The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.

People of a certain age may remember the words of Pope St. John Paul II reminding the Western Church, in particular, that the Church is a body with two lungs, the West and the East. And to be fully itself and spiritually healthy, it needs to breathe with both those lungs. While for years he was speaking of the Eastern Churches behind the Iron Curtain, he often also referred to the truly ancient Churches of the East - in the lands where the Church was born.

Is it coincidence or providence that in the very first week of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, one of his first addresses was directed to the Eastern Churches? Coincidence, because it was the week already long-scheduled for the Jubilee Year to celebrate those Churches. Yet providence can be seen in his words - not bland generalizations or weak words of affirmation, but a profound appreciation of the importance of the Eastern Churches. He spoke of the necessity of their survival for the life of the whole Church, a direction for their life in the diaspora, and the witness of those, especially in the Middle East, who have suffered for the Faith.

In this 1700th anniversary year of the Council of Nicaea, at which the majority of the bishops attending were from the East, Pope Leo reminded the whole Church of the "glorious history and bitter suffering" of Eastern Christians. And he declared, as Supreme Pontiff, that they were "precious in God's eyes."

Having visited the Christians of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt many times in the last ten years, I can state with certainty that this is what many there have wished to hear for years, and it is deeply appreciated. Time after time on my visits - with ISIS just a few miles away, churches destroyed, burned, and desecrated, and thousands of Christians driven from their homes - priests and bishops have drawn me aside and told me, quietly, that, deep down, they felt the Church of the West was unconcerned at their suffering.

Some of the specific points Leo XIV accentuated in one of his first addresses are likely to change this sense of neglect.

Quoting two of his predecessors, Leo XIII and St. John Paul II, the pope's most pointed words were to remind the Church of the West that it "needs the East," because, among many reasons, the "work of human redemption began in the East" (Leo XIII), and the East was the "original setting where the Church was born"(JP II).

This is no light matter. Leo XIV told the gathered Eastern Christians that the reason the "Church needs you" is because of the gifts the Churches of the East have to offer, in liturgy, mystery and witness - teaching an impoverished Western Church that, in both leadership and laity, is often woefully ignorant of its Eastern roots. A tree cut off from its roots will not be healthy.

Closely linked with that truth is the witness of the suffering Church, and the lack of attention and care it often receives from the Church of the West. Pope Leo highlighted the Christians of the Middle East who "persevere and remain. . .resisting the temptation" to abandon their ancient homelands. He was speaking of the Christians of Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and other places.

These fellow Christians are persevering and remaining in their historic homelands after centuries of persecution, including many recent travails, with the temptation to leave exacerbated by economic hardships and their experience of dhimmitude, or second-class status. All these are issues that both the Church and governments in the West can and must address.

Calling for their rights to be fully guaranteed is both a consequence of genuine peace, a word constantly on the lips of Pope Leo, and justice, without which true peace cannot exist. Those who have lived in the Middle East since long before the rise of Islam can no longer be treated as though they were interlopers.

Leo had a word of warning, and the first directive of his pontificate during this address, that the "priceless heritage of the Eastern Ch...

By Jason M. Baxter.

Flannery O'Connor once said this about writing novels: "Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." I don't know of a better description of what it's felt like as I translated Dante's Purgatorio, which was just released by Angelico Press.

Every morning, during the final six-month stage of this project, I followed the same routine: wake up, get coffee, and build up some psychic reserves of energy for the massively depleting experience. Then I went upstairs, spread out my Italian text and commentaries, and attempt - over and over again - to render in English Dante's dense web of music and meaning. And, for this reason, for six months (maybe longer: ask my wife), I've been a zombie, looking with eyes that don't see, listening with ears that don't hear.

Why is translating Dante so psychically depleting? Everyone knows that his poem is an inspiring journey from a "dark wood" that soars up to the Beatific Vision and God Himself. But his language is always working in multiple dimensions. On the most basic and obvious level, Dante is a musician, who wrote in hendecallyables (eleven-syllable long lines) captured well, by iambic verse that's not too stuffy. Dante also uses rhymes, of course, which Dorothy Sayers went all out to capture. In addition to the rhymes, however, Dante used all kind of dense word play, which he can do, in part, because he's working with an inflected language: he can leave the root stable - like an Aristotelian substance - while varying the accidents of his inflections.

But then, he also loves to use, on occasion, a maddeningly difficult syntax, a gnarled, thorny wood of grammar often made even more complicated because of the learned circumlocutions he employs. In all fairness, he warned us about such maddeningly difficult syntax and entangled cosmological grammar:

Reader, I know you see that I am raising

my subject, and thus you will not marvel"

if now I use more art (più arte) to reinforce my poem.

(Purgatorio. 9:70 72)

And what does this look like? Dante loves word play and word art. Those rhetorical tropes and schemes from classical rhetoric that we find repellent, he adores. For instance, at one point, when Dante is being interrogated by Beatrice, "when, by her eyes, my eyes were struck" (33:18), the figure Dante quite deliberately uses is anadiplosis (a rhetorical "doubling back"). A modern translation, to make this line feel more natural for us, kills the rhetorical scheme by translating it: "when her piercing eyes met mine."

Elsewhere, Dante uses chiasmus, an X-like pattern that sets one word on one side of the scale and then balances it out by putting a variant of it on the other side. For instance, at one point, Virgil has intuited that the pilgrim had within him more questions, and then generously proceeds to encourage him to speak forth those hidden doubts. Dante puts it this way: he "by speaking made me bold to speak." (Purgatorio. 18:7-9). That chiasmus becomes this in one recent translation: "that true father. . ./ spoke and gave me courage to speak out."

But what is extraordinary is that Dante has the inverse tendency as well. After passing through the "refining fire" that cleanses the distorted love of the lustful, for instance, Dante, Virgil, and Statius have to pause to wait out the night, resting on the steps of a steep stairwell that goes right up the mountain:

And just like goats in tranquil rumination,

who had been rowdy, capricious among

the hills before they'd found repast,

but now in shade are quiet while the sun is hot,

now guarded by the shepherd, who leans upon

his staff and stands to watch their rest;

or like the watchman who sleeps outdoors

and spends the night beside a somnolent herd

and watches lest a beast should scatter them;

just so were we, all...

By Joseph Wood.

Aristotle has given much to the Catholic understanding of "what is," of reality. Among his gifts were three axioms about man:

• All men naturally desire knowledge.

• All men are by nature rational and political animals.

• All men want to be happy, and by nature are supposed to be happy.

We are, by the given order of nature, beings who want to know, do, and be something. Those desires form our human nature. They are closely related, and when one desire is frustrated, there are consequences for the other desires and for our capacity to be fully human.

Aristotle claimed that in wanting to be happy, we are really meant to use our reason and intellectual excellence to contemplate the divine. We want the wisdom of knowing the causes and truths of the highest, metaphysical things, which don't change and exist beyond the naturally changing world we sense.

But he concludes, we can't live our telos, or our proper end of knowing the divine things, the fullness of our human nature - mainly because we are occupied with taking care of the needs of our bodies. We're composites of body and soul, always animals yet always with a uniquely human capacity for reason.

Yet no need for despair. Aristotle advises us that we can have good lives in politics. We can cultivate human excellence in political communities, which come to exist by nature to know the common good of the community and to do it.

So the knowing and doing of being human are closely linked. That linkage shows up in other philosophical thought as well.

Aristotle's teacher, Plato, in his dialogues Republic, Gorgias, and Statesman, shows Socrates (or a stand-in) using reason to discuss justice and governance in political communities. In the Republic, Plato devotes time not just to politics but to how we know truth, through reason, in his famous "divided line" explanation of the range of human understanding and the allegory of the cave.

But in these dialogues, wisdom or knowing the "what is" of politics requires that the philosopher turn to myths involving the nature and action of the divine as sources of truth. Socrates warns that his opponents will think of these myths just as old wives' tales, but we should take what they offer until a more reliable source of truth is found.

Modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke also ground their political thought on their own epistemological theories. In both cases, our understanding of what is outside of us is very limited, so interior reason (rather than nature or God) becomes the dominant source of truth.

We can expect, then, that when we are frustrated in our knowledge, we are frustrated in our politics. Our knowing the truth of the genuine common good precedes the political choices of doing that good.

In his book The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis surveys medieval literature in order to discern the model by which medieval man viewed the world, which shaped how he knew what he knew. That model was less empirical or "evidence based" than the modern "paradigm." It encouraged a vertical outlook - towards the heavens, the divine, and was open to truths that could not be empirically certified but could be known through a broader reason.

Our modern horizontal view, already dominant by the 17th or 18th centuries, tends to be restricted to the findings of physical science, discarding the contemplation of the divine that Aristotle thought to be the fullness of human nature. It has produced enormous material progress based on industrial and now digital methods. But it leaves out much of reality, as Pope Benedict XVI brilliantly pointed out.

Many people have felt uneasy about this modern way of knowing. Father Paissy in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov captures this distrust:

The science of this world, having united itself into a great force, has. . .examined everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in sacred books, and after hard analysis, the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left of ...

By Stephen P. White.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, May 15th 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 election of Leo XIV, his first week as pope, 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...

The election of Leo XIV comes at a significant moment in the life of the Church in the United States. Though Leo spent much of the past four decades outside the United States - primarily in Peru, but also in Rome - it would be hard to overstate the opportunity (and challenge) that comes with having a pope who is a native son of these United States.

Trying to predict how a pontificate will play out this early in the game is a fool's errand, but there is good reason to suppose that Pope Leo is reluctant to appear more preoccupied with the affairs of the world's only superpower than the responsibilities of his office require. In short, he won't want to seem like a homer. Nevertheless, the energy and interest his election has created here is remarkable.

A 30,000-foot view of the cultural and ecclesial landscape provides some general sense of what this pontificate might mean for the Church in the United States.

Americans under the age of 40 mostly do not remember a time when the large institutions that form the pillars of our common life had been working well. Distrust of institutions is now widespread, and for understandable reasons.

The most fundamental institution of society, the family, has been in trouble for decades. Since the advent of the sexual revolution, we have seen widespread divorce, ubiquitous contraception, industrial-scale abortion, collapsing marriage rates, the legal redefinition of marriage, and sub-replacement birth rates.

The carnage and confusion this has produced are widespread and manifest. Young people are dissatisfied and disheartened, and have a hard time imagining how things might be otherwise. A shockingly high percentage of them no longer see marriage and family as important sources of meaning and happiness.

Our political life is not exactly a model of stability and civic-mindedness. Polarization has become a chronic problem. There is little consensus about the existence of the common good, let alone anything approaching a consensus about how to pursue it.

Both parties seem convinced of the righteousness of their vision of the American past and future, but neither seems able to find a way to govern on behalf of the whole. Perhaps worse, neither party seems particularly interested in doing so, each defining themselves at least as much in opposition to the failings and sins of the opposition as to some positive, coherent vision of a future together.

We are going on three generations of Americans - Millennials (who are approaching middle age), Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha - who have little or no memory of a Catholic Church unsullied by the abuse crisis and its fallout. The public moral authority of the Church, and especially our bishops, has waned.

We have also just lived through a contentious pontificate in which debates about how best to engage and evangelize the modern world have revealed even deeper divisions in which not just the means of proclamation but the substance of the message to be proclaimed have been called into question from within the Church.

The Church in every age faces obstacles to the proclamation of the Gospel, but a Church that lacks confidence in the truths it would proclaim would struggle to gain traction in any age.

One could go on: our popular culture seems stuck in an oscillation between transgressive vulgarity and nostalgia; the post-war international order is cracking if not actually broken; our educational institutions have lost sight of what edu...

By Robert Royal.

The world is still a bit giddy over what happened in Rome the past few weeks. And rightly so. I've been present in the Urbs Aeterna over decades, for a couple of conclaves, and many Vatican events. As I recently confessed (here), these past dozen years I've felt great weariness and distaste, for obvious reasons, at all that Church business. But I have to record that the emotion that greeted Leo XIV when he stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter's was - in both intensity and quality (whoever expected to hear Italians shouting il papa americano!) - like nothing I've ever seen. I felt it myself, deeply, too. And yet my own most intense experience in Rome this trip came prior to the papal election: at an Eastern Rite Catholic liturgy, which I think says something not only about the current form of the Mass but about some fundamental questions now facing our new Pope Leo.

Thanks to Bob Moynihan, who writes Inside the Vatican, for publicizing that liturgy at Santa Maria in Trastevere, which is celebrated Sunday evenings. The church itself is one of the earliest in Rome (the original layout probably goes back to around 340 AD, with some elements even a century earlier). And its many beauties were augmented in the High Middle Ages with radiant mosaics in gold and various colors. I'd been there many times for the usual Masses in Italian and appreciated it as a solid local parish with large numbers of children. But this Eastern Rite Mass floored me, literally, in the sense that it brought me to a grounded yet exalted place that I don't think I've touched since the pre-Vatican II high Latin Masses I remember witnessing as a young boy.

One of the things that many of us have noticed about Pope Leo is the way he seems grounded - "based" in the current slang - in his spiritual formation as an Augustinian and in what seems a manly and genuine serenity. One Chicagoan who knows him a bit told me, "At least he's not crazy." That is probably setting too low a bar for the successor to Pope Francis, but we're right to expect some great things given the more traditional way Leo has conducted himself - his traditional vestments on the loggia, his careful celebrations of the liturgies, and his well thought-out and delivered remarks at every event to date. Even if he continues some of the rather messy things Francis set in motion, there's a good chance that he will bring to them more discipline, substance, and - dare one say - Catholicity.

But he has some steep hills to climb. Several commentators have expressed the hope that he will bring back Pope Benedict XVI's openness to the Traditional Latin Mass, which there's reason to think he might. Given the calmness he seems to be deliberately cultivating - not an artificial media strategy but something that seems to radiate from his basic personality - I'd be surprised if he were to do that right away. But early indications are that he seems to believe that Francis moved too far into simplifying liturgies, which inspired no one, despite the intention to suggest humility. We know that many young people have been coming to the Church lately for firmer teaching about how to live their lives and, often enough, for the very Latin liturgies that were allegedly diving a synodal Church.

It will be interesting to watch how Leo handles all this as well as how he intends his papacy, which has deliberately reached back to the great Leo XIII, to engage our postmodern world. Even in his early remarks, the American pope has shown a remarkable grasp of what we're facing - not only the longstanding rejection of religion as untenable and irrelevant in a scientific and technological age - but a time marked by the breakdown of belief even in science and technology and all the institutions that make civilization possible.

As many Catholics know, Leo XIII basically inaugurated modern Catholic Social Doctrine with his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum. The very title of that work suggested two things. It can be...

By Randall Smith.

"Oh, so you're using logic," said the young man when I pointed out he had contradicted himself. "I'm not confined by logic." And Lord knows, he hadn't been. That was one thing we could agree on.

If your math teacher asks, "What is 2 + 2?" and you answer "10," and she says, "No, that's not right," it won't help to say, "Oh, so you're using mathematical logic? I don't wish to be confined by that."

Whatever "philosophy" you may have studied, two dollars plus two dollars does not equal ten dollars. And statements can't be both true and false at the same time in the same respect. These aren't just made-up "rules" that you can bypass like the rule against chewing gum in school. They are expressions of reality.

What's at stake here isn't merely an abstract "academic" debate about "logic." The tragic result of rejecting logic is that it insulates you from taking seriously any meaningful critique of your views. One can always take refuge in the claim, "Oh, that's just logic." But that's like saying: "Oh, so you think statements should make sense?" Well, yes, actually, I do. And quite frankly, so does everyone else!

Now, to be fair, this isn't the only way people insulate themselves from meaningful critique. An even more common way is to commit a logical fallacy, mistaking it for a real argument.

There is, for example, the Fallacy of Relevance: citing evidence or arguments that are irrelevant to the conclusion they are supposed to support. During the Second World War, the commander of German Reserve Police Battalion 101 told his men, as he was giving them the order to slaughter 1500 Jewish women and children in a small Polish village, that they should "remember that Germans were being killed by bombs back in Germany."

Yes, but these Jewish women and children had nothing to do with those bombs, and murdering them would do nothing to make the bombing stop. It may sound like an argument, but it's not. People cite evidence and arguments all the time that have precious little relevance to the dramatic conclusions they wish people to embrace.

And then there is the famous Ad Hominem Fallacy: thinking that an attack on the person is enough to refute his argument. Politician X may be a lying shyster, but that doesn't make his argument wrong. If we could convince people that ad hominem arguments are empty and invalid, most of what passes for political discourse would simply vanish. Even if Republicans are "greedy," and even if Democrats are "hypocrites," that tells us nothing about their specific arguments about taxes and the budget - unless their only arguments are that Republicans are greedy, and Democrats are hypocrites.

Then there are Fallacies of Ambiguity: arguments that rely on vague or ambiguous language. What does it mean to say, "We should tax the rich"? Maybe we should, but who is included in the category "rich"? Who are "the poor" and how will taxing "the rich" help them? It might, but we would need to know how, and then we would need to verify whether it is actually helping.

Straw Man arguments are also common. This is when people misrepresent the arguments of the other side to make them easier to attack. It's usually done by re-stating the argument without the supporting evidence or by using different, more emotionally laden terms. "They're trying to destroy the country!" Really? That would be an odd motivation for anyone living in this country.

Then there are slogans, repeated like mantras until they become nearly impossible to dislodge from the mind. "If men got pregnant, abortion would be sacred." Well, if women were white and living in the South in 1850, slavery would be sacred. Either way, slavery is wrong, and if men got pregnant, it would still be wrong to kill a living human being.

Many of these fallacies serve the partisan tribalism that currently bedevils our political discourse. People blind themselves to the illogic of their arguments because they take themselves to be supporting "the good guys." Th...

By Fr. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J..

While most of the world's attention was focused on the election of the new pope in Rome, another major spectacle was taking place in the city as well. "If there is a single painter with whom the new millennium has identified, it is without a doubt Caravaggio," begins the catalogue for Caravaggio 2025, an extraordinary exhibition of twenty-four of the artist's works, gathered at Rome's Palazzo Barberini from museums and private collections across the world. Judging from the crowds and the hype, the event's organizers have it right. Caravaggio is in.

This hasn't always been the case. After falling into obscurity for several centuries, Caravaggio's (1571-1610) star began to rise again in 1951 thanks to a similar exhibition organized in Milan by the great art historian Roberto Longhi. Another art historian I know told me years ago that her colleagues had run out of things to write about Michelangelo and so fixed on Caravaggio. But there's more to it than that.

The painter's life fits the post-Byronic template for a tragic artist - salacious liaisons, murder, exile, and an untimely death on the unforgiving (but romantic) Italian coast. Romanticism put a premium on artistic self-expression, and Caravaggio's work was undeniably original because of the inner tumult that gushes from his figures. Those figures are not always conventionally beautiful, but they are compelling.

Yet these considerations don't quite explain Caravaggio's magnetic draw. Perhaps above all, Caravaggio was a great religious painter and something about his style resonates with the spiritual aspirations and shortcomings of our age. His works on secular themes are clever, but don't convey the power of his later religious works. And none of those works are quite so powerful as the Flagellation, Supper at Emmaus, and Ecce Homo with Jesus Christ at their center. One feels a yearning for redemption in the darkness of the artist's life.

Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon locates the roots of Caravaggio's style in the reforms of Milan's great archbishop St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584). Borromeo was the dominant cultural and religious figure in Caravaggio's native Lombardy at the time of the artist's birth. Guided by the Council of Trent's emphasis on the sacraments and the imaginative prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola, Borromeo favored an intense, dramatic, devotional style Graham-Dixon describes as "populist."

These characteristics - alongside Borromeo's awareness of the darkness that original sin casts over our existence - are distilled in Caravaggio's mature work. In the Flagellation or the Conversion of St. Paul or St. Francis contemplating death, one feels no scholastic abstraction, but salvation worked out achingly in wounded flesh.

Another art historian, Alessandro Zuccari, points out that all available evidence indicates that Caravaggio's religious beliefs were conventionally Catholic. He confessed and received Communion at Easter and participated in forty-hours Eucharistic devotions. The fiery temper that caused the artist so much grief is evidence of concupiscence, not heterodoxy.

Exiled from Rome after killing a man in a duel, Caravaggio spent the rest of his life seeking papal forgiveness instead of fortune in the Protestant principalities of northern Europe. When his self-portrait appears in scriptural scenes, it has a haggard, yearning look. But feeling the difficulty of faith is not the same thing as unbelief. And that's, I suspect, why the artist's work so resonates today.

In Michelangelo's muscular figures, we witness the robust marriage of faith and Renaissance humanism. The inky darkness of Caravaggio's scenes anticipates an age when faith no longer feels so inevitable. At Caravaggio 2025, I was struck by the arrangement of St. Francis in Ecstasy - the saint, reclining in soft angelic arms, fills one side of the painting, but its center is all shadow. If you look closely, you can make out figures in the distance,...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.

Among the defining features of much of contemporary society are both distraction and lack of attention, which are not necessarily the same thing. We are most certainly distracted by the multiplicity of social media, the inability to concentrate, and the sheer omnipresence of noise and visual distraction. This then leads to lack of attention, an unwillingness, almost certainly not entirely willed, to be able to focus on any one thing for any length of time. And particularly with the lack of silence, our attention can veer away from God, towards the mundane and the insignificant.

I was reading a book recently about the ancient wisdom of some of the cultures still in existence in parts of Bulgaria, Greece. and Macedonia. The author made the clear connection between the lack of silence in Western society and illness - mental illness, obviously, but also physical illness. She writes of a place where the natural world is still dominant, the sky at night is still illuminated only by the stars, food is natural and healthful, and, when artificial noise enters in, it is jarring. There is, as the great Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote, a "time to keep silence."

Giving something, or someone, attention is a sign of respect. The more mundane, in the true sense of the word, the celebration of Mass becomes, with all that involves, especially music and art, the less worshippers are able to give what demands attention, the attention that is needed, but also the respect that the worship of the divine demands.

St. James, in his short but powerful letter, addresses this in a few verses, and something even deeper. He reminds us to be "doers of the word, and not hearers only." If we just hear, he says, we are deceiving ourselves. Many years ago, while visiting a friend in Frankfurt, Germany, I attended Sunday Mass. My German, then and now, is at the schoolboy stage, but I realised the Gospel was that of the Transfiguration. At one point during the homily, the priest used two English words, "listen and hear." Afterwards, I asked him if he was making the point that, in the English language, there is a great difference between hearing and listening. In his, of course, perfect English, he responded that I was correct.

To hear and to do require concentration and attention. And to be obedient is really to listen correctly and then to act, the very command of the Father to those who were on the holy mountain when the Lord was transfigured in glory. The word St. James speaks of, is both the Word of God, the Lord Jesus, and His word, encompassing both Scripture and the teaching of the Church.

St. James uses the marvellous image of the man who just hears the word, and does not act upon it, as a man who looks at his face in the mirror, and forgets what he looks like. What a description of contemporary man, and particularly post-Christian contemporary man.

What is the solution? Fixing our attention. St. James says, "look steadily at the perfect law of freedom," another translation says, "look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere."

The perfect law of freedom, the law of liberty, is not politics, personality, or populism; it is the Gospel, the saving message of Christ. It is the encounter with the Person of Jesus, the steady gaze at His face in prayer and meditation, the attentive listening to His word, without which we cannot progress.

As we look steadily, we become aware that the Lord is looking at us, which is perhaps the very definition of prayer. We are probably familiar with the story of St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars, asking the old farmer, whom he used to see daily seated before the tabernacle, what he was doing: "I look at Him and He looks at me." The man was a mystic.

The penetrating gaze of Christ, even unseen from the altar, marked by the burning red candle, is a captivating gaze; it is the inoculation against the virus of distraction and inattention. The pandemic of superficiality, and life lived upon the su...

By Brad Miner.

Be Good Bankers is a remarkable title - one that places the book's premise boldly, perhaps controversially, before the reader. And the story of how Prof. Michael Pakaluk came upon it - years ago as a grad student at Harvard - is both compelling and provocative. It also shines a light on the heart of the Roman Catholic faith.

You won't find the phrase, "Be good bankers," in the New Testament. You will find it in the writings of the early Church Fathers. Pakaluk discovered the phrase when he was reading Francis de Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life: "[We] must carefully practice what the Savior of our souls was accustomed to say, as the ancients have informed us, 'Be ye good bankers . . . Separate the precious from the vile.'" It is among the brightest of Catholicism's lights that we look not only to Scripture but also to Tradition.

But St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) was not an early Father. So, where did the phrase come from? Pakaluk went looking, and it led him to John Cassian (c. 360-435).

All this, in the book's Preface, reads like a detective story, and from it, we discover the point of view of the world's most famous tax collector and the premise of Pakaluk's Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew's Gospel, with a Fresh Translation: "Christianity's most fundamental claim is that Jesus is the Redeemer. To redeem is literally to make payment; it is to buy someone back - from debt and consequent enslavement."

This book (and its Gospel translation) follows upon Pakaluk's The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark and Mary's Voice in the Gospel According to John: A New Translation with Commentary.

In each book, Pakaluk's scholarship, clarity, humor, and wisdom shine through.

One of the more jaw-dropping statements he makes in Be Good Bankers has to do with Christ's paternity (this in the context of Matthew's genealogy): "How does the genealogy give the origin of Jesus, if Joseph is not the father?" One answer might be "by adoption." But that's not the author's answer.

Pakaluk, uniquely in my experience, suggests that at conception, God gave Jesus not only Mary's DNA but Joseph's as well - and that Matthew's genealogy assumes this. God was "able to accomplish through a miraculous process what would have been so in a natural process." Therefore, Christ would have resembled both Mary and Joseph, and it just as surely means that Joseph is not simply Christ's stepfather.

And, again, this is just in the Preface.

In the Introduction, Pakaluk makes clear why his translation and especially his commentary employ the language of economics: Matthew saw the world that way, and it's exactly why Jesus chose him.

This is made clear in surprising ways. For instance, discussing Matthew's descriptions of Christ's healings, Pakaluk writes, "Matthew does not regard a healing as without cost. . . . these cures were 'paid' for later on by the Passion." And in discussing the Parable of the Talents:

We see here an implicit endorsement by Jesus of interest in so far as it represents, as we would say, the "time value of money." As this modern conception could not have come from a Hebrew understanding of money and lending, it must have come from Roman culture, with which we are supposing Matthew was familiar.

Be Good Bankers would be sufficient were it simply a masterful translation of the first Gospel, but it is equally illuminating in its commentary. Pakaluk's translation of the Resurrection (the opening of Matthew 28) is dramatic, which I excerpt here in bold - as all the words of Scripture are in the book - and note that he renders behold as "amazingly":

2 And amazingly there was a great earthquake because an angel of the Lord had come down from heaven; it went up to the tomb, rolled away the stone, and sat on top of it. 3 Its countenance was as if lightning and its garments as if snow.

Pakaluk's commentary:

The image of snow is presumably drawn from Mount Hermon, about 60 mile...

I confess that on Divine Mercy Sunday, when I should have been praying, "Jesus, I trust in you," I was fretting over the conclave and the next pope. As if my opinion counted, I ran a mental list of Cardinals whom I would rejoice to see in white - and a second, more worrisome, list of those for whom white would be unbecoming.

But since then, the cardinals of our holy Catholic Church have spoken: Cardinal Robert Prevost is now Pope Leo XIV.

The rush is on to analyze the cardinals' rationale, and the scrutiny of every tiny piece of the pope's time on St. Peter's loggia - the name, the mozzetta, the prepared text, the languages, the words themselves, the emotion he showed. We seek a program, an agenda, a hint of what the new pope will do, what needs he will address first.

As I realized after Mercy Sunday, and even more as we recover from today's excitement, I believe that we humans fret over the wrong things. Because God does not think this way.

The image of the Lord Jesus asleep in the boat that is the floundering Church has endured through the ages, even longer than the old joke that divine protection alone explains how the Church has survived the ineptitude of her leaders. Many of the successors of St. Peter have contributed to this narrative with their gross incompetence, sloth, lust, greed, and even malice.

It's, therefore, fair to ask: Is God as worried as we are over what we deem to be the Church's pressing needs, given all the sins He has permitted His vicars to commit?

This is a point worth pondering as we greet our new Holy Father with filial reverence. This question, a particular spin on the eternally nagging problem of evil, reminds us that God does not always give us what we want, which is usually just the smooth navigation of the Barque of St. Peter. He gives us, rather, what we need for salvation, and very often that means enduring trials of infidelity and suffering evils inflicted by others. Our Lord endured these Himself on the Cross, God's curious way of bringing about the greater good of our redemption.

But distinguishing the good that arises from the Church's human failings often requires high-powered lenses. Where is the good in the Great Schism that split western and eastern churches? The Avignon Papacy? The so-called Reformation? The theological debates during Pope Francis's pontificate? Closer to home, where is the good when a pastor neglects, or, worse, abuses his flock? When a Catholic school teacher promotes immorality and heresy?

Amidst these evils we learn a most difficult lesson: God alone is good. Upon Him and His grace flowing through the Church and her organs do we depend. Nothing more. Not even the proper functioning of the Body of Christ, which we are right to work for and pray for, is necessary in God's providence.

Sometimes God grants us a pope - or bishop or pastor or teacher - whose holiness and leadership inspire us, console us, and help us grow in faith. We pray for this as Pope Leo XIV loosens the sails. Yet when the ship sails on smoothly, a danger looms: we can grow complacent, overly reliant on the shepherd to do what God wants each of us to do: to love Him above all things and to bring the Gospel to each person we meet.

Our hope for salvation rests not in princes, not even ecclesiastical ones, but in the Lord. Of course, what the pope says and does is of great importance. But his particular program and personal sensibilities - whether he is a great leader or a timid one, wise or foolish, peaceful or confrontational - does not change our vocation as baptized Catholics to bring the Gospel to the corners of the world that we each inhabit.

It's easy to forget this in the grand pageantry of a papal election. And even as we admit that it is the most exciting event left in the modern world, still, the pope is not the summit and source of Catholic life. God is. Whatever Pope Leo does in the future, he will not change, and cannot change, the mission that each one of us has as baptized child...