The Catholic Thing

By David Warren.

Perhaps it is a failure of diplomacy on my side, but my approach to most contemporary political controversies could be summed up in the statement, "You're nuts!

This expression implies there will be no point in continuing the discussion. After all, the opponent is unlikely to acknowledge that he is mentally ill - even when I have allowed that everyone, including myself, is rather titched these days.

It is in fact the condition of political debate currently. No matter what issue we start with, we soon find ourselves arguing everything that has ever been raised in politics; and of course, we are not well informed on everything that was ever raised.

Politics takes priority in our most specialized political discussions. Religion, for instance - whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Other - has shrunk to an obscure corner of the controversial map.

Wealth and open materialism are displayed, but thanks to socialism they are politicized by both left and right.

Professional sports may rise briefly out of the obscurity, and I have witnessed moments when a joke is so widely understood, that everyone sentient is laughing. These are moments of relief from the condition to which we are enchained - even with the people we agree with.

I wonder if monastic life is much different, today, when I discover that almost every monk or nun can be reached by email.

Some, very disciplined, have apparently learnt the "art of shutting up," at least on matters that are none of their business; for in an extra-religious way they realize that almost nothing is anyone's business.

Verily, I think of an old Jewish friend, whom I couldn't be sure was a friend, even when playing chess with him. It was not that he was silent, though he was mostly so; but that he did not seem to have any demonstrative opinions. Street directions were the most one could get from him, and the occasional mysterious quotation from Maimonides, or the Mishnah, as he moved his Rook into place. Or perhaps it was Kafka.

My admiration for this "Eric the Blest" (as I called him in parody of his given name) was for his instinct of self-preservation, in the highest conceivable sense. Whether or not he was physically threatened (and Jews often are), he never strayed from what he believed to be unqualified truth.

This I inferred. Eric would not declare such a thing. I think he would assume that, as it were, all declarations are false.

Faith, too, I would say, is not a declaration. It comes prior to any verbal formula, although perhaps words have contributed to it. In this sense, faith is quite different from reason, which can usually be expressed; sometimes, even mathematically.

But to return neurotically to politics, an opinion can be based on reason, or rather employ it in some way, but without becoming reasonable itself. One must leap into the ether, for faith must also be consulted.

There are, as Christ shewed in words and action, no glib certainties here, where the sun is not always visibly shining. What we see, we see only for a moment, and then it is covered by night. What we describe can remain apparent only momentarily.

Yet the odd thing, to those who think it odd, is that truth can only be a function of freedom, and freedom only a function of the truth, in our twilight world. Every attempt to compel our views is a betrayal of truth and freedom, both. It is a small declaration of war against sanctity; or a large one.

It was for this reason, I think, that Eric restricted himself, at most, to droll observations; and to a drollery that was soft. For he was not trying to be witty, either. Instead, only to be polite when asked for a comment.

A world consisting exclusively of Erics might not be intelligible to most of the characters this world contains, and yet there is something recognizably "Ericsome" in all our better moments.

Curiously these happen when we are looking for truth, in a small or big way; though as I think Maimonides said, there is no such thing as a small...

By Stephen P. White

Fifteen years ago this month, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to make a state visit to Britain. (John Paul II made a pastoral visit in 1982.) It was a historic event, both for the Catholic Church in the UK and for the United Kingdom. Nearly five centuries after Henry VIII broke with the Church, here was the Bishop of Rome being received by the Queen at Holyroodhouse, welcomed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth, and invited to address British leaders and dignitaries in Westminster Hall - the very place where St. Thomas More had been tried and condemned 475 years before.

The central event of the pope's visit was the beatification of John Henry Newman in Birmingham. Naturally, Newman loomed large in the pope's various speeches and homilies during his entire visit. It's worth revisiting some of Benedict's speeches and homilies, not only because the recent decision of Pope Leo XIV to declare Newman a doctor of the Church makes them timely, but because Benedict's remarks, which draw heavily on Newman, have only grown in relevance in the subsequent decade and a half.

In his homily for the Mass at Westminster Cathedral, Pope Benedict highlighted Newman's enthusiasm for a robust, well-formed laity and the responsibility which all the baptized share for the Church's mission. He quoted Newman to this effect:

I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.

In this view, the lay faithful are indispensable, not only to the Church and her mission, but to society itself. They are the primary means by which the Church is leaven in every part of society and civic life. Newman's view, Benedict observed, found an echo in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, particularly in Lumen Gentium.

And Newman's vision for the laity was complemented by what Benedict called his "profoundly human vision of priestly ministry."

In his address to leaders and dignitaries at Westminster Hall, Benedict made the connection between the apostolic work of the laity and a healthy and thriving clergy. In fact, he insists that the essence of the priestly vocation becomes clearer when the lay vocation is lived with fidelity and zeal.

Let us pray, then, that the Catholics of this land will become ever more conscious of their dignity as a priestly people, called to consecrate the world to God through lives of faith and holiness. And may this increase of apostolic zeal be accompanied by an outpouring of prayer for vocations to the ordained priesthood. For the more the lay apostolate grows, the more urgently the need for priests is felt; and the more the laity's own sense of vocation is deepened, the more what is proper to the priest stands out.

This mutuality between the lay and clerical vocations is a far cry from the zero-sum calculus, so common in some parts of the Church today, which seems unable to imagine the relationship between laity and clergy except through the categories of power.

A similar mindset threatens public and civic life, too. As both Newman and Benedict understood, to treat the relationship between faith and reason as a zero-sum affair is to impoverish both.

And here we come to the heart of Pope Benedict's address at Westminster Hall: "The central question at issue is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found?"

How can any society - particularly a pluralistic society, as exists in the UK -possibly hope to answer fundamental political questions while excluding the light of faith from our deliberations about how we ought to live together? "If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus," Benedict warned, "then the fragility of the proce...

By Brad Miner.

Poland has suffered much over the centuries, and the Poles have been made stronger for it, in the spirit of what Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

The Holy Spirit moved in the conclave that elected St. John Paul II on October 16, 1978, to reward Poland for her suffering and courage, especially in the 20th century. And the pope, who raised hundreds to the altars, canonized many Polish people, among them Faustina Kowalska and Maximilian Kolbe.

A new dramatic film Triumph of the Heart, about the great saint, written and directed by Anthony d'Ambrosio, is about to appear. It focuses on Kolbe's two weeks of imprisonment with nine other men in the Hunger Bunker, a subterranean starvation room at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where Kolbe died. This means the film is, at times, claustrophobic. I don't know how it could be otherwise. [The term usually used is Starvation Bunker.]

For those who don't already know: In late July of 1941, a prisoner escaped from the camp, and the Nazi commandant decreed that, as a warning to other inmates, ten prisoners would be sent to the Bunker to starve to death. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, pleaded that he had a wife and children, which moved Fr. Kolbe to offer himself in Gajowniczek's place.

Through flashbacks, we see aspects of Kolbe's life and the lives of the other men with whom he shared confinement. But given that all died, do we know how they interacted with one another? Yes. For one, because a janitor periodically entered the Bunker. And other camp personnel overheard conversations from outside the barred window of the Bunker. Still, much of the dialogue is imagined.

For instance, Kolbe (played superbly by Marcin Kwasny) and another prisoner, Albert (Rowan Polonski in another fine performance), share an imaginary cigarette and talk. Albert, a soldier, wonders why Kolbe doesn't doubt God's existence after what they and all Poland had gone through. Kolbe acknowledges anger at it all, in essence evoking the old notion that Poland was crucified between "two thieves": Russia and Germany. But Kolbe quotes the Lord's words from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (from Psalm 22) Kolbe says God has come to be with them in suffering.

Triumph of the Heart echoes Jonathan Glazer's extraordinary 2023 film, Zone of Interest, the story of the last commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family, who lived idyllically in a home just outside the death camp. Glazer never took us inside. In Triumph of the Heart, there are glimpses of that same home, occupied during Kolbe's time by then-commandant, SS Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch (icily acted by Christopher Sherwood), but most of the film takes place in the Bunker.

And in a scene reminiscent of the great "La Marseillaise" moment in Michael Curtiz' 1942 classic, Casablanca, a woman in Auschwitz begins singing a patriotic Polish song as Germans guards are singing what sounds like a drinking song. A Nazi officer shoots the woman, but her song is picked up by the men in the Hunger Bunker, then by others around the death camp. A fleeting moment of triumph.

Is Mr. d'Ambrosio's intended to counter Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 pro-Hitler Triumph of the Will? It's certainly apt. Later in the Bunker, the prisoners huddle together against the chill of starvation and sing the Salve Regina.

Scenes of brutal depravity are difficult to look at. Of course, this was the truth of Auschwitz and had to be portrayed. But watching men capture, kill, and eat a rat is sickening, as are the guards' taunts that the prisoners will inevitably resort to cannibalism.

Mr. d'Ambrosio has a steady hand. He needs it. An exception is a fictive scene i...

By Randall Smith

Imagine you are applying for a highly competitive job, and someone says, "I can tell you how to be more competitive than 98 percent of the other applicants." Would you be interested?

Let's say he adds: "It's not hard, but you may not like it." Perhaps it's something like wearing a coat and tie to your interview, and you hate wearing a coat and tie. I'm with you on that, but if you really want the job, wouldn't you make that little extra effort? Or would you complain? "Why should I wear a coat and tie? Coats and ties are stupid! If they want a coat and tie, the heck with them."

Now again, I'm with you on the coat and tie thing, but really? Do you want the job or not? If not, fine. But don't whine about not having a job or how life is so unfair.

Why this little story? Well, I am about to offer some advice to young men on courtship and dating, and some may find parts of it annoying.

Years ago, I wrote a column, inspired, as this one is, by conversations with young Catholic women engaged in the ghastly business of going on Catholic dating web sites, which they were forced to do because, otherwise, there was no dating going on for them.

In that article, I suggested that the serious, orthodox, beautiful, family-oriented young Catholic woman I knew - I knew quite a few (still do) - were not interested in men who advertised online for "traditional" Catholic wives.

"Not interested" is a euphemism. Feelings were much stronger. Some men found that article annoying. One woman thought I was "white knighting." I didn't know that expression. Fortunately, one woman who had inspired the article wrote to say: "I told him that!"

So look, it's no skin off my nose. My younger self made plenty of stupid mistakes (still do). But God was kind, and I have a great wife. So take this advice with a grain of salt. But if the things you're doing aren't working, then maybe you should try something else.

Okay, so according to my very unscientific survey, the results of which I have confirmed with many young Catholic women, here is how you could put yourself ahead of 97 or 98 percent of the rest of the crowd. It comes down to this:

Get a job.

Don't live with your parents.

Don't spend all your time playing video games.

Don't surf for porn.

Don't swear every other word.

Don't be a weird fanatic.

Have some skill, either working out or fixing things or something similar.

Be interested in something other than the one thing you think you know something about.

Be a gentleman.

That's it. Nothing expensive. You don't need James Bond suits or cars. Being a "player" will not interest these women. You don't need to be a CEO. But you need to show that you have the discipline to get a job and finish a task. You need to be devoted to something other than yourself. And you need to be courageous, willing to take some risks. When people call and need help, you need to be the one who goes.

Some of those things may annoy you. "What's wrong with video games?" Nothing necessarily. Please don't write and tell me: "I know a guy who met his wife playing video games!" I do too. One guy. I know guys who met their wives on an airplane. I'm not recommending guys do more air travel. That's not how you put yourself in the top group for most Catholic women. I met my wife in a coffee shop. Drinking more coffee won't necessarily get you a wife either.

"What's wrong with swearing? I know women who swear a lot!" I do too. Are you dating them?

"Why do I need a job? If you're asking me that, it would be best for all concerned if you just stayed off Catholic dating sites. So too, if you say, "Don't want kids - ever!"

Please understand. You live in a culture that has largely left young men and women systematically unprepared for courtship and marriage. That's tragic. I wish things were different. But you must play the hand you've been dealt.

If you prefer not to take any of this advice, fine. It might work out. But if not, please don't whine about the problem or, for heaven's s...

By Daniel B. Gallagher.

A few decades of teaching at the college level have demonstrated to me that students are increasingly unprepared to study political theory. This is neither an insult nor is it the students' fault. In some ways, it is a reversion to the mean, given Aristotle's observation that it is virtually impossible to teach young people the principles of authority and governance before they have participated meaningfully in a particular political community.

Such participation is not achieved by reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but by paying taxes, serving on the local school board, and volunteering to coach youth basketball. More specifically, young people lack phronesis (practical wisdom) - an essential political virtue - simply because they haven't lived long enough. Another way to put this is to say that engagement in the community beyond one's family discloses not only the need for an authority beyond one's family but also the limits of that authority. When we are young and idealistic, we think not only that everything is possible, but that nothing depends on anything but government.

That is why, after having been involved in writing scores of papal addresses for Benedict XVI and Francis, I am impressed with Leo XIV's emphasis on the limits of government. It's not that Leo's predecessors failed to acknowledge such limits, but they were not as salient or nuanced in their run-of-the-mill, day-to-day papal teaching.

Last week, for example, against the backdrop of Saint Augustine's City of God, Pope Leo encouraged members of the International Catholic Legislators Network "to infuse the earthly society with the values of God's Kingdom" in order to allow for "authentic human flourishing."

His predecessors would often leave it at that, but Leo went further, asking, "How can we accomplish this?" After clarifying that human flourishing "depends on which 'love' (i.e., of the world or of God) we choose to organize our society around," he urges lawmakers "to work for a world where power is tamed by conscience, and law is at the service of human dignity." (emphasis added) One cannot help but hear resonances of "America the Beautiful," in which, as a nation, we beg God to "confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law."

Again, this is nothing new to Catholic social teaching. But in the past, too much emphasis had been placed on vague notions of what individual and multilateral governing bodies were capable of.

Leo's reliance on the principle of limited government seems more subtle. When addressing diplomats accredited to the Holy See, for example, Leo quoted Rerum Novarum, noting that the chief means for government leaders "to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies" is to "invest in the family. . .'a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society' (Rerum Novarum, 9)."

In other words, the aims of a political entity are not achieved solely by designating some authority to achieve them, but by supporting the "small societies" that the authority is designated to serve in the first place.

Though less prominent in his address to members of the International Inter-Parliamentary Union, the limits of government nonetheless underpinned Leo's assertion that "an essential reference point is the natural law, written not by human hands, but acknowledged as valid in all times and places, and finding its most plausible and convincing argument in nature itself."

A concomitant claim - reminiscent of Benedict XVI - that emerged from Leo's address is that reference to the natural law is a way of ensuring that there is no a priori exclusion of the transcendent in political decision-making processes. In other words, if, as Leo said, "law is at the service of human dignity," then human dignity can only truly be served when natural law places natural limits on positive law.

It's clear that, with the help of City of God, Rerum Novarum, and the legacy of both, Leo wants to draw attention to two possible t...

By Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM Cap.

I was speaking to one of my Capuchin confreres recently who had just returned from visiting his family. He remarked that there were a number of skunks around his sister's home. These little creatures can be quite cute. Skunks are notorious, however, for their ability to spray a liquid with a strong, unpleasant scent. God, providentially, in a manner that only He could have ingeniously conceived, gave this ability to skunks in order to protect them from predators. My confrere then related that his sister's dog had just been a victim. Only after three baths was the dog washed clean of the horrid smell.

In doing some online research on skunks, I found a fascinating account of a Jesuit who had arrived in what is today the United States and Canada. He was in awe of all the new and various species of animals that he was now encountering, for they were not present in Europe. One such animal was the skunk.

In 1634, he wrote in The Jesuit Relations (accounts sent back to France of what the Jesuits were experiencing in the "new world") that there was a "low animal, about the size of a little dog or cat. I mention it here, not on account of its excellence, but to make of it a symbol of sin." He proceeds to describe what a skunk looks like and concludes by noting how foul-smelling it is:

No sewer ever smelled so bad. I would not have believed it if I had not smelled it myself. Your heart almost fails you when you approach the animal; two have been killed in our court, and several days afterward there was such a dreadful odor throughout our house that we could not endure it. I believe the sin smelled by Saint Catherine de Sienne must have had the same vile odor.

So, the Jesuit makes two points concerning skunks. First, he equates the smell that a skunk makes with the smell of sin. Second, he likens the smell of a skunk to the experience of St. Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) - her ability to "smell" sin.

This tidbit of information led me back to the Internet. What I found was that St. Catherine related to her confessor, Raymond of Capua, that "the stench of sin" was so overpowering among some of those who came to see her that she could not endure it. Catherine knew a sinful skunk when she smelled one.

The ability of saints to smell sin is not unusual. Padre Pio, for example, when hearing Confessions, had the ability to smell mortal sin. It is reported that such sins smelled "putrid," "foul," like the smell of a "rotting corpse." Conversely, when penitents made an honest and contrite Confession, Padre Pio would smell flowers. This was a manifestation of the "odor of sanctity," a sweet fragrance of roses, violets, or jasmine. Thus, though sinners smell like a skunk, there's an odor of sanctity for those in the state of grace.

For example, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the "Little Flower," is reported to have smelled like roses, especially upon her death. Likewise, the body of Saint Teresa of Ávila emitted a sweet perfume that filled her monastery when she died. And similarly, many witnesses reported that Saint Padre Pio, during his life, had the odor of flowers or incense, especially emanating from his stigmata.

Although the odor of sanctity became particularly evident upon the death of the above saints, that odor would have been present during their lives, for it was while they were alive that they became holy. Evidence of such holiness became unmistakably evident upon their sweet-smelling deaths.

These grace-filled phenomena find their basis in the risen Lord Jesus. When Jesus came to raise his friend Lazarus from the dead, Martha pointed out that, since he had been dead for four days, there would be an odor. If this event had taken place in North America, she might have said that Lazarus would have smelled like a skunk. What Martha forgot is Jesus' declaration: "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and he who lives and believes in me shall never die....

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza.

The big Newman moment of the summer was the declaration by Pope Leo XIV that St. John Henry would soon be declared a Doctor of the Church. I had another Newman moment a few weeks beforehand in a cinema watching, of all things, The Life of Chuck.

A Stephen King novella adapted for film, it's not a horror flick but the tale of an accountant, Chuck Krantz, who dies at 39. Chuck has led an unremarkable life, quietly admirable but not inspiring. No one much noticed him when he was alive; few would remember him when dead. The movie moves backward through a 39-year tale of Chuck learning how to live in and getting ready to die.

Learning how to live meant, for Chuck, in part, learning how to dance. As a boy, Chuck's grandmother taught him; from her he learned the confidence, the shared emotion, the sheer fun of dancing. Dancing broke into the monotony, brought a bit of color to a monochrome world.

Tom Hiddleston plays Chuck, and the actor loves to dance; clips of his exuberant dancing delight viewers on the Internet. He was cast as Chuck because his dancing makes people smile and shift and shuffle, and feel better about things. It is possible that the entire screenplay was written to allow Hiddleston to dance in a splendid five-minute number, evocative of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. It is the heart of the film.

The narrator explains that Chuck, already suffering from a terminal diagnosis and from the enervating emptiness of his professional life, experienced an evanescent ecstasy in that moment of spontaneous dancing in the street:

Later [Chuck] will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife's name. What he will remember - occasionally - is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

I heard that and thought Cardinal Newman would agree.

It is possible that all of Creation was for one moment, one moment of joy, one moment of dance?

Trinitarian theologians might be inclined to answer: Yes. They have a fancy word, perichoresis, which aims to describe the relationship and of love and life, harmony and intimacy, glory given and glory received among the three Persons. A long time ago my professor summarized perichoresis in one word: dancing.

The Trinity dances, which is harmony and intimacy, round and round in glorious celebration and expressive joy. If creation extends the love and life of the Trinity outside of the Godhead, why shouldn't it all exist for a moment of dance?

I was likely the only person in the theater who heard "that is why God made the world" and thought of Newman. The passage that came to mind is well known, from his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, where Newman insists that "the Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest."

How evil is man's rebellion against God? The Church must "anathematize it" with such severity that Newman was pleased to repeat a formidable formulation he had earlier fashioned:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

About a year before he died, Christopher Hitchens debated Tony Blair in Toronto on whether religion was a force for good in the world. Hitchens, a more able debater than Blair, took the position that religion is "twisted and immoral" and is plagued by "essential fanaticism."

To that end he introduced - as evidence from "no mean source" - the Newman quotation above. Newman was no jihadi suicide bomber, but the most refined intellect of his time. Nevertheless, he wa...

By David G. Bonagura, Jr.

Consider the parallel lives of John and Bill, who each have three children, reside in the suburbs, and commute to the city to work. John is agnostic and indifferent to things religious. Bill is a practicing Catholic; he attends Mass each Sunday and prays daily.

The two do essentially the same things each day. Is there a substantive difference between their lives, given their faith - or lack of it?

On Monday, both get caught in traffic. En route, John is listening to the news, Bill to the Bible in a Year Podcast. They both arrive late and flustered. Bill, having heard Matthew 11 recited in the car, prays that God will make light the burdens that come with being late for work.

At their desks, they open their emails. Each receives a note from his boss assigning an odious task. Each is aggravated. Bill asks God why He is testing him. Then, though still unsettled, he stammers a silent, "Thy will be done," and digs in.

Taking a break, each runs into an exasperating co-worker with whom he does not wish to speak. Each cuts his interlocutor short and scurries away. Bill realizes immediately that he was rude. He asks God for forgiveness and resolves to go to Confession on Saturday.

At lunch, they sit at their desks and eat from brown bags. Bill silently says grace and makes the sign of the cross before he eats.

The day ends, and they drive home. The roads are clear; each arrives home in a good mood. They morph into "Dad mode" immediately: each drives one child to practice, another to scouts, picks up the first, eats dinner, goes back out to get the second, cleans the kitchen, checks one child's homework, and watches 15 minutes of sports on television. Exhausted, John bids his children good night and passes out. Just as tired, Bill gathers his family; they pray one decade of the rosary together. Bill passes out in the chair, rosary in hand.

Tuesday morning comes. John rises at 6:00. Bill rises at 5:45. The latter spends fifteen minutes in prayer next to his bed before preparing for the day.

How is Bill's life different? Is it "better" than John's when they are doing the same things, living the same family life, enduring the same trials?

John has a wonderful wife, healthy children, friends, and a good job. Yet all these are discordant notes in a cacophony. They have neither rhyme nor reason. He occasionally feels overwhelmed. In his few quiet moments, he asks himself what he is doing with his life. Things are going well, but they don't make sense. He muddles through - there is no other choice. The years pile up, and he wonders how many he has ahead. He has worldly goals for himself and his children. Focusing on these keeps his mind from wandering toward bigger, more vexing questions.

The Catholic faith allows Bill to see realities that John cannot. Bill knows God is always present right next to him. He knows his blessings come from Him, and he gives thanks; he knows He sends trials to stretch him, and he tries to grow from them. His life is not easy, yet he realizes God has willed his existence for many ends, even when he does not understand what God intends in most situations. But knowing God is in control gives him both purpose and a sense of adventure: wherever he goes, and whenever he comes home, God has a new set of circumstances waiting for him. In his better moments, he smiles, imagining that he is part of an epic action film without knowing its ending.

Bill is also grateful that he has something that John does not: accountability and structure for his life. God's laws, as directed in the Ten Commandments and distilled into their multiple dimensions in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, tell him plainly what he should do and what he should avoid. Since Bill loves God, he sees these laws not as an unpleasant imposition, but as a gift to help keep him on the straight and narrow. In more recent years, he has learned from the Catechism about virtue - about how to do good, beyond just avoiding evil. He h...

By Michael Pakaluk.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, August 28 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 Leo XIV's continuing impact, 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.

St. Augustine's conversion began, on his own telling, when, as a nineteen-year-old boy - roughly the age of a college sophomore today - he encountered a dialogue by Cicero called the Hortensius:

Quite definitely it changed the direction of my mind, altered my prayers to You, O Lord, and gave me a new purpose and ambition. Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upwards by which I was to return to You. (Confessions, III.4)

Later on, after years of seeking, and still in the grips of Manicheism and fleshly desires, he would judge his progress against that earlier event:

I was much exercised in mind as I remembered how long it was since that nineteenth year of my age in which I first felt the passion for true knowledge and resolved that when I found it, I would give up all the empty hopes and lying follies of vain desires. And here I was going on for thirty, still sticking in the same mire. (VI.11)

Even the saint's famous half-hearted prayer for chastity comes up in connection with Cicero: "Many years had flowed by - a dozen or more - from the time when I was nineteen and was stirred by the reading of Cicero's Hortensius to the study of wisdom; and here was I still postponing the giving up of this world's happiness to devote myself for the search for that of which not the finding only but the mere seeking is better than to find all the treasures and kingdoms of men, better than all the body's pleasures though they were to had merely for a nod. But I in my worthlessness. . .had begged You for chastity, saying: 'Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.' For I was afraid that you would hear my prayer too soon." (VIII.7)

As St. Pope John Paul II summarized in his Apostolic Letter, Augustinum Hipponensem, on the 16th centenary of the conversion of St Augustine, "He awoke at the age of nineteen to the love of wisdom, when he read the Hortensius of Cicero."

This great convert from paganism, materialism, and a life of fleshly pleasure, would go on to become one of the two surpassing theological masters of the Church alongside St. Thomas Aquinas. The author of The City of God, and On the Trinity, and also of many richly illuminating shorter works, homilies, and letters, he would be proclaimed "The Doctor of Grace" - a teacher to the world, really, and, in his way, a savior of civilization.

One might think that a practical lesson to be drawn from Augustine's conversion is that Catholics should foster the reading of Cicero's Hortensius, on the grounds that what so inspired Augustine would likely inspire many others.

But, sadly, the Hortensius was lost in the 6th century.

What do we know about it from fragments and reports? We know that it was a "protreptic," that is, it contained a carefully constructed argument, intended to persuade the reader to seek wisdom above everything else. (The word protreptikos in Greek means "exhortation.")

Plato has various "protreptic passages" scattered throughout his dialogues. Aristotle wrote an entire dialogue, once lost but now reasonably reconstructed, called Protrepticus. Cicero probably used these as models. The Hortensius, we also know, was composed as a dialogue among a poet, a rhetorician, and an historian, with Cicero, the fourth participant, taking the side of philosophy. But otherwise, we do not know its contents.

And yet are there books like the Hortensius which Catholics can use tod...

By Francis X. Maier.

July 2026 marks the 250th birthday of the United States. Alas, the celebration next year will come in the midst of yet another election cycle, and at a time of deep cultural divisions. We need a "common good" politics more than ever. But that's easier said than done. Here's why.

In Catholic thought, the political realm is primarily the responsibility of the laity - complicated and distracted people like you and me - not the clergy. But the civil war inside the Church over what Vatican II really meant, and the resulting confusion about which issues should have priority in working for the common good, are not over.

Quite the opposite: During the Francis pontificate, the frictions took on new heat. And the course of the Leo pontificate, while promising, is not yet fully clear. Additionally, the bureaucratic mass of the U.S. bishops' conference, with its need for collective buy-in from its members, creates inertia. This makes any quick, clear, and decisive action by the body of bishops difficult to achieve. Plus, the risks for the Church of being co-opted and used by the political left and right are always present, and always expensively high.

Thus, the "political" role of the Church, in her national and diocesan structures, rarely amounts to more than providing basic principles of morality and justice, and interfacing and lobbying at the bishops' conference level with government offices on a range of issues.

Very broadly speaking, that's how the Church in the United States operates institutionally, as an organized community of believers. But it's worth considering a few added points, most of them obvious to the alert observer:

1. The Church always seeks a modus vivendi with public authority - in every nation, in every century. This get-along strategy has both practical and Scriptural grounding. But it also has its weaknesses. The desire to minimize conflict with secular authority predisposes the Church to make compromises and avoid confrontations in a way that's not always prudent. Additionally, given her minority status in our own country, the Church has always been eager to fit in and prove her loyalty. The result of that eagerness today, sustained over generations, is that most Catholics are now more thoroughly American than they are Catholic. Many bishops are, in their own words, "generals without armies." This reduces Catholic political muscle as a distinct and coherent community.

2. Many American Catholics, and even a few Church leaders, still assume that we live in a country that (in reality) no longer exists - at least, not in the form they imagine. Demographic, technological, legal, and cultural changes have transformed the United States over the past 70 years. But this delusion of America as somehow implicitly Christian, or at least Biblically grounded, persists. And it's strongest among boomer-aged practicing Catholics like myself who still have a reasonably accurate knowledge of the Founding. In many dioceses, this is exactly the age group, now dying out, who are most actively involved with the Church, and the most generous.

3. We have a duty to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. But that duty requires a healthy degree of Catholic prudence. Whatever governmental form Caesar takes, he always has three defining characteristics: (a) his legitimate zone of authority is very limited; (b) he thinks it's a lot bigger than it is; and (c) he's never a trustworthy friend, no matter how cordial he seems. This suggests that while issues like protecting the unborn and defending religious freedom are vitally important and must be pursued, the more fundamental task for the Church is educating Catholics to develop a healthy distance between themselves and their allegiance to the American experiment and its culture.

4. As Catholic numbers and practice decline, so does the influence of Christian moral thought. The "common good," according to secular thinkers, can be very different from that same idea ac...