The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

For devotees of Cardinal Newman, the coming week was already highly anticipated, with his formal declaration as a Doctor of the Church on the solemn feast of All Saints. Then this week, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV would also name him the co-patron saint of Catholic education, along with St. Thomas Aquinas.

A happy thing, as few have given as much thought to the philosophy of education as St. John Henry, particularly regarding his (ill-fated) project in Dublin to found a Catholic university. Though the combination of Aquinas and Newman - or the combination of Aquinas and anyone? - is formidable, I confess I never think of them as teachers, per se.

Scholars, certainly. And seekers of truth, more students themselves even than teachers of others. Both were creatures of the university - and professors do research and teach, with many accepting the latter as the price of doing the former. It's not unusual for the most accomplished scholars to teach very little, if at all. In the event, both patrons taught more through their writing rather than their lectures or tutorials.

The Aquinas-Newman dyad is a happy one for another reason, in that over many years on campus their prayers were the ones I most recommended to students, fitting for their stage of life. Both wrote prayers and hymns. St. Thomas gave us the hymns for Corpus Christi, and I consider no occasion unsuitable for Praise to the Holiest in the Height (here), Newman's hymn from The Dream of Gerontius.

The prayers I recommended to students were Aquinas' Prayer before Study and Newman's Mission of My Life. Not only young students can profit by praying them.

The Thomistic prayer before study appears here and there in different forms. The estimable Dominican friars of the St. Joseph Province use this version:

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding.

Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.

Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.

Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The version I first learned when I was an undergraduate appears in the Raccolta, and expands the initial salutation:

Infinite Creator, who in the riches of Thy wisdom didst appoint three hierarchies of Angels and didst set them in wondrous order over the highest heavens, and who didst apportion the elements of the world most wisely…

It reminds us why Thomas is the Angelic Doctor, and a reminder too that intelligences have a lofty place in God's providence. I could never remember what the three hierarchies of angels were, but no matter, it was pleasing to think that they were watching over me.

The Raccolta's English translation speaks of "copious eloquence," but the Dominican version above goes with "thoroughness and charm." I prefer the latter, as the world needs more wholesome and holy charm. Students, it seems to me, would learn better from charming teachers, even though neither Aquinas nor Newman are often thought of as charming. Newman, though, does propose in his "definition of a gentleman" a kind of charm as desirable.

Education depends upon good teachers, but the goal of education is to effect some good in the students. Thus, Aquinas and Newman are exemplary models, for their achievements in the life of the mind, the search for truth, effected in them genuine goodness, the witness of holiness.

The Prayer before Study was never as popular as Newman's Mission of My Life, which many memorized. Study, after all, can be hard. A mission is exciting.

Newman's prayer is simply one of the best ever written in English and, while resonant with the...

By Francis X. Maier

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Christopher Lasch's final book. Published just a few months after his death, The Revolt of the Elites (1995) capped a series of five extraordinary works starting with his Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). An accomplished historian, Lasch was also a penetrating social critic. He was never religious and always a man of the old, democratic left. But he saw the world clearly and wrote about it honestly. As a result, he had many Christian admirers. And much of his work aligns, if imperfectly, with Catholic concerns. Reading him today is like paging through the diary of a fiercely astute prophet.

Simply put, Lasch argues that the appearance of modern life masks its real nature. We're swamped with material comforts and choices, but they have no higher meaning. Our personal autonomy is celebrated in marketing hype. Then it's promptly undermined in practice, because an economy organized around consumption needs a steady pool of dependent consumers. The Industrial Revolution created new wealth and eased the hardships of life for many. But it also removed work from the home, centralized it, and collectivized the labor force under "scientific" management.

This, in turn, fed the rise of the social sciences, which - in Lasch's view - presume the inability of most people to understand and manage their own lives, and who thus need guidance from a phalanx of expert "helping professions." As he relentlessly documents, the early leaders of American social science viewed religion as a form of mystification and the traditional family as "the last stand of amateurs"; a breeding ground for authoritarianism, neuroses, and social disorders needing therapeutic intervention from properly educated specialists.

That attitude subtly endures and infects the wider culture. It bleeds over into our politics.

The American Founders presumed a citizenry of reasonably intelligent and productive adults; in other words, people capable of self-governance, engaging the community while managing their own affairs.

Today, the nation is a very different creature. As early as 1962, John F. Kennedy claimed that "most of the problems, or at least many of them that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems. . .they deal with questions which are beyond the comprehension of most men." [emphasis added] Let that sink in. For Lasch, who quoted that line in his work, Kennedy simply - and inadvertently - expressed the spirit of America's increasingly elitist leadership class, a class too often suspicious of the very people it claims to represent.

Since Lasch's death, the nation's "technical" and administrative problems have only increased. So has the thicket of complex professional bureaucracies meant to handle them. So has the army of therapists dealing with the inevitable social and psychic costs. And so has the gulf between America's expert class and the mass of citizens they manage. For Lasch, this pattern of governance creates new forms of character weakness and illiteracy in everyday life:

People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of their country's history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights. The conversion of popular traditions of self-reliance into esoteric knowledge administered by experts encourages a belief that ordinary competence in almost any field, even the art of self-government, lies beyond the reach of the layman.

For the individual, the result is a cocktail of anxieties, appetites, resentments, and a sense of being manipulated. A leader like Donald Trump is almost unavoidable, the product of populist blowback.

Ironically, as Lasch writes in The Minimal Self (1984):

A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism. . .not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it...

By Michael Pakaluk

Pope Leo XIV took his name to signal his closeness to Leo XIII, and yet in his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, his statements sometimes seem at odds with his predecessor: on the root of social evils, the remediation of poverty, and private property.

For Leo XIV, the root of social ills is inequality. Reaffirming Francis, he says: "I can only state once more that inequality 'is the root of social ills.'" (n. 94) But for Leo XIII, in his first encyclical, "On the Evils of Society" (Inscrutabili Dei consilio), the root of social ills is rather the rejection of Christianity by civil powers: "the source of [social] evils lies chiefly, We are convinced, in this, that the holy and venerable authority of the Church, which in God's name rules mankind, upholding and defending all lawful authority, has been despised and set aside." (n. 3)

The difference is not small, because if Christianity is not necessary, then, to eliminate social evils, it would suffice for civil powers to eradicate "structures of sin," that is, structures of inequality. But if Christianity is necessary, then clearly the most important policy for a civil power would be for it to encourage, or at least provide the good conditions for, Christian belief and practice (for example, in making it easy, not difficult, for parents to send their children to religious schools).

In Rerum novarum, Leo XIII taught that the quest for equality is an unreal dream of socialism: "the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition." (n. 17)

If one were to say, in response, that the inequality meant by Leo XIV, following Francis, is not that of outcome and possessions, but of standing before the law and of respect for human dignity, then the nature of "poverty" changes radically, and immediately the poorest members of our societies are the unborn, because it is they whose equal human dignity is most pervasively denied, around the world. It would follow that the Church's "preferential option for the poor" must take the form of making the pro-life cause pre-eminent.

As regards the remediation of poverty, remember that Leo XIII was well-briefed on contemporary economic science through his assistant, Fr. Matteo Liberatore, S.J.

The work of Adam Smith begins exactly with the observation that some countries are working their way out of poverty, and others are not, and what explains the difference?

Economics classes today will often begin with a presentation of the "hockey stick" graph of astounding economic growth worldwide in the last 300 years and pose the question, what explains it? The answer, accepted by both Fr. Liberatore and Pope Leo, is upholding of the right to private property by the civil power, and its recognition that individuals in their economic activity, and families, are prior to the State - that is to say, a free market and free society. The State has a role to correct abuses such as oppressively long work hours, but, in general, a sound administration of the State should be sufficient. (nn. 32-33)

But Leo XIV's position seems to deny the importance of that hockey stick graph: "The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities,"(n. 13) Poverty must be defined, he insists, not absolutely, but relative to the standard of living of a particular nation.

But if market processes for wealth creation have not diminished poverty (in that understanding), it follows that any confidence that they could continue to do so, in the future, must be the product of sheer "ideologies." And these are described in a straw-man fashion, so that they correspond to no position held by a...

By Auguste Meyrat

Of all the arts, poetry is the most inherently religious. Although it is often defined by the use of figurative language, rhythm, and sound devices, what really separates poetry from prose is its subject matter, which transcends the literal and soars into the metaphysical. The techniques of poetry are secondary causes that serve the primary cause of exploring the deep nature of things.

Of course, in a post-Christian, postmodern, and increasingly post-literate culture, few people appreciate poetry, let alone read it. It isn't useful, and it pertains to immaterial reality. Even the designated apologists for poetry (i.e., English teachers like me) do a poor job of communicating the power and beauty of poetry, choosing instead to focus their efforts on more marketable verbal skills such as conducting product research and writing business emails.

Sad to say, this leaves people today, particularly people of faith, spiritually impoverished. Condemned to a prosaic understanding of the world, everything is consequently disenchanted, even religious devotion. Holy Scripture becomes inscrutable, the presence of God turns into absence, the sacred mysteries degenerate into irrational superstitions, and the devout life flattens into a mindless, if comforting, routine.

Sensing this problem, Catholic poet and former nurse Sally Read put together a delightful poetry collection 100 Great Catholic Poems. As she notes in her introduction, "No other literary genre is so concerned with truth - not only in the sense of writing about true things. . . but in the scalpel-precise rendering of things that humans cannot otherwise articulate." Though poetry offers a means for knowing God and His Creation more intimately, Catholics rarely consult their own poetic tradition and likely wouldn't even know where to start.

Thus, Sally Read went to the trouble of compiling some of the most excellent verses on the Catholic faith in one book. Beyond representing a brilliant range of experiences, reflections, and emotions that constitute the vast panorama of Catholicism, each poem stands on its own merits, prompting the kind of intense reading and thinking that one associates with prayer or contemplation.

Read takes care to narrow her definition of poetry to preclude the vast compendiums of prayers and hymns as well as poetic exclamations of faith. Although some of the first entries in her list by saints of the Early Church seem to violate this definition, they contain enough elements to be read as poems. In addition to including Our Lady's famous words in the "Magnificat," this sufficiently flexible definition allows Read to feature works from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Clement of Alexandria.

While some of the names in the collection will be familiar to readers acquainted with the Western literary canon, the anthology's greatest virtue is the much-needed attention it gives to lesser-known figures, particularly those from early medieval Europe.

Despite the innumerable hardships of that time, or perhaps because of them, Irish Catholic monks wrote evocative and poignant accounts of the True Cross ("The Dream of the Rood"), romantic love ("Donal Og"), longings for home ("Columcille Fecit"), or their pet cat ("Pangur Ban").

The sheer diversity of expression is the other great virtue of this anthology, showcasing the very catholicity of Catholicism. No matter the age, the person, or the surrounding context of a particular poem, Christ's face appears.

Sometimes He is a hunter seeking His beloved as in St. Teresa of Ávila's "About Those Words, "My Beloved Is Mine," or a bird as in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "As Kingfisher Catch Fire." Or there's this in "Still Falls the Rain" by Edith Sitwell:

Still falls the Rain

At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.

Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us

On Dives and on Lazarus:

Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

The sacraments are a...

By Luis E. Lugo.

The announcement of the appointment of Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury marks a historic first for the Church of England (CoE), which traces its origins back more than 1,400 years to the time of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. In addition to being the head of the CoE, the Archbishop of Canterbury also serves as the spiritual leader of the world-wide Anglican Communion, whose thriving churches of the Global South have become increasingly alienated from the mother church due to the latter's long-term drift toward theological liberalism. This appointment will surely widen that breach.

Already in the 1940s proposals were circulating in the CoE in support of the ordination of women priests. Those early efforts provided the impetus for a 1948 essay by the well-known Anglican writer, C.S. Lewis. The arguments he lays out in "Priestesses in the Church?" are worth revisiting and seem as relevant today as when he first penned them - and for Catholics as well as Anglicans.

As Lewis makes clear at the outset, his opposition to women's ordination is not based on the claim that women are any less capable than men with respect to the many qualifications associated with priestly ministry: "No one among those who dislike the proposal [for the ordination of women priests] is maintaining that women are less capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office. . . .[Women] may be as 'God-like' as a man, and a given woman much more so than a given man."

Lewis further asserts that the Church's historical opposition to the practice of female ordination could not possibly have been rooted in a contempt for women's religious capacities. And that, for one simple reason. As he writes, "the Middle Ages carried their reverence for one Woman to a point at which the charge could be plausibly made that the Blessed Virgin became in their eyes almost 'a fourth Person of the Trinity." Despite this, Lewis continues, never "in all those ages was anything resembling a sacerdotal office attributed to her."

Lewis lays out four arguments for his opposition. The first concerns the nature of the priestly office. In the more traditional understanding, the priest is seen primarily as a representative; in fact, he is a "double representative, who represents us to God and God to us." The latter function, in which the priest represents God to us, is something that only a man can perform: "Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to him."

His second argument revolves around the authority of the Church. The practice of only ordaining men to the priesthood is something the Church has done as the bearer of divine revelation, as the guardian of the depositum fidei. If this claim for the Church's authority is false, Lewis contends, "then we want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests." For then the Church would have no authority to ordain anyone.

Lewis' third argument centers on the fact that the Church's imagery and language reflect the proper order of things. The Church affirms, for example, that in the Eucharistic celebration the priest stands in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. But the second person of the Trinity is called the Son, not the Daughter. And the mystical marriage is between Christ the Bridegroom and the Church as his Bride; a reversal of these roles is simply unthinkable. Moreover, in the Lord's Prayer, we address ourselves to "Our Father," not to "Our Mother."

For Lewis, this language carries great weight. Turning the male language into a feminine gender (or, by extension, into some gender-neutral variation) does violence to our understanding of God. Goddesses were worshipped in other religions, but not in Christianity, he points out. So, to feminize the godhead (or to neuter it) is to embark on a different religion. God Himself, L...

By Brad Miner.

There's a show, To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum, at the Frick Collection in Manhattan (the entrance is just off 5th Avenue at E. 70th St.). It will run until January 5, 2026, and is well worth seeing.

If you've not been to the newly renovated Frick, it's a treat, although beautiful as the space is, it lacks the elegant charm of the original, which remained very much like the home of the man who built it.

Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) was a robber baron. At 21, he founded the Frick Coke Company, using what's called a beehive oven to turn coal into coke, which the company then sold to steelworks. In a decade, having bought out his partners and having received a loan from his friend Andrew Mellon, he launched H.C. Frick & Company. The next year, he formed a partnership with Andrew Carnegie. After some bitterness, that would lead to lawsuits and settlements.

To have a place to relax and fish, Frick and some other rich men bought Lake Conemaugh, a reservoir that was supported by the earthenwork South Fork Dam just above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They lowered the level of the dam by 3 feet for better transit in and out of the area. On Friday, May 31, 1889, a torrential rainstorm caused the dam to overflow and collapse, sending nearly 4 billion gallons of water flooding into Johnstown and killing more than 2200 people. Frick was never sued, but he did donate "thousands of dollars" to help with Johnstown's recovery.

As one poet put it at the time, "All the horrors that hell could wish, / Such was the price that was paid for - fish!"

Needless to say, all these years later, the Frick Collection is free of any taint of Mr. Frick's union- or dam-busting activities. And although I'm unsure how much credit he deserves for his art acquisitions - for which he employed the advisory services of notable art experts - the man did know what he liked. He would have agreed with Oscar Wilde: "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

Before turning to the Holy Sepulcher exhibit, I must mention that, for me, the Frick's highlight is the counterpointing of Hans Holbein the Younger's portraits of Sir Thomas More (1527) and Thomas Cromwell (c. 1532-33) on either side of the fireplace in the Living Hall. And over the fireplace is El Greco's St. Jerome (1590-1600). And, my goodness, the Frick has three Vermeers!

To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum is a small exhibit with a big impact. As with all great stories of art and archaeology, there is mystery, as well as history, involved.

The gist is this: After the Crusades, Franciscans came to the Holy Land, and one group of them took charge of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Obviously, it's a long and complicated history - from the Resurrection to St. Helena's building of a church at the site - but the Franciscans founded the Custodia Terræ Sanctæ. Indeed, it was begun by Saint Francis himself in 1217. That custodia (custodian) is now shared by Catholic and Orthodox communities.

But as Alvar González-Palacios writes in the Frick exhibition catalog, much of what is held in custody by Franciscans and others was, until recently, unavailable to the public. His story of gaining entrance to Jerusalem's St. Savior Monastery and its treasures 45 years ago, while not exactly Indiana Jones-worthy, reveals why it was important to launch the coordinated Terra Sancta Museum project.

As the Frick explains about the current show:

This groundbreaking exhibition presents more than forty rare objects from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Largely unknown to the public until their recent rediscovery, the opulent works range from liturgical objects in gem-encrusted gold and silver to richly decorated vestments in velvet, damask, and other luxurious materials. These treasures were donated by European Catholic monarchs and Holy Roman Emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the church in Jerusalem, the religious center ...

Prayer, an elusive conversation with God, confuses many as St. Paul tells us, "For we do not know how to pray as we ought." (Romans 8:26) The Spirit, Who prays in us "with sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8:26), searches our hearts, revealing our innermost secrets, fears, dreams, and desires. This inner revelation worries our conscience, for the depth of our sin becomes a reality.

But so, too, the depth of the Father's love, revealed to us through Jesus and the Spirit, frightens our souls, for we experience the power and presence of His purity, purifying our weakened hearts. Divine Love is totally beyond comprehension, as St. Paul explains, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him." (1 Corinthians 2:9)

This intimidates our hearts. We cannot fathom the breadth, height, and depth of Divine Love wanting to engage in our lives. Yet this is what prayer is. It is not so much our conversing with God, as much as it is God speaking directly to us, as He did with Moses, face to face.

Such intimacy upsets our stability. Feeling unworthy because of our sinfulness, we hide from Divine Love as Adam and Eve did, ashamed, because our sinfulness dehumanizes us. Unworthy, we hide rather than engage. We flee rather than convert. We freeze, feeling exposed not trusting God, for we do not trust ourselves.

Prayer exposes our innermost self not only to our conscience, but to our Father, making us feel uncomfortably self-conscious. Yet, the Father speaks to us heart to heart, not to intimidate, but to affirm. Affirmation is the purpose of prayer, affirming how beloved we are to the Father.

In his Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte, St. John Paul reflects on our encounter with God's transcendence: "Prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit's touch, resting filially within the Father's heart." (32)

Through prayer, the Father speaks, revealing us as His children. He gives us His identity, and we become one with Him, partaking in His life. In prayer, He reveals His Son, Who came to find us, feed us, and save us from our self-doubting reservations. We are no longer lost and forsaken, but found radiating Divine Love.

During prayer, the Father reveals His affirming love, teaching us not only what it means to be a son or daughter, but more importantly, how to be one. He, through the Son and Spirit, infuses Himself into our very being. This grace, God's gift of Himself transforming our lives, converts us from living solely for created wealth to seek the source of these earthly treasures, the Father Himself. Filled with grace, we, as Mary did, radiate Christ glorified.

The Holy Spirit opens His treasure for us, unveiling our beauty and goodness if we avail ourselves of His grace. Opening ourselves to the Spirit reveals "the power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing" (Revelation 5:12) of Christ dwelling in us, if we follow Him.

St. Paul teaches this: "According to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." (Ephesians 3:16-17).

Wisdom discovers the richness of His glory. Wisdom, the lamp that enlightens our intellects, touches our souls, making us rich in grace: God's life and love. This richness comprehends the thoughts of God and receives graciously all the gifts of the Spirit so we may interpret Divine Truths correctly, for we "possess the Spirit." (I Corinthians 2:13)

Possessing the Spirit through prayer, "makes us an everlasting gift" (Eucharistic Prayer III) back to the Father.

Through prayer, the Holy Spirit breathes divine life into our hearts. Our heart, an abyss longing for divine life, participates in God's redeeming love when it is docile to the Spirit. Docility, the ability to receive gifts and divine truths, give...

By Stephen P. White

The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America (where I serve as executive director) has just published the results of a new major survey of American priests. The study builds on our past research (here and here), giving a clearer picture of the American presbyterate as it currently stands and hinting at what the future might hold for the Church in the United States.

This new survey provided an opportunity for a follow-up to the 2022 National Study of Catholic Priests, examining the well-being of our priests, their levels of burnout, confidence in their bishops or religious superiors, and the like. Since every participant in this 2025 study also participated in the 2022 study, we are able to track any changes longitudinally.

Our previous studies showed that our priests were, by and large, flourishing. Happily, our new data confirms that American priests are flourishing at levels well above the average for the general population.

This result is neither controversial nor surprising, but it should not be overlooked. Men who enter the priesthood tend to flourish. It's not all wine and roses, of course (more on that in a minute). But whatever concerns priests have, whatever challenges they face, should be understood against this backdrop: on the whole, American priests are thriving.

That said, there are points of real concern. Many priests (44 percent of diocesan priests, 31 percent of religious priests) show signs of burnout. And 45 percent of younger priests (those ordained since 2000) say they are expected to do too many things that go beyond their calling as a priest. The same percentage of that cohort shows elevated indicators of loneliness. Older cohorts of priests are doing significantly better by both measures.

Diocesan priests' confidence in the leadership of their bishops remains low (52 percent), but has risen slightly (up from 49 percent) since our 2022 study. Confidence in the U.S. bishops generally shows a similar trend, rising from 22 percent in 2022 to 27 percent in 2025.

Our previous study showed that a priest's perceived alignment with his bishop on political and theological matters correlated with the degree of confidence that the priest had in his bishop's leadership. As our report shows:

A far greater predictor of a priest's confidence in his bishop is whether the priest agrees with the statement, "I feel that my bishop cares about me." 72 percent of diocesan priests who said that their bishops care about them express confidence in their bishop, whereas among priests who did not say that their bishop cares about them, only 10 percent express confidence in their bishop.

This new finding is perhaps unsurprising, but it strongly underscores the highly personal nature of the relationships between bishops and their priests.

A second broad objective of this study was to get a clearer sense of the actual pastoral priorities of American priests. What do our priests see as the greatest pastoral challenges facing the Church in the United States?

This included a chance to drill down a bit on what our priests think about the Synod on Synodality, to what degree their parishes participated in the Synod, and how it changed, if at all, their ministry.

American priests were not very enthusiastic about the Synod on Synodality. Only 39 percent thought the Synod was not a waste of time (37 percent positively agreed that it was a waste of time); only 28 percent felt they were fully included in the Synod, and only 25 percent agreed that the Synod had been helpful for their ministry. So much for that.

But when it comes to synodality in practice, American priests are already engaged in many of the "synodal practices" recommended by the Synod, even if priests don't connect those activities with "synodality" or the Synod itself.

So, for example, 85 percent of priests with parish assignments reported that their parish has a pastoral council or similar body that plays an important role in decision-makin...

By Joseph R. Wood.

In His discourse at the Last Supper, Christ teaches the Apostles about three related themes: knowing and seeing God, loving God, and being one with God. He holds out these three as different aspects of a single phenomenon.

Christ tells the group, "Where I go you know, and the way you know." Thomas insists they don't know where Christ is going. Christ assures him, "If you had known me, you would have known my Father. And henceforth you do know him, and you have seen him."

Seeing and knowing are linked. What it is to know, the field of epistemology, is one of the most vexing areas of philosophical investigation.

When Philip still asks to be shown the Father - to see Him - Christ explains that He is in the Father, and the Father is in Him. To see Christ is to be shown the Father. See the Father and me as one, Christ seems to exhort them. And if Philip's faith can't fully grasp that identity, he can at least see the visible works Christ has performed.

In the dialogue Statesman, Plato seems to offer a choice similar to what Christ gave Philip. The wise "visitor" to Athens explains that "it is not painting or any other sort of manual craft, but speech and discourse, that constitute the more fitting medium for exhibiting all living things, for those who are able to follow; for the rest, it will be through manual crafts."

If we can't understand things with our speculative or theoretical intellect, we can get some understanding through concrete things made with our hands: Plato's equivalent of "if you can't understand with your mind, understand through works."

And this isn't a mutually exclusive choice. Consider the Benedictine precept of "ora et labora," or "pray and work." Mental acts (including monastic study) and manual acts provide a way of contemplative life, to encounter the greatest truth.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates describes our knowledge of reality as like a line divided into four parts: "imagination" that takes in sensory images; "belief" about what the objects whose images we detect really are; "thought" that works with mental concepts such as geometric shapes that we draw from images of objects; and finally "understanding" that seeks to grasp the highest realities, the forms or divine intellectual ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness that transcend the time-matter world.

Images and physical objects lie in the domain of the visible, the things that we can sense. The "objects" of mental concepts and the forms are in the intelligible domain that we know through reasoned speech.

The intelligible domain on this divided line, says Socrates, is actually the larger part of reality, of what is - larger than the reality we see and sense.

Taken together, Socrates and Plato in these cases are telling us that what we know with our intellect is greater than what we can sense. They draw the link between seeing and knowing. For all of us, knowledge begins in the senses. For some of us, our knowledge will be drawn mainly from those senses. For others (philosophers), the higher intelligible truths will be accessible through the speculative intellect.

Christ, though, will give the Apostles faith in Him and His Father as the key to the highest truths. Plato wasn't far off - he didn't have Judeo-Christian revelation to work with. Jesus adjusts Plato's approach to make the highest truths available to everyone, and he completes the idea that the full truth is much bigger than the visible world, the works and objects that we see around us.

So the problem of seeing and knowing the greatest good has been around for a long time, before the light of Christ brought us a way to understand it more deeply. What about being one with God?

Aristotle saw "being one" as a problem of knowing. In his De Anima (On the Soul), he studies the question of how the rational human soul knows something. He claims that "actual knowledge is identical with its object." And he calls the soul the "place of forms."

His meaning is not entirely clear, ...

By John M. Grondelski

Pope Leo XIV has joined the chorus of those lamenting the implosion of global fertility levels. Speaking after a visit with the President of Italy, the Pope urged action to implosion of fertility and the collapse of childbearing. Encouragingly, he specifically extolled gendered names for family members: "'Father,' 'mother,' 'son,' 'daughter,' 'grandfather,' 'grandmother'. . .[t]hese are words that in Italian tradition naturally express and evoke sentiments of love, respect, and dedication - sometimes heroic - for the good of the family, community, and therefore for that of society as a whole." They also express what is necessary to - and the result of - childbearing, something "parent one" and "parent two," as several countries now designate mothers and fathers, do not.

Remedies for this state of affairs often focus on social reforms: parental leave, subsidies and tax breaks for families, childcare, and so on. There are indeed elements in our socio-economic structures that militate against families. It's good that the pope noted them. But methinks his focus might be somewhere else.

As his predecessor, St. John Paul II (elected forty-seven years ago today), observed, culture lies upstream from both politics and economics. And our "blessed barrenness" is a cultural problem - both in the larger society and within the Catholic Church. As he said in Love and Responsibility:

Neither in the man nor in the woman can affirmation of the value of the person be divorced from awareness and willing acceptance that he may become a father and she may become a mother. . . .If the possibility of parenthood is deliberately excluded from marital relations, the character of the relationship between the partners automatically changes. The change is away from unification in love and in the direction of mutual, or rather, bilateral "enjoyment.

Human societies have always recognized that marriage and parenthood, though distinct, normally go together. In other words, in the ordinary run of things - absent disease, advanced age, or other impediments - spouses eventually become parents. This is not some esoteric Catholic doctrine but a natural law reality that human societies have long acknowledged. It's why procreation was understood to be normally connected to marriage - at least until the novel oxymoron of "same-sex marriage" appeared.

This natural law fact, however, is elevated to a more significant level by Catholic theological teaching. Vatican II taught: "Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents." (Gaudium et Spes, 50) The Council also affirmed that spousal cooperation with the Lord through parenthood is part of God's work of Creation and Salvation. That's why the nuptial blessing in the sacrament of matrimony includes an invocation that age-appropriate spouses may "be blessed with children, and prove themselves virtuous parents, who live to see their children's children."

Now: When's the last time you heard a priest - or even a bishop - talk about those things?

Our secular society has broken the nexus between marriage and parenthood, treating the latter not so much as a "choice" as what former Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit calls a "parental project" - an optional element of two people's identity package, tailored to their desires and achieved by whatever means they deem fit.

The general social tolerance of out-of-wedlock childbearing, surrogacy, homosexual "adoption," and similar arrangements attests to a broader cultural acceptance of the idea that children are not necessarily connected with marriage, much less that a child has a right to be conceived, born, and raised within a permanent marriage.

If you doubt that, consider whether asserting a child's right to live in a marital environment would jar modern ears.

That more general cultural disconnection is now often mirrored within the Church. Catholics immersed in this dominant anti-culture - b...