The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia .

"Lord, teach us to pray." This appeal by the disciples arises from their immediate circumstances. They had just seen Christ Himself praying. And they knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray. It's reasonable now that they should ask the same of our Lord.

Lord, teach us to pray. This appeal arises, more importantly, from the depth of the human heart. It's an appeal that every disciple should make to our Lord. We are created for prayer, for that intimate conversation with God, to walk with Him in the cool of the day. But we don't know how to pray as we ought. We need to be instructed.

And because our wounded human nature goes astray, we need to be corrected as well. Until we recognize the futility of our own prayer, we won't really begin to pray. Implicit in the appeal of the disciples is that there's a right way to pray - and thus a wrong one as well. Indeed, human history is full of mistaken ways of prayer and worship - some silly, some dangerous, all unworthy of both God and man. Jesus has come to give us the way of prayer.

So Jesus gives us the first and last word of prayer: Father. "When you pray, say: Father." The bluntness of Luke's account shocks us into realizing the reality of the One to Whom we pray. He is eternally Father and has introduced us into His Son. Our divine sonship is the heart of all prayer.

Prayer is, first of all, the ascent of our heart and mind to the Father. That's fundamental to all prayer. "For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, 'Abba, Father!'" (Romans 8:15)

Saint Josemaria Escrivá experienced this gift of prayer when, travelling in a streetcar in Madrid, he suddenly felt a clarity about his sonship: "I had learned to call God Father, as in the Our Father, from my childhood. But feeling, seeing, being amazed at that desire of God that we be his children. . .that was on the street and in a streetcar. For an hour or an hour and a half, I don't know, I had to shout Abba, Pater!"

Abba. Father. If we go no further than that one word, spending all our time saying it with faith and love, then we have prayed well.

But we do go further. The simple acknowledgement of God as Father establishes the proper order of things. It provides the context in which all other prayer is made. Our prayer ascends to the Father so that His grace will also descend to us. The word "pray" really means to ask. Indeed, most of us think of prayer as only petition. Our Father doesn't mind our petitions. So the remainder of our Lord's instruction addresses the confidence we should have in asking, a confidence that comes only from knowing God as Father.

Jesus gives us an odd parable (typical for Luke's Gospel) about a not-very-good friend whose "generosity" is won over by persistence. Point is, God is better than that friend. If a bad friend can be won over by persistence, how much more your loving Father by a simple asking.

The instruction concludes with a surprising but logical statement: "If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" It's surprising because, well, He calls us wicked. He's not wrong, but maybe He could have been gentler?

Anyhow, the statement reminds us of the distance between our goodness and the Father's. We should not think of Him as being good to us as we are good to others, not like that friend in the parable. His goodness infinitely surpasses ours. We should not think of the Father's goodness according to our own constrained goodness. Nor should we estimate His Fatherhood according to our poor image of it. As Tertullian said, "Nemo tam pater quam Pater - no one is so much a father as the Father." (See CCC 239)

But the conclusion is also surprising, because our Lord introduces the gift of the Spirit at the very end of the instruction. How much more will the Father ...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Last Sunday, to mark the anniversary of the moon landing in 1969, Pope Leo XIV had a video call with Buzz Aldrin, who was delighted and moved to speak with the Holy Father and receive his blessing.

Robert Prevost was 13 that summer of '69 and, like millions of other teenage boys, certainly gazed up at the sky in wonder. That fall, he would leave Chicago for a high school seminary in Michigan.

I hope that Pope Leo likes anniversaries. I do. They liberate us from what is happening right now, and remind us of happier things, of the various intrusions of Providence into history. Or perhaps better to say, remind us to be more attentive to the Providence that does not intrude so much as sustain and support and surround us.

Readers will appreciate that I am particularly keen on anniversaries that fall on July 20th, the date of my priestly ordination. I was ordained in 2002, just a few days before St. John Paul the Great arrived in Canada for World Youth Day; this year was my 23rd anniversary.

By happenstance, I spent the anniversary on a four-day train journey across Canada. In the age of cheap air travel, no one takes the train across Canada except to take the train across Canada. Via Rail's The Canadian goes from Vancouver to Toronto twice a week; I have wanted to go for some time, an experience of the vastness of Canada and its history.

It was, as it happens, on July 20th, 1871, that British Columbia joined the fledgling Dominion of Canada. A transcontinental railway was a condition of joining, even though it seemed utterly impossible at the time. In 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation, the United States had purchased Alaska, and not a few Canadians thought that Americans might desire more northern territory. So, a railway was built in a mere ten years from first sod turning to the last spike.

Pierre Berton, Canada's preeminent popular historian, wrote in 1970 - a year after the lunar landing - that while in the 1850s there was fanciful rhetoric about one day hearing "a steam whistle in the passes of the Rockies. . .a century later, public figures were prophesying with equal recklessness and incidental accuracy that their children would live to see a man land on the moon."

"The comparison is a reasonable one," noted Berton. "For most colonial Canadians at mid 19th century the prospect of a line of steel stretching off two thousand miles into the Pacific mists was similarly unreal."

But they built it - a railway and a country.

Sunday morning, I offered Mass aboard the train while passing through Saskatchewan, where the bright fields of canola look as if God had taken a yellow highlighter and dragged it across the endless prairie. Jesus spoke of the "fields white for harvest" (John 4:35), but the golden canola is prettier. My Jewish friends joke sometimes that Canada would have made a better Promised Land than Canaan. Prettier, to be sure.

Canada has been an unimaginably blessed country in which my parents made a life, and the altar of the rails seemed somehow suitable to give thanks for this abundantly bountiful part of Creation. Psalm 16 is the psalm of the priestly tribe, but it can be applied to those fortunate souls who make Canada their home: The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6)

I was disappointed to observe that, while the election of the new Holy Father has prompted new attention to Pope Leo XIII, nobody seemed to notice that July 20th was the anniversary of his death in 1903. I considered it a grace to be ordained on the 99th anniversary of his dies natalis (please God). Perhaps one day Leo XIII will join his predecessor (Blessed Pius IX) and successor (Saint Pius X) in being raised to the altars, but it does not seem likely.

I keep it as a sort of private feast day. While John Paul II changed my life, it is Leo XIII whom I regard as the great visionary pope of our time. Leo XIII and John Paul II can be considered papal twins, as it ...

By Joseph R. Wood

"Everything changes," exclaimed an elderly woman in Sydney with a broad Australian accent. She was expecting Mass at a church when the COVID-19 restrictions had just been lifted. But this particular church had shut again due to virus exposure among the priests there.

She was agreeing (maybe unintentionally) with the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, who argued that everything is "flux." He focused on the material world that changes constantly. He was known as the "philosopher of tears," given to melancholy.

This moment has run through my mind as I again enjoy the privilege of teaching at George Weigel's Tertio Millennio Seminar in Kraków, Poland. I'll move on shortly to Slovakia, where I'll join our editor-in-chief, Robert Royal, for the Free Society Seminar.

These seminars assemble groups of very bright, faithful Catholics in their 20s and 30s, mostly European and American but occasionally from beyond, for an intensive examination of Catholic truth and contemporary problems confronting the Church's teaching. And there's plenty of wonderful conversation where real philosophy - seeking wisdom - emerges.

The seminars were started by Michael Novak of blessed memory, a prolific advocate of free markets and liberally-grounded political institutions regularly mentioned on this website, which he also helped found. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Novak hoped the seminars would help a new generation of Central European Catholics learn the habits and ideas that their countries would need as they moved out of the dark decades of Communism.

The Americans would discover the depth of Catholic tradition and faith that had been brought here centuries before, survived the Communist era, and might animate the future of the region and the West.

Novak was no "philosopher of tears."

But in recent seminars, I've been struck by the changes since the students began coming decades ago. These changes can bring out the weeping Heraclitus in me.

The political and economic institutions that defeated Communism, or at least let it defeat itself, are no longer attractive to many in the West, or to many in Central Europe who see totalitarian Communism as having been replaced by something offering homo economicus and moral relativism as the fullness of being human.

Amid all the changes is a sense of instability, that truth doesn't exist or can't be found because everything changes anyway. That has yielded a widespread loss of hope accompanied by forgetting that suffering is part of life, that it has meaning, and that while it should be reduced where possible, it also brings those of us with faith to the greatest possible joy.

The students at these seminars are looking for, and finding, truths that, unlike the seasons or political institutions or social fashions or popular opinion, don't change.

I've experimented here with an ancient source, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was a scholar-historian and a man of action, a general. He writes of the 5th-century B.C. wars, primarily between Athens and Sparta, that hastened the decline of the Greek cities as a dominant and sometimes successful political form.

That was a century when "revolutions broke out in city after city," and events in one place caused in others "still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal. . .[with] an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge."

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as courage; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character. . . .Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. . . .Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted. . . .In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to ...

By Steven P. White .

I just finished spending two weeks studying the Church's social teaching with a group of young men and women in Krakow, Poland. The students came from all over the world: predominantly the United States and Poland, but also Cameroon, the Philippines, Finland, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching students Catholic social teaching is helping them understand that the Church's social teaching is more than a collection of moral exhortations and prohibitions, though it certainly includes both. As I always emphasize to my students, the Church's social teaching is descriptive before it is prescriptive.

That is, if we want to understand what the Church says about what we owe to one another as persons, or how we ought to order our common life in service to the common good, we must first understand what it means to be a person and what it means to be part of a society, and what the Church means by the common good.

Over the years, the Church has identified what she calls the four "permanent principles" of Catholic social teaching: The dignity of the human person, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good. If one understands these principles and how to apply them, then Catholic social teaching becomes a powerful framework for thinking through some of the thorniest problems of contemporary life. Begin with general principles and apply them to the particulars of public life. Sounds simple, right?

Not quite.

Knowing the principles that ought to guide our moral action and applying them is obviously important, but in an age marked by skepticism and relativism, the principles themselves must be accounted for. It is one thing for the Church to speak, for example, of "human dignity" or "natural law," and the faithful may take these as axiomatic simply on the basis of the authority of the Church. It is another thing to be able to defend, justify, and propose the principles to a world that doesn't acknowledge the Church's authority.

Among Catholics, there is sometimes a tendency to treat moral theology - which includes Catholic social teaching - as a sort of moral mathematics, a moral algorithm. Begin with fixed principles, enter certain inputs, and the moral calculus produces concrete moral judgments. The whole process is seen as deductive, deriving certitude in particular judgments on the basis of fixed general principles.

The problem with this is not that it treats certain principles as fixed and true, nor that it treats moral truth as something that we can know, but that relatively few moral decisions can be made on the basis of deductive reasoning alone.

Most of what we learn, we learn through induction: we begin with noticing the way things are and, on the basis of those particulars, we derive general principles. This way of arriving at the truth does not always follow the laws of deductive logic, but it is no less capable of arriving at the truth. For example, it's a formal fallacy of deductive logic to hold that the word of an untrustworthy person ought to be considered untrustworthy. But we all know from experience, that liars aren't to be trusted.

It's reasonable not to trust liars even while acknowledging that the character of one making an argument does not determine the logical validity of the argument he makes. A reasonable person uses both deductive and inductive reasoning because both lead us to the truth. If we rely exclusively on one or the other, we hamstring our own ability to acknowledge the truth.

A great teacher of mine used to say that human beings are "datives of truth," by which he meant that our capacity to receive and recognize the truth is the most distinctive thing about us. It's practically the definition of the human person: We were made for truth.

Understanding the truth about the human person requires us to make use of the full array of human reason, just as understanding the natural law requires us to pay close attention to the nature of things. Unde...

By John M. Grondelski

This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the first of the seven ecumenical councils, accepted by Catholics and Orthodox alike. The Council met from May to June 325. Pope Francis wanted to go to Turkey (within which Nicaea now sits) for the occasion. His extended illness and death made that trip impossible, though it remains likely that Pope Leo XIV will go to Turkey this Fall, his first international pilgrimage.

The early Councils were dominated by Christological and Trinitarian controversies: how Jesus's human and divine natures fit together and how the three Persons of the Trinity were related. Modern people, unaccustomed to thinking in terms of "natures" and "persons" (in a technical theological sense), perhaps imagine those Councils were preoccupied with much ado about nothing. However, contemporary cultural and political debates about what a human being is and gender ideology reveal that the "nature/person" question is alive and well, even if we have forgotten the terminology that could help clarify things.

On the Christological side, the councils have repeatedly returned to the relationship of Jesus's divine and human natures. Could a being simultaneously be human and divine? If so, how? Was it a question of inverse proportionality: the more divine, the less human? Or a theoretical equality that, nevertheless, shut off certain practical dimensions of one nature (usually the human), e.g., was Jesus's human nature in some kind of suspended animation, some frozen sleep?

Eventually, by the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, orthodox Christian faith affirmed that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. . . fully, actively, completely, simultaneously, and truly divine and human. Yet I fear that for many Catholics still, the raw, sobering truth of the Incarnation isn't fully appreciated.

That is why we would benefit from recalling a central element of St. John Paul II's theological anthropology. He lifted it from Vatican II and set it front and center in his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis. He never tired of repeating it throughout his papacy.

That central element is the truth that, if human beings want to understand themselves, their model is Jesus. As John Paul put it:

Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. (Redemptor hominis, 8, emphasis added)

Reread that text carefully. Jesus Christ "fully reveals man to himself." John Paul did not write Jesus "fully reveals God to man." Yes, Jesus Christ is the Self-Revelation of God. But that's not where John Paul put stress. Jesus Christ is the revelation of man and his vocation.

In other words, if you want to know what it means to be human, you have one (actually, two) models. Jesus Christ. And the Blessed Virgin Mary (because, if you take seriously Our Lady's Immaculate Conception due to the prevenient grace won by her Son, she also reveals what a human being should be).

As Scripture reminds us, Jesus Christ is "like us in all things but sin." (Hebrews 4:15) That "but" might at first seem like a really important exception, given that we are all sinners. But it requires us to think about it.

God did not make man sinful. Sin was not part of the design of Creation. God made man good, indeed, "very good." (Genesis 1:28) Which means that it is not Jesus but us - all of us - who misrepresent what it means to be truly human as God made human beings. It is us, not Christ, who deviate from the norm. We are not what we are supposed to be. Sin may be universal, but it is a self-inflicted, not congenital, deformity. The truth is that, in Jesus (and Mary) we see what man - obedient to the Father - should be.

"But I'm not Jesus," you object. True. But Jesus died for you. In the Redemption, He offers you the graces needed, in the life in which you ate now, to live as God wants, to be "holy and pleasing in His sight." (R...

by Randall Smith

When I get exasperated by some of the failures in contemporary liturgical practice and annoyed by the perpetual arguments over it, I am tempted to exclaim: Okay, that's it. We need to return to the traditional Catholic liturgy!

You know what I mean. The Mass in Greek. Every other liturgy is a later translation and not always a reliable one. There are good reasons why the Latin translation of the original Greek Scriptures was called "the Vulgate." It was the vulgar (that is, common) language of Italy.

Translating the text and the liturgy from its original form to the "vulgar" Latin of the common people was always questionable. Did they do it just because people couldn't understand Greek anymore? Does anyone think that's a justification for translating the liturgy? Who thinks it is important for people to hear and understand the words of the Eucharistic prayer?

I am open to those rites, such as the Maronite, that may have preserved the original Aramaic of Christ. But since the Scriptures are in Greek, I can see no reason that the liturgy shouldn't be done only (or mostly, other than the Aramaic) in Greek. The Roman form of the liturgy in Latin probably wasn't commonly used before the fourth century.

Some people claim that later liturgical changes were made "in continuity with" the earliest liturgies of the Church. But that's just silly. Can anyone imagine that Peter, Paul, James, and John never spoke the Mass out loud when they traveled from village to village? Does anyone think they whispered quietly to themselves while people knelt or wore black beanies with a little puff ball on the top and did mass at a huge, gilded altar festooned with multiple golden cherubs and candles? You wouldn't have found such things even in the medieval church.

Anyone who has ever been to a Gothic cathedral in Europe likely knows that those elaborate golden altars in the back of the church weren't added until the Baroque period. Most are tacky additions that don't match the aesthetics of the building. If the popes of the time hadn't been weak or corrupt, they would have prohibited them.

And even to speak of continuity in the Mass, as though it was a monolithic entity, is absurd. There have been over a hundred different rites in the history of the Church. Six of them are still in use. And many who attend the other five resent the notion that the Latin rite is the Mass

All one need do is attend the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom to realize that the "continuity" between that rite and the Tridentine liturgy is significantly less than what exists between the Tridentine and the Novus Ordo.

I'm not a fanatic. I am open to some of the developments that occurred up to the time of Thomas Aquinas. He would have said Mass using the Dominican rite, which differs greatly from anything you would find today. But to my mind, anything after the thirteenth century is suspect and probably shouldn't be allowed.

All the golden falderal added after 1500 are obvious corruptions. Read St. Bernard's letters about gold in churches, and you'll find that he wouldn't have tolerated it for a moment.

It was probably only allowed because some of the more disreputable bishops at the Council of Trent were over-reacting to Protestantism. If you look at some of the participants at Trent, the character of the corrupt Renaissance popes who reigned during its deliberations, and its unwarranted duration (no other council comes close to its eighteen-year duration; the next longest being four years), doesn't all this put enough doubt in your mind to suspect it might not have been a real council like Nicaea - enough to conclude we need not be bound by its so-called liturgical "reforms"?

No, I insist; it's obvious: it must be Greek or nothing. Everything else is just bad liturgy and makes a "different church." I have no doubt that if we returned the liturgy to the original Greek the churches would be full, and young people would return in droves.

Now, to be honest, ...

By Robert Royal

A doctor who came to one of my lectures recently told me of a problem within the medical profession: with some noble exceptions, the general practitioners know less and less about almost everything, and the specialists know more and more about almost nothing. (He's a specialist himself.) I don't know if this is broadly true in medicine. I do know that it seems to describe a great deal about what goes on in the modern world.

For instance, Sigmund Freud was once believed to have finally exposed the truth about the depths of the human psyche. From what I hear, it seems that psychiatrists and psychologists have mostly moved on - to what, it's difficult to say, other than endless talking and psychoactive drugs. Yet whatever else you might say about Freud, at least he approached things through (relatively) human pathways: ancient mythologies like Oedipus, and solid Latin terms like ego, id, and superego. He probably would have laughed himself silly over terms like "sex assigned at birth," which is accepted now even by the American Medical Association.

But Freud, who wrote influential tomes like The Future of an Illusion (i.e., religion) and Civilization and Its Discontents (everyday sadness), was almost blind to the rise of the greatest evil of his time: Nazism. He only survived by fleeing from Vienna to England just before the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany. His awakening came too late to save his sisters, all in their eighties; one died in Auschwitz, another at Theresienstadt, and two at Treblinka. Even then, the master of the human psyche didn't really take the full measure of the most obvious, real-world evil in his day. He wrote a letter from the safety of London saying that he expected the Catholic Church would sort out the Nazi problem.

If only. To our shame, the Church at first tried to work with Hitler, but quickly found out that was a deadly illusion. One heroic figure, Franz Jägerstätter, refused all collaboration, even the Nazi subsidies he could have received for his children, as a poor farmer and parish sexton. He was executed, of course. Pope Benedict declared him a martyr and beatified him in 2007. It's worth watching A Hidden Life, Terrence Malik's film about him.

In the event, it was the Allied and Soviet armies that "resolved" Austrian Nazism. And thereby hangs a tale.

When we are told by Church authorities (including Pope Leo, I'm sorry to say) that "war never solves anything" (contrary to a millennium-and-a-half of just-war and tradition) or that the death penalty is "inadmissible" (Pope Francis, also departing from traditional wisdom), or are invited to believe that "social justice," or politics in general is our primary task, despite St. Augustine's warnings about the City of Man, we should beware. Because we're building Towers of Babel out of "expertise" and departing from the fuller and more modest wisdom of a long tradition.

Most people today, even many Catholics, think of tradition as a shackle on human freedom from which we must be liberated. There are always plausible reasons advanced why this is so. But single persons - even whole generations - are just a small part of the accumulated wisdom of the human race. It's through the experience of many generations in many circumstances that we indeed are liberated - from the partial and narrow views that exist at any given historical moment.

It's good to focus on Jesus, who liberates us from sin and death. But accepting that crucial truth will lead us into others. Pope Benedict was fond of quoting Hegel's remark that "Reason has a wax nose and may be turned in any direction." There were reasons given for Nazism and Communism in their day, and there are reasons today offered for "sex assigned at birth" - bad reasons that need to be confronted by right reason.

Despite some of his own occasional wobbliness on the tradition, Pope Leo has recently offered a kind of perennial wisdom to guide us through the current madhouse. Speak...

by Fr. Thomas Kuffel.

Two sisters, close to Jesus, invite Him into their home. Martha and Mary, dedicated disciples of Jesus, are also to become controversial. Martha complains because she is worried about many things, busy taking care of home and hospitality. Mary, content at the feet of Jesus, shows that she is a disciple intent upon hearing Him preach. In contrast to her sister, she is not worried. She is at rest. The two sisters have a brother also, Lazarus. He, too, plays a notorious role in the family: he dies only to have Jesus raise him from the dead.

Mary is the most controversial figure. St. Gregory the Great says she is the same woman from whom Jesus cast out seven demons. (Though other commentators are not so sure.) In any event, Luke presents Mary as a distraught woman whose sins are many, falls at the feet of Jesus, and smashes an alabaster jar filled with nard. St. Gregory, in his homily on Magdalene, declares: "She turned her crimes into so many virtues, that all that in her had despised God in sin was put to the service of God in penance."

Mary anoints Jesus not once but twice, as St. John describes it:

There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment." (John 12:2-3).

Who is this woman who causes such controversy?

In his letter concerning the feminine genius, The Dignity of Women, St. John Paul II refers to Tradition and tells us: "The Gospel of John (cf. also Mark 16: 9) emphasizes the special role of Mary Magdalene. . . . Hence she came to be called 'the apostle of the Apostles.' Mary Magdalene was the first eyewitness of the Risen Christ. (Mulieris dignitatis 16)

Not only is Mary Magdalene the first witness of the resurrection, but Christ also redeemed her from a life of sin.

Many have regarded Mary as merely a prostitute, but in reality, seven demons possessed her. Which demons possessed her we cannot say with certainty, but like other exorcisms that Jesus performed, their dramatic expulsion was memorable.

'Legions' possessed the man at Gennesaret; Jesus cast them out and sent them into a herd of pigs, which drowned. At the exorcism in the Synagogue, demons declared they know who Jesus is, the Holy One of God. They possessed a boy who convulsed and foamed at the mouth, and Jesus rebuked them. A demon possessed the Syrophoenician Woman's daughter. With a word, Jesus dismissed him. These powerful stories reveal a different, greater dimension to Mary Magdalene than being merely a prostitute.

Magdalene knew evil face to face. Like most who suffer from demonic influence, she feared for her life. Her sins controlled her life as the demons took greater control over her. Desperate for help, she turned to Jesus. Falling at his feet pleading for freedom, Jesus declared, "Your sins are forgiven." (Luke 7:48) From that moment on, Magdelene became a disciple.

Such accounts cannot be trivialized, reduced to sins of the flesh. St. Gregory says that the seven demons are the universal and deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Seven is also the number of the covenant by which the demons made the pact with her that destroyed her life.

In an instant, with a simple confession, Jesus freed her from that covenant, removed all her sins, and invited her to follow Him. A dramatic change took place. She becomes an apostle to the Apostles, filled with His Spirit, for she knows the struggle of sin and the power of Jesus

Because of her experience with evil, Magdalene focuses solely on Jesus. When He comes to visit, she wants nothing else than to partake of His presence. She, a sinner, became a saint and now wants to abide with her Savior, relishing his every word. Can this happen to us, too?

Martha, a woman with many concerns, was busy. Not that busyness is bad, but priorities need to b...

by Fr. Benedict Kiely .

Anecdotal evidence, while not necessarily without value or verity, needs solid facts to become confirmed as reality. For the last several years, there has been much talk of increasing numbers of young people, particularly men, coming to orthodox Christianity and, in particular, to the Catholic Faith. These stories now have a factual basis. More than 10,000 people were baptized or received into the Church in France last year. In other European countries and the United States, more people came into the Church at the Easter Vigil than has been the case for decades.

Something that is being talked about is actually happening.

It might, perhaps, be too soon and too dramatic to talk of a "religious revival" in the bleakly secular West. But the desire, among many who know little or nothing of Christ, to discover the ancient truths of the Christian faith is - if the Church is meant to read the "signs of the times" - something not only to be welcomed, but to be fostered, with the treasures of beauty, truth, and goodness, which the 2000-year old history of the Church possesses.

Familiarity, as the old phrase goes, "breeds contempt." But Chesterton, writing more than eighty years ago, spoke of the "fatigue of familiarity." He wrote in a time when, even if there may not have been widespread practice of the faith in Britain, there would have been, for anyone with a modicum of education, indeed even with an elementary school education, a general knowledge of the simple facts of the Christian faith.

As the American novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, the "constant reading of the Bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under language as a whole, and under the English language."

Chesterton's point, in what he called the "specially Christian case," was the near impossibility of making the "facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen man it is often true that familiarity is fatigue." He continued that, if Christ were presented as a Chinese hero (in other words, as an esoteric figure) people would be more ready to respond.

That familiarity simply does not exist anymore, and not just in Britain. Across the Western world, as three or four generations have been successfully educated into ignorance, not only of the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity, but of the works of literature, music, and art which are the products of that civilization.

Quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, the knowledge of which could be assumed in the time Chesterton was writing, are now as unfamiliar as Sanskrit verse. To speak of "seeing through a glass darkly," or the "blind leading the blind," will not register with people who are the product of four years of expensive brain deprivation, known as a bachelor's degree.

All this, however, should not be seen as an obstacle, but rather as a magnificent opportunity, indeed, a providential moment.

There is no longer the "fatigue of familiarity," because the facts of Christianity are not only unfamiliar, they are unknown.

The Catholic sociologist Stephen Bullivant has spoken of the need for a "herd immunity" to the Gospel, before the faith can once again be proclaimed with better prospects of success. Unless I am misunderstanding him, it seems to be exactly the other way around. The masses, particularly the young, are not immune to a Gospel they have never heard; they are ripe for infection.

St. Paul walked into the Areopagus, where the Acts of the Apostles tells us, people did "nothing except telling or hearing something new." So, in this new Areopagus moment, the Gospel, ever ancient and ever new, can ignite the same fire for a surprisingly similar group of people, divided by time but not desire.

It is true that many, as at that time, will mock. But others will, and are, saying "we will hear you again about this." We know that a Dionysius and a woman named Damaris were converted by Paul's preaching of the Word to them, ...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray.

When Pope Leo XIV spoke from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on the day of his election he said: "we want to be a synodal Church." The significance of this depends, of course, on how Pope Leo understands synodality. The notion of a Church that is One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic - and now Synodal - isn't clear to most, because synodality is a largely unknown concept. Its meaning will emerge as Pope Leo guides the "synodal path" with the help of the General Secretariat of the Synod. That secretariat's latest contribution to the ongoing definitional saga is not encouraging.

If you're wondering about the purpose of the Synod on Synodality, the General Secretariat, in Pathways for the Implementation Phase of the Synod 2025-2028, has provided this answer: "to build a synodal Church."

If you are also wondering what synodality is, Sister Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ, Undersecretary of the Synod Secretariat, answered in a recent interview:

I often quote an Australian theologian who was at our Synod, Ormond Rush, who states "Synodality is the Second Vatican Council in a nutshell." And all our documents, and still in these pathways, in the Final Document, highlight that what we are doing is really referred to the vision of the Second Vatican Council. We can say synodality is the way to understand the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council in this stage of the reception of the Council. So, it's nothing else but just continuing the reception of the Second Vatican Council. Because the council is not yet implemented everywhere, in a way.

Nowhere in the Council documents, however, is such an idea put forth.

Sister Becquart continues:

So it's a way to be Church. That was a way, from the early Church, that we retrieve from the Second Vatican Council as a fruit highlighting that, first of all, we are all baptized; and as baptized together as people of God, we are called to carry on the mission together. So, it's calling every baptized person to be a protagonist of the mission, to help us understand that we are called to work together, exercising co-responsibility for the mission - of course, a differentiated co-responsibility because we don't all have the same vocations. There is a diversity of vocation, of charisms, of ministries. But we are people of God, journeying with the other people.

How will this "way to be Church" come about? The Synod Secretariat, referring to the Final Document [FD] of the 2024 Synodal Assembly, offers this wearisome, jargon-filled justification of a revolutionary program [jargon emphasized]:

the dynamism that animates the FD, and which the implementation phase is called to take on, derives from the continuous articulation of certain polarities and tensions that structure the life of the Church and the way in which ecclesiological categories express it. Here are some of these polarities: the whole Church and the local Church; the Church as the People of God, as the Body of Christ and as the Temple of the Spirit; the participation of all and the authority of some; synodality, collegiality and primacy; the common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood; ministry (ordained and instituted ministries) and participation in the mission by virtue of baptismal vocation without a ministerial form. Implementation of the FD requires addressing and discerning these tensions as they arise in the circumstances in which each local Church exists. The path to advance is not to seek an impossible arrangement that eliminates tension in favour of one of the sides.

Rather, in the here and now of each local Church, it will be necessary to discern which of the possible balances allows for a more dynamic service of the mission. It is likely that different decisions will be reached in different places.

The Council of Nicaea would not pass the test of synodality as it in fact accomplished the "impossible arrangement" of "eliminating tensions" by deciding "in favour of one of the sides," that is, orthodoxy was af...