The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal.

In spite of all the fuss over "education" and the enormous amounts of money spent on it in America, as students are returning to school this week, how much real learning goes on these days? My parents had only public high-school diplomas, long before the Federal government got into the business of promoting "education." But between the local classrooms and instruction in the parish, they read and wrote well, did math properly, understood the American system of government, the Church's prerogatives, and the truths necessary for salvation.

How often does that happen today?

The U.S. Constitution sought to form "a more perfect union" (the merely "perfect" isn't enough for Americans). Part of that perfection involved reducing the chances of tyranny and misgovernment by limiting the Federal reach to certain "enumerated powers." Education, a sensitive activity in a pluralistic society, wasn't among those powers. It was, predictably, the beginning of a steeper educational decline than was already evident when, in 1980, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, an unconstitutional agency.

The DOE website today invites you to "Find educational resources for parents, students, and families from birth through high school." Given the politicized and ideologized nature of schools in recent years, we should be very wary of these "educational resources."

America spends well over a trillion dollars every year on education, compared with around $750 billion on defense. We haven't managed to win wars lately, so there's good reason to question the defense budget. We didn't do too well in the war on poverty either. And though the monies spent on schooling are, perhaps deliberately, hard to trace, who these days would conclude that the enormous sums at the Federal level alone (over $200 billion) have been well spent and producing desirable outcomes?

Only 37.6 percent of Washington D.C. students, for example, read "at grade level" - what is called "grade level" being already a fairly modest goal, to be sure. But The Washington Post recently touted this as an encouraging sign, also reporting that "More than 26 percent of [D.C.]students performed on grade level in math, the highest proficiency rate recorded since students returned to classrooms in 2021, but still lower than pre-pandemic performance." (Pre-pandemic was a whopping 30 percent for math and 37.5 percent for reading in the capital city of the greatest, most powerful nation on earth.)

Pundits are currently agitated over the president sending the National Guard into Washington to control crime (and are further agitated that it seems to be working). But what about the crimes being perpetrated in the city school system, which is leaving basically two-thirds of young people unprepared for the simplest adult responsibilities?

And this although D.C. spends about $29,000 annually per student, roughly the tuition of a semester at Harvard. Meanwhile, we're regularly told that schools need more money. But the problem is not money. Almost half of the children in D.C. are born out of wedlock (77 percent among D.C. blacks, 55 percent for Hispanics). "Chronic" truancy, not surprisingly, is over 30 percent. And D.C. is hardly unique. Among the many problems affecting young people today, spending on schools isn't the main problem. The crisis of marriage and family, a direct consequence of the sexual revolution, very much is.

The Church, as it has for centuries, could help here.

In the Catholic perspective, the family is the primary cell of society, not the individual. Schools and other institutions are supposed to be a help to parents. When we talk about the Catholic social principle of "subsidiarity," we usually are thinking of the distribution of political powers. Long before we get to those arrangements, however:

As those first responsible for the education of their children, parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This r...

By Jayd Henricks.

During his recent "Address to the Participants in the Social Week of Peru," Pope Leo made some observations well worth noting: "Let us understand that all social action of the Church must have as its center and goal the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ, so that, without neglecting the immediate, we always remain aware of the proper and ultimate direction of our service. For if we do not give Christ in his entirety, we will always be giving extremely little."

That's already a very useful clarification. But he added: "Dear brothers and sisters: it is not two loves, but rather one and the same, that moves us to give both material bread and the bread of the Word that, in turn, by its very dynamism, will give rise to hunger for the Bread of Heaven, which only the Church can give, by the mandate and will of Christ, and which no human institution, however well-intentioned it may be, can replace. And, for our part, let us not forget the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles: 'Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up.'" (Galatians 6:9)

I cannot tell you how refreshing I find it to read this from the Holy Father. In the first months of Pope Leo's pontificate, there has been a pronounced Christocentric vision of our faith, articulated clearly and with evangelical vigor. And it is not confined to the spiritual life of the Church but, as the above quote makes clear, also at the heart of the Church's charitable work.

For many years, I worked at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops engaged in public advocacy for the Church's charitable work. I'm proud of our efforts, and yet there was always the haunting concern that the goal of the work was "extremely little" compared to the real mission of our faith: salvation.

Our work was about creating space for the Church to compete with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or with the strong arm of government itself. This is a worthy goal. Millions of poor and marginalized have been served and continue to be served by the generosity of the Church. The value of this should not be dismissed. And yet, if we truly believe the Nicene Creed, it's extremely little compared to eternity, and the Holy Father's words should be a call to reexamine how the Church understands her mission in society as a leaven for the common good.

The common good is not just material well-being: food, shelter, jobs, physical and mental health, and so forth. All of this is good and should be part of the mission of the Church as an agent of charity. And yet the ultimate common good is that which we will all face one way or another in the coming years (for some tomorrow, for others seventy years from now, but it is coming for all of us), which is our eternal destiny. Anything short of that consideration, albeit important, is extremely little.

The work of so many Catholic charitable organizations, as well as the public advocacy work of the USCCB, can sometimes be shortsighted. I can't tell you how many letters to Capitol Hill or the Administration I either drafted or edited that read like any other NGO. Yes, Members of Congress are not especially concerned about the Church's eschatological mission, so it perhaps was not appropriate to lead with that sort of language. But to intentionally ignore the salvific purpose of the Church's work in our communication seemed to be a failure to advance the Church's essential mission.

The purpose of the Church is to be united to Christ for the salvation of souls, first our own and then to aid others on their own path. The charitable work of the Church falls under that but is deficient if not united with salvation.

For if we do not give Christ in His entirety, we will always be giving extremely little.

From my experience working deep within the bureaucratic Church, the idea of giving Christ in his entirety was not a focus of our work. It's hard to say if it was even an afterthought.

I wonder how things woul...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Is our Lord avoiding the question? At first glance, it appears so. The man in today's Gospel (Luke 13:22-30) asks a simple yes/no question: "Will only a few people be saved?" Jesus doesn't answer, doesn't say yes or no. Perhaps to the man's disappointment, He doesn't give the stats on the population of Heaven relative to that of Hell. Instead, He gives a stern warning and tells an ominous parable.

Maybe our Lord is abiding by the ironclad rule of public relations: Don't answer the question that was asked, but the question that should have been asked. Instead of a direct response to the questioner's concern, He answers what should have concerned him - and us. Namely, complacency.

For there seems to be a kind of smugness about the questioner. He appears pretty sure about his own salvation even as he remains curious about others. Instead of asking about others, he should have asked about himself: What must I do to be saved? And it is this unasked question that our Lord answers: "Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough."

The Greek here for "strive" is literally "agonize" or "be in agony." Point being, Heaven is not easily entered. God's grace does not bear fruit in our lives unless we strive - agonize - to cooperate with it. We cannot sit back, relax, do nothing - and then expect to enter Heaven. You can't coast uphill.

So our Lord tells a parable about those who do not strive. They are the ones who know Him only in passing and become satisfied with that insufficient knowledge. When He returns, they will say, "We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets." As if mere proximity to Him is sufficient for salvation. As if simply being near Him, in the crowds that followed Him, would suffice. He was in their company, but they never took the time to know Him directly and personally.

Nor did they make an effort to be known by Him. Indeed, the parable's strong words of condemnation focus on just that fact: "I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!" Or as He says more bluntly on another occasion, "I never knew you." (Matthew 7:23) Apparently, allowing ourselves to be known by Him is every bit as important as knowing Him. This shouldn't surprise us, for both knowing and being known are necessary in a relationship. The human heart desires both.

It's interesting to note how Saint Paul associates salvation with knowing God and being known by Him. Indeed, they are caught up with one another: "[I]f one loves God, one is known by him." (1 Corinthians 8:3) The Apostle looks to heaven, where "I shall know fully, as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12) He reminds the Galatians how they were once in darkness. But now it is different, "now that you have come to know God" - and then he corrects himself - "or rather to be known by God." (Galatians 4:9)

It's significant that this warning and this parable are directed not to those who don't follow Christ but to those who do - people like us, who follow Him. . .but perhaps not as intimately as we should. It's directed to us who might know about Christ because we've been raised that way, because we attend Mass and say our prayers and observe all that's asked of us. . .but who don't know Him. In the end, it's not knowledge about Christ that saves but knowing Christ Himself - and being known by Him. To be satisfied with anything less is dangerous.

All of this can be seen as the difference between a personage and a person. A personage - someone of notoriety and fame - is apart from us. We know about him, perhaps even a great deal. He might even inspire us. We might even shape our lives according to his example. But we don't have a relationship with a personage. He remains an historical or cultural figure. We can put him on a shelf where he we can admire him from afar and without fear that he will intrude.

A person, on the other hand, is more than reputation and ...

By M.D. Aeschliman.

Much of our knowledge is inevitably quantitative and additive, but sometimes a good book contains such necessary, valuable forms of human knowledge while also touching, and being graced by, such qualitative insight that it registers as human wisdom. Such is the case with University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox's ambitious Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.

Wilcox is a strong statistician, and his book is full of exceptionally valuable, detailed information and analysis about contemporary social and economic phenomena in the USA and the West. It's particularly insightful about catastrophically declining birth rates, marriage rates for different demographic groups, and surveys of several negative social indicators such as unemployment of men, drug abuse, loneliness, and "deaths by despair."

His thoughtful and judicious grasp of these phenomena and their dynamics puts him among the outstanding public intellectuals and commentators of our time, and merits the name social philosophy: a tradition of over two centuries which includes Burke, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber, and more recent figures such as Robert Nisbet, Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Philip Rieff, David Martin, Peter L. Berger, and Wilcox's Virginia colleague James Davison Hunter.

An excellent example of this social-philosophical insight is found near the conclusion of Get Married when Wilcox writes that his research "reveals this paradox regarding the pursuit of happiness in contemporary America: individual happiness is most likely to be found not by directly pursuing it for oneself but by opening your heart to love, marriage, and living for your spouse and family."

Wilcox here vindicates an argument or thesis that has been intermittently meditated in the philosophical, political, religious, and poetic literature of the West, what Plato and Aristotle first articulated and that we have come to call "virtue ethics" or eudaemonism. It has also been the stock-in-trade of centuries of moralists and clergymen.

The Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) identified "the paradox of hedonism" in a famous sermon and the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) wrote about it in his Methods of Ethics. Their point, writes the contemporary philosopher Simon Blackburn, is "that agents who consciously attempt to maximize their own pleasures are more likely to fail than those who have concerns for other things and other persons for their own sakes."

A particularly poignant case is found in the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873), the great Utilitarian philosopher, most of which is exceptionally dry, leading Thomas Carlyle to call it the "autobiography of a steam engine."

But one chapter records Mill's mental breakdown. Mill, a child prodigy and successful public intellectual, records a mental collapse, not apparent to the public world in which he continued to live and work. From 1821 to 1826, he had been the companion and inheritor of the growing political prominence of his own Utilitarian father, James Mill, and of Jeremy Bentham: his "object in life was to be a reformer of the world," and he seemed to be succeeding in journalism and politics.

But Chapter V reports an increasing gloom at the realization that his direct, successful pursuit of Utilitarian ideological aims left him more and more unsatisfied and depressed. He came to credit "the anti-self-consciousness theory of [Thomas] Carlyle" with helping him shape a new "theory of life."

He "never wavered" in his Utilitarian conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life." But he "now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind. . .followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else,...

By Joseph R. Wood

We're a few days into the Novena to St. Augustine for his feast on August 28. To my mind, any excuse will suffice to talk about the thought of that great saint. His feast day in the first year of Augustinian Leo XIV's pontificate simply can't be passed up.

During a pause in the conversations on faith and reason at this summer's 2025 Free Society Seminar in Slovakia, our editor-in-chief and I shared the mutual sense that, after a fair amount of philosophical engagement over the years, maybe the greatest pleasure and light come from reading St. Augustine and one of his influences, Plato.

Augustine thought the Platonists were, of the pagan philosophers, the closest to the greater truths of Christianity. As I read Augustine's City of God, it seems apparent that he was also familiar with Aristotle. The influences were indirect: he knew Plato through "Neo-Platonic" writers who came centuries after Plato himself, and he had Cicero's work on Greek philosophy.

Pope Benedict XVI sought to bring elements of Augustine's theology back to prominence, emphasizing the relational aspects of our being human as equal in importance to our reason. The rational nature that we are given in the image of God had received great attention in the Thomistic tradition, but other aspects of the divinity for which we are built sometimes became obscured.

In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas quotes Augustine constantly, more than any other Church Father and (depending on whose word count you trust) more than Aristotle. We can leave the exact accounting to others, but Thomas's reliance on these two sources is evident.

He seems to have at least two projects in mind. First, to correct the many misinterpretations of Augustine that had sprung up in the eight or nine centuries between the two.

Second, to reconcile the thought of Augustine and Aristotle. Both figures had much to say about the natural life of man and the divine or supernatural aspects of the cosmos.

That reconciliation does not align the two perfectly, and sometimes Aquinas seems to overreach a bit in pressing his case. But it demonstrates that Aristotle's reason (and ours) can take us a long way towards the truths that ultimately Catholic teaching, based in no small part on St. Augustine's gifts of faith and reason, can best grasp and express.

As Augustine explains in On Free Choice of the Will, we use our reason to understand better the revealed precepts of the faith, though the Christian mysteries ultimately are beyond us.

Aristotle was not the only pagan philosopher to draw Augustine's attention. In City of God, he deals with the Stoics.

While some people think of Stoicism as a "cult of suffering," that's far from true, if you think of "cult" as worship or love of suffering for its own sake. The Stoics were concerned with peace of mind, which called for accepting suffering as part our "fate" and part of the way we build necessary virtues. We accept suffering, but we don't love it just to suffer, and that acceptance contributes to peace of mind.

The gods of the Stoics were made of matter, like us. They believed that the suffering we endure is sent or permitted by the gods for our own sake; our mistake comes in thinking it's an evil, and that shakes our peace.

What Stoicism lacked was an eternal and spiritual meaning to our suffering in this life. With no afterlife, suffering might help us be more virtuous in this life, but it could not lead to spiritual salvation and resurrection of the body.

St. Augustine particularly criticized the Stoics for their approval and even admiration of suicide. Catholic Christianity offered a better way to a true and final peace of mind.

In our day, Stoic resignation appeals to many who, lacking faith, have no hope of the great gifts of Christian surrender. Reading St. Augustine, especially his Confessions and seeing his guilt for his sins transformed into faith, hope and love, might help them open themselves to those gifts.

Again in City of God, A...

By Stephen P. White

One sign of our improbably ludicrous times is that the question, "What is a woman?" has become a point of political contention in recent years. The obvious answer (obvious, that is, until just yesterday) has proven unsatisfactory to the keepers of the Zeitgeist for whom the connection between nature and meaning has been thoroughly dissolved.

A world that doesn't know what a man or a woman is, let alone what it means to be a man or a woman, is going to have a very difficult time figuring out what it means to be a good man or a good woman. It is difficult for a world so thoroughly confused about nature to discern the presence and action of grace. Grace, after all, builds on and perfects nature.

There is reason to hope that the fever of gender ideology is breaking - or at least that the stranglehold it has held on our politics and social discourse is loosening. But even if it were to subside completely, there is still reason to worry about what would follow in its wake. The failure of one bad set of ideas is no guarantee that what replaces it will be any better.

Disentangling modern science and medicine from gender ideology would be a very good thing. But it would be a mistake to assume that a more biologically grounded account of male and female would solve the underlying anthropological confusion. It turns out that the meaning of the human person - male and female - is not easily definable in naturalistic or material terms.

Any attempt to account for human nature in purely material terms, even without the thumb of ideology on the scale, will tend to exclude God. Such an account would be inherently a-theistic.

In Gaudium et Spes, the Fathers of Vatican II took direct aim at a kind of atheism "which anticipates the liberation of man, especially through his economic and social emancipation." The Council goes on to declare that the Church, "has already repudiated and cannot cease repudiating, sorrowfully but as firmly as possible, those poisonous doctrines and actions which contradict reason and the common experience of humanity, and dethrone man from his native excellence."

The Council Fathers clearly had Communist ideology in mind with this condemnation, but the fundamental anthropological error of that ideology was rooted in an atheistic-materialist conception of man.

And as Pope John Paul II would later argue, Communism is hardly the only system that is susceptible to such an error. A consumerist society, he insisted, can make the identical mistake, effectively agreeing with the Marxist system, "in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs."

Material science alone, useful as it can be, can't tell us much about what it means to be human. It cannot answer the question of what it means to be a good man or a good woman. The Church offers answers to those questions, but she also forthrightly acknowledges that the questions themselves touch on a mystery.

Here's Gaudium et Spes: "Meanwhile every man remains to himself an unsolved puzzle, however obscurely he may perceive it. . . .To this questioning only God fully and most certainly provides an answer as He summons man to higher knowledge and humbler probing."

All of this may seem rather abstract, or at least incomplete. But the "higher knowledge and humbler probing" to which man is invited and by which man comes to know himself in the light of the Incarnation is fundamentally personal and concrete.

The longing to know oneself, to know one's own origin and purpose, is present in every human heart. And it is a longing often expressed far better in literature and poetry than in philosophical or theological prose.

What does it mean to be a good man? What does it mean to be a good woman? These are pressing questions in every age. They are all the more pressing today for the confusion about what it simply means to be, simply, human. They are not likely to become less pressing as our technology and affluen...

By Robert Royal.

Most Catholics, even well-informed Catholics, if asked who were the great medieval saints would reply with a familiar list of names: Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena. But one of the earliest among these great figures - and most conspicuous in his day - has, oddly, been almost forgotten in modern times. He was so obviously holy and multifaceted that Dante, in Paradiso, after meeting with hundreds of other saints and heroes, chose him to make the ultimate prayer to the Virgin Mary so that he, Dante, would be granted the Beatific Vision.

That forgotten saint is Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), the Mellifluous Doctor, whose feast is today. We're somewhat aware of Doctors of the Church again just now because of St. John Henry Newman's nomination to that very exclusive body (he brings their number up to only 38). Some have been given special names because of what they did. Augustine is the "doctor of grace," Aquinas the "angelic doctor," Anselm the "doctor magnificus."

Bernard is "mellifluous" because his words were regarded as flowing and sweet as honey. But in his lifetime, he was also a charismatic leader, builder, reformer, adviser to kings and other temporal rulers, and - in his role in helping to found the Knights Templar and the Second Crusade - could sting like a bee when the Church and Christendom needed to be defended (in his time, from militant Islam, which was then reconquering the Holy Land).

We tend to think these days that contemplative figures are otherworldly, that whatever virtues or progress that they achieve in the spiritual life have little, if anything, to do with our earthly grubbiness: messy politics, wars and rumors of wars, or even the multiple ways in which worldliness - sex, greed, ambition above all - corrupt religious institutions.

Bernard believed the opposite. That the spirit was essential to the right ordering of the world and keeping worldly things in their proper, secondary, place.

Even as Bernard wrote the most sublime spiritual texts (just read his commentary on the Song of Songs), he was equally adept at tackling the practical needs of his time. And he inspired others to follow him. Although he started as just another monk at the famous reform abbey of Cîteaux, it wasn't long before he founded his own monastery at Clairvaux, which attracted numerous vocations and led, by direct and indirect routes to hundreds more foundings in the Cistercian reform.

The Church today is badly divided. But the Church in Bernard's time was still worse. It faced the usual heresies among the intellectuals (He gave Peter Abelard, among others, a pretty good smackdown.) The bishops in several places, even Paris, needed to be stirred up to defend the Church against the state (sound familiar?) - a task that he succeeded in almost miraculously. But worst of all, two popes were elected simultaneously in 1130, producing a schism that he was asked to resolve. Which he also did.

And all that amidst his efforts to make peace among various actors in France, Germany, and Italy - even to prevent pogroms against Jews (hence the common Jewish name Bernard, popular even today).

Writing to his patron Can Grande della Scala, Dante says that those who wonder whether it's truly possible to ascend to the Beatific Vision should consult three texts: St. Augustine's De quantitate animae, Richard of St. Victor's "On Contemplation," and St. Bernard's On Consideration.

"Consideration" was a technical term in those days, akin to meditation, shading off into full-blown contemplation. The bulk of the work is advice to Pope Eugenius about how not to let practical matters eat up his soul. Dante had suffered under ambitious and unspiritual popes and princes, and doubtless resonated to passages such as, "Action itself certainly does not fare well unless preceded by consideration."

But recognizing the proper scope of the practical underscores the primacy of the spiritual all the more.

This puts a que...

By Randall Smith.

The French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote in his famous "memorial" about his "night of fire": "The God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob - not of the philosophers and scholars."

We can understand this desire not to turn the personal God in the Scriptures into an abstract idea. But there are good reasons not to pit the God "of the philosophers" (especially those like Thomas Aquinas) against the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Étienne Gilson pointed out that we have lived so long with the Christian notion of a God who is both personal and the highest, most fundamental cause of all things, that we often fail to realize that uniting the two was one of the great accomplishments of Christian philosophical reflection: "After so many centuries of Christian thought, it has become exceedingly difficult for us to imagine a world where the gods are not the highest reality, while that which is the most supremely real in it is not a god. It is a fact, however, that in Plato's mind the gods were inferior to the Ideas."

The problem, however, is that "an Idea is not a person; it is not even a soul; at best it is an intelligible cause - much less a person than a thing." Aristotle's "god" is an Act of self-thinking Thought," which "eternally thinks of itself, but never of us." "Perhaps we ought to love the god of Aristotle," notes Gilson wryly, "but what would be the use, since this god does not love us."

"Man knows himself," Gilson continues, and "because he knows himself, man can say 'I am.'" The question is whether Plato or Aristotle's highest principle can say the same. Is it self-aware in such a way that it can say "I am"? And is it aware of itself such that it can act freely and care for others? This remained a challenge for Greek thought.

Pope John Paul writes in his encyclical Fides et Ratio that one virtue of the Greeks' philosophy was that it "no longer rested content with the ancient myths but wanted to provide a rational foundation for their belief in the divinity." As a result, "superstitions were recognized for what they were and religion was, at least in part, purified by rational analysis." And yet something was still missing. It was the God who could say - and say in relation with others - "I am."

Plato's divine principle, the source of all Being and Goodness, was no longer like the gods in Greek mythology, capable of gross immorality. This was a purification. But what Plato's divinity had gained in purity, it lost in personality. It was a principle, not a person. It was not someone who could hear prayers or care about the lives of people in trouble.

What Christianity achieved was the unification of this fundamental principle of all being and goodness with the personhood of a God who knows and cares about human well-being. This is the God who can say both "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," and "I am who am. Tell them, I am has sent me to you." (Exodus 3:14)

We find in these two statements both the "I-thou" relationship that Jewish philosopher Martin Buber speaks about, not "I-it." And that relationship has a history and a particularity - "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." It does not remain distant and abstract. This is the God who has a relationship with particular people and who intervenes on their behalf in time and history.

And yet, this is not the "house god" of the Israelites, but the God of all creation. As Benedict XVI affirmed about the authorship of the Genesis creation account, which likely was written during the Babylonian Captivity:

At this moment the prophets opened a new page and taught Israel that it was only then that the true face of God appeared and that he was not restricted to that particular piece of land. He had never been. He had promised this piece of land to Abraham before he settled there, and he had been able to bring his people out of Egypt. He could do both things because he was not the God of one place but had power over heaven and earth. . . .And so it cam...

By Maggie Gallagher

Leo XIV has done much in the first few months of his papacy to dispel damaging misconceptions about Gregorian chant rooted in ignorance of what Vatican II actually taught.

When he stood on the loggia of St. Peter's in his very first public appearance, like a good Augustinian friar, he chanted the Regina Caeli, along with 100,000 people gathered from the four corners of the earth, speaking as many different languages as at the Tower of Babel. Yet together they could spontaneously sing the ancient hymn - in Latin - at that historic moment, showing the value of recovering Latin as the common language of the Catholic Church.

And then, to make the commitment to renewing respect for Gregorian chant clear, the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music. in conjunction with the Vatican Dicastery for Communications, almost immediately launched a social media course "Let's Sing with the Pope." The social media videos teach the next generation of Catholics how to chant parts of the Mass in Latin: the Pater Noster, the Mysterium Fidei, the Agnus Dei, Kyrie, and Sanctus. "People wanted to join in," the Institute's president, Fr. Robert Mehlhart, told the National Catholic Register in May. "And I thought, 'Well, I can help them. Let's pull off this project, and let's have people sing with the pope.'"

Mary Ann Carr Wilson is on a similar mission: to set the souls of young Catholics on fire by teaching them how to chant the Mass

Over the last 15 years, she's formalized her children's chant camps and workshops under the umbrella of Canticle.org.

Around 5000 young souls have learned to chant with her and, in the process, learned the prayers of the Mass, most often in Latin. She's also worked with more than 100 music directors and music teachers, training others in how to teach kids to chant. The demand is growing exponentially. "There's more interest than ever. I'm not able to respond to all the requests."

Archbishop Salvadore J. Cordileone of San Francisco says such children's chant camps are more than just a fun summer activity: They're a powerful way to evangelize the next generation of Catholics. "Children and young people are fascinated by the traditions of the Church. I'm not surprised that children's chant camps are a growing phenomenon, and I'm very pleased. When we offer children only childish music, they grow out of it quickly. Gregorian chant helps sustain their faith through the years."

Children as young as 7 or 8 can master chant beautifully, he points out. And even more importantly, in children's chant camps, young people are singing the Mass, not just singing at Mass

Columbus, Ohio Bishop Earl K. Fernandes has remarked:

I think it's wonderful to expose children to the tradition of the Church and sacred music. In the diocese of Columbus in many of our parishes and schools we already have children's choirs, some of which sing sacred music. We are part of a grant project at the Catholic University of America called 'Welcoming Children in Worship, ' which allows teachers and students to have access to a large number of resources in sacred music. Young people may not have much money to give to the church, but we need to create opportunities for them to use their talents for God's glory.

This summer, Archbishop Cordileone brought a children's chant camp to St. Patrick's Seminary through the Catholic Institute for Sacred Music, led by St. Patrick's sacred music professor, Dr. Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka. Singers ages eight to seventeen came together to sing at daily Mass, learn vocal technique, and read chant notation to develop a deeper understanding of what the Mass is, and exercise opportunities for fellowship, personal prayer, and Confession.

But this summer's chant camp is just the launchpad of an ambitious new youth chorister program, a plan for liturgical renewal that will help build a culture of Gregorian chant and active participation in the Mass for thousands of next-gen Catholics throughout the Bay Area and bey...

By Anthony Esolen

A man with the dopiest face imaginable, always ready to break into a broad grin and a goofy laugh, is talking to Joe the Bartender about the only day he ever went to school. His name is Crazy Guggenheim.

"The teacher, she asks me, Who wrote the Constitution? I said, I didn't do it! So she sends me straight home, and she says, You stay there till you can bring back your father! My father, Joe, he stuck up for me. He says to the teacher, Why did you send my kid home from school? She says, I asked him who wrote the Constitution, and he says he didn't do it. And my father says, If my kid says he didn't do it, he didn't do it!"

A few minutes later, Crazy says that when he was a boy, he had to support his big family - "There were twelve of us, Joe, six boys and five girls!" - first by taking on a Polish champion who outweighed him by sixty pounds - "He beat my brains out," says Crazy - and then by singing.

"I can sing anything, Joe," he says. Joe rolls his eyes and can't believe it. We don't, either. So he tells "Mr. Dennehy," the unseen character whom Joe addresses by facing the audience, to play Number Three on the jukebox.

The show's orchestra then takes up the love song, "Because of You." And Frank Fontaine, "Crazy," sings the first verse, in a powerful and beautiful baritone, with just a trace now and then of his character's comic manner. Joe - Jackie Gleason as the straight man - looks toward the audience in astonishment and appreciation.

No snark, nothing off-color, no politics, nothing but pure merriment.

And why am I writing this for Roman Catholics?

That's what both Frank Fontaine and Jackie Gleason were. Frank was a devout Catholic, of rock-solid devotion to the Church and to his wife and their eleven children. Jackie was a bad Catholic, with a soured marriage and a wayward eye. "Jackie doesn't practice it," said Jack Haley, the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, himself a devoted Catholic, "but he believes it."

Both Fontaine and Gleason were tireless in works of charity, and for Fontaine that was the more impressive, as he tailored his career so that he could spend most of his time with his family, and thus he had nowhere near the means that Jackie had.

Frank Fontaine married his high school sweetheart Alma in 1937, when she was 17, and he was two days shy of his own 17th birthday, and no, it wasn't a shotgun wedding. Their first child was born in 1939. He then left school and went immediately to work, performing in clubs in the Boston area, where they lived. He had developed the Crazy Guggenheim voice and character when he was just eight years old, to make his buddies laugh, he said, rather than beating each other up all the time.

After Pearl Harbor, he spent three years as a soldier in the army. Even so, he and Alma had eleven children, nine boys and two girls. One of his boys appears at the end of the sketch I have described above, after Joe tells Crazy to bring him in. The audience breaks out into laughter before we even see a thing. It's a boy who looks like Dad and who has adopted Dad's "Crazy" manner, basically doing an impersonation of his own father.

Fontaine died of a massive coronary in 1978, when he was just 58 years old. He was in Spokane, Washington, performing in a charity benefit. Gleason, never in good health, overweight and too much given to alcohol and nicotine, died in 1987 at the age of 71. His funeral Mass was celebrated in Miami, in the cathedral.

Good humor requires a certain relaxation. You can't have fun with people on edge, spying out things to be offended by, cultivating touchiness and sinning against charity. Merriment takes good humor and runs or dances with it.

You cannot be merry if you are concerned always with how you look to other people. You can also not be merry - this is harder to describe - if you possess no innocence of heart; if you have banished or stunted or spoiled or warped the child within you.

Children loved Crazy Guggenheim; I certainly did, when I was a lit...