By Anthony Esolen

"It is better to give than to receive," says the Lord, as Saint Paul reports to us. And when you give, says the Lord, you are not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. I should like to place these two verses together, to shed light on what is so dreadfully wrong with our therapeutic and narcissistic culture, especially as it is implanted and propagated in schools, among children and young people, much to the stunting of their personalities and the glooming of their souls.

Central to the therapeutic culture is a half-truth. If you say, "There is something wrong with me," you are right, there is. It is sin, or the propensity to sin. There may be more; you may be mentally or physically ill, and if so, you need treatment, no question. I have personal experience of that.

But even if our minds were as clear as the blue sky and our bodies were as stout as oaks, there would still be sin. And unless we are talking about Christ, the "true Aesculapius" or the God of healing, or, to see it from the human perspective, unless we are talking about prayer and spiritual direction and the acceptance of divine grace, there is no cure for sin.

As far as the propensity is concerned, it is a wrongness and a poverty that you will always have with you, on this side of the grave and your final purification.

Sin tarnishes the image of God within us. Serious sin, if we persist, makes us like hunchbacks and cripples. Yet the more fully we give ourselves to it, the less likely we are to notice the deformation. We become like Narcissus, gazing into the pool and falling hopelessly in love with his own reflection. With this distinction: Narcissus was beautiful, and we are not.

We say, "How good it is to be just the way we are! It is good to be a cripple, good to have a bent torso and brittle bones." Or we gaze, in a macabre way, on our sores, picking at them, absorbed in them, turning the pain into a perverse pleasure.

Yet to be healed, we must break free. The Pharisees, as Jesus suggests, turned their giving into a stage for self-display, and thus was their superficial generosity warped and made into a ravenous taking, rousing in those who beheld them not gratitude but envy. It was not better for them to give than to receive, because they wanted the left hand of everybody to see what their right hand was doing.

The widow who gave her small coin to the temple treasury could do so by forgetting herself. She gave from her very life, says Jesus. Nor was there any great display, for what she gave, in the world's eye, was so little. And by her giving, she became, in reality, greater than all the other donors. She increased by decrease; she multiplied by self-surrender.

There is the key to such happiness as is available to us in this world. If you grit your teeth and determine to be happy, you will never be. If you poke at your sores, they will never heal. If you say, "Because I'm sick, others must tend to me," you will never be well.

But if you lose yourself for the sake of Christ, you gain in the very losing, as he who gives in the pure spirit of giving becomes like the Creator who made all things, not because he needed them, but in an act of pure overflowing grace. Charity conquers all.

"But at least a teacher who presses children to talk about the things they are suffering is giving of herself," you may say. Maybe yes, maybe no, if I must judge by intentions; but the results are generally poor, regardless of intentions. Sometimes the intentions are bad. Some people seek attention by preying upon the weakness of others, setting themselves up as their healers, winning an unhealthy allegiance at the cost of worsening the disease.

But unless we have an urgent case that requires, say, the intervention of the police, the best thing for a well-intended teacher to do is to turn the child's eyes toward other people and other things, and to forget himself. This she can do by giving him the sense that he is needed; by providing hi...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray

"It is essential to safeguard the deposit of faith," Cardinal Robert McElroy affirmed in his recent address to the Los Angeles Archdiocesan Religious Education Congress. Yet he next posed this question:

But how do the doctrinal tradition and history of the church restrict the church's ability to refine its teaching when confronted with a world where life itself is evolving in critical ways, and it is becoming clear that on some issues the understanding of human nature and moral reality upon which previous declarations of doctrine were made were in fact limited or defective?

He, therefore, claims that the Deposit of Faith - Divine Revelation - is poorly served "on some issues" by the Church's "previous" doctrinal declarations that were conditioned by history. (No mention here of the Holy Spirit's role in protecting the Church from teaching error.) This tradition and history have produced an unsatisfactory result: the Church is restricted in her ability to refine Catholic teaching in an evolving world.

Refinement is an obvious euphemism for alteration. Cardinal McElroy claims that "it is becoming clear" (to whom?) that the anthropological and moral foundations of Catholic doctrine "on some issues" were "in fact limited or defective."

What issues? Primarily homosexuality; secondarily, divorce and remarriage. Cardinal McElroy takes for granted the existence of what he calls the "exclusion of the divorced and the remarried and LGBT+ Catholics" in the Church. He praises the 2023 Synod's Synthesis report, which "recognizes and condemns powerfully the structures in society and the church that grind people down with unceasing exclusion." The Synthesis "condemns all of these barriers as sinful."

Leaving aside, for the moment, whether the Synthesis actually says that: Why does he think that "LGBT+ Catholics" are being ground down and excluded by the Church? He finds "in our own country. . .[a]n enduring animus toward LGBT+ persons." Animus is defined as "a usually prejudiced and often spiteful or malevolent ill will" or a "feeling of hate or anger toward someone or something."

So, it all comes down to persistent "hatred." Cardinal McElroy is pleased that the Synthesis "condemns all of these evils with the humble recognition that they have existed within the life of the church and are a repudiation of Jesus Christ."

How does Cardinal McElroy justify this severe judgment? He uses a "whataboutism" argument: Those who reject the blessing of homosexual couples are most likely acting with malevolence because they expend little energy in condemning the blessing of adulterous unions:

It is wholly legitimate for a priest to decline to perform the blessings outlined in Fiducia [supplicans] because he believes that to do so would undermine the strength of marriage. But it is particularly distressing that the opposition to Fiducia in our own country focuses overwhelmingly on blessing those in same-sex relationships rather than those many more men and women who are in heterosexual relationships that are not ecclesially valid.

If the reason for opposing such blessings is really that this practice will blur and undermine the commitment to marriage, then the opposition should, one thinks, be focusing at least equally on blessings for heterosexual relationships.

Cardinal McElroy seems to believe that critics of Fiducia's blessing of homosexual couples can only refute the charge of having a hateful animus against homosexuals if they equally criticize the blessing of adulterous relationships. Absent that, they are presumed to act not out of love for the Church's teaching, but rather out of angry and malevolent ill will.

This stigmatizing characterization of the supposedly uncharitable motives of the "overwhelming" majority of opponents of Fiducia is a discussion-ending tactic. Cardinal McElroy certainly would not want us to pay any attention to what haters actually say. A sincere defense of Catholic doctrine and practice need not...

By Carrie Gress

The idea that Catholics must embrace feminism to engage non-Catholic women has been repeated so frequently that it's simply accepted as a truism. But is it actually working?

Before answering that question, let's take a close look at the work of St. John Paul II. He is generally invoked as the reason why we must have a Catholic feminism. As pope, John Paul was clearly interested in upholding the dignity of every woman. His 1988 Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, delved deeply into the nature of womanhood and has provided a backbone of sorts to the contemporary understanding of Catholic womanhood.

What we do not find anywhere in that roughly 25,000-word document is the word "feminism."

In fact, he only used the word one time: in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, where he called for a "new feminism." In one short paragraph, he wrote:

In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a "new feminism" which rejects the temptation of imitating models of "male domination," in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.

Despite this single mention, feminism has been perhaps oversold to the faithful as the route forward for understanding womanhood. It has even been used to claim that those who don't embrace Catholic feminism are rejecting John Paul's wider Catholic vision.

Yes, John Paul II was deeply interested in restoring and upholding the dignity of women, but he saw too that it had to be pursued in a way consistent with the Catholic faith. What is often missed in by those focusing on the Polish Pontiff's view is the modifier "new" - thereby implying that the "old" feminism is inadequate.

Through my own research about older feminism - most of which was not available during John Paul's pontificate - it is clear that feminism has significant problems. Since the beginning, it has had deep connections with the occult, egalitarianism (influenced by socialism/Marxism), and the eradication of monogamy for the sake of liberating women.

These misguided efforts have led to more unhappy women, fewer marriages, and severe damage to the nuclear family. As an ideology, feminism has perpetuated the belief that abortion is the means through which women can achieve equality with men, resulting in 44-million worldwide abortions in 2023, more than all other causes of death combined.

Perhaps more fundamental to feminism's problems is the question that has driven most of its forms since its inception, "How do we make women more like men?" Pope John Paul recognized this in his brief paragraph on feminism, saying that we must reject "the temptation of imitating models of 'male domination,'" where women adopt male vices.

This idea had led to the belief that children are an obstacle to women's happiness, resulting in the extreme ways in which women's fertility is curtailed, as if it is a curse instead of the blessing the Church and Scripture have always affirmed.

Feminism has long been considered a bridge to bring in outsiders via more familiar landscapes. The problem, however, has been that the hoped-for movement of women, from the outside in, has frequently had the opposite result, leading more Catholic women to identify with feminism than with the Church.

Catholic women currently contracept, abort, and divorce at roughly the same rates as non-Catholic women. Moreover, the teachings of the Church about women, which have developed slowly over millennia, have been overshadowed by contemporary feminist language which presents a shallow understanding of womanhood.

Although there are certainly individual cases to the contrary, Catholic women now resemble secular feminists more than secular feminists resemble us. Meanwhile, womanhood, and particularly motherhood, which has long been an icon of the Church itself, has be...

By Michael Pakaluk

But first, a note: Be sure to tune in tonight, February 29th, at 8 PM Eastern to EWTN for a new episode of 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal joins Fr. Gerald E. Murray and host Raymond Arroyo (the Papal Posse) to discuss the Alabama embryo ruling, Cardinal Burke's 'Return to Our Lady' novena, the health of Pope Francis, and more. 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 Michael Pakaluk's column...

I've been in the desert with Him these days of Lent, at the suggestion of a priest. In the way that immigrants have pined for their homeland of Ireland, or Italy; or pilgrims can keep in their hearts those special days in Rome or Jerusalem: Can we, for this season, live not so much among the distractions of the world, but rather be recollected, with Him, in a desert place? This same priest said that we should also look for the Devil there, who most assuredly will assail us.

The Gospel account of the temptations astounds me. Surely, we are dealing here with a mystery. The account itself is a marvel, since it had to have come from Jesus. There were no witnesses. It's the Lord's telling of his temptations, in the way that He wanted the Church to remember them. The three demands of the Devil and the quotations from Scripture - the chosen narrative of the Lord, terse but baffling and complex.

Luke's ordering of the temptations differs from Matthew's. Did one of the evangelists get it wrong, or was he trying to make a point "as an editor"? And yet indifference of order can be conveyed by a teacher also.

Suppose that after dictating the narrative the Lord asked His apostles to repeat it back: one does so in a different order; the others point out the apparent mistake; but the Lord says, "It does not matter; the order is not important." Then indifference of order in the matter has entered into Sacred Tradition. Apostolic authority extends to judgments of indifference.

Why were there three temptations? I cannot believe that the number is a meaningless "accident," or that the number was controlled by the arbitrary choice of the Devil. Also, what was the Devil trying to accomplish - discover whether Jesus was God? Derail the mission of salvation before it started? Provoke a second Fall of human nature?

I myself find a clue to answering these questions in the way that (in the Lord's own narrative) the Devil begins two of his temptations: "If you are the Son of God." This phrase, "Son of God," it seems to me, contains implicitly three distinct ideas, about anyone to whom it is applied: God, Son, human.

First, anyone who is "the Son of God" is God. The definite article is important, since it conveys that we are not dealing with an analogy or resemblance. The Pharisees understood this. (John 5:18) "The Son" must be the same in nature as His Father, homoousios. That is why, I take it, the first temptation is a challenge to create bread - as only a being who is God can create.

But nothing coming from the Devil is ever straight; he is always perverse, contemptuous, and mocking. He does not say, "create bread." He says, "command the stones to become bread."

Now, when God creates, He creates ex nihilo. Or if He wanted to teach us something about cooperation, He would create baskets of bread from a few small loaves that we contribute. But the Devil wants to see creative power bounded by the shape of a stone. He seems incapable of distinguishing a miracle from magic: "command the stones" is like sorcery.

He wants a parody of transubstantiation, that stone become bread. And if Jesus had gone along with the obscene demand (per impossible), the Devil would have shown Him merciless contempt and mocked Him.

Second, anyone who is "son of" is therefore a person, inherently related to a person, the father, "of whom" he is son. Which is to say, the second idea that this appellation contains is that "the Son of God" preci...

Robert Royal talks with Cardinal Raymond Burke about his hopes for the nine-month Novena “Return to Our Lady,” which he is organizing and will begin in March. Interested people can register at: novena.cardinalburke.com. The Cardinal will be sending out a monthly email to everyone enrolled with a meditation and prayer suggestions.

By Francis X. Maier

Let's start with a fun quiz. Who said the following words?

The insanity of the Christian doctrine of redemption really doesn't fit at all into our time. Nevertheless there are learned, educated men occupying high positions in public life, who cling to it with the faith of a child. It is simply incomprehensible how anybody can consider the Christian doctrine of redemption as a guide for the difficult life of today. . .Whereas the most learned and wisest scientists struggle for a whole lifetime to study but one of the laws of nature, a little [rural priest] is in a position to decide this matter on the basis of his religious knowledge. One can regard such a disgusting performance only with disdain. A church that does not keep up with modern scientific knowledge is doomed.

Sound familiar? It should. Surely they're the words of a celebrity atheist like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennett? Or maybe they belong to a member of today's Harvard or Yale professoriate? They're both very plausible options. And they're both wrong.

Try Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. He scratched those words in his diary in the 1930s.

Yes, I know, America 2024 is a very long way from Germany in the 1930s. And yes, of course, what happened there can't happen here. History never repeats itself. But it doesn't need to, because the patterns of human thought and behavior that make history repeat themselves all the time.

We already live in a surveillance state. In China, it's state policy. Here, it's a shared community project. Our version is more subtle than its ugly precedents, but it's also more pervasive and thorough. We strengthen it every time we sign away our privacy by downloading a new phone or computer app.

And it's worth remembering that, not so long ago, an FBI goon squad raided the home of an innocent pro-life family man - Mark Houck - on a bogus assault charge for which he'd already been acquitted locally and was promptly acquitted again in federal court. Bullying is now the go-to methodology of our "enlightened" leadership class.

But where am I going with this?

This Spring marks the 90th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration. If that triggers blank stares, it's understandable. We Americans tend to be bad at history, especially when it involves events beyond our borders. So here's the background: In May 1934, the German (Protestant) Pastors' Emergency League held a synod in the city of Barmen. From it emerged the Declaration.

Drafted largely by the theologian Karl Barth, it was a sharp repudiation of German Christian efforts to embrace and affirm National Socialism.

Today much of the declaration, though powerfully written, will seem irrelevant to American Catholics. Our circumstances are vastly different from the German Protestant crisis of nearly a century ago. But the Barmen text also marked the birth of Germany's "Confessing Church" movement, cofounded and passionately advanced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And therein lies a lesson that transcends time and borders.

The word "confess" has several applications. We confess our sins, but we also confess our faith in Jesus Christ and his Church. In Baptism, Christians are made "confessors" by nature. It's our vocation. We're meant to witness, or confess, our faith through the example of our lives; in what we say and in what we do.

In 1933, the Vatican signed a Concordat with the Third Reich protecting (in theory) German Catholic believers and interests. By 1934, the Nazis were already violating it. The point of the 1934 Barmen Declaration, and of Germany's "Confessing Church," was to offer a forceful counter-witness to the Nazification of the nation's official Evangelical Lutheran Church and other Protestant communities.

Bonhoeffer's role in the Confessing Church led him, eventually, into outright resistance to the Nazi regime and his execution by hanging just weeks before the end of World War II.

We live in a different time with different challenges. But maybe not s...

By Brad Miner

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

Freud's Last Session, a recent film directed by Matthew Brown, is based upon the play by Mark St. Germain who wrote the film's screenplay with Mr. Brown. Both film and play had their genesis in a book by Armand Nicholi: The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. Doctor Nicholi, a psychiatrist, had for years taught a popular course at Harvard on just that subject, engaging students in the conflict between the secular and the religious, contrasting two powerful human emotions, despair and hope.

As the movie begins, we see images of antisemitism, and of Jews and other religious figures, including Jesus - from the Shroud of Turin. We enter the den in Freud's London house, which is filled with artifacts, including effigies of ancient deities, almost a museum, one might say, of totems and taboos.

Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins) has invited Lewis (Matthew Goode) to his London home to discuss religious belief, something Freud rejects as childish fantasy. Of course, the encounter devolves into a therapy session with the twist that each man takes a crack at finding chinks in the other's psycho-philosophical armor.

Freud escaped Vienna after the Anschluss, came to London in 1938, and as he and Lewis meet a year later, WWII air-raid sirens wail, and Lewis begins to suffer PTSD flashbacks from his service in WWI's trenches.

It's September 3, 1939, and Freud begins his "last" analysis session - last because he will soon die. Suffering the effects of buccal (oral) cancer, the result of years of cigar smoking, Freud died twenty days later, although not from cancer. At his request, a physician friend administered lethal injections of morphine.

Assisted suicide: despair unresolved.

Now, this extraordinary encounter between Freud and Lewis never took place. Or, I should say, there is no certainty that they were ever together - just a cryptic note in Freud's appointment book about a meeting with an "Oxford don" on that date. So, it could have been any one of the Inklings: Barfield, Cecil, Williams, Dyson, or Tolkien. It could have been a professor of biology or physics.

What had been a 2-person stage play becomes a film with more than 2-dozen roles - added presumably to give depth and color to the drama. I've not seen the play, but I suspect, mano a mano, it worked better. Others in the screen version seem there for extraneous reasons.

The single exception is Freud's daughter, Anna (German actress Liv Lisa Fries), and the added frisson she brings because she's in a sexual relationship with an American woman, Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), as Anna was in real life.

Ironically, this upsets the man for whom sexuality seemed to ooze into every nook and cranny of psychoanalysis. Freud thought same-sex attraction among males was neurotic but among women likelier psychotic. Worse for him: he thought lesbianism arose from failed father-daughter relationships.

He even broke one of his own rules about conducting therapy by taking on his daughter as a patient. Her presence in the film would seem superfluous, were it not for the fact that it deepens her father's angst.

Sigmund Freud's despair is, of course, counterpointed by the Christian hope of C.S. Lewis, although there's no Christian triumphalism in the back-and-forth between the two. And it's fair to say that, in the end, the match is a draw. If anybody could have crushed Lewis's spirit, it might have been Freud. If anybody could have caused Freud to fall to his knees in prayer, it might have been Lewis. But both are unchanged, which is the film's main failing.

To the extent that Lewis might have made the case for God, it would have been by going back to basics - the proofs of Aquinas, for instance. But what's basic here...

By Robert Royal

Many people in many nations these days say they "don't recognize" their country anymore. Between radical changes in sexual morals and social behavior, the inability to state the obvious like "what is a woman," claims of racism and "hate" over everyday social frictions, massive unregulated immigration, and wholesale dismissals of the past as irretrievably evil, it's no wonder.

But it is a wonder that similar complaints - not exactly the same, but closely related - also arise often enough now about disorienting changes in the Church.

Part of the problem is that media - even Catholic media - have to fill limitless digital spaces, often by emphasizing controversies that they hope will attract clicks. Another part, however, is the radical rupture, sometimes even within the Church, with age-old human truths and goods, driven by technological developments, but also by abandonment of traditional anchors in tested truths of faith and reason, in the name of human liberation.

To understand all this is not easy; to know what to do harder still. But now comes a very useful tool from TCT contributor, Francis X. Maier. True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, which will be officially published tomorrow, is both a passionate statement of faith and love of the Church and a careful inquiry into what a cross-section of American bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people are thinking and doing at a very difficult moment for the Church and the world.

(Several anonymously, to get maximum candor.)

Fran Maier is the right man for this job and many others. He's been in the trenches. Archbishop Charles J.

Chaput, who made Maier his chancellor in Denver and special adviser in Philadelphia, provides a Foreword to this volume in which, among many other valuable things, he says, "In 26 years of working together, I've never had a moment when I questioned Fran's ability or character." I've known Fran even longer - though not at as close range - and would vouch for his reliability in what he says in his own name and in what he reports about others.

Many things in his book, therefore, warrant careful attention and offer realistic hope.

For example, he points to a recent survey:

the average Latin rite ordinary - i.e., the bishop actually in charge of a diocese, as opposed to an auxiliary - sleeps 6.49 hours a night and prays 1.80 hours a day. He works 6.33 days and about 51 hours each week. Ordinaries rank the National Catholic Reporter a progressive publication] lowest on a list of religious news publications they typically read. They rank the Fox network as their most frequently watched television news source.

Some 72 percent of ordinaries (and 88 percent of auxiliaries; they're not the boss) feel accepted by most of their priests. Barely 3 percent rank criticism from priests as a serious problem. And 97 percent list administering the sacraments and celebrating the liturgy as their greatest joy.

The anonymous comments by bishops are among the most interesting parts of the book, and what comes through, surprisingly, is how many of them "get" what's happening. For instance, "We're no longer arguing about how to get to a commonly shared goal. Now we have warring goals." Like their counterparts in the secular world, Church leaders have limited ability these days to shape what happens, even among Catholics, especially since the abuse crisis, which has eroded episcopal authority.

Furthermore, several bishops express worries like this one:

I have good relations with our local authorities. I support our police and certainly don't fear them. But when it comes to the federal government, I do believe that we're dealing with a totalitarian attitude now. . . .Our Catholic schools are very important to the Church, but government could easily shut them down with content regulations that would make teaching a genuinely Catholic curriculum impossible. It's just a matter of refusing our schools' accreditation.

I don't know if it will happe...

By Father Paul D. Scalia

A significant theme throughout salvation history is the ascent of a holy mountain. Abraham ascends Mount Moriah and Moses Mount Sinai. David ascends Mount Zion and there his son builds the temple, after the pattern that Moses saw on Mount Sinai. Later, after the contest of sacrifices on Mount Carmel, Elijah returns to Mount Sinai. As the new Moses, Jesus goes up the mountain to give the new law. He later ascends Mount Tabor and ultimately the mount that is called the Place of the Skull, Calvary.

Two of Scripture's most important mountains figure prominently in today's Mass. First, Mount Moriah where Abraham, obedient to God's command, goes to sacrifice his son Isaac. (Genesis 22) Second, Mount Tabor, where Jesus goes to be transfigured before Peter, James, and John. (Mark 9:2-10) This tale of two mountains frees us from false notions about God and reveals what He desires for us.

First, Mount Moriah. "God put Abraham to the test. . .'Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.'" What kind of god would do this, would ask a man to sacrifice his own son? Jews and Christians have struggled with this question for millennia. But in Abraham's day it wouldn't have been a pressing question. Human sacrifice was not uncommon in the ancient world.

In fact, the practice surrounded Abraham. The command to sacrifice Isaac might simply indicate that Abraham's god is not much different from others.

But the whole point of the scene is just the opposite. God is teaching Abraham that he isn't like those other gods. He brings Abraham all the way up there to impress upon him precisely this point, that He doesn't require human sacrifice.

This is strong medicine. It's aggressive treatment for serious spiritual illness. The events on Mount Moriah are the First Commandment in dramatic form, the Lord in effect saying to Moses, "I am the Lord your God, you shall not have other gods before me." Do not think that I am like the other gods, who require inhuman and barbaric things of you.

False gods destroy us and lead us to sacrifice those we love. We don't fall into this today as did the Philistines, Carthaginians, or Aztecs. But we have our little gods: our petty little kingdoms of control, our comfort, possessions, wealth, and pleasure - our own will. To these, we sacrifice our marriages, families, and children. We literally sacrifice our children to the false god of sexual freedom. But we sanitize the procedure and call it not "sacrifice" but "reproductive freedom."

Mount Moriah raises a fear we have about God, that devotion to Him will mean a lessening of life for us. Like Abraham, we will lose what's more important to us. This is Satan's lie that we are in competition with God, that more of Him means less of us. If we let Him into our lives too much, we will somehow lose. Which brings us to that second mountain - the Mount of the Transfiguration, commonly known as Mount Tabor.

"And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them." In contrast to the scene on Mount Moriah, the Father brings his Son up this mountain not for sacrifice but for glory, to reveal His glory and - more to the point - the glory He desires for all His children, for you and me. The Father desires not to demean or shame us but to raise and to glorify us with the glory of His only Son.

To get there, we need to ascend another mountain: Calvary. The road to glory is sacrifice. God desires to raise us up in glory. But for that to happen, we must part with the things of this world - with our control and possessions and pleasures. Christian sacrifice is demanding, and it may at times seem as though we are being crushed. But sacrifice is not the end. The lesson of Mount Tabor is that Christian sacrifice is directed not to our annihilation but to our glorification.

On the wa...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Sacrilege and synodality have come to the fore these last days.

For years the annual Religious Education Congress in Los Angeles has been a regular source of liturgical distress as various innovations test the bounds of reverence, not to say sacrilege. This year as the congress unfolded on the West Coast, the genuine sacrilege took place on the East Coast, at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

The "sacrilegious" - the apposite term of the cathedral rector - funeral for atheist transgender activist Cecilia Gentili was something of an ambush, with the surprised cathedral priests cutting it short and offering a Mass of Reparation for the outrages afterwards.

Father James Martin, SJ, to no one's great surprise, had been invited to serve as ringmaster for that circus but, conveniently for him, he was on the other coast for the congress.

It's a pity the organizers didn't think to invite Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who might have found some suitable passages from his theo-erotic book Mystical Passion to read at the Gentili funeral, the deceased being described enthusiastically by one eulogist as the "mother of all whores." A touch of cardinalatial erotic accompaniment would have fit it quite nicely.

About the funeral, plenty of comment has been offered elsewhere, with the flamboyant entourage of the deceased now disgruntled to have learned that instead of a funeral Mass, they got a simple Liturgy of the Word before the casket and congregation were hurried out the door. At the time, no one seemed to notice the difference, their liturgical piety apparently having become rather attenuated.

Meanwhile, back at the congress on the left coast, Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego was on hand to accuse those who oppose the papally-approved blessings for same-sex couples - but not same-sex unions! - to be driven by anti-gay "animus." Be that as it may, what caught my attention was the response when Cardinal McElroy was asked whether synodality will outlive Pope Francis.

"I hope so, I think so," he said, but "I'm not sure."

If that's what the champions of the Holy Father's program think, then synodality is in rough shape. All throughout 2023, even as the planetary stage of the synodal process for a synodal Church rolled on, no one knew exactly what it was. Whatever it meant, all-encompassing synodality as a new-way-of-being-Church died on 18th December 2023, when the authorization for blessings for irregular and same-sex couples was published.

The super-consultative synodal process will never recover. After all, how will the Holy Father and his advisors respond when, in the first days of the synodal assembly this coming October, someone asks, "What secret projects are the Holy Father and Roman Curia working on right now that take no account of the synod process, contradict its decisions, and undermine its credibility?"

Denials can be offered aplenty, but once that clandestine horse has bolted from the synodal barn, it is hard to get it back. Especially since the African bishops shot it dead at point-blank range. The synodal managers are desperately trying to breathe life into the expired steed, but trying to revive a dead horse is even more pointless than flogging it.

Nevertheless, the never-ending synodal process on synodality for synodal Church continues. The Vatican announced the dates for October. It will be preceded by another spiritual retreat. Perhaps last year's retreat master, Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, will return to advance his lifetime project of undermining the Church's settled teaching on homosexuality. It would seem at this stage that it would be more honest to just have Fr. Martin preach the retreat instead.

He could use whatever notes he might have prepared for a Gentili panegyric.

Back in Rome, the synod apparatus announced that it would convene a meeting of 300 parish priests from around the world for several days of synodal discussions on synodality. The synodocrats were embarrassed ...