The Catholic Thing

By George J. Marlin

After Kamala Harris declined the invitation to be on the dais of the famous Al Smith Dinner hosted by the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, columnist Joe Concha opined that Harris "clearly doesn't care about snubbing [Catholic voters]."

Harris is the first Democratic presidential nominee to skip the event since Walter Mondale in 1984. That decision sends a strong message that a charity event honoring New York Democratic governor Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944), the first Catholic nominated for the office of president, isn't an important forum for radical leftists who have taken over the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy.

This happenstance raises an important question. Does the Catholic vote matter anymore? Vice President Harris seems to think it does not.

Throughout most of the 20th century, a united Catholic vote mattered to Democrats. In 1960, for example, if Catholics had not come out in force for JFK in Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis, he would have lost the tightly contested states of Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Missouri - and Richard Nixon would have won.

In the late 1960s, the Catholic political demographic began to change. The shift was due to an increasing number of Democrat officials who were critics rather than champions of the moral principles of Catholic voters and their Church. Hence, the Catholic vote was key to the election of Nixon in 1972, and to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

In the 21st century, however, the influence of the children and grandchildren of Catholic immigrants from Europe and Ireland has declined. Members of the "Greatest Generation" are fast diminishing. In August 1945 when the war ended, there were 16 million Americans in uniform: 35 percent were Catholics. Today, there are fewer than 50,000 WWII Veterans.

'My father, John Marlin, was on the young side of those veterans. He joined the Marines at 17 in 1944, received the Purple Heart, became an NYPD cop, and was a lifelong Republican. He died on September 25 at the age of 97.

Korean War veterans are dying at the rate of 1,000 a day, and Vietnam GIs are dying at the rate of 500 a day.

The passing of these "meat-and-potato" Catholics, as Cardinal Dolan has called them, has had a significant impact on the results of elections and public opinion polling.

So, what's to make of the Catholic vote in 2024?

An EWTN/Real Clear Politics poll, released in August, indicated that 50 percent of Catholics plan to vote for Harris while 43 percent support Trump. Female Catholics support Harris over Trump 56 percent to 37 percent. The Catholic male vote breaks for Trump 49 percent to 43 percent.

Forty-nine percent of Hispanics prefer Harris with 30 percent leaning toward Trump.

The EWTN poll tracked with other national surveys, in part because it was generic. In other words, it did not distinguish between baptized Catholics and practicing Catholics.

Take the case of President Joe Biden, who boasts of being a rosary-carrying Catholic. The Archbishop of Washington D.C., Cardinal Wilton Cardinal Gregory, remarked on Easter Sunday that Biden is a "Cafeteria Catholic." He meant that Biden adheres to the Catholic teachings he likes, and rejects those he finds personally or politically inconvenient. "Cafeteria Catholic" Biden supports abortion - even at the moment of birth - and same-sex marriage.

The distinction between Church-going Catholic voters and non-practicing ones matters. Here are some examples why.

In 2000, George W. Bush won with the support of 57 percent of practicing Catholics, but only 49 percent of the generic Catholic vote. In the tightly contested 2004 race, Bush, running against a baptized Catholic, John Kerry, received 52 percent of the generic Catholic vote. As for traditionalist Catholics, a Pew poll revealed he received a record-breaking 76 percent of their votes.

In those two elections, which were virtually tied, practicing Catholics provided the margins of vict...

By Anthony Esolen

There is a scene in Milton's Paradise Lost that affirms my resolve to fight against bad ideas and the unrealities they assume or help to spread, like a contagion. The seraph Abdiel, whose name means "Servant of God," has refuted Satan on each point the tempter has made to his followers - for Satan is stirring them up to rebellion against the Son of God.

Abdiel has done so with a combination of precise reasoning and zealous passion. But Satan rejects the truth, mocking both it and its messenger. Rather than concede a single point, he commits himself more deeply to falsehood, going so far as to deny that he is any kind of creature at all.

"We know no time when we were not as now," he boasts, "Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power." He tells Abdiel to go and deliver the tidings to the Son of God, that war is on the move, and he ends with a threat. "And fly," he says, "lest evil intercept thy flight."

Abdiel is not cowed. Thousands and thousands of rebels are encompassed around him, deaf to his words and dismissive of his zeal, which they judge as "out of season," or "singular and rash."

But one soul devoted to the truth is mightier than thousands of liars and fools. The rebels have completed their break with truth, and now, says Abdiel to Satan, "Other decrees / Against thee are gone forth without recall." He leaves their camp alone, scorned by all:

So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found, Among the faithless, faithful only he; Among innumerable false, unmoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified; His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal, Nor number nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind Though single.

From amidst them forth he passed Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained Superior, nor of violence feared aught, But with retorted scorn his back he turned On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.

Milton, no doubt, thought of himself as an Abdiel, so deeply committed to what he saw as theological truth, that he could not find it in him to join any particular church; it is this individualism that marks him as the first of the moderns, though in most other ways he is better seen as the last man of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

But that biographical wrinkle is not pertinent to the scene and its drama, since Abdiel is not going off to be by himself, nor has he come up with any peculiar doctrine of his own. He leaves Satan's camp to join the camp of the eternal God, and thus can the Catholic reader in our time see in Abdiel a model for a fuller devotion to the Church as the repository of truth.

But how do you commit yourself to the truth? We have the Scriptures, the Catechism, and magisterial teachings from the Church's very beginning. Yet it is not always clear how these teachings apply in a current controversy, and people argue about their scope and significance, and human words are powerless to deliver ultimate realities.

Thus are we often in a muddle not entirely of our own making. And then the psychological pressure to go along with everyone near you is intense, and going along involves both assenting to a proposition and taking part in an action, whether actively or permissively.

Action and vision in man are inextricable: we act according to what we see or think we see, and we see, or think we see, according to what we do. We have no direct apprehension of reality apart from ideas, and we have no ideas unaffected by what we do.

This being so, we can perceive that sin and falsehood are intervolved, and thence we may posit several reliable signs to direct us at least away from the quicksand.

Whatever I have come up with on my own is probably false, because it is likely to be partial in both senses of the word: I see only in part, and I am partial to my ideas and to the deeds they will justify.

Whatever depends upon the passions of the hour is probably false, because truth is everlasting and...

By Robert Royal

It's often been said that our civilization is based on a kind of historical trinity - Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome - in addition (it needs saying in an age bereft of a historical sense) to the Holy Trinity. While the deepest roots of any culture are religious - and we have seen all around us in recent decades what happens when we human beings are uprooted from our rich Christian cultural soil - there are other elements essential to nourishing a full human life.

And this is as true of the life of the Church as it is of the "secular" world in which we move, in and through, every day.

Such considerations shed no little light on the difficulties many people are having about the Synod on Synodality, even those who are confirmed synodistas. One way of understanding the problem is that we seem to want to lean entirely on Jerusalem - the Holy Spirit is often invoked as the guarantor of everything, though who gets to decide what is the voice of the Holy Spirit, and what is not, remains up in the air.

Meanwhile, we fail to keep in mind the sacred history that God Himself made clear by His appearance on earth "in the fullness of time." (Galatians 4:4)

Christianity came into the world at a particular time. It needed, and absorbed, the high rationality of Athens so that the human mind, as well as the human heart, could enter profoundly into relation with Revelation. Much of what we understand about the Incarnation, for example, was worked out using ancient Greek terms.

In recent years, even at the highest levels of the Church, we've often enough heard philosophy and theology denigrated, almost as if having clear ideas about Faith and morals are an affront to God, who seems instead to be pure, undefined "mercy."

And the Church needed Rome as well, because to go out and preach the Gospel to all nations effectively, which meant keeping an essential unity among global diversity and opposing forces over wide stretches of the earth, something like the Roman disciplines of law, order, and - yes - even military power - were, and are necessary.

Christianity did not spread by the sword, as did Islam, but the sword was often called on to defend the Faith. We just celebrated the anniversary of the Christian naval victory at Lepanto over the Ottomans on October 7; October 10th is the day that the Franks turned back the invading Muslims at Tours in France; and the 14th marks the defeat of the Turks at the Siege of Vienna.

Without such resistance to armed attacks, Christian Europe would not now exist or have transmitted its faith and culture to the Americas and much of the rest of the world.

But it's not only in protecting Christian lands from outside assault that a certain martial virtue is essential. The Church itself needs a manly spirit - in our time perhaps more than ever - when forces even within the Church try to make it appear that true Christianity's soul is merely openness - especially to its critics.

The modern American poet Ezra Pound wrote a bit of a corrective of our modernist image of Jesus and something more in its humorous way ("Ballad of the Goodly Fere"):

Ha' we lost the goodliest fere o' all

For the priests and the gallows tree?

Aye lover he was of brawny men,

O' ships and the open sea. . . .

I ha' seen him drive a hundred men

Wi' a bundle o' cords swung free,

That they took the high and holy house

For their pawn and treasury.

They'll no' get him a' in a book I think

Though they write it cunningly;

No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere

But aye loved the open sea. . . .

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,

A mate of the wind and sea,

If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere

They are fools eternally.

I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb

Sin' they nailed him to the tree.

That's the voice of a working man, a carpenter, a fisherman. Someone who also livs foursquare on the earth as well as in worlds of spirit and ideas.

A Benedictine bishop said in recent days that "The Synod will not bring any concrete answers, ...

By John M. Grondelski

Population figures have lately come to be used in arguments connected with U.S. immigration policy. Some opponents of that policy accuse the Administration of importing a "replacement population." For them, that simply means politicians choosing their voters by bringing in immigrants they later provide with a "clear path to citizenship," and a Democratic voter registration card. For others, it means changing the demographic mix of "systematically racist" America by increasing representation from Third World countries.

Proponents of lax immigration policy, however, also employ population numbers. The American Chamber of Commerce has long pushed looser immigration with the claim that it will "boost economic growth" (and increase profits by paying lower wages), and that immigrants do jobs Americans won't.

Recently, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has thrown in the argument that, with an aging, top-heavy, inverted demographic pyramid, we need immigrants just to work (including caring for the old gringos) and, by extension, keep our social welfare system going by paying into it.

Even Pope Francis seems to have gotten into the act, telling Jesuits in Belgium on September 28 that importing a substitute population is how a childless Europe might survive: "Europe no longer has children, it is aging. It needs migrants to renew its life. It has now become a question of survival."

This makes me want to ask: Is parenthood among the "jobs" immigrants will do that Americans won't?

Republican nominee J.D. Vance has been criticized for observations he's made about childlessness and, while they have a polemical edge, their core remains valid: having babies - a social ideal, maybe even an expectation once thought natural and normal - is now deemed "weird."

U.S. population trends are below replacement level and have been for a while. It would have been even lower but for Hispanic women having babies. But even there, fertility is falling. Still, if anybody is having babies (other than traditional Catholics), it's immigrants.

Psychologist Erik Erikson identified "generativity" as one of the highest of his stages of psychosocial development. Those stages involve progressive exit from egocentricity towards other persons (and, in that respect, are highly Christian). Generativity differs from its preceding stage of intimacy. While intimacy takes responsibility for someone who is one's peer, generativity involves responsibility for another for whose very existence one is responsible.

For Erikson, these stages are not mere "choices." They are normal stages in human psychosocial development - or decline.

Yet, in our elite culture, marriage is increasingly deferred (or replaced by ersatz substitutes) while parenthood - hitherto a natural follow-on of marriage - has now become an Everest to conquer. And with the replacement of the idea of parenthood as a gift by that of parenthood as a choice, maternity and paternity are seen less as normal adult vocations and more as "jobs" whose appeal - like mowing lawns or caring for the elderly - finds fewer American takers.

Various commentators have noted the "job-ification" of American culture. We prepare kids from preschool for the "right" paths that will lead to the "right" jobs twenty-some years down the line. We plot schools, coursework, internships, and extracurricular participation to line up Junior for the "ideal" job.

Other than mention it in passing, however, do we devote anywhere near the same amount of attention to preparing Junior for the "ideal" marriage? For someday being a mother or a father? Why are those realities, those "choices," left to the autonomous individual (usually in his spare time) while the "job" is plotted out by the village with a laser-like precision?

And, given the changing nature of American work, isn't that also reflected in marriage and family life? Once upon a time, job permanence, stability, and loyalty were premiums. People "committed" to a good j...

By Michael Pakaluk

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, October 10th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing second Synod on Synodality now underway and other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

A new problem - new to me, anyway - came to my attention last week. I was corresponding with a college student from another institution who had just converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. It became clear in our exchanges, however, that his conversion had resulted solely from watching videos on YouTube. Not from friendships, not through "reading himself" into Catholicism, but by watching videos.

I thought to myself, This is interesting. He hasn't read any books. His Catholicism is a product of our new visual age. . . .But why do we care about books anyway?

It's a concern to me - though not a very big concern - that there used to be a good credentialing system, which went along with books. If you picked up a Doubleday Image book in the 1950s you could be sure that you had a pretty good Catholic book in your hands. Then, too, it used to matter if a book had a bishop's imprimatur and nihil obstat. Today, anyone with a smartphone can post videos on the internet.

It's been a long time since the credentialing of books has been reliable. Our gatekeepers have generally failed. I'm fine if, in matters of religion, we return to a mainly oral culture, as in New Testament times, when anyone could walk into a town like Corinth and preach whatever he wanted. Such a change shifts responsibility for the purity of Christian truth back to where it belongs, to our bishops, the successors of the Apostles - and maybe then they'll wake up from their synodal slumbers and start doing that job again.

Nevertheless, books have a place, just as the Bible has always had a place, because of the closeness of reading to prayer. Reading can foster interior life, watching videos cannot. Moreover, reading provokes deliberation and considered judgment, while videos incite to distraction. Reading is undeniably rich soil for receiving the seed: videos are shallow soil at best, usually mere rocks by the side of the path, birds hovering nearby.

So then, here's the new problem: What spiritual books do you recommend for a young person who has not read spiritual books, and maybe not even read any books at all? The problem used to be to pick an intelligible sequence of books mapping out a path of conversion. Now the problem is: out of hundreds of good books, which half dozen or so are best to place first in the hands of a genuine neophyte?

They would need to be books that are mother's milk for nurslings, not strong meat for mature Christians. They need to be short. They need to answer to the more serious needs of young persons. They need to open doors and lead somewhere. But they also need to be solid and serious - the straight stuff. We have no reason to think they will be the books that were important for you and me. Perhaps they will not even be explicitly spiritual books but books dealing with prolegomena.

I will tell you my thoughts for such a list; you might compose your own.

The very first book I would recommend is C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. Nothing so elegantly tells a Christian about the kind of world he lives in, and what sort of Christian he must become. The first lecture refutes emotivism, the view of morality that nearly everyone holds today, and argues for the building up of the heart, magnanimity, and manliness. The second shows that insofar as we reject the natural law, we efface ourselves. While the third warns that industrial science with its roots in magic and Faustian bargains will turn against ...

By Francis X. Maier

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow - Thursday, October 10th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing second Synod on Synodality now underway and other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

Americans have a genius for amnesia. It's in our DNA. Henry Ford captured this best more than a century ago when he said "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today." The past comes with annoying lessons. It interferes with our imagining the future. And yet it's inescapable. The past shapes who we are and explains where we came from - details that are handy when trying to understand a crisis like the political car wreck we face this fall.

The United States began as a marriage of Biblical faith and Enlightenment thought. The tension between those elements in the American character has fed the nation's dynamism from the start. The Calvinism of founders like John Witherspoon, rooted in the Scottish Reformation, combined with the moderation of the Scottish Enlightenment, shaped the early American experience. Together they distinguished the American Revolution from the more extreme revolutionary events in France and set it on a far more successful course.

Calvinist Protestantism is key to understanding the American psyche and its political implications. On the positive side, Pierre Manent, the French Catholic political philosopher, credits "the magnificent contribution of Calvinism to modern political freedom." In Calvinism's deep respect for the law, "human power is liberated or encouraged, but no human being, religious or secular, is above the law." He contrasts this with his own (Catholic) Church's regrettable past preferences for authoritarian regimes and resistance to liberal thought. For Manent, Catholic thought has always been "more alert to the risks than. . .to the grandeur of political freedom."

The same Calvinism, though, has a downside of unintended consequences. And it's chronicled by both the Yale historian Carlos Eire and the late Anglican philosopher George Parkin Grant. Calvin's motto was "glory to God alone." In Calvinist practice, this led not just to a powerful faith but also to an intense iconoclasm. The elimination of relics, sacramentals, religious statues, "magical" thinking about saints and the Eucharist, and belief in such things as Purgatory logically followed.

In effect, Calvinism desacralized the world, wiping out the mediating links in worship and everyday affairs between this life and the next. In doing so, argues Eire, Calvin became "a pioneer on that steep trail" that has led, centuries later, to modern unbelief.

At the same time - wrote George Grant - Calvinism created a community of very driven individuals who sought to be God's elect. Today God may (seem to) be absent, but a community of the elect remains, more driven and puritanical than ever on issues ranging from "reproductive rights" to climate change. That sense of anointing, of destiny's special favor and its demand for an endless, urgent striving toward success, is at the heart of modern progressive politics. Destiny's favor comes with an intolerance for anything in its way.

That's why permissive abortion, in the Kamala Harris campaign, is not just another policy matter. It's a passionate element of creed. Put simply, a woman's right to kill her unborn child at any stage of development is a non-negotiable sacrament.

So what's the point in all of this? Again, the past shapes us. And while it needn't determine our actions going forward, forgetting its lessons c...

Fr. Gerald Murray joins TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal in a conversation about the first days of the second session of the Synod on Synodality. They review what’s emerged so far and speculate on why Pope Francis has changed the whole process from a single session, to two monthly sessions, and added a third element, a parallel process with continuing “study groups.” One not to miss!

By Brad Miner

I grew up in a secular household. What's worse, my parents demanded I attend church - a Methodist church - for Sunday school and then confirmation, which I did. This all happened a long time ago, and my memories are fading. But I cannot recall my parents ever coming to church. Not on Sundays when I sang in the children's choir or even on the day I was confirmed.

They had pushed me toward the Christian faith, but they had neither preceded nor followed me. This is by way of saying my parents considered Christianity a path to respectability and not the way to eternal life. On Sundays, they played golf. I took this lesson into my teens and twenties.

After college, I began to take an interest in religion, and I liked talking about it. Dad grew weary listening and asked, "Are there golf courses in heaven, Brad? If you can assure me there are I'll make a profession of faith."

We were both exasperated.

Two weeks later, Dad died suddenly. He was 54. I was 23.

That very night, I was in another city at the home of a college friend's mother. My buddy and I returned from a night on the town, and I retired to the guest bedroom and quickly fell asleep. Sometime later I awakened.

Although the bedroom was on the second floor, I could see a shadow moving outside the window. Suddenly, the shadow burst into the room, silently but forcefully, as though a vacuum were being filled.

I had the feeling of an animal presence hovering over me and of its cold nose touching my forehead. I was frozen with fear.

Just as suddenly, the presence fled.

A telephone rang in the house. My friend's mother knocked on the bedroom door and entered.

"It's your mother," she said. She plugged the phone cord into a floor jack and gave me the receiver.

"Mom?"

I looked up at Mrs. B.

"The line's dead," I said.

She took the receiver, placed it back in the base, and the phone rang again almost immediately.

"Hello. Yes, here he is."

My mother was calling to tell me my father had died several hours ago.

"Your father is gone," is what she said.

Only a few people came to Professor Miner's funeral. He had many devoted friends, admiring colleagues, and devoted students at The Ohio State University, but a blizzard had brought Central Ohio to a halt. Twenty-two inches of snow will do that. My intrepid maternal grandparents (he 79 and she 85), who, after retirement, had traveled by automobile to all the contiguous 48, couldn't make the hundred-mile drive to Columbus. Grandpa tried, but the Highway Patrol made them turn around.

My older brother and his family waited a day before returning to Chicago. I left soon after for California. My mother headed to the liquor store.

In California, I converted to Catholicism.

There was a sexual revolution out there. There was one back in Ohio, too, but it was more alluring on Pacific Ocean beaches. And, even though the sound of wings awakened me from a nap one day, and I'd found myself ringing the doorbell at a Catholic rectory, I kept on going to the beach.

Sometimes, progress follows loss. Despair may, too. But the Spirit persists. He persists to the end.

Then. . .New York. Work. Marriage. Sons. Grandchildren. Old age.

I think of William Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up":

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

Wordsworth was a confidant of Frederick "Faith of our Fathers" Faber, an Anglican cleric who, under the influence of the Oxford Movement, became a Catholic priest. John Henry Newman admired Wordsworth's work, but the great poet, who may have admired Newman, would have preferred to drown in the Tiber rather than cross it. Or, as Michael Tomko writes in a review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of the poet, "for Wordsworth, there was always a flaming sword before the Tiber."

To each his own Eden, I guess.

These t...

By Robert Royal

As the first full week of the final session of the Synod on Synodality begins today, little is emerging that has not been heard many times before. Some delegates have expressed pleasure at reconnecting with friends they made last year. It's no small thing to make friends, good friends, true friends, anno Domini 2024, even in the Church. And while that may not lead to much as many were hoping for in the synodal way - the new way of "being Church," "listening," "walking together" - at least it may help keep some measure of calm in the synod hall.

News has been so slow that, at a press briefing the other day, there were just a few more journalists than there were panelists. That may change as things unfold. But there's "not much there there" - except for Australian Bishop Anthony Randazzo who, on Friday, deplored the focus on so-called "hot button issues," as if the Church were involved in a political campaign. He dismissed all that as merely being driven by a small number of ideologues. Progressives in the media, however, love to give that small group a big megaphone.

But there was one remark in a previous press briefing that caught my attention. Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas has been the synod point man for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Amid some hard-to-get-a-grip-on meandering in the general direction of synodality, he raised a question that will not go away when the synod ends. Or after. Ever. Because it can't.

He suggested that some people fear that talking about each of our "perspectives" on the faith risks losing the necessary elements of truth and unity. Clearly, the emphasis we've been presented with in these first days about the importance of "experience" rather than dogma seems to confirm those dangers. The good bishop, however, noted that there are four Gospels, four different "perspectives" on the life and death of Our Lord. And that the early Church saw this as a good thing to preserve rather than to reduce the story to a single account.

Fair enough. But it's also true that there was a limited range of authentic perspectives that the Church, as it grew, deemed authoritative. There are various fictitious early texts, Gnostic gospels, etc., so different than the four Gospels we have, that for the Church not to have declared them heretical would have indicated no concern for fact or truth. Even some sound early documents - the Didache, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Epistle of Barnabas, etc. - were disputed (antilegomenon graphon), never regarded as heretical, but still didn't make it into the canon of Scripture.

Which brings up a meta-perspective, if you will, under which all the others must operate. Bishop Flores hinted at as much, but in our postmodern, fragmented world - which paradoxically is becoming ever more uniform even as it emphasizes diversity - Catholicity not diversity is where the real battle lies. It's easy to have perspectives, life experiences, opinions - everyone has those.

For the present writer and many other synod observers, concern arises when we see things like the following, excerpted from the report that "study group 9," the one charged with addressing, "Synodal theological and methodological criteria for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues (SR 15,)," published last week and distributed to the synod delegates:

We have chosen Acts of the Apostles chapter 15 as a biblical paradigm. This text gives witness to the path of discernment experienced by the nascent Church. . . .Thus, the criteria offered to the discernment of an authority that is synodally expressed and structured (Peter and James, with the other apostles, the elders and the whole Church) are: the absolute precedence of God's universal salvific will and the prohibition to hindering God's universal salvific will with anything that no longer has any efficacious meaning. (Emphasis added.)

This "paradigm" aspires to be Biblical and respect Biblical "authorit...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely

The BBC is rightly castigated in these times for its left-wing bias and sub-par journalism, seeing anything representing the Western Christian heritage as abhorrent, and the values of other cultures as inherently superior. Apart from the costume dramas - the adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens, for example - there is one other thing they used to do very well, and that is what was called "situation comedies."

One of the classics, still shown in both the U.K. and the United States, is the show called "Keeping Up Appearances." Starring the great actress Patricia Routledge, who plays the part of Mrs. Hyacinth Bucket which she insists on pronouncing "Bouquet"). It details Hyacinth's attempts, along with her long-suffering husband, to move up the social ladder from her decidedly middle-class existence.

Class is still the predominant means of social identification in Britain, with everything from accents, words used, and home décor, being the way to tell where a person belongs. Mrs. Bucket is, of course, a terrible snob, but all the laughter in the show, which I believe ran for five seasons, is about the attempts of Hyacinth to be something that she is not, and the fact that others know exactly who she is.

She wants to keep up the appearance of being bourgeois and respectable, despite the ridiculous situations she gets into. That respectability, based on outward appearance and social conformity, would be, in her mind, the key to social mobility and acceptance, and her position in society.

Sometimes when one reads the letters of St. Paul, the endless discussions about circumcision and the Law can feel not only peculiar but rather irrelevant in the life of a twenty-first-century Christian. Yet we know, the word of God is not only an inexhaustible treasure, but a fountain, as St. Ephrem the Syrian said, which can never be emptied.

There is always something, some word, phrase, or verse, even in the most obscure texts, which becomes a word of encouragement or challenge, comfort or chastisement, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

St. Paul, in the letter to the Galatians, a community who was being swayed by false prophets, writes: "who are they, these people who insist on your being circumcised? They are men, all of them, who are determined to keep up outward appearances, so that the Cross of Christ may not bring persecution on them."

That temptation, not just of keeping up appearances, but worrying about human respect, is a danger for all times and all seasons, proving again that seemingly obscure passages of Scripture can speak a word that is needed.

The desire for human respect is not just a danger today, when it is in fact not very respectable to be a Christian, especially if you wish to advance in the media or academia, but is perhaps even more dangerous when Christian conformity, nothing too radical or dramatic, is acceptable in polite society.

The saints, the men and women who take their faith seriously, always disturb respectability. They make the world, as Chesterton said, "stand on its head." The saints are never worried about keeping up appearances; they are worried about fidelity. The burning heart of St. Paul's message which, as he says, is the real reason people are so concerned about conformity and exterior appearance in relation to the Christian faith, is the fear of persecution.

This persecution does not have to be "red martyrdom," dying for the faith as so many of our brethren are doing right now in Nigeria, Syria, and many other countries. The "white" martyrdom of fidelity is what, for the moment, we face in the West.

It is the fidelity of such a figure as the late, great, Cardinal George Pell, falsely accused, but faithful. It is the fidelity of Paivi Rasänen, the member of the Finnish parliament who, for merely Tweeting that marriage was between a man and a woman, and deploring the participation of her Church, the Finnish Lutheran Church, in the so-called "Pride" march, was...