The Catholic Thing

By John M. Grondelski

On November 5, The New York Times' headline proclaimed: "Victory Changes Nation's Sense of Self." Kamala Harris ran with the Democratic mantra of "American values" and insisted America's self-consciousness mirrors the party's radical woke agenda of abortion-on-demand-through-birth, pretending men are women and vice versa, and discriminating against people on the basis of race or sex.

On November 5, Democrats learned: Americans don't.

One would think that losing the White House to Donald Trump by a popular vote majority, the United States Senate majority, and likely the House of Representatives would cause Democrats to reevaluate why they lost even people they won four years ago. One would hope they might conclude it would be a good thing to allow some prolife candidates to run under the party banner, even if they likely would otherwise be quarantined in party circles.

Will they?

I doubt it.

My fear is that, behind the NYT headline "Victory Changes Nation's Sense of Self" is a further alienation of the "elites" from the American people. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris constantly complained of American "systemic racism." Control of the border is called "xenophobic." Refusing to pretend men are women and vice versa is "transphobic," even "hateful." "Women's rights" means not protecting preborn females from execution through their "sacrament" of abortion. And "choice" means not picking your school and your car make and model, but killing your baby.

As I hear it, the elites are convinced that Americans are now not worthy of their support and backing. Americans, in their mind, are abandoning their values - except to them, "their" means the elites' anti-values.

Contemporary Polish philosopher Zbigniew Stawrowski insists that the fundamental split in the world today is not "the West versus the rest" but "the West with itself." The "West," he insists, is divided by its tradition, rooted in Greece, Rome, and Israel, versus the "Enlightenment" cultural appropriation of that tradition. As he sees it, the atheist and secularist "Enlightenment" stole terms like "rights," "freedom," "choice," "marriage," "justice," etc. and turned them on their heads, making them mean the exact opposite of what they always did.

Like cuckoos, they took over the West's nest and laid their eggs in it, selling those cuckoo eggs as the legitimate progeny of the West.

Expect to see more of that - from "the Resistance" - over the next four years.

Expect to see more condescension from these folks that Americans, by popularly voting for Trump, have made themselves unworthy of the elites' respect. The Americans, in their minds, "abandoned" their "values." In their minds, the clinging, deplorable garbage really is just that.

And the Left is likely to conclude it has the mandate of heaven to resist. As Kamala Harris said in her grumpy concession, "while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign - the fight: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up."

In other words, the elites will double down on their "ideals" - even if, in their minds, the majority of the American people don't "deserve" their labors. After all, as we repeatedly heard, the "college-educated" didn't do bad things like vote for Trump. It was those illiterate hillbillies in flyover country.

St. John Paul II was right to insist that culture is upstream of politics and economics: the values you espouse decide what you do with power and money. That is why the political expressions of things like abortion really reflect cultural pathologies.

The American people instinctively seem to understand that. Not completely, to be sure: in seven out of ten states majorities voted to promote prenatal murder through birth. But, in their gut, they recognize something is wrong.

And if we Cathol...

By Bishop James D. Conley

Before Christianity came on the scene, ancient Greek and Roman pagans did not consider children to be fully human persons like adults. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that Christianity introduced the concept of children that we have today, in which we give children more concern than adults owing to their vulnerability. This was truly a revolutionary concept.

Such a view comes directly from the commands of Christ, whose very strong view was also extremely counter-cultural. When the disciples tried to stop children from engaging with Jesus, he sternly rebuked them saying that the Kingdom of God belonged to the little children. Indeed, our Lord reverses the adult-versus-child priority, saying directly that adults must become like little children.

And he reserves the harshest language of all for those who harm children: saying that it would be better if they were drowned in the sea with a millstone hung around their neck.

It is from this vision of little children that the Church had and continues to have its strong response to abortion and infanticide. It is this vision that makes the sex abuse crisis so reprehensible and the Church's aggressive reaction to it in the last two decades an imperative. It is also from this vision that the Church criticizes the brutal manipulation of children when it comes to sex and gender.

Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that as the voice of Christianity fades from the public sphere, we see a repaganized culture using children as experimental subjects - poisoning them with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and mutilating them with ghastly surgeries that forever alter their bodies.

God creates human beings male and female, along with various ways to express that maleness and femaleness. Joan of Arc, leading armies in battle, was just as much of a woman as any contemporary ballerina. A seminarian, wearing cassock and singing in a choir, is just as much of a man as any contemporary football player. It is bizarre and wrong, however, to pretend that men and women, boys and girls, are not bound by given male or female biological realities.

And it is particularly heinous to harm children with drugs and surgeries in attempting to escape from these realities.

Pope Francis, while rightly focusing on pastoral care for children and others with sex and gender confusion, also rightly described gender ideology, which leads to poisoning and mutilating our children, as "evil." Just a few months ago, the Holy Father called it the "ugliest danger" of our time.

Mindful of these realities, individual Catholics and Catholic institutions must resist gender ideology - particularly as it affects young people - whenever we find it. Unfortunately, and this was tragically true of the sex-abuse crisis as well, preliminary investigations have found these evil and ugly practices present in the Church - including in some of our Catholic hospitals.

A group called "Stop the Harm" has compiled a database from publicly available hospital records showing nearly 14,000 treatments related to sex changes that were delivered to minor children in the U.S. - and nearly 150 Catholic hospitals apparently had codes for procedures suggesting they were involved. Catholic hospitals seemingly prescribed both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones - and not a few even performed mutilating surgeries on children.

I am grateful to say that there was no evidence that anything like this is happening within Catholic health care institutions in the Diocese of Lincoln, but as someone with pastoral leadership roles within the Catholic Medical Association and the Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance - and as a follower of Christ's command to give special priority to children - I cannot stand by in silence, knowing that Catholic institutions do this to the most vulnerable in the Church's name.

It should be noted that some of the Catholic hospitals on the list appear because of one-offs or single-digit counts....

By Michael Pakaluk

But first:

God our Father, giver of life, we entrust the United States of America to your loving care. You are the rock on which this nation was founded. You alone are the true source of our cherished rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Reclaim this land for your glory and dwell among your people. Send your Spirit to touch the hearts of our nation's leaders. Open their minds to the great worth of human life and the responsibilities that accompany human freedom. Remind your people that true happiness is rooted in seeking and doing your will. Through the intercession of Mary Immaculate, patroness of our land, grant us the courage to reject the "culture of death." Lead us into a new millennium of life. We ask this through Christ Our Lord.

Amen.

Now for today's column...

"Study," says St. Thomas, "implies the vehement application of the mind to something" (ST II-II, 166, 1). Nothing easy about study apparently; no curling up in an easy chair with a cup of coffee simply taking it in.

Moreover, this Doctor of the Church says, although study itself is good, incidentally it easily leads to sin, as:

when "one takes pride in knowing the truth," or

"when a man desires to know the truth about creatures, without referring his knowledge to its due end, namely, knowledge of God," or

"when a man studies to know the truth above the capacity of his own intelligence, since by doing so men easily fall into error." (167, 1).

This last sin is a kind of recklessness - by not knowing your own limits, you place yourself in situations where you can't but formulate false views, liable to lead others astray also.

A striking corollary of these assertions is that, simply by the nature of the case, atheists can hardly avoid at least material sin when they study. Also, for a Christian there is a burden of proof against studying under non-Christians. Also, how could a Christian practically speaking avoid sin except by enclosing his study within prayer?

We should expect St. Thomas Aquinas's own Oratio ante Studium, "Prayer before study," to be a kind of antidote to these and other sins. And indeed, it is. Since all the translations I see on the internet are inaccurate, a good service may be done to readers of this site simply by publishing a good translation.

Here is the best I know, from a recent dissertation at my university on the prayers of St. Thomas, by a young theologian at St. John Vianney Seminary, Joshua Revelle:

InvocationIneffable Creator, who from the treasury of Thy wisdom didst appoint three hierarchies of Angels and set them in wondrous order over the highest heavens, and who didst distribute the parts of the universe most elegantly:PetitionsDo Thou, who art rightly called the fountain of light and wisdom and supereminent principle, deign to pour a ray of Thy brightness upon the darkness of my intellect, removing from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, namely, sin and ignorance.Thou, who makest eloquent the tongues of infants, instruct my tongue, and pour onto my lips the grace of Thy blessing.Give me sharpness of understanding, capacity for remembering, method and ease in learning, subtlety of interpreting, and copious grace of speaking.Prepare the beginning, direct the progress, and perfect the ending.ConclusionThou who art truly God and Man, who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen

I have distinguished the parts of the prayer, adding headings and numbers for clarity.

Right from the start, St. Thomas's words express humility. Although the prayer keeps in mind that study is meant to lead to fruitfulness and therefore speech that helps others find the truth, God is addressed as "ineffable," which means beyond our capacity to express in words. The highest realities, the most interesting and precious truths, must ultimately remain mysterious for any creature.

Furthermore, he situates himself at the lowest rung of a vast hierarchy of intelligences. You are doubtless familiar with astronomers...

By Francis X. Maier

By the time this column is read, the 2024 election will be decided. Or nearly so. And since what I say will affect no one's vote, and I don't know the outcome as I write, I can be candid. Simply put: My wife, our youngest son (who lives with us), and I all voted on Tuesday against the Democratic Party ticket at every level. The Republican candidate for president was an eccentric, blustering narcissist. But his opponent, her political party, her running mate, her celebrity supporters, and the corrupt national media that consistently covered for her inadequacies were worse.

Her party branded scores of millions of ordinary citizens as "garbage" and "fascist." This, while cynically calling for national unity. And the Democratic candidate's addiction to abortion was both defining and repugnant.

We all have a duty to follow our conscience. Many good people no doubt found a way to vote differently from my own family. That's for God to judge. But the right to kill a developing human child in the womb is now, quite clearly, a core value of America's "progressive" elite. The party of Al Smith and the once-Catholic working class is now the party of abortion clinics; the party that turns the chopping up of an unborn human being into a private real estate issue.

Some quiet reading of Genesis 19 might be in order

As Christians, we can't avoid political engagement. It's a duty of our citizenship. More importantly, we have a Gospel obligation to be a leaven for good in society. Politics involves the acquisition and use of power, and power always has a moral dimension. And law always embodies someone's idea of right and wrong.

So we can never excuse ourselves from working for what's virtuous and true in the public square. But politics is never the central concern of a Christian life. It's always a cocktail of imperfections and compromises. And - as thinkers from Jean-Marie Lustiger to Leszek Kolakowski have argued - it can easily become a seductive form of idolatry. Which is exactly the direction of our current culture.

In his 1986 essay "The Idolatry of Politics" (collected here), Kolakowski noted that America's founding ideals - that all men are created equal; that all have inalienable rights endowed by a Creator - today "appear either patently false or meaningless and superstitious to most of the great men who keep shaping our imagination."

Too many of the men and women who lead us don't really believe what they claim to believe. And they subvert words like "democracy" to mean something quite different from a traditional popular understanding.

Modern American life still has a residue of Biblical faith. Many millions of Americans are religious believers. But our nation's heart, and the spirit of its leadership class, are increasingly technocratic and materialist. In effect, we live in the most materialist culture in history; a culture of practical atheism where God is not repudiated, but instead rendered irrelevant by other appetites and concerns.

Absent God, nature (including the human body) becomes dead matter waiting to be manipulated, and human life lacks transcendent purpose. Politics fills the void of meaning left by the exit of the divine. And technology offers the tools to achieve a more perfectly rational, man-made ordering of society.

The result is a kind of soft totalitarianism. Modern society - so the reasoning goes - is too complex to bear populist confusion and bickering. Leadership must therefore fall to an enlightened expert class that will consult the masses but ultimately knows what's best for everyone else - whether they agree or not.

I've simplified our current political reality here, but not unfairly. Christopher Lasch, among others, argued much the same more than thirty years ago. My point is simply this: Too many Catholics and other Christians think we're living in one nation with a familiar set of rules, when we're really living in quite another.

The go-to Catholic posture in this country, espec...

By Anthony Esolen

I am relieved to find that Pope Francis has refrained from saying that someday we may be conferring, or pretending to confer, Holy Orders upon women. It keeps alive the possibility that the churches East and West may reunite. It averts an inevitable and devastating schism. It allows the faithful to retain their trust that, as Sigrid Undset's convert Paul Selmer says in The Burning Bush, it is the Church's boast not to have changed her doctrine, so that what we believe is but an organic development of truths revealed already to the apostles.

Nor do I think it wise to attend to anything at all that the current culture, or whatever we call whatever it is that is widespread and that mimics the action of a culture without its soul, has to say about sex. Al Capone, I have heard, repented of his crimes in prison, but before he did that, I would not consult him for moral advice, nor would I have him fill out my taxes. Yet I think that even the unrepentant Capone would be a more reliable guide on right and wrong than our society is on sex, marriage, and the raising of girls and boys. I am not going to order food from people who come unwashed from swimming in a sewer.

To take but one obvious form of our madness, we now have men and boys competing against women and girls in sports, clobbering them, and we have decided that all the armies in the history of the world have gotten it wrong until now, so that women must be allowed to be in the infantry, in combat.

Pride goeth before a fall, we say, but what shall we say when pride persists even after embarrassment upon embarrassment, defeat upon defeat?

The German prelates, standing in the midst of the collapse of the faith in their own nations, instead of donning the sackcloth and heaping ashes over their heads in penitence, not only insist on continuing to dose themselves with the secular nostrums that have rotted their lungs out in the first place; they insist on prescribing them for everyone else.

Religious sisters who have presided over the disastrous collapse of their orders, learning nothing by it and repenting of nothing, still pluck away at their single-stringed harp, demanding an innovation that would seem pretty clearly at odds with somebody named Saint Paul, and they do so while invoking "the Spirit," presumably a different Spirit from the one who inspired Saint Paul.

Unless, perhaps, the Spirit is not a Person but a vague movement, a something-or-other working its way by fits and starts through human history, a Spirit of democracy, a Spirit of political freedom - who knows? The shadowy sisters know.

Do you wish, sisters, to be leaders of men? How about first being teachers of boys? If you cannot do the lesser, you can forget about the greater. Do you wish, German prelates, to instruct the world? How about first instructing the couple shacking up down the street? Do you wish, whoever in the Vatican came up with the silly idea of an anime-cartoon figure named Luce to represent a pilgrim in the faith, to appeal to the natural human hunger for beauty? How about first reckoning with the flood of clumsy music, garish art, and blank architecture heaved upon the faithful for the last sixty years?

Your foundation is sagging because you built upon the sands of mass entertainment and mass production, but instead of condemning the mold-ridden and rickety things, and humbly learning the arts from builders who succeeded in the past, you go farther out into the void, thinking, "This time it will work!" It won't.

I should not suggest that only churchmen behave in this way. Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955, shortly after the chic wisdom had it that we should not teach reading as it had always been done in English, swiftly and efficiently, with phonics, but rather as if English were made of pictograms.

It is nearly seventy years later, and still the educational establishment has learned nothing from the failure. We can apply the analysis to other educational failure...

By Robert Royal

A crucial presidential election takes place tomorrow. This site operates under tax-exempt, non-profit status, which does not permit us to engage in partisan politics - let alone endorse candidates. But we're The Catholic Thing and have the constitutional right to comment on Catholic things. There are several such things in play this year, especially the proper understanding of religious liberty under the American constitutional order.

What follows here, then, will remain non-partisan. But it's frankly a reaction to an interview that Kamala Harris gave recently in which she was asked whether she would be willing to allow religious "concessions" on abortion. She said no. No concessions on "a woman's right to control her own body."

Catholics already know - or should - how to approach specific moral questions like abortion, LGBT+, parental rights, etc. But there's another large question here about religious liberty, with wide-ranging consequences for our public life. The partisans and poorly formed won't listen. But religious liberty is the first liberty. And without that, all the rest is in doubt.

The very use of the term "concessions" by both the interviewer and Kamala Harris is a liberal, unconstitutional assumption that has done great damage - and not only to the unborn. The American Constitution does not speak of religious liberty as a concession by the government to citizens to do what the government would otherwise control. The First Amendment's protection of religion, speech, assembly, etc.

is simply a recognition of natural rights, rights given us by the Creator, that precede and exceed the authority of every government.

The "right to control your own body" - which is not only a euphemism, but ducks the question of whether there might not be another body involved, with another DNA, a heartbeat, brainwave activity - claims priority even to the First Amendment, an Even-More-First Amendment, as I sometimes think of how it's presented.

Even if you're willing to concede such a legal novelty, what about the rights of others to control their own bodies: e.g., the surgeon who would be forced by law to perform the abortion, but won't because of his religious beliefs; the hospital administrators or nurses or clinic workers who likewise won't help kill a baby in the womb because they know innocent human life is never to be deliberately destroyed?

This whole question of whether the U.S. government can issue concessions for religious belief and conscience - or not - was already settled when George Washington wrote a letter to the Newport, Rhode Island, Touro Synagogue, which he visited in 1790. Moses Seixas, the Warden of the synagogue, later wrote to Washington asking for assurances of religious freedom for Jews.

Washington could have granted the request - if he believed the federal government had such authority. He did not.

Instead, he wrote back invoking principles, American principles, that deny the very idea of government granting "concessions" to religious liberty:

All [American citizens] possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

This notion of "concessions" is far from being the only way that we offend against our own Constitution by curtailing a God-given right. Politicians currently love to speak of threats to the Constitution and "democracy" - if we elect someone else. But the very same people often talk of abolishing the electoral college, a constitutional mechanism, without understanding how it preserves a better form of democracy.

Because while it's tr...

By Fr. Brian A. Graebe

"Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350" recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to glowing reviews. A collection of over 100 objects from around the world, the exhibition traces the emergence of Siena, a major stop along the Via Francigena connecting Rome to Canterbury, as a fulcrum of artistic innovation on the cusp of the Renaissance.

One of the most commented-upon works comes at the end of the exhibition: Simone Martini's "Christ Discovered in the Temple" (thirteen forty-two). The painting is striking for its subject matter - the young Christ is usually depicted "sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46), where Mary and Joseph find him after three days.

Martini takes us to the scene afterward. Joseph seems to glower at his foster son, with one arm wrapped around him and the other pointing to his seated wife. Although the Gospel re cords only Mary's words, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously" (Luke 2:48), here Joseph speaks volumes.

He seems to be admonishing Jesus, showing the aggrieved relief that comes after much worry. The viewer can almost hear him saying, "How could you do this to your mother?" For her part, Mary sits stoically, her hand extended in what may be a gesture of reassurance or comfort. She holds an open book, surely a Scripture passage with which she "kept all these things in her heart." (Luke 2:51)

It is the adolescent Christ, however, who attracts the eye. He stands sullenly, slightly hunched, with his arms defiantly crossed, his eyes narrowed and his lips frowning. The scene has a certain charm for anyone familiar with adolescent moodiness, and it makes the Holy Family seem not all that different from every other family in this moment of misunderstanding, or of a reprimand poorly received.

While admiring the technical brilliance that Martini displays, I found the work theologically troubling. Holland Cotter, co-chief art critic for The New York Times, wrote in his review that "Jesus, Joseph and Mary come across as a dysfunctional modern family: pouting adolescent kid; exasperated Dad; mediating Mom."

But the Holy Family was not dysfunctional, and the Son of God did not pout. To affirm that is not to diminish Christ's humanity. Jesus is not more human by sharing in the flaws of our fallen nature. For example, when the Devil tempted Jesus in the desert, Jesus did not wrestle with those temptations the way you and I might. He did not find the temptations enticing and struggle to reject them. That fact makes Jesus more human, not less.

His freedom from concupiscence, or the inclination to sin, flows from the perfect human nature that he possessed and that, with grace, we strive to reclaim.

Of course, Jesus was capable of anger, as seen in the cleansing of the Temple. His anger, though, was righteous, the proper response to the sacrilege taking place. And Jesus was in complete control of that anger, directing it with his perfect reason and will. That emotional control was not a skill Jesus learned; he had it as part of his perfect humanity, even as a teenager.

So what to make of Martini's pouting Christ? It could simply be a well-intentioned but theologically flawed image, an attempt to make Jesus more relatable but that ends up diminishing his human nature. I am reminded of films and television shows that portray Mary experiencing labor pains at the birth of Christ.

While trying to underscore the humanity of both Mary and Jesus, the depiction errs by contradicting the doctrine that Mary preserved her virginal intactness even in the very act of parturition. Preserved from Original Sin, Mary did not, in the miraculous birth of her Son, suffer the labor pains that entered the human experience as a result of the Fall. (Genesis 3:16) Like Jesus's freedom in the desert, Mary's freedom from labor pains does not lessen her humanity or compromise her maternity.

Rather, it exalts ...

By Stephen P. White

God, whose love is infinite, loves a finite number of people. He may love everyone, but the number is still finite.

I read somewhere that the total number of human beings who have ever lived is estimated to be somewhere north of 100 billion. That's a lot of humans. How one estimates such a number is somewhat obscure to me, but if we take that number as reasonably accurate, it means that something like seven or eight percent of the people who have ever lived are alive today.

This somehow strikes me as vaguely disconcerting - like the feeling one gets the first time one realizes that the years one has already lived probably outnumber, or at least balance, the years one has left to live. Not that such things are really ours to know - neither the day nor the hour - but it's just less worrisome to be, as it were, driving around on a full tank. It gives one terrific peace of mind.

God promised to Abraham, "I will bless you and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore." I checked (read: I Googled it) and apparently there are a lot more grains of sand than there are people who have ever lived, by many orders of magnitude. And the number of stars in the heavens dwarfs the number of grains of sand. In this context, 100 billion seems a modest sum.

Without presuming the Lord intended to be taken with mathematical exactitude, maybe there's a whole lot more of us to come. Maybe, someday, many millennia from now, men will look back at our own age and wonder what it was like when the human race was so very small and very young. And maybe they will wonder, these future men, when the Lord will finally return in glory. Will they think, surely it must be soon? Or will they think, surely not for a long while?

Our own lives are almost comically brief. "Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong," writes the Psalmist, adding, "Most of them are toil and sorrow; they pass quickly, and we are gone." The short time we have is a gift. This is true in several senses: in the sense that life is a gift; in the sense that our time on earth being limited is a gift; and even in the sense that we experience time at all is a gift.

This might seem far out, but bear with me.

At the end of the Biblical account of the Fall there is a very curious conversation God has with Himself which is easily overlooked. "Then the LORD God said: See! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil! Now, what if he also reaches out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life, and eats of it and livs forever?" God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden as punishment for their disobedience. So far so good.

But the punishment is also an act of mercy, as we are reminded in the Mass during Sundays of Ordinary Time (Preface 3):

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory,

That you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity

And even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself.

That the cause of our downfall,

Might become the means of our salvation,

Through Christ our Lord.

Life is good; a gift. But it would be miserable to be stranded in this fallen state forever. Immortality in this life would not be a blessing but a curse.

As I said, time itself is a gift. Not just the discrete allotment of hours and days we have before we die, but the very phenomenon of passing through existence which we all experience and which we call "time." From the first instant of our existence, everything we experience happens within the inescapable framework of time: our growth, our thriving, our learning, our thinking, our remembering, our forgetting, our aging, our death. All of the beauty and fragility that makes us human presupposes our being bounded by time.

This becomes immediately apparent when one considers angelic beings. Like us, angels are created; they have a beginning. Like our souls, they are immortal. Like us, they were created free; some have even fallen. But our freedom is exercised...

Christians, and particularly the Saints, have a record of flourishing under the least likely circumstances. The reader with even a passing acquaintance with Christian history will be familiar with this.

They, and we, when we persist to victory, are undefeated even through defeat. For if God is for us, who can be against us?

The faithful Christian will even know why this is so. He will be inwardly confident, that the universe is designed in such a way that he can win. And it will be a good fight, against insuperable odds, except that Christ has made them superable.

For our religion is founded on Christ, the Son of God, and rests upon Him and rises with Him. He came down from Heaven at the most auspicious moment, which to our view was the most unlikely time. And He prevailed, through Crucifixion.

Of course I've been told that this is just my opinion, but I proclaim it in the knowing company of All Saints - even though the battle for the hearts and minds of the pagans is not over yet. And when, too, you have Christ on your side, there is no reason for a peace treaty. The world, even the Synods and the Vatican, can take it or leave it.

But just that one word, "Synod," leaves a bad smell in the nose. For I have not been describing a bureaucracy. We do not have meetings to decide what we are, if we were formed already.

And the Saints have long been following Christ's evangelical instruction, to "go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. And he that believeth and be baptized shall be saved."

To contemporary American ears, this will sound like the rantings of old-time religion. Depending on their politics, they will smile, or spit. My own habit, when listening to a rant, is to examine every word, in case I agree with it. For some things, including not only thought but action, must follow if the rant is true.

Not only America, but old Europe and the world are also with us, in these "globalized" times.

Once we could pretend that the whole world was unreachable. Now we notice that not everyone is listening for a religious message.

The Saints, let us observe, are not bureaucrats. Each of them was, and is, a one-off job. Of course, even Saints can be intimidated for a moment, but being Saints they know when they are called. Always.

And we, perhaps, are not even Saints. But we are called also: to the world's salvation.

The ambition to save "the environment" instead would be a compromise. God will actually do that for us. He made this environment from the beginning, and He made it to be self-healing. Similarly with questions of migration and crime: which may or may not be acute, but are insignificant compared with the real problem in the human soul: the problem of salvation. It is a problem that no amount of activism can solve.

The solution to physical hunger and thirst are relatively simple, if we use good sense. But we may hunger and thirst after righteousness: and that is not so simple.

For righteousness is something that depends on us, as if we were Saints. Yet only the Saints have acknowledged their responsibility.

Catholicism, as every other form of religion, is personal, and social. We often find this when we are left alone, and reach for something to distract us. The "culture" has prepared us for various things, or we discover that it hasn't. It has given each of us some notion of what is right and good and beautiful, as a gift from the stars. We were, in fact, born into an intuitive, pre-religious and pre-cultural, knowledge of what is what. Only a psychopath can entirely lose this.

There are moments when we, who are not psychopathic, wonder if we have a purpose, or will ever have a purpose, in our life "down here." In which we stand, apparently, abandoned without the Devil or God. The very ability to wonder about this sketches our hard philosophical situation. For if any kind of purpose could be imagined, our purposelessness can be imagined, too.

We live in a world of amateur philosophy; among so many amate...

On this day, the 31st of October, All Hallows' Eve, many of our Protestant brothers and sisters celebrate Reformation Day - the momentous day in 1517 when the Augustinian friar Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

The date always brings to mind my return to the Catholic Church some thirty years ago. Major factors in that homecoming were nagging questions about the proper relationship between Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. (Another was a growing hunger for the Eucharist, which was less a matter of the head than of the heart; as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.)

I'll always be grateful for those evangelical Protestant churches that nurtured me in the faith for so many years, including instilling the sound practice of daily Bible reading. In the mid-1990s, however, after having gravitated to the Reformed/Presbyterian wing of evangelicalism, I began a quest that eventually would lead me to take my place among the ranks of "reverts" to Catholicism.

Prior to that return, I was becoming increasingly concerned that the decades-long crisis of authority within Mainline Protestantism was also beginning to manifest itself in Evangelical churches. Most disconcerting to me was the dawning realization that Protestantism, in whatever form, simply lacked the wherewithal to confront this predicament.

For it was increasingly evident that appeals to the Bible alone, however heartfelt, were proving less and less effective against the corroding acids of modernity.

The question of interpretive authority was the nut the Protestant Reformers couldn't crack, which is why there was no Protestant Reformation (singular), but various Protestant Reformations (plural). The common cry of sola scriptura couldn't provide a way for the various Protestant camps to settle their differences - and not just over nonessentials, but over such central doctrines as Baptism and the Eucharist.

No way, that is, except by recourse to the sword (the literal one, not the sword of the Spirit), a bloody affair in which Catholics lamentably also played a major role.

It was through a reading of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church - a great symphony in four movements, as John Paul II described it - that I took my first tentative steps into the Great Tradition. There, I discovered what Jaroslav Pelikan meant when he referred to Tradition as the living faith of the dead (in contrast to traditionalism, which he defined as the dead faith of the living).

In the Catechism, the beauty of the Great Tradition seemed to shine forth from every page, confirming the truth of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler's observation that tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. (Mahler was Jewish, so knew a thing or two about the importance of tradition.) I concluded that this is what Jesus must have been referring to when he promised his disciples that when the Spirit of truth came, he would guide them into all the truth.

(John 16:13)

But something else was beginning to gnaw at me, which, if you think about it, is the most obvious question you can ask about the Bible: Where did it come from? We, of course, share with our orthodox Protestant brothers and sisters the strong belief that the Holy Spirit is the ultimate author of Sacred Scripture, that it is divinely inspired.

But how did the Church come to recognize and authenticate the twenty-seven books that comprise what we know today as the New Testament? After all, the Bible did not come with an inspired table of contents.

Moreover, there doesn't seem to be a sure-proof, objective standard by which to establish the Biblical "canon." Witness Luther's own struggles with whether that "right strawy epistle" of James (and not just that epistle) should be included in the Bible.

So, when the Protestant reformers appealed to sola scriptura, they seemed to be taking an awful lot for granted. For implicit in their accep...