By Robert Royal

It's never easy to bring unwelcome truths into the public realm. And it's become increasingly difficult, for obvious reasons, since the advent of the Internet - to say nothing of the deep divisions we face at the start of this crazed election years. Or equally deep divisions in the Church. So, what light and steadiness can we possibly find at a moment like this in our untimely, ancient Catholic Faith?

To start, I'd suggest resisting something truly toxic that's been little noticed: letting public and private polarization - even over matters as transitory as mere policy differences - turn into "hate." We just observed Martin Luther King Day and there are many things about that pivotal American worth recalling in our time, perhaps nothing more urgent, however, than his warning: "Don't let them get you to hate them."

Crucial spiritual advice. A lot of people, whom you might expect would admire Dr. King, claim to find "hate" everywhere: "hate speech," "preaching hate," "hating women," "hating blacks," "hating LGBT." These are clever rhetorical tropes intended to hide their own thinly disguised "hatred" towards: Christianity, pro-lifers, opponents of LGBT ideology, or of "anti-racist" racism, and much more.

Still, we have to be constantly alert to the temptation to embrace "hatred" ourselves, even as we seek to counteract evil and promote goodness and truth. The term hatred, as it's commonly used these days, banishes the other into the outer darkness as damnably evil. King knew that even when you're facing monstrous evils, such hatreds might themselves become mortal sins. That it's possible to turn yourself into the very kind of people you "hate" unless you stand careful watch over your own soul.

There is - or at least ought to be - a clear distinction, among Christians and other people of goodwill, between hatred and anger. St. Thomas Aquinas, who knew a few truths about the human soul, wrote: "evil may be found in anger, when, to wit, one is angry, more or less than right reason demands. But if one is angry in accordance with right reason, one's anger is deserving of praise." (ST IIa IIae q.158 a.1)

In other words, there is "righteous anger," an anger proportionate to the evils that we must try to correct, not hide from or ignore. But there are good and bad ways to do so. A proper, righteous anger is, in its way, a form of love.

By contrast, there is no "righteous hatred" - if by hatred we mean essentially that we wish someone dead - and "damned to Hell."

In our post-Christian society, there's, unfortunately, a lot of that around, even in the Church. And it's the result of our failures to recognize our own sins and imperfections, need for forgiveness, and the unavoidable task of bearing one another's burdens. In other words, the pursuit of an earthly Utopia that never was and never will be. A Christian heresy.

Cardinal George Pell, who passed away just a year ago, wrote - after months of unjust imprisonment - in his Prison Journals:

When feelings run deep, it is especially useful to strive to remain calm and wise and to resist the temptations of uncharity, to hate. St. Thomas More's prayer to resist temptation is helpful. "Almighty God, assist me with your gracious help so that to the subtle suggestions of the serpent I never so incline the ears of my heart but that my reason may resist them and master my sensuality and keep me from them." [Italic added.]

A lot of people who have not had a very deep Christian formation haven't learned such subtle crucial distinctions between anger and hate. Those who know the difference in theory find how difficult it is to practice. But it can be done. When I was writing my book on the modern martyrs, one of the things that always struck me is how they often died - like Jesus - not cursing but praying for their executioners. That kind of charity cannot be faked.

Outside of Christianity, however, the desire for calm and wisdom - and avoidance of hate - can mean something else t...

By Brad Miner

In 1850, a small and sickly girl, the youngest of thirteen children, was born two months prematurely to a farm family in the Italian region of Lombardy. Francesca Cabrini would suffer from poor health her entire life.

When in her teens she decided to give her life to Christ, she was rejected by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, who considered her too weak to endure convent life. But she persisted and became a nun in 1877, taking the name by which we know her now: Frances Xavier Cabrini.

Years before, while visiting her uncle, Fr. Don Luigi Oldini, she placed violets into paper boats, dropped them into a stream, and imagined they carried her and other missionaries to China, where the great St. Francis Xavier had journeyed 300 years before.

When she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880, she told Pope Leo XIII of her wish to travel with her small group of Sisters to Asia to bring the Lord's love to the suffering poor there. But the pope had a better idea and sent her to the United States.

Pope Leo expressed skepticism even of that journey and its challenges, given her weakness (a worry compounded when people met her by the fact that she was barely 5 feet tall), but she told him, "We can serve our weakness, or we can serve our purpose. We can't do both."

Cabrini, the new film by the director of Sound of Freedom, Alejandro Monteverde, gives us Mother Cabrini in New York and in Rome, and - in both great cities - she found more hostility than help. But her faith and determination, as we know, overcame every obstacle.

Before she died in 1917, Mother Cabrini had established schools, hospitals, and orphanages - in the United States and around the world: sixty-seven in all. And all of them were run by women. Not for nothing is the official release date for the film March 8: International Women's Day.

In New York in the late 1880s, principally in Manhattan, Frances Cabrini (superbly portrayed by Italian actress Cristiana Dell'Anna) encountered slums, hunger, disease, and virulent anti-Italian sentiment - even among many Irish Catholics, not least among them Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan (David Morse).

With George J. Marlin, I wrote a book, Sons of St. Patrick: A History of the Archbishops of New York, that deals in part with this period. So, I know enough to say that, as history, Cabrini is uneven. For instance, Mr. Monteverde (and screenwriter Rod Barr) present Mother Cabrini in several tense confrontations with "Mayor Gould" of New York (John Lithgow). But New York City never had a mayor named Gould.

A New York Times muckraker named Calloway (Jeremy Nobb) writes, at Cabrini's behest, a blistering front-page story asserting that the city's Italians are forced to live like rats. But if there was a journalist of that name, I've found no reference to him.

Then there's the opera singer Disalvo (played by Rolando Villazón), based perhaps on Enrico Caruso. (It's Caruso's remastered voice dubbed in for DiSalvo's singing of "Vesti La Giubba" from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.) Disalvo's anticlericalism makes him unwilling to help the Catholic nun who has come to him seeking financial support for his poor countrymen struggling in New York.

In another film, such lapses in historical authenticity might have been egregious missteps. It's not the case here. History is important in Cabrini, but drama is more important. And, as they say, it's "Based on the true story."

And what a story it is. This little woman (Miss Dell'Anna is 5'5" but in her scenes with Mr. Morse and Mr. Lithgow - both of whom are 6'4" - you get the right sense of the disproportionate moral power Mother Cabrini was able to exercise over all the men God sent her to battle, like David against Goliath. And in just about every case in which Mother Cabrini went toe-to-toe with these men (even the muckraker has no interest in helping her at first), she won them over - building her "empire of hope" on the way to sainthood (proclaimed by P...

By John Barry

Three-quarters of a century ago, one of the greatest Catholic minds of modern times, praised by numerous secular thinkers as much as by his fellow believers, and whom T. S. Eliot called "the most powerful intellectual influence in England," identified a truth that has only become more evident since he wrote: "Religion is the key to history. We cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion. We cannot understand its cultural achievements unless we understand the religious beliefs that lie behind them. In all ages the first creative works of a culture are due to a religious inspiration and dedicated to a religious end."

The new year marks the 75th anniversary of Christopher Dawson's Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. For over 130 years, the Gifford Lectures have been one of the most prestigious scholarly forums dealing with religion, science, and philosophy. Adam Lord Gifford, a Scottish judge and intellectual, established the series in order to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God." The lectures began in 1888 and, with the exception of the intervening years during World War II, have been delivered continuously ever since.

Many pre-eminent thinkers in various fields delivered these lectures over the years, including philosopher Hannah Arendt, physicist Niels Bohr, French philosopher Etienne Gilson, mathematician and philosopher Alfred Lord Whitehead, the late contributor and friend of TCT Ralph McInerny, political philosopher Roger Scruton, and British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (a figure for treatment another day).

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), inimitable Catholic historian of religion and culture, delivered his widely prized Gifford Lectures on Christianity as the driving force behind the development and emergence of Western culture.

Dawson expanded on these lectures in his book titled Religion and the Rise of Western Culture which further elucidates, in contravention to popular thinking, the vibrant and fertile intellectual and spiritual history of the so-called "Dark Ages" which filled the cultural void created after the fall of the Roman Empire. It's a great loss that many people today, even many Catholics, are unaware of his vital work.

Dawson makes the case that religion is the great impetus behind history and a decisive factor in the rise and fall of civilizations. For the West specifically, he writes that "Christianity was the first universal religion to unite men of all races and nations in a common faith." His sweeping account describes the emergence of Western Christendom from the ruins of the Roman Empire to the age of Dante.

According to Dawson, this began with the conversion of the various Northern European "barbarian" tribes who formed a new spiritual community from the remnants of the Roman Empire through the amalgamation of Roman law and organization, Christian culture and tradition, and missionary zeal. Moreover, the rise of monasticism preserved classical culture and writings, fostered new scholarship, and created Medieval centers of learning which influenced the intellectual development of the West.

Chief among the innovations of monasticism was the emergence of a type of free society, "independent of external control and based on voluntary membership," which sanctified work and poverty as the spiritual and economic heart of rural life.

Dawson ties together the history of Christian learning throughout the Medieval period by distilling other pivotal aspects of the era, including: the Byzantine cultural and religious influence; the emergence of the papacy as a unifying political and spiritual force; the classical and artistic achievements of the Carolingian Empire; the religious and cultural significance of the Crusades and of Medieval reform movements; chivalry and courtly culture in the feudal world; and the establishment of schools and universitie...

Philosopher Michael Pakaluk joins TCT’s Robert Royal in a conversation about the controversial sexually lurid book by Cardinal Fernandez, the head of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, which has been rediscovered in recent days. Professor Pakaluk has also uncovered other essays by the Argentinian along similar lines, which he says indicate a kind of sexual idee fixe.

By Auguste Meyrat

There's a great line by St. John Henry Newman that Catholic apologists like to quote, particularly in debates with Protestants: "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." Among the strongest reasons to become Catholic is realizing how the Church continued to exist and thrive over the course of over two millennia, making it the oldest continuous institution on the planet. Surely, a divine force is working through the Church's members, driving them to spread the Gospel and build up God's Kingdom.

Recognizing and celebrating this miracle, H. W. Crocker the third has just published an updated edition of his history Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church. At a time when so many Catholics either ignore their own history or apologize for it, Crocker takes great pride in examining the great personages and achievements of the past.

True to his title, he shows how the story of the Church is one of amazing triumphs in realizing humanity's potential and being a tremendous force for good. Properly told, it's a story that will inspire the faithful and, let's hope, convert nonbelievers.

As Crocker demonstrates, the most important aspect of writing a comprehensive history of the Church is to make it readable. Unlike most modern histories that either revise events to fit a certain lens (e.g. "a Marxist take on the Sicilian Vespers") or contextualize their subject into oblivion (e.g., "St. Joan of Arc was the product of impersonal economic and social forces in 15th century France"), Triumph offers a clear and understandable narrative, featuring a diverse cast of movers and shakers throughout the ages.

To this end, Crocker focuses on the men who fought great battles on behalf of the Church. Sometimes he will write at length about saints like Athanasius, Thomas More, Ignatius of Loyola, or John Paul II, but he will devote even more pages to sinners like the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or "L'Empereur" Napoleon Bonaparte. Even from the outset, before mentioning Jesus and His Apostles, Crocker can't help but describe Constantine's momentous battle with Maxentius in his prologue, his first sentence functioning like the voice-over of an action movie, "Perhaps the legions had grown overconfident."

While displaying an obvious preference for certain historical figures, Crocker nevertheless succeeds in covering all of the great moments along with many of the small ones in the Church's history with impressive detail and drama. Some of the best parts of Triumph happen when Crocker describes some of the lesser-known episodes in Catholicism, like the guerrilla warfare campaigns of the Teutonic Knights in the Black Forest, the hectic reigns of the Avignon popes, the wars between Catholics and Puritans in the Netherlands, or the tragic decline of Mexico, a society that was once "a more advanced, older, better-educated, and devout civilization than the United States."

Crocker also shines when engaging with the biased conclusions of other historians. He defends the Renaissance popes as men well suited to their time: "The Renaissance popes were men who had to navigate the political world captured in Machiavelli's The Prince."

He does the same for the Church's inquisitions during the Middle Ages: "One of the very reasons the Church involved itself in these matters of secular law was so that the secular authorities would not act arbitrarily or use laws of heresy merely to punish their enemies."

He also sets the record straight with the twentieth century popes, specifically Pius XII who has been accused of supporting the Nazi agenda despite the fact that "outside the Allied armies, [he] did more during World War II to save Jewish lives from the Holocaust" than anyone else.

As one might expect, Crocker is clear about whom he believes are the villains of history. Head and shoulders above them all is Martin Luther, who incited the Protestant rebellion that broke Christendom. From the Thirt...

By Michael Pakaluk

Wikipedia says of a "whiskey priest" that he is "a stock character who shows clear signs of moral weakness while preaching. . .a higher standard." Perhaps you are familiar with the original whiskey priest in Graham Greene's novel, The Power and the Glory. Many Catholics are troubled by the book. If it is meant to portray the truth, that the objective work of the sacraments can be accomplished by a priest, in virtue of the "character" impressed upon his soul, even if he has deep flaws - then there is no problem.

But suppose Greene is saying something else, like "this is what sanctity looks like today"? Then surely that is problematic. And how far can that strange idea be taken? Suppose a priest habitually commits serious sins, like larceny or battery, can he be a saint? What if they are sexual sins? Supposing if he is living with his boyfriend?

Let's change the image. In 1996 a movie was released called Breaking the Waters, about a woman, Bess, whose husband becomes paralyzed from the neck down in an industrial accident. He asks his devoted wife, since she cannot have relations with him, to have sex with another man and tell him the details. She fights off her revulsion and does so, putatively to show her love. Subsequently, she spirals down into a degraded condition where she seeks out grotesque abuse. There's a kind of twisted altruism to her path of self-destruction. Could she perhaps beneath it all be a saint?

Yes, the priest and theologian Víctor Manuel Fernández opined in a 1999 article, "The Mysticism of Tending to Another." The key, he says, is to grasp what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: "Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors." [1735] Therefore, "a life of grace can coexist with actions which are objectively evil yet for

which a person is not fully responsible." Morality and mysticism can diverge, Fernández observes.

In people like Bess, "there can be a genuine gift of oneself to another, in which the Procession of the Spirit is prolonged, together with a beautiful (bella) sapiential experience, in which the Procession of the Son is prolonged - but coexisting with ethical defects. . .I can accept the positive interpretation which some commentators have placed on the film."

In another article the same year (again citing CCC 1735) he says, "Fools can also be in God's grace, even if they commit objectively grave actions, but are not guilty. . .holiness can coexist with psychic disturbances, to the point that a madman can be holier, living a more intense degree of charity, than a completely sane and healthy person." Once we reject Pelagianism, we see that "There is no preparation that can merit friendship with God, which transcends us." For all we know, such friendship may be granted to those who objectively are committing grave sins.

These articles were written at the same time as Fernández's orgasm book, La Pasion Mistica. I do not accept that that book is something he can now disclaim - not that he has done so. He was 36 years old, not a callow youth, already a widely published scholar. The book, then, must be imputed to his mature character and his considered judgment.

Besides, it requires sustained attention over many months for an author to see a book through to publication - outlining, drafting, editing, copy editing, proofreading. Lots of opportunities for second-guessing: no book can be dismissed as a "mistake" or the result of "inadvertence." Besides, the same strange use of the CCC 1735, the same idée fixe, is found in that book also (page 80), to underwrite the idea that persons in same-sex sexual encounters are not hindered from attaining the same heights of mystical ecstasy.

Not that the idée fixe is limited to just those years. In articles written five years later, and then ten years, he uses the idea in the same wa...

By Francis Ex Maier

I've written about an old and very close friend, Joe Mahoney, in this space before. Joe died in an automobile accident on Christmas Eve. He was 80. He left behind a treasured wife of 58 years, eight children, and 24 grandchildren. Most people have many friendships over a lifetime. But real friends, the intimate kind, tend to be few.

This makes sense. The word "friend" comes from the Old English freund, with an Indo-European root that means "to love." Love is an overused expression in our culture, and overuse cheapens a word's reality. We can like and admire dozens of other people. But the love of a true friend, like the love of a spouse and family, comes with obligations and strong feelings, including the pain of loss, because it involves giving away part of ourselves.

Most of us have limited room for that kind of generosity. The reason is simple. It involves a high degree of risk. And everything about the nation we've created over the past half-century encourages the opposite.

Fidelity is intrusive. It's a drag on our appetites; a cramp on our ambitions. But it was never that way for Joe. He was an exceptional Catholic man in every sense. A former Marine - he'd argue that there are no "ex-Marines" - he lived the motto of the Corps, Semper Fidelis, in his daily life. In a world of alibis and excuses for infidelity, he was "always faithful" - to his family, his Church, his duties, and his friends.

He was buried with full military honors on January 9, the first day of ordinary time on this year's Church calendar, at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. The morning was cold and the wind bitter. From a distance, we watched the casket lowered into the ground. His coffin fit the empty grave perfectly. It left a commensurate hole in the lives of those who loved him.

So much for personal memories. Here's the point.

Death is an ordinary part of everyone's "ordinary time." No one escapes it. And nearly all of us will be forgotten, sooner or later, by everyone but God. The result is predictable.

For the unbeliever, death is an obscenity. It's an outrage to be evaded as long as possible and eventually somehow wiped away by human ingenuity. That's a hopeless project, a project literally without hope in something above and beyond time as we know it. But even if such a project could succeed, life in this world would simply mean more of the same, here and now, without end. . .and not for just any child who happened to be conceived.

Immortality would have strings. The planet, so the argument goes, can barely support those of us already here. Fertility is already seen as an ambivalent blessing needing rational control, if not by willing individuals, then by more competent "experts." This is already implied in our relentless "reproductive choice" propaganda. It drives our international population control policies. In effect, the future is something to be feared unless carefully manufactured and controlled by the more (seemingly) intelligent among us.

Put simply: Nothing proves the foresight of C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength more forcefully than the social conditions we see emerging now. Infertility is made a virtue. Big families are vulgar, if not a vice. And empty nurseries are good for business, at least in the short run, because they free women from the burdens of child-rearing, weaken messy and inefficient bonds like marriage and family, and amplify the workforce.

The fewer with human "skin in the game," the more there is for the flesh and blood lucky few who remain. Or so the assumptions go, and that's clearly where they lead. The fact that populations age and cultures die in the process is a problem for study at a later date.

Thus our current leadership class is - ironically and blindly - very religious; "religious" in the word's minimal sense. In our case, the cult's creedal content is simply another variant of the ideologies that savaged Germany and Russia in the last century. The objec...

By John M. Grondelski

A newly published book, Faith, Rights, and Choice, details the evolution of the debate over religious schools in each of Canada's provinces. Unlike the United States where, since McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948, the Supreme Court has twisted the First Amendment's protections of freedom of religion into freedom from religion (especially in schools), Canada has afforded constitutional protection (and sometimes subsidies) to religious schools without anyone suggesting Canadian "democracy" was imperiled.

The title comes from the three foci the authors identify as successive bases on which proponents of those schools argued their case over the 156 years of Canadian nationhood. The focus was first on the rights of faith communities, especially minorities in given provinces (English Protestants in Québec, French Catholics in Ontario) to religiously-informed schooling. It later moved to "rights" to education, with religion often the substitute card for language/ethnicity. In recent years, it has shifted to "choice," including both parental rights and the benefits of educational competition.

Without detracting from any of those factors, let me suggest how we should move the debate forward, at least in the United States: via persons. Specifically, I have in mind the persons of a student and his parents who, given the child's status as a minor, have a legitimate role to act on his behalf. Bottom line: whom or what is education for?

The very interrogative pronouns in that question give away the issue. Is education for persons, i.e., students and their parents, or is it for schools, i.e., the institutions where students go?

Some readers may laugh at the question. Of course, education is for kids, not schools! But, if that's so, then why are educational dollars - one of the things that makes education possible - for schools rather than kids?

Education makes no sense apart from the person educated. We can talk about what a person is taught, e.g., should faith be part of education or not? We can speak about why a person may claim an education, i.e., is it his right or privilege? We can discuss the range of educational options, i.e., school choice. But the bottom line is: it all keeps returning to the person.

So shouldn't the question be answered on the basis of what a person is due?

On Catholic grounds, the answer would be "yes." A person has a right and duty to know things, including above all, God. A person has a right to education. Persons (in the case of children those primarily charged with their interests, i.e., parents) have a right to choose the appropriate education for that child. All this also stems, in the end, from the love due to a person, including his integral development as a child of God, endowed with intellect and freedom of choice.

On secular, democratic grounds, the answer should also be "yes." Education is a good of persons and benefits society. That a government does not support a particular church's form of education does not mean that it must, can, or should withhold support from a student who wants it. Society's non-religious affiliation does not translate into an individual's. And, in a society where religiously based education fulfills minimum state requirements under compulsory education, society cannot "stack the deck" by preferring one compliant school over another without abridging the equality of persons who might prefer a different school, or the equality of institutions that otherwise meet recognized educational standards.

My argument clearly goes in the direction of promoting school choice, but not for the economic reasons offered by many of its advocates. The authors of Faith, Rights, and Choice recognize that there are two competing motivations under the rubric of "choice." One is parental choice: parents, on behalf of their children, should be able to pick the appropriate school that is otherwise educationally qualified for their child. The other is institutional and econo...

By Robert Royal

Last week, Pope Francis spent 40 minutes - a long time for a busy man - with representatives of DIALOP, a group that engages in Christian-Marxist "dialogue." It was formed in 2014 after he met with some of the founders. It will probably only be remembered as a mere blip compared with much more momentous things that he's done. But for the hundreds of millions of people who suffered and are still suffering under Communist regimes - and for many of us who worked with St. John Paul II towards the demise of the Soviet Union and other murderous Marxist outposts - the disinterment of this long-dead corpse is no small matter.

Given Marxism's record of tyranny and death - a body count three times as great as Nazism's (itself National Socialism) - where was the pope's principle in Evangelii gaudium [231] that, "Realities are greater than ideas"? There are good reasons why there's no Christian-Nazi dialogue. Why does Communism get a pass?

Even in its heyday a half-century ago, the Christian-Marxist "dialogue" did little other than weaken Christian resistance to what every modern pope has condemned as a fundamentally evil ideology. Leo XIII prophesied in Rerum novarum (1891), just a few years after Marx's death, that if socialist ideas were "carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer." [4]

It's a great historical irony that it was the largely Catholic workers of Polish Solidarność who lit the fuse that blew up Communism. In Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio sometimes argued that "God's faithful people" didn't want Marxism. But at the recent Vatican meeting, he praised the search for a kind of common humanitarian project, "instead of rigid approaches that divide, let us cultivate, with open hearts, discussion and listening."

Who takes Communism seriously today, real Communism as we know it from history - a nightmare, not the "dreaming of a better world" that Pope Francis and others see in humanitarian initiatives of this sort? It's precisely sentimental dreaming that enabled unprecedented carnage.

You have to wonder what Marx would have thought of all this. Anyone familiar with his "scientific socialism" knows that he scorned the softheaded humanitarian socialisms that existed in his day - and still do in ours. Marx, with typical Enlightenment hubris about the powers of atheist reason, believed that he'd demonstrated how the revolution would take place by inexorable laws of history: The forces of capitalist production would increasingly exploit the workers, large numbers of the poor would rise up and, almost without the need for violence, simply "expropriate the expropriators."

Of course, this never happened despite Marx's "science of history," because there is no such science. Communism conquered places where "capitalism" hardly existed: primarily Russia and China (then Laos, North Korea, Vietnam). You might try to argue that Cuba sort of resembled what Marx thought would happen everywhere under capitalism. But that has to be balanced against the fact that Cuba was wealthier - and even less oppressive - before Communism than in its current disastrous state. (I've been there and seen it.)

Eastern European countries had Communism imposed on them by the USSR after World War II. The Soviets almost succeeded via proxy wars in Africa and Latin America. But the actual Marxist vision about the "arc of history" didn't go as expected. It was monstrous everywhere it's been tried, producing over 100 million dead in the course of a century or so.

Yet the dream - the deadly illusion - continues. It's interesting that Communism and the social justice movements more generally have moved away from their classic foci - politics and economics - and into the realm of culture. They had to.

During the 1980s, as the Cold War was coming to an end, you sometimes heard complaints from Marxists that the embourgeoisement of workers - i.e., greater prosperity - in capitalist countries was undermining revolutionary...

By Elizabeth A. Mitchell

In the aftermath of blood and horror, after murders that have led to further murders, crimes, and coverups, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth descends into madness. She sleepwalks with a candle at night recounting the crimes and admonishing her husband, "What's done cannot be undone." (Macbeth, Act V, scene 1)

Indeed.

As king, Macbeth had hoped to accomplish good through evil, to gain the throne through regicide, and then to rule in peace. And yet, his crimes are now compounding. Nothing can stop the momentum and the descent. "It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood." (Act III, scene iv)

Things have gotten out of hand in Macbeth's realm, and more death and chaos are the natural progression of a disordered and diabolical event. The aftermath cannot be revised, nor indeed, can it be controlled.

And so it is with the Declaration Fiducia supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings. Hoping that the sleight of hand of turning our attention to an amplification of the meaning of blessings would distract our attention from the blessing of sin, the Declaration, written by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and approved by Pope Francis, unleashed an unstoppable force. Intentionally.

The worldwide media did not wait to parse the paragraphs. They saw sin condoned, they hooted, and they howled, and they announced the Catholic Church's new stance on sin to the world. Homosexuality and living in sin are now (though somewhat covertly for now) condoned and approved. In fact, these are now asserted as actions with redeemable, even admirable, qualities. And what is done, in the world of the media soundbite, the photo op, and the communications coup, cannot be undone.

Such grave misleading of the flock into untruth is soundly condemned by Our Lord. He states, clearly, to his disciples, in the Gospel of Luke: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves." (Luke 17:1-3)

On matters of sin, Our Lord is unequivocal. But we might forget His words, were we to listen to their revision by the spin doctors long enough.

On living in sin, the Lord says: "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery." (Luke 16:18).

To the woman caught in adultery, the Lord says: "Go and sin no more" (John 8:11)

On homosexuality, God's word says:

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. . .because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.

Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. Romans 1:22-27.

Impurity. Degrading. A lie. Shameful acts. Due penalty. Error.

And, in words that should give us all pause: "Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." (Romans 1:32)

We thank, profoundly, those Bishops Conferences, and individual pastors all over the world, who have spoken God's righteous decree clearly in recent days: churchmen who have declared that the Declaration cannot be implemented.

For instance, in a statement on December 23, 2023: The British Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, responding to widespread confus...