The Catholic Thing

By Michael Pakaluk

It's from a kind of compulsion that this week I write on Charlie Kirk. I keep seeing in my mind again and again the images. It is a brilliant day, the kind of day we live for in the summer. It's glorious to be alive. He is smiling and relaxed, wearing a loose-fitting white tee shirt emblazoned with just one word, "Freedom." Seated on a stool under a tent, he is good-naturedly taking questions from students gathered on a campus lawn. He has just answered a question with a question, lowered his mic to his lap, is smiling, waiting for the reply. So relaxed. So amiable. And then he is knocked off his stool with an obviously mortal wound to the neck from a high-powered rifle.

Why have I been obsessed with these images? I think because, allowing for differences, Charlie was doing what good professors hope to be doing. We like outdoor classes, holding forth, challenging students, winning their attention, debating to find truth together.

If so, I was shot with Charlie Kirk. And my children, and many of my students, have thought that they were shot also. They see that what they are up to was obliterated.

I do not agree with Peggy Noonan, who wrote that in a society with a sense of class the images would not even be shown: the Zapruder film of JFK's assassination was censored for years, after all, to remove the bullet's carnage. But as Cardinal Müeller has remarked, Charlie Kirk died as a witness, a martyr. I like to think I would have been present at the stadium, with other Christians, to watch St. Polycarp. It was good, not bad, to stand at the foot of the Cross and see the effects of torture. Sometimes it is good to be shocked.

What my children and students are up to was obliterated in more than one way. Charlie Kirk was hardworking. He was an entrepreneur. He got married young and worked even harder after that. He and his wife generously welcomed children. He studied hard and wanted to know what was true, not what people said. He read the Bible and prayed every morning and advised others to do the same. He loved his country. He believed that the United States is the greatest country that has ever existed, and that we are tremendously blessed to have been born and live here - which carries responsibilities. He did everything which he did out of love of Christ. This is what moved him. And he seemed on his way towards full communion with the Catholic Church.

Therefore, all of us with similar aspirations were shot with Charlie Kirk.

Why was he hated? Was it because he was "controversial"? But mere intellectual divergence does not itself generate hatred. I didn't listen to his podcasts or follow him, but he said such things as that the trade-offs of allowing gun ownership in a society are preferable to the trade-offs of banning guns altogether. (Sounds right to me.) Also, that affirmative action was calculated to lead to discrimination, not remedy it. (Very plausible - and the intention is good.) That women should consider having children in their 20s and save a career for later. (Many women say the same.) I disagree with what I've since learned he held about immigration and housing. But, again, disagreement of itself will lead to discussion ("let's talk") or contempt ("you're an idiot") but not hatred.

Hatred to be sure can come from envy. Who is this tall, athletic and handsome guy, without a college degree, who married Miss Arizona and is so much more successful, so much wealthier and more influential, so much more widely followed and admired, than I? He was happy with an evident goodness. Many men in history have been hated for this reason alone. Read the Bible to see that Christians should expect it.

But I think he was mainly hated because he rejected our popular culture's "settlement" about what love is. Love for us is to find a way to affirm whatever preference anyone has, and not to say anything which would imply that another person was mistaken, was going astray, or (most of all) was doing something which ...

By Francis X. Maier

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this past spring, is best remembered for his book After Virtue (1981). But his book Dependent, Rational Animals (1999) is a work of equal value. In it, he argued that dependence on others is hardwired into the human experience. We're not interchangeable creatures. We have different strengths and weaknesses, skills and deficiencies. And our dependence is not a design flaw of our species, but a feature.

We were made to need each other. Our personal autonomy can grow with knowledge and experience. But it will always be limited. Thus, a just society is marked by a realistic understanding of each other's different needs, and a generous, mutual self-giving to meet those needs.

MacIntyre appears in the bibliography of Leah Libresco Sargeant's new book, The Dignity of Dependence. He's referenced by name in the final pages. And for good reason: He's a key resource among the many Sargeant uses to advance what she describes as a new "feminist manifesto." That word "feminist" is not a slam-dunk positive for this reviewer. As a husband and father, I'm old enough to remember, in detail, the 1970s. That includes the subsequent course of mainstream, secular feminism and the wreckage it too often wrought.

Sargeant is different. She's among a current wave of women scholars, writers, and leaders - from Erika Bachiochi and Abigail Favale to Terry Polakovic, co-founder of ENDOW, and many others - who offer a feminine critique of culture from a Christian-informed perspective. This opens the door to a wider receptive audience. And the author is skilled at her craft. The Dignity of Dependence is not just exhaustively researched; it's also elegantly written and persuasively argued. It's a pleasure to read. And while it is very much a "feminist" manifesto, it's also the expression of a sane Christian humanism.

Sargeant's page-one, opening sentences set the framework for her material: "The world is the wrong shape for women. I move through a world in which my body is an unexpected, unanticipated, somewhat unwelcome guest. It is as though women were a late, unanticipated arrival to a civilization that developed without them and their needs in mind." That's a sweeping and debatable claim. But if it sounds like the preamble to an anti-male grievance jamboree, the reader would be quite wrong.

For example:

When the world is the wrong shape for women, women will look for a range of techniques to solve or side-step their womanhood. Our culture is sometimes male-normed, but frequently the norm women are trying to match is simply an inhuman norm, one that neither men nor women can comfortably inhabit. Both men and women face pressure to regularize themselves, avoiding strong emotional or physical shifts, limiting the acute demands of caregiving, and working to widgetize themselves.

And this:

Equality for women is not the same as asserting interchangeability with men. . . .Recognizing and honoring the differences between men and women means putting dependence at the heart of our account of what it means to be human. Dependence marks women more obviously and intimately, but it is also impossible to tell the truth about men or treat them justly without accounting for our mutual dependence. No just society can be built on the basis of a false anthropology.

And finally this:

It is not good for woman or man to be alone, and more than that, it is not possible for man or woman to be truly alone. To treat each other justly, we must be honest about who we are. Men and women are deeply dependent creatures. We cannot build a just society on a false anthropology. We cannot have a feminism that does not begin with recognizing and rejoicing in the embodied difference between men and women.

The passages above can't do justice to a text that's both intellectually rich and accessible to any interested reader. Sargeant's chapters on "Helping Women Be Better Men" and "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" outline in pra...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely

In 1984, as a young man of nineteen, I returned from a year of testing my vocation to the religious life. We had been deprived, or rather liberated, from the television for that period. On my short vacation afterwards, I went off to Blockbuster and rented a VHS tape of a popular new movie called "The Terminator."

It showed a future world where machines were at war with humans, and machines, or as we would call them today, "drones," killed. It was a science-fiction movie. Forty-one years later, what was fantasy is now reality: drones, even the size of flies, are a principal means of warfare on many battlefields, some sophisticated, some, as in the case of those used by ISIS in the battle of Mosul, rudimentary.

Four years before that movie appeared, the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI, one of the finest theologians in the Church in the last several hundred years, gave a speech at a conference in Palermo, Sicily. (Searching the Internet for articles on this speech, I have only been able to find one, a short piece in Aleteia, written in 2018, by Professor Daniel Esparza.)

Among other things discussed by the Church's doctrinal watchdog, Ratzinger addressed the seemingly esoteric meaning of the description of the "Beast," in the Book of Revelation (13:18), in particular the name of the Beast, or rather the number, "666."

This subject, normally relegated to the outer fringes of religion, or the unpublished dissertations of the mentally unstable, in this barely known address by Cardinal Ratzinger may be one of the most important - and prophetic - speeches in anticipation of the world unfolding at rapid pace in the middle of the twenty-first century.

Rather like "The Terminator," the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1980 was pure fantasy, and warnings of the danger of "the machine" seemed to belong alongside ravings from the lunatic asylum.

Drawing from the experience of the Nazi concentration camps, however, Ratzinger said that they "cancelled faces and history, transforming man into a number, reducing him into a cog in an enormous machine."

He continued, warning of future dangers that portended:

man must be interpreted by a computer, and this is only possible if translated into numbers. The Beast is a number and transforms into numbers. God, however, has a name and calls by name. He is a person and looks for the person.

Many years before, Fr. Romano Guardini, a theologian highly influential on the thought of Joseph Ratzinger, spoke of the dangers unleashed by a post-nuclear age, but which apply as much, if not more, to the age of AI:

At the centre of the endeavours of the coming culture will loom this problem of power. The solution of it will remain crucial. Every decision faced by the future age - those determining the welfare or misery of humanity and those determining the life and death of humanity itself - will be decisions centred around the problem of power. Although it will increase automatically as time moves on, the concern will not be its increase but first the restraint and then the proper use of power.

From the very beginning, in the Garden, when humanity was assured, by the Father of Lies, in whom, as the Lord said, there was no truth, that we could become "like God," fallen man seems incapable of both caution and restraint.

This is not the twenty-first-century equivalent of the machine-destroying followers of Mr. Ned Ludd, even though that will be the accusation of those determined to forge ahead with the "unavoidable" future of AI. The Beast, the number, not only exists, but is of infinitely superior intelligence to ourselves. He knows all about the unrestrained and improper use of power.

If one quality is needed at this time, perhaps more than any other, it is the gift of discernment.

In the Book of Proverbs, we are told: "Blessed is the man who discovers wisdom, who gains discernmen...

By Brad Miner.

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking

Was looked on as something shocking

But now, God knows

Anything goes

"Anything Goes" by Cole Porter (1934)

A single headline at Vatican News got me thinking:

Pope says Israel's attack on Hamas in Qatar marks a 'very serious situation'

In itself, it's a simple statement of fact. And it's chilling if, as in my mind, it evokes "wars and rumors of wars" (Matthew 24:6-7, Mark 13:7, and Luke 21:9). The world is a dangerous place, and diplomacy is essential.

But there are existential reasons for skepticism about the success of diplomatic efforts, let alone of pacifist statements concerning Gaza, etc. Besides, negotiations (let alone good intentions) won't save the world; Christ will. If we all lived in God's light, we'd have peace on earth. Failing that . . .

Sweet reason is important, but I admire Jonathan Swift's warning (from A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter'd Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality, 1721): "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired." In other words, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he never used reason to arrive at in the first place."

In Catholicism, we speak of "just war theory," which is a reasoned response to the reality (indeed, the inevitability) of conflict. Diplomacy to affect peace requires both wisdom and restraint. Vito Corleone advises Tom Hagen about a contentious, upcoming meeting with the Tattaglias on a point of concern to the Five Families, "Mention it, don't insist." Use prudent, economical speech.

The Vatican, it seems to me, has lost the understanding of economy in speaking. Every day, and this was especially true when Francis was pope, the Vatican inserts itself into the "public conversation" - even to the point of sending messages to meetings of the World Economic Forum at Davos.

It's tempting to believe that the Catholic voice of a pope may have catholic appeal - that because there is in Catholicism a universal message of peace and justice, a pope has the authority to speak out and that the world will listen. But I'm afraid this is only true some of the time (more rarely than the Vatican seems to imagine), and that a message to a Left-liberal enclave such as Davos is akin to throwing a bucket of water into Hell. And I have no patience for the assertion that "It can't hurt." Futile gestures almost always hurt.

If the statements coming from Rome were rare, sharp-edged, and Biblical, they might have a certain shock value. But it's usually the case that the Vatican's words are anodyne. And this is true even when a statement is actually shocking - to a traditional Catholic sensibility anyway.

Consider this from Catholic News Agency on September 10, 2025:

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, stated in a recent interview: "I would not define morality - especially sexual morality - as narrowly as the Church does today."

Whenever Cardinal Hollerich speaks, you know it's in the context of synodality, which, as he suggests in that same article, is morphing into an "ecclesial assembly." Although he adds, "it remains unclear what exactly such an ecclesial assembly will entail."

But, Eminence, if it's unclear, why are we doing it? And why, concerning sexuality, are you speaking as though you were the Lawgiver?

When the Lord said (Mark 16:18) that we will be able to "pick up serpents" and not be harmed, he wasn't recommending dangerous behavior. He was promising that if we live by His word and law, we will be saved. Although in Hollerich's home, Luxembourg, there is no church tax as such (i.e., in the manner of Germany's Kirchensteuer), Luxembourg does provide direct financial support to formally approved religious groups via conventions with the state.

It's possible that clerics in Germany and Luxembourg believe the survival of the Church in their countries depends upon governmental largess that, in turn, depends upon increasing the number of members of the Church, ...

By Msgr. Robert Batule.

In the public ministry of Jesus, there is an incident involving a poor widow who puts two small coins into the treasury. Upon seeing this, the Lord drew the attention of the disciples to this offering. He let them know that the poor widow contributed more than anyone else did. Jesus based his judgment on the fact that the others contributed out of their surplus wealth; the poor widow, on the other hand, gave all she had, her whole livelihood. (cf. Mark 12:41-44)

When this scripture passage shows up in the Church's liturgy, it is at the end of the period we refer to as Ordinary Time. More specifically, it comes late in Ordinary Time when we are reflecting on last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The wisdom of the liturgical placement is not in question. I would only say the eschatological lesson is a good beginning to understand the proclamation of the Gospel.

Many of us recall from our childhood, our elementary school years in particular, when we were given "mite boxes" as a way of keeping the Church's penitential discipline before Easter. It's too bad that mite boxes are not much used anymore. They were a great way of introducing children to the asceticism of almsgiving, along with a lifelong concern for the poor and those on the margins of society.

The poor widow and mite boxes are reminders that religious faith exacts a personal cost. And the financial one is usually not the most burdensome. Far more threatening is the prospect of having to let go of certain tactics we employ mentally and emotionally to negate what is most essential to religious faith: conversion.

On this point, some remarks by Fr. Clodovis Boff during this past summer are quite telling. Fr. Boff was once among the most well-known advocates of liberation theology in Latin America. But he began having misgivings about liberation theology years ago. Since then, his misgivings have only intensified.

In an open letter to the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, he criticized "the same old story: social issues, social issues, and social issues." This has been going on, he wrote, "for more than fifty years." Fr. Boff lamented that the "good news about God, Christ and his Spirit [has not been preached]."

The same, he indicated, goes for "grace and salvation, conversion of the heart, prayer, adoration, and devotion to Mary the Mother of God." These have been sidestepped, too.

There is always the temptation to reductionism - not just in Latin America but anywhere the Gospel is proclaimed. Why is that? Because with the Gospel, we are always contending with mystery. In faith, mystery is what we behold. "Handling" mystery only domesticates the Gospel. With handling instead of beholding, we mistakenly think faith is for problem-solving. To behold the Gospel is to entrust ourselves to God, not counting the cost but only making ourselves a gift for the Kingdom.

The beauty of holiness is that saints come from every corner of the earth and emerge from every epoch of history. The circumstances are thus richly variable. What is constant, though, is the personal desire to serve the Lord in the Kingdom which he inaugurated, but is not yet fully realized. The Kingdom is manifested only when God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are preached, and when grace, salvation, conversion, prayer, adoration, and Marian piety are preached too. That is Fr. Boff's understanding of what the Gospel is; it is the Church's too.

The religious Left, we have to say, is like the political Left in always searching for and trying to calibrate progress vis-à-vis the things in our midst right now. The Church, however, was not established by Christ to lower unemployment rates or increase home ownership - laudable as these developments are for all the nations of the world. The Church has sought, in every time and place throughout history, to tend to the poor, the dispossessed, and the downtrodden.

Jesus did the very same in his ministry. Indeed, the judgment scene w...

By Robert Lazu Kmita

A recent article by Michael Rota and Stephen Bullivant, "Religious Transmission: A Solution to the Church's Biggest Problem," published in Church Life Journal, has sparked reactions in several quarters because of its main contention: that nine out of ten people born Catholic leave the Church.

The exodus of adults, and especially of adolescents and young people, is one of the most troubling symptoms of the deep crisis in Christian life, not only within our Church but in our whole culture. (I believe that the most terrible and widespread malady is the contraceptive mentality, but also the abortion regime to which it leads. All other problems reflect this slow suicide of communities in the Western world that have ceased to procreate.)

Regarding the exodus of young people in particular, an in-depth examination and concrete suggestions are absolutely necessary. But before that - just as in the case of patients with multiple severe symptoms - it's essential to establish an accurate diagnosis that will reveal the hidden causes of the "illness." My perspective on all this is somewhat unusual these days: that of a convert from the "Orthodox" Church to the Roman Catholic Church.

What I noticed after I asked (in 2000) to be received into full communion with the Roman Church (thus returning to the Church of my Polish ancestors) was a grave crisis of Catholic identity. Without exaggeration, I dare to say that the Catholic identity of a frighteningly large number of believers today is in dissolution. This crisis, obviously, can only lead to the alienation and indifference that easily result in the exodus denounced by Rota, Bullivant, and others.

To better understand the causes, it's worth briefly defining what we mean by "Catholic identity." My starting point is the classic "Act of Faith":

O my God, I firmly believe that Thou art one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; I believe that Thy divine Son became man and died for our sins, and that He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived. Amen.

Anyone who believes what is so succinctly stated here can be considered a Christian (i.e., Catholic). To this, I would add the need for the conviction that the Catholic Church is the one and the same Church founded by our Lord Jesus Christ.

No other community or "church" can be considered such. Moreover, no other community or "church" can offer its believers salvation. Heresies and the state of schism from the true Church are real dangers that prevent full conversion and, ultimately, the salvation of souls.

Of course, this does not exclude the fact that God can save souls even from those other communities. However, this necessarily implies that they enter into communion with the Catholic Church at least via "baptism of desire."

Catholics today no longer believe - like Saint Cyprian - that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation (Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus). Inter-religious dialogue and ecumenism, the practical pluralism of today's world, and the lack of authentic Christian evangelization and catechesis have generated indifference and even hostility toward any "firm" value (sometimes even toward the very notion of "dogma").

In fact, although some priests, bishops, and believers showed me a certain sympathy at my conversion, many others expressed puzzlement: What is the point of converting from the "Orthodox" to the Catholic Church? Aren't they the same thing? You cannot imagine how many times I have been asked this question.

For me, here's a significant detail: in "Orthodox" churches and in Protestant and Neo-Protestant communities, Catholics are continually presented as heretics, apostates, etc. For example, well-known monks in Romania constantly claim that since the Great Schism (1054), there has been no Church in the West. They also say that Ca...

By Joseph R. Wood

St. Paul worried about the Galatians. In his letter to them, he laments:

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are not gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain. (4:8-11)

The distinction Paul emphasizes is between not knowing God, and knowing Him, and then being known by Him. That calls for close attention. But first, some preliminary points.

The phrase "beings that by nature are not god" catches the ear of anyone who has carefully read Aristotle. The Philosopher, as St. Thomas calls him, uses the phrase "by nature" repeatedly to describe men, who are rational animals by nature, and political or social animals by nature. We use our reason to know and seek a common good.

By the order of what it is to be human, the nature of being human, we have certain features that we don't choose ourselves.

Aristotle also tells us that certain human communities exist by nature: families and households, villages that bring together households, and cities or political communities. Each has its own good that it is supposed to realize, by the nature of what it is.

I'll leave it to the Scripture scholars to discern whether St. Paul intends the same thing with "by nature" as Aristotle. But the meaning has to be close, as Paul is using "nature" to distinguish different beings with different orders of existence, or we might say different "essences."

I'll leave it to the theologians to explain what are the "weak and beggarly elemental spirits," which are not gods. They are not divine; they are elemental or base; spirits (without bodies?) likened to the begging needy, yet having the power to enslave humans. And apparently the power to re-enslave them, perhaps in adhering to the cycle of the celebrations of the Old Covenant, even after they have come to know God by faith.

AI told me that last part about the Old Covenant. Paul may well have been concerned about reversion to Jewish practices among the Galatians. But I don't think that explanation really accounts for "elemental spirits." Those sound to me more like the Golden Calf that the Jews crafted while Moses was away and later rejected, or the detritus of the Greek and Roman (or Celtic) gods lingering in the Anatolian region.

To talk about Old Covenant enslavement, surely Paul would have discussed works of the law without faith. I'm hoping the theologians can do better than AI on all this.

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, Adam and Eve are known to God, and they know Him. They speak with Him and receive instructions directly from Him.

After they violate the one rule God had given them, they immediately hide themselves and seek to avoid being known by God. Our Original Sin, then, causes us not to want to be known by God.

A pattern recurs throughout the Original Testament, as the Jews choose to know and be known by God, then refuse to be known by Him, then return to Him and His law.

A comparable story comes up in Plato's dialogue, Statesman. The visitor who guides the discussion about the true man of politics presents a myth wherein the universe has seen two ages or epochs.

In the first, a god or demiurge guides the events occurring in the universe as it rotates in one direction, and lesser gods are appointed to govern groups of men and provide for them. During this age, men have abundant food without labor. Because the gods provide for them, they have no need for constitutions or politics.

It's a scene reminiscent of Eden, though as one of my sharp seminarian students once pointed out, in Plato's myth, man has no responsibility for dominion over Creation, as he had in prelapsarian paradise.

At some point, the second age arrives: the gods withdraw their governance, the universe violently reverses it...

By Stephen P. White

If you listen to talk about generational change in the Church and you're likely to hear about shifts in Catholic practice that have become increasingly evident in recent years. Falling Mass attendance, with older Catholics attending with far greater frequency than younger Catholics. Or the interminable liturgy wars, ostensibly pitting "Spirit of Vatican II Boomers" against "Zoomer Trads."

The fiscally minded might note concern about the fact that older Catholics are disproportionately generous in their financial support of the Church compared to younger Catholics. Or how the fiscal crunch many dioceses are facing, or see coming down the pike, might affect critical ministries. Surely many Catholics are feeling the pinch from years of sagging vocations to the priesthood and religious life, a pinch that is going to get worse in most places before it gets better.

All of these are legitimate areas of concern. But the landscape outside the Church is shifting, too. I'm thinking in particular of long-term demographic shifts that will profoundly shape American life. A Church that is well-prepared for the pastoral challenges - and the evangelical opportunities - of the coming decades would do well to begin thinking about these long-term trends sooner rather than later.

Twenty-five years from now, the generation of Americans we call Millennials will have begun to retire. By 2050, the eldest Millennials will be entering their 70th year. At the same time, Generation Z will be approaching 40. The youngest Catholics born before the close of the Second Vatican Council, and the very youngest of the Baby Boomers, will be entering their late 80s. Virtually all living memory of the pre-Conciliar era will be gone.

It is likely that by 2050 (perhaps sooner, perhaps not long after) the population of the United States will be getting smaller.

Birthrates have been below replacement level for a long time. The largest factor keeping the population (and birthrates) up is, unsurprisingly, immigration. But even with significant immigration - far from a sure thing these days - our population will soon begin to shrink. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent projections (2023), over the remainder of this century, the U.S. population will level off and begin to decline.

The Census Bureau projects that, should immigration be reduced to zero, "The population. . .is projected to be 226 million in 2100, roughly 107 million lower than the 2022 estimate." That's a population decline of roughly one-third between now and the end of the century. Such a zero-immigration scenario is, of course, completely unrealistic. But it illustrates how dependent America is on immigrants for maintaining even a stable population.

Under more plausible scenarios, with low or moderate levels of immigration, the Census Bureau estimates that the population of the United States will be in decline - accelerating decline - by the end of this century and possibly as soon as mid-century. A catastrophic decline of 107 million might be unrealistic, but even one-tenth of that decline would be enormously disruptive.

Immigration policy today is, to make a gross understatement, both complicated and contentious. Catholic leaders - bishops, included - have found themselves having to insist on the humane treatment of migrants while also coming to terms with legitimate, pressing concerns about the deleterious effects of massive, illegal immigration.

Still, even if political concerns about border security were miraculously resolved tomorrow, the dependence of the American economic model on a permanently growing, rather than shrinking, population suggests that immigration will remain a pressing issue - one way or another - for a long time to come.

The United States will soon have more residents over the age of 65 than under the age of 18. Social assistance programs for seniors - Social Security and Medicare, primarily - are funded through taxes on the wages of current wor...

By Robert Royal.

In 1776, the year that America became independent (and San Francisco was founded), two Franciscan priests, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, traveled from what would become Santa Fe, New Mexico, through Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, aided at several points by native guides, until circumstances forced them to turn back in Orem, Utah, the very place where, last week, Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Their mission, as strange as the path may seem to us today, was to find a shorter route from Santa Fe to the Franciscan mission in Monterrey, California - and no doubt to prepare the way for evangelization of native populations, who were scratching out an existence on the hard Southwestern ground.

Most people today have little idea of how Catholicism came to the lands now part of the U.S. Southwest. But it's quite interesting to read the detailed records, with maps and observations on local peoples, that the explorers kept for the Franciscan Order, which have been published in English as The Dominguez-Escalante Journal.

I've been traveling through Utah the past week, at times along some of the paths they forged, which eventually turned into the Old Spanish Trail. It's some of the most simply stunning land on God's earth.

Except for a flat tire in the middle of the desert (which took hours to find help), it was a reminder that in spite of the evil we visit on one another, God's overarching Creation - with its transcendent beauty, goodness, and truth - cannot be cancelled and is perpetually there for us, if we have eyes to see.

At the same time the ruggedness and sheer vastness of the region, which photos can only begin to convey, witness to the toughness and determination of those missionaries in pursuing a nearly impossible task.

But perhaps they were borne up on their way. Zane Grey is sometimes mocked, when he's even remembered, as a corny old Wild West writer (his books aren't in Utah bookshops). But like Paul Horgan, the great Catholic novelist of the Southwest, he too was deeply aware of the eternal in these lands, which is easier to see in places like Zion Canyon, even amidst human vicissitudes. (I'm writing this in Zion and am taken with Grey's words about the wind here):

Always it brought softly to him, strange sweet tidings of far-off things. It blew from a place that was old and whispered of youth. It blew down the grooves of time. It brought a story of the passing hours. It breathed low of fighting men and praying women. (Riders of the Purple Sage)

It's not only the canyon's winds that whisper of larger spiritual and human things. The Milky Way alone here, an arching river of light in the clear night air, is something few people living in the light pollution of towns and cities now have a chance to appreciate. You don't need a telescope or specialized scientific knowledge to understand the grandeur of all that here. All you need to do is to look up, as our ancestors did for thousands of years, with receptive eyes.

For me, the rock formations (pitifully inadequate terms) here in Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Moab are revelations. The working of wind and sun and water on stone has carved huge forms that remind you of cathedral pillars (hoodoos) and flying buttresses, lonely towers and castles on multiple promontories, high sculpted outcroppings like the enchanted hilltop cities you see sometimes in dreams.

What was it that turned Kirk's assassin, Tyler Robinson - by all accounts a notably intelligent boy and young man - from such high and uplifting things?

One of the telling tragedies about him is that he grew up in St. George, Utah, near Zion, in a solid family (his father spent decades as a sheriff's deputy) and amid these stunning natural vistas. He somehow detached himself from all that - knowledgeable people say the messages he wrote on his ammo indicate memes common in online "gaming communities." And then there's his connection to that strange modern phenomenon we call the "trans" movement v...

By Randall Smith.

Let's say you're on "Jeopardy," and you choose a panel that says: "This exists between certainty and doubt." You say: "What is faith?" Correct! The audience cheers, but most remain puzzled. You know, however, that if you were certain, there would be no need for faith. If you were in absolute doubt, we wouldn't say that you "have faith."

So, is doubt the sign of a lack of faith? Can faith and doubt co-exist? Do people who have faith also have doubts?

We don't need to speculate abstractly; we have the examples of the saints. St. John the Baptist seems convinced that Jesus is "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world" when he saw Him coming for baptism - so convinced, he considers himself unworthy to baptize Him. Later, however, when he is in prison, John wants to know, "Are you the Christ?" Given the way things have turned out, he has some doubts.

And of course, all the apostles had doubts. They all abandoned Him. Does that suggest a strong faith? Peter denied that he even knew Jesus. And then there is the apostle whose name has become synonymous with doubting. Poor Thomas. He is known to history as "Doubting Thomas" just because he wanted the confirmation that nearly everyone would want.

Even though he had been with Jesus, listened to His words, and seen the miracles, Thomas still had doubts. In the modern age, we have the examples of St. Therese of Lisieux and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Both were animated by a powerful faith, but both also suffered from darkness and doubts.

Joseph Ratzinger, in Introduction to Christianity, writes that, "the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void," but so too does the unbeliever. "However vigorously he may assert that he is a pure positivist, who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses, and now accepts only what is immediately certain, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty whether positivism really has the last word."

Ratzinger continues:

The unbeliever may be just as troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of which the which he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole. He can never be absolutely certain of the autonomy of what he has seen and interpreted as whole; he remains threatened by the question whether belief is not after all the reality which it claims to be. Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth.

The title of a satirical article in The Babylon Bee captured this same paradox: "Life's Struggles Causing Atheist To Lose His Faith In The Existence Of Nothing." It begins: "Wimbly said that all his life, he had prided himself on his ability to face life's challenges with an unshakable faith in absolutely nothing, but several recent events had admittedly led him to thinking about the possibility of a divine and loving creator."

"Things were getting so hard, I accidentally prayed the other day," said Wimbly, shaking his head with embarrassment. "Who was I praying to? Is someone there?. . . .I'm afraid I'm on the edge of losing my faith in the existence of cold, blind determinism and nihilism." "I don't know what's gotten into Steve," said one close friend. "I'm afraid he might be deconstructing his Atheism."

Yes, it's terrifying. The universe just might have meaning and purpose. It just might be true, as Ratzinger writes elsewhere, that "God created the universe in order to enter into a history of love with humankind; He created it so that love could exist." It just...