The Catholic Thing

One of the better ways of trying to understand a writer or speaker is to imagine what audience he thinks he's addressing, and what he believes that audience most needs to hear. For the popes of the last half century or so, I think I pretty much understood what St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were driving at, and the people they hoped to reach. With Francis - and now Leo - I'm much less sure. Because the world that they seem to think that they're addressing is not the one that I believe I'm living in.

Item: Leo's recent homily to "Synodal Teams and Participatory Bodies," during which he remarked: "The supreme rule in the Church is love. No one is called to dominate; all are called to serve. No one should impose his or her own ideas; we must all listen to one another. No one is excluded; we are all called to participate. No one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together."

It caused a stir because some people interpreted this to mean denying revealed truths of the Faith in favor of the amorphous "walking together" and "dialogue" that Pope Francis hoped would synodalize the whole Church. That interpretation doesn't seem entirely wrong, since Fr. James Martin, S.J. immediately highlighted those words for his usual causes.

But it doesn't seem entirely right either, at least in Leo's case. In fact, when he was addressing the members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See in May, he affirmed quite clearly that:

the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world, resorting whenever necessary to blunt language that may initially create misunderstanding. Yet truth can never be separated from charity, which always has at its root a concern for the life and well-being of every man and woman. Furthermore, from the Christian perspective, truth is not the affirmation of abstract and disembodied principles, but an encounter with the person of Christ himself, alive in the midst of the community of believers.

Yet whenever the subject is "synodality," substantial affirmation of truth seems to become an embarrassing no-no, even a stumbling block. It's been claimed lately that Leo is still using Francis' team of speech writers. Perhaps so. And maybe once the whirlwind of the Jubilee is over, we'll get more considered words from him. But if he had asked me to write that controversial speech about none of us possessing the whole truth, I would have emphasized that, particularly in our day, the vast majority of people already believe that no one, no church, no institution has the truth.

It's far more urgent that they hear something like, "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20)

All Christians are, of course, "on the way," since none of us has arrived at our final destination - yet we're accompanied by revealed truths that guide us on our way, even as we strive to live them more fully.

Yet we have a second pope now who at times seems to assume that the people who actually pay some attention to what a pope has to say need to be warned not to be so sure they have a grip on Catholic truth. When I look around me in our flailing postmodern world anno Domini 2025, however, Catholics and non-Catholics alike are far more in need of assurances about the truth of God's Word and the historic teachings of the Church.

In fact, this whole episode reminded me of arguments that I got caught up in some decades ago. At the time, two Protestant theologians - if memory serves - Stanley Hauerwas and George Lindbeck were talking about how Christian currents had changed in recent centuries.

I'm simplifying and probably garbling their central points, given the passage of time. But the historical part went something like this. Christianity had moved from what was basically an authoritarian posture (churches simply declared doctrines with a...

By Bishop James D. Conley

President Trump recently announced measures to expand access to and reduce costs associated with in vitro fertilization (IVF). This is being billed as a pro-family and pro-life effort to help "American families have more babies." While the intention and goal are noble, IVF, in fact, undermines human dignity, marriage, and family life for a variety of reasons.

But first, a word to those conceived through IVF, those struggling with infertility and, by extension, those wrestling with this aspect of the Church's teaching, which can seem counterintuitive, confusing, and even harsh.

For anyone conceived through IVF, know that you are a gift, not just to your parents but to us all. Regardless of how someone was conceived, every human person is made in the image and likeness of God and therefore is loved by God and shares in the same inviolable dignity as each one of us.

For those who struggle with infertility, I walk with you in your sufferings. There is a deep yearning within the human heart to love and to be loved. Spouses desire to come together in marital intimacy and bring new human life into the world. When that desire is unfulfilled, it can cause disappointment, stress, shame, envy, anger, and desperation.

Like so many other sufferings, infertility is part of the mystery of Original Sin and the wounded, fallen world in which we live. Yet God calls us to bear these crosses with grace and dignity.

We need not carry our crosses alone, however. Jesus meets us in our sufferings. He walks with us, desires to make us whole, and hopes we see the good He can bring out of suffering. As the Sisters of Life so beautifully state: "Jesus is intimately familiar with the barren wilderness and yearns to meet us there until we can rest refreshed in the Promised Land with Him."

The Church supports technologies and medical interventions, such as restorative reproductive medicine, that help married couples address the root causes of infertility and naturally achieve a pregnancy through sexual union. These interventions are often very successful. Given the number of people with reproductive-health issues, these efforts deserve a greater commitment of our scientific and medical resources.

Infertility cannot always be resolved successfully, either by restorative measures or IVF. But restorative options provide great hope and opportunity to couples, while respecting the dignity of human life, marriage, family life, and Church teachings.

To return to President Trump's recent executive action, there are several key reasons why this action is ethically compromised and morally misguided.

As our U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recognized in response, "The IVF industry treats human beings like products and freezes or kills millions of children who are selected for transfer to a womb or do not survive."

It's important to understand that in nearly every IVF cycle, many more embryos are created in the lab than it's possible or desirable to implant in the womb of the intended mother. Those not implanted are either destroyed, frozen indefinitely, or abandoned, which often results in those tiny human beings becoming victims of medical experimentation.

Often with IVF, multiple embryonic human beings are implanted in the womb and survive, but are then "eliminated" because they can threaten the mother's life and health. In other words, these babies' lives are terminated through "selective reduction" abortions.

None of this is pro-life, nor is it pro-family. It's dismissive of human dignity and the real value of individual human lives, one of the clearest examples of the "throwaway culture" Pope Francis warned us against.

At a fundamental theological level, IVF undermines the marital act as the natural means for achieving a pregnancy. Rather than begetting new life through an act of love between a husband and wife in accord with God's design for life-giving love, IVF relies on medical professionals and other technicians to manufactur...

By Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky

Many things remind those of us with eyes to see of the enduring dangers of ideological confusion. In an effort to sort out a few of such confusions, veteran Catholic journalist Phil Lawler exposes the spiritual disorientation of post-conciliar Catholic life in his latest novel, Ghost Runners, which is just appearing this month

A Harvard graduate who also studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Lawler brought his analytic rigor first to Washington as Director of Studies at the Heritage Foundation, and later to Catholic journalism - as editor of The [Boston] Pilot, Catholic World Report, and founder of Catholic World News, the first online Catholic news service in English.

He also ran in 2000 as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts and, alas, was badly beaten by Senator Ted Kennedy. But it was a valuable lesson: too many pro-life Catholics fail to translate their convictions to ordinary life, including in how they choose to vote. Catholic World News has since transitioned (to use that now-suspect term) to the CatholicCulture.org website.

Books (and films) about priests can be saccharine, pietistic, brutally scandalous, cartoonish, and downright dishonest. Even the great Fulton Sheen wrote a book, Those Mysterious Priests. Typical of Bishop Sheen, it contained orthodox and solid doctrine, though perhaps it failed to identify a few warts among the brotherhood. But if Phil isn't Fulton Sheen, neither is he Andrew Greeley (remember him?) ecclesiastical muckraker extraordinaire.

In Ghost Runners, we see hints of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Godfather III, and perhaps a touch of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho along with a dash of Ghostbusters. Lawler's protagonist cannot escape the graces of his priesthood amid careerist and worldly Church officials. Even as he confronts evil - both clerical and secular - he discovers mystical realities within and beyond the confessional.

And add in a PBS documentary on El Salvador for good measure. Lawler utilizes his extensive experience to demonstrate how priests navigate the Church's complex waters and sustain their faith.

Although this is a work of fiction, the main character types are familiar to most priests - and in all likelihood especially so to the priests of the Archdiocese of Boston.

Lawler sets his story in the Reagan years, a period that comes more sharply into focus as the narrative unfolds. The young priest protagonist tells his story to the chancery-appointed psychologist. He reveals his personality and the profiles of his brother priests.

The narration describes the realistic and wonderfully complicated intricacies of the priesthood from the inside. Such stories are familiar to any priest alive today who suffered through the 1980s. Many religion writers - conservative and liberal alike - never quite capture that reality. Lawler does.

The priest protagonist remains faithful despite many reasons to surrender to infidelity or walk away from the priesthood. He identifies several routine vices among the clergy that usually aren't categorized as scandalous but, like every sin, can lead to great evil. Catechists like me may pedantically write about the Catholic principle/prudential judgment distinction. Lawler illustrates the distinction with a compelling account of the priest's visit to 1980s El Salvador during its civil war. Perhaps unconsciously, Lawler captures the habitual and unhealthy caste system that begins in the seminary.

He portrays this same ecclesial anxiety in his depiction of alleged mystical events. The treatment recalls an old joke from the pontificate of Pope John Paul II: What are the two things a bishop dreads most for his diocese? First, an alleged apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Second, a papal visit to his diocesan territory.

But in a real-life instance, Lawler's characters wrestle with a third high-maintenance possibility: the allegation that little old ladies are undergoing mystical and miraculous...

By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Today, in Rome, the great English convert and theologian, St. John Henry Newman, will be proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV. Newman will enter that august and select company - he makes only the 38th Doctor (i.e., Teacher) out of all the billions of Catholics who have lived on earth. With good reason. His gifts were many and great. And today Fr. Stravinskas reminds us of his achievements - over and beyond the theology, the history, and the polemics - as a poet, and guide of souls.

Now for today's column.

St. John Henry Newman, at age fifteen, embarked on a decades-long journey: in the words of his motto, ex imaginibus et umbris in veritatem ("From images and shadows into the truth"). For many years on his theological sojourn, Newman stood by the teaching of the 39 Articles of Religion of the Anglican Communion, including the one that describes Purgatory as a "pernicious" doctrine. With much prayer, intense study of the whole thrust of Sacred Scripture, as well as the convincing witness of the Fathers of the Church, he ended up writing one of the finest works on Purgatory, "The Dream of Gerontius," which rivals the depth and beauty of Dante's appreciation of Purgatory in his Divina Commedia; perhaps this work is best known through the lovely hymn, "Praise to the Holiest," which Pope Benedict XVI quoted in his homily at Newman's beatification.

In Newman's poem, a soul is in its last agony and is trying to make sense of his final moments, assisted by his Guardian Angel. The dying man cannot understand why he has become so calm in the face of this previously dreaded experience; the angel tells him that the prayers of the priest and his friends who surround him have given him confidence and, further, that the "calm and joy uprising in thy soul is first-fruit to thee of thy recompense, and Heaven begun."

The man gradually slips more and more and becomes concerned about the loss of his senses; the Angel comforts him: "till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind; for e'en thy Purgatory, which comes like fire, is fire without its light."

The soul is buoyed up by that knowledge and conforms his will to God's, asking but to see the Face of God for no more than a moment before embarking on his process of purification. The Angel declares that he shall, in fact, see God for just such a twinkling of an eye, but warns him: "That sight of the Most Fair will gladden thee, but it will pierce thee too."

This soul will now "learn that the flame of Everlasting Love doth burn 'ere it transform." He is now ready to face the Lord in judgment, the sight of whom "will kindle in thy heart all tender, gracious, reverential thoughts."

And what might such thoughts be? Best to allow the poetic genius of Newman to speak directly for, as he knew, cor ad cor loquitur (his cardinalitial motto: "Heart speaks to heart"):

Thou wilt be sick with love, and yearns for Him

And feel as though thou couldst but pity Him,

That one so sweet should e'er have placed Himself

At disadvantage such, as to be used

So vilely by a being so vile as thee.

There is a pleading in His pensive eyes

Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee.

And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself; for, though

Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinn'd,

As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire

To slink away, and hide thee from His sight:

And yet wilt have a longing aye to dwell

Within the beauty of His countenance.

And these two pains, so counter and so keen,

The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not;

The shame of self at thought of seeing Him,

Will be thy veriest, sharpest Purgatory.

As the man proceeds to the divine tribunal, he is astonished to hear earthly voices; once more, he is reminded that he hears the priest and his friends praying the Subvenite ("Come to their aid, ye saints of God") on his behalf, bringing now the same Angel of the Agony who strengthened Christ in His final hours to do the same for t...

By David Warren.

Readers of books, and specifically fantastic books by Charles Williams and other Inklings, are summoned.

I do not like them as much as I should, for I have never been a fan of fantasy literature, and I note that among the Inklings, only J.R.R. Tolkien is a reliable Catholic. But C.S. Lewis is almost a Catholic, and the other two I have read are largely sympathetic. I wouldn't put any of them on the Index.

Williams was the first I discovered. I haven't fully discovered Tolkien even yet, though devoted types have upbraided me. Only Lewis is what I would call the preachy type, to whom I am naturally allergic. In a sense, Owen Barfield is the antidote to Lewis, though as an anthroposophist and translator of Rudolf Steiner, my trust in him is not unqualified. Let me just say that, like Lewis, I very much like him.

Yes, Tolkien. I should have been reading by now, but my aversion to hippies when I was young and impressionable kept me away. Tolkienists may be nice people, but I am not a nice person.

That is perhaps why I was drawn to Charles Williams, who by reputation was not a nice person. C.L. Wrenn (another Inkling), for instance, suggested burning him at the stake for his views, or something equally warm. While none of the Inklings were vegetarian when making arguments, this drew some blood.

It is ALL HALLOWS' EVE today, and I have been rereading the novel thus entitled by Williams. It was his last, and as he died just a few days after Hitler, recent accusations of anti-Semitism against him are not really plausible. The worst you could say is that his Antichrist character is Jewish, but English-speaking intellectuals were not plunged into Holocaust reporting until later in that year, 1945.

The novel opens with the death of a young woman, told from inside. It was the sort of thing that was happening when the book was published. Airplanes were crashing, here, there, and everywhere, making death slightly more common than it is today. And Christians will know that death has supernatural implications.

Williams didn't avoid them. His plot, which develops out of the young woman - Lester Furnival - gradually realizing that she is dead, and then wandering through post-mortal London or the City of God, with her also late companion, Evelyn. Interactions between dead and living are presented from both sides.

All Hallows' Eve, the seventh and concluding novel in Williams' remarkable series, deserved its place as one of Messrs. Faber and Faber's more reprintable books, reissued in America with a preface by T.S. Eliot. It was Eliot who tagged Williams as the author of "spiritual thrillers," a special genre.

For remarkable people like Dante Alighieri and Charles Williams were capable of writing such things. It is easy enough to write a thriller, but making a narrative "co-inhere" with a spiritual plot is difficult, on the scale of impossible. One must rise to classical heights; casual contact just won't do.

But Williams, too, was a shameless "religious nutjob," whose wanderings into, for instance, Jewish mysticism, can be distressing to the modern secular reader, for it suggests the universe is uncomfortably large, and there may be more in it than a remorseless secularism could tolerate.

Indeed, Williams was also quite aware that Jesus Christ was a Jew.

Curiously, it was the reliable J.R.R. Tolkien who delivered the most subtle criticism of Williams' processions into the occult. But Williams goes there to a purpose, and comes back with important news from the supernatural realm. It is that both good and evil are present at large, and will both be encountered when one invades either nature or supernature unprepared.

A good life is, of course, the best preparation, and the Godhead, in the person of Jesus Christ, is the best companion.

Williams was, by nature, a theological writer, whether his genre is theology or not. He can be entertaining, but even this is meant to a theological end.

When he is writing of Dante - and his boo...

By Stephen P. White

In June of 1577, an Englishman by the name of Cuthbert Mayne was taken under arrest by the High Sheriff of Cornwall and imprisoned in Launceston Castle to await trial for high treason. Mayne was born in Devon, in southwest England, and had been a Protestant cleric as a young man. But during his subsequent studies at Oxford, he converted to Catholicism.

Mayne had narrowly escaped arrest once already and, in 1573, he fled England for the north of France. There, he joined the new English College in the town of Douai where he would receive ordination and complete his studies.

The English College at Douai (or Douay, for those who are familiar with the translation of the Bible the college produced) was established in 1568 by William Allen. Originally intended to be a place of study for Catholic exiles from English schools, it soon became a seminary for training priests who, Allen hoped, would lead the reconversion of England and Wales. From the point of view of the crown, the English College was a training ground for traitors and foreign agents intent on overthrowing Queen Elizabeth at the behest of the pope.

Suffice to say, the priests who returned from the English College at Douai to minister in their native lands did not expect a warm welcome from the English authorities. The treatment of Cuthbert Mayne showed clearly just how unwelcome they were. Mayne was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. When he heard his sentence read out, he replied, simply, "Deo gratias." Mayne was the first of the graduates of the English College at Douai to be executed for treason. He would not be the last.

Between November 1577, when Mayne was martyred, and the October 1680 execution of Thomas Thwing, 158 men who studied at Douai were ultimately executed by the English authorities. Most of these were eventually beatified, and 20 were canonized (alongside other Martyrs of England and Wales) in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

Among the Douai men canonized, the best known of them was undoubtedly Edmund Campion, who was martyred at Tyburn, alongside his fellow Jesuit, Alexander Briant, and Ralph Sherwin. Both Briant and Sherwin were among the Douai men canonized by Paul VI, as was Cuthbert Mayne.

St. Cuthbert Mayne, as I've said, was martyred at Launceston in Cornwall. Most of the other Douai martyrs met their grisly fate at the Tyburn tree - as London's infamous gallows was known - near the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Hyde Park was a royal hunting ground in the late sixteenth century, and the condemned prisoners would be paraded there from where they were imprisoned in Newgate or the Tower of London.

As for William Allen, who would eventually be made a Cardinal by Pope Sixtus V, he went on to establish an English College in Rome modeled on the college at Douai. Many of the Douai martyrs, including Campion and Sherwin, also studied at the Venerable English College, as the Roman college is now known.

As for the College at Douai, it survived until 1793 when, like so many other Catholic institutions, it became a casualty of the French Revolution. The college property was confiscated and its students imprisoned for some months before being released to return to England. By that time, mercifully, restrictions on Catholics in England had lessened, and the seminary of Douai was transferred to the newly created St. Edmund's College in Hertfordshire. The college had come home, and English Catholic priests were once again being trained on English soil.

The next half-century saw the passage of the Catholic Relief Acts and the restoration of the English hierarchy by Pope Pius IX. In 1869, Cardinal Manning established a new seminary apart from St. Edmund's. His successor moved the seminary again. And his successor moved the seminary back to St. Edmund's in 1904.

Right around this same time, the very beginning of the 20th century, a young community of nuns, devoted to the Eucharist and particularly to Eucharistic Adoration, wa...

by Daniel B. Gallagher

When I retired after a decade of service at the Holy See, things were not going well. That was in 2016. Truth be told, things were already not going well even under Benedict XVI. The Roman Curia is a bureaucratic mess.

But magisterial messes are even worse, and a massive one occurred four years after my departure.

It wasn't a spontaneous comment made during an impromptu press conference. It wasn't an off-the-cuff, ambiguous statement on a topic like marriage, LGBTQ rights, or capital punishment. It was an entire theological vision. Or lack thereof.

This October marks five years since the biggest bungle of the Francis pontificate. Sadly, it is closely connected to the very name Jorge Bergoglio chose upon his election to the See of Peter. Interpreting Saint Francis, his legacy, and the charism he bequeathed the Church has always been difficult. Fratelli Tutti massively compounded that difficulty.

Most criticisms of Francis's 2020 encyclical focus on a specific item in the laundry list of issues he presents as crucial to our time: racism, immigration, interreligious dialogue, the dignity of women, capital punishment, and others. But I've seen very few critiques of the document's foundational principle.

Even though Francis himself described the encyclical as a hodge-podge of prior homilies, addresses, and catechetical talks, at its core is a highly dubious and risky enterprise: namely, the bracketing of Christ from Christianity in the attempt to enter into dialogue with the world about the meaning of "fraternity and social friendship."

"Although I have written it from the Christian convictions that inspire and sustain me, I have sought to make this reflection an invitation to dialogue among all people of good will," he wrote. (6) It is the "although" that is crucial here. Francis implies that the convictions about fraternity and social friendship that flow from his Christian faith can be communicated to others in a way that doesn't depend on that faith since they can indifferently flow from other faiths or simply from the un-evangelized human condition.

Francis justified his approach by appealing to Saint Francis's engagement with the Sultan of Egypt, Al-Malik al-Kamil, in 1219:

Unconcerned for the hardships and dangers involved, (Saint) Francis went to meet the Sultan with the same attitude that he instilled in his disciples: if they found themselves "among the Saracens and other nonbelievers," without renouncing their own identity they were not to "engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God's sake."

Saint Francis's enjoined the friars to refrain from arguments and disputes not as a way of bracketing Christ's commandment to preach the Good News, but as the very means of fulfilling it. Saint Francis fully intended to convert the Sultan, not to merely share with him a Christian vision of fraternity and social friendship minus Christ.

Without a foundational Christocentric principle, Fratelli Tutti quickly descends into platitudes that are almost laughable:

Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all. (8)

The idea is that Christianity shows or models the kind of community humans are inherently capable of. Yet the early Christians knew well that the koinonia they enjoyed was a gift. It was attributable to divine action, not human achievement. It consisted in the Mystical Body of Christ, not a political paradigm. It motivated the baptized not merely to preach something that Christ preached, but to preach Christ Himself.

This was the foundational principle of John Paul II's first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (1979). The primary focus of Christian disciples should be on the community they have been made a part of through grace, not the co...

By Randall Smith

Something that should more often be understood is that every assertion of a right involves a concomitant obligation on others either to do or refrain from doing something. If I have a right to health care, then someone has an obligation to provide it for me. If I have a right to freedom of speech, then others must not prevent me from speaking.

Now consider the problems that arise in a society whose moral discourse is dominated by competing claims of rights - one in which people love talking about rights but rarely talk about obligations. If every claim of a right involves an obligation on others, and if no one is willing to consider their obligations, only their rights, this is a recipe for social frustration and worse.

I've written before about what is often called "expressive individualism," which is rampant in our current society. Expressive individualists don't recognize unchosen obligations. Rather, on this view, people are bound only to those commitments "freely assumed." Harvard professor Michael Sandel describes this as the "unencumbered self."

So, we all are willing to assert that we have an abundance of rights, but few of us, it seems, consider ourselves obligated to anything other than the things we choose.

But why would I choose to obligate myself to something other than those things that foster my own expressive self-realization? And why would I obligate myself to something permanent, like a marriage, if the possibility exists that at some point in the future, it might not continue to foster my own expressive self-realization? And people wonder why fewer people are getting married and more people are getting divorced!

Perhaps we need to learn a new language.

Consider what might happen if, instead of "rights," we talked about obligations. Whereas rights in our culture tend to be absolute, obligations are always circumscribed.

I have certain obligations as a parent or as a teacher, but they are not open-ended and unlimited. But if I have a right to own a gun or view pornography, then this right "trumps" any social "cost-benefit" analysis.

Someone might say, "But widespread ownership of guns causes x, y, z problems." But that's immaterial if people have a right to own them. A claim of a right outweighs most cost-benefit analyses; that's why people claim them so often. Once you say you have a right, the conversation is supposed to be over.

Some people in the Church also like to speak in terms of rights. They say things like: "People have a right to immigrate." That's not quite true, however. What the Church actually says is that people have a right to emigrate. They have a right to leave their country if they are subjected to tyranny and abuse. Countries shouldn't fence them in and prevent them from leaving, as was done by Communist countries during the Cold War, and still happens today.

The problem with this "right," however, is that there is no concomitant right to immigrate to a particular country. If I travel to France and say to myself, "I quite like it here in Paris; I think I'll stay," the French government is not obligated to allow me to stay. I don't have a right to immigrate there. If they find that I have overstayed my allotted time, they will likely "deport" me - that is to say, they will repatriate me back to my home country.

No one would blame the French for doing this, because I don't have a right to live in France that the French government must obey.

Now, under certain circumstances, countries might be morally obligated to take people in. Indeed, we are called upon to be generous and to help people fleeing danger. But if we spoke in terms of obligations rather than rights, we might then be able to stipulate what obligations we have and what obligations those we have taken in have. We are a constitutional republic. Those who immigrate here have an obligation to uphold that form of government.

The French have a language, culture, and form of government they wish to preserve. If I go...

By Robert Royal.

It's common today to lament the widespread loss of faith in institutions: governments, schools, colleges and universities, courts, medical authorities, religions, and (not least) the Catholic Church. There are many reasons, good and bad, for this loss of faith. In most cases, it's simply the reaction to our institutions failing to do what they're meant to do. Sometimes there are such bizarre breakdowns that you're tempted to give up on such bodies yourself.

The Catholic Church lost a great deal of confidence, of course, over the sexual abuse crisis. However much the Church has been unfairly criticized when other institutions - like public schools - have comparable and even worse records, with little damage to their reputations, the humiliation was a wake-up call. Or would have been, if the whole Church had adopted effective remedies for this all-too-real problem. Yet inexplicably, we have celebrity priests like Marko Rupnik S.J. accused of staggering abuses and blasphemies, yet still active in ministry. As are others.

And on the less scandal-sheet level, consider the recent controversy over Cardinal Parolin's remarks about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. A spokeswoman for Aid to the Church in Need, which issued a report last week on the persecution of Catholics around the world, defended the Cardinal's contention that Nigerian Catholics were often the victims of social - not religious - conflict. She characterized this as an off-the-cuff remark, just intended to acknowledge the complexity of the situation.

Perhaps so, but it's precisely what a person in a high position of responsibility - Parolin is the Vatican's Secretary of State - says almost randomly that's revealing. (A "Freudian slip" if you believe in such.) Part of what gives us confidence, or not, in a person's judgment is getting the proportions of things right in what are always complex situations.

Parolin was correct that there are other causes than religious antagonism for the killing of Christians in Nigeria. In particular, the competition for land between Muslim Fulani cow-herders and Christian farmers. But that's a small part of the problem. (The Vatican's occasional claim that "climate change" explains bad actors also falls into this category.) And it's true that even some "moderate" Muslims are attacked by radical Islamists in Nigeria.

But to draw attention to this side issue when something like 8,000 Christians have been killed, mostly by radical Islamists precisely for their faith, since the beginning of 2025 alone, suggests an almost willful desire not to state the real problem.

The persecution and martyrdom of Nigerian Christians is so bad that the decidedly secular - and woke - Washington Post invited me recently to write a guest opinion piece (here). Don't miss the comments if you need further proof of how many Americans have, of late, gone batsh*t crazy.

I myself wrote about the herdsman/farmer conflicts and the attacks on moderate Muslims in my book The Martyrs of the New Millennium, but more to the point:

According to Open Doors, 4,998 Christians perished in Nigeria in 2023; "there were more people that were killed because of their Christian faith than all other places in the globe combined.". . .from 2019 to 2023, 33,000 Christians of various denominations and several thousand moderate Muslims were killed by Islamic extremists belonging to Boko Haram, Fulani militants (formerly mostly Muslim "herdsmen" involved in land disputes with Christians), and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWP), among others. Over an even longer period (2009-2021), the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety) - a Nigerian watchdog group - has documented 43,000 Christians killed, 18,500 Christians "disappeared," 17,500 churches attacked, 2,000 Christian elementary schools destroyed, and much else.

Those cow-herders do have some unusual ways of getting grazing land.

Aid to the Church in Need's 2025 rep...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

"Thank God I'm not like that Pharisee!" Now, if that's your response to today's Gospel (Luke 18:9-14), then you probably missed the point. Because there's more than a bit of the Pharisee in each of us, and not enough of the tax collector. Our Lord presents the parable as two different men in the Temple of Jerusalem. But it might as well be two different men within each of us. They represent the battle between pride and humility that rages in our souls.

Pride is the inordinate focus on self. We typically associate it with haughtiness, the exaltation of self we see in the Pharisee. But that's only one manifestation of it. What's at the heart of pride is the self-referential thinking that turns a man in on himself (Incurvatus in se) and renders him incapable of opening to God and grace.

So, pride isolates. Notice how the Pharisee is incapable of an authentic conversation with God. His prayer is self-focused and about his own virtues. It's not about God or God's goodness. In fact, it isn't even to God. He speaks the prayer "to himself." That line is a rich description of how spiritually crippling pride is. It traps us in ourselves, prevents us from going out and genuinely speaking with God or anyone else. It also prevents anyone from getting through to us to administer a necessary correction.

The only outward thinking of the proud is to compare themselves to others. The Pharisee finds a foil in the tax collector and thus feels good about himself. Worse, he thinks that he is pleasing to God because he's better than another. In comparison to the lesser man, he can stand tall and proud in his prayer. But in so doing, he constructs his own prison. He's chained himself and his self-worth to being better than the other. This is what we call vainglory. It's a useless satisfaction because it rests not on the truth but on comparison.

And the comparison could have worked out differently. The Pharisee could have encountered someone better, someone who fasts and tithes even more than he does. What then? For a man so self-focused, it would have meant discouragement and despondency. His peace is so caught up with being better than others, that being less would unnerve him.

This, too, is a manifestation of pride, to think that we are displeasing to God because others are better than we are. For it is still an excessive focus on self instead of on God's love for us. It's the same error as the haughty, but with a different result.

The error is comparison. That the Pharisee finds himself better than others is, in a sense, incidental. The real spiritual cancer is the constant comparison he always makes. Remember Uncle Screwtape's counsel: "To be" means to be in competition. The Pharisee finds his worth only in comparison to others, never in light of God's love for him. What matters - what gives him worth - is not God's love but his being better than others. And had it worked out differently, discouragement would have overwhelmed him.

Comparison is the thief of joy. That old line contains a lot of wisdom. The man who finds his worth only by comparison to others will be haughty when he's better than they and discouraged when he's not. Those are simply two sides of the same pride coin. Another variation is to think ourselves failures for not meeting our own self-focused standards instead of receiving the love that God extends and finding our worth in His estimation of us. The proud set the terms for their being loved instead of receiving what God extends. They grasp for what He wants to give.

Pride is slavery. Humility is freedom. "The tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'" To our culture, this must seem tremendously unhealthy. He would be accused of low self-esteem.

In fact, his humility opens the door to a genuine conversation with God. Unlike the Pharisee, he's praying to God not to himself. Prayer is the first f...