The Catholic Thing

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky.

Subservience is ever ancient, ever new. In that respect, the hierarchy of the Church is not much different than the hierarchies of business and government. But servile obedience can foster a culture of self-destructive tyranny even within the institutional Church.

By God's design, the Church is a hierarchy, not a democracy. The successor of Saint Peter is at the top of the pyramid - or, from another point of view, at the bottom of an inverted pyramid. The office of the papacy identifies the pope as the "servant of the servants." The pope rules the entire Church and enjoys, by divine institution, the "supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls." (CCC 937)

The bishops are the successors of the twelve apostles. Jesus, through His Church, confers authority on the bishops (by the "laying on of the hands") as "priests, prophets, and kings." Their role is conservative - in the proper, non-political sense. They are dutybound to conserve, proclaim, and hand on the apostolic truths. They abide by the truths of Sacred Tradition - G.K. Chesterton's "democracy of the dead."

The authority of a priest is inextricably bound to the authority of his lawful bishop (or sometimes through a religious superior). During ordination, a priest solemnly promises to respect and obey his bishop and his successors. Bishops are also bound in obedience to the Deposit of Faith.

Church bureaucracies cannot substitute for the inherent religious authority of bishops and priests. A parish council is advisory and has no authority over the pastor. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has its delegated administrative duties but does not have doctrinal authority over individual bishops. USCCB policy positions do not carry authoritative doctrinal weight unless individual bishops ratify the statements as their own. Even then, the faithful have a right to distinguish between the principles of Catholic doctrine and the prudential judgments of the bishop.

A bishop or a pope may have varying opinions on, say, immigration policy. The first principles of the faith bind in conscience. We insist upon the inestimable dignity of every human being and the tenets of the Decalogue. Summary execution of illegal immigrants - to take an outlandish example that no one has suggested - would clearly be immoral. A country has a right, however, to secure borders and the rule of law. Furthermore, violating immigration laws may be an infraction against the secular law, but not necessarily a violation of God's law.

Breaking the traffic speed limit is not immoral under two conditions (according to traditional moral manuals): 1) We are not acting unsafely, and 2) we pay the traffic fine - if we're stopped for speeding. Thus, at a minimum, persons who illegally enter the country for economic or political reasons, but must abide by the just laws of the host country.

The right to protect a nation's (and a family's) sovereignty with appropriate border control is always open to debate over particulars. The prudential application of Catholic moral principles by the clergy in matters beyond their competence does not bind in conscience, and often tramples on the rights of the laity.

In a recent letter to the American bishops, Pope Francis said deporting people who fled "extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious environmental deterioration in their home nations," regardless of how they enter the U.S., "damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness."

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, President of the USCCB, unsurprisingly thanked the Holy Father for his encouragement to continue the pastoral work of the American bishops for those most in need. His letter, however, did not much endorse what seem to be the pope's policy judgments.

The Trump administration's "border czar," Tom Homan, has not received the papal opprobrium like ...

By David G. Bonagura, Jr.

It's the paradigmatic statement of belief in the twenty-first century: "I'm spiritual but not religious." That captures both man's irrepressible longing for the supernatural and today's individualistic distrust of institutions. And all the data report the same: church attendance is down and 28 percent of Americans are religiously disaffiliated. Yet of the disaffiliated, half call themselves spiritual and three-quarters believe in God or a higher power. The trend is clear: the spiritual person prefers to relate to God on his own terms; the religious person, who prefers to relate to God through an organized religion, is fading into minority status.

Some new data complement this picture: Bible sales jumped 22 percent in 2024 while church attendance has continued to drop. The Wall Street Journal report on the former included an embedded video from an "artist and influencer" who pronounced the esprit du siècle: "I've never studied [the Bible] or read it. And now at 28 years old I've been finding myself having this deeper craving for really understanding what it means to walk with God and I think that definitely starts with reading and studying the Bible."

We thank God for her craving, which resembles the Ethiopian eunuch's efforts, recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, to read the prophet Isaiah. He did not understand the book, so he asked the apostle Philip for instruction. "Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus." (Acts 8:35) The eunuch was so enlightened that he asked to be baptized on the spot.

Will this young influencer, who is also a church-goer, come to the same realization: that to read and study the Bible, she needs someone knowledgeable to teach her?

That teacher is religion. Without it, the individual veers from the path of false self-confidence into a murky solipsism where truth cannot penetrate. Instead of finding God, the spiritual but not religious person finds only himself - and it is himself whom he ultimately worships. At his own peril.

Today's alleged wall of separation between the spiritual and the religious brings the pursuit of both to a halt. This is an unnecessary tragedy, for spiritual and religious are not only complementary realities. The religious presupposes the spiritual; it would not exist otherwise.

Taking the words by their definitions, a person is spiritual if he lives conscious of his soul and of his connection to God; a person is religious if he exercises his soul and connection to God through an established way of worship, belief, and morals.

The individualism that has bifurcated the spiritual from the religious values freedom from all constraints - religious, familial, societal, biological - so that each person can seemingly create himself anew with every decision he makes. This perspective is contrary to human nature, which is inherently dependent on biology, family, and society to live in a healthy and happy manner.

Our longing for the supernatural is also grounded in human nature: we are hardwired to seek things higher than ourselves, and to bend our knees in worship of them. Religion guides the spirit so that we worship the correct thing, God, and do so in the proper way.

Those who prefer their personal spirituality over religion are quick to identify the multiplicity of religions, and their sins, as signs that they are better off on their own. But critically, the individual is destined to reproduce these same problems on the micro level and will only, therefore, succeed in worshipping himself.

The human need for family and community offers the best approach for bringing the spiritual and the religious together today. Family and community provide for our material and spiritual needs throughout our lives, especially in the first two decades. Religion, which we practice in community, nurtures our spiritual needs according to the practices of our ancestors, whose wisdom teaches us and whose sins warn us....

By Fr. Gerald Murray.

Pope Francis' Letter to the Bishops of the United States on what he describes as "the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations" is plainly meant as a rebuke of President Trump's vigorous enforcement of United States immigration law. Yet implicit in the pope's criticism of Trump's actions is a condemnation of the very existence of laws that regulate the consequences of illegal entry into a country. Any deportation, mass or otherwise, is now presumed to be a violation of the human dignity of people who simply seek a better life.

Every nation has laws governing entry, including the Vatican City State, which recently stiffened the penalties for illegal entry to include "fines ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 euros (about $10,200 to $25,700) and prison sentences ranging from one to four years." The December 2024 Decree signed by Cardinal Fernando Vergez, President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, states:

These fines will apply especially to those who enter by means of violence, threats, or deception, bypassing border controls or security systems. . . .The penalties can be increased if the crime is committed with firearms, corrosive substances, by a person in disguise, or by several people together. Likewise, if illegal access is made in a vehicle, the penalty can increase by up to two-thirds. . . .Anyone convicted of illegal entry will be banned from entering Vatican territory for a period of up to 15 years. If this sanction is breached, the offender may be punished with a prison sentence of one to five years.

The arrest and deportation of those who enter a country illegally and thus have no valid claim to be allowed to remain there is simply the due enforcement of law, whether by the United States or the Vatican City State.

Yet Pope Francis describes "the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution, or serious deterioration of the environment" as something that "damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness."

He adds that human beings possess "infinite and transcendent dignity" which is "the most decisive value possessed by the human person" and which "surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society." The claim that a finite creature has, or ever could have, an "infinite dignity" is a poetic exaggeration. It is metaphysically impossible for something finite to possess an infinite quality. Only God is infinite and has infinite qualities.

The logic of Pope Francis' assertions would make the enforcement of laws against illegal entry and permanence in a country a violation of the respect due to every human being who possesses an "infinite and transcendent dignity" that "surpasses" any national law.

This claim is plainly preposterous. A person who illegally enters and remains in a country cannot reasonably claim that he is beyond the reach of the law because enforcement of such law would violate his infinite dignity as a human person. For a nation such as the United States to qualify as a just and fair society, must every illegal alien be spared the indignity of "unjust" arrest and deportation?

On the contrary, enforcing immigration laws affirms the dignity of a human being by compelling him to recognize and submit to laws enacted to promote social harmony and peaceful coexistence. The law-breaker is held to the same standard as everyone else. His dignity is promoted when he is reminded of his duty to obey just laws.

If a foreign national tries, however, to illegally enter and remain in Vatican City State, he is subject to arrest, imprisonment, fines, and prohibitions from re-entering the territory for an extended period. Do ICE agents inflict harm when they arrest an illegal alien, but...

By Michael Pakaluk.

Should Catholics celebrate Saint Valentine's Day? The best recommendation for celebrating it at all, I think, is that in our tradition three different martyred saints have been called "Valentine," and the feast day for all three of them is February 14th.

At least so states the Catholic Encyclopedia, in an article by judicious scholar, Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J., famous for his skepticism about legends:

One is described as a priest at Rome, another as bishop of Interamna (modern Terni), and these two seem both to have suffered in the second half of the third century and to have been buried on the Flaminian Way, but at different distances from the city. . . .Of both these Saint Valentines some sort of Acta are preserved but they are of relatively late date and of no historical value. Of the third Saint Valentine, who suffered in Africa with a number of companions, nothing further is known.

If we have any belief in Divine Providence at all, we should take this "feast in triplicate," I consider, as a sign that God endorses some kind of celebration of Saint Valentine on February 14th.

Yet what do we celebrate? From the tradition, if we adopt the skepticism of Fr. Thurston, only martyrdom. Not that there is anything "only" about martyrdom, the complete gift of the body, with abandonment, to God. The ecstasy of living outside of oneself in death, for Christ. An unbreakable fidelity, mirroring that of the Bride, the Church, to the Bridegroom.

Simply in martyrdom there is the essence of all genuine romance. If on Saint Valentine's Day we celebrate "only" martyrdom, we shall not be doing badly.

But over time, the sense of the Christian faithful caused to sprout and grow, as if it deeply desired it, over this core of martyrdom, a festival of Christian mating. It was as if some austere wooden cross planted in the hard winter's ground should become adorned with flowery vines of early spring, which appeared spontaneously from the earth and grew up around it.

That these traditions of mating, and later romantic love in general, are genuine offshoots of an incarnate, Western, Christian sensibility is shown by how Muslim countries respond to the commercial holiday today. They ban roses, flowers, cards, and even the color red around the date of February 14th, viewing them as Christian incursions.

An early legend of one of the Roman Saint Valentines (dismissed by Fr. Thurston) is that the saint, when in prison, secretly married Roman soldiers to their brides, against the Emperor's order that the men had to remain single to fight more effectively.

If this legend is true, then one Saint Valentine - fully in accord with the spirit of martyrdom - was also a pro-family pro-natalist, prepared to commit civil disobedience against unjust laws.

But mating became more strongly associated with Saint Valentine's feast day around the time of Chaucer, because of a popular belief that birds paired off, into monogamous couples, on the feast. Again, why February 14th precisely, when that date is a little early for birds, and presumably birds pair off throughout all of spring? No one knows for sure. Chaucer wrote a poem on the theme, The Parliament of Fowls, in which among others Cupid, chaste Diana, Bacchus, and "pre-eminent" Priapus appear:

For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his make. . .

And although Chaucer himself perhaps understood the pairing off to take place in early May, over time, popular intuition firmly placed the mating of the birds on February 14th.

The two Saint Valentine's poems of courtly love by John Gower (1330-1408), Chaucer's friend, both presuppose that the love celebrated on that date is loyal and monogamous, like that of birds:

Saint Valentine has under his governance

the love and the nature of all birds,

whereby each of them chooses a worthy partner

similar to its size, according to its desire,

entirely of one accord and one assent.

For that one alone it leaves alone

all oth...

Fr. Brian A. Graebe.

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight- Thursday, February 13th 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 health of Pope Francis, the pope's reaction to the immigration policies of President Trump, and other issues in the global Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, arguably the most consequential gathering in Christian history. The still-young Church, then emerging from centuries of persecution, found itself torn apart by a debate over the identity of Jesus Christ.

The crisis began when a priest from Alexandria in Egypt named Arius argued - contrary to the long-standing but as-yet-undefined Catholic position - that the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, was created by God the Father. For the Arians, Jesus was the highest creature, the closest to the Father, but was not co-equal and co-eternal with Him.

The debate was not limited to the ivory tower: it divided dioceses and towns throughout the Roman Empire, many of them with competing Arian and Catholic churches and bishops. Seeing that this confusion threatened his precarious hold on power, the emperor Constantine convened the world's bishops in the city of Nicaea, in modern-day Turkey, to settle the matter in a definitie way. Thus came about the first ecumenical, or universal, council in Church history.

The resulting statement of belief, the Nicene Creed, stands as the most important text in Christianity outside of Scripture. It resoundingly refuted Arianism and affirmed the full divinity of Christ as "true God from true God."

The key word in the entire creed is homoousios, or "consubstantial." It affirms that the Son is "of the same substance," just as fully God as the Father is. The council fathers rejected the compromise term homoiousios, in which the added letter would have rendered the Son "of similar substance" to the Father.

The correct term, and the truth it upholds, makes more than just an iota ("i") of difference. Nor is the debate merely a matter of semantics or esoteric theological terms. If Jesus is not true God, then He has no power to save us, and the Crucifixion is reduced to just another ancient tragedy.

When Christians the world over recite the Creed every Sunday (the final version came later that century at the Council of Constantinople), they can take for granted how fraught the debate was and how uncertain the outcome. Even after the council, many bishops remained under Arianism's sway.

Assessing the situation 1500 years later, the famous English theologian St. John Henry Newman wrote, "The episcopate, whose action was so prompt and concordant at Nicaea on the rise of Arianism, did not, as a class or order of men, play a good part in the troubles consequent upon the Council; and the laity did. The Catholic people, in the length and breadth of Christendom, were the obstinate champions of Catholic truth, and the bishops were not."

Newman's words are, sadly, no less relevant today. A great deal of doctrinal confusion emanates from the highest levels of Church leadership, from those bishops and priests who ought to be voices of clarity. The lure of novelty, of being untethered to the tradition that we believe to have come from God Himself, tempts far too many prelates to cast doubt upon and to make a mess of the Church's apostolic faith.

The resulting division disorients Catholics, and those looking on, just as it did 1,700 years ago. A popular slogan in certain Christian denominations holds that "doctrine divides" - that theological debates impede the work of discipleship. But Nicaea reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth. It was precisely the division s...

By Francis X. Maier.

Earlier this month, in its regular Artificial Intelligence section, the Wall Street Journal ran a 2,000-word feature - for a newspaper, that's serious ink - on the AI program "FutureYou." Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), FutureYou allows you to talk with your 80-year-old self. It also (regrettably) projects what you'll look like. The idea, according to the WSJ author, "is that if people can see and talk to their older selves, they will be able to think about them more concretely, and make changes now that will help them achieve the future they hope for."

Thanks to FutureYou, the author discovered that she'd write a book, have six grandchildren, live in the suburbs, take up gardening, survive a health scare, make a solo visit to Japan, and take a family trip to Thailand. In the years ahead, her FutureSelf said, she'd regret not starting a business. She'd also need to jettison her doubts and fears. And she would always work for positive change. . .however she might define that. Immersed in an ongoing, engaging, intimate chat with herself, the author gradually achieved what the program's creators call "future self continuity" - strong identification with her online octogenarian avatar.

Some 60,000 people in 190 countries currently use FutureYou. With that kind of endorsement, what could go wrong? So I signed up myself. The registration process was free. I duly provided a wide range of personal data, concerns, and aspirations to a series of questionnaires, and a photo snapped by my computer - all of which, per MIT, will remain anonymous.

Alas, it turns out that 80-year-old Fran is tediously familiar. He's not a riveting chat partner. And that's not a surprise. I'm already in my mid-70s; and at 80 (assuming I'm still around) I'm likely to be more of the same old me. FutureYou seems geared to those with a longer takeoff ramp; people in the 30-50 age cohort. So I won't be joining Elon on Mars or writing the sequel to Dostoyevsky's The Devils. Dashed dreams are bitter.

On the bright side, MIT's developers describe FutureYou as an "imagination aid," not a fortuneteller. It offers possibilities, not prophecies. It doesn't give medical or financial counsel or outcomes. It's designed to help people think more clearly about the person they might become. It's simply another self-help tool, and similar tools can be very useful. I use Google's Gemini chatbot for quick research every day. The results, while not perfect, are nonetheless impressive.

So why bother telling you this?

The Wall Street Journal is easily (I'd argue) the finest newspaper in the land. But it has a bias toward shiny new tools if they suggest a profit downstream. And that bias, that subtle boosterism, frames its treatment of AI. The Journal does caution readers about AI's various dangers, with stories highlighting Anthropic's anti-Doomsday Frontier Red Team, or the hapless and very real guy who fell in love with "Charlie," his female chatbot, or the problem of AI "hallucinations." But if progress is good for business, then - the reasoning goes - so are the tools that drive it.

And it's true: In practice, tools like AI are often very "good" for advancing improvements in medicine, communications, and education. The trouble, as the cultural critic Neil Postman warned, is that human tools tend to reshape and master the humans who make them, with unhappy results. To put it in Biblical terms, humans have an instinct to worship, and Golden Calves come in all shapes and sizes. This accounts for how easily we can anthropomorphize the AI voices on our phones.

The advertising for Google's Gemini tool promotes exactly that delusion. I've had conversations with the personality on my Gemini app that were astonishingly relaxed, informative, and real. Except they weren't. It's hard to be skeptical when you have a warm and fruitful relationship with the algorithm in a microchip. Or your 80-year-old "self" online.

Simply put, AI is the m...

by Anthony Esolen.

One of our neighbors in Canada, where we live for part of the year, is thinking of buying the cottage next door, the homestead of an old man who isn't in good health and who hasn't been to that house in a long time. In 2005, when we were new to the neighborhood, I helped him and some men he had hired to shingle his roof, knowing that I'd learn from the job and that I'd have to do the same for my own house soon.

Up there, you have to "butter" the shingles on the inside with tar, or else the winds off the bay will lift them off. Even so, they wear out quickly, as they have done with this house. Water has gotten inside.

When I asked my neighbor whether he was going to fix the house, he told me it had become impossible. "There are ants inside," he said. "The anthills reach from the floor to the level of a sofa, more than two feet high. Everything has rotted out. There's nothing left to work with."

It's got to be cleared away. So also for the property behind it, gone wild with an invasive and pernicious strain of hogweed. That too has to be cleared.

I suppose it is the same with other inventions of man, including cultures. Here is how the ants infest. First, you cannot do what needs to be done to keep things in good order, though you try. Second, you no longer bother to try, though you still know what might be done, had you the strength and the will. Third, you no longer even know what might be done; not only have cultural habits fallen into disuse, but the knowledge they were based upon has gone. Fourth, you fall into a taste for the falling and the fallen; you cannot rebuild, but you no longer want to, though your conscience is uneasy about it.

Finally, you celebrate the corruption. You revel in the rot; you coat what is left of your floors with honey, to help the ants to increase and multiply, and fill your house and subdue it.

I say that the West is in that condition, at the end of the end. Of course, I know very well that there are stirrings of life and health even in the darkest times. Theodoric had Boethius, the greatest scholar of his age, executed on a false charge of treason, but Boethius had planted seeds that would sprout up in a fine harvest long after Theodoric was gathered to his half-barbarian fathers. I am describing a general condition.

Consider a few measures of cultural oblivion. We have college graduates who have not read a single book in their lives. We are not replacing ourselves with children. Marriage is not on the rocks; it hardly gets out of port to begin with. Churches are closing. Ignorance of Scripture, in part bound up with a general ignorance of history and the cultural heritage of Western civilization, is endemic.

Formerly Christian nations, awash in that ignorance, have embraced death as a right to be pursued, as doctors have been corrupted as healers, making money by killing human beings at either end of natural life. Even young people who do remain in the faith hardly know what is to be expected of them as men or as women. And the Internet, a glut of distraction, information, and disinformation, bids fair to overwhelm us in the subhuman.

In this state of widespread breakdown, of natural organs losing their function one by one, what do the leaders of our Church do? Young people don't know what their own sex is, so - let's increase the confusion by smiling at sodomy. People have lost the sense of the sacred, so - let's sneer at a few of the faithful "throwing themselves down" to receive Communion, and suggest that they are hypocrites, which the spiritually sluggish are ever eager to believe.

Almost no great art or music is produced in our time, because we have smothered their wellsprings under trash, and we have done it too as the reflex of ideological contempt for the past, so - let's commission a big modernist chocolate egg to be the altar at Notre-Dame de Paris.

Boys are languishing, and the life expectancy for men has begun to shrink, so - let's play patty-fingers with th...

By Robert Royal.

An ancient Greek legend tells of Alexander the Great confronting the Gordian Knot, which no one could untie. An oracle prophesied that whoever untied it would rule the East. Alexander drew his sword and cut it in half. In another version, the knot was tied around a chariot pole; Alexander slipped the pole out, and that did the trick. Either way, the lesson is: some things don't yield to the usual approaches. They require a leap to unprecedented measures.

In Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth," the archbishop of Canterbury, marveling at Prince Hal's metamorphosis from youthful carouser to sage ruler says: "Turn him to any cause of policy, / The Gordian knot of it he will unloose." Words that come spontaneously to mind, though further moves remain to be seen, about the second Trump administration.

Some of our knots required the swift Alexandrian sword: Boys and men in girls' bathrooms (and sports), surgically disfiguring children, criminal illegals roaming American streets, open borders, DEI racism masquerading as anti-racism, support for gay comic books in Ecuador or LGBT plays in Ireland, and how many other absurdities? There's no point in administrative or congressional "investigations" into such things. That would be a further waste of time and resources much needed elsewhere. You just stop them and those who did them.

So, Kudos to Trump and DOGE. But now begins the harder part, which calls for a certain finesse.

There's been a bit of talk in these heady days about Catholic social principles, though the main concepts haven't been much in play. There was implicit recognition, for instance, of the Catholic idea of the family as the primary cell of society in the confused discussion of Vice President Vance's assertion about the ordo amoris.

But the central Catholic social principles are human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity. We need serious attention to these because they've been subtly undermined and would help greatly, properly applied.

Human Dignity, for instance, is widely taken for granted, but it's often presented as if all people and ways of life are equally acceptable. (Several American bishops have even used it as an argument against deportations.) Last year's Vatican document Dignitas infinita rightly says that we remain made in the image of God, whatever our sins. But it doesn't nearly warn enough about what once was obvious: that our sins disfigure that image and are a rejection of portions of our own dignity.

The Common Good is a complicated notion that cannot be much discussed here. (The worst lecture I've ever given was trying to explain the concept to a foreign audience; I've taken pains so that won't happen again.) But it can't simply mean some sort of collectivism. Indeed, quite the opposite. The U.S. Constitution similarly speaks of "promoting the general welfare," but the Founding Fathers feared runaway government and restricted the Federal republic to carefully enumerated powers.

Education, for instance, contributes to the general welfare, but there's a reason why there was no department of education until 1979 (almost 200 years after the Constitution was ratified); education inevitably involves community values and moral questions better handled at the local and state level - i.e., not the federal government's business.

Catholic social principles of solidarity and subsidiarity help to understand why. For present purposes, solidarity is clear enough - it's a virtue, a dedication to care for others, but with limits of its own to guard it from totalitarian temptations, which is why we also have subsidiarity.

Here's the classic passage about subsidiarity from Quadragesimo anno (1931):

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshake...

By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

But first a note: The following column by the late, great Fr. James Schall (one of the founders of this site) appeared here on August 29, 2017, in slightly different form. We thought readers might appreciate being reminded of some Catholic wisdom about a much-misunderstood subject on this Super Sunday.

Now for today's column...

A recent column by Anne Killion, "More Ominous Signs for Football," in the San Francisco Chronicle, ended this way: "One reader was much more succinct: 'Outlaw that disgusting sport.' This debate isn't going away. But, little by little, high school football might be."

Baseball is probably faring even worse than football. Lacrosse is on the rise. If football is abolished, we may see the return of its ancestor, rugby, a game that still flourishes in many former British colonies.

The logic seems clear. With no high school football, we get no college football. With no college football, no professional football can continue. The link between generations will have been broken. Fathers will not have taught their sons how to play.

For a number of reasons, largely due to injuries and subsequent insurance costs, with some ideology mixed in, I suspect that many high schools will not field football teams in a decade or so. Is that a good thing? I doubt it. But good things now have no preferential claims on existence.

On a fall Friday evening, when I was in high school (Knoxville, Iowa), the biggest town event was the football game. On Saturday morning, the local merchants around the town square would go over the game of the previous evening. We all awaited the report in the local weekly paper. If one of our players was recruited by the Iowa Hawkeyes or the Iowa State Cyclones, or even by Central College in nearby Pella, it was the local talk.

With some pride, old codgers talk about their past football glories and injuries. Serious injuries, even deaths, do, no doubt, occur on the fields of play, not just in football. The prospect of a risk-free sport or a risk-free life is not always a happy one. The only way not to be injured in some way is not to do anything, and that may not work either.

Football is a sport for boys and young men. Many things are learned in athletics that can only with difficulty be learned elsewhere. The world's most widely played and watched sport is soccer (fútbol, in Spanish). The possibility of concussions is the main sticking point of the opponents of football at any level. I could never see why soccer's helmet-less "headers" were not more dangerous.

I remain one of those men who are glad to see fall season roll around. Still when Nile Kinnick's Iowa Hawkeyes defeated Notre Dame by a score of 7-0, in 1939, it was a crushing blow to us few Catholics in Knoxville.

Some folks like to think that football and sports in general are a quasi-religion. But I side with Brad Miner. Sports are, or should be, the one place where a man can escape the politicization of everything else, including religion.

Sports, as Aristotle maintained, are not as frivolous as people often assume. Aristotle had only the Olympics to watch, but the Olympics are well worth watching. As I have remarked elsewhere, games and matches are things worth watching for their own sakes. It is not an accident that games take us out of ourselves to concentrate on what is happening "out there."

We really do not want to "do" anything at a good game, unless we are making money by selling beer or hot dogs. In that case, we are not there to see the game. Games, as Aristotle said, are less "serious" than the contemplation of being. But that does not prevent us from seeing in them what we mean by something that fascinates us because it is gripping.

The nearest an average man gets to contemplation is in fact the watching a good game. What is there rivets one's attention simply because it is going on. We are caught up in the action unraveling before us.

So what if, in the end, the score is Iowa 7 / Notre Dame zi...

by John D. Grondelski.

When I read that President Trump had banned government emails from including "pronouns," I immediately thought of. . .Descartes. We don't realize just how deeply René Descartes deformed modern Western thought.

This year marks the 800th anniversary of the birth of St. Thomas Aquinas. Fifty years ago, American theologian Germain Grisez delivered a foundational paper at a Thomistic conference in which he argued that much of the dualism behind then-prevalent revisionist Catholic sexual ethics (Charles Curran, Richard McCormick, Anthony Kosnik, Phil Keane) owed much to Cartesian dualism.

All wind up in the same place: the "person" is reduced to consciousness, while the body becomes sub-personal, a tool or appendage attached to the "person" (mind) to do with as he chooses. Starting from this dualism, the revisionists accused Catholic sexual ethics of "physicalism" when the revisionists, in fact, were the ones who depersonalized the significance of the personal, human body, leaving only the physical.

If the "person" is essentially mind, then bodies can be "wrong." They're just tools, and sometimes you need a regular screwdriver, sometimes a Phillips. Just adjust to your "needs."

Descartes has had a good ride as the deep dualist foundation of modern sexual mores and bioethics. Thanks to his depreciation of the body and the senses, fertility ceases to be a human good to be loved and becomes merely a phenomenon: good, bad, or neutral depending on momentary utility.

And when consciousness is impaired, well, keeping the sub-personal body alive becomes of no moral significance. The severely handicapped but not necessarily dying comatose patient becomes, by some perverse alchemy, a "vegetable."

You throw out old vegetables when they go bad.

But in considering President Trump's recent pronoun decree, I concluded that Descartes had gotten a second act.

How so?

Playing along with the fantasies of "transsexuality" always required some element of disbelief, most prominently of what one's senses tell you. You looked at this shop teacher with size 38EEE breasts, a baritone voice, and a five-o'clock shadow and were told - under pain of social ostracism, employment "discrimination" investigation, and/or violence to call him "her."

In a real sense, the roots of that suspension of disbelief lie in Cartesian systematic doubt. In the end, Descartes gives us not an objective world out there that we then perceive. He gives us a subjective world built in one's mind and projected onto the world "out there." Which comes first: the world or your mind? For René, it's essentially the latter, which is why he put des cart before des horse.

Descartes' critics, of course, asked how it was that almost all people had the same perception of the world "out there," if it is primarily built from inside individual minds. For that, Descartes posited some "deceiver" who coordinates the vast majority of perceptions.

Józef Tischner observes that Descartes is utterly weak on ethics, and the question of the Cartesian "deceiver" is fundamentally an ethical one. Why would the "deceiver" go to all that trouble to construct in so many people over so long a time a common perception of the world?

If it is a deception, why? Cui bono? What would be the motivation for such a global ruse? Descartes never gives us a satisfactory answer, and faith is not a reason for signing up to his philosophy of "knowledge."

If man's basic approach to what his senses tell him is to consider them flawed, erroneous, and worthy of doubt, then reality - built in the mind - requires that mind to tell you what is real. If that is true, we have the perfect foundation for gender ideology. Don't believe what you see: I am a woman because cogito ergo sum.

In the same week that J.D. Vance introduced the concept of ordo amoris into a political debate, Donald Trump struck a blow for Thomistic realism. No, we will not play pretend; yes, we will react to what our senses and what our biology,...