The Catholic Thing

By Robert Royal.

I sometimes wonder whether Thomas Aquinas, whose feast is today, hasn't been ill-served by being so universally praised - and therefore less really read. Please don't misunderstand. He's the GOAT ("Greatest of All Time," in sports parlance) among Christian thinkers. And - except for a few names like Plato and Aristotle - among all human thinkers, period. But in the general decline of culture and its many current perversions, to have once been thought great in that way is now to become a prime target.

When I was young and trying to find my way through the thickets of thought, I had a Catholic-schoolboy's assumption that Aquinas was, at the very least, someone to be reckoned with. But then you might come across a passage like this in what many might think an authoritative source:

He [Aquinas] does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

That's from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. I wonder if anyone reads it anymore, except for those ensorcelled by Russell's narrow, mid-20th-century skepticism cum libertinism.

It's clear that Russell didn't read Aquinas; "he already knew the truth" about him and therefore made obvious assumptions. Many still do read Thomas - people not easily fooled, with names like Maritain, Gilson, Wojtyla, Lonergan, McInerny, MacIntyre, Feser, and many more. Because at the same time that he is creating a vast cathedral of thought and spirit, Aquinas establishes the gold standard for distinguishing between human reason (i.e., philosophy), and what by nature exceeds the scope of human reason (i.e., revelation).

He sets out as a convinced Christian, to be sure, but uses his brains on matters that reason is fitted to address:

It seems that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated. For it is an article of faith that God exists. But what is of faith cannot be demonstrated, because a demonstration produces scientific knowledge; whereas faith is of the unseen (Hebrews 11:1). Therefore it cannot be demonstrated that God exists. [ST Ia, ii, i.]

Among the many interesting things about a passage like this in Aquinas is that it's presented as a question (actually an "objection"), one of three similar objections to demonstrating that God - absolute Being - exists. And so a kind of intellectual dialogue begins: people have said this on one side, and on the other side these other things. How can they be reconciled?

Thomas thinks that the Absolute can be demonstrated by Reason - the famous Five Ways. To oversimplify and give them names, he posits an Unmoved Mover, First Cause, Necessary Being, Greatest Good, and Final End.

These notions he gathered from thinkers like the pagan Aristotle and many Christian sources, to be sure. But they are categories of reason, not faith or revelation, which he recognizes as something quite different. Readers over the centuries have disputed whether these "ways" are watertight proofs or not, but they are at least material that can be rationally examined. And there's no denying that engaging those ideas has resulted in much remarkable Christian thought.

Many Catholics and others believe that St. Thomas was the primary intellectual figure in Church teaching from the moment he appeared. He was always regarded as a great thinker, of course. But contrary to widespread impressions, Thomism had not been particularly prominent in Catholic philosophical training prio...

By David G. Bonagura, Jr.

"Excellence," along with its cousin "success," is the most overused word in education. It adorns mission statements and admission pitches at all levels of both Catholic and secular schools, seeking to convince prospective students to enroll and prospective donors to give. The Catholic elementary school where I was educated, to name but one, had a citation on its outdoor sign: "A National School of Excellence." The honor was bestowed by some accrediting agency that somehow wielded the majestic power to define what is excellent.

And there is the game: everyone uses "excellence," but no one really knows what it means.

The dictionary defines excellence as "the state of possessing good qualities in an unusual or eminent degree; the state of excelling in anything." For Aristotle, excellence was synonymous with virtue, arete in Greek. A thing is "excellent" if it performs its purpose at a high level. A knife is excellent if it cuts well, a calculator is excellent if it calculates well, a person is excellent if he lives well.

A school is excellent, then, if it educates well. As we celebrate Catholic Schools Week, whose bland theme for 2025, "United in Faith and Community," does not conjure excellence, we should consider what Catholic education is so that we can ensure that it is, in reality, excellent.

Education, a word whose meaning is in the eye of the beholder, is the process of developing the minds and characters of youth through the study of nature and culture. Catholic education, as explained by the Sacred Congregation of Education, perfects education with grace, for it "works towards this goal [of education] guided by its Christian vision of reality." Young minds and characters are cultivated in order to foster "those particular virtues which will enable [the Christian] to live a new life in Christ and help him to play faithfully his part in building up the Kingdom of God."

In other words, Catholic education employs academic study to develop young people's capacity to love God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love their neighbor as themselves. All courses and activities at Catholic schools - from arithmetic, art, band, and basketball to science, technology, theater, and writing - ought to contribute to meeting these two ends of Catholic education in their complementary ways. God is the Creator of all things; to study any aspect of Creation and to exercise the abilities He has given us leads us back to Him.

Each Catholic school has its own style and emphases, yet each has to unite its particulars to the whole - the catholic - vision of God as Creator, Jesus Christ as Redeemer, and human beings who, made in God's image, are on pilgrimage to Heaven.

A Catholic school achieves "excellence" to the degree that its particulars - curriculum, sports, activities, programming, and religious formation - contribute to bringing students to God. And the particulars cannot be viewed apart from the whole.

If an academic curriculum helps students grow in wisdom, virtue, and faith, it is excellent; if it is a disjointed series of courses that do not foster growth in both reason and faith, it is not excellent, regardless of how many students matriculate at Ivy League universities or work for Fortune 500 companies.

If a sports program teaches sportsmanship and helps athletes grow in their talents with an awareness that their abilities are gifts from God, it is excellent. If it cares only about winning without an eye to the greater good, it falls short, regardless of how many trophies it accumulates.

If a band program makes terrific music conscious that, as an expression of human creativity, its power points to the infinite creative powers of God, it is excellent. If it requires practice every Sunday morning before performing in that afternoon's football game, it contradicts everything that a Catholic school stands for, regardless of how much admiration its music draws.

Given how difficult it is to...

by Fr. Paul D. Scalia.

The Acts of the Apostles recounts Saint Paul's conversion three different times. Some details vary, but one is constant. When Saul of Tarsus, lying on the ground outside Damascus, looks into the blinding light and asks who it is, the response is the same in each telling: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Saul was forever changed by that revelation.

I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Our Lord makes no distinction between himself and his Church. Paul discovered that Christ and His Church are so profoundly one that to persecute the Church is to persecute Christ. He had struck at Christ's Church and found that he was striking Christ himself. Years later he wrote to the Corinthians, "Now you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it." (1 Corinthians 12:27) The doctrine of the Body of Christ was one Paul learned directly and painfully.

This doctrine is the fundamental and most ancient way to understand the Church. As in Saint Paul's day, so also now, the doctrine of the Body of Christ keeps us from various errors about the Church. The first of which is how exactly the Church is related to Christ. Most people don't see an intrinsic relation between Christ and the Church. Christ is one thing, the Church another. At best, the Church is merely the community that gathered to continue His memory. At worst, it's a bunch of Pharisees who coopted Jesus' message of [insert your agenda here]. The doctrine of the Body of Christ teaches differently.

It's more than a metaphor to speak of Christ as head and the Church as his Body. It's not "as if" Christ is the head or that the Church is "like" Christ's Body. Nor is their connection the legal union of a contract or the moral union of a shared purpose. Christ and the Church have an organic oneness, as between a head and body or a vine and its branches. The Church is the extension of Christ himself throughout the world and throughout history.

One effect of this doctrine is to deliver us from the anti-hierarchy heresy of our culture. Since this Church organism is both Head and Body, there is an actual hierarchy as there is in the union between your head and body. The head governs. But Christ the head doesn't rule over the Church tyrannically. He governs the Church the way your head rules your body, as one organism. This is an organic hierarchy, not one imposed.

Christ entrusted his headship first to Peter and the Apostles and now exercises it through their successors, the pope and bishops. They must exercise this headship - no one else can. Of course, there are advisors and consultors and all the rest. But at the end of the day, the Church is not governed by committee or council or synod but by the Shepherds who watch over it in place of the Apostles.

This doctrine is also a healthy corrective to our culture's fascination with equality. The burden of Paul's words to the Corinthians is that no member of the body is less a member than the others. There's a fundamental equality because every member of the Body was "in one Spirit. . .baptized into one body."

Our egalitarian age loves to emphasize this equality but omits an important aspect of it. Namely, that the equality of the members means also an equal obligation to holiness. Nobody is off the hook. Equality in the Church is a truth that shouldn't be used to tear down the hierarchy, but to remind all the baptized of their obligation to strive for sanctity.

To the fractious Corinthians Saint Paul emphasizes the oneness of the Body of Christ. "As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ." This oneness is based on the supernatural not the natural. It doesn't come from common descent, mutual social interests, or a shared political purpose. It's not something willed by us or imposed by external forces. It comes from being incorporated into one Body by one Baptism in one Spirit.

This oneness means that each member has responsibilities to the wh...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza.

In the work of evangelization is it sufficient to preach Christ crucified? Or do we need to offer something more than Jesus? Does successful evangelization require Jesus plus something more immediate, practical, useful?

Jesus Himself alluded to such questions when he told the crowds eagerly following Him: "Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." (John 6:26)

Does evangelization require some loaves too?

Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, died recently. He died while the relics of St. Francis Xavier were exposed, as they are every ten years, in Goa, and as the tenth anniversary of the canonization of St. Joseph Vaz, the first native-born Goan saint, approached.

His passing brought to mind a conversation I had with him in January 2015. I was on my way to Sri Lanka for the visit of Pope Francis. He would canonize Vaz in Colombo, just as he would canonize Junipero Serra in Washington later that year, as part of his program of canonizing the great missionary saints (he had canonized St. François de Laval of Quebec in 2014).

At a clergy conference in Rome that January, Amato spoke about Joseph Vaz (1651-1711), the Edmund Campion of Sri Lanka, conducting a clandestine ministry after the Dutch suppressed Catholic practice.

"Today, Joseph Vaz is a more important model than Francis Xavier," Amato said. Those were fighting words for us Goans, who honor Francis Xavier and consider him the greatest missionary after St. Paul. So, I asked Cardinal Amato why he would say such a thing.

"Francis Xavier evangelized with the support of state power," Amato replied. "Today, we don't have state power to support us; sometimes it is against us. Joseph Vaz evangelized against state power. Francis Xavier did not have to do that."

Francis Xavier arrived in Goa and traveled beyond, courtesy of the Portuguese crown, just as Junipero Serra relied on the Spanish crown and as François de Laval relied on the French crown. Crown support was not without difficulties - Laval fought with the French colonial authorities to keep the alcohol trade away from the indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, even when the missionaries were at odds with the crown, their very presence depended in large part upon them.

On his feast day, we read in the breviary the inspiring letter Francis Xavier wrote to St. Ignatius Loyola:

Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians. Again and again I have thought of going round the universities of Europe, especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity: "What a tragedy: how many souls are being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!"

That stirs up the zeal, which is all to the good. But we don't read the letters of Francis Xavier to the Portuguese king, demanding more resources for the mission, or his accounts of how the local Portuguese governors have been most helpful, not only with material resources but also in favorable treatment for Christians. Francis Xavier was able to offer Jesus - and something more.

That seems to be a common pattern. Without the miracles, would Jesus have attracted quite so many? No, although it remains always true that some will follow Jesus for His sake alone. Even for those who follow Him for material blessings - the "hundredfold" (Mark 10:30) of houses, family, lands - Jesus does not hide that these will come "with persecutions" for His followers.

Yet when the Cross comes, nearly all flee. At Pentecost a great number are added. Is it because Peter preaches Jesus Christ, or because of the wonder and awe of each hearing the Good News in his own language?

It's usually both. Loaves and languages get attention, create attraction, after which the possibility of sincere conversion comes. It can be that atte...

By John M. Grondelski.

As the Pro-Life March takes place in Washington D.C. today, it's good to remember that January 22, 2025 was the 52ndanniversary of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision imposing abortion-on-demand through birth on all the states. Roe was the 20th century's equivalent of the Dred Scott decision. In 1857, the Supreme Court said Dred Scott - a black man taken by his owner to Illinois - could not be free because he was not a "person" and was thus subject to whatever choice his master made. In 1973, the Supreme Court said unborn children were not "persons" and thus subject to whatever choice their mothers made.

Both judicial abominations have now found their way into the ashcan of history: Roe by reversal in Dobbs, Dred Scott through enactment of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The 14th Amendment put to rest the question of whether slaves were persons and citizens by stipulating that being born in the United States made you a citizen - and entitled to be protected against deprivation of life without due process of law.

That provision is the center of controversy today because President Donald Trump has signed an executive order challenging its scope. Those who play fast and loose with the law claim the Amendment is clear: be born in America and you're a citizen. Well, the Amendment actually says being born in the United States "and subject to [its] jurisdiction." What that means is where the debate now lies.

I, however, want to address a neglected side of the "born-in-America-gives-you-rights" question, one the heralds of human rights in the ACLU and the Democratic Party studiously avoid. Being born alive should give you rights.

Does it?

Former Democratic Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam (a medical doctor), let the cat out of the bag in an infamous 2019 radio interview in which he defended post-natal infanticide. Responding to the outcry over a Virginia Democrat's bill that would have legalized third trimester (i.e., months 6-9 of pregnancy) abortion, he had to answer what happens if the baby happens to be born alive:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

The 14th Amendment does not say the right to live of a person born in the United States is subject to a "discussion. . .between the physicians and the mother." It says there is an obligation to protect that person's life.

Abortionists say one thing and do another. They have always opposed any restrictions on abortion, even in the third trimester, using bogus claims of "health" (undefined and including psychological discomfort) to justify such abortions. Of course, they claim such abortions are "rare," but they rarely use that adjective now since Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" criteria for abortion have been retired. That, too, was never true.

Late-term abortions always "risk" a live birth. The question is what to do with that child because the 14thAmendment is pretty clear. But every effort in Congress (and there have been more than six dozen) to enact a "Born Alive Protection" Act (requiring that child be kept alive and that a second physician to care for a potentially born alive child be present at a late-term abortion) were always killed by Democrat opposition.

Just Monday, as Virginia Senate Democrats rammed through a state Constitutional amendment to legalize abortion-on-demand-through-pregnancy in the Commonwealth, they defeated (21-19, on a straight party vote) an additional amendment that would have explicitly required protection of such born-alive babies. They allowed no responsibility to protect a baby born alive in Virginia as a result of an abortion.

This is not abortion. This is infanticide and a deliberate blurring of the 14th Amendment's "born in the United States" line.

It'...

How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? Those are the questions a lot of people seem to be asking these days. Underlying those questions is the premise that things have, in fact, gone wrong. This week's inauguration underscored just how widespread this sentiment is. Whether one sees the incoming administration as evidence of just how wrong things have gone or as the remedy to so much that has gone wrong, the most solid consensus in American life these days is that somehow things should not be the way they are. Things could have been better. They ought to have been better.

These are also questions for which there is no shortage of purported answers. Any number of books have been written in recent years which trace the river of our present troubles back to their sources, locating the historical headwaters in some person or idea or movement: the epistemology of John Locke or the method of Francis Bacon or the nominalism of William of Ockham or wherever.

One reason for the popularity of the genre is that a lot of people have a sense that things haven't turned out the way we hoped or expected they would turn out. Of course, it helps to understand where we went wrong so that we can correct those errors and try to avoid repeating them in the future. If we're being honest, another reason for the popularity of the genre is that we find it immensely satisfying to have someone to blame for our problems.

Not that there's anything wrong with laying blame where it belongs. Some people are most certainly blameworthy. Some ideas are corrupt and corrupting and should be named as such. Ideas have consequences, as one of the titans of the genre famously put it.

Timothy S. Goeglein has written a book - Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream - in which he points to the 1960s as the decade in which America really began to stumble. Goeglein traces these various stumbles - stumbles in morality, education, family, entertainment, public policy, and so on - in the hope of answering the question, "How did we end up in such a mess?"

The radical activists, Goeglein writes, "took a wrecking ball to society and America has never been the same. All one has to do is look at our current culture to see the damage the 1960s utopians created." That, Goeglein insists, is what happened to America: "The latest attempt to create utopia has failed . . ."

Goeglein's thesis is not new, but he does provide a concise, if somewhat cherry-picked, account of how various strains of progressive thought ultimately produced the social, political, and cultural upheaval that made the 1960s such a watershed.

Some of the thinkers whose ideas Goeglein rightly takes to task were around long before the decade in question. Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey, for example, were both born in the 1850s. In this regard, the book is less a critique of the utopian 1960s than of the progressive ideas that laid the groundwork for the revolutions of the 1960s and the lasting consequences of those revolutions for American life.

I make that point not to quibble about dates or timelines but because, as Goeglein himself acknowledges, the roots of "the Sixties" reach back well into the 19th century and even earlier.

For the most part, Goeglein chooses the targets of his various criticisms well. Margaret Sanger, Saul Alinsky, and Alfred Kinsey (among many others) take their deserved lumps. The unintended consequences of Johnson's Great Society, the collapse of the Mainline Protestant churches, and the advent of no-fault divorce (under Ronald Reagan in California), and Roe v. Wade all joined the cascade of horribles that flowed into, or poured out of, "the 1960s."

But here we come to the biggest weakness of Goeglein's work - and similar accounts. Goeglein's story sometimes reads as if America were strolling through history - innocent and bright-eyed - when the 1960s came along and mugged her. But the 1960s were not something tha...

A high-ranking prelate of the American Church says that we need to listen to the stories of people who, as I will put it and he will not, have centered their lives upon sodomy. This we need to do, he says, before we pass judgment upon them.

Of course, as anyone familiar with moral theology or philosophy could tell him, we must draw a distinction between persons and actions. God alone sees into the heart. We judge deeds and categories of deeds; the eternal disposition of the person is another matter.

As for the heart, who among us will say confidently that he knows his own? The heart of man is evil from his youth. I do not say so. God says so, in Genesis. Sinful man is more often sentimental than severe, comfortable in condoning the sins that other people commit, so long as they will condone his in turn.

But as for stories, we all have them in store, we sinners do. Nor does the prelate explain why we should honor the stories that sodomites tell, but not the stories of adulterers, pornographers, voyeurs, seducers, bigamists, rapists, pederasts, and good old ordinary fornicators after the immemorial way of nature, these whether they believe they are in love, or they are just a college boy and girl seeking a night's solace from loneliness, to wake up lonelier than ever.

Don't they have stories? And why should we limit ourselves to one subgroup of one subgroup of sinners? What about liars, robbers, blasphemers, traitors, embezzlers, slanderers, bunko artists, arsonists, brawlers, wastrels, detractors, gluttons, hypocrites, grafters, loan sharks, murderers in a fit of passion, warmongers, abortionists, and assassins? I'm sure they have stories.

Why should I credit the story the sodomite tells about himself, any more or any less than I credit the adulterer, the pornographer, the voyeur, the seducer, the bigamist, the rapist, the pederast, or the unmarried man and woman down the street, who may have snuffed one child in the womb, and brought another into the world outside of the haven of marriage which they could easily have provided him, as they owed him by rights?

Why should I bow down in honor to somebody telling me about how his sin isn't a sin at all? If I am honest with myself, I know how magnificently creative I can be when I must come up with justifications for the wrong I have done.

And mostly these justifications come dressed up as stories. The story ushers you into a world before you can get your bearings, and you can easily participate in your own manipulation, whether you are weaving the story as gauze around yourself to hide the truth from your own eyes, or someone else is weaving the story to involve you in it.

At the heart of every sin, after all, is the lie. It sits like a seed of poison. It does its work regardless of what anybody thinks about it, and if you tend it and water it with your sentimental tears, it can grow into quite a lush and flourishing tree.

Let us think about it. The man who murders his wife and her lover tells himself the lie, that they deserved it, and that he was caught up in a rage - when actually a part of him was pleased to discover them, so he could indulge his revenge.

The embezzler says that what belonged to someone else really belonged to him, because he was not paid enough, or because he needed the money more and nobody would miss it anyway.

Benedict Arnold no doubt enjoyed many a pipe with the gentlemen in London, telling everyone that it was Congress's fault, it was Washington's fault, or that upstart Greene, or that madman Wayne, and so on up and down a veritable Hudson River of everyone else from generals down to drummer boys. America was not really his country, after all.

The blasphemer says there is no God. He is lying. The fornicator says with his body, "I give myself wholly to you, and to the child we may beget." He is lying. The bunko artist says that fools are made to be fooled. He is lying. The warmonger says he is defending his country. He is lying. The sodomite says that ...

By Randall Smith.

I heard a story recently from a Catholic father who invited his atheist friend to dinner with his family. Before dinner, the family always says a prayer. After dinner, the man's atheist friend complained that they had prayed while he was there.

I had to laugh because I begin my classes with a prayer, and what I tell my non-Christian students is that I assume they will act the way they would act if they were invited to a friend's home for dinner who was Jewish or Muslim. I assume they would bow their heads respectfully until their friend and his family had finished their prayer, and then they would go about the business of having dinner and a pleasant conversation. (I sometimes add the advice my mother would have given: "And eat what's put in front of you!")

I imagine that this atheist likely thought of himself as very "liberal" and "open-minded" as opposed to the Catholic family who were "close-minded" and "oppressive." And yet, they didn't insist that he pray, but he insisted that they not pray. So who was close-minded and oppressive?

I wonder how this man would have responded if someone asked him, "If you were at the house of a Jewish or Muslim or Hindu family, would you insist that they not pray in front of you?" I can't be sure, but I suspect the answer might be: "No, of course not! This is the United States. We don't discriminate against religious minorities."

Are Catholics not a "religious minority"? I think if you look up the statistics, you'll find they are - and have been for a long time with a long history of being discriminated against everywhere in the English-speaking world. So, perhaps we should put companies on notice: If you don't hire the same percentage of dedicated Catholics to match the percentage of Catholics in the United States (something like 23 percent), then we will sue you for discrimination.

Okay, so that's not going to happen. I'm not sure why, but it's not. So the question to ask is: "Is there just something about Catholics and other serious Christians that makes them odious to so many?" I was once interviewed by a television news reporter the day after a shooting at a Christian church by some crazy guy. I suspected she would ask me whether Christians were being targeted, and I was ready to say, "Look, it's early. We don't know his motivations. Let's wait and see."

But her first question was: "Is there something about Christians that brings about this sort of violence?" Huh? This seemed to me like asking: "Is there something about women that brings about rape?" But I couldn't say that. I've survived three hurricanes in Houston unscathed, but nothing would have saved me from the angry winds that would have blown if they had put that on the news. The other comment that came into my head was, "Are you out of your dammed mind?" But that didn't seem entirely diplomatic either.

The post-modern French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously asserted that our "post-modern condition" is characterized by "incredulity towards metanarratives." People are dubious about "big stories," he said, like the "myth of progress." Not only do I think Lyotard was wrong about that, I think it would be more accurate to say that our "post-modern condition" is characterized by modern people's complete domination by metanarratives.

Everyone has a little story they tell themselves about history and culture that justifies their behavior. The history of the world is the history of an abusive patriarchy. Or the history of the world is the history of class struggle. The history of the United States is the history of white supremacy. Progress in history depends upon science and technology replacing Christian faith.

If you believe history is the story of progress, but only when the good guys overcome the bad guys, then clearly, if you want to help bring "progress," you need to crush the bad guys who keep getting in its way. For those who assumed that Christianity was going to be supplanted by Enlightenment re...

By Robert Royal.

This is a red-letter day for the United States of America. We come to the end of a deeply divided, often bad-tempered - someone might even say venomous - national contest. The Constitutional order held, the vote was clear, and today there will be yet another peaceful transfer of power between two parties, despite little love for one another.

"Democracy," in short, did not die.

Anyone who believes that our Constitution is an outdated eighteenth-century document inadequate for dealing with modern conditions - as a recent former president has suggested - might be asked: What, in such contentious circumstances, might have worked better?

At the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, our bishops debated the pros and cons of America's Constitutional order. But Archbishop James Gibbons, speaking on behalf of his fellow bishops, concluded: "We consider the establishment of our country's independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws, as a work of special Providence, its framers 'building better than they knew,' the Almighty's hand guiding them."

A just judgment, except that the framers - including Charles Carroll, the Maryland Catholic who signed the Constitution - knew quite a lot about how states had succeeded and failed in the past. They did their best in terms of institutional structure, designing a democratic republic, to avoid such disasters on these shores. For the rest, as Franklin famously remarked, it would depend on the people to keep it.

The very people who think they could build better than the founders are the last ones we should consult about our circumstances. Things like enumerated powers, the electoral college, and much else were put in place precisely to limit government, and thereby to protect freedom from the kind of majoritarianism and power grabs and ultra vires behavior we've seen lately among our politicians, courts, and federal agencies.

The new administration is aiming at making America great, good, prosperous, and efficient. It's attracted some excellent people. Godspeed in all that. And let's hope it can at least return the Federal government to basic competence.

But let's also hope - on sound Constitutional and Catholic grounds - that we are about to move towards much smaller, much more modest government.

And for even more urgent reasons, to a reduced and realistic vision of politics itself and its place in human life instead of the pseudo politics-as-religion of many people in recent years.

The State typically can only provide a few things well: defense from outside threats, a just and peaceful order within, and a sound economic system. It's not only a political error but a deeply anti-human, idolatrous one when a governing class or a people comes to think that the State should provide for virtually all human ills.

We were almost there in America. And it's understandable that the incoming administration is enthusiastic and eager to lead on some glaring problems that the Federal government itself has created. It's also imperative that it not feed into those very false expectations of omnicompetence that have led to the explosion of the federal government. (Those of us who live in the Washington area see it every day even in the tangle of traffic on streets never meant to handle so many people.)

When I myself first arrived in Washington as a callow youth during the Reagan administration, there was a lot of talk at the bishops' conference and among liberal Catholics warning against the minimalist "nightwatchman state," which Reagan was allegedly seeking to create. As we know in light of history, he did recenter the federal system for a while, but only succeeded in slowing its growth by a few percent. That's a sobering perspective well worth keeping in mind.

The challenge for the Trump administration is that our situation is much more perilous:

It can solve the border crisis fairly easily, though it will be painful and there will be much weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

The cri...

By Dominic V. Cassella.

I traveled to England this summer to speak at the Oxford Patristics Conference. While I was there, I had time to make two long-desired pilgrimages.

The first pilgrimage came in a rush, immediately after the plane landed at Heathrow Airport. My flight had been delayed two hours, and I narrowly made my appointment at the Tower of London, where I had scheduled months in advance a private viewing of the prison cell that once held St. Thomas More.

I lugged my way, baggage and all, through the Tower and was able to spend some time in prayer in the very cell where Thomas More prepared for his trial and eventual martyrdom.

In the prison cell, there hangs the classic portrait of More by Hans Holbein the Younger. Above it, a plaque said "Sir Thomas More at the Tower of London," with, as subtext, a variation of More's famous words, turned into a title: "The King's good servant, but God's first."

However, the famous phrase - "I die his majesty's good servant, but God's first" - is not what St. Thomas More said. Those are Robert Bolt's words, which he placed into the mouth of More in his play A Man for All Seasons. The play is excellent and communicates More's basic character, but Bolt's preoccupation with individual liberty and conscience led him to skew the words of the saint.

But the reel St. Thomas More said, "I die the King's good servant and God's first." That simple "and" makes a world of difference.

"But" suggests a conflict; it implies tension between serving the king and serving God.

"And" suggests a harmony between being the king's and God's good servant. "And" implies that More viewed his duties to the king as a part of his duties to God, placing them in a relationship of complementarity rather than conflict.

"And" also reflects the Catholic understanding of an ordered hierarchy. It underscores the Catholic belief in a natural order where loyalty to earthly rulers does not inherently conflict with loyalty to divine law.

In fact, if Thomas More had acted in a way contrary to the true and genuine interests of the king, he would have been neither the king's nor God's good servant. Instead, by serving God above all things, and by keeping divine ends at the forefront of one's mind, one cannot help but be the good servant of both God and king - or of a prime minister, or a president, or your neighbor.

My second pilgrimage was to Littlemore, Oxford, where John Henry Newman wrote his Development of Doctrine and converted to Catholicism on October 9, 1845. While Newman is well known for his theology of development, he is also a teacher on conscience.

Bolt makes More's conscience a virtual existentialist self-assertion ("What matters to me is not whether it is true or not but that I believe it to be true, or rather not that I believe it, but that I believe it"). The Catholic tradition, with Newman, sees conscience as "the aboriginal vicar of Christ." And that, again, makes all the difference.

For Newman, conscience is not merely a personal sense of right and wrong. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman emphasizes the primacy of conscience, arguing that it must be formed and informed by divine law rather than by subjective preference. Newman's view resists the modern tendency to elevate conscience as an autonomous authority divorced from objective truth.

For him, conscience is not an independent voice but one that speaks in accord with God's truth. It is an organ of discernment that must be tuned to the eternal moral law, not to fleeting societal trends or personal whims.

Following Thomas More, John Henry Newman might have said, "I follow the voice of my conscience, and God's first." We know that the voice of God echoes throughout his Creation and through revelation. As his creatures, we are inclined by nature (that is, by the Image of God in which we are created) to do what is clearly revealed in the Law.

As St. Paul says in Romans 2:14, "When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requi...