and Sadducees, who didn't exactly jump for joy at seeing Him.

We like Christmas, as it has become now, for obvious reasons. Gifts, parties, food, (Catholic) beverages, family, friends, good cheer, caroling, and at least minimal gestures of goodwill towards men. Even a secularist, rampant commercialism aside, might find all that a welcome respite from the grimness of the everyday. It's all quite Dickensian. But for a Christian, the grimness goes far deeper. Which is why the joy is all the greater.

And yet in the end, perhaps we need to put in a good word for darkness. The darkness around us and inside in our earthly existence is, in its way, part of God's mercy. Like all the trials and tribulations that stem from sin, as we see in Scripture, darkness is a spur to look...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be in the capital city of Slovakia, Bratislava, formerly Pressburg, staying in the beautiful Old Town, to speak at a conference. To say it is charming makes it sound like a wedding-cake creation; it charms because it is intact and as it should be, not ersatz and artificial, a Catholic town, in creation and in fact.

Navigating its very walkable streets (a weekend break would be ideal to see all that is necessary), you see that multiple churches are open and in use, with, on a Sunday, many families with numerous children spilling out into the small squares. Unlike its Czech neighbor, in Slovakia the Faith appears healthy, a sign of encouragement for those who believe any revival of the Faith in Europe will come, in good part, from its Central and Eastern nations.

St. Martin's Cathedral, in the very heart of the Old Town, is a small 15th-century Gothic jewel, simple and devout, dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, whom the populace claims as their own, which is technically correct, as parts of Slovakia were in what was called Pannonia.

This cathedral has seen kingdoms rise and fall - the kings of Hungary were crowned there. And there is a small shrine to the last Habsburg Emperor, Blessed Karl. In the lifetime of an elderly citizen, it also saw the horrors of the two most destructive atheistic ideologies ever known, Nazism and Communism. Both of those cruel systems attempted, as Herod tried and failed, to kill the rival to their earthly power, the true King, whose reign shall never cease.

As the Gospel was about to be proclaimed that Sunday, the organ prelude thundered, an acclamation, in the true sense, for a person of great dignity, a royal person. It was a greeting for the Word, who would appear in Scripture and Sacrament, most truly in His Real Presence - the bread and wine transformed into His Body and Blood. It's still as difficult to discern His divinity in those elements, just as it was a baby in a crib, except with the gift of faith, given to Shepherds and Magi.

The cathedral, as every church, humble chapel, or even, in necessity, table or Mass rock, is Bethlehem, the House of Bread, the royal palace of the hidden king.

There seemed to be something very appropriate about that triumphant organ. As Bishop Barron has written, during the reign of Caesar Augustus, trumpets and acclamations would greet the one perceived to be the King of the known world. Yet in silence, in "the fullness of time," the true King appears, not acclaimed by trumpet and organ, unknown, but recognised and adored by rough shepherds and wise seekers from the East.

He has no earthly army, but something much greater, the army of the Heavenly Host. The great and the good, if they even hear of the event, laugh it to scorn, a very contemporary reaction to the Gospel. Yet the story, as Chesterton said, is "plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep."

God confounds worldly wisdom with His hidden foolishness. "He came unto His own, and His own knew Him not." Why did they not recognise Him, whom all the prophets had foretold?

It was partly the "mystery of iniquity," of course, and the extraordinary simplicity of His birth. There is more, though: a God so close, so weak, so defenseless, is almost too much to accept, and therefore contradictory to the concept of divine omnipotence.

It is still the fashion, of those outdated critics of Christianity who have yet to realise their once fashionable views are now passé, to claim that, because pagan legends and myths included tales of a Virgin birth, or the appearance of a God in human form, this proves the Christmas tale to be just that: a tale like all the others. Hilaire Belloc, who punctured pomposity and intellectual cant with the weapon of his pen, quite accurately noted that "these are not pagan legends transformed. They are pagan foresights inherited."

As St. Paul identified, in his evangelism at the Areopagus, the nearby...

By Daniel B. Gallagher

When I first began devouring Catholic fiction in college, I couldn't figure out why J. F. Powers immediately struck a chord with me and Flannery O'Connor (this year is the centenary of her birth) did not. It wasn't that one was better than the other. Judging from their prose, they are both extraordinary stylists.

What I failed to recognize back then is now obvious to me. I was born in Pittsburgh, raised in Chicago, and educated at the University of Michigan. When I first read O'Connor, I knew much more about trains, factories, and blizzards than I did about heatwaves, fried shrimp, and peacocks. Everything I knew about racial segregation I read from books, including O'Connor's.

The Midwest is far from an egalitarian utopia, but it certainly lacks the Southern class structure upon which so many of O'Connor's plots turn. If I had been a more imaginative reader, stories like "Everything That Rises Must Converge" would have taught me something about a culture and a place of which I had absolutely no experience.

Yet I did know a thing or two about alcoholic priests and the affected robustness of many Midwest Catholic institutions, ranging from Notre Dame to the Knights of Columbus. Powers' stories made me laugh and showed me the narrative possibilities of an author who can wittily describe Midwest Catholic and clerical culture through the eyes of the rectory cat.

Since moving to Savannah a couple of years ago and working within blocks of O'Connor's childhood home, all of that has started to change for me. It didn't take long to meet people like Manley, the conniving Bible salesman in "Good Country People," and the self-righteous Grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

I've watched peacocks unfurl their plumage on O'Connor's Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville and knelt in the same pew O'Connor prayed as a girl living a stone's throw from Saint John the Baptist Cathedral. Even though I'll always be a Midwesterner, I'm starting to wrap my mind around what it meant for O'Connor to be a Southerner.

But I don't think I'll get very far, and that's okay. Because if I've learned anything from re-reading O'Connor in this centenary of her birth, it's that I'll never have to wrap my mind around her Southernness completely to understand her - at least not in the way a Southerner understands her.

Everywhere I go, I can't help but be a Midwesterner, just as O'Connor couldn't help being anything but a Southerner, be it in Iowa, New York, or Connecticut. Her one visit to Europe only reinforced her desire to stay put in the South.

While collecting her wits in Rome, she joked that she and her mother Regina - her sole companion on the journey - would "probably end up behind the Iron Curtain asking the way to Lourdes in sign language," adding that "my will is apparently made out of a feather duster." Her 14-year battle with lupus would make us think otherwise, but if she simply meant that she lacked the strength not only to put up with the inconveniences of traveling but to adapt to the cultures it took her to, it's a point well taken.

In O'Connor's mind, my boyhood home of Chicago - where Powers sets the first part of his great novel Morte d'Urban - is as far away from Milledgeville as Rome. Every detail of her five-day stint at the University of Chicago in 1959 "assisting" young female writers was unbearable. Living in the dormitory, O'Connor was obliged to give a public lecture that no one attended and then sit with the girls "drinking tea every afternoon while they tried to think of something to ask me. The low point was reached when - after a good ten-minute silence - one little girl said, 'Miss O'Connor, what are the Christmas customs in Georgia?'"

O'Connor found a way to apply this fierce loyalty to home to her soul as well. She would not tolerate a lack of integrity when it came to prayer, be it hers or that of others. Writing to her good friend Janet McKane, she describes an attempt to plow through Karl Rahner's On...

By John M. Grondelski

A suburban Boston Catholic parish ignited a controversy this Advent when its outdoor Nativity scene replaced the figure of the Baby Jesus in His crib with a sign, "ICE was here." The pastor contends the display moves "beyond static traditional figures and evokes emotion and dialogue."

A new battlefront is emerging in the "War on Christmas." For years, the "war on Christmas" was primarily a confrontation with encroaching secularism: many Americans' first encounter with the "naked public square" was the city hall park from which the traditional Nativity scene had been evicted, usually by court order. As wokeness spread, "Happy Holidays" became the euphemism for the holiday that dared not speak its name.

But the "War on Christmas" seems to have taken on a new frontline: Christians wanting to co-opt Christian symbolism as agitprop for political causes. The 2025 cause célèbre is immigration law enforcement.

News reports confirm that using crèches as partisan props is not limited to Massachusetts. In Illinois, one Nativity scene apparently features a Baby Jesus whose hands are zip-tied, the detention tactic used by ICE. Another has Jesus in a gas mask, an allusion to tactics used to disperse those illegally obstructing federal law enforcement activities.

As is typical of many controversies today, we're being presented with the claim that there are two sides to the question. Critics of the actions call it sacrilegious, using religious symbols for ideological purposes. Its defenders call it adapting the Gospel message to contemporary issues, causing people to grapple with applying Jesus's teachings to the times.

But there's a limit to this perspectivism. In Fiddler on the Roof, every time Tevye's daughters challenge him with some new issue, he's depicted mulling things over in his head. "'On the one hand….' 'On the other hand….' 'On the other other hand ….'" But, at a certain point, when Chava marries outside the faith, he raises his arms in a powerful gesture and shouts, "'No! There is no other hand!."

Suburban Boston and other Catholic venues in this fair land need a Tevye.

A manger scene - especially one in public - has one purpose: to give visible public witness to the truth of Christ's Incarnation: the Son of God made man. That is the purpose of every crèche scene. Anything that gets in the way of that message - whether by displacing, diluting, or distracting from it - does not belong there.

Certain brands of "political Catholics" - especially those prone to "accompanying" the Zeitgeist - appear afflicted by a peculiar form of ecclesiastical navel-gazing. They seem to forget that no small part of the world does not share their faith in God, much less in Christ, and even less in their political caricature of Christ.

In many Western societies, God, for increasing numbers of people, is as fictional as Santa Claus. Pope Leo warned against a "neo-Arianism" that accentuates Jesus as a great humanistic, ethical teacher, or prophet - maybe even poster boy for political causes, but one who gets tongue-tied in professing his divinity.

When that is the way of the world, Catholics who overlay the clarity of that religious message with others - including messages they perhaps deem "religious," but are arguably subordinate - compromise the Gospel. Such gestures divide the Church.

Press coverage sometimes suggests as much, noting how Catholics are visiting the South Dedham manger scene to "take sides" about it. No Catholic should have to "take sides" in front of a Nativity scene. No Catholic viewing it should have to confess any political profession alongside his profession of faith.

If he does, there's something gravely wrong there. This is not a denial of the Church's social teaching or corporal works of mercy, but a defense of the integrity of Catholic devotional symbolism.

The last two pontificates attached a premium to "ecclesial unity," which has primarily meant suppressing any manifestations of sympathy for the ...

by Michael Pakaluk

But first a note from Robert Royal: Several readers have recently written to ask what happened to our longtime columnist David Carlin. His son, Joshua, just contacted us to say that he passed away on December 12 (obiturary here). Dave was not only a forceful writer and thinker, as his work here consistently demonstrated. He was that rarest of rare birds: a pro-life Democrat. He kept up his work well into old age, and many of us remember him fondly. Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine.

Now for today's column...

Let's start with the "O Antiphons." They began yesterday. There are seven of them, and they end on December 23. Then, with Christmas Eve and Christmas, they make nine - a novena - which is a period of expectation, the same in number as the months of pregnancy.

So, the lead up to Christmas is like a leading up to birth.

It's fine and all to discourse about the O Antiphons, but to hear them in situ, it is necessary to go to Mass for those seven days, or to pray Vespers. If the first, and we receive Holy Communion, we repeatedly express our hope of receiving the Lord by, well, receiving the Lord.

If the second, we join Mary in celebrating the growing child within her, as she does in her Magnificat.

Moreover, since we are not Pelagians, and if we are sober and are convinced that through our own efforts we are incapable of giving rise to anything divine in us, we will also believe that the graces won from attending Mass those days, or praying Vespers, will change us, to make us more receptive to receiving the Child.

Then, everything about Christmas breaks down the barrier between born and unborn. Take the O Antiphons again. Famously, their first initials form an acrostic (Sapientia, Rex, etc.) which if taken backwards spell ero cras. You will hear it said that this means in Latin "tomorrow I will come," as if, "I come into the world."

Not so, it means "tomorrow I will be."

But (you say) He already is: before Abraham was, He is. (John 8:58) Indeed, and therefore it must mean "be for you," that is, become apparent to you, as for instance to the shepherds. Which is to say that in the womb he is saying that tomorrow you will see me, who now is unseen.

The statements about his life made by Zechariah in the "Benedictus," perhaps even in the Lord's presence (if Mary stayed for the circumcision) are all in the past tense - e.g. "he has visited his people." True, this priest is using the so-called "prophetic past" - to refer to something so certain in the future that it must be expressed with the necessity of the past. But at the same time, he is referring to what that two-week-old embryo has already done.

And then, Catholics hold that Mary did not go through labor, and there was no disturbance of the birth canal or of her virginal integrity, so that the infant appeared to us by passing through her body as the Lord was later to pass through walls.

I don't think that anyone ever claimed that someone changed from being a "clump of cells" to being human by walking into a room. Nothing could more clearly show the continuity and identity of born with unborn.

But Christmas tears down other justifications for abortion as well. "Every child a wanted child"? (Please take what I am about to write with appropriate reverence.) Jesus was not a "wanted child" by Mary. This is certain. She believed she would be a virgin. When the angel greeted her, she "was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be." (Luke 1:29, Douay-Rheims).

She asks, famously, "How shall this be done?" She did not say, "I have been planning to have a child," or "How providential that you arrive just when Joseph and I were thinking that we could afford a child!" But, yes, immediately the child becomes "wanted": "Be it done to me according to thy word." She denies any "autonomy" she might have claimed to have.

We often hear, "Who are you or I to say to a woman that she must accept all the burdens of raising a child?...

By Francis X. Maier

The Mahoney and Maier clans have been best friends for half a century. Our kids - their eight, our four - grew up together and remain close. Kim, the oldest Mahoney sibling, is godfather to our youngest son. A former Marine Corps fighter pilot, he's now an admirable Catholic husband and dad. As a child though, and one with precocious genes; well, that's a different story. Somewhere around the age of reason - seven or so - he asked his mother if there really were a Santa Claus. His mother, a committed truth-teller, said no, but Santa's a beautiful part of the Christmas spirit. To which Kim replied, "If there's no Santa, I don't believe in God either."

This is impressive, if flawed, kid logic. It raises some useful questions about Santa and the entire North Pole propaganda machine.

Consider Elf on a Shelf (hereafter ES). He's a Christmas favorite. The typical marketing copy for ES goes like this: "Ever wonder how Santa crafts his Nice list? Well, Santa has a trusted Scout Elf assigned to every family around the world. He'll find a spot in the family's home to sit and watch all day long. Each night, he'll fly back to report to Santa at the North Pole to tell him all your stories and adventures."

Isn't that sweet? Maybe, but think about it. A skeptic might note that he also reports all your mistakes and failures and bad behavior. The whole ES operation might be subsidized by the coal industry. Worse, Santa's little helper might actually be working for, or at least sharing your personal data with, Krampus, who's quite a different kind of Yuletide creature - it's just a rumor, but where there's smoke, there's usually fire. And isn't it just a bit odd that ES pops up all over the house, uninvited, in the weeks before Christmas with his cute puckish smile, androgynous build, and Aryan blue eyes?

One might reasonably ask: Does jolly old St. Nick really need a branch of Elfdom that functions like the Stasi?

Let's face it: Elf on a Shelf is an ambiguous figure; enigma incarnate. Is he a friend and champion of children everywhere? Or just another minion of consumer capitalism; a servant of grasping Xmas commerce, and arguably a paid informant for unknown interested parties? These are serious questions.

I'll come back to them in a moment. Meanwhile, I have a confession. My wife and I are not just complicit in the Père Noël/Father Christmas/Santa Claus racket. We're veteran agents of the tale; basically a Santa's Workshop agitprop team for decades.

Cleaning out a basement closet earlier this month, we found some 20 years' worth of annual 3'x2' homemade Santa's elf charts - the complete set of North Pole personnel files on our now-adult children. The purpose behind the charts, all those years ago, was simple. Each night starting December 1 through Christmas Eve, Santa's real elves (us) would visit the Maier household and leave a kind of "performance review" - there's no kinder way to put it - on each of our kids.

The kids really got into it. They believed in the elves, or at least pretended to, right up to the brink of junior high. Sure, the December chart sometimes bred sibling grievance and finger-pointing. That's life in a healthy family. But it could also lead, especially in the last week before the Big Day, to modest efforts at conduct reform.

The elves would offer each child some helpful overnight life-coaching in a few scrawled words - Don't bite your brother," etc. - but what really mattered were their five graded categories of daily kid behavior: gold star (wonderful work!), silver star (good job!), green star (ok, but you can do better), red star (you're taking the road less traveled, in the wrong direction), and the dreaded black mark (hope you like coal, kid). Happily, these particular elves were guilty of grade inflation. Black marks were few.

So what's the point of all the above?

Walking with J.R.R. Tolkien in 1931, C.S. Lewis dismissed myths as "lies breathed through silver." Only after his conversion c...

By Randall Smith

I am often annoyed and frustrated at Mass. Not with the Mass, mind you. I used to get annoyed and frustrated a lot with the way Mass was done when I first became Catholic. But some of that craziness from earlier years seems to have subsided somewhat. Or maybe it's just that I'm fortunate in the places I go to Mass these days. Mostly, I'm just grateful to be going to Mass at all. A lot of people don't have that luxury, or they risk their lives to go.

No, I get annoyed and frustrated with myself, because my mind wanders. I find that strange and troubling. Strange, because it's Christ Himself present. Troubling, because if I can't get myself to listen to God, then who would I listen to?

I mean, if Christ was present not in the accidents of bread and wine, but as He appeared to the disciples in the upper room after His crucifixion, would my mind wander then? Would I be wondering, "Wow, it's Jesus, but what am I going to have for lunch?" or "These are the words of life, but did I remember to send my students that email?" Would I have to say: "What's that, Lord? What did you say? I'm sorry, my mind wandered." That would be more than a little embarrassing.

The Scriptures are God's own inspired words, but my mind still wanders when I'm listening to them. If God appeared to me in a vision and said, as He did to John the Apostle, "Listen and write this down!" would I be only half-listening and have to ask Him to repeat Himself? Did St. John say, "Wait, God, what was that? I lost my train of thought. I just remembered a funny joke Matthew used to tell."

What kinds of things does my mind wander to? Well, one day, I was kneeling during the consecration, and while my mind was wandering, I thought, "Maybe I should write an article about how my mind wanders at Mass." Now that's just perverse. I thought I heard something the other day about staying awake and "keeping alert." But it's fuzzy, because my mind wandered to what I am going to put on my syllabus next semester.

One thing (among many) I admire about the Byzantine liturgy, which we in the West should consider, is that before the Scripture readings, the priest announces: "Wisdom! Be attentive!" I love that. It's a good reminder.

Maybe in the Western Church, we need a bigger "windup" before the Scripture readings - something that indicates liturgically: "Okay everybody, breathe deeply, shake out the cobwebs, and get your brains in the right space. This is the word of God, so let's all just. . . pay attention!" Perhaps this is the purpose of having preparatory periods like Advent and Lent.

So too, it would be nice if the homily helped us remember the readings. My wife has a points system for homilies, and the priest gets extra points if he mentions all the readings - big points if he mentions the Psalm for the day in the homily, which oddly, almost no one ever does. This is strange because they're always so great, and they are in one of the most commented-upon books of the entire Bible.

But for me, reverence at Mass would be remembering the Lord is here, so pay attention! This is important. This is the key to my whole life. Without this, I'm lost. Everything else is pretty much secondary.

So, what can I say? It's frustrating and annoying. Mass could be done better; that might help. But one lesson of the Scriptures seems to be that, even if Jesus is on top of a hill or out in a boat or walking in a crowd along the street, I should strain my ears and my soul to pay attention. But I don't.

Perhaps the problem is, as T. S. Eliot says, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." It's true; there are days when I am blown away that the God of all Creation cares enough to speak to us, and it's just a bit much. Wait, He did what? God incarnate touched some guy? He wept? He died on a Cross? Sometimes, it just blows all my circuits.

But, as much as I'd like to say the problem was always bound up with some deep metaphysical awe, the truth is, I don't listen to my neighbors all that...

By Robert Royal

But first a note:

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Now for today's column...

Offering advice to a pope is a presumptuous thing - for anyone. In the Church of synodality, however, where everyone is supposed to have a voice - and be listened to - perhaps not so presumptuous as once upon a time. Still, such counsel should be offered in a spirit of loyalty and concern, as a kind of aide-memoire - in the classic diplomatic sense of providing a leader with information and analysis. Not about dogmas, Creeds, and long-settled matters such as any pope should already know. But as a help in understanding how things, important things, stand, which a pontiff may not be adequately aware of, shaped as he is by what the French elegantly call a déformation professionelle, and what we Americans, more technologically minded, regard as an "information silo."

So let me embark on this diplomatic task, just as a personal exercise (as if one had been asked), made slightly more complicated by the fact that Pope Leo is an American who has mostly lived abroad for much of his adult life. And half-sees, perhaps half doesn't, what I'm about to say.

I start from the recent controversy over the relationship between Europe and America, because it's about much more than politics - and is revealing. I'm in perfect agreement with the pope's recent remarks that the Transatlantic Alliance is of the utmost importance. And I concur that some of the ways that the Trump Administration has couched its recent National Security Strategy (NSS) might give an unsympathetic or hasty reader the impression that America is about to give up on Europe.

But this would be to overlook a deeper commitment to Europe, indeed to something cultural and - dare one say - religious, far more important than political, economic, and military policies, which come and go. As the NSS says early in a section titled "What Do We Want": "We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe's civilizational self-confidence and Western identity." (Emphasis added.) And, therefore, what the NSS is seeking to promote, as well as to warn about, is - more properly understood - something about which the Roman Pontiff himself should be concerned. Deeply.

Where the NSS is critical of "Europe," it's mostly speaking of the progressive and unaccountable European Commission, which is the real policy-maker in the European Union. The EU is a body developed over decades in the aftermath of the disaster of World War II with the hope of forever banishing such intra-European destruction. And to a large degree and for a long time, it worked, thanks to the influence of three heroic Catholic figures: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy (the latter two now up for formal sainthood, not just for their political contributions, but the holiness of their lives).

And behind them all stood the Christian Democracy elaborated by the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, which exposed and rebutted the anti-human principles of the twentieth-century totalitarianisms - Communism, Fascism, Nazis...