The Catholic Thing

By David Warren.

For all the saints I can call to mind, and I should think for all saints, a job in politics would seem highly unsuitable.

Looking at it only from the point of view of an exemplary "Saint X," as it were: his politicizing would be counter-productive, to the point of wrong.

What would he have to do, to achieve holiness? While making some kind of mark in this debilitating trade? In what way could he contribute to anyone's salvation?

To "save" someone in a political sense is to contribute to his survival, or to the recovery of his fortune. These are worldly things. The citizen may be in need of food or medicine, but when these things are obtained by political methods, we get the usual effects of socialism.

More often he is simply in need of money, and by supplying him with the fruit of public taxation, while not requiring that he do anything to earn it, we get the usual effects of inflation.

These are not mere inconveniences. Saint Paul was very clear: "no work, no eat." But he was not a politician; he would never get himself elected with a promise like that.

Of course, there are charitable, graceful acts. Religious, specifically Christian, tradition encourages these. Not everything must be done for money.

Medical doctors (whether on the state's payroll or not) are sometimes credited with sanctity by the patients whose lives they have saved; and I would not want to condemn them, even while playing the curmudgeon.

But mere survival, or the restoration of someone's good health, or wealth, is not the same thing as sanctity.

Neither, on the way to these good ends, is getting one's sweet way in politics, whatever the operation that accomplished it (usually false rhetoric).

For some reason, persons from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. are compulsively cited when examples are sought for sanctity in politics. More anciently, there was George Washington's candor when he hacked into his father's cherry tree; and there are several other legendary indications of honesty and good behavior.

But to perform most conspicuously saintly acts (stopping abortions, for instance) is more controversial, and "not done" in democratic politics, except for empty promises. For electorates do not tend to be saintly, nor can an ungoverned mob perform a saintly act.

Conversely, Saint John Paul II may be considered as a politician, and a specifically saintly one, crossing over from his "day job" as pope to many sterling accomplishments in the world.

But Wojtyla was not a saint in the merely colloquial sense, much less than from his station in the hierarchy. He was behaving well, even before being elevated to the papacy; and had he remained stuck in Poland he would also be a saint. Or, might have been recognized as such, depending who was "His Holiness" in Rome.

It is unfortunate that the modern habit of canonizing every pope who dies has blurred the distinction between saintliness and political efficiency. (Our Catholic ancestors knew better than to do this.)

There were arguably several other magnificent "crossovers" in the fair history of the Church, but Church politics has not been, generally, the means to engender saints, or a source of the best inspiration.

It's likely that saintly acts "behind the scenes" were involved in preventing, or at least distracting, certain gentlemen from becoming pope.

There are no footnotes on actions like these, secretly manifested; but for the moment let us consider the "negatives" that may be holy. Thus we might gain insight into why Our Lord allows evil to continue (including what evil politicians do).

For positive forces require negative forces. They are what makes it possible for victory to be declared.

Worldly ambition is invariably excluded from the career of the potential saint, as Christians realize, for a reason. This is because the saint is working towards a divine victory, which cannot be foreseen - except by "divination." We see only the battles, dimly; God sees the war.

In secular, or r...

By Stephen P. White.

Our country's immigration system is a colossal mess. Few would argue otherwise. It is the responsibility and duty of the federal government to resolve that mess, both for the sake of the nation and her citizens and out of genuine concern for the safety and well-being of migrants and refugees. The failures of the Biden administration in this regard are a major reason that the new Trump administration can claim an electoral mandate on immigration.

The Catholic Church has long played a role in providing basic assistance to immigrants who come to the United States. So adept is the Church at this work that the federal government has turned to her for help in providing the sort of humanitarian assistance many migrants and refugees require.

The federal government, by law, allocates large sums of money to facilitate, in a safe and ordered way, the relocation of refugees, migrants, and unaccompanied minors entering the United States. To accomplish this massive undertaking (again, by law) the federal government partners with non-governmental organizations and local institutions. These organizations and institutions have the local presence and expertise to carry out this work - work that would otherwise require a massive increase in the federal workforce or simply go undone.

The federal government grants a portion of the billions of dollars it spends annually resettling refugees and migrants to the care of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which in turn distributes those funds to regional affiliates and local organizations where the money is needed and where our laws mandate that it be spent. In recent years, the grants have totaled as much as $130 million.

As the laws establishing these grants require, persons assisted and resettled through these grants have been vetted by the federal government before entering the United States. In other words, the migrants and refugees who are the direct beneficiaries of these grants are, by definition, entering the United States legally.

For the Church to be untrustworthy in its management of these federal funds or for the Church to use the funds in violation of federal law, would constitute a gross breach of the public trust and dereliction of moral duty. The same would be the case if the Church were to use these funds as a means of self-enrichment.

Which brings us, as you might have foreseen, to remarks made by Vice President Vance last month in an interview on CBS News' "Face the Nation." Vance clearly insinuated that the USCCB's federally funded work with migrants is driven not by humanitarian concerns but by greed:

I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops should look in the mirror a little bit and ask themselves: When they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line? We're going to enforce immigration law.

The vice president suggested, without evidence, that these grants are being used to resettle illegal immigrants, contrary to both the federal requirements of the grants and the USCCB's statements on the matter. Add to this the insinuation that the USCCB participates in federal programs for the resettlement of immigrants in order to pad its bottom line, when the USCCB consistently spends more on these programs than it takes in, and Vance's remarks take on an ill-informed and reckless character.

There are any number of fair questions to be asked about where the USCCB gets its money and how it spends it. And there are good reasons for the government to want to know how its grants are being spent. But it's odd to suggest, as the vice president did, that the Church is somehow blameworthy for carrying out that work according to the federally mandated form and purpose of those programs.

If our immigration laws have been poorly conceived, poorly written, and poorly enforced, that is, in the first instance, a State problem not a Churc...

By Daniel B. Gallagher.

"The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice." If G. K. Chesterton was right about this, any attempt to glue two half-truths together not only misses the whole but compounds the vice. If the whole is "love," the result is catastrophic. And if you put any stock in 1 John 4:8, the whole is indeed love.

So, provided love is directed toward its proper object, John Lennon was right: All we need is love. Or as the Bishop of Hippo put it, "Love, and do what you will!" But this is only half the truth. For he immediately adds, "Human actions can only be understood by their root in love. All kinds of actions might appear good without proceeding from the root of love."

Augustine contrasts a father spanking his son to discipline him and a kidnapper caressing him to keep him quiet: "Offered a choice between blows and caresses, who would not choose the caresses and avoid the blows?"

In other words, if I happen to catch sight of a man caressing my neighbor's son on the cheek, I have only half the truth. Once I know he's a kidnapper, I wouldn't think twice before calling 911 (provided I'm virtuous, of course). Thus, Augustine's concluding exhortation: "Let the root of love be in you! Nothing can spring from it but good."

As these examples show, love - true love, by its very nature - is ordered. Ultimately, moral actions can be judged according to whether they spring from love, but only from love directed toward the true good. If actions are so ordered, their corresponding objects are hierarchically ordered such that those more proximate to the fundamental requirements of love are attended to first.

Conversely, Augustine imagines the chaos that ensues if we hierarchically arrange our actions with no regard for their respective objects. In his mind, if the object - i.e., the "whole truth" - is to discipline my son, then (provided I love him), the spanking I give him for stealing can only be virtuous, and the precept "never spank your son" is, at best, a "half-truth."

The "whole truth" will rear its ugly head if I fail at disciplining him and later have to bail him out of jail for shoplifting: "Love should be fervent to correct. Take delight in good behavior, but amend what is bad. Love the person, but not the error in the person."

Only against the background of this ordering of love can we understand what J.D. Vance meant in a recent interview when he invoked the ordo amoris:

There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.

If the Vice President had meant this to be a list of unrelated spheres of concern, he would be clearly wrong. But it's clear he did not mean this. So, if I know the man caressing the cheek of my neighbor's son is a kidnapper, I better call 911 before spanking my son for the theft his mother just reported to me. But if I spend the whole evening searching for a suspected kidnapper I heard about on the radio rather than taking the time to play a game of basketball with my son, my order of loves is definitely out of whack.

This was James Orr's point in a recent essay: "the idea that we must structure and not dissipate our finite and fragile stock of affections and loyalties does nothing to undermine Christianity's revolutionary insistence on the inestimable worth of every human being."

Indeed, the "inestimable worth" of my neighbor's son must take priority when I spot him receiving a caress from a suspected kidnapper, but the "inestimable worth" of my own son demands that I attend to helping him achieve his full potential even if my neighbor's dad is neglecting the potential of his son.

But if we stop there, we've only identified a "half-truth" about Christian love. That is why Kat Armas is also correct in pointing out that Christian agape "is ultimately not about love confined to bloodli...

By Randall Smith.

Here is an odd pair of statistics. The Congress has an abysmal 17 percent approval rating. And yet 97 percent of congressmen and women running for office get reelected. People say they want to "drain the swamp," but oddly, they don't want to start with their own swamp creatures. Do people really disapprove of Congress? Or do they just disapprove of other people's congressmen and women?

"The Congress is filled with a bunch of crooks!" you hear people say. So, I take it that when their own representative puts a hefty "earmark" into the federal budget and brings home several billion dollars in "pork-barrel spending," their response must be: "You did what? You got billions in federal dollars? What are you - an idiot? Don't you realize that if you take billions in federal spending for our projects, everyone else will do that too, and soon, the whole country will be bankrupt?"

I'm sure they must - logically - say that. I've never heard anyone actually say that, but they would have to. Wouldn't they?

Or is it simply budget-busting and unnecessary "pork" when it's being spent on other people, but not when it's spent on our good and noble projects. It's "pork" when it's spent on their state projects, but it's money well spent when it's for our state projects. We are making valuable, legitimate investments in America's future. They are ripping off the American people.

The new administration is promising to reform the federal bureaucracy. It is said that "this is what the American people want." Perhaps. But this may be like their desire to "reform" the Congress. It all depends on who is going to be "reformed."

As the philosopher Plato taught centuries ago, it is difficult to reform a society because each group is convinced of its own importance and the value of the benefits they are receiving. No one wants their special interest cut or even trimmed because, of course, they don't consider their "thing" one of those nasty "special interests" that you hear so much negative reporting about.

One thing the new administration attempted - for about a day - was to freeze certain federal expenditures. The panic was immediate and overwhelming. "This is unreasonable! Unconstitutional! Unethical! Unconscionable! How can they do this? Don't they understand the damage it will do if they cut off the perpetual flow of federal funds?"

So perhaps we should look at ourselves honestly in the mirror and admit that all of us are on "welfare" now. Grants, entitlements, tariffs, special exemptions and tax breaks: we're all suckling at the government teat in our own way. And if the flow of money is cut back, many of us are going to squawk like a baby torn away from its mother's breast.

So expect people to go to those with greater access to power to keep their own spigot of federal money flowing. Cost-cutting reforms won't mean less special-interest lobbying; the lobbying will simply become more desperate. And the differences between those with access to government largesse and those who don't will increase.

That's the problem with the government having so much control over so much of the life of the nation with its financing going into so many pots. Everything depends on who has access to key government officials and the media.

Expect a flood of articles in the coming days detailing the gruesome results of how poor person X is suffering because the government is no longer doing Y. I notice in my own area, education, that there has been an uptick in articles bemoaning cuts in government funding. These are often paired with articles furious at the attempts of state governments to reestablish general education curricula and standards.

This has become standard practice well beyond the education establishment: insisting on "rights" with no corresponding responsibilities.

I was always amazed at how "generous" Joe Biden could imagine himself to be when he was spending other people's money. Did he save people with student loans billions? Did he spen...

by James Matthew Wilson.

It would be nearly impossible to overstate the influence on modern Christianity of the French mathematician, physicist, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). In his lifetime, Pascal was known chiefly for his work on the mathematics of probability and his experiments proving the reality of the vacuum, in addition to his controversial writings in defense of French Jansenism.

Late in his short life, however, Pascal engaged his fellow Jansenists and his unbelieving "libertine" friends (whose interior lives seemed to prove the reality of a spiritual vacuum) with whom he would sit long hours at the gambling table (to make use of his theory of probability), arguing for the truth of Christianity. We have evidence of these efforts only from a set of notes found after his death.

Pascal's Pensées (Thoughts), as these notes came to be called in their published form, has given shape to how we talk about Christianity ever since. Pascal provides a stark, indeed chilling, account of the human condition and adapts the ancient wisdom of St. Augustine to his own view of the world, all with the purpose of inducing all human beings to seek God.

Pascal's notes come to 923 different fragments, some a sentence long, some extending for pages, but their argument can be summarized briefly. Christianity teaches, Pascal states, that the human condition is a fallen one. Human reason has difficulty knowing anything: our rational powers are often specialized and narrow, and, in any case, prone to distortions of vanity and imagination. Furthermore, we are "disproportioned" to the universe. The outer world consists merely of matter, but we are composed of matter and thought. The outer world is an infinite abyss, but we are finite. Christianity teaches that our God is a hidden God. Indeed, we cannot see him anywhere in the infinite emptiness of the universe.

Human behavior offers further evidence of our fallenness. We are endowed with the greatness of thought, but we spend our energies continuously trying to avoid thinking, lest we be made aware of the vanity and emptiness of our interior selves: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."

We would like to be happy; we would like to rest in happiness. But in fact we keep ourselves in constant "stir," diverting ourselves from thought and deceiving ourselves with the belief that this or that activity - whether the hunting of hares, the new business venture, or our next bet at the casino - will at last allow us to rest content.

Do we realize our absurdity? No, we double down on it: the immortality of the soul and the existence of God are two questions of absolute importance whose answers would determine how we should live. But most human beings give those questions only perfunctory consideration before shrugging their shoulders and heading back to the roulette wheel.

Reason alone would counsel us to bet on the existence of God, but reason is a small thing compared to the confused depths of the human heart. Fallen man squanders his days with diversions rather than pursuing the truth about what matters most.

In Christianity, true faith is a gift from God, as Pascal knows well. We receive it in supernatural grace and cannot seize it by reason's natural efforts. But this much reason can see: we are surrounded by an infinite universe, impossible to cross.

Even the most minute thing - an insect or an atom - is infinitely divisible mathematically. But there is still one more infinite abyss for us to discover. If we look inside ourselves, we will discover that a faint "trace" of our unfallen condition remains. That trace tells us that we were once happy, but are not now. And the spiritual hole within us is infinite in size. Only an infinite spiritual being can fill it. Only God can full-fill us.

Later in Pensées, Pascal provides an elegant list of typological evidence from Scripture that would...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.

We remember Chesterton's great quip that the object of a New Year is that "we should have a new soul." Part of that, I think, apart from repentance and resolution to avoid the sins and failures of the past year, is to enter the new year with a sense of hope.

Not a naïve optimism, but a sense of hope and trust in God, and a willingness to cooperate with Him, to listen to Him. And yes, a new soul means a conversion. Let us, in a profound way, be more committed to our faith, in public and in private, even as we end the first month of the new year, than we were in 2024.

That sense of hope has, I believe, solid grounds, even if the grounds are the size of a mustard seed. Although it is necessary to speak realistically and regularly of the great void that has appeared in the West due to the decline of the Faith, and the dark forces that are massing, there are some points of light, visible, even if small, due to the darkness.

We are hearing of increasing numbers of people, some well-known - intellectuals, writers, artists - who are coming to faith in Christ. This is heart-warming and hope-inducing. There are also thousands of unknown people who are seeking baptism or want to enter the Church; you will know some of them. This is truly extraordinary as the Church goes through a very public time of great confusion. This must be the work of God because, otherwise, it makes no sense.

Therefore, one of our first thoughts, as we enter this time of newness, is to do all we can to help and bring others to the light, and for that, we require something of a new heart and soul.

We also, without any partisanship, merely from the point of view of the defense of life, free speech, and common sense, have much to hope for. The election and inauguration of President Trump have brought what we might call a necessary correction to the tsunami of idiocy which has been the hallmark of the last several years. A perfect example of that was seeing, on the "breaking news" ticker moving across the screen of the news channels, "Only two genders, Trump declares - male and female." That, of course, was breaking news in the Book of Genesis.

Inextricably linked with that, is our other thought for this new time in God's providence - the gift of our defined faith. This year of Our Lord 2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, from which we get the Nicene Creed, which most orthodox Christians recite on Sundays and Feast Days.

Why does that matter? Surely, it is only an anniversary, and a form of words, and isn't dogma a terrible fusty old thing, because we are so undogmatic and free-thinking now, a sign of our maturity, our coming of age.

Poppycock. As G.K. Chesterton said, and I'll quote him liberally again, there are two kinds of people in the world, the "conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were the most dogmatic." We saw a glaring example of the unconscious dogmatist lecturing the president and his family in Washington's National Cathedral in a most dogmatic manner.

It is fashionable folly to decry dogma, we remember again the words of Dorothy L. Sayers, that the "dogma is the drama." If people are coming to Christ, they want and need to know what they believe in; an undogmatic faith is no faith at all. Chesterton enlightens us on this: "Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning - an instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. . . Dogma is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."

Our age in the Western world desperately needs a period of lucidity. Obfuscation has been the normal modus operandi recently - in the world and the Church. We now need clarity and light. When the world is questioning, the very last thing it needs from Christianity is confusion.

"The faith," said Hilaire Belloc, "is the only beacon in this night, if beacon there be." As the Counc...

By Jackie Dettling

When I was seventeen years old, I aborted my baby. Abortion had never previously crossed my mind. I thought I would be a virgin until I fell in love, like the women in the novels I read from the public library. The ones with the handsome man riding up on a horse. Women in the 1970s devoured these new romance novels, featuring explicit depictions of sex, selling millions of copies. I started reading them in elementary school. I knew sex outside of marriage was a sin. In my books, however, sex happened before marriage. Marriage came at the end, when they lived "happily ever after."

Getting drunk was expected in high school. A boyfriend was also expected. I thought about boys more than God, school, and current events. Weekends were for getting drunk and hanging out with the boys. No one mentioned God in my public school. My family was Catholic. Mass on Sunday, grace before dinner. But no mention of God after that. Just be good.

After Confirmation, I never went to Confession or received any catechesis. I was thankful to be done; religion didn't seem to be important. I never heard abortion mentioned in Church teaching or any teaching. I never heard that abortion is murdering a child. I knew the Catholic Church opposed birth control. But I didn't know why. A friend said it was to bring more Catholics into the world, which at the time seemed right.

After the abortion, I went on with my life. I never told anyone. It was as if it never happened. The terror that my parents and the community would learn I was pregnant was all-consuming before the abortion. I could think of nothing else but getting the abortion as soon as possible. If I thought at all about what I was doing, it was "ending a pregnancy." It was legal, easy, and affordable. It must, therefore, not be a big deal.

The shame of pregnancy, accompanied by fear of public humiliation, gossip, and the loss of approval by my family and friends was overwhelming. Handling the situation on my own, without drama, emotion, or discussion seemed strong to me, and admirable. I got myself into this situation, I would fix it. No one needs to know.

So, I had the abortion and was back in school. Done. Don't think about it. I was one of the valedictorians and received other accolades, then a top Catholic college, and eventually a post-graduate program. I married, had three children, and started a successful career. I would say I was happy. I was actually used to being somewhat numb.

If I had to describe my life after the abortion, I would have to say, it was like watching myself live my life. I stopped going to Mass regularly. I rarely prayed. Once an older, Catholic woman who had many children and grandchildren, stopped and softly touched my newborn daughter with great reverence. I remember thinking it odd. I loved my children deeply, but she seemed to see something else, something sacred. I couldn't understand it at the time.

Thankfully, my husband is Catholic. We knew that our kids needed their sacraments because that is what Catholics do. I remember telling a friend that we went to Mass to teach our children values. Eventually, one of my daughters was preparing for Confirmation. The parents were invited to go to Confession with them. I had been attending Mass for years by then. I hadn't been to Confession since ninth grade. I confessed the abortion.

Some time after, I was at Mass and the Gospel passage "ask and you shall receive" was read. It had never dawned on me to ask for anything, really. I thought you just keep trying to be good; that's the way to God. I asked for faith that day. I knew I didn't truly believe. God was distant, not knowable.

But that was the beginning. Over the next several years, the Lord poured his grace over me. He opened my eyes. I read Scripture every day. If there was a Catholic Church nearby, I stopped in to pray in front of Jesus in the Tabernacle. I went to Mass on Sundays, and then daily.

I also went to Confession, and read the saints: A...

By Brad Miner. I got an. A. although

The word "plagiarism" comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper." I've known writers who've referred to a book or a poem or a play they've written as their "baby." And if somebody had pilfered their text, they'd have considered it tantamount to child abduction.

The word, rendered as plagiary, didn't find its way into English until the beginning of the 17th century, specifically in 1601, when dramatist Ben Jonson (author of The Alchemist and Shakespeare's acquaintance and rival) first used it.

It's rather like this exchange in Lewis Carroll:

Alice: Well, I must say I've never heard it that way before. . .

Caterpillar: I know, I have improved it.

And it captures the attitude of writers in the 17th and earlier centuries. It wasn't so much that, say, William Shakespeare stole from Luigi da Porto (1485-1529), or Matteo Bandello (c. 1480-1562), or Arthur Brooke (d. 1563) - all of whom had written earlier versions of a tale of star-crossed lovers. It's that the Bard of Avon improved them all in his Romeo and Juliet.

Da Porto's was first in 1524: Historia novellamente ritrovata di due giovani amanti ("Newly discovered story of two young lovers.)

In 1554, Matteo Bandello - as with da Porto, a name never mentioned in my college Shakespeare classes - wrote his own novella based on da Porto's. It's unclear if it was Bandello's work that Shakespeare principally drew upon. (But thinking of Friar Lawrence in the Bard's version, note that Bandello was a Dominican friar - and a bishop of Agen in France!)

Shakespeare was likely conversant in Italian. As Prof. Kent Cartwright - excerpted in the Folger Shakespeare Library article - writes:

[Shakespeare] apparently learned Italian. . .in the mid-1590s, and he read sources in Italian for plays such as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. For Shakespeare and his countrymen, "the idea of Italy," as [scholar Michael] Wyatt puts it, "took on a life of its own."

But Shakespeare also had access to English translations of Bishop Bandello made by William Painter (d. 1595) and, more especially, the narrative poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke (1562).

I never tire of reminding myself and, therefore, of boring others with the fact that during this time, England was Catholic, Protestant, Catholic again, and finally Protestant in the space of a bit more than a quarter-century. It was a period of destabilization and violence.

But it was also an era of great creativity. And at the end of the chain begun by Luigi da Porto, we have Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1597).

Hamlet usually tops a list of "Shakespeare's Greatest Tragedies," which is fine. In college, I wrote an essay suggesting that the Prince of Denmark was a kind of existentialist Christ figure. I got an. A. although that was for effort and not because the professor thought I'd proved the point. (I wasn't a Roman Catholic then, or I might have.)

In March, my wife and I will see Denzel Washington in Othello on Broadway (with Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago), and one could argue that the great tale of jealousy deserves consideration as Shakespeare's best.

The Greatest Writer in the English Language was at his best writing tragedy. I'm not going to suggest that Romeo and Juliet ranks above the aforementioned plays, or King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, et alia. But I think the case may be made that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare's most influential play.

This is because it's the most read and often the first read Shakespeare play by impressionable students. And it is the most-taught, most-performed play in American high schools by far. Scholar Jonathan Burton, writing on the Whittier College website, says, "No play is taught more frequently than Romeo and Juliet, which appears in roughly 93% of all ninth-grade classes." I believe it.

If "To be or not to be" is the most quoted line from Shakespeare, "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" can't be far behind - even if...

By Michael Pakaluk.

I take it that charity has to be freely given by the person who shows charity. If I steal someone's credit card and purchase all kinds of goods with it for a homeless person, I am not showing charity, because that other person never gave his consent.

If we are being strict about it - and why not be strict? - the $100 million that the U.S. bishops received in Federal money last year to resettle refugees was not theirs and does not even exist. At least, you'd need a good argument for why that sum shouldn't be assigned to the Federal government's roughly $2 trillion dollar deficit last year. So, not only does the money not exist, many of the people who will be obliged to pay it, your grandchildren and mine, may still not exist. They certainly did not give their consent.

Charity should be ordered. There is something called an "order of charity." Giving that is disordered is not charity.

If I am reading the USCCB's financials correctly, the bishops added in $4 million of their own to resettle refugees, from monies taken in weekly collection, for a total of $104 million. One cannot argue from this (as The Pillar has done) that they took a loss on the program, because it was their free decision to add the $4 million. And who knows what amount they would otherwise have spent if they had not received the $100 million?

But for the program to be in the strict sense a work of charity - and, again, why not be strict? - they would need to have persuaded parishioners to give 25 times more than the $4 million they were already giving to assist refugee resettlement. Who believes that they could have succeeded in doing this, when - for instance parochial schools are woefully underfunded? There is an order of charity.

Vice President J.D. Vance wondered aloud on CBS Face the Nation last week whether the bishops' criticism of Trump's executive orders on immigration wasn't motivated by their desire to protect their bottom line. The claim I take it is not, of course, that they pocket any of the Federal grant but rather: Who wouldn't want a flow-through stream of $100 million?

The bishops take a 20 percent cut of that money before passing it on to lower-level entities that deal with the refugees (grant for purposes of argument that they are all "refugees" and not merely economic migrants). Let's say optimistically that those entities take a 20 percent cut too. Let's say, also optimistically, that the Federal government took a 20 percent cut before the money even got to the bishops. Then of the roughly $120 million that never existed and was taken from my descendants without their consent, only half of it anyway gets to actual refugees. $60 million evaporates for no lasting good purpose, if it does not underwrite mischievous purposes.

If you are beginning to wonder what any of this has to do with charity and Matthew 25, you are not alone. Doubts have already been raised about "the Church as NGO" by Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.

Whether the bishops or some bishops like to see the consequences of $100 million in flow-through monies may be the least of the worries. In administering the Federal funds, the bishops made themselves agents of the government and collaborators in the Biden administration's policies. If they are agents and collaborators, by no reasonable standard accepted anywhere else can they be accounted disinterested or dispassionate.

Moreover, recipients of Federal funds know that with grants come strings. It proves very difficult to avoid falling into an across-the-board culture of compliance. Do all of the subsidiary entities, in their expenditure of these funds, follow a Christian inspiration, or do they rather follow Federal codes of compliance? The question answers itself.

Does a culture of compliance in one domain have overflow effects in other domains? This question remains to be investigated. An entity receiving many millions of dollars in Federal monies will typically find it difficult to re...

By Francis X. Maier.

The new autobiography by Pope Francis, Hope , written with the help of Italian journalist Carlo Musso, is a mixed experience. On the one hand, it's filled with revealing personal details; Gospel wisdom on the futility of war and the urgency of mercy and forgiveness; the difference between hope and optimism; and exhortations to trust in God and the future.

So far, so good: The intimate personal witness of a pope from the peripheries should have natural appeal. Alas, on the other hand, much of the text is tedious platitude, with familiar nods to climate and the environment, complaints about "rigidity" in the Church and the dangers of populism, and a confessional tone that's meant to be absorbing but ends up feeling awkward and embarrassing for its lack of depth.

The book was designed to be released after Francis's death. He moved up its publication to coincide with the Jubilee Year. That was a mistake. Death can throw an enhancing veil over the memory of a man. In life, there's such a thing as TMI: too much information, especially when it's not compelling. Such is the case with Hope. Whatever its long-term value, the book is, regrettably, of little help to faithful American Catholics who face a new and challenging cultural terrain.

Consider the following factors, in no particular order, but all of them serious:

The Obama and Biden presidencies with their systematic mendacity and appetite for "equity" and social engineering; the application of behavioralist

"nudge" techniques to the political environment; the growth of the administrative state; the spread of government-approved "snitch lines" for citizens to report each other for perceived offensive speech; invasive developments in surveillance technology; legacy media polarization; fragmentation in popular sources of information via the Internet, thereby intensifying social conflict; and the rise of the social sciences (especially psychology and sociology) as a kind of alternative clergy. These realities, when combined, offer the foretaste of a "soft totalitarianism" uniquely suited to the American environment.

This was a concern among bishops interviewed for my 2024 book True Confessions, but the perception is held far more widely than in Church circles. Secular scholars with no religious affiliation such as Christopher Lasch saw the emerging ingredients of this reality decades ago. And in his collection of essays, Technology and Empire (published nearly 60 years ago), the Canadian (Christian) political philosopher George Parkin Grant observed that "the dynamism of technology has gradually become the dominant purpose" in Western civilization, in effect, its state religion.

The result, said Grant, is predictable. The "motive of wonder" in scientific inquiry has become "ever more subsidiary to the motive of power" - with a consequent drive for mastery not merely over nature and the element of chance, but over man himself. The urge to control human nature in the interests of improving it - whatever that might mean in the mind of the "improvers" - "is the chief cause of the development of the modern 'value-free' social sciences." In a world where notions of good and evil are reduced to value judgments and subjective preferences lacking bases in fact, sociology and psychology serve "the function of expanding that knowledge which gives [social] control." They also provide, for those in power, "a large percentage of the preachers who proclaim the dogmas which legitimize" the modern argument for more intrusive social controls.

In the end, what results is a minority leadership class with a monopoly of power, and a majority of the led who might "live in affluence but are removed from any directing of the society" and whose purpose is found in an ethos of pleasure and distraction. Writing at the height of the Vietnam War, Grant suggested that the theme of North American life had become "the orgasm at home and napalm abroad." Whether anything fundamental has change...