The Catholic Thing

By Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky

At times it's enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to question whether we need priests, bishops, and popes – or even the Church. (Protestants have, for 500 years.) Why not dismiss them all as complicating factors and enjoy the bliss of sola Scriptura? Well, a few nagging details are noticeable.

The Gospels recount Jesus' words and glorious deeds. After the miraculous multiplication of loaves, the Apostles sail across the sea and encounter Jesus walking on water. Jesus elicits Peter's momentary faith but saves him from sinking into the waters in a moment of doubt. Ashore, the crowds seek Jesus as their "Bread King," but he reveals an astounding truth: Jesus is the Bread of Life, and unless we eat His body and drink His blood, we have no life within us.

Except for the Apostles, the disciples scatter in disbelief. The Apostles don't thumb through their Bibles (which they didn't have back then anyway). Peter asks, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life."

The Gospel narrative reaches its decisive moment (Matthew 16:13-20). Jesus asks His disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" They respond, Elijah, John the Baptist, or one of the prophets. But Peter, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, witnesses to the messianic divinity of Jesus: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God!"

Jesus responds with words that Bible-alone Christians may find difficult to read: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail over it." It's a tall order. Peter? Church? Protected from the Devil's assaults?

From a Bible-alone perspective (what Luther codified as sola Scriptura), it's an inconvenient truth. Why was a Church necessary in the first place? And if it was necessary, couldn't He have done better with a qualified, highly educated man, sophisticated in the ways of the world, and relating well to the Jewish elites? Why did Jesus need to identify a mere mortal – and a fisherman at that – as his vicar? Yet after the Resurrection, at Pentecost, the Church emerges publicly under Peter's apostolic leadership.

We know much of the rest of the story. The Apostles went out to the world to preach the Gospel. Peter's ministry abruptly ended in Rome, where he was crucified. For a couple of hundred years, his successors suffered similar fates. Yet somehow, the gates of Hell didn't prevail over the infant Church. That Bible didn't float down from heaven. It was born into the Church, recognized within the Church, and authoritatively confirmed by her bishops and popes.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. We won. We have leather-covered Bibles. Some Protestant Bibles are missing important books. Thomas Jefferson took scissors, literally, to the pages of the book and produced a Bible without miracles, limited by Jeffersonian rationalism. Many modern Catholic Bible translations are scarred with political correctness. Despite a few flaws – with a Bible on one's lap – people often get in the way, unless they're bringing lunch or dinner.

Church history is distressing. Critics of the popes have always found reasons to complain. Some popes have seemed too silent; others have talked too much. Some have overextended their authority. Others have failed to use it correctly. The popes of the Middle Ages were often so worldly they hardly had time to rule the Church. It's no wonder the Protestant revolt gained such traction in the sixteenth century. Today, Churchmen opposing the modern machinery of death in its various forms are accused of ivory tower naiveté. Who needs a Church?

Yet, year after year, century after century, Church teaching somehow remains consistent while developing organically in depth and understanding. The simple faithful often identify departures from Ap...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

This summer I got a new favorite song – Bob Dylan's Chimes of Freedom. It's not a new song; it dates from the early 1960s. It remained entirely unknown to me until a few months back at Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen used it as the final song on his Land of Hope and Dreams tour. He used it, too, on his European tour last year. I am not the only one who often prefers cover versions to Dylan himself.

Is Bob Dylan's music a Catholic thing?

Many a homilist has quoted his 1979 song Gotta Serve Somebody, especially against the argument that unbelievers are freer because they don't have to serve God. Dylan knew better: "It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord/ But you're gonna have to serve somebody."

In May, for Dylan's 85th birthday – and his own 40th anniversary of priestly ordination – Bishop Robert Barron recorded a video singing You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.

In June, Pope Leo XIV saw Barron and praised him, citing Dylan in the foreword to an anthology on peace and disarmament. He quoted from 1963 lyrics that Dylan never recorded himself, Go Away You Bomb. That's some serious Dylanology. "As the singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan wrote, addressing the atomic bomb figuratively in one of his poems: 'I hate you because man created you, and man possesses and controls you,'" wrote Pope Leo.

Then there was Dylan with St. John Paul the Great in Bologna, at the 1997 Italian Eucharistic Congress, which had a World Youth Day vibe. Invited to sing in the presence of the pope and some 300,000 young people, Dylan sang Knockin' on Heaven's Door and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. After greeting the 77-year-old John Paul, he concluded with Forever Young.

John Paul was not a Dylanologist, but someone in the papal speechwriting shop thought that Dylan might have sung Blowing in the Wind.

"The answer to the questions of your life 'is blowing in the wind'. It is true!" John Paul said. "But not in the wind which blows everything away in empty whirls, but the wind which is the breath and voice of the Spirit. . . .How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? I answer you: one! There is only one road for man and it is Christ."

Chimes of Freedom is about taking shelter from an evening thunderstorm, watching it unfold from a doorway, likely of a church. In the darkness of the sky, the blowing rain, the ripping hail, the noisy thunder, and the flashing lightning, Dylan writes "the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder/ That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze."

The storm represents all those beaten down by life, the lightning "flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight/ flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight/ an' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night."

The "bells of the lightning" are "tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake/ tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an' forsaked/ tolling for the outcast, burnin' constantly at stake."

The storm rages for those the world forgets. Dylan echoes Luke 14:21, where the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind are welcomed to the master's feast.

The "bells of lightning and its thunder" are "striking for the gentle, striking for the kind/ striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind/. . .tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts/ tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute/ tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute/ for the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit."

Then the lightning flashes, the "chimes of freedom" – a light shining in the darkness. Dylan invites us to gaze, in the storm, "upon the chimes of freedom flashing."

Springsteen called it "one of the greatest songs about human freedom ever written." That's rather extravagant, but it is a great song, and expresses a deep human truth that we were created for freedom. Long before Dylan, Pope Leo XIII called "liberty the highest of natural ...

By Msgr. Charles Fink

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something such that it has the remarkable capacity to evolve into the complex yet orderly universe we behold, so orderly that predictability and science are possible? Why do even the simplest living cells contain genetic information analogous to complex computer codes?

These are not meaningless questions. Nor is it obvious why the only intelligent answer to such questions is simply a roll of the dice. Or that's just the way things are. In all areas of human endeavor, we look for reasons and causes to account for the way things are. It's hard to see why the hypothesis underlying all these extraordinary realities makes simpletons of those who propose it.

Bumper sticker philosophy like "Atheism is a myth understood" or "Religion stops a thinking brain" or references to "flying spaghetti monsters" may be entertaining, but, surely, they don't qualify as loftily intellectual.

English philosopher Anthony Flew, after a lifetime of scholarship and atheism, came to see the existence of God as a cogent explanation for the seemingly miraculous fine-tuning of the universe in its apparent origin.

Alex O'Connor, a contemporary online podcaster, invariably thoughtful and gracious, though still an unbeliever, concedes that Thomas Aquinas' demonstrations for the existence of God and the evidence for Christ's Resurrection are much more compelling than he previously thought, certainly not dismissible as the musings of fools.

I often wonder how rabid atheists, so dismissive of belief in God and inclined to conflate belief with stupidity or superficiality, explain people like the late Father Stanley Jaki, who had doctorates in theology and physics and spoke seven languages. Believing geniuses like Jaki may not be legion, but they're by no means unheard of and suggest that lack of intelligence can hardly be accepted as a legitimate explanation of religious belief.

Nor can the view that faith in God is simply a crutch for weaklings and those otherwise incapable of dealing with the rigors of life; you know, people like Saints John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Kolkata – the one who helped bring down the Soviet empire, the other living among the poorest of the poor in the slums of India. Pathetic weaklings both, we're supposed to think, no match for the brave, bright, muscular atheists teaching in our universities or working in the media or Hollywood.

Of course, it's true that many believers are simple souls lacking advanced degrees and that many, too, need their religious faith to get through another day. There's a moving scene in the film "Steel Magnolias" where the Daryl Hannah character says just that to Sally Field, who's devastated by the death of her daughter. Their exchange doesn't minimize the tragedy of that death. But to cope with life, Field needs to believe that God is in charge and that after death, there's something beyond.

I've been a Catholic priest for fifty years and have dealt with some unbelievably heartbreaking tragedies, including the triple funeral of a woman and her two nieces, killed in a car accident that wasn't their fault. The mother of the two girls had recently divorced. The girls were her only children. I still have the pyx, the small metal container used to bring Communion to the sick, given to me by that mother, engraved with the names of her daughters whom she described as God's angels.

Let's concede that this woman's faith at that point was in good measure a crutch. I presided at her funeral years later, and I know she was never the same after the devastating loss of her beautiful teenage girls. Nevertheless, she endured until her death with faith, hope, and love. Would she have been better off without all that? I've known hundreds, maybe thousands like her, facing unspeakable sorrows, some their heads just above water, others amazingly buoyant in spite of tragedy, and all largely because of their faith.

So here's a question for all who ...

By Michael Pakaluk

Search the Catechism, the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, indeed the entire Vatican website – search all you want – for teaching about what we call the "national debt." You will not find it. You can find teaching about the debt that poorer nations owe to wealthier nations, "foreign debt," but not about the debt that a government accumulates through financing deficits.

Some background: Each year the U.S. federal government spends roughly $2 trillion more than it takes in and issues bonds to finance this deficit. Each year's deficit, when not repaid, gets added to the "national debt." Last week this accumulated debt made headlines for topping $40 trillion. In four years or so, it will be $50 trillion. Current debt represents about seven times the government's annual revenue. The proportion is as if a husband and wife who together earned $50,000 per year had credit card debts of $350,000.

Imagine a couple like that who hardly ever paid attention to their massive debt. When they did, they couldn't agree on a plan to keep the debt from growing, because they were constantly fighting and had their own pet projects. That's our government.

People say, "But the government is not a household; it can increase revenue at will by taxation, or print money." Political society, however, is a household. Our nation is a household. The government is not. It is, rather, leadership over a household, possessing sovereign authority.

Sovereign authority, by the natural law, comes from God. It is a creature's participation in God's authority. Therefore, as it is the authority of a creature, the last thing it can be is unlimited; and since it's a participation in God's authority, the last thing it can be is arbitrary. The government is not a Leviathan. The government cannot make something out of nothing. It must exercise responsible stewardship over the household. The analogy does stand.

How great a Leviathan can it be, anyway, if each year it needs to go out to the markets and induce other countries (Japan, UK, China) and investors to lend it tens of trillions of dollars? With our constant quarreling and no debt stabilization plan, you'd think that eventually these lenders would require a higher return.

This could throw us into a vicious cycle, as the servicing of our debt costs more and more, leading to depressed economic activity. A legendary hedge fund investor, Stanley Druckenmiller, argued in the Wall Street Journal this week that that is exactly what we are seeing now ("Let the Bond Market Speak"). He calls it "generational theft" (i.e., future generations will pay). The usually sober Eurointelligence was blunter: "We believe it will end in default of some sort. . . .It squarely falls into the category of things that end one way or the other because they are not sustainable."

The Church thinks in centuries. It's not as though irresponsible governments running up debts they cannot repay are unseen in the history of the world. Often, these debts were assumed so that kings could wage wars of vanity and conquest. Typically, the debts were subsequently made irrelevant through the debasement of the currency, which becomes a form of theft.

As Samuel Gregg has pointed out ("Debt, Finance, and Catholics"), many early-modern Catholic theorists spoke sharply against such governments. Bishops, too, were savvy about the matter, from the need then for theologians to be adept at the casuistry of usury.

What explains the Church's silence today? Part of the reason is that our bishops and popes generally lack real-world experience in commerce and the necessary theoretical background in economics. Two exceptions were Leo XIII, who could rely on his friend, a real genius and an expert in both theology and economics, Fr. Matteo Liberatore, S.J., and Pope John Paul II, who saw first-hand the economic illogic of socialism. And who prudently relied on his own friend, and genius too, Michael Novak.

Otherwise, we have the spectacle of a Chur...

By Francis X. Maier

One of my favorite, if cynical, figures from Reformation history and Europe's Wars of Religion is Henri de Bourbon. Raised as a committed (Calvinist) Huguenot, he succeeded to the French throne as Henri IV. But in a dominantly Catholic nation, he faced fierce resistance. So he did the pragmatic thing. He converted. His motives may have been dubious. But a line attributed to him – it's not clear that he ever actually said it – echoes down through the centuries: Paris vaut bien une Messe; "Paris is well worth a Mass." Simply put, he did what he needed to do to get what he wanted.

I mention this to illustrate a very different, and much more personal, story.

Cannabis and similar unauthorized goodies arrived on the University of Notre Dame campus (at least in Dillon Hall, my sophomore year dorm) sometime in late 1967. Which is why the next two years are a bit fuzzy in my memory. But as a senior, I met my lovely, very Catholic bride of the past 56 years.

She sweetly but quite emphatically briefed me on her non-negotiables for a mutually agreeable future, including what and who needed to change. I wasn't an idiot. For me it was an easy choice and, given the woman involved, a sincere one – well worth a different kind of life, one that I can write about gratefully here instead of drying out somewhere in a drug rehab program.

For some of my buddies from that time, though, the story is a lot darker. They made a different choice. My closest friend – one of the few truly genius-level persons I've known in my life – ended up an addict with a destroyed intellectual career.

It started with cannabis. All of which is background for what follows.

My wife and I (and our kids when they came along) have returned to ND and the Lake Michigan area every year for half a century. In summer, this sliver of the Midwest is pure magic. For us and so many others, it's thick with memories. It is a rustic escape for nearby Chicago ex-pats and vacationers. The air is clean, the cornfields seem infinite, the lake is an inland ocean, an immense, majestic sea stretching to the horizon ("no salt, no sharks" – a local slogan), and US Route 12 still connects two of our favorite beach communities that lie just a few miles apart: Long Beach, IN, and New Buffalo, MI.

Once upon a time, that 60 mph, undivided, four-lane road rolled past a restaurant, a car repair shop, some open fields, an American Legion post, and a couple of lazy motels. Today these fossils share the highway with a gleaming new breed of buildings.

The three or so miles between the Indiana/Michigan state line and New Buffalo's city limits are now the region's high-speed Stoner Alley, offering 20 different high-end cannabis outlets – from "BLOW" to the aptly named "Information Entropy" – in the niche form of capitalism previously known as dope peddling.

Some have lounges for on-site consumption and socializing. Most are busy seven days a week. Many offer the first half ounce of cannabis free for a first-time customer. New Buffalo, once a rundown poverty hole and now an upscale holiday spot, has nine more such dispensaries within its municipal limits, earning it the affectionate nickname "Weed City, USA."

The highway along Stoner Alley does have one official, earnest road-sign reminder: Under Michigan law, seat belts are mandatory.

To underline the obvious, in Michigan, cannabis is fully legal, taxed, and commercialized. In Indiana, it's fully illegal, with any THC above trace hemp levels treated as a controlled substance under criminal law. First-offense possession is a Class B misdemeanor with up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. Penalties escalate from there.

Twenty-four states now treat cannabis as fully legal, with another sixteen allowing it for medical use. This is the gift that keeps on giving from my own self-centered, infinitely self-indulgent Boomer generation. As the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this week, "senior citizens are at a record high for getting high....

By Kristen Ziccarelli

There are few things more foreign to the modern imagination than the idea of a Christian king. We are accustomed to separating the sacred from the political, faith from public life, and the Church from the ordering of society. But for much of Christian history, these divisions would have seemed all but impossible.

Today's feast of King St. Louis IX of France (August 25) offers us an opportunity to recover a gem of medieval wisdom, which is the prospect that political authority can be truly ordered toward Christ. King St. Louis IX, who ruled France from 1226 to 1270, is regarded by many as the greatest medieval king and the only true saint-king of France. His reign is an enduring model of Christian kingship, so much so that the subsequent generations of French monarchs were all expected to emulate him.

In his reign, one finds a sophisticated and saintly understanding that his kingship belonged to Christ.

In his kingdom, there was no secular state lurking beneath religious trappings, waiting to be separated from them. The kingdom itself was ordered around the sacraments, and the faith's vision of man, justice, authority, family, worship, and the common good. The categories of "religious" versus "secular," so familiar to us, did not structure medieval society.

By contrast, King St. Louis IX governed by prioritizing the salvation of his subjects' souls. He governed for France, acquiring the Crown of Thorns, a large piece of the True Cross, and the Holy Lance – and commissioning the magnificent Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house these relics. The Crown of Thorns became the sacred treasure of the French monarchy itself, placed at the heart of the royal court: thus, his own crown existed beneath the crown of Christ.

What is the meaning of the social kingship of Christ? As Catholics, we understand Christ as Priest, Prophet, and King. His kingship extends over individuals, families, nations, and peoples. Pope Pius XI made this point forcefully in Quas Primas, his 1925 encyclical instituting the Feast of Christ the King. Christ possesses kingship not only in His divinity, but also as man, having received from the Father "power and glory and a kingdom."

Pope Pius XI explicitly connected the salvation of individuals with the ordering of society, arguing that Christ's kingship cannot be confined to the private sphere. At the conclusion of Quas Primas, he expressed the hope that the annual celebration of Christ the King would remind rulers and princes that they too owe public honor and obedience to Christ, and that the state should take account of God's commandments and Christian principles in making laws, administering justice, and educating the young.

This is not a call for the state to force its citizens to convert, or legislatively to mandate Catholicism. But a recognition of what we all know, which is that political communities cannot exist without moral foundations. Every society rests upon assumptions about what man is, what constitutes justice, what rights and duties belong to families, and what constitutes the common good.

Catholic Christianity has never regarded Christ's authority as something that ends at the church doors. Yet many people today are fine with relegating the faith to the private sphere.

In the life of King St. Louis IX, one can observe how seriously he took his primary responsibility of administering justice. And because justice cannot be separated from love, the Christian ruler was called not merely to administer a bureaucracy, but to cultivate a society ordered toward the good.

His holiness, too, was inseparable from his kingship.

Louis gave generously to the poor and personally served them. He would disguise himself as a beggar and leave the palace to serve the poor and to meet with his subjects. He was a devoted husband and father of ten who took seriously his responsibility to raise his children in the Faith.

His letter to his son Philip III states: "The first thing I advise is that yo...

By Brad Miner

The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn't invent, revise, or vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine can develop in the sense that St. John Henry Newman described it, growing in clarity and application, as an acorn becomes an oak tree. But it cannot be renegotiated – or reversed! – by majority sentiment or contemporary enthusiasm.

The claim of having received the Truth and of guarding it is the Church's entire reason for existing and makes it something other than a voluntary religious association. But synodality, no matter what its defenders suggest, introduces a mechanism capable of dissolving that claim: a standing, undefined, participatory process for generating endless, contemporary ecclesial consensuses that increasingly function as rival sources of authority alongside, and – from the standpoint of the innovators – ahead of the settled deposit of faith and, therefore, the Magisterium meant to guard it.

The vagueness we've seen so far in the synodal process has not been incidental. It's a feature, not a bug. After multiple synodal gatherings, the Church still has no fixed definition of synodality – only descriptions of a "style," a "process," an "instinct," and this inability to clearly define synodality is no minor omission.

It's reminiscent of the first Barack Obama campaign, which defined its agenda with one word: "Change." It meant nothing then; "Walking together" means nothing now. Where is our fixed point?

Aquinas and others, including the early Church Fathers, and several councils, have given the Church a fixed point and a shared technical vocabulary precise enough to allow the adjudication of all real disputes. Synodality has nothing equivalent. It runs on "individual discernment" and "the sense of the faithful" – categories that are functionally unfalsifiable: whatever the assembled body concludes gets read backward through the outrageous claim that each new proposal is what the Holy Spirit was saying all along! Finally, they tell us, we're listening!

But a process with no fixed criteria for correction isn't discernment; it's consensus-building with theological vocabulary attached, like the stickers my grandkids slap onto seemingly everything, including Grandpa's face.

History shows where this will lead us. The Church of England is the closest institutional analog we have, and it demonstrates exactly how the process plays out over time: synodal bodies incorporating clergy and laity into decision-making, provincial autonomy under a loose central authority, and a steady sequence of changes, each introduced as modest, "pastoral" accommodations – remarriage after divorce, women's ordination, blessings for same-sex unions, approval of artificial contraception, ambiguity on abortion – all over time transforming Anglicanism's doctrines and fracturing its unity.

Entire Anglican and Episcopal provinces now refuse to recognize each other's positions on same-sex "marriage" and the ordination of women. Sarah Mullally's installation as Archbishop of Canterbury has caused a schism within Anglicanism.

Yet it's the mechanism, not any single decision, that always was and remains the real and ongoing danger.

And that same mechanism is inherent in any Catholic version of synodality. Germany's Synodal Path pushes for a permanent Synodal Council that would hand the laity shared governing authority with bishops over doctrine and discipline. Rome has intervened directly to halt it, but several German bishops still openly resist the Vatican's warnings. Who knows what the outcome will be? But a "national" church attempting to institutionalize exactly the Anglican pattern within Catholic structures has been restrained so far only by direct ...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Soon-to-be-Blessed Fulton Sheen once quipped, "The questions of God are more satisfying than the answers of man." (That's a variation on his friend G.K. Chesterton's line, "The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.") Today's Gospel (Matthew 16:13-20) gives evidence of this truth. God doesn't ask questions because He needs the answers, but because we need to reflect on them and to find in them more spiritual fruit than human answers can provide.

Our Lord has taken His Apostles into the pagan territory of Caesarea Philippi. It's a calmer place because it's free of the scribes and Pharisees. He can speak openly without having to deal with their traps. This time of more explicit instruction centers around two questions to His Apostles: "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" and "Who do you say that I am?"

Who do people say that the Son of Man is? The response to this first question immediately reveals just how unsatisfying the answers of man can be: "Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." John, Elijah, and Jeremiah all resembled the Christ because they pointed to Him. The crowds confuse a similarity for our Lord Himself. This is just religious opinion.

Thus, the first question reveals our need for divine instruction. On our own, we seek and cast about for the true God, dimly perceiving Him, and in many ways coming close to the truth. But we inevitably latch on to false images or understandings of Him. The idols of pagans are an obvious example.

But we – who, like the crowds, have followed, watched, and listened to Jesus for some time – also can get it wrong. We have ideas and opinions about Him that stray, to some degree or another, from the truth about Him. All of which means, not that we do not believe, but that our understanding of Him needs constant purification and enlightenment. In short, we don't want to be like the crowds, straying into mere religious opinion.

Which brings us to the second question: But who do you say that I am? This question prompts profound doctrinal statements about Jesus and His Church. But rather than rushing into the doctrine itself, let's consider its purpose. Jesus doesn't ask the question as if it were a catechetical test or theological exam. It's a personal appeal of His Sacred Heart to His followers. He desires that His closest friends and coworkers know Who He is. Every human heart desires that, of course. How much more our Lord's Sacred Heart.

We cannot respond accurately on our own. Peter's answer – "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" – is not human but divine: "For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father." Unlike the crowds, because of his faith, Peter doesn't have a religious opinion about Jesus. He has the truth and his speaking of it brings joy to our Lord's Heart.

With Peter, we receive from the Father the ability to confess the true faith. Ours is not the answer of a man but the revelation of God, not our own discovery but the Father's gift. The Father alone gives us the true faith by which we console His Son's Sacred Heart.

This also teaches us something about the Church. Founded on Peter and his divinely inspired response, the Church proclaims not only human wisdom but most of all the saving doctrine revealed by the Father. The Church is present in the world not as an NGO or another participant in international discussions on integral human development. She is the authoritative voice of God. Yes, the Church is "an expert in humanity" (Paul VI). But only because she possesses the faith that "purifies reason" (John Paul II).

But back to the personal dimension of this exchange. Doctrine is given to us not simply so that we can be theologically right but, even more so, that we can pray rightly. Uncle Screwtape knows how prone we are to mistaken prayer. He fears that we might recognize the subjective nature of our thoughts and images of God, that...

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Pope Leo XIV is traveling to Rimini today for the annual cultural festival organized by Communion and Liberation (CL). Few use its formal name, the "Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples." It's simply "Rimini." It might be the only thing many know about the Italian coastal town, which draws major figures from the worlds of religion, the arts, and even Italian politics for its summer gathering. Some 80,000 participants attend, with three-quarters of a million more following online.

Communion and Liberation inaugurated the Rimini meeting in 1980, and already in 1982 St. John Paul the Great visited. Pope Leo will be the second pope to visit and what he says about culture, art, and beauty will be noted carefully. Just this week at his general audience, the Holy Father spoke of music and the worship of God.

This year's Rimini theme is taken from the final line of Dante's Paradiso: "The Love which moves the Sun and the other stars."

It's perfect for Rimini, where devout Catholics speak in a language that they hope will engage even nonbelievers. Thus the "love" of this year's theme is explained as "the dynamic principle of the cosmos, the energy that holds everything together and drives it toward fulfillment."

That sounds a bit like "The Force" in Star Wars, but that's the CL way. They are clearly intended to offer an opening to the Holy Father and his recent teachings on artificial intelligence.

"We live fragmented within digital bubbles that isolate rather than connect us," CL's introduction continues. "In a world where algorithms decide what we see and whom we meet, rediscovering love as a force that moves and transforms becomes a radical challenge. It means recognizing that reality is not static chaos, but carries within itself a direction, a dynamism that pushes us beyond ourselves."

That there is a dynamic that takes us beyond ourselves was articulated at Rimini in two memorable addresses that were not given by a pope, but a future one: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 1990 and 2002. How does that love dynamic manifest itself? In beauty and sanctity, which is what Ratzinger said the Church offers the world as her ultimate testimony.

Ratzinger was close to the CL movement and its founder, Msgr. Luigi Giussani, so much so that he preached at Giussani's funeral Mass just months before his own election as pope in 2005:

Father Giussani had grown up in a house – as he himself said – poor in bread, but rich in music. . . .And so, from the beginning he was touched, indeed wounded, by the desire for beauty; he was not satisfied with just any beauty, a banal beauty: he sought Beauty itself, infinite Beauty; thus he found Christ, in Christ the true beauty, the path of life, the true joy.

Ratzinger was thus applying to Giussanni a longstanding claim of his, articulated most famously at Rimini in 2002:

I have often already stated my conviction that the true apologia of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth, against any denial, is on the one hand the saints and on the other the beauty that faith has generated.

Earlier in the same address, Ratzinger recalled "an unforgettable experience for me was the Bach concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Munich after Karl Richter's untimely death."

"I was seated next to the Evangelical Bishop Hanselmann," he said. "When the last note triumphantly faded away, we spontaneously looked at each other, and just as spontaneously said, 'Whoever has listened to this knows that faith is true.'"

Ratzinger too grew up rich in music; he described his hometown as belonging to the "Mozart region of Bavaria."

In the truly magisterial lecture that he gave at Rimini in 1990, Ratzinger addressed the question of authentic reform in the Church. Some twenty-five years after Vatican II, he explored what true and false reform meant. What needed to change so that what doesn't change – the Gospels, the deposit of the faith, the tradition of holiness – can be discovered ...

By Joseph R. Wood

As I write, on the day celebrated by some Orthodox as the feast of the Transfiguration on the Julian calendar, I've had several experiences of beauty just this morning. The sunrise through the West Virginia trees, the sunlight streaming into an Orthodox monastery church and illuminating the rising incense smoke around the icons, the chant, the memory of the faces of those I love, on and on.

While I drove across the country this summer, I imagined, or at least hoped, that I was more aware of and attentive to the beauty surrounding me than I had been on similar voyages earlier in my life. This may have stemmed from my grandly calling the trip a "pilgrimage," and trying to travel accordingly.

The Transfiguration may be the most beautiful moment in recorded history. Peter, James, and John were mortal sinners chosen to witness the fullness of beauty: Christ as God alongside two great prophets. The pleasure that God the Father spoke of at that moment is the pleasure of the source of all beauty.

But for all that, beauty remains a mystery to me. I've always thought that I don't "do beauty" well.

It's a confusing subject. "There's no accounting for taste," we're told, suggesting that beauty "is in the eye of the beholder." These clichés surely carry some truth. But just dismissing beauty as an entirely subjective matter is inadequate to explain it, or to explain the need we feel to share it with others.

Some writers have identified "real beauty" with human faces or bodies, or particular examples of art and architecture. I think these efforts are as confused as I am. But they too are looking for the "what is" of real beauty.

One great help towards sorting out the confusion is a book by the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, Beauty (also published under the title, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction).

Scruton rejects the notion that beauty is simply a subjective experience, though subjectivity is very much involved. Taking an explicitly incarnational view of the body, he claims that "human beauty belongs to our embodiment, and art that 'objectifies' the body, removing it from the realm of moral relations, can never capture the true beauty of the human form."

Beauty is inextricably linked to goodness, and so to moral matters.

The book is an example of one of my favorite "genres," works by philosophers and theologians who no longer need to write competitively or academically. These writers are on the far side of much thought, scholarship, or prayer – or possibly all three. The books are brief and simple, presenting settled conclusions. They tend towards wisdom (Pope Benedict XVI's short trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth is another example).

Scruton finds some understanding in the classical notion of beauty, along with truth and goodness, as a Platonic reality that transcends time and space. But it is more than that, just as it is more than whatever I happen to say it is. There's an objective reality to which the person responds subjectively in some way:

The experience of beauty is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment as much as right action.

Scruton does not say what I would add (though he is not irreligious). But I think his short book points to beauty (and truth and goodness) not just as absolutes in themselves, but as a right relationship with God, the absolute. We are rational and relational creatures, and beauty reflects ou...