The Catholic Thing

By David G Bonagura, Jr.

Christianity is a religion of paradoxes. One is the strange relationship between the natural world that we see and the supernatural world that we do not. The latter is where God resides and is our ultimate home. At the same time, it is ever-present to us: it sustains and penetrates the natural order while enveloping us in multiple ways.

God is present in us through sacramental grace and before us in the Eucharist. He is also present in a different way in other people whom we encounter, an astonishing fact Jesus taught plainly: charitable acts transcend both worlds. "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:41)

Serving others is as essential to Christian practice as Sunday worship, prayer, and keeping the commandments, and ways to serve are abundant. Rightfully, Catholic schools and religious education programs compel their students to perform charitable works in the hope that they will learn to cultivate a habit of serving.

In Book X of The City of God, St. Augustine reminds us of another form of service. "If a man loves himself, his one wish is to achieve blessedness, which is to be near God. Thus, if a man knows how to love himself, the commandment to love his neighbor bids him to do all he can to bring his neighbor to love God. This is the worship of God; this is true religion; this is the right kind of devotion; this is the service which is owed to God alone."

If the greatest act of charity is to give God to another person, why don't we regularly encourage this form of giving? Perhaps because it is easier to give money or material things. Perhaps because our view of service suffers from a false dichotomy imagined between worship and charity. Perhaps because deep down we don't believe that God is the ultimate good for our lives.

This is not to say that we should cease material giving, which is necessary for all Catholics. Charity, like all things, is best understood in context. Catholic material charity in any form is not designed to be given alone; it is given along with the Gospel.

Franciscans, for example, do not give food to the poor and then send them away. They sit with recipients and befriend them with the intention of inviting them to know God. Material charity serves as the channel to God, who is charity - that is, love itself.

Hence, as an aside, attacks by states and the federal government against the Little Sisters of the Poor and other Catholic charity groups, on the grounds that the organizations perform social work, not religious work, strike at the essence of Catholicism itself. These government orders, therefore, are unlawful intrusions into the free exercise of religion.

Closer to home, how can we give the supreme gift of charity - God - to others, short of teaching the faith directly?

First, and perhaps greatest of all, we can bring someone to Mass who would not or could not go otherwise. This someone could be a fallen-away Catholic or an elderly person who needs help getting to church. The fallen away person requires courage to issue the invitation; the elderly person requires a significant sacrifice of time to get the person in and out of our car and then the church. "You received without pay, give without pay." (Matthew 10:8)

Second, we can bring to Mass those who can no longer get there. That is, we can have a Mass offered for the repose of a deceased loved one or friend. Better still would be to attend this Mass and offer our prayers for the deceased, as the one sacrifice of Christ is offered on the altar. In fact, I would recommend this practice for all candidates seeking Confirmation: arrange for two Masses for deceased loved ones, pay the offering from your own pocket, and then attend each Mass. In this act, you anticipate the grace you will receive at Confirmation: the strength to bear witness to the faith and bring it to others.

Third, and not far from the first two, we can invite - or prod, as the ca...

By Randall Smith.

In the 2005 movie Cinderella Man, based on the life of boxer James J. Braddock, there is a touching scene in which Braddock, having had to take government assistance for a time to support his family, shows up at the public assistance office to give that money back. It was there when he needed it, so now he wants to give it back so it will be there for someone else. It is something nearly impossible to imagine today. Giving money back - so that it's there for others?

At his 1961 inaugural address, John F. Kennedy famously declared: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." It would be unthinkable now, if not considered "fascist."

In Plato's dialogue, the Crito, Socrates's friend Crito tells him that, although he has been condemned to death, government officials will look the other way if his friends bribe the jailers and sneak him into exile in another country. Socrates refuses, telling his friend that, since he was born in Athens, educated in Athens, and has benefited from Athenian law and culture, he owes his existence to Athens and cannot abandon her, even if it means his death.

Consider now the common attitude of the modern college student. The military strength of their country has given them years of peace; its economic strength has made them members of the richest country in history; and that country has spent literally millions of dollars on their education, from free public schools to scholarships and low-cost loans to attend some of the finest colleges and universities in the world. How many live with the conviction that they now owe something - anything - to their country, their community, or their parents? It's not so much that they're opposed; the thought has never occurred to them.

The bulk of today's young people don't go to colleges and universities because they want to develop skills to be of service to their families, to their neighbors, to their city, state, and country. Nor are they recruited that way. They are lured to college to "get ahead," to "be successful," to become "their bold selves," to "be all they can be," to be "the leaders of tomorrow."

Would any contemporary college or university advertise itself as: "Training the servants of tomorrow"? It would be nice if a Christian college or university said something like: "We train our students to serve others, because Christ did." But I fear it would be less popular than, "Come, get yourself on CEO Street!"

This sort of marketing is thought necessary in a culture of expressive individualism. "Expressive individualism," writes author Carter Snead, "takes the individual, atomized self to be the fundamental unit of human reality. This self is not defined by its attachments or network of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment.

No object of choice - whether property, a particular vocation, or even the creation of a family - is definitive and constitutive of the self. In Michael Sandel's words, it is an 'unencumbered self.'" Expressive individualism "does not recognize unchosen obligations. The self is bound only to those commitments freely assumed. And the expressive individual self only accepts commitments that facilitate the overarching goal of pursuing its own, original, unique, and freely chosen quest for meaning."

One sometimes hears the claim, "I'm spiritual but not religious." What this often means is that I don't want to be obligated to anything I haven't chosen. Can one be religious and not patriotic? That's possible, I suppose, if being "patriotic" meant "my country, right or wrong." But not if "being Catholic" means "I owe nothing to my country."

There is nothing in Church teaching that would support such a view. Rather, as St. Augustine understood, although Christians are a "pilgrim people," they will often be - and are called to be - the best citizens, because they are not, like so many...

By Robert Royal

Today is Columbus Day, or (among the alternatively oriented) Native Peoples' Day, both displaced in any case, as even major Catholic feasts now are, to a different date, so that people will have long weekends, or not be inconvenienced, or something. In any event, it's a day now redefined in terms that make it unclear what, if anything, we are celebrating, or deploring, in this booming, buzzing confusion that we still (kind of) think of as the twenty-first Christian century.

So let us seek a little clarity.

For most of subsequent history following his voyages, Columbus' reputation was strong and settled. It began to change, in the nineteenth century, in the United States, of all places. Washington Irving got the idea that Columbus must have been a Protestant and a Progressive - he opposed the council of learned theologians, you see, who told him (rightly) that the distance from Spain to China was greater than he was saying. But in an expanding and confident America, El Almirante became, in Irving's imagination, the precursor of American initiative and vision.

Medieval Europe, another Columbus myth notwithstanding, knew the world was a ball (see Dante), not flat - what the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell rightly mocked as "the pizza theory." Columbus didn't "prove the earth was round" and no one thought so until ignorance of pre-modern times became widespread.

The 19th-century American progressives, however, had still other plans for the Genoese Catholic sailor. Andrew Dickson White, a founder and president of Cornell University, enlisted him in the Darwinian cause - for reasons similar to Irving's, as a maverick who broke with religious obscurantism to "follow the science."

Other appropriations and mis-appropriations followed.

The Knights of Columbus, mostly Irish, around the same time, saw the explorer as a model Catholic American. And the growing number of Italian immigrants - well, just look at Columbus Circle in Central Park.

In recent decades, of course, all that has become the case for the prosecution. A significant swath of American elites has chosen to repudiate its own history, ironically based on cherry-picked Christian principles that Columbus helped bring to the Americas.

He's now also often charged with bringing all the evils that have allegedly plagued the Americas since 1492 - slavery, genocide, racism, inequality, patriarchy, rape, torture, war, environmental degradation, disease, etc.

Contrary voices have asked (e.g., the present writer): if we're going to attribute all these evils to that man, doesn't he also deserve credit for the many good things that have also followed on these shores?

Besides, he didn't have to bring those bad things here because they already existed among the various native peoples also being "remembered" today. Few ever really look at native cultures and practices, which also included colonialism, imperialism, territorial conquest, a warrior ethos, human sacrifice, and - dare one say to our LGBT-ified elites - overwhelmingly, binary views of human sexuality.

Prior to the Great Columbus Reversal, in 1892, Pope Leo XIII praised Columbus in Quarto abeunte saeculo: "For the exploit is in itself the highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man; and he who achieved it, for the greatness of mind and heart, can be compared to but few in the history of humanity." Leo added: he brought Christianity to "a mighty multitude, cloaked in miserable darkness, given over to evil rites, and the superstitious worship of vain gods."

Amidst all these vagaries, the man himself has largely been lost. The Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, the well-known - almost fanatical - "defender of the Indians," noted the "sweetness and benignity" of the admiral's character. And even while criticizing some things that he did, remarks, "Truly I would not dare blame the admiral's intentions, for I knew him well and I know his intentions were good." Las Casas attributed C...

By Anthony Esolen

Pope Leo issued an encyclical on poverty this week. Perhaps he should recommend it in part as a cure for our ills. "Blessed are the poor," says Jesus, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

The only time I met the saintly Father Benedict Groeschel, he was too frail to walk on his own. He was one of several of us giving lectures to a Catholic group in Boston, in Faneuil Hall itself, if I remember right - in the belly of the secular beast. "If you want to die a happy death," he said, "be near the poor." He had lived among the poor all his life, so I trust he knew what he was talking about. That it is true, I can well believe. Why it is true is the question.

I've worked hard all my life so that my wife and my children, one of whom will never be able to live on his own, will be provided for when I die. I don't spend money on myself. Even with this deliberate holding of material goods at arm's length, I worry sometimes that I'm missing the good that Jesus holds out for us by poverty.

It's why, when I pray the Beatitudes, I don't say, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," because for me that would offer an evasion. Nor do I think only that the poor will be blessed by compensation, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. For Jesus was an exemplar of poverty here and now.

The sparrows had their nests and the foxes their dens, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. He went into the desert to pray, without food, without drink. On the Cross, He was stripped to the skin, and all His Apostles except for the young John abandoned Him.

If I think of the Aramaic in which Jesus addressed the crowds, the identification of poverty with blessedness seems the more immediate and powerful: Blessed the-poor / [for] to-them the-kingdom [of] Heaven. It is a line of Semitic poetry.

We may suppose that the kingdom of Heaven will be given to them as a consequence of their poverty, but we may also say that poverty is a condition of their receiving the kingdom of Heaven, not by the arbitrary will of God, but by the nature of the two terms.

To be poor as Jesus was poor is to welcome the kingdom of God. If we know what poverty and the kingdom of God are, we know they are inseparable.

I do not wish to be misunderstood, though I feel I am groping toward a truth only dimly perceived. We would go wrong, I think, to view this poverty as strictly material, since the materially poor can be as grasping and as hardhearted as any Scrooge.

We would also go wrong to spiritualize it completely, so that people can rest content with their full granaries, and look forward to an easy old age, assured by God that they are good, or good enough to get by.

Nor can it be half of one and half of the other. Somehow we must cultivate a noble and free disparagement of the goods we own for a brief time on earth, as if they did not matter; or our poverty must be the material sign of, or the embodied discipline for, that humility which alone admits God into our hearts.

Somehow we must work at poverty, and that will be easier to do if, as Father Groeschel said, we rub shoulders with the poor.

I cannot claim to know how to do this. Nothing in the life that surrounds me will give me the least clue, let alone encouragement.

Obviously, the destitute must be cared for, and poverty entangled with moral chaos must be fought on fronts both material and spiritual. The state can do a fair job with the former; is helpless with the latter, and sometimes worse than helpless; sometimes it sows the moral evil that impoverishes body and soul.

But I wonder how much of the harm of poverty among us can be alleviated by a general embrace of poverty, or at least by a distaste for wealth, flash, power, glory, and the ceaseless noise of the licentious.

There are partial precedents. Mink coats once commanded prices that, expressed in constant dollars, would stagger us now. But those same coats are now disdained. You can pick one up at an antique store for peanuts.

A similar thing...

By Dominic V. Cassella

In Herodotus' Histories from the 430s BC, we read of a wise Greek philosopher and political thinker, Solon. While traveling, Solon met the King of Lydia, Croesus, who was known for his immense wealth. Croesus asked the philosopher what he thought about his great riches and whether such wealth meant that he, Croesus, was the happiest man alive.

To that, Solon replied that you can "Call no man happy until he is dead."

Solon's point is that as long as someone is living, though they may be happy today, fortunes change, and bad decisions are made that can result in the fall of even the most well-off and mighty.

Now, we should ask: Is Solon right? Is it only the dead whom we can call happy?

To this, the Christian says "yes." It just depends on how you are dead. For if you are dead to sin (Romans 6:11, 1 Peter 2:24), having been crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20), then your true life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). This is because, if we die with Christ, "we will also live with Him" (2 Timothy 2:11), and in this life in Christ we find true happiness.

But what, concretely, does all this mean? How can we live this new life in Christ? And what is it to take up the Cross (Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, and Luke 9:23) and be crucified with Him?

In Fr. Thomas Joseph White's latest book, Contemplation and the Cross: A Catholic Introduction to the Spiritual Life, we are given a comprehensive answer to these questions. Originally put together as a spiritual retreat for a Catholic religious order, Contemplation and the Cross also serves as a sequel to an earlier work of Fr. White's The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (reviewed by Robert Royal here).

In this new book, the same perspicacity and readability are present as they were in the prequel. Fr. White - a Dominican and now Rector Magnificus of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (the Angelicum) in Rome - has written with the express purpose of offering the reader two different resources, which are evident in the body of the text and the footnotes. This is a book that can be read through for its own lucid exposition of the Catholic tradition, or scanned for its rich references for further study in figures such as Thomas Aquinas, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, as well as modern magisterial texts.

Each chapter identifies and explores a "cause" of the Catholic spiritual life. The primary source and efficient cause of the spiritual life is God Himself. So the first chapter begins with the "final" cause - the "why" or "goal" of the spiritual life. In this unusual opening, we immediately see the difference it makes to view things in the light of Christ.

Man, by nature, gropes in shadows as he reaches for the truth. In the covenant of the Old Testament, the Law served as a guardrail to prevent God's chosen people from holding on to what is self-destructive. With the coming of Light, who is Jesus Christ, we are no longer in darkness but have been offered "grace and truth." (John 1:16-17, John 17:17)

But what is this spiritual life and what are the means by which we live it? Here we find the relevance of the Cross which, as the new tree of our redemption, repairs the damage done by the old tree at the Fall. In emptying Himself, the Son of God has taken on the poverty and slavishness of human nature and has become obedient "even unto the Cross." (Philippians 2:7-8) It is through His assumption of human flesh and crucifixion that He redraws "the lines of our humanity from within and [reorients] us toward God anew."

The Cross, then, is where we find the exemplar of obedience to God. In contemplating Christ crucified, we find as our model the virtues of righteousness. And in Mary, His mother, we see the exemplar of what it means to live our lives with eyes upon the Cross. In grace and truth, we possess the means by which we unite ourselves to Christ and "become recipient of the mercy of God and a servant or steward of divine mercy."

Cen...

By Casey Chalk

There was a time when German Catholics fought for the faith. One hundred and fifty years ago, half the bishops of Prussia were imprisoned, as were hundreds of parish priests, leaving more than a thousand parishes orphaned. All of them had refused to cooperate with various Prussian laws, often called "May Laws," intended to suffocate the independence of the Catholic Church in favor of an "ecumenical" brand of Protestantism. German lay Catholics responded by providing hiding places for clergy, paying fines clergymen incurred from the state, and purchasing bishops' furniture at auction. And they were just getting started.

As Roger Chickering explains in his recent book The German Empire, 1871-1918, this battle between the German State and Catholics was years in the making, and shows a Catholic Church in Germany that was orthodox, pious, and deeply fervent. It is not only a demonstrable difference from a German church today, which is hemorrhaging members, but also likely explains why the German-American experience - which included such a large percentage of Catholics - was itself so vibrant, giving us such saints as St. John Nepomucene Neumann and St. Marianne Cope.

The conflict in Germany began in 1837, when the Prussian government incarcerated the archbishop of Cologne over a dispute regarding mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants. In the decades that followed, German Catholicism was reinvigorated. In 1844, more than half-a-million Catholics made a pilgrimage to an exhibition of the Holy Coat in Trier. There was also a dramatic increase in the number of religious organizations: between 1837 and 1864, the number of monasteries in Bavaria quintupled.

This concerned many German Protestants, particularly liberals and those in positions of government, who believed that the fulfillment of German unification and the Protest Reformation required the destruction of Rome's power in Germany. To disempower the Catholic Church in Germany, these parties reasoned, would remove a foreign intruder from the German body politic, a relic of a superstitious past, and usher in a single Protestant German national church.

Unfortunately for Catholics, Protestant liberals and their allies enjoyed a majority in the 1871 Reichstag of the new imperial Germany, and exploited that power to introduce a new provision to the federal penal code, stipulating imprisonment of up to two years for any clergyman who addressed affairs of state in a manner likely to disturb the public peace. The "pulpit paragraph" was the opening salvo in what came to be known as the "culture war" or Kulturkampf.

A suite of further anti-Catholic legislation followed. One law empowered the state to remove clergymen from positions they had previously held as local school inspectors. Another forbade religious orders from teaching in state schools. Yet another banished the Jesuits and several other orders from Germany altogether. Still others demanded that German clergy be educated at German universities, and that clergy pass a "culture test" that was not required of Protestant theology students. Papal disciplinary actions were made subject to Prussian state oversight.

In response, Pope Pius IX declared that the duty of Catholics to obey secular authority was valid only so long as the state "ordered nothing against God's commandment and the Church." In 1873, the bishops forbade Catholics from complying with the May Laws. This did not deter the Prussian parliament, which banned all Catholic religious orders from Prussia and introduced compulsory civil marriage. Chickering observes: "The liberals abandoned their political ideals, this time religious toleration, freedom of assembly, and the equal protection of the laws."

By 1876, all of Prussia's twelve Catholic bishops were either in prison or exile. Approximately 200 clergymen were fined or imprisoned, along with more than a hundred Catholic newspaper editors. Twenty Catholic newspapers were closed down.

That sa...

By Michael Pakaluk.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, October 9 at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss 'Dilexi te,' Pope Leo's first Apostolic Exhortation, the pope's planned trip to Lebanon, and his comments on Gaza, as well as other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

Ask an educated Catholic what the two leading teachings of Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum are, and, if he knows anything at all about this foundational text of modern Catholic social teaching, he will likely say that it endorses labor unions and articulates the principle of a living wage.

The doctrine of a living wage is indeed important, even if it cannot be followed in the United States today, given current mores and employment law. The doctrine is that to hire a father, who is the head of a household, is to hire in effect a family, not a mere individual, and therefore he must be paid a wage sufficient for supporting a large family, and sufficient too for him to save something, so as to acquire "substance" over time - on the assumption that his family lives modestly and thriftily.

As for the worker's associations envisioned in the encyclical, they do not exist primarily for collective bargaining, and "they must pay special and chief attention to the duties of religion and morality." (n. 57)

Despite our praise of Rerum Novarum as a fundamental founding document, one might reasonably judge that these two teachings have been pervasively abandoned.

But these are not the two leading teachings of the encyclical, which are rather that:

(1) socialism is a disastrous mistake which chokes the sources of wealth and subverts the family, and that

(2) no solution to "the problem of labor and capital," or to any other grave social problem, is possible without a revival of Christianity.

Leo XIII did not define socialism as "State ownership of the means of production," but rather, as a philosophy that denies that the individual in his economic activity is prior to the State, and denies also that the family is a true society prior to the State. In particular, it denies the authority of the father, who, Leo says, has a claim over the resources of his household at least as weighty as the State's.

Leo grapples with socialism in several of his encyclicals. He clearly regards it as the great menacing problem of our time. It would be foolish to suppose that such a deep challenge to Christian civilization, as he thought it to be, was put to rest by Fabian-style reforms in the direction of a Welfare State.

Rather, in our use of fiat currency, in our Great Society initiatives (which have undermined the family), and in the State's claim to redefine marriage, one sees this very philosophy of socialism.

Does anyone today suppose that limits to the taxing power of the State are fixed by natural law in the prior claims of the family as a true society? Or is it part of our public consciousness that the giant wealth transfer, which is Social Security, is a matter of free gift rather than putative "right" - a claim of right by the retired elderly over the resources of growing young families?

So, no, it seems we have not put to rest the "socialism" that Leo worried about.

As for the second, genuinely leading idea, it would be hard to claim that it conditions our interpretation of "Catholic Social Doctrine" today. I urge readers to read paragraphs 16-30 of the encyclical and ponder them anew: "No practical solution will be found apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church," Leo insisted, and "All the striving of men will be vain, if they leave out the Church." (n. 16) Do we believe this?

Leo draws attention indeed to the glory of the Ch...

By Francis X. Maier

Every few years, I reread a couple of my favorite authors. George Orwell, despite his disdain for things Catholic, has always been on my list. This time I paid special attention to his essay, "The Principles of Newspeak." He appended it to his dystopian novel 1984. As Orwell noted in his text, Newspeak - the language of Oceania's Airstrip One (formerly the UK) - had three distinct vocabularies; A, B, and C. The B vocabulary "had been deliberately constructed for political purposes." Its words "had, in every sense, a political implication." They were designed to impose a desired mental attitude upon the user.

A perfect such B-word was duckspeak. It meant "to quack like a duck." Ultimately, for Newspeak's linguists:

it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. . . .[Thus, like] various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker, it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

On the other hand, duckspeak could also be used to describe and vilify any opinion seen by the Party as crimethink. In effect, words meant whatever, and only whatever, the Party wanted them to mean in any given circumstance.

The other author I've returned to this year is the philosopher, Augusto Del Noce. After flirting with the Italian Left as a young man, Del Noce later reverted to his Catholic faith. In the aftermath of World War II until his death in 1989, he wrote a series of brilliant reflections (collected here and here) critiquing Marxist thought, technological civilization, the sexual revolution, progressive politics and theology, and the emerging contours of the postmodern world.

Of special interest, given our current environment, is his essay from the late 1960s, "On Catholic Progressivism." In it, he argued that:

Whereas a discussion with a rigorously Marxist intellectual is possible, it is not so with a Catholic progressive. Not because we despise him, but because he despises his critic, treating him already from the start as somebody who stops at mere formulaic intellectualism. Therefore, one does not discuss with a Catholic progressive, but in front of him, just hoping that our arguments may provide an opportunity to stimulate his critical reflection.

If Del Noce's frustration sounds familiar, it should. Internal Catholic debate has been fractious since the close of Vatican II, with renewed tension in the last 12 years. Whatever its strengths, the Francis pontificate, despite its purported openness, was the most authoritarian in more than a century, resistant to even faithful criticism, loose in matters of Church law, and marked by a studied ambiguity in various issues of doctrine.

We now have a new pope who's taken the name "Leo." His predecessor, Leo XIII, worked tirelessly to bring the modern world into line with eternal principles through his personal leadership and encyclicals like Rerum Novarum. We can hope that Leo XIV will do the same. We need that kind of faithful leadership urgently, because per Del Noce's essay above, today's Catholic progressivism - renascent during the Francis years - represents the "exact inverse" of Leo XIII's efforts. In contrast, it seeks "to bring Catholicism into line with the modern world."

This is most obvious in, but not limited to, matters of sexuality. There's a gulf between respecting persons with same-sex attraction and their God-given dignity, and affirming morally destructive sexual behaviors. Channeling Del Noce at Rome's 2018 synod of bishops, Archbishop Charles Chaput, among others, stressed that "what the Church holds to be true about human sexuality is not a stumbling block. It is the only real path to joy and wholeness."

He went on to argue that:

There is no such thing as an "LGBTQ Cathol...

By George J. Marlin

In the summer of 2014, Yohana Al-Zebbaree was a 12-year-old boy when his world turned upside down. From his home in Duhok, a city in northern Iraq, he recalls the whispers spreading across neighborhoods, saying that ISIS was moving closer.

"There was this huge scare," says Al-Zebbaree, now 23. "I remember the night when they said that ISIS was approaching the northern cities, like Erbil and Duhok. Everyone was watching the news, and we got multiple phone calls from our relatives telling us to leave town and go further north."

While Erbil and Duhok never fell, Mosul - the second-largest city in Iraq with almost 2 million inhabitants and just a short drive away - was taken. And the Nineveh Plain, with Mosul as its regional capital, home to some of Iraq's most ancient Christian communities, was overrun. Hundreds of thousands fled, swelling Erbil's refugee camps. Churches became shelters; classrooms turned into dormitories; streets filled with families who had left everything behind but their faith.

The Christians who lived in the provincial capital of Mosul on the Nineveh Plain - in ancient times the City of Nineveh - have ancestors whose roots go back to the very beginning of Christianity. The region had been the traditional home of Assyrian Christians and gave birth to the monastic movement. But on June 11, 2014, the city's Chaldean Catholic Archbishop, Emil Nona, announced that the last Christians had fled the city.

Describing reports of attacks on churches and monasteries, Archbishop Nona said: "We received threats … [and] now all the faithful have fled the city. I wonder if they will ever return here…. My diocese no longer exists; ISIS has taken it away from me."

Open Doors, a religious freedom advocacy group, agreed with the archbishop. "This could be the last migration of Christians from Mosul," its representative said. "The Islamist terrorists want to make Iraq a 'Muslim only' nation and as a result they want all Christians out."

Amid this chaos, the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil, led by Archbishop Bashar Warda, recognized that those refugee families needed more than shelter and food. They needed education, both religious and secular, and hope for the future. In 2015, the Catholic University in Erbil (CUE) opened its doors as Iraq's first private non-profit university.

Next week, as the university graduates its fifth class, it will also celebrate its 10th anniversary - a milestone born of resilience and faith in the face of what once seemed overwhelming odds.

CUE's first academic building was funded by the Italian Bishops' Conference. Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), a papal charity, followed with funding for new wings for the study of subjects such as architecture and medicine, and the provision of laboratories and a modern library. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, ACN-USA contributed more than $1.8 million.

An educational initiative that began in hope with only eleven students has grown to more than 760. About 65 percent of the student body now studies on full scholarships, most of which are funded by ACN.

And today, the Christians of Iraq are reaping the fruits of that carefully targeted generosity. The entire people of Iraq will as well. For a community that now accounts for less than 1 percent of the population, because of years of persecution, Iraq's Christians can and must have significant influence on the direction of the nation. CUE is providing a major contribution to that war-torn country in that regard.

While CUE is rooted in the Catholic tradition, its doors are open to all. About 60 percent of its students are Christian, 30 percent are Muslim, and the rest belong to smaller groups such as the Yazidis. In a country where religious and ethnic divisions often run deep, the campus offers a rare example of daily coexistence and common purpose.

"When you go to the villages, you see the Christians on one side and Muslims on the other," says John Smith, a university trustee. "But at the ...

By Brad Miner

Honestly, I've had it. I'm now all but certain there has never been a movie about exorcism that has had Christ at its heart. Thanks to Catholic author William Peter Blatty, the original Exorcist was good. Director William Friedkin deserves credit for a fine assist. It comes close but misses. No reverence.

I asked Grok3 to list all the movies about exorcism. It hedged a bit:

While it's impossible to list every motion picture ever made about exorcism due to the vast number of obscure, international, and low-budget films produced worldwide (including many direct-to-video releases), below is a comprehensive compilation drawn from major film databases, critic rankings, and horror genre resources.

It's almost comforting to see an AI bot use the word "impossible." In five seconds, it churned out a 1200-word list with descriptions of 51 films. Despite how it sometimes feels to me, this proved I haven't seen them all. The Grokster ended helpfully: "If you'd like expansions on specific eras, countries, or sub-themes (e.g., non-Christian exorcisms), let me know!"

Oh, no! I don't want that. I'm just here to say ave atque vale to the Conjuring franchise that, in some ways, set a standard both high and low.

There are nine films in what is now called The Conjuring Universe. Why do producers add "Universe" to their sequel-isms? To make lofty what is repetitive and often banal? Perhaps they don't care for the actual universe they're living in.

This franchise consists of four films in the main series: The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025). Additionally, there was Annabelle Comes Home (2019), which also features the Universe's main protagonists, Ed and Lorraine Warren. That means four Conjuring films are Warren-less. I sort of reviewed #s 1 and 2 here.

The thing is this: Patrick Wilson (as Ed) and Vera Farmiga (as Lorraine) are very fine performers. (Both can sing, by the way, Mr. Wilson especially well.) It's a rare actor who doesn't sign on to some projects for no reason other than the paycheck. For Last Rites, Wilson and Farmiga have been doing a kind of Conjuring farewell tour, complete with a New York Times interview ("Horror's Mom and Dad Say Goodbye to the 'Conjuring' Movies"), but I suspect they're relieved, paychecks notwithstanding. And I'm relieved, because one hates to see talent wasted.

Anyway, on to The Conjuring: Last Rites, which is the burden I carry (lightly) today. It cost $55 million to make and has already brought in more than $400 million worldwide. (The current #1 in the world in an animated feature, Ne Zha 2. I didn't know there was a Ne Zha 1, but #2 has hauled in a respectable $2 billion, although a mere $23 million in the US of A. The are a lot of people in China. Still, those Chinese communists sure know how to pick our American pockets.)

The Warrens were real people. I don't know if they were either entirely sane or honest (possibly sane if dishonest), but they catapulted to fame in 1975 via a case known as the Amityville Horror (books, movies, collectibles, sequels), and the Warrens were just getting started.

It must be mentioned, however, that the whole Amityville shebang was a tissue of lies, which we know because the attorney who represented the haunted Long Island family - and netted them several hundred thousand dollars from book and movie deals - later admitted they made it all up with a writer and a couple of bottles of wine. But The Warrens - he died in 2006, she in 2019 - always maintained it was all true.

The Warrens were Catholic. People in Connecticut, where they lived, have attested to the Warrens' regular Mass attendance. The estimable Jimmy Akins has suggested that, as paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine may have consulted with exorcists. They may have been nice folks. But neither of the Warrens was a priest, so they were not and could not be exorcists for the Roman Catholic Church.

As t...