The Catholic Thing

By Anthony Esolen.

But first, Be sure to watch The Conclave Crew's latest commentaries and analyses by clicking here.

Now for today's column...

Why did Jesus choose only men as his apostles? Three replies are typically given. The first two are absurd, and the third is insufficient. As the Cardinals vote for the next successor to St. Peter, it's a good time to look more deeply into this question.

First, it is said he was bowing to the culture around him. The Jews would not have looked kindly on a man traveling with women among his intimate entourage. As if Jesus was ever afraid of rejection! And what could they have done to him that they were not already going to do? Crucify him twice? Flickering beneath this first reply is the assumption that Jesus was not divine; that he was but a very fine teacher who had a few unfortunate limitations. We, today, it is supposed, know better.

Second, it is said he did choose women as apostles, but the men, deliberately or from unconscious cultural habit, shouldered them aside. That makes the apostles out to be liars, knaves, or even - after Pentecost - blockheads. It also renders their witness untrustworthy. If we cannot trust them on the names of the apostles and the special character of their mission, why should we trust them on the world-shaking matter of the Resurrection? Besides, Jesus did not choose twelve as a random number. He was reconstituting Israel and her twelve tribes. And we are told who the twelve were.

Third, it is said that the apostles, and then by extension their successors and the priests they ordain, must be male, because the priest acts in persona Christi, and sex is not a mere accident of the human person, like occupation, height, place of birth, or skin color. Here we verge upon the great mystery of the fatherhood of God himself: not biological fatherhood, but also not an abstract parenthood.

This reply concerns the individual apostle, the individual priest, and the character of the divine Father and Son. I believe Christians are bound to honor the choice Jesus made and his revelation of God as Father. To lose your hold on the determinative force of the first is to lose your hold on the second, and that is why we see the inevitable slide, in liberal Protestant denominations and in liberal orders of religious women in the Catholic Church, from feminism in sociology to feminism in theology.

As a result, the name "Father" sticks in the throat and translators, editors, hymn writers, and other camp followers will twist the English language and Scripture into knots, to avoid, as far as they can, the names "Father" and "Son," and masculine pronouns to refer to any of the Persons of the Trinity.

But we are still missing something, and it is typical of an individualistic society to miss it. It is what a friend of mine, Dr. David Pence, used to call "the missing icon" - the brotherhood. Jesus did not simply choose twelve individual men to be twelve individual apostles. He formed a band of brothers.

We have the icon of mother and child. Think of the Christmas crèche. Think of Mary at the foot of the Cross. We have the icon of husband and wife. Think of Cana. Think of the wedding feast that is the Kingdom of God. We are missing the icon of the male protective group, the brotherhood in responsibility, danger, and self-sacrifice for the common good.

If these three are fundamental to any real human society - rather than some imaginary science-fiction or fantasy world of sexlessness beneath superficially male or female forms - then we should not be surprised that to deny or weaken one of them will harm the others also.

We do not recognize the dynamism and the essential goodness of the brotherhood. Is it then a surprise that we also no longer revere the special bond between a woman and her child? Or that we can no longer figure out why man and woman are meant for one another in marriage?

Again, I often hear the objection that what was fit for cultures in those old days - we might ...

By Francis X. Maier.

H.G. Wells was a gifted writer. He was also a tiresome socialist. He was also a callous thug when it came to matters of faith. In his novel The Shape of Things to Come, a future scientific elite targets and exterminates religious believers, and especially Catholics - all in the pious name of "necessity" and human progress. But otherwise his science fiction did entertain. His novel War of the Worlds has been made into film seven different times.

An even better tale, though, and one of the very best books of my teen years, was his novel The Time Machine. The storyline is simple. A man in Victorian London invents a vehicle that carries him into the distant future. He finds a world filled with beautiful young people, the Eloi, whose main tasks seem to be eating, playing, and having lots of carefree sex. But paradise has a cost. At night, the Morlocks, the formerly human creatures who manage the machines that run the paradise, emerge from their tunnels underground. As the time traveler discovers, the Morlocks raise and tend the infantilized Eloi as cattle. The Morlocks love the Eloi - for dinner.

I mention this because there are days now when the people in our national leadership class - the various elites who run the machine we call our nation - clearly have some Morlock DNA. The top 10 percent of the U.S. population controls about 70 percent of the nation's wealth. The bottom half controls barely 3 percent. The wealth divide in our country is obscene. It's an insult to justice. It's wider than in any other developed nation. And it's increasing. It's also bi-partisan. There are just as many, or more, Democrats in that top 10 percent as Republicans. The oligarchy that Bernie Sanders and his sidekick AOC like to rant about has a big-tent, open-borders kind of membership policy. You just need a lot of money.

The good news - the difficult, but I think finally good news - is that our economic realities, along with the country's complicated moral issues involving sex, race, abortion, immigration, and other matters, offer great evangelical terrain for the Church if we have the will and the skill to engage it. It's not an impossible goal.

People in pain seek answers and meaning. The Church has both answers and meaning in the person of Jesus Christ and in the people who genuinely love and serve him. And the Church in the United States, despite her problems, is still stronger, healthier, and more generous than anywhere else in the world.

That's not hyperbole. I saw it in my decades of diocesan service. And I've heard it many times from foreign friends, including here in Rome in the ramp-up to the papal conclave - which makes the criticism of the U.S. Church that animated the Francis pontificate all the more unwarranted. The Church in the United States is rich in fruitful apostolates. Our seminaries are dramatically stronger than they were 30 years ago. We have a Catholic donor class that's numerous, committed, and articulate. And they're not shy about how and why they give to Catholic causes.

Yet, almost unconsciously, we've also cooperated in creating the most thoroughly materialist culture in history. It doesn't deny God. Instead it renders him irrelevant and finally incomprehensible in a river of consumer distractions and appetites. In our efforts to assimilate, the beliefs and behaviors that make us distinctly Catholic have been scrubbed out in the process. Too many of us, too often, including me, have done exactly the opposite of St. Paul's message in Romans 12: Do not be conformed to the world. We've conformed ourselves to a world that doesn't want us hanging around if we drag along the baggage of our Catholic beliefs.

The result is predictable. Obstacles to a Christian life that were unimaginable in our nation just 50 years ago - a growing hostility to biblical morality; attacks on religious freedom - are here now and very real. And unless we sober up and start thinking and acting differently, "the shape of t...

By Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky.

In every generation, the world witnesses the Catholic ecclesiastical Super Bowl as the cardinals gather together in Rome to elect a new pope. The choice is always, at bottom, theological. Will they elect someone who believes God created man in His image and likeness? Or will the new pope believe, like most Catholics today (apparently), that man created God in man's image and likeness? Alas, much of the Catholic world has replaced the language of the Catholic faith with fig-leaf terms that cover various kinds of heresy.

The term "heretic" is descriptive, properly understood, not merely polemical. It comes from the Greek haerein, which means to pick out - usually only what we like - from the full range of truth. Orthodoxy (which is to say, right belief) points us in the right direction, though we often don't live up to the truth. Heretics willfully deny one or more truths of the Catholic faith. Open heretics are at least honest. But professed Catholics who often impose their dissident views on the Church via misleading language are dishonest heretics.

The pope is the successor of Peter. The Petrine ministry, established by Jesus, participates in Saint Peter's papacy. By the very office, every pope should be the guardian of the Catholic faith. He is the Vicar of Christ and the first among the bishops. With his brother bishops, the pope is a sacred ambassador of the infallible Deposit of Faith.

We discover who we are when we study and accept God's revelation with faith. Theological reflection deepens our understanding of God's revelation. Led by the successors of the Apostles, with the pope as the Vicar of Christ, the Church hands down the faith. Tradition, Scripture, and the Magisterium, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, form a beautiful and logical structure of doctrine.

The pope is not, however, some latter-day Oracle of Delphi. As he sits on the Chair of Saint Peter, the pope is infallible by God's grace, but only under strict conditions that apply theological logic to the existing Deposit of Faith. Human reason buttressed by faith permits him, for example, to proclaim the Immaculate Conception and Mary's glorious bodily Assumption into Heaven. A pope is the servant, not the master, of God's revelation.

Centuries of Church teaching and theological speculation have given us the vocabulary of the faith: creedal formulations, the Ten Commandments, Sacraments, and prayer. Borrowing from the philosophical disciplines, we add to the Scriptural inheritance a vocabulary of virtue rooted in Christian love. The Church also highlights the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Sin distorts and degrades the Divine imprint on our humanity.

We examine our consciences against these violations of His goodness. We obtain the grace of the Sacraments, above all the Eucharist, to sustain us in a life of virtue. At the end of our lives, we stand before God, manifesting our responsibility for our lives. Our virtues demonstrate our commitment to the truth that God created man in His image and likeness. Purgatory purifies the unfinished business of our pursuit of holiness.

But most Catholics seem to believe that man created God in man's image and likeness. The evidence of this outrageous contention has become unmistakable during this ecclesiastical season. Almost every Catholic outlet uses a fig-leaf vocabulary that hides various heresies: the widespread rejection of the wholeness of Catholic teaching.

The media cite so-called experts who sort the candidates into several categories: traditional, progressive, moderate, liberal, conservative, and centrist. But this lexicon is inimical to the faith. The designations categorize God and Church teaching on our terms, not God's, as if the faith were merely a spiritual version of secular politics. The ideological vocabulary disguises heresies under a Catholic label. Many of us have become dishonest heretics.

Moderates and progressives revo...

BY Robert Royal.

But first a note: We will be bringing you regular commentary here at TCT on the Conclave to elect the next pope, which begins this Wednesday, May 7. And as always, we'll also be covering other matters of interest in the everyday column, even during the voting. The Papal Posse (Raymond Arroyo, Fr. Gerald Murray, and I) will appear on EWTN in the regular Thursday 8 PM time slot. But I'd like to call your attention to the longer and more detailed reporting the three of us will provide - daily - on the Arroyo Grande podcast (the first episode from last Friday on "The Real Factors Shaping the Next Pope" may be viewed by clicking here). You can access all of those either on YouTube or wherever you listen to or watch podcasts. And in the meantime, to keep us from being entirely absorbed by the rumors, politics, and sheer horse-race of the Conclave, a personal reflection here about some longer-term perspectives on the world and sacred history.

Now for today's column...

I have a confession to make: the past dozen years ruined Rome for me. And it's my own fault. I suppose it was inevitable that someone who got drawn into the multitudinous labors of the Papal Posse would begin to feel that Rome itself had become an unpleasant task. All the controversy and confusion started to eclipse "the grandeur and the glory." But Rome has a way of surviving everything that threatens to obliterate it. And I expect that this week's Conclave will demonstrate once again, above and beyond all personal and passing episodes, that indestructible, historical truth.

Rome is a city that doesn't so much see history pass through as it accumulates much of what's important to our race. As Chesterton noticed when he visited here in 1929, people talk about the City founded on seven hills but forget that it, therefore, also has seven valleys that have become an "inexhaustible store of superimposed cultures and closely packed secrets of the past ; the sense of a place being mined for all the gold of human and divine glories ; brought up for ever out of an abyss of abundance, the depth and the richness of Rome."

This makes it the scene of both endless endings and boundless beginnings. The prospect of what may come after the dozen Francis years and in the years and centuries to come has gotten me thinking about my own long (humanly speaking) relationship to this city. In 1978, I spent a year - mostly idling, though with intent - on scholarship in Florence. But it was also the year that Pope Paul VI died, and we saw his funeral - as well as the election of two subsequent popes, John Paul I and, more consequentially, John Paul II. It was also the year that Ignazio Silone, a forgotten but seminal and internationally award-winning Italian writer, passed on to his own reward.

Silone was an anti-Fascist, when Fascism meant something concrete, not merely a slur to hurl at people you don't like. A naïve Communist in his early years, he broke with the party over Stalin and moved on to be a Christian "without a church," as he put it, mostly because he thought some in the Catholic Church of his days were too chummy with the Italian Fascists. He wrote one of the essays in The God That Failed, an anthology of brilliant thinkers - Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, and André Gide - who saw through the pretensions of Communism as a kind of substitute religion decades earlier even than Solzhenitsyn. (I borrowed that title, slightly altered, for my own book The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West.)

But I've been thinking in particular of Silone's novel The Seed Beneath the Snow - the final volume of a trilogy that included two other noteworthy tales: Bread and Wine and Fontamara. Cluny Media, which has been bringing out elegant editions of many titles of interest to Catholics and anyone who appreciates fine thought and writing, has republished all of them.

As Silone's title suggests, there's always hidden life present even be...

by Michael Pakaluk.

When Mary visited Elizabeth, if you were present and had asked them, "Where is the Lord? Who is the Lord?" they both would have pointed at Mary's belly and said, "There He is. He is within Mary."

They understood their meeting, clearly, as a gathering of four persons. "And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?", Elizabeth asks. (Luke 1:43) It was not that Mary was to be a mother, but that she was already a mother, then, of the Lord, just as Elizabeth was already the mother, then, of John.

And yet each mother was also aware that she, with her living powers, was a kind of mediator for the little being she carried inside. Babies in the womb hear sounds. Newborn infants whose moms live near airports have no trouble in sleeping when a jet passes over, because they have been long accustomed to the sound.

And yet Luke takes pains to specify, and Elizabeth relays the fact also, that John leapt in her womb, not when John heard Mary's greeting, but rather when Elizabeth heard it. (verse 44)

This Prophet and Forerunner is apparently roused not by the Lord directly, but through Elizabeth, through Mary. Mary's greeting, the Lord's greeting; Elizabeth's hearing, John's hearing. For all that, it is not the "bodies" of Mary and Elizabeth that mediate, but rather the living powers of their souls, because the powers of hearing and of speaking are powers of life.

Thus, when Mary begins her Magnificat and says, in a literal rendering, "My soul is causing the Lord to grow greater," (as her language strictly says), she refers to the being within her. Of course she must, since the referent of "the Lord" could not have changed since Elizabeth's utterance.

For Elizabeth, "the Lord" meant the being in the womb of whom Mary was the mother, and then Mary, referring to this same "Lord," says that the living powers of her soul are nurturing His growth. That is, the Magnificat begins with Mary's testimony to God growing within her. (And since Scripture is inspired, look no further for a divine warrant for the title, Theotokos.)

I reject the common view that the first two verses of the Magnificat show "Semitic parallelism," that is, the Hebrew poetical device of saying the same thing twice with slight alterations. Why should they do so, when that device (look carefully!) appears nowhere else in the Magnificat?

Besides, "soul" (psuchē) and "spirit" (pneuma) are not to be assimilated. God and the Holy Angels are spirits, but God is not a soul, and angels are not disembodied souls. Souls enliven bodies; spirits are alive, rather, with spiritual and intellectual life. "What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit." (John 3: 6) But flesh bears flesh because of souls. Mary's "soul," then, is quite a different power from her "spirit."

If Mary in the first verse of the Magnificat declares that her soul is nurturing the enfleshed Lord within her, in the second verse, she serenely contemplates this reality within her, in her spirit, and exults in joy. Joy may be defined as pleasure in the recognition of a present, possessed good. Since God is her last end and happiness, she in truth is rejoicing that she possesses happiness.

She might have said, simply, "My spirit rejoices in the Lord." Yet she replaced this with "God my Savior." "Savior" she had learned from the angel, who said that her child's name would be "Jesus," which means "God saves." But it was her added touch to say "my" Savior, which shows that she knew that she too needed to be saved, and that she was saved "retroactively" - which the Church has always held, even when it was debated, over long centuries, whether Mary's salvation took place at the moment of her conception, or some time between then and when Jesus was conceived.

As for her referring to "the Lord" within her as also "God": this she shows that she, and Elizabeth too, had no doubt that this being growing within her was divine, as the angel had also said.

In the Mag...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza.

But first a note: Who will be the next pope? What challenges will he face? Look for 'The Conclave Crew' (Raymond Arroyo, Robert Royal, and Fr. Gerald E. Murray) on the Arroyo Grande podcast. Check your email for each new episode as it's released. Here's Episode #1: The Real Factors Shaping the Next Pope.

Now for today's column...

The Gospel reading for the funeral Mass of Pope Francis, as it was for St. John Paul II in 2005, is sometimes called the "restoration of Peter." (John 21) After the triplex denial of Holy Thursday, Peter is subjected to a triplex enquiry, both an interrogation and an absolution, and then the mission: Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Follow me.

Now that the late Holy Father has been laid to rest, the College of Cardinals turns its attention to what the Church needs from the next successor of St. Peter. What is needed in a restoration of the Petrine office, in need of some rehabilitation after twelve years of downgrading.

Pope Francis, to the laudations of the world, presented a "simplified" papal office. Consider the widespread acclaim that his "humble" tomb at St. Mary Major carried only the inscription "Franciscus." That was important enough to the late Holy Father that he stipulated it in his final testament, a curious document that primarily dealt with the logistical disposal of his mortal remains rather than the affairs of his immortal soul.

The last papal tomb of any grandeur was that of Pope Pius XI, who died in 1939. Of the six popes between Pius XI and Francis, all had rather simple tombs when originally buried in the crypt of St. Peter's. Three were above ground (Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul I) and three below ground (Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI).

The inscriptions were almost identical: Regnal Name PP Roman Numeral. So, Pius PP XII, Ioannes PP XXIII, Benedictus PP XVI. John Paul II's original tombstone included the dates of his reign, which was singular.

So why did Francis specify what was the usual practice? He evidently did not want the "PP," postnominal letters that indicate pope or pontifex. He avoided the use of it in his papal signature as well.

The naked "Franciscus" is neither humble nor vain, neither formal nor informal, neither simple nor grand. It is a deliberate diminution of the Petrine office. Hence, the need for a restoration.

In his January 2025 autobiography, in the valedictory pages toward the end, Pope Francis recalls how he thought about his office from the beginning.

This is the papacy: service. The pope's personal title that I like most is Servus servorum Dei. Whoever serves everyone, who serves for everyone. Two months after my election, when I received the proofs of the Pontifical Yearbook, I sent back the first page containing titles attributed to the pope: vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of the prince of the Apostles, sovereign, patriarch. . . .Away with it all: simply Bishop of Rome. The rest was put back on the second page. That was how I presented myself from the first day, and only because it's the truth. The other are real titles, added by history and by theologians, and with reasons too, but precisely because the pope was, and is, Bishop of Rome."

That is incorrect. That Pope Francis would be so mistaken at the beginning was remarkable enough; that he would remain so to the end is astonishing.

Chronologically, Bishop of Rome is subsequent to Vicar of Jesus Christ. In John 21, Peter is not the Bishop of Rome. Yet he is already the "Prince of the Apostles." And that he is "Vicar of Christ" is soon made clear in the first pages of the Acts of the Apostles. As Vicar of Christ, Peter would go first to Antioch - the first see of the Vicar of Christ - and then afterwards to Rome. History and canon law have made the titles Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ into a single Petrine office, but it is simply wrong to subordinate the latter to the former.

As for the characterization of titles "added by history and theologians," the fa...

By David Warren.

Half of one century has now gone by, I realized this week, while various news reports were advising me of the latest catastrophes. There is, of course, no connection between any of these events, or between any two events on this earth.

And there is no such thing as a religious war, as opposed to a war from irreligious, entirely miscellaneous causes. Except, every war is a religious war, and has always been.

This becomes clearer when one looks into conflicts. Questions of causation are normally reduced to the narrowest measure, because the more they are considered more broadly, reality becomes too large.

I had this actually painful experience of the "eternal" a mere half-century ago, in watching, at the time through Western television, the fall of Saigon and the conclusion of what the media had packaged as the "War in Vietnam."

Shockingly few years had been added to the heap of my knowledge, and the liberal or hippy attitudes of the then-young were already being expelled from my soul.

Because I had been in Vietnam, and watched some of this war at close quarters continuously; and because I knew intimately so many of the people who had lived and died in it, this became for me the big and decisive background event.

This was "real" in a world that was foundering in immaturity and unreality, and all the other events of the time would be colored by this sobering event.

I was not a neutral, and reasonably could not have been, through all the years when I had been aware of the terrible clash that was happening there, and when as a growing child I'd been living in a Southeast Asian country, where Vietnamese news was next door.

For better or worse, I was a prodigy at reading newspapers, magazines, and books from an early age, and had parents, especially a father, who was interested in things.

The war that the (relatively) free Vietnamese were fighting against a horrible enemy - communism - was already large enough to be discerned over time and far away.

The "war protests" in America were, for me, what was abstract. The idea that I was a wicked warmonger, simply because I had more direct access to the truth, was, however, something that I encountered first-hand when I came home to Canada.

Perhaps all my subsequent life has been colored by that, as well as my reading of history. It would seem to be at the root of my skepticism, for in Vietnam itself I had discovered that the most respectable Western journalists were quite indifferent to the truth, i.e. liars.

And they were paid for their lies by Western media, and were celebrated and honored in what presented itself as high society.

Reading back, at least through the nineteenth century and adventurously beyond, I found the same "bias" again and again, and the destructive consequences of this glib, "secular, progressive" slant.

It wasn't a pendulum, swinging from side to side; one moment this side in fashion, next moment, that. The left side was always in fashion, and the right side always out of fashion, until the left was relegated to the right because for alleged "reasons." (Fascists, and Nazis, were originally on the left, for instance.)

Vietnam became an intellectual training ground, on this chart, and on several unrelated levels. I learnt, for instance, that sincere Christians, regardless of nationality and race - and thus certainly including all Vietnamese religious - were basically trustworthy and, in the main, "on our side"; for so were the sincere Buddhists I had transactions with.

Alas, for a world in which everyone is sincere, the abandoned individual must use his judgment. (To say one shouldn't judge is to talk nonsense; it is to be defenselessly stupid.)

But communists, one was to discover, were actually the enemy, and friends to the satanic. I think everyone who has lived under communism, and is not profiting from being a communist himself, sooner or later comes to this conclusion; usually sooner. This isn't subtle: "Communists are not your friends."

Yes, ...

By Stephen P. White.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, May 1st 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 coming conclave to choose the successor to Pope Francis, as well as other issues in Rome this week and 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...

Today, May 1, the Church celebrates St. Joseph the Worker. It is often remarked of Joseph that Scripture records none of his words. While it is true that no direct word of Joseph's is recorded in Scripture, it is from Joseph's own lips that the name of Jesus, the name announced privately to Mary and in a dream to Joseph, is first announced publicly among the people of Israel: "And he [Joseph] named him Jesus." (Matthew 1:25)

Joseph, as we know, was not the natural father of Jesus. But Joseph, on behalf of the God-child's true Father, gave him the name by which the world would know him: Jesus. And it was in the home of Joseph that the Incarnate Word practiced obedience: "He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart."

The obedience of Jesus, of course, is manifest most perfectly in his obedience to the will of the Father, "becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross," as St. Paul writes to the Philippians. And because of this, "God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name."

The symmetry here is beautiful and shows how the fatherhood of Joseph, though not natural fatherhood, is an imitation of the fatherhood of God. The Father bestows on the obedient Son, conceived in the flesh through the Holy Spirit, the name which is above every name. Joseph gives to Jesus, conceived through the Spirit, his name and the Christ child is obedient to him.

Joseph's fatherhood was thus caught up in - caught between, we might say - the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is given the grace to experience, in a human way, the love of the Trinity, as it were, "from within."

No one is a father as God is Father, as the Catechism reminds us, but it is precisely the fatherhood of God that stands as the fundamental reference for understanding all fatherhood.

St. Joseph was not the natural father of Jesus, but his fatherhood was true fatherhood - not merely in imitation of natural fatherhood (and therefore, by analogy, to the generative fatherhood of God) but by direct reference to the Fatherhood of God by whom we are all, through baptism, made adopted sons and daughters of the Father.

Emphasizing the true fatherhood of Joseph is not only important for understanding his relationship to Jesus, but for understanding our relationship, through Christ, to God the Father. Because we have been adopted by God through baptism and the Holy Spirit, we can pray as Jesus taught us, to "Our Father."

St. Paul makes this point explicitly in his letter to the Romans:

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, "Abba, Father!" The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Being adopted sons and daughters of God makes us co-heirs with Christ. This divine filiation makes possible our divination. The Catechism sums this up, citing in turn Scripture (2 Peter), St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, and St. Thomas Aquinas:

The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature": "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine s...

By Randall Smith.

There's a lovely little pop song from the mid-1990s called "What If God Was One of Us?" The final verse says:

What if God was one of us

Just a slob like one of us

Just a stranger on the bus

Trying to make His way home?

Back up to Heaven all alone

Nobody calling on the phone

'Cept for the Pope, maybe in Rome.

For the next couple of weeks, I suppose we'll need to drop the last line, because the pope won't be "callin' on the phone," more like he'll be "knockin' on the door."

Be that as it may, and aside from whether you like or remember the song, the question it poses is worth considering. What would we expect an Incarnate God to be like? What would we expect Him to do?

The sentiment expressed in the song is one many people seem to share. "Why is God always so silent, so far away? Why can't God just come down and talk to me - like a regular guy?" That's a lovely thought. Maybe a bit idealistic; maybe even a bit naïve. But it's a lovely thought.

Here's the problem. If God showed up "as a regular guy" and said, "Hi, I'm here; you said you wanted to talk," what would you do? I mean, wouldn't your first reaction be: "You're not God. You can't be God. You're just a regular guy! You're just walking on the ground, and you're getting sweaty in the hot sun, you're not dazzling white, and you're even kind of scruffy-looking."

"Well, you said you wanted to talk to me just like a regular guy. So I'm a regular guy."

"But how can I be sure that you're God," you ask, "and not just some guy pretending to be God? Because I want to talk to the real God. Not some crazy guy who thinks he's God."

"Alright," says God, "what would I need to do to show you?"

"How about some miracles?" you say.

"What kind of miracle do you think would convince you?" asks God.

"Maybe you could zap some people with a lightning bolt," you say.

"That wouldn't show that I'm the just, loving God of the Old and New Testament. That would only show that I might be a subordinate deity like Zeus or Apollo.

"Oh, right," you reply. "Well, how about making a big volcano or a massive earthquake right here in town?"

"So now you want me to kill even more people?" says God. "Destroy countless homes? Unsettle the delicate balance of nature? Would that prove that I'm 'God,' or would it show that I'm a very powerful, but bad, deity?"

"How about levitating?" you ask.

"Haven't you seen magicians do that?" asks God. "And do you want to know whether I'm God, the Creator of All Things, or whether I'm a Marvel superhero?"

You see the problem? What could the Incarnate God do or say to prove to you that He is, in fact, God, and not some person or being pretending to be God? Although you say you want Him to be a "regular guy," His being a "regular guy" makes difficult, if not impossible, for you to believe that He is God. And if he does certain "god-like" things like zapping people or showing off His divine power, this would prove that he isn't the wise, loving God of Christian faith but a demon. So, you're in kind of a bind.

"I've got it," you say. "How about if you overcome death?"

"Just for you, or for everyone?" asks God.

Having become wiser to the fact that if you say, "Just me," and he says okay, this would show that he is an evil deity, tempting you, not the God of all Goodness, and if you say, "Just me," the God of all Goodness probably wouldn't like it, you say: "Everyone."

"Do you want me to keep everyone alive for all eternity, getting older and older with no new children so the world doesn't get jammed?"

That doesn't make immortality sound as good as you thought it would, so you ask: "Isn't there some other way?"

"Yes," says God, "but you'd have to get beyond death into a different kind of life."

"That sounds good," you say. "What would this different kind of life be like? Would there still be burritos and margaritas and puppies?"

"Nothing good in this world could possibly be absent in the next, since you would be united with the Source of the Goodness of all that is...

By Robert Royal.

Yes, even the title of the popular song said it three times. But that's virtually nothing compared to the repetitions of the word, over and over, during and after the papal funeral in Rome these days, by commentators, lay and clerical alike, as if it were a recent and novel discovery by Pope Francis. And as if the day after the funeral (Divine Mercy Sunday) had not been instituted by St. John Paul II in 2000, a full quarter century previously. Or his encyclical Dives in Misericordia ("Rich in Mercy") had not been issued in 1980, two decades before that.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re used the term multiple times in his homily for the Requiem Mass

The Cardinal also preemptively canonized the just departed pope by asking him to pray for us: "May you bless the Church, bless Rome, and bless the whole world from heaven." Not even a brief stop in Purgatory.

Of course, discussions are already underway as to what the next pope will need to be and do. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, for instance, the Vatican Secretary of State under Pope Francis - to some observers a strong contender to succeed Francis - is saying, very publicly, that the Church needs to continue Francis' legacy of "mercy." (I myself believe that Cardinal Parolin will have a steep climb to the papacy, though he's trying very hard, after his disastrous, still "secret" accord with Communist China, which has been anything but a mercy to Chinese Catholics.)

Mercy is, of course, a central theme in both the Old and New Testaments, and should remain so, along with truth, justice, and fidelity. Because an overemphasis on a naked mercy, of a somewhat superficial sort, without those other and quite crucial elements of the Faith, accounts for many of the divisions in the Church of recent years:

Communion for the divorced and remarried,

the "blessing" of gay couples,

the overturning of the teaching on the death penalty,

an essentially unrealistic plea to welcome even greater illegal immigration

a shocking lack of urgency about missionary work (and fear of "proselytizing")

a false universalism and indifferentism that views all religions as "valid paths" to God.

Yes, amidst all the talk of mercy, there have also been some words about following Jesus. But when you ignore the Lord's own teachings, sometimes even changing the words he's recorded to have said, and the doctrines of His Church developed over centuries by men and women of great learning and holiness, it's difficult to see what mercy is, other than a kindliness understood in current worldly, not Christian, terms.

The Church in the coming years needs to speak of a more robust mercy that understands, forgives, and expects weakness and sin, but isn't sentimentally indulgent. The Church was founded by a Savior who had to suffer and die a horrible death to redeem us from all that. Because the stakes, not only in this life but in the next are crucially, cosmically, eternally high.

As Monsignor Charles Pope makes clear in his stunning new book The Hell There Is: An Exploration of an Often-Rejected Doctrine of the Church, Jesus spoke often of Hell and even warned us that few find the way that leads to eternal life. The good monsignor recounts, however, what is probably not all that rare a response to that teaching these days:

Some years ago, I was preaching on heaven and hell since the Gospel for that Sunday was of the wide and narrow roads just mentioned. Afterward, a woman approached me, angry that I had mentioned hell at all, and said, "Father, I didn't hear the Jesus I know in your words today." I replied, "But Ma'am, I was quoting Him directly." She didn't miss a beat and simply replied, "Well, we know He never really said that."

If we're looking for a program for the next papacy, we could do worse than reaffirming that, in His love for us, God gave us freedom to choose between Good and Evil. (Without that freedom, our love for Him would be impossible since we'd simply be beings determined by our environment.) The...