By Randall Smith. But first a note from Robert Royal: At TCT, we try to maintain a certain serenity rooted in our belief that God is, ultimately, in control. Of everything. But we also still cannot take this mission too casually. We're at the point in our mid-year fundraising that donations are flagging. That's understandable, but something we cannot accept. We're still a long way from where we need to be to be sure that this mission continues for 2024, with all its challenges, let alone in coming years. I can't say this clearly enough: if you believe in this mission, what are you waiting for? I know that in the past you've responded to our needs. I'm calling on everyone to support the work of TCT. Now. Without delay. The situation is dire. The need great. Click the button. Do the right thing. Support The Catholic Thing. Now for Professor Smith's column...

So I read that the pope was interviewed on 60 Minutes. I had the reaction most people probably did: "Wow, is that show still on?" I mean, I haven't seen 60 Minutes in years. I don't watch network television anymore - who does? - but it's nice to know that someone is still trying to keep alive those old television traditions. I fear it's probably a losing battle, though. It's likely that 60 Minutes will soon be like Sexagesima Sunday.

People will ask: "What's that?" and then an AI program will tell them a partially true story about it.

Like most people, I only read the headlines about the papal interview, not the interview itself. (Who has time for that?) So, I take it that the pope said something about people being "stuck in a box" in the past, not able to move on, and that this is suicidal. And there was something else about "madness." All this seems to have been controversial. I'm not sure why. I mean, I'm pretty sure I understand what he must be talking about.

Haven't we all been struck by those people who are "stuck in the past" as though it's still 1965 or 1972? Some Catholics are still playing the same tune about "the spirit of the Council," rather than paying attention to what the documents of the Second Vatican Council actually say. There are still aging boomers strumming out on their guitars the old St.

Louis Jesuit hymns from the 1970s, thinking it's "for the young people," when "the young people" haven't been interested in music like that for decades - if they ever were. Young people are increasingly falling to their knees to receive Communion, learning standard Gregorian chants and hymns by Thomas Tallis, Josquin des Pres, and John Taverner.

We still have aging church leaders who think that modernist church designs with white-washed walls and "church-in-the-round" are "cutting edge," even though that style also went out of fashion decades ago, and congregations are increasingly opting for contemporary churches that hearken back to classical, Romanesque, or Gothic styles. You want to say, "Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson are dead. Move on. Don't get stuck in that modernist box - literally.

And we still have church leaders who seem to think that the way to draw people back to Mass is to make it more "hip," even though "hip" isn't a term anyone uses anymore. I only use it with my students when I want to look especially nerdy. I say something like, "Hey, I'm really hip," which shows how totally out of touch I am, and they all laugh.

For some reason, these 1960s holdovers seem to think that stripping away all the beauty of the Church, the liturgy, and the vestments will make the Mass more "approachable." All I know is that more congregations, especially those with young people and families, are opting for more beautiful churches, more solemn liturgies, and more traditional music.

So too, the religious orders that have re-dedicated themselves to their traditional roots are thriving; those that abandoned them after the Council are dying or dead.

As is often said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and exp...

By Robert Royal. But first a note. We hope you all had a restful Memorial Day with family and friends. But we're back now and need to do business again. Our mid- year funding campaign resumes with good progress made and more that needs to be made. Soon. We intend to be here for everything that will happen in the Church and the world for the rest of 2024 and beyond. Are you willing to do your part? Setting up automatic monthly donations is easy, and a possible option for those who can't give much all at once. And there are other ways: all fully tax deductible. If you click the button you can see several ways by which you can make your own, personal contribution to the ongoing work of The Catholic Thing. Please do so, today. And now for Robert Royal's column...

Sociology is the softest of the sciences - according to sociological surveys - and its practitioners, with noteworthy exceptions, largely lean - and more than lean - Left. Which may explain why a recent New York Times essay seems puzzled and not a little irritated by the fact, noted by the sociologists, that conservatives are measurably happier (and have been for half a century) than liberals in our radically rabid era.

Their explanations tend towards the judgment that conservative happiness may be deplorable - for instance, that conservatives are (allegedly) less troubled than their liberal counterparts by inequality and injustice in the world. But it doesn't take much insight into human existence to see that, on the question of happiness, the sociological dogs may be barking up several wrong sociological trees.

Let's stipulate at the outset that, to a reflective mind, it's not immediately evident what it means to be conservative or liberal. Pope Francis recently remarked in his CBS interview that conservatism is "a suicidal attitude," characterizing conservatives as people whose hearts are "closed up inside a dogmatic box." The world is wide, and it may indeed contain such strange creatures.

But that rather illiberal judgment doesn't come within a country mile of the vast majority of persons - inside or outside the Church - whom a sociologist would classify as a conservative.

Meanwhile, recent surveys show that almost all younger priests in the United States and large majorities in Germany (!) are what the pope would doubtless regard as conservative without showing any signs of clinging to the past and failing to engage the present. In fact, for many of us, their resistance to many currents in the world offers a viable shelter while the world - especially the Western world - seems hell-bent on suicide.

But for the sake of a manageable argument, let's say that the sociologists have a street-level understanding of who counts as a conservative. And for the same reason, let's accept that what they mean by such a person being happier than liberals is also - in ordinary, everyday terms - an adequate description. The reasons for this, however, seem to lie elsewhere than usually thought.

Now for today's column..

In philosophical terms, happiness, too, is no simple term to define. I've written here recently about what Christians might learn - actually re-learn - from the great ancient pagan philosophers. Happiness in a high, rational sense among the ancient philosophers was the aim of human life. And Christianity took over that concept from the pagans with obvious additions about the happiness we'll find in the next life.

The Dominican Servais Pinckaers, whose book The Sources of Christian Ethics remains our best account of the subject, writes: "quite frankly. . .there would have been no Christian theology or 'philosophy' were it not for the contribution of Greek wisdom."

To be clear, happiness in both its ordinary and deeper meaning does not mean an absence of suffering and disappointments. As any mature person knows, those are features of the world in which we live and come to all of us in greater or lesser degree.

Rather, it means the sense of satisfaction of training ours...

By Brad Miner

"A good chaplain is as valuable as a good general." - British field marshal Sir Douglas Haig, 1915

Growing up in Worthington, Ohio, Memorial Day was always accompanied - as where was it not - by a parade down High Street that included veterans, our high school band, some active-duty servicemen, and lots of spectators.

There were many WWII-era soldiers, Marines, and sailors in our town, and a few veterans of World War I too.

My memories are vivid of flags on veteran graves at Walnut Grove Cemetery and of band members in their full, fall uniforms, especially one 80+-degree day, on which occasion a clarinet player collapsed from heat exhaustion after the mile-long parade.

That cemetery is always the parade's terminus (1300 veterans are buried there). A trumpeter always steps forward to play "Taps."

These days the band members wear shorts and t-shirts, and the procession is followed by medical personnel - and plenty of water.

A diminishing number of WWII vets remain among us, but the last American veteran of WWI, Frank Buckles, died on February 27, 2011 - at the tender age of 110.

And it's CPL Buckles' war, the Great War, I want to discuss today, in thoughts prompted by a remarkable exhibit at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri.

Sacred Service, which opened this past Thursday, presents stories about (and artifacts from) chaplains who ministered to soldiers between 1914 and 1918. All images herein are from the exhibit.

The "war to end all wars" was horribly bloody and led to the deaths of "an estimated 9 million soldiers . . . and 23 million wounded, plus up to 8 million civilian deaths from numerous causes." There were 37,000,000 casualties in all. And the war was followed by the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that killed as many as 50,000,000 worldwide. One easily grasps why Gertrude Stein (with an assist from Ernest Hemingway) described the post-war cohort as the "Lost Generation."

The Second World War would dwarf those awful statistics, but that's another story for another Memorial Day.

Unlike WWII, WWI was not a war of ideology. It was more clearly an internecine conflict in which the fighting was partly among consanguineous ruling families and formerly (mostly) friendly allies.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were cousins - Wilhelm and George were first cousins. George and Nicholas were also first cousins, and Wilhelm and Nicholas were third cousins. This had a great deal to do with Queen Victoria's nine offspring, all of whom married into royal and noble families. It was the Queen's (failed) plan for European peace.

These were all Christian leaders from nations (and although not directly consanguineous, this also applied to France, Italy, and most other combatant countries) whose day-to-day social, political, and economic traditions were more alike than different.

Still, the Great War was seen as a kind of holy crusade. Sacred Service notes that "animated feelings of national pride and religious fervor to nations at the brink of war. The 'Spirit of 1914' descended on European cities, towns and churches."

It was madness, as are all wars, even if the casus belli are justified. I don't intend to engage that further, and, in any case, whatever may result from a war - whether peace or simply the next war - the courage of the combatants should be a lasting legacy and inspiration.

The image above of the charm worn by chaplains bears the inscription: "A.E.F. COMRADES IN SERVICE '17 '18 NEH. 4:18." The citation from Nehemiah is, "And each of the builders had his sword girded at his side while he built. The man who sounded the trumpet was beside me." The initial letters stand for Allied Expeditionary Force.

When Rev. John J. Allan, who served in both world wars and would become the Salvation Army's Chief of Staff in 1946, was reassigned to the General Headquarters Chaplain Office, he recommended Rabbi Elkan Voorsanger as his replacement as...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Many readers will be familiar with the story of Nicholas of Myra at the Council of Nicaea. It's said that when the saint heard Arius speak heresy, he was so angered that he strode across the Council floor and struck the heresiarch in the face. Now, that behavior is not to be imitated or encouraged. Still, there's something admirable in it. Perhaps Nicholas couldn't control his temper.

But at least he took dogma seriously and understood that a dogmatic error would empty Christianity of meaning, of all goodness and beauty. At least he saw dogma as something worth fighting about.

Now, that account might seem out of season. In fact, however, it's perfectly suited to today's feast - not only because it concerns the Trinity, but because it brings out the importance of dogma itself.

Up until today, the Church's liturgical calendar has commemorated and celebrated historical events: Christmas, the Presentation, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, etc. These are easier to get our minds around because they happened in our world and involved people like us. We can point to the place and imagine the scene. But today's feast is not about an event. It's about a dogma, and that's always a more difficult thing to convey.

So perhaps we should just linger on the importance of dogma itself and our celebration of it. We must learn to appreciate, as Nicholas did, that the drama is in the dogma.

It will strike many people (including many Catholics) these days as weird, perhaps even unhealthy, to celebrate a dogma. The word is rightly associated with authority and requirements of belief - abhorrent things to our culture. Worse still, today we celebrate the highest dogma, the most dogmatic of all dogmas, if you will. That God is One in Three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That each Person is entirely God and together they are one God.

That the Father generates the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit is the love or the bond between them.

Most people will find that pretty boring stuff and desire more stories and events - more action. But this dogma is the purpose of all the other feasts, of everything else that we've celebrated thus far. We might have the impression that Trinity Sunday is just an addendum to Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. But God entered the world, suffered, died, and rose again precisely to communicate the Trinity - in both senses of the word communicate.

That is, to reveal the inner life of the Triune God and to impart that life to man.

The modern mentality despises religious dogmas. This is at the heart of the liberalism in religion that Newman set himself against. One of the worst modern myths is that dogma doesn't matter. What matters is that we all just love one another, do good, serve the poor, etc. At best dogma gets in the way. At worst, it leads to intolerance and persecution.

But the human mind is made for dogmas. If you close the door on them, they'll just sneak in another way. The religion of the day scorns traditional religious dogma only to admit dogmas of its own, which are extraordinarily intolerant. So, it does matter what you believe. And those who claim otherwise tend to be dogmatic about that. Modernism begins by convincing the Church's teachers to set aside dogma only to bring it back with a vengeance.

Now, the reason to believe in and to celebrate the dogma of the Trinity is because it is true. It hasn't been revealed to us for any utilitarian purpose - not to build up civilization or save the West or any such thing. We celebrate this dogma because God is. And He should be adored because He is and as He is. So the prayers for today's Mass speak of God simply as He is and not about anything He has done.

That said, to live according to dogma also brings great benefit, as devotion to the truth always does. To believe and live the truth of the Triune God frees us from the slavery of this world. It relatives everything else and proclaims our independence from any created thing. Th...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Thirty years ago, St. John Paul the Great launched two new pontifical academies, the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences (PASS) and the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV). It was the heady days of the 1990s, when the papal magisterium offered a bold defense of life and liberty according to Gospel principles.

The Cold War had been won, not least by a revolution of conscience in Poland. How then to envision the free society? How then to build a civilization of love in the face of the West's spreading culture of death?

The breadth and depth of the encyclicals of the 1990s - Redemptoris missio (1990), Centesimus annus (1991), Veritatis splendor (1993), Evangelium vitae (1995), Ut unum sint (1995), Fides et ratio (1998) - were simply astonishing. The John Paul-Ratzinger partnership also produced, for good measure, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992). It was the single most impressive decade for the papal magisterium in the history of the Church.

Into that fervent intellectual ferment, John Paul wished to insert the two new academies, the better to inform the Church's social teaching. The academies brought together leading scholars - Nobel laureates included - across disciplines so that the Church would have access to the best scholarship in reading the signs of the times in the social order. The scholar-pope, assisted by his scholar-prefect, saw the value of gathering leading scholars, not all of whom were Catholic or even Christian.

Rome today isn't what it was in 1994. Two recent Roman conferences highlighted just that.

Dr. Jérôme Lejeune, the father of modern genetics who discovered the chromosomes that cause Down syndrome, was a close friend of John Paul. He was passionately pro-life, heartbroken that eugenicists were using his research to abort babies diagnosed in utero. Lejeune and John Paul had lunch together just hours before the Holy Father was shot in St. Peter's Square. John Paul asked Lejeune to draft the founding statutes of the PAV, and appointed him its first president in February 1994. Lejeune would die on Easter Sunday that same year.

Under its current president, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the PAV is no longer the intellectual heart of the pro-life movement in Rome. It often confuses what it should clarify. Consequently, those committed to Lejeune's original vision hold their own conferences now. The recent Roman one on 17th-18th May included an address from papal biographer George Weigel, who charged Paglia's PAV with "betray[ing] its founding president." Weigel said that a recent PAV book offered "an anti-biblical and anti-metaphysical anthropology that would have been completely foreign, indeed abhorrent, to both Jérôme Lejeune and John Paul II."

The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences isn't what it was intended to be either. Its president for a very happy decade, 2004-2014, was Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon. Its less happy chancellor was Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentinian philosopher of no particular distinction. But under John Paul and Benedict XVI, with Professor Glendon in charge, PASS did admirable work and Sánchez was kept largely in check.

Under Pope Francis though, Bishop Sánchez busily set about turning PASS into something of an NGO, agitating on various causes, climate change primary among them, with academicians issuing policy declarations instead of scholarly analysis. Sánchez clearly desired to be a political player, inviting Bolivia's Marxist president Evo Morales to address the PASS plenary in 2016, along with Senator Bernie Sanders. So thrilled was Sanders with the opportunity for a Vatican photo-op, he broke off campaigning against Hillary Clinton for the trip.

In 2018, knowing that Pope Francis was eager to conclude an agreement with the Chinese communist party, Sánchez took a tour of China and gave his assessment upon returning.

"Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese," said Sánche...

By David Carlin

But first a note from Robert Royal: We're still doing well in our mid-year fundraising, but we're slowing down. And that just can't happen. Not until we get to where we need to be for the rest of 2024 and beyond. If you need convincing, just look at today's column. David Carlin makes a strong case about not only President Biden but all those Catholics like him who have rationalized their heresies way beyond being mere "cafeteria Catholics." To use an old phrase, they've embraced a different Gospel. And are proud of it. What then is to be done? To tell the truth, truthfully. And not to stop even when we're ignored, mocked, called "suicidal" conservatives, and much more. So don't wait to be generous. The challenges aren't slowing down. Neither should we.

Now for the column...

Head of the Democratic Party.

Joe Biden, in addition to holding the exalted title of President of the United States of America, holds a number of informal and unofficial titles. For instance:

Commander-in-chief of the US armed forces.

The second Catholic President of the USA.

Leader of the free world.

Father of Hunter Biden.

"Cafeteria Catholic" - this title having been recently bestowed upon him by the cardinal-archbishop of Washington D.C., Wilton Gregory.

America's foremost champion of abortion rights.

America's foremost champion of transgender rights.

John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic President, was no model of Catholic virtue, at least when it came to the Sixth Commandment. But Kennedy took the trouble to keep his sexual sins concealed from all but his friends and a co-operative press. He didn't broadcast them. We (the general public) didn't learn about them until after his death. More important still from a Catholic point of view, Kennedy, unlike Mr. Biden, didn't make public pronouncements declaring certain sins are morally good.

America's foremost champion of homosexual rights.

He didn't, for instance, shout from the rooftops that fornication is good and adultery even better.

But something like that is what President Biden is doing. When it comes to religion, Biden is not a man who presents himself to the public as a person who grew up Catholic but has long since outgrown that childishness and now embraces an anti-Catholic view of the world and of morality. Far from it. He presents himself as a true Catholic. "When you see me, you see a Catholic, a genuine Catholic, the real thing."

And so when he tells the nation, including the very sizeable Catholic portion of the nation, that abortion and homosexuality and transgenderism are morally allowable and deserve legal protection, he is in effect saying, "I can assure you from the point of view of a true Catholic that abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism are morally permissible things. And not only morally permissible but deserving of legal protection."

A theologically unsophisticated person can hardly be blamed for saying to himself/herself, "If Biden, a good Catholic who must, after a lifetime of Catholicism, understand the teachings of his religion, says this, isn't it almost certain that he's correct? And if an occasional bishop slaps him on the wrist for saying such things, isn't the weakness of the slap a clear indication that the bishop doesn't truly disagree with him?"

In 1984, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, a New York Catholic, was running for Vice-President on a Democratic platform that endorsed the right to abortion. Cardinal John O'Connor of New York was quite blunt in denouncing her for that.

Mario Cuomo, like Ferraro a Catholic Democrat, and at the time governor of New York, rushed to the defense, delivering a then-famous speech at the University of Notre Dame arguing that it's right and proper for a Catholic politician to be "personally opposed" but publicly indulgent.

That may sound like Biden's defense of abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism. But it wasn't. Just as Dan Quayle (according to Lloyd Bentsen) was no Jack Kennedy, so Joe Biden is no Mario Cuomo. Cuom...

By Michael Pakaluk

Reflect with me, in Mary's month, on what we learn about Mary - her personality and her virtues - from the Magnificat. I don't mean what it says, so much as (i) the fact that we have it at all; (ii) the fact that she composed it; and (iii) what it does not say.

First, the fact that we have it at all. (Luke 1:46-55) We take this for granted, but think carefully. Luke probably wrote his Gospel in the late 50s, which means that Mary would have composed her hymn 60 years earlier or so. Now imagine you are an old person in your 80s, and someone asks you to repeat something you said in your 20s. Also, we have it only from Luke. Mary's hymn is not mentioned in any other Gospel or ancient source.

Apparently, if Luke had not hunted it down, it would have been lost.

What do we learn about Mary from these mere facts? We must presume, I think, that Mary recited the Magnificat frequently, if not every day, for sixty years. Since the Magnificat is a hymn of thanksgiving, that she recited it often, shows that gratitude was a leading virtue for her.

Also, it shows how fully she embraced Our Lord's emphasis on the importance of persistence in prayer. Obviously, since she had composed the hymn and had recited it heartily from the start, the "merit" of praying it often, for her, would accrue to a large extent from the mere consistency of the repetition.

Then too, it shows that Mary loved vocal prayer. Her life in fact became a "type" of the Church, which in the Divine Office recites the Magnificat daily.

The fact that Luke deliberately had to seek out the hymn shows how much Mary loved private life and the intimacy of the home. With marvelous discretion and modesty, she seemed intent on "keeping" this glorious hymn in her heart, as an act of love expressed to the Lord, in her relationship with him. Hers was almost the opposite of our own impulse to "share," display, and seek "likes" on social media. (Consider the image of Guadalupe, which - as everyone says - expresses tremendous modesty.)

Second, that she composed it. The Magnificat bears resemblance to great hymns in the Old Testament, such as the Song of Miriam (Exodus 15:20-27), and the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1-10), and yet it is no mere adaptation of these. It is fully its own work, reflecting Mary's own situation. Moreover, it is not some clumsy production but, as everyone has acknowledged, a masterpiece.

Admittedly, we cannot discount the contribution of the Spirit, but it seems that Mary composed her hymn before visiting Elizabeth. At the Visitation, she sang a hymn she had already composed.

What do we learn about Mary from these facts? We learn that she loved Scripture, recited it frequently, and probably memorized her favorite parts: invention requires a basis. We learn that she desired not simply to follow what Scripture taught, but also to imitate the very voice of Scripture itself - the way that someone who loved (say) the writing of John Henry Newman might copy out sentences, and practice writing his own sentences on the same pattern, in the hopes of imbibing Newman's style.

How fitting her entrancement would be, for someone who would conceive The Word behind all Scripture!

Furthermore, no one writes just one poem, just one song, just one essay. Certainly, no one writes just one thing of a certain kind, which then turns out to be a masterpiece. Therefore, she must have composed and sung many hymns. It seems plausible that, frequently, when she visited "her kinswoman" or others she would share a song she had just composed. But this then reveals that she was fond of the stylized and rehearsed.

She did not, like us, favor the spontaneous; she saw no contradiction between the stylized and the sincere.

That she composed songs in imitation of Miriam and Hannah shows that, for her, God's relationship to his people was a living thing, not a dead tradition; she saw herself as taking a present and equal part within that long covenant history. She expects God to act ...

By Francis X. Maier

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow, Thursday, May 23 at 8 PM Eastern, to EWTN for a new episode of 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss recent developments in the Church in Rome and in the U.S. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. And don't forget TCT's mid-year funding campaign is in full swing!

Now for today's column...

As I've noted here in the past, Georges Bernanos, author of The Diary of a Country Priest and Under Satan's Sun, is one of my favorite writers. The reasons are simple. He was profoundly Catholic. He had a keen sense of irony. And he was relentlessly candid. Honesty matters, and Bernanos never avoided it, because nothing good comes from evading or minimizing uncomfortable truths.

Candor marked all of his final works. Among them is an essay written in the aftermath of World War II (and collected here) titled "Why Freedom?" In it, he argued that "An inhuman civilization is, obviously, one that is based on a false or incomplete definition of man." And that, said Bernanos, was exactly what he saw taking shape.

Thanks to modern technologies and their power to shape thought, appetites, and opinion, modern man was creating a civilization "in the image of a prodigiously diminished and shrunken man, a man no longer made in the image of God, but in the image of a speculator - that is to say, of a man reduced to two states, both equally miserable, of consumer and taxpayer."

The result would inevitably be a crippled sense of our humanity and the need "above all to re-spiritualize man."

Bernanos wrote those words through the lens of his native French culture nearly eighty years ago. They're even more urgently relevant today in an American culture soaked in technological addictions that promise freedom, but too often bear fruit in a "diminished and shrunken" concept of man.

Americans have a genius for toolmaking and practical innovation rooted in our Protestant (Calvinist) and Enlightenment founding. We have a similar genius for dismissing the past and its wisdom. We define ourselves as a novus ordo seclorum, a "new order of the ages" - words stamped on the Great Seal of the United States.

But what does any of the above mean today for American Catholics? That's the question at the heart of Kenneth Craycraft's excellent new book Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America. Craycraft is a lawyer and Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Cincinnati's Mount St. Mary's Seminary and School of Theology. His command of both the law and Catholic beliefs gives him a uniquely valuable perspective on the American character. . .and how Catholics can (and can't) faithfully engage it.

Craycraft has a clear, lean style, and like Bernanos, he starts with some unvarnished facts: "Catholics in the United States today are liberal Protestants before we are anything else. To form our moral lives as Catholics is a constant battle to overcome the liberal Protestantism that we began to consume with our mother's milk." As a result, he argues, our political party affiliation can often be irrelevant because our culture is permeated by a false anthropology, an idea of humanity absent the image of God.

For Craycraft, "This anthropology is characterized by at least two elements: (1) radical personal autonomy and (2) an absolute commitment to individualism characterized by the language of 'individual rights' as the basic moral foundation (or indeed, for some, the only measure of moral action)."

The issues that divide America's right and left may have real substance, but the vocabulary of the debates is shaped by a closed system of classically liberal thought. In effect, "we speak a common language of liberalism with partisan accents." Thus,

Many of us American Catholics are liberals before we are Catholic. . .we subscribe to and pra...

By Father Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.

But first a note from Robert Royal: As Father Weinandy rightly points out today, Pope Francis misunderstands the Church in the United States, particularly what conservative Catholics here are and do. Unlike the dead clinging to dogmas that the pope believes exists on these shores among many bishops, priests, and laity, our adherence to the full tradition of the Faith is quite dynamic, probably more dynamic - for all the challenges - than any place on earth outside Africa.

Now for today's column...

CBS's 60 Minutes is the premier television interview program in the United States. Over the years, it has held conversations with politicians, heads of state, royalty, celebrities, actors, athletes, and other people of note. This past Sunday, May 19, it aired an interview with Pope Francis, the first time that 60 Minutes has interviewed a Roman Pontiff.

Pope Francis appears to enjoy giving interviews, and he is very good at giving them. He has a common touch in his manner of expressing himself, employing words and phrases that catch the imagination of his listeners. He comes across as one who understands and can speak to ordinary men and women. In so doing, he elicits an affectionate response. This was evident in the 60 Minutes interview. He smiles. He makes people laugh. He can even tell a good joke. He endears people to himself. People cannot help but love Pope Francis, and this is a good thing.

That said, there is also another trait that has become apparent when the topic of the Catholic Church in the United States arises. On this subject, one can be assured that Pope Francis will offer some criticisms. He perceives the American Catholic Church as conservative - particularly many of the American Bishops. This concern again became evident in the 60 Minutes interview.

When asked by Norah O'Donnell about the criticisms he has encountered from American Catholics, Pope Francis first stated that a conservative is someone who "clings to something and does not want to see beyond that." Conservatism has no future. It only has a past to which it tightly cleaves. In this light, Pope Francis made two further inter-related points. He emphatically stated that to be closed to change is "suicidal." This suicidal mindset appears to rest on the presumption that, if one is not open to the contemporary work of the Holy Spirit, one dies as the Church continues to develop.

Moreover, to be suicidal means that a conservative shuts himself up into a "dogmatic box." Francis admits that the Church's doctrinal and moral tradition must be "considered," but it cannot hinder further development. The dogmatic box may be filled with the Church's traditional doctrinal and moral teaching, but if the box remains locked, the doctrines and moral teaching that are contained within it serve no useful purpose. They become dead doctrines, and so become incapable of addressing the needs of today.

When asked about the blessing of homosexual couples, Pope Francis insisted that homosexual couples are not blessed as couples, but the individuals are blessed. The Church cannot bless the homosexual union, it can only bless the individuals who are in that union.

To most people, this appears to be a distinction without a difference. If a minister is standing before two men or two women who are holding hands and pronounces a blessing over them, he is not simply blessing them as individuals, he is blessing them as a couple, a couple who commit homosexual acts. To think otherwise would be a charade. To bless them as an active homosexual couple is blasphemous, for one cannot attempt to bless a sin as if it was morally virtuous.

Many have noted the irony that Pope Francis cozies up to the likes of New Ways Ministry and Fr. James Martin, S.J., who actively affirm and foster homosexual lifestyles. Yet he never praises the courage of those who have homosexual tendencies and live a chaste life. It's as if such a virtuous life is unimaginable.

Such ...

By Anthony Esolen

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Now for today's column...

When I think of the generation of Catholic churchmen, religious sisters, theologians, and songsters who were coming into their revolution when I was a boy, and who have never admitted a single error, not even in such non-doctrinal matters as what they did to works of art in their churches, I imagine elderly hippies returning to Woodstock with canes and walkers, shimmying to the piped-in blaring of Sly and the Family Stone. "Bliss it was in those days to be alive!" says Wordsworth, looking back on the hopes he held in the French revolution.

But Wordsworth grew up. He came to view those days with a critical and judicious eye. With age, we hope, comes wisdom, and with that wisdom, regret for the sins and follies we all commit, most especially when we follow the spirit of the age and not the Holy Spirit, who does not change, and who is beyond all ages.

Yet I meet, all the time, stuck-in-the-mud progressives, fuddy-duddies of a revolution that has come and gone and left a lot of rubble behind, with very little institutional, intellectual, artistic, and cultural compensation. The scandal surrounding the artist Marco Rupnik is a case in point.

The man was a monster. If you invented his character for a novel, nobody would believe it; his filthy deeds seem to out of a bad rehash of The Exorcist. But setting that aside, I am astonished that anybody still admires his dull old programmatic pseudo-primitive art. What's next, doing the Watusi as you come back from Communion?

I got the same feeling as I read the reactions to a commencement speech, at Benedictine College, given by Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs. Benedictine is an hour's drive away from the stadium, so it was a natural choice for the event's coordinators to make, as Butker is a devout Catholic, and Benedictine is a faithfully Catholic college.

In his speech, the young man said that the greatest of all titles for a woman is that of a wife and mother, and as he did so he praised his wife, and came to the point of tears. For saying what was not controversial when I was young, but what is abominated now, he has been the target of abuse and hatred.

The Sisters of Saint Scholastica, whose forebears founded Benedictine College, sneered at the "limited" vision of homemaking that Butker admired, preferring an attitudinal homemaking which, it appears, obviates the need to have a home and to make something of it. Spiritual diapers don't get your hands dirty.

Of course, Butker suggested only what Chesterton suggested long ago, to the effect that modern women rose up and said they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers. How can it be "limiting," Chesterton said, to bring the universe to a child you love, but a spree of liberty to do one or two things hour after hour for bosses and strangers?

I could say that the place-kicker was the truly countercultural player in this controversy, since every engine of mass media and mass entertainment, almost every school and college, every profession, and all the powers and principalities within the Church and without, are ranged against him and his wife, reveling in the delight of making him look like a knuckle-dragging brute or nitwit, and his wife like a poor oppressed patsy.

Surely, the ...