The Catholic Thing

By Brad Miner.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: Dostoyevsky made one of his characters say, "Beauty will save the world." There are many days when it seems doubtful that he was right. But it's worth always keeping in mind that there are deeper realities than the day-to-day controversies - even in the Church - which may ultimately decide what happens in this world and the next. Today, Brad Miner takes us through a masterly account of some of the works of a man who may have been the greatest Catholic artist ever - and in multiple media.

Here at The Catholic Thing, we've always said that part of our mission is to recover the Catholic cultural tradition, the richest in the world, both for its own sake and for the light it brings to our world. There's so much that needs doing in our circumstances that we have to do more, better, longer than perhaps ever before. If you find that prospect challenging, please help us take The Catholic Thing to even greater days. Just click the button. Do your part.

Now for today's column...

There's another basilica called St. Peter's in Rome, located near the Colosseum. San Pietro in Vincoli ("St. Peter in Chains") is a minor basilica that gets its own share of visitors, many of whom come for just one reason.

Therein lies the "tomb" of Julius II, although the late pope is not interred there. Julius (Giuliano della Rovere) now lies in the other St. Peter's, the world's greatest church, next to his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV.

Julius, who had no small opinion of his august self, wanted a grand memorial to his life and papacy, so he brought Michelangelo Buonarroti to Rome to design it. The great, 30-year-old artist accepted with gusto, visualizing it as his life's great work. And it's to see this (especially its central sculpture) that people come to San Pietro in Vincoli.

What they see, however, is a work very much diminished from the original vision of Julius and Michelangelo because problems arose.

Julius decided that, having Michelangelo in his employ, the artist was just the man to illuminate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo had begun to work on the tomb in 1505 but was forced to put the project on hold in 1508 to climb the scaffolding in the Chapel and begin painting what many consider the greatest achievement of the Renaissance (if not in the whole history of art), a project he worked on for four years, completing the ceiling on October 31, 1512.

Julius was relieved. Now, he assumed, he'd live to see the tomb that would be a monument to his monumental life. Michelangelo's original plan was for an enormous, free-standing, three-tiered sort of wedding-cake structure featuring 40 statues. It would be 23 feet wide, 26-1/4 feet tall, and 36 feet deep, and fairly dominate the interior of the new and equally enormous St. Peter's at the Vatican, then under construction. And it might have worked if sited there, but it was not to be. Because it was at this point that the project came to a halt.

Why is not entirely clear. To be sure, the construction of the new St. Peter's was a drain on the Vatican treasury, and its then-chief architect, Donato Bramante, was no friend of Michelangelo, and he may have convinced Julius that overseeing the construction of one's own tomb was bad form for a holy man.

And there were wars, of course - with Julius leading the army of the Papal States. And, on the gloomy horizon, religious dissent that would lead to the Protestant Reformation.

The Vatican balance sheet was sliding into the red.

But Julius would not abandon the tomb project. In fact, he issued a bull (February 19, 1513) declaring that Michelangelo would be the only one to craft his tomb - a very high-powered back-to-work order. Michelangelo had finished his work on the Sistine Chapel a few months before. So now, Julius must have thought: Now he can finish my tomb!

Two days later, the pope died.

Michelangelo did finish the "tomb" in 1545, just two years before Pope Paul III would name him Chie...

By John D. Grondelski

This year marks the centennial of the institution of the Solemnity of Christ the King. Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Quas primas on December 11, 1925, which sketched the theology and announced the new feast of the "Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

Contrary to this year's protest rhetoric, America does have a king. All men have a king, because the Kingdom of God encompasses all men. As the Preface for the feast observes, Christ presents to His Father "an eternal and universal kingdom."

The claims of Christ's Kingship might seem to most people today inflated, even triumphalist. They are an offense to a modernity that makes its peace with secularism, something of which even some clerics urge us to see as a positive development.

But one should not forget the historical context that motivated Pius XI. The world had passed less than a decade since the "Great War," which didn't acquire the appellation of "First World War" until a Second one outstripped it. The horrors of World War I profoundly marked that generation, shocked that a Europe which prided itself on its mission of exporting "civilization" could be so basely uncivilized.

Nor were the pope's concerns limited to the Marne, the Argonne, and Amiens. As nuncio, then-Archbishop Ratti was the last diplomat who stayed in Poland to witness the "Miracle on the Vistula," which halted the Bolsheviks' Western offensive in 1920. The Battle of Warsaw probably saved Western Europe from Communism for a generation.

The papal diagnosis of the previous decade - both of the mutual butchery of Europe's old order as well as the threat posed by the new regimes - was man's abandonment of God and His Law: "[T]he majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics."

That same dismissal of the Deity and Divine Law also would send men down futile rabbit holes of human-designed peace and security, culminating in the risible 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which solemnly proclaimed war to be forever outlawed - just a decade before the next World War. Pius XI had a different vision: "[A]s long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations."

A century later, those of us stuck in the postmodern condition may imagine the pope's warnings to be quaint in a world where "democracy" demands a strict separation of church and state, exiling God from the public square.

The truth is that democracy demands no such thing, though we pretend that it does to avoid the demands binding every human being by virtue of natural law - another reality unfortunately consigned to unjustified silence.

The Gospels may speak of the "things of God and the things of Caesar," but - while respecting the legitimate "autonomy of created things" - Christians never understood that division to make both sides equal, as if there were things of Caesar that were not first and always things of God.

The human temptation to build a world without God dates back to man's origins. It was, in fact, the temptation of the first sin: to be as gods, by which we, not God, defined good and evil. It was also the temptation of Babel: to reach heaven by human means.

It is precisely against those temptations that the Kingship of Christ stands. His is a Kingship rooted in spiritual truth, grounded in "justice, peace, and love." It is a Kingship that recognizes man's desire to reach Heaven is fulfilled through his union with the Crucified and Risen King, not by human self-sufficiency.

Contrary to those who would argue claims of human freedom, Quas primas explicitly connects "the blessings of real liberty" with recognition "both in private and in public life, that Christ is King."

The problem of genuine freedom is arguably a leading moral problem of our day. Is freedom the end in itself, self-justifying so that whatever is done freely is good? Or -...

By Robert Lazu Kmita.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: We are finishing the first week of our end-of-year fundraising, and we've already come a good way. As always, I like to get back to our main business as soon as possible - bringing you the very best commentary on things Catholic. But that, among other things, depends on you. So let's do this. Let's lay the foundation for TCT in 2026 - and beyond.

Now for today's column...

In recent months, we have heard a great deal about traditional liturgies being canceled in certain dioceses. Of course, this is nothing new. The tenacity of certain bishops, however, in eliminating not only these liturgies but also the groups devoted to preserving and transmitting the Catholic liturgical treasure cannot fail to worry us.

First, it must be said that the core of the heated debate surrounding the right of the Traditional Latin Mass to exist is not liturgical in nature. A certain vision of the evolution and state of the world over the past centuries - marked dramatically by the collapse of Catholic monarchies and by revolutions, Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, and the two World Wars - has generated the idea of a complete "readjustment" (i.e., aggiornamento) of the traditional categories of Christian theology and morality, as well as of divine worship.

The premise of this vision is sensitivity and understanding of modern man, who is allegedly no longer capable of receiving the Gospel as transmitted through the traditional means that the Church has employed for nearly two millennia. Hence, the "updating" of the entire Christian religion would be a necessity imposed by new historical conditions. Regardless of how it is phrased, this is the main argument of the "reformers" - often accompanied by the claim that "We no longer live in the Middle Ages!"

The second reason for the changes, systematically denounced by the lovers of Tradition and the defenders of continuity and immutability in divine worship, concerns the theological core expressed in the liturgical and sacramental forms, which were directed against the Protestant tsunami by the Council of Trent (1545-1563).

Critics insistently claim that these forms no longer meet the new needs. Fundamental notions such as "sacrifice," "symbol," "penance," "reparation," and the like have been bracketed under the influence of a confused ecclesiology. Thus, it is no longer clear whether the Catholic Church is still the one true Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ - the only community in which salvation is possible.

This, of course, leads us to the third reason for the liturgical reforms: the ecumenical one, which represents a notable departure from the teachings and ecclesiological style that existed before the Second Vatican Council. In this case, the goal is not so much to adapt to the sensitivity and understanding of modern man as to adapt to the requirements of dialogue with other Christian denominations - a dialogue in which openness and the desire to minimize differences (unfortunately, at the cost of diluting traditional teachings) are dominant.

Thus, although any form of communicatio in sacris with members of other denominations was strictly forbidden to Catholics before the Council, today joint prayers and meetings like those of Assisi and Abu Dhabi have become the norm, while the voices of the few Cardinals and bishops who raise concerns are quickly silenced.

In such a context, the Liturgy of the Ages - characterized by its monarchical and hierarchical principle, and by the sacredness and reverence faithfully preserved by the clergy and the faithful devoted to Tradition - remains the target of those convinced that it represents an outdated, sclerotic form, incapable of overcoming the current crisis.

In the excellent volume edited by Joseph Shaw, The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals, even the hierarchs charged with overseeing the activity of the Ecclesia Dei Commission (suppressed by Pope Francis in 2019, with its responsibilities t...

By George J. Marlin.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: With all the online infighting over who's a "Nazi" or a "Fascist," almost no one stops to think why it is that we regard such political formations as wrong. Today, George Marlin, recalling the trials of real Nazis, explains the need to resort to divine law and natural law. But to do that brings with it certain other public judgments as well. At The Catholic Thing, we'd be glad to see that, and labor towards it in various ways. And that's the reason for our end-of-year fundraising, which is moving along. But I have to be frank and say we need to step up the pace and need many more of you simply to step up. Our business manager, Hannah Russo, just reminded me that this week TCT turns seventeen. So by my reckoning, we're still in our early youth - and plan on having many years ahead. Please help us to make that a reality so that TCT can continue to appear every day, now and for a long time to come.

Now for today's column...

Exactly eighty years ago yesterday, the War Crimes Tribunal convened a trial to prosecute twenty-four Nazi leaders - a legal procedure with continued relevance for us today. The driving force behind the creation of the tribunal was American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Shortly after America entered the war, he said, "It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murders of thousands of innocent persons in the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith."

The November 20, 1945 indictment of the 24 Nazi ringleaders consisted of three parts. Part one accused the defendants of conspiracy to wage a war of aggression and violation of international treaties; these were "crimes against peace." Part two charged the defendants with violations of the laws and customs of war as embodied in the Hague and Geneva conventions and as recognized by the military forces of all civilized nations; these were "war crimes against peace." And finally, part three accused the Nazis of the extermination of racial, ethnic, and religious groups and with other atrocities against civilians; these were "crimes against humanity."

The arguments of the defense were essentially two. First, it was claimed that at the time the various acts were alleged to have been committed, the "crimes," which the defendants were now being charged, had no statutory basis: either in German law or international law; that the legal basis of indictments had been created after the fact. Since "ex post facto" laws are constitutionally prohibited by each of the Allied Powers, they could hardly have validity in a court convened by those nations.

The defense's second argument was that the accused ought not to be charged with the consequences of following the orders of Germany's lawful leaders. Hitler's supreme authority had been confirmed equally by appointed judges and elected legislators, and he was able to boast of the Nazi Party: "We stand absolutely as hard as granite on the ground of legality."

It was, however, perverse legality. Beginning with the decree for the Protection of the People of the State (1933), which obliterated the personal freedoms formally protected by the Weimar Constitution, the Nazis promulgated a series of legal outrages. There were "Racial Purity" laws that forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews. There were laws that forced the registration of "alien races" and genetically "less valuable" individuals; and laws that expelled Jews from government employment and permitted the "Aryanization" of Jewish assets. From such "hard as granite" laws, Hitler and the German leadership fashioned the Final Solution.

Yet, despite the enormity of these Nazi atrocities, the legal dilemma at Nuremberg was very real. In establishing a case against the defendants, especially on charges of "crimes against humanity," the prosecution had no pre-existing statutes sufficient to the task. B...

By Michael Pakaluk.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: When I meet many of you in person, I often hear how much you love reading The Catholic Thing. And I often reply: so do I - and I read it a day before you do, when I don't write it myself. And just look today at what Michael Pakaluk has given us all! How can you not support that? You know how. There's the Button. There's you. There's The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

The Church is a poet, in the strict sense, since through the Spirit she makes poems, that is, beautiful, created objects. Her sacraments and liturgical year are poems: they have meaning and even tell a story. Likewise, each parish church is a poem, and each liturgy celebrated there. And every faithful Catholic must be zealous for this poetry.

At least, so much I have gained by pondering Newman, Doctor of the Church. Newman traced the origin of his beloved Oxford Movement to a longing for this poetry. It was an attempt to recover the poetry that properly belongs to the Catholic Church.

It began in 1827, with the publication of John Keble's book of poems, The Christian Year. Few know this book today. Evidently, it played its role and departed. Yet historians say that, with perhaps 1 million copies sold, Keble's was the most popular volume of English verse in the 19th century.

The Christian Year contains a poem for each Sunday in the liturgical year, and for various feasts, such as St. Stephen's and Holy Innocents. Christian families used it as a breviary, reading aloud the poem for the week and memorizing it together. In doing so they would also pray, because, as Keble says in his Dedication, his poetry was the fruit of prayer:

When in my silent solitary walk,

I sought a strain not all unworthy Thee,

My heart, still ringing with wild worldly talk,

Gave forth no note of holier minstrelsy.

Prayer is the secret, to myself I said,

Strong supplication must call down the charm,

And thus with untuned heart I feebly prayed,

Knocking at Heaven's gate with earth-palsied arm.

Fountain of Harmony!

Keble, then, would re-enchant the world by enchanting it, by calling down "the charm" in prayer.

Newman's assessment:

[Keble] did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do; he made it poetical. . . .the author of the Christian Year found the Anglican system all but destitute of this divine element, which is an essential property of Catholicism; a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piece-meal; prayers, clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture lessons turned into chapters. . .a smell of dust and damp, not of incense. . .the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar. . .and for orthodoxy, a frigid, inelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just account of itself.

His happy magic made the Anglican Church seem what Catholicism was and is.

Because of the success of The Christian Year, in 1831 Keble was appointed Chair of Poetry at Oxford. Two years later, on July 14th, he preached his famous sermon on "National Apostasy," which Newman in his Apologia later said "I have ever considered and kept. . .as the start of the religious movement of 1833."

Thus, the Oxford Movement and therefore Newman's own conversion began with poetry. From out of the shadows of poetry (ex umbris et imaginibus), Newman entered into the truth poetry (in veritatem) of the Church.

For Newman, Keble was part of a broader movement of yearning after beauty and truth which today we call the "Romantic Movement" (on which see the perceptive commentary of Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty). But whereas the Romantic poets, whom Keble admired, looked to build a new civilization on the ruins of ...

By Francis X. Maier.

But first a note from Robert Royal:

Friends, There was a widespread Internet hiccup yesterday morning, which knocked out sites way beyond TCT. So if you got an error message when you tried to read Professor Gallagher's very fine column on the things that are Caesar's and the things that are not, I recommend seeking it out. It will clarify a lot of what's going on in the Church these days. I'm happy to say that service was restored before noon and even more happy to say that the tech glitch did not stop many of you from being generous during our end-of-the-year fundraiser, now underway. And just look at today's brilliant column by Fran Maier. If you value work like this, please show it. It's easy enough. Click the button below. Send a check. It all helps advance the mission of The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

We're just weeks from 2026, and just months from America's 250th birthday. We're also just days from Advent, a season of self-examination and hope for Christians in preparing for the central event of human history: the birth of Jesus. It's a beautiful, serious, reflective time of year. Which makes it a perfect time for some awkward thoughts about who we are as a believing people and the character of the "American Experiment," the nation we call home and help sustain. So, let's begin.

On the place of religious faith and traditions:

1. The American Founding is a child of Biblical and Enlightenment thought. But the Enlightenment itself is a child of the Biblical framework - its anthropology and morality - from which it developed and tried to outgrow. To oversimplify: no Bible, no Enlightenment, no United States. At least, no United States as its Founders originally understood and intended it.

2. Despite more than a century of anti-Catholic prejudice and occasional violence, Catholics could successfully fit into and contribute to a deeply Protestant country because we shared a "mere Christianity" despite our theological and ecclesial differences. From the start, Jews too have shared in the country's Biblical roots. To put it even more forcefully: A Christian-inspired understanding of man and his purpose, and therefore his civic life, makes no sense outside its grounding in the Judaism from which it emerged. Thus, Christian anti-Semitism is a uniquely ugly form of blasphemy. Jesus and his mother were, after all, Jews.

3. Because of the above, other religious traditions can sometimes have difficulty integrating here. They must either adjust themselves to the Founding's original framework and "soul" (not an impossible task), or change them into something else, i.e., diminish the Christian and Biblical dimension of public life. The latter course has largely succeeded, conducted by a secularized, progressive leadership class. This accounts, in part, for the negative revisionism in American history and civics education during the past half-century. Note especially that Islam has an anthropology and view of the state and society very different from Christian and Enlightenment thought. This has obvious implications for public life. Note current conditions in Europe.

On Jefferson's "wall of separation":

4. Religion and politics make ripe ground for conflict. On the one hand, the "wall of separation" between Church and state appears nowhere in the Constitution. The phrase came from an 1802 letter by then-President Thomas Jefferson. Established Churches can work. Various U.S. States had an officially recognized church in the early years after independence. The last, in Massachusetts, was disestablished only in 1833. But history shows that they're a bad idea. Establishment usually benefits the state more than the Church, which too often becomes a dependency of, and a chaplaincy to, political power. Thus, the separation of Church institutions from the state is, in principle, a sound idea. But it can easily be abused by excluding religious institutions from public activity and appropriate collaborative s...

By Daniel B. Gallagher.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends, e made a good start towards our end-of-year funding goals yesterday, and I'm deeply grateful to all of you for your support. It's a great encouragement to all of us at TCT to see donations coming in from every state in the Union, and in countries from New Zealand to Switzerland. But we're only at the beginning and still have a distance to go. And in the meantime, the work needed is essential. As Professor Gallagher makes clear today, it's not just that the Catholic Faith can't be identified with any political party or project. The Faith gives us a quite different perspective on what our ultimate and relative commitments should be. It's a distinction as old and always relevant as Christ's admonitions about Caesar's coin and Augustine's explanation of the City of God.

And one that not only gets our spiritual lives right, it makes clear the relative place our political and social lives should occupy as well. Here, we not only write with such things in mind, we try to live them and to make them clearer in the lives of our readers and our world. It might seem a cliché that we can't do any of this without your support but it's the simple truth. So please, click the button, select how and how much you can support what we think of as a crucial contribution to our Church and our world: The Catholic Thing. Just click the banner below.

Now for today's column...

Amidst all the turmoil surrounding Cardinal Blase Cupich's decision to honor Senator Dick Durbin last month, objections raised by the faithful (including Cupich's brother bishops), and Pope Leo's unscripted comments, almost no attention has been given to a fundamental theological problem underlying the entire fiasco. "The tragedy of our current situation in the United States," Cupich wrote in a statement after Senator Durbin declined the award, "is that Catholics find themselves politically homeless."

At the November 3rd Keep Hope Alive Fundraiser, Cupich doubled down on his assessment of "our current situation" as a "tragedy," this time pointing to the dearth of politicians who embrace the entire gamut of Catholic social teaching: "Let's be true and honest," he said. "The tragic reality in our nation today is that there are essentially no Catholic public officials who consistently pursue the essential elements of Catholic social teaching."

But is that really a "tragedy?" If we want to be "true and honest," shouldn't we acknowledge that Catholics are not supposed to find themselves at home in this world, politically or otherwise? Doesn't Holy Scripture, along with a host of saints, remind us that the Gospel entails placing our hope in the home of a world yet to come?

"Put no trust in princes, in children of Adam powerless to save." (Psalm 146:3)

"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." (Matthew 22:21)

"My kingdom does not belong to this world." (John 18:36)

Another Archbishop of Chicago by the name Cardinal Joseph Bernardin created controversy in 1983 when he introduced the concept of a "consistent ethic of life" connecting the issues of poverty, war, capital punishment, and euthanasia to abortion in a "seamless garment."

Whatever one makes of this concept, I would propose that what we really need is a "seamless garment" connecting theology to the Church's teaching and preaching priorities. If we really expect this world to offer a political party that we could call "home," if we really expect politicians to embrace all of Catholic social teaching without exception, then we should probably call ourselves something other than "Christian."

I am not, of course, arguing at all that Christians should detach themselves from social responsibility. Neither am I suggesting that Catholics remain apolitical.

What I am suggesting is that Catholics engage the polis with their eyes set on the Kingdom of God, their mouths on the call to conversion, and their hearts on the hope of everlasting ...

By Robert Royal.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Dear Friends: Today we give you a somewhat longer reflection than is usual on this site about the U.S. Bishops' meeting in Baltimore last week and its ramifications here and in the Church at large. We're also beginning our end-of-year fundraising campaign - which is to say, we seek your support for all The Catholic Things you visit this site to find - not only our daily columns but our podcasts, courses, links to vital News and Commentary, and much more. We only fundraise twice a year because I have great confidence in you, our readers. And that confidence has been repaid for almost two decades now.

We don't come to you promising to change the world. But we do claim to provide the freshest, sharpest, and most balanced look into the Church and society that we can provide. It takes your help to do all this. As our regular writers know, I often remind them that even though they write for quite modest compensation, their reward will be much greater, we believe, in Heaven. Still, they and our dedicated staff, like all of us, find themselves facing higher costs of living and competing demands for their time. So I ask you as we're about to enter Advent and the Christmas Season to please be generous in support of our work, even more generous, if possible, than in past years. The challenges are many and the need great. We need everyone reading this to take part in this ongoing effort we call The Catholic Thing. Click the banner below.

Now for today's column...

In his address to the U.S. bishops at their annual meeting in Baltimore last week, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States, argued - nearly to the point of obsession - that Vatican II has to be regarded as the guide to the present and future of the Church. And the Council, he made clear, as interpreted recently by Pope Francis. ("Pope Leo also is convinced of this.") It was a bold, if doubtful, claim, given the well-documented ability of theologians to disagree. Even the more progressive among them might find reasons to dispute any such attempt to "control the narrative." Indeed, the Cardinal went further into even more difficult terrain, claiming - Rome must have cleared all this ahead of time - that "We now inhabit the world that the Council foresaw." It's telling - more on this below - that Pierre felt he had to push this so strongly at the American bishops, the implication being that he knows they're not so very much in agreement.

Now, most committed Catholics today often tend to pay too much attention to such passing statements coming from the pope or the curia. (Mea culpa. . .) And, sadly, sometimes "cancel" others just like the social media maniacs. The most important thing happening any given day on the surface of the Earth, however, may not be some large-scale political or ecclesial matter, but a priest helping someone to die reconciled to God and family. Or perhaps a humble, unknown person, entering into the way of becoming a human being as God intended us to be, one who will really make a difference in the world, which is to say, a saint.

Still, lesser truths also matter because truth is one of the divine names. As any fair observer might tell the Cardinal, no one in the 1960s - let alone the bishops gathered in Rome - had any clear idea of the world we currently "inhabit." It does no favor to the real achievements of the Council Fathers back then, or to our confused Church today, to make claims that probably none of them would have made for themselves. It's not merely a question of our brave new world of smartphones, the Internet, and AI, though those are already significant and threatening enough. We live in unprecedented conditions about the value of human life and the nature of human societies, over and above the older problems of sin and unbelief.

In the 1960s, to take a crucial example, Paul Ehrlich published a widely influential book, The Population Bomb, which confidently predicte...

By Robert J. Kurland

Every day, we encounter articles warning of AI's future dangers. But is machine learning really the threat? No. As psychiatrist Karl Stern warned 71 years ago in "The Third Revolution," the core problem is that intellectual elites have spent more than a century embracing materialism: scientism über alles.

Stern, a Jewish psychiatrist who fled Nazi Germany and converted to Catholicism, diagnosed this delusion with prophetic clarity. He warned that when we reduce persons to mechanisms, it opens the door to dehumanization in all its forms. The AI debate is the latest chapter in a story Stern witnessed firsthand: in Nazi Germany, materialist ideology reduced human beings to specimens in a racist biological theory, their humanity ignored.

Stern identified the fundamental error: science operates legitimately on the material, measurable plane. But when it claims this is the only plane, it fails on its own terms.

Consider Stern's famous thought experiment. Imagine assembling a research team to study Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Physicists analyze the sound waves, intensities, and frequencies; psychologists investigate Beethoven's childhood traumas and how he coped with deafness; sociologists examine his choice of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the post-Napoleonic political climate; neurologists use functional MRI to map which brain regions are stimulated when subjects hear the choral movement.

Yet as Stern observes, "No matter how much data our scientific team compiled, it could not 'explain' a single bar of the musical experience we call the Ninth Symphony. The problem isn't insufficient data. The problem is categorical: aesthetic experience, meaning, and beauty exist on a plane that scientific measurement cannot access.

This isn't a failure of science. Science cannot deal with all of reality. As Stern wrote, "Love and hate, joy and mourning cannot be quantified." You can map every neuron, measure every hormone, track every electrical impulse - and still not explain why one loves a prodigal son.

The same limitation appears across every domain that matters most to human life. Science can map neurological processes during moral decision-making, but it cannot ground moral obligation itself. Why should we sacrifice for others if we're merely collections of atoms following physical laws?

Fundamentally, science cannot answer "why" questions about purpose and meaning. It excels at describing mechanisms - i.e., how things work. But it cannot address teleological questions - why things exist, what their purpose is.

These aren't defects in the scientific method. They're inherent limitations that reveal reality's true nature: multiple planes of being, each requiring its own mode of knowing. The catastrophic error of scientism is claiming that only the material plane is real - that if science cannot measure it, it doesn't exist.

Stern's solution wasn't to reject science but to take it as a partial understanding of reality. The Catholic intellectual tradition, drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, has always insisted on what Stern called "multiple planes of being." Material reality operates according to physical laws that science can study. But persons exist simultaneously on several planes - body, soul, and spirit united in a person, a person made in God's image.

If Stern were alive today, he would tell us how his understanding of reality relates to potential dangers from AI. Consciousness cannot be achieved through algorithms - not because our computers aren't powerful enough, but because self-awareness belongs to a non-material plane of reality. No amount of computational complexity can bridge the gap between syntax and meaning.

Consider something as concrete as addiction recovery. Could an AI chatbot serve as a 12-Step sponsor? Technically, it could be programmed with all the right phrases. But it could never actually be a sponsor - because sponsorship requires what AI fundamentally lacks: empathy born of shared suffering, mor...

By Auguste Meyrat

One of the great paradoxes of the modern world is that as living has become easier, believing in God has become more difficult. This lack of belief stems from, among other things, the many choices of religion on offer. The world today is largely pluralistic and individualistic, and people now pick their religion like they pick out an outfit at a department store.

Naturally, this results in a kind of spiritual paralysis and malaise. With so many choices, the ordinary person might despair that any of them is the right one and might assume choice itself is an illusion. Moreover, this problem becomes all the worse when most educational institutions regularly deride religious faith and discourage its practice.

So, apologists not only need to argue for belief in God, but also for the act of belief itself. This is the challenge that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat - and a conservative Catholic - takes up in his recent book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat is well situated to appreciate the moods and prejudices of modern readers, and makes the case that they should reconsider their indifference to church and commit to a religion.

On one hand, Douthat's broad approach relieves him of having to account for obscure theological differences and speak as a reasonable layman who can identify with his audience. On the other hand, he is forced to attempt reconciliation between religions that are often opposed to one another.

Instead of assuming a great leap of faith from doubt into belief, Douthat works off the premise that people make many little hops from a qualified skepticism to full religious participation. His analogy usually works, but it can also mistake certain hops backward as progress.

That said, Douthat deserves praise for his eloquent defense of theism. He avoids the dry syllogisms explaining causation and contingency, but uses them as a means of dismantling the popular idea that science disproves God's existence.

While not exactly debunking religious faith, the momentous theories of heliocentrism and evolution have effectively disrupted and destabilized traditional faith: "Two hinge points, the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, are understood to have shifted the reasonable default to purposelessness and accident, materialism and atheism."

Douthat explains, however, that these theories mainly speak to the complexity of the cosmos, not to the absence of God. Moreover, as one surveys more recent scientific discoveries, it even appears more likely that God designed the universe.

Douthat presses on and explores the mystery of the soul. Similar to scientific breakthroughs in physics, new discoveries in neuroscience seem to challenge the existence of souls. And yet, such advances also may be seen as offering more evidence for the existence of an immaterial soul: "Whatever consciousness may be, soul or mind, dream or spell, it self-evidently has its own integrity, its own being, which is intertwined with physical reality without being reducible to physical substances and their interactions."

In expounding upon these points, Douthat gradually presses materialists into an untenable corner. In order to explain the soul and the universe, they must conjure up implausible theories of an infinite multiverse and of consciousness inexplicably "emerging" from complex neural networks in the brain. He makes it clear that today's materialists are desperately grasping at straws and, consequently, do not occupy the intellectual high ground.

After an interesting chapter on miracles and ghosts, Douthat moves on to the trickier case for religious adherence. After all, most people these days can at least be brought to a point of being "spiritual but not religious" - and leave it at that. It is quite another matter to coax them to the next step of committing to a religion.

Douthat's reasoning here is solid and dispels much of the do-it-yourself attitudes about religious practice. He explains the need for com...