The Catholic Thing

By Brad Miner.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Most people, I think, take it for granted that they know about St. Peter's. But Brad Miner gives us a great deal of helpful information and insight about that singular basilica in just a few words today. People may also take the daily appearance of TCT for granted, but I assure you it takes daily dedication on our end as well as your support to make it all happen - from the daily columns to News and Commentaries, to our podcasts, the Posse, TCT courses, and much more. We're getting to the point where it looks like we'll be here for the rest of 2025, but I can't emphasize enough how urgent it is that you do your part. Today. We're here every day for you, will you be there for us?

Now for today's column...

It was built upon the ancient Roman site known as Mons Vaticanus. Vatican Hill is on the west side of the Tiber, facing the seven hills of Rome, and - to put it clearly in context - it is the burial site of Peter, the man to whom our Lord said, "on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it."

St. Peter's Basilica, as we know it today, is a relatively new building, constructed mainly during the Renaissance, which is to say more than 1400 years after the Apostle was martyred on that very spot, c. 68 A.D.

The site was treasured by early Christians, but it wasn't until Emperor Constantine the First (272-337) ended the persecution of Christians and embraced the faith (in hoc signo vinces) that a church could be constructed over Peter's tomb. That was what we now refer to as Old St. Peter's. There are no extant 4th-century images of its appearance, but Shawn Tribe, writing in Liturgical Arts Journal, included this digital mockup "as it may have appeared closer to Constantine's time":

The old church took about 40 years to complete. And it endured for more than a thousand years.

Leon Battista Alberti (d. 1472), often considered the first "Renaissance Man," was among the earliest to call for a new structure to be built on the site because the 4th-century church was collapsing into ruins.

Construction of the current Basilica, however, did not begin until April of 1506. It was completed in November of 1626. Those 120 years may seem like a very long time to build a basilica, but Notre-Dame de Paris took six decades longer, and Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was begun 143 years ago and is not yet complete.

The plan for a new St. Peter's was kick-started by the return of the papacy to Rome from Avignon. And it was a propitious moment, given that there happened to be working in the city an assortment of geniuses such as we'll likely never see again: the aforementioned Alberti, Bernardo Peruzzi, Donato Bramante - and others - until, in 1547 and at the behest of Pope Paul III, the work fell to the great Michelangelo Buonarroti, who seemed never to relish his Vatican work. "I undertake this only for the love of God and in honor of the Apostle," he said. He had earlier tried to dissuade Pope Julius II from using him to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512), but at the age of 71, Michelangelo became the Chief Architect of St Peter's.

Historian James Lees-Milne has written that Michelangelo cleared out the clique of sluggish craftsmen who had been employed at St. Peter's and hired new "basilican workmen with a fresh enthusiasm and zest for the great and holy task ahead of them."

Michelangelo built upon the architect Bramante's work, but like Gaudí, did not live to see the Basilica's consecration. No matter. As the American art historian Helen Gardner wrote, "Without destroying the centralizing features of Bramante's plan, Michelangelo, with a few strokes of the pen, converted its snowflake complexity into massive, cohesive unity."

And massive it is. St. Peter's is the largest church in the world. The Basilica and Colonnade cover nearly 240,000 square feet - nearly six acres.

This brings us to the dome of St. Peter's - in some ways...

By Robert Royal.

But first a note: We're making steady progress in our fundraising, but we're behind last year. And you all know that nothing has gotten less expensive in the past twelve months. I won't belabor a point that you already understand. We can only come to you every morning, 365 days a year, if you are generous towards us during the two times a year that we ask for your support. Please, be generous and hopeful - hopeful that the work we do here will help both the Church and the world. There's the button. There's you. There's the future of The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

I don't remember precisely how I came to know Virgil Nemoianu, who died on June 6. Even his widow, Anca, isn't exactly sure. It must have been at the kind of informal salon that Jude Dougherty, legendary dean of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America for three decades, hosted at his home. D.C. locals and visiting eminences from Rome, Poland, the U.K., etc., would rub shoulders there. But somehow - Divine Providence often works through people and things that may never rise to great public prominence - we met. And Virgil became an intellectual inspiration, later my dissertation director, and - for forty years - my friend.

Back then, I was a youngish vice-president for research at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington. My then-boss and founder of EPPC, Ernest Lefever, was a distinguished Protestant foreign-policy expert. He instructed me one day that it was "unseemly" that I had researchers working under me with PhDs, while I had left mine unfinished to become a magazine editor at Princeton, before moving to the Center. Jude Dougherty wouldn't let me do philosophy, unless I quit my job to study full time (an impossibility for a father with children). But Virgil stepped in.

He was chairman of the Comparative Literature department at CUA, which was more in my wheelhouse anyway. I'd been studying Dante and literature in a couple of languages earlier. But unbeknownst to many, even at the university, he was also Secretary General of the World Comparative Literature Association, which is to say the biggest of the big fish in the discipline. And he generously made it possible for me to finish doctoral work without too much stress on the family.

He was also, for me in particular, a bit of a Godsend in that, as a native of Romania (communist when he was growing up), he had little patience with people in the academic or political worlds who were soft on the Soviets or who flirted - and more than flirted - with various forms of Marxism and socialism. He'd seen what all that led to up close, and wasn't about to indulge it in conditions of freedom where we had the gift of speaking the truth about poisonous intellectual and political illusions.

At the same time, he was intellectually sophisticated and disturbingly well-red in what seemed, at times, everything. And he fought for the proper life of the mind. For instance, the "canon wars" were roiling university campuses - leftists at universities were arguing even back then that the great books included in the curricula of most programs in Western civilization were (sigh) sexist, racist, imperialistic, etc. ad nauseam. He decided that we should jointly edit a volume of essays making a different case.

We rummaged around looking for a suggestive title and he found, in Shakespeare of course (Coriolanus I:10), exactly what we wanted: The Hospitable Canon. The unusual word "hospitable" here suggesting that, in fact, the great Western texts invite in everyone who wants to become a participant in "the best that has been thought and said." The canon was even open to new writers and thinkers - if they could survive the competition to become part of the great human cultural legacy.

Notably, Virgil also developed what he called the "theory of the secondary," by which he meant that the proper role of literature was not to become part of the dominant political and social culture,...

by Stephen P. White.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Do you think you could guess my political affiliation based on what music I listen to? Does my preference for, say, Jimmy Buffet, yacht rock, and country music from the late 1990s tip my political hand at all? These hypothetical musical preferences might tell you something about me (I have eclectic tastes, I'm probably part of Gen X, etc.), but would they tell you very much about how I vote? Probably not.

One person is a tiny sample size and, as the saying goes, there's no accounting for taste. What if I asked you about a larger group?

What if there were 1,000 people or 10,000 people who all liked Jimmy Buffet, yacht rock, and country music from the late 1990s? Now, do you think you could, with reasonable accuracy, guess the general political leanings of that group based simply on their shared taste in music? Has the larger sample size made that guess about political preferences easier, more difficult, or about the same?

Now, what if I told you (again, hypothetically) that I attend Mass every Sunday and that my three all-time favorite hymns to sing are, in no particular order, "On Eagle's Wings," "City of God," and "Be Not Afraid"? I especially like it when these songs are accompanied by an acoustic guitar.

Do you think you could venture a guess about my politics now?

I bet you do. At the very least, most of you have a hunch. Prudence might convince you to withhold that judgment. You might make some objection about "inductive fallacies" or "correlation not implying causation." You know you shouldn't judge, but that doesn't mean you're not also pretty confident that you could judge. The answer is already there in the back of your head. Even if you're withholding it, you know what judgment you're withholding.

Let's leave that (admittedly loaded) hypothetical for a moment and turn to the reality of the Church and the country in which we live. We hear a lot about political polarization these days, for obvious reasons. We also hear a lot about the ways in which political polarization has seeped into the Church.

While political polarization may exacerbate our ecclesial divisions, our most significant ecclesial divisions - e.g., about liturgy or sexual morality or the proper interpretation of Vatican II - long predate the current moment of political polarization. Moreover, as I've written before, it's hard to see American political polarization as the prime driver of our ecclesial divisions when so much of the Church outside the United States, and thus well removed from our domestic polarization, is dealing with very similar divisions.

Political polarization is at least as much a symptom of our ecclesial divisions as it is a cause. And I'm not the first to observe that many of our political divisions are underwritten by much deeper disagreements about the nature and ends of human life.

Those anthropological questions are, to the Christian mind, inherently theological questions. So we shouldn't be surprised to discover that the way we pray (or even what we like to sing) somehow shows up in the way we view our political life and the responsibilities of citizenship. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. The way we pray shapes the way we believe, which in turn shapes the way we live. To which we might add, lex civitandi - the way we pray eventually shapes the way we exercise our citizenship.

Now, of course, we can't really tell much about people's political beliefs based solely on what sort of liturgical music they prefer. No doubt, there are progressives out there who love to chant the Regina Coeli and conservatives who long to "Sing a New Church" into being.

Nor am I suggesting that liturgical renewal ought to be seen as a means to some political end, even a worthy political end. Instrumentalizing the worship of God is a wicked and disordered thing to do. But it is the case that right worship cannot but be a boon to the life of any community that so worships.

In a recent h...

By Auguste Meyrat.

But first a note from Robert Royal: I don't like fundraising campaigns. Maybe you do, and if so, God bless you. But if you'd like to help put an end to this one, the answer is easy. Be generous. Make your contribution. Support The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

If you consider the evolution of Christian apologetics over the centuries, most of the changes pertain to style and format. In the early days, apologists would deliver their arguments at forums or write letters on papyrus scrolls. In the Middle Ages, they would have formal debates or write lengthy, abstruse treatises on vellum. In the modern era, apologists have made use of radio, popular literature, television, and now the Internet to explain why Christianity is the one true faith.

As for the actual substance of Christian apologetics, not much has changed since the days of St. Justin Martyr. Many of today's arguments are the same as those articulated centuries ago. After all, if they haven't been disproven (and they haven't), there's little reason to develop new ones.

By contrast, opponents of Christianity are continually forced to reframe and reconstruct their arguments. These days, atheists prefer to invoke science in the effort to prove God doesn't exist. This, in turn, forces Christian apologists to adapt by speaking extensively on the sciences while articulating the same perennial points.

This approach is apparent in Science at the Doorstep of God: Science in Support of God, the Soul, and Life After Death (2023) by American scientist, philosopher, professor, and priest Robert Spitzer, S.J.

Spitzer systematically dismantles and debunks the supposedly scientific arguments of today's skeptics. In addition to proving God's existence, he also demonstrates that the old arguments are more relevant than ever, and that they even may prove necessary in saving scientific inquiry itself from materialist nihilism.

At the outset, Spitzer explains how modern physics and astronomy point to a beginning to the universe (with the "Big Bang") and how this important truth necessitates an immaterial God. This also addresses the usual atheist rebuttals that the universe is somehow one of an infinite set of universes (a multiverse) - for which no evidence exists.

These theories also conflict with the current expansion of the universe and the law of entropy. Seen differently, they are ideas that effectively trade away the conclusions supported by millennia of scientific and mathematical scholarship for the kinds of implausible narratives typically found in a superhero movie.

The same back-and-forth applies with the "fine-tuning" argument. Spitzer relates how the many variables that allow the universe to exist and sustain life (low energy, universal constants, the mass of fundamental particles) are so finely "tuned" that such a system arising randomly is virtually impossible.

There is also "string theory," which proposes a potentially infinite series of alternative dimensional universes, and a "Level IV multiverse," which claims that an unchangeable series of physical laws precedes the creation of the cosmos. Yet, again, none of these alternative theories are based on any real science, but rather stem from a deep atheistic prejudice with a science-sounding vocabulary.

Spitzer responds to an argument made popular by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins. A philosopher/scientist himself, Dawkins proposes the following syllogism: "1. Whatever is more complex is more improbable. 2. A cosmic designer (God) must be more complex than anything it designs. 3. Therefore, a cosmic designer must be more improbable than anything it designs."

Spitzer explains that not only does Dawkins have this backwards (in truth, God, at least in Christian theology, is "simple" and thus more probable than any designed reality). But Dawkins also misapplies and misunderstands science itself.

All the sciences are based on induction (forming conclusions from observed phenomena), not deducti...

By Joseph R. Wood.

But first a note: As Professor Wood explains today, the contemplative life, especially of hermits, is a fundamental service to the Church and the world, even though to many it doesn't seem so. Here at TCT, we cannot make such fundamental claims, but we do what we can, and we know it achieves results, not least among our readers. What we already see developing this year will call for some of the same - and even greater - efforts that we've made for the past decade and a half. We know economic times are hard out there, but they're hard for us too. And right now, we're not hitting our chalk marks for this mid-year fundraiser. So I have to ask, please, if you care about the future of Catholicity in this country and the world, we're in the fight. Will you be too?

Now for today's column...

This year's routine announcement of clergy assignments in my diocese included one that you don't see often. A priest will follow a hermit vocation.

Eremitical life, and the contemplative vocation in general, were central in early Christianity and remain a search for union with God for the contemplatives themselves, and for the good of the universal Church.

The early Desert and Church Fathers, often hermits, are a source of strength and grace, always being forgotten and always being found again. Today seems to be another "found again" moment.

As Sister Benedicta Ward explains, the earliest years of the Church saw some Christians determined to await the return of Christ "with a totality of commitment. . .[as] ascetics. . .who undertook a poor and celibate life. . .in the expectation of the coming of the Lord."

This asceticism was first undertaken in urban settings, but "gradually a need for more absolute retirement. . .caused people to seek. . .solitude away from social, political, and economic demands."

In these years, as Hilary White has noted, "there were no written rules to follow, no orders to join and permission was not needed from any ecclesiastic in Rome or Constantinople. You simply decided to do it."

People moved away from cities in search of solitude and silence, sometimes as hermits occasionally getting together for prayer or meals, sometimes in more tight-knit groups.

St. Anthony the Great sought solitude. But according to St. Athanasius, Anthony encountered other hermits and, in particular, St. Paul the First Hermit. Anthony himself attracted followers and became known as the Father of Monasticism for the group that gathered around him.

We think today of "hermits" as living in solitude and "monks" as living in a cenobitic community in accord with the Rule of St. Augustine or St. Benedict. The necessity for such rules and their emphasis on obedience to superiors became apparent in those first few centuries, as the rigors of ascetic life led some to holiness and others in all sorts of bad directions.

St. Dorotheos of Gaza reports the foul ways his wayward brothers showed their displeasure with him. St. Benedict, after living as a hermit then being drafted as superior for some misguided monks, was nearly murdered when they found his efforts to reform their ways too strict.

Two orders devoted to eremitical life became prominent over the centuries: the Benedictine Camaldolese founded around 1000 A.D. by St. Romuald and renewed half a millennium later by Blessed Paul Giustiniani, and the Carthusians founded by St. Bruno not long after St. Romuald. Both remain active.

In recent centuries, the eremitical vocation has often followed decades of devotion in a monastery. The experienced monk, equipped with the strength and temperament gained through years of monastic practice, leaves his brothers to seek a closer union with God and to undertake spiritual combat with the devil.

He'll usually stay close to his monastery, under obedience as part of complete submission to God, for both physical and spiritual support as he enters a deeper solitude.

Herein lies one of the most misunderstood aspects of monastic and eremitical life....

By Randall Smith.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, June 12th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the emerging papacy of Leo XIV, the removal of art by Marko Rupnik from the Vatican website, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

This year is the 1700th anniversary of the 325 A.D. Council of Nicaea, from which we get the Nicaean Creed. Some claim they don't want to be "constrained" by a creed. So why do we need a creed?

Our word "creed" from the Latin credo, meaning "I believe." If you say, "I believe," you need to believe something or in someone. It would be odd to shout: "I believe, I really believe!" but then if someone asks, "What do you believe?" you reply: "I don't know, but I know I believe." You have to believe in something. It might also be important to understand how and why you believe what you believe. But the first thing to get clear on is what you believe.

But to say, "I believe" in the sense understood by people who recite the Nicaean Creed is not merely to indicate, "Here's what I happen to think right now," as when someone in response to the question, "Where's the men's room?" says, "I'm not sure, but I believe it's over there." A creed is a statement of the fundamental principles that animate your life, as when someone in the face of great adversity proclaims, "I believe that goodness will triumph over evil" and then backs up those words with his actions.

When people recite the Creed, they are saying, in effect: "This is who I am." Or, if it is a community of persons, they would be saying, "This is who we are. We pledge ourselves to God and to each other. We set ourselves to live our lives this way, in good times and bad. We believe that living this way is the way to human flourishing, and we accept everything that comes along with it." A creed, in this sense, is something like a marriage vow.

Because it is meant to be an expression of who you are, you can't say, "Here is what I believe, but, you know, it could change tomorrow." If you did, then you wouldn't be talking about the beliefs that animate your life. You would have other, more fundamental convictions that animate the way you actually live and by which you judge everything else. If the beliefs in the creed fit with those deeper convictions, then fine. But if not, then the creed, or certain parts of it, get dumped. That's like vowing to be faithful in your marriage, but if things get difficult, you opt out. That makes your marriage less important than whatever you dump it for.

Oddly, there are theologians who claim that the creeds ratified in the past - at Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon - have no relevance for us today. The complexity of God cannot be captured in words, they say, so each generation has its own concepts, and each generation must compose its own creed.

But that's like saying, "Since no words can capture the essence of marriage, whatever I vowed to my spouse the day we got married is no longer relevant now. My new vow allows me to commit adultery." That's not a vow, nor would it be the basis of a creed. Can you imagine someone insisting, "I believe it's always wrong to lie," and then the next day, not only lying to you, but insisting he holds the same belief. I think you'd probably tell him, "I don't think you do believe that."

Pope Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, warned against those who "on the basis of preconceived assumptions," deny the universal validity of the faith. "Faith," he writes:

clearly presupposes that human language is capable of expressing divine and transcendent reality in a universal way - analogically, it is true, but no less meaningfully for t...

by Bishop James D. Conley

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow night - Thursday, June 12th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the emerging papacy of Leo XIV, the removal of art by Marko Rupnik from the Vatican website, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column.

Professor John Senior, my godfather and one of the professors of the famed Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, was a master of hyperbole. He once hinted to us, his students, that we should just go home and smash our television sets. Perhaps he didn't mean this literally, but he suggested that this was something we should consider. I know of at least one fellow student who took him at his word and dropped his 19-inch Motorola black and white television set out of the window of his fourth-floor dorm room onto the concrete alley below.

Today, the lightweight plastic screen would barely make a sound when it hit the pavement. But in the 1970s, the dozens of sealed tubes (this is why some still call the TV "the tube") exploded with a thunderous noise. It was so satisfying. So cathartic.

TV was a relatively new technology at the time; it had taken a generation or so to begin to realize what it was doing to us. Instead of being active, seeking, critical engagers with the real world, filled with wonder and joy, we were becoming lazy, slack-jawed, and flat-souled accepters of an often false or incomplete mediated version of reality.

The sound of a TV exploding on the pavement helped mark a new phase of life for us. One in which we made a commitment - a commitment deeply related to our faith (I converted to Catholicism through influence of the IHP) - to refuse to allow this technology to shape us in these negative and distorting ways.

Today, we are faced with a similar problem, but on a wildly greater scale. Artificial Intelligence and related technologies will now be able to use our reliance on screen-delivered mediating technologies and throw us into something close to total confusion about what is real and what isn't.

Deep-fake videos are now often indistinguishable from real ones. Soon, you won't know whether you are in a Zoom meeting with a real person or with an AI-created chatbot who looks just like a real person. Voices can now be faked to the point where even family members cannot tell the difference. "Proof of reality" is going to become a thing.

Two generations after John Senior, I wonder: do we need to do the equivalent of "smashing our TVs" once again? I also wonder if, this time, the ideas and call of Pope Leo XIV might be our inspiration for doing so.

The Holy Father has certainly made it clear that one of the reasons he chose his name was to signal that he would be like Leo XIII, a pope who helped the Church and world respond to the massively disruptive Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. Today, our Holy Father understands we are in the midst of another technological revolution, one that promises some good things but is likely to raise our passivity in the face of distorted reality to levels never seen before.

What would it look like to "smash our TVs" in 2025? Fewer people are even watching what we might think of as traditional television. But "cutting the TV cord" doesn't automatically mean less screen time. Our many other screens have, if anything, led to even more time looking at screens. This is especially true for young people, but I myself often feel this way about my phone and computer screens.

Last week, Clare Morell released her new book, The Tech Exit. It's geared toward parents wrestling with these matters, especially for their children, but it can be read with profit by virtually anyone. Morell a...

By John M. Grondelski.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Today, a story about something that has ended well, even if the usual figures put up resistance. It's because this site and others like it report on the slow-walking of scandalous cases in the Vatican that things, occasionally, change. We're ready to continue that work. Are you ready to help?

Now for today's column...

Yesterday was the Memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, a relatively new feast for a very old theological reality. Until last Saturday, the Vatican News website was still featuring the work of Marko Rupnik, the notorious abuser of nearly thirty religious women, who still somehow functions as a priest, seemingly protected by someone high up in Rome.

Sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning, his work disappeared, replaced by a mosaic similar to the "Mater Ecclesiae" mosaic looking down on St. Peter's Square, erected by Pope St. John Paul II in gratitude to Our Lady for saving his life from an assassin's bullet.

It wasn't that hard to replace the irreplaceable Marko Rupnik. And perhaps this is a sign that Rome may finally deal with this scandal.

But it did cause Pope Francis biographer and apologist Austen Ivereigh to defend Rupnik's art. Ivereigh opposes "iconoclasm" and explains that many shrines had only "covered up" Rupnik art rather than removed it. And in a strained comparison, he argued that just as sacraments work ex opere operato, so mutatis mutandis, Rupnik's works stand independently of him.

Where to start?

"Iconoclasm" was about visual art in general, not any particular artist. The Iconoclasts did not say, "Let's smash Greek icons, but Cretan ones are OK!"

As to "cover-ups" at shrines, well, the biggest cover-up of Rupnik was in Francis's Vatican. Rupnik was excommunicated, then rehabilitated, although we still do not know officially by whom. He was immune from prosecution until the pope, after great delay, decided otherwise. Rupnik's erstwhile Jesuit confreres washed their hands of him, but nobody saw a problem with incardinating him into a diocese in Slovenia. And we still have no idea when Cardinal Fernández and the DDF might assemble a panel of judges to try Rupnik.

Have shrines "covered up" Rupnik art? Yes, because unlike paintings on walls in papal apartments, removing mosaics is not a five-minute or a single day's job. And stripping a mosaic off a shrine wall will leave - until replaced - a blank space of rough stone.

But the most repulsive argument in all this mess is Ivereigh's invocation of ex opere operato. Ex opere operato is a concept of sacramental theology that affirms that sacraments have their effect by virtue of doing them, not by who does them.

The concept arose - apropos of our Augustinian pope - from a controversy in Augustine's day. During one of the periodic Roman persecutions of Christians, priests in North Africa apostatized: faced with torture and death, they denied the faith. When the persecution was over, they sought to resume acting as priests. Some Christians contended that the sacraments they ministered would all be invalid because of their prior apostasy.

St. Augustine rejected this argument. Christ is the real minister of every sacrament. The priest acts alter Christus, in Christ's name. But the sacrament and its effect remain Christ's. If you made sacramental efficacy dependent on moral rectitude, given that we are all sinners, what human being could be a valid minister of any sacrament? Sacraments work ex opere operato, "by the doing of the work," not ex opere operantis, "by the doer's doing."

To stretch a principle applied to sacred realities - sacraments instituted by Christ - to any merely human product borders on sacrilege. The sacraments are ultimately God's work, not man's. It is His fidelity that stands behind them "for us and for our salvation." To compare what is necessary for our salvation to a work of art is an inexcusable conflation of radically different realities.

Dostoyevsky said t...

By Robert Royal

But first a note: Controversy seems to be a constant feature of the contemporary Church. There are already divisions arising over the first steps of Pope Leo. Those are important matters to follow. But there are also deeper issues facing any Catholic today. And The Catholic Thing is committed to bringing you the best we can offer on both fronts. We can't do it without you. We're well into our mid-year fundraiser, so let's make this a quick success. Just click the button. You know the rest.

Not for today's column.

Catholic means universal, everything. A big claim, a crazy claim to the world. And the believer who aspires to be fully Catholic - especially in a fragmented age like ours - has a demanding vocation. Probably the most common phrase one hears about the Faith these days is the need for "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." And this is true. And essential. There's a lot packed into that short phrase. Jesus Himself told us: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (Matthew 22: 36-40)

Simple and familiar words, but what do they signify for us now?

Because what does "heart" mean here - merely emotions? Or soul - some "spiritual" thing? And what of mind? Also, the whole phrase is from the Jewish tradition going all the way back to Deuteronomy. (Chapter 6 verse 5) The Scripture scholars may help here. But maybe the most difficult term for us today is "mind." The phrase about the personal relationship with Jesus got a great deal of emphasis in recent decades as an antidote to a merely "propositional Christianity," almost a kind of ideology, that some thinkers believed had replaced the love of God with the kind of dry rational analysis that Thomists allegedly practiced before Vatican II.

Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on which philosophers and theologians you're talking about because the greatest modern figures, like Thomas himself, wrote treatises passionately and precisely out of the mind's love of God. Witnesses to the fact that, again, God Himself has told us we must love Him with our minds as well as our hearts and souls.

So how do we do that today?

In many ways, to be sure. Even as we develop that personal relationship, there are other things that we need to be doing and not only if we're philosophers or theologians. Everything we're engaged in - science, technology, medicine, law, business, education, domestic duties, sports - everything has to be marked by loving God with our whole minds, however difficult or improbable it might seem. Because the Faith is there both for the simple daily practices of the believer, but also must be present in the whole range of human things if it's to be true to itself in following the First Great Commandment.

We have a new and attractive Augustinian pope, and we will all doubtless be learning more about Augustine and Augustinianism in the coming months and years. Any authentically Catholic intellectual formation is all to the good these days. And Augustine is such an immense figure - he shifted the whole direction of Western Christian thought and thereby the whole history of our civilization - that close study of him and his work will enrich us all.

The one fault we must guard against, however, is to think that Augustine is all about the heart or the soul - and not also the mind. He got himself entangled with a formidable and disastrous philosophical current in his day, the Manichaeans (who believed there were two physical gods, one good and one evil, with all the consequences that follow for human beings and the world). It was only when he met with the group of Platonists around St. Ambrose in Milan that he finally shook free and came to understand what non-material, spiritual being means. All that is part of the background that enabled him to ...

By Fr. Brian A. Graebe.

How much can we glean about the young pontificate of Pope Leo XIV? Early signs may not be definitive, but they can be suggestive. And no doubt many and various surprises lie ahead. One theme that has emerged, however, may well become a leitmotif. In his first remarks from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on the day of his election, Pope Leo spoke of walking together "as a united Church." This Pentecost Sunday, as we remember the tongues of fire that descended upon the Apostles, is also a good time to recall how often we have said we need to listen to the Holy Spirit to rediscover that unity.

The voice of the Spirit speaks to us through many sources in the Church, but especially through the pope. The emphasis on unity found fuller expression in Pope Leo's inaugural Mass

"Brothers and sisters," Leo exhorted, "I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world."

Pope Leo has drawn attention to the first of the four "marks of the Church" that Christians profess in the Nicene Creed: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The Church's oneness, or unity, derives from her common foundation (Jesus Christ), a shared set of beliefs, and a singular means of grace in the Holy Spirit.

Thus can St. Paul speak of "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." The internal coherence of doctrinal unity has always found its visible, external expression in the person of the pope who, like St. Peter whom he succeeds, is tasked by Jesus to "strengthen the brethren" in that same faith. Catholics rightly look to the pope as a voice of creedal clarity and a bulwark against confusion and distortion.

Pope Leo's emphasis on unity, and his awareness of his personal role in both representing and assuring that unity, is welcome and needed. The preceding pontificate was marked by unprecedented doctrinal confusion. Certainly, there has been confusion and error since the earliest days of the Church; what was different was that the confusion came from the pope himself.

Pope Francis seemed to revel in studied ambiguity: not explicitly changing Church teaching (which he had no authority to do anyway) but winking at those who would like him to.

Can a priest bless a same-sex couple, or simply bless individuals who happen to form a same-sex couple? Can something that touches so closely on the Church's understanding of marriage and human sexuality be permitted in Germany but forbidden in Nigeria?

Pope Francis had little regard for such questions, and his biggest fans were always those most eager to see the Church capitulate to the secular zeitgeist. Combined with a certain harshness, especially against those drawn to the Church's most ancient forms of worship, Pope Francis left behind a deeply divided and wounded Church.

His successor has, from the start, displayed a more subtle savviness, and his calls for unity are not lost on those who have felt left out in the cold. His serene and confident demeanor, unafraid to embrace the external signs of an office larger than himself, suggests to many Catholics that he is aware of their suffering and wishes to heal the family rift.

Even at this early stage, he has prescribed a noteworthy remedy. A week after his election, speaking to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Leo said that, "from the Christian perspective, truth is not the affirmation of abstract and disembodied principles, but an encounter with the person of Christ himself, alive in the midst of the community of believers. Truth, then, does not create division, but rather enables us to confront all the more resolutely the challenges of our time."

The pope makes clear that truth, the "one faith," is not some arbitrary collection of dogmas. It is the person of Jesus Christ, "the way, the truth, and the life." That theme of unity rooted in Christ has continued to imbue the Holy Father's words throughout the first month of his pontificate. In a ...