The Catholic Thing

by Father Raymond J. de Souza.

Is it a sin to follow the news? Or to read commentators upon the news? Or to listen to podcasts that comment upon the commentators? Or to watch the YouTube videos of those picking apart the podcasts?

It's Lent, the season for more than the usual number of Confessions. And this Lent, as has increasingly been the case over the last half-dozen years or so, more and more penitents are confessing that they are following the news.

They don't put it exactly that way. They say that the news is making them angry, more apt to harbor resentments, to making rash judgments, to indulging prejudices, to cultivating ill will, to rejoicing in the misfortune of others - even to wishing harm upon those who disagree. All this is directed at people they have never personally met - this political leader, that famous personage.

For those penitents who know the language, they speak of the news as an occasion of sin, about which they've been careless.

I don't recall hearing that in the confessional ten years ago; if I did, it was rare. Now, I hear it frequently. The volume and ethos of the news is evidently disturbing the peace of those very few Catholics who go to Confession. The pious, one might think, ought to be less troubled than others by the passing scene. Perhaps they are. In which case, imagine the state of the rest.

Our TCT friend Francis X. Maier, confessed here a few days ago that, "Once upon a time, I was a news junkie."

No longer? At least much less so, because "so often these days I find myself locked in my head, in the Land of the Unreal, battling enemies and ideas that blind me to the beauty of the world and the people I love."

Fran notes that marvellous things are available digitally - The Catholic Thing! - but "these information formats also host a generous share of nutcases, liars, and haters. . . .The result is fatigue, tribalism, and (too often) grievance. Grievance culture is venomous. It's also self-sustaining, like a colony of ticks in the secret places of the heart, because there's always another oppressor to expose and indict."

His complaint is by now "tediously familiar," Fran concedes, but the familiarity is breeding so much contempt that a warning is in order.

"Resentment is addictive," writes the former news junkie. "It presumes the wickedness or ignorance of those who disagree. It precludes reasoned discourse because it's a waste of precious time listening to others if, by definition, they're stupid or evil since their views conflict with our own."

The toxins are coursing through public life as entire cable networks, podcasts, and social media platforms are reliant upon a business model that requires the cultivation of outrage to monetize the anger. It's commercially successful, politically powerful, and culturally influential.

"That explains why so much of our nation's current public life is toxic," Fran concludes.

It's much worse than that.

The spiritual life of millions of souls has become toxic too. We can see the degradation of our public life. The interior life is harder to see, but a similar degradation is quite advanced and threatens the sanctity of souls seeking to live close to God.

A few recognize this and seek forgiveness in Confession - and the grace of the sacrament to resist this particularly powerful vice. Good for them. For many more, the interior is life continuously corrupted without awareness or apparent remedy. Their minds, hearts, and souls are daily drenched in the toxins of "our poisoned shared culture."

Years ago, when a searching soul would approach me with inquiries about becoming Catholic, I would generally start with a few words about God's love, our need for salvation and the person of Jesus. Then an introduction to what prayer is and how to do it. After that, more formal study of the truths of the faith.

Now, when a young person approaches me - usually a man (there has been a noticeable uptick among young men) - I begin by discussing his digital habits. I...

By Msgr. Robert J. Batule.

In William Peter Blatty's famous novel The Exorcist (1971), Chris McNeill, the mother of Regan (a mysteriously disturbed child) and a professional actress, arranged to meet Fr. Karras at the Key Bridge near Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Her awkwardness could not have been more obvious. She was not a Catholic; indeed, she wasn't even a believer. But she was desperate to find help for her daughter.

Probably to tamp down her anxiety, Chris decided to ask Fr. Karras, first, about his education. She thought Fr. Karras had originally been a psychiatrist and then left that life behind to become a priest. Fr. Karras explained that, no, he was, first, a priest, and then his Order, the Jesuits, sent him to medical school, and then on to training in psychiatry.

Chris was working her way up to the real reason for meeting with Fr. Karras. All of a sudden, she just blurted it out. "How do you go about getting an exorcism?" Fr. Karras was stupefied. "It just doesn't happen anymore," he said. Chris interjected, "Since when?" Without missing a beat, the priest replied, "Since we learned about mental illness. All these things that they taught me at Harvard."

The Harvard curriculum has never taken an official position on Catholic teaching and demonic possession. Nonetheless, Fr. Karras was certain, because of his time there, that the possessed individuals mentioned in the Gospels were schizophrenics. Thus, when Chris revealed it was not an exorcism for herself but for her daughter Regan, Fr. Karras responded, "forget about getting an exorcism."

But the conversation was not over. Fr. Karras was not going to change his mind on an exorcism for Regan, but Chris tried one last time. "Can't you even look at her?" "Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could." Chris was not satisfied. With all the force she could muster, she yelled at Fr. Karras: "She needs a priest."

In Fr. Karras' education, there was seldom if ever a comeuppance like the one given at that moment. With that single remark, enough doubt is cast upon the supposedly insuperable judgment that had bubbled up in the helping professions by that time that every unruly behavior can be explained and treated by applying the right therapy.

Several years before Blatty wrote The Exorcist, Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), whose subtitle is often overlooked: Uses of Faith after Freud. In the book's very last paragraph, there is this telling admission, a virtual lament: "A sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end."

After taking his readers through an extensive study of the psychoanalytic thought of Freud and a few other psychoanalysts like Jung and Adler, Rieff argues that a stunning change has occurred in modern consciousness. It is the claim that well-being, psychologically understood, is the real goal of human life. Rieff then goes on to note that this has led to a fundamental change in our culture. And then comes the coup de grace. In such a perspective, which focuses of individual feeling, "there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old style of despair and hope."

That attitude was no doubt central to Fr. Karras' education at Harvard and in his subsequent psychoanalytic training. His quick dismissal of demonic possession, and his flat-out refusal to even considering an exorcism attests to how swift was the triumph of the therapeutic.

What remains puzzling, of course, was the failure on Fr. Karras' part to take into account the education he must have received in the seminary before his Ordination. Surely it would have included how to contend with the mysterium iniquitatis (the mystery of evil), by means such as prayer, spiritual direction, ascetical theology, and the sacramental life - all of which might very well have helped him at least to keep an open mind.

Fr. Karras started out seeing Regan as a psychiatrist as he said he would, but then something happened. He ...

By Michael Pakaluk.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, March 28, 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 Pope Francis' health, ongoing controveries about the handling of financial and sexual scandals in the Church, reactions of bishops to political changes in America, as well as 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...

One way to tell whether one person knows another well, is whether he is familiar with what that other person likes and does not like. Aristotle said it was a mark of friendship to like and dislike the same things. Maybe those who do, can spend more time together, with less conflict. At very least, to know what someone likes is a test of friendship. Country music or classical? Fast cars or punting on a lazy river? Ethnic food or mac n' cheese?

Therefore, if we are friends with Jesus, we should have an idea of what He likes and dislikes. I mean, in His human nature - those likes and dislikes which have the character of tastes, or visceral reactions. Jesus loved mercy and hated sin, of course. Did He react viscerally to sin, in His human nature? Presumably so. And yet perhaps, even here, He did so more viscerally to some sins than to others.

He had to have had likes and dislikes, like all of us, if He assumed a genuine human nature.

When we think of such things, we often begin with food. Let's start there. Do we know anything about the food He liked? Newman said that He preferred simplicity. After the Resurrection, on the shore, when Peter and His friends were in the boat fishing, He could have prepared for Himself, by His infinite might, any meal that He wished. It was an Easter meal, after all. You or I might have chosen filet mignon and fine wine. Yet Jesus roasted one small fish and some bread over a charcoal fire. (Jn 21:9)

On the other hand, He had a taste for fine wine, "thou hast kept the good wine until now." (Jn 2:10) And with magnanimity, He recognized the place for it, in abundance, at the celebration of a wedding.

In clothing He seemed to despise luxury, "But what did you go out to see? a man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings." (Mt. 11:8) And yet He loved good workmanship, because He wore next to himself an exquisite garment, so well-wrought that even coarse soldiers declined to tear it. (Jn 19:23)

He must have liked to walk. Hundreds of miles of journeys on foot are attributed to Him in the Gospels. He clearly loved being outdoors, for days on end. From His teachings, we know he loved nature, flowers, birds, fish in the sea, the seasons, the sky. He liked climbing mountains. He liked the solitude and quiet of nature.

His earthly father, Joseph, picked where He was to grow up. But in doing so, Joseph was only following the Lord's own providence. It was Jesus who selected the place of His own childhood. What did He like? Not a city, but a small village on a lake, remote from any city, a full two days' journey from Jerusalem. The lake is beautiful and self-contained, a place that a small boy can easily view as his home.

He loved going through life with family and relatives. He could have told them to stay behind but, clearly, He invited them to follow Him around. He liked hospitality; His was an open household. We think of His instructions to the Apostles, "You find them something to eat," in the face of the 5,000 and 4,000, as a special test of their faith. But what if He was merely saying what He usually said when many guests would be joining them for dinner?

In politics, He expressed no liking for democracy, when He might have. His own government was a mixture of monarchy (Peter), aristocracy (the Apos...

By Francis X. Maier.

Here's a fun fact: In December 1990, the planet had exactly one website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. A year later, total global websites numbered 50. By December 1993, there were 623; by January 1996, 100,000; by April 2008 (around the time The Catholic Thing started), 162 million. Today the number is north of 1.1 billion. About 4 percent of those websites are pornography-related. Predictably, given the potholes in human nature, porn-related web searches are sharply higher. But overall, for better or worse, it's now almost impossible to imagine (or remember) a world without Google search, Amazon shopping, and unhinged YouTube videos like The Sound of Music: Action Recut.

I mention this because we humans have a genius for wandering into problems we should have seen coming. Here's an example.

One of the men who helped shape my adult thinking was the media scholar Neil Postman. In 1996, as the Internet exploded, we had the first of several conversations. A neophyte tech addict - I'd taught myself Linux and the joys of the command line interface (CLI) - I bubbled on about the web's democratizing impact; how it would horizontalize power structures; how everyone could now have a voice in world affairs, national governance, etc.

Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, listened patiently. Then he suggested that too much information, too raw, too loose, too loud, from too many sources, might not have happy results. The greater and faster the flow of information, the more opportunities for confusion and conflict. The more confusion and conflict, the more the need for curators.

And curators - elected or expert or not, he said - come in all flavors, including unpleasantly controlling, deceitful ones, as the COVID experience later proved. Postman was far from authoritarian in politics. He was classically secular and liberal. He simply foresaw the potential for anarchy in a culture overwhelmed by new tools and unable to digest the tsunami of new ideas, ambiguities, and appetites they create. He understood that fragmentation inevitably breeds anxiety and the need for centralized power to offset a culture's turmoil.

Postman died in 2003, before the birth of Facebook (2004), Twitter now X (2006), Substack (2017), and Bluesky (2019). The information torrent that triggered his concern has only increased - exponentially. To be fair, much of it is good. Facebook connects families and friends. Thousands of excellent religious resources are available online (including publications like this one). Substack hosts the work of terrific new and established voices like Matthew Crawford, Iain McGilchrist, N.S. Lyons, Paul Kingsnorth, Nathan Pinkoski, Mary Harrington, and many others; writers who can say what they want, whenever and however they want.

The trouble is that all these information formats also host a generous share of nutcases, liars, and haters. . .who also say and argue whatever they want in the same space. Tracking real reality - the news and views that comprise a truthful understanding of the world - becomes a challenge of catching facts in a hurricane-strength wind tunnel. The result is fatigue, tribalism, and (too often) grievance.

Grievance culture is venomous. It's also self-sustaining, like a colony of ticks in the secret places of the heart, because there's always another oppressor to expose and indict. It's true that anger is not always a bad thing. It's a natural response to wickedness and corruption. In Luke 19:45, Jesus himself shows a righteous anger toward the Temple's moneychangers.

But anger is, by nature, corrosive. It feels good in an ugly sort of way because it so often involves a moralizing exercise that subtly reinforces the self: I was mistreated, or I see others mistreated. So I want justice. I demand justice, now. I don't care about the cost. And I want the transgressors punished. So let me tell you all about it - online.

Resentment is ad...

By Dominic V. Cassella.

Before St. John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism, he gave a series of sermons to the students of Oxford. The last of these University Sermons provided a brief theory of developments in religious doctrine, and he took for his model Mary, the Mother of God.

Quoting Luke 2:19 - "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart" - Newman offers Mary as a model of faith since when she was provided with the Angel's message, she does not question it like Zacharias; she accepts without question, but ponders it.

Our Lady "is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it. . . .she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel."

In this way, Mary the Seat of Wisdom is a clear and evident model for all who want to arrive at the Truth. It's no surprise then that several faithfully Catholic, and even lapsed Catholic, universities are dedicated to or named after Mary. Jesus Christ is the "big t" Truth, and He took on human flesh in the womb of Mary, where He grew from conception until birth.

Similarly, the "little t" truth conceived in our own minds, often finds its conception and growth in the classroom, through great books, and with good teachers - all part of a healthy university.

But being named after our Lady does not guarantee that truth (big or little "t") is treasured there. As Anne Hendershott carefully lays out in her recent book A Lamp in the Darkness: How Faithful Catholic Colleges Are Helping to Save the Church, some once grand institutions are less interested in being the Seat of Wisdom and more akin to wisdom abortionists.

Throughout the book, Hendershott profiles many of the Colleges she refers to as the "faithful few," those colleges and universities recognized as truly Catholic Institutions by the Newman College Guide. And alongside these, she provides an account of the shortcomings and failures of other institutions that were once "Catholic" in a meaningful sense.

One of the most frequent guises for shedding one's Catholic Identity is the "Academic Freedom" claim, which itself echoes the pro-abortion movement: instead of "my body, my choice," the relativist proponents of loose academic freedom proclaim, "my mind, my truth."

Catholic Institutions have been struggling with the embarrassment of their fidelity to Church teaching since Charles W. Eliot (Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909) wrote that the Catholic university curriculum was "the most backward educational system of religious fundamentalists."

Such criticisms of Catholic education continued both from within and without Catholic universities, finding its institutional expression on June 20, 1967, when Notre Dame president Theodore M. Hesburgh and a small group of Catholic academic leaders declared "independence" from Church authority in what is known as the Land O'Lakes statement.

Almost sixty years later, Notre Dame, the ring leader of Land O'Lakes, is hosting a self-described "transgender man" and "abortion doula" and describes DEI as something "equally important" to Catholicism..

Contrast this with one of the faithful few that Hendershott profiles. In early 2024, an "abortion doula" was invited to speak by a teacher at The Catholic University of America. Within the week, the school's president, Peter Kilpatrick, dismissed the professor.

In responding to the event, Kilpatrick wrote, "As a Catholic institution, we are committed to promoting the full truth of the human person. . . .we do so fully confident in the clarity given by the combined lights of reason and faith, and we commit to never advocate for sin or to give moral equivalence to error."

For a Catholic institution ...

By Robert Royal.

"NUNC et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death. . ."

So begins the celebrated modern Italian novel, Il Gattopardo - in English, The Leopard, though the animal in question is, accurately translated, the "ocelot." But that name wouldn't have adequately conveyed the grandeur of the protagonist, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an imposing Sicilian nobleman, as the island is being invaded in the 1860s and absorbed into the emerging nation of Italy.

That the author, himself the Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, thought to place the passing of the old monarchic order and birth of a new one amid those large realities in the Ave, however, is noteworthy. I know of no other significant work of fiction that starts in a similar way. And it's even more surprising in that Lampedusa wasn't an especially Catholic writer, though he was an admirer of novelists like Graham Greene and, in complex ways, several Christian currents in history.

The greatest Italian Catholic novel, and perhaps the greatest Catholic novel ever, is Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, a book on the order of War and Peace. But it's just one indication of the subtle richness that has made The Leopard a classic that it almost imperceptibly frames earthiness and world-historical events in light of eternity, via what to many might seem just the most conventional of Catholic devotions.

The Prince is a passionate man with a mistress, a streak of religious skepticism, and a manner that intimidates people. But he also has a shadowy Catholic conscience in the family chaplain, Father Perrone, who's deferential but, at times, a true spiritual counselor.

Netflix has just brought out a six-part "adaptation" of the novel, which does not start with the Rosary or bring to life the large human questions. Like most modern stories, it overdoes sex and romantic intrigues, and it even fails to capture the great beauties of Sicily. Better to watch the older Visconti film - at half the running time - with Burt Lancaster (a real-life "leopard") as the prince. (Normally, I'd defer to noted film critic, one B. Miner, for such judgments, but I've been living with this novel since my early Italian studies, many moons ago.)

It describes a period like ours in some respects, when the whole way of life of a people is being threatened by "progress." The line most often cited from the book is pronounced by the Prince's reckless, romantic nephew, Tancredi, as he's going off to join the revolutionaries: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change."

I've never been quite sure about what that means, and neither is the Prince. It may simply mean that Tancredi, intoxicated with radical politics, just doesn't know what he's talking about. Because things are certainly not the same after the change in regime.

Even today, some still lament that radical change. I was driving in Palermo once with a Sicilian art historian on Via della Libertà and was surprised that, like the Prince, this sophisticated man, too, deplored the conquerors from the mainland (a century-and-a-half earlier!). He claimed that they had substituted deep personal loyalty to a man (king) with shallow adherence to abstractions. Like Libertà, I asked? Yes, he said.

The Prince appears to have much deeper historical intuitions than his wild nephew:

the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery. . . .Do you really think. . .that you are the first who has hoped to canalize Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem imams, how many of King Roger's knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin Barons, how many jurist...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia.

The famous Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil is often credited with the saying, "All politics is local." Now, I'm not particularly interested in the political part of that statement. But I am interested in how it applies to my line of work. You could say that all salvation is local. It happens in particular souls. And you don't get any more local than that.

Our salvation - yours and mine - does not happen out there, in some other place or in someone else's life. It doesn't occur in the media or latest gossip, online or otherwise. It doesn't depend on our knowing the latest political intrigue or celebrity news. It depends on our personal and interior adherence to the Lord.

But we love to be distracted because this reality can be daunting. We fear that God is too close, too personal. Too local. So we distract ourselves by looking elsewhere, to other people, places, and things. But salvation doesn't happen somewhere else. It happens locally, where we are. And we shouldn't choose to be elsewhere.

That's precisely what's going on in today's Gospel. (Luke 13:1-9) The crowd is fascinated with current events: Some people told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. Clearly, they're reporting a recent news story. It has all the elements of good copy: politics, religion, violence, death.

The people have the mistaken belief that bad things only happen to evil-doers. And that gives them the nice, warm feeling of moral superiority. Well, we're not as bad as those Galileans. . .because those things didn't happen to us. But the deeper problem is that their attention is elsewhere. The Lord Himself stands in front of them, and they just want to dish the latest news. Yes, there's an ugliness to the gossip. But what's worse is that their attention elsewhere creates an obstacle to the Gospel. They lack the necessary presence, self-awareness, and reflection to hear our Lord.

So He corrects them. Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did! He even goes further and mentions another event that seems to have been in the news: Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them - do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!

By these rebukes our Lord focuses them - and us - on what's most immediate and important, on their own souls. Twice He directs their thoughts and concerns to their own status: I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish! In effect, Don't spend time worrying about people and events that do not concern you. Tend to your own soul and to the penance you need to do.

Now, we might not share the crowd's flawed theology that disasters only befall evil doers. But otherwise, we bear a great resemblance to them. We are fascinated and distracted by events that don't concern us. We have an entire media industry that depends on our desire for distraction and for the intimate details of celebrities and others. We're only too willing to oblige.

Eighty years ago, Father Edward Leen wrote of the modern world's "cult of unreality." Obviously, that cult has only grown since. Our technology gives us the constant ability to flee reality. We can always be somewhere else, distracted from the here and now, not present to ourselves or to Him. This caters to our fallen nature's penchant for distraction. Man has always tended toward distraction, but we've made an industry of it.

And much of this distraction is picking through the lives of complete strangers. Because it's much easier to pore over the sins of others than to repent of our own. Plus, we can enjoy a little moral outrage and superiority. We omit any reflection on our own faults because those people over there have done ...

By Stephen P. White

During this season of Lent, we make it a point of discipline and charity to pray, fast, and give alms. It has long been my practice to make a special effort during this season to pray, with more consistency than I manage during the rest of the year, the Liturgy of the Hours.

For anyone looking to structure his day around prayer - rather than being content to fit prayer within the allowances of a busy day - the Divine Office is particularly beneficial. To pray this prayer is to join the countless priests and religious (and a growing number of lay men and women) for whom the praying of the Divine Office sets the rhythm of daily life throughout the year. It is a privileged way of praying, as St. Paul exhorted, unceasingly.

The Second Vatican Council touched on this point in Sacrosanctum Concilium: "When this wonderful song of praise [the Divine Office] is rightly performed. . .then it is truly the voice of the bride addressed to her bridegroom; It is the very prayer which Christ Himself, together with His body, addresses to the Father."

At the heart of the Office are the Psalms, which have been the hymns of God's people since the days of the Old Covenant. We sing from the Psalms at every Mass, of course, but I never appreciated the beauty and power of the Psalms until I learned to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. There is something about the recitation of the verses, and the repeated recitation of the verses, which I have long found more conducive to meditation and prayer than listening to a cantor or singing only a response, as at the Mass.

That said, the Psalms are meant to be sung. Chanted with reverence, or set to an appropriate melody, the Psalms take on an entirely different dimension. Anyone who has heard Allegri's haunting polyphonic setting for Psalm 51 will understand this.

Perhaps more than any other book in the Bible, the Psalms are meant to be prayed or sung not just heard. St. Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria and great opponent of Arianism, was particularly eloquent in his advocacy of praying the Psalms. His Letter to Marcellinus concerning the Psalms is a neglected classic. "The whole divine Scripture is the teacher of virtue and true faith," writes Athanasius, "but the Psalter gives a picture of the spiritual life."

There is a Psalm for every purpose and occasion, as St. Athanasius notes: "We are bidden elsewhere in the Bible also to bless the Lord and to acknowledge Him: here in the Psalms we are shown the way to do it, and with what sort of words His majesty may meetly be confessed. In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls' need at every turn."

Herein lies another particular beauty of the Psalms. Not only is there a Psalm for every occasion - from rejoicing to desolation - but these inspired hymns are the self-same hymns of the People of Israel, of Moses and Solomon, of King David, and of the Lord Jesus Himself. In praying the Psalms, their words become our own, and our prayers become as their prayers.

When we pray or sing the Psalms, we are singing and praying in our own voice, from our own perspective. The Psalms are, in this sense, Scripture in the first person. There is tremendous power in that. St. Athanasius elaborates on this point:

In the other books of Scripture we read or hear the words of holy men as belonging only to those who spoke them, not at all as though they were our own; and in the same way the doings there narrated are to us material for wonder and examples to be followed, but not in any sense things we have done ourselves. With this book, however, though one does read the prophecies about the Savior in that way, with reverence and with awe, in the case of all the other Psalms it is as though it were one's own words that one read; and anyone who hears them is moved at heart, as though they voiced for him his deepest thoughts.

Surely it is no coincidence that Athanasius, th...

By David Warren.

We still do not know - anything, really - about the "coronavirus pandemic" that passed through the news five years ago. We agreed to a fortnight to "contain the spread," on Dr. Birx's advice, now 130 fortnights ago. Needless to say, her official mission seems to have ended, along with Dr. Fauci's, and for the moment we do not endure arbitrary public health instructions.

Things like churches are open again; and restrictions on prayer are only in effect near abortion clinics, or in communist jurisdictions, such as England.

We have "experience" now, I read in the media.

Perhaps the main thing we have "learned" is that lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates, travel restrictions, quarantines, social distancing, contact tracing, &c, were either useless against the Batflu, or made it worse - the medical versions of "the process is the punishment."

I wrote "learned" sarcastically. In fact, the worthlessness of each of these proposed remedies was fully known and demonstrated in all previous "pandemics." The public health "experts" were in a position to warn us against each of these old wives' tales, but falsely promoted them in the name of "science."

As to whether the "vaccines" were any more use than other pharmaceuticals - or the infamous ventilator machines - I have no special insight. My skepticism, which did not require a medical degree, has been growing quite radically, since the "Batflu" was first announced.

Too many untruths were told about it.

And by the summer of 2020, the "experts" were supporting mass political demonstrations, cheered on by hospital staff in every "progressive" urban environment, that contradicted their own explicit medical instructions.

In view of this obvious and total hypocrisy, people like me became convinced that expert views on public health should be ignored. Nevertheless, they were legally enforced, in all those theaters where human freedom is held in contempt.

By coincidence, this was about the time my spiritual master died, at an advanced age, and not from the COVID virus. (Fr. Jonathan Robinson, 3 June 2020.) His funeral could not be attended.

The "old world," in which the life of Christian nations could be taken for granted, was now over.

As, imperfectly enough, an "old Christian," I had the new feeling of being entirely on my own. This was subtly confirmed by various environmentalist pronouncements, coming from the Vatican. The Church herself seemed to be surrendering to the public health authorities. And even the pope, apparently, was no longer Catholic. How could this be?

But this was a panic as indefensible as the Batflu response. For there is God, there is Christ, there is the Spirit; and the created universe does not change like a transient political event.

My own learning, about the best and also the worst of medical procedures in my little corner of the world, happened a year later when I suffered a heart attack and stroke: also quite unrelated to the Batflu.

It was my first sudden acquaintance with life in a "world-class" public hospital, where I would encounter the abilities and efficiencies of doctors and nurses. Several happy truths would be illustrated.

Yet I would also come up against the influences that were undermining, possibly destroying, what had been one of the most splendid features of Western, Christian civilization.

For Western medicine, its clinics and hospitals, were the creations of the Church, and patronized almost exclusively by the Church, over many centuries.

Even today, in non-Christian countries, medical services and investments are largely in the hands of Christian missionaries (in the broadest sense) or are modeled on Christian institutions (e.g. the Red Crescent after the Red Cross).

In the West, however, the healing art has been mostly nationalized, or crudely commercialized, and tax monies have replaced the work of charitable religious orders.

A conscious effort to desanctify the hospitals has accompanied the heathen and atheist move...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray.

But first a note: TCT's three-week online course on St. Bonaventure's "The Soul's Journey into God" starts TONIGHT! Don't miss this opportunity to enrich your spiritual life this Lent. Just click here for more information about the course and how to register.

Now for today's column...

The unending process that is the Synod on Synodality has taken a new and unexpected turn. The current "Implementation Phase" of the three-year synodal path, following the conclusion of last Fall's Synodal Assembly in Rome, has now become the preparatory phase for something no one has ever heard of in the Catholic Church, namely an "Ecclesial Assembly."

In a March 15 letter to the bishops of the world, the General Secretariat of the Synod announced that it will now "start a process of accompaniment and evaluation of the implementation phase" of the conclusions of the Synodal Assembly's Final Document by the dioceses of the world. "It will ultimately culminate in the celebration of an ecclesial assembly in the Vatican in October 2028. For now, therefore, a new Synod will not be convened; instead, the focus will be on consolidating the path taken so far."

So, the synodal path now leads, ironically, to the canceling of the next synodal assembly, which will be replaced by a new and improved type of assembly that will stand in judgment over the whole synodal process: "the celebration of the ecclesial assembly in October 2028 will be structured in such a way as to offer adequate and sustainable times for the implementation of the Synod's indications, while also providing some significant moments of evaluation."

It seems, remarkably, that a synodal assembly itself is not an "adequate and sustainable" time to evaluate the work of implementing the synodal path.

Naturally, the question arises: What is an ecclesial assembly? Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the General Secretariat of the Synod, was interviewed on this question by Andrea Tornielli, Editorial Director of the Dicastery for Communications. Grech cautioned that "as we are dealing with the first time there will be an ecclesial assembly at the level of the entire Church, there are many things which have yet to be determined."

He is, however, perfectly clear on one point - it will be different from the synodal assembly: "the Assembly is ecclesial, which is meant to stress its distinct nature and function with respect to the synodal Assembly which we have just celebrated, which is and remains substantially an Assembly of Bishops." [Emphasis added.]

Insofar as this statement has any discernible meaning, Grech seems to be suggesting that, even with the inclusion of non-bishops, the bishops were, unsurprisingly, the majority at the assembly of the Synod of Bishops. This, apparently, is not synodal enough.

So, the Ecclesial Assembly will not be "substantially" an assembly of bishops. It will be substantially an assembly of non-bishops, which means that most participants will be lay people. The Ecclesial Assembly will more or less mirror the demographics of the Ecclesia (Church) in which the clergy, let alone the bishops, make up a tiny fraction of the number of baptized Catholics.

Here we see the trajectory of the not-so-slow-motion revolution that goes by the name of synodality: The Second Vatican Council's call for the creation of a Synod of Bishops to assist the pope in his governance of the Universal Church, primarily through periodic assemblies in Rome to discuss determined topics, became in Pope Francis' pontificate a forum in which a select group of lay people, deacons, priests, religious men and women were joined together as equal participants, in voting but not in number, with the bishops at the synodal assembly.

Now, that way of proceeding has been judged to be inadequate for carrying out the work of synodality. A new gathering called an Ecclesial Assembly, in which bishops will not be the majority, will now have the final word on what synodality means and...