By Randall Smith

I was sitting hard at work in my usual coffee shop the other day when the song "If Every Day Was Like Christmas" came on. It's that time of year when a lot of places are playing pretty much the same group of Christmas songs, which is pretty much the same group of Christmas songs you would have heard last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

Not that I'm complaining. But when I heard those sweet lyrics, "Oh, why can't every day be like Christmas," my immediate thought was: "But then we'd have to listen to these same lousy Christmas songs all year long!" We're not talking Adeste Fideles or Joy to the World here. I mean, who would really want to listen to Winter Wonderland and Santa Baby every day for the entire year? So that's one reason why every day shouldn't be like Christmas.

But asking whether every day can be like Christmas is like asking whether every day can be like Thanksgiving. If it were, we'd all be half-drunk and fat as cows. And we'd all be bankrupt from buying presents and there'd be broken toys everywhere and none of us would get any work done and, in short, we'd be miserable.

Hence the Church's wisdom in recognizing the need for liturgical seasons. There are times for celebrating and times for fasting. You don't go too long before you get a nice "feast day," and you don't go too long after that before you're doing another fast.

The year has a rhythm to it, and that rhythm is associated with the major events of salvation history, especially Christ's birth and Second Coming at Christmas, and His death, Resurrection, Ascension to the right hand of the Father, and sending of the Holy Spirit from Easter to Pentecost.

Now I can imagine someone's wonderful old grandmother asking: "Is that man being purposefully obtuse?" To which my reply would be: "If I'm understanding the meaning of the word 'obtuse,' then yes." In my experience, many people's grandmothers love that song, and not just because it was sung by Elvis. (My mother disliked Elvis but still loved that song.)

So I can well imagine a person who loves that song telling me with no little exasperation that the song isn't about perpetuating the eating and drinking and partying of Christmas every day of the year (although I think you'd be wrong to suppose that no one thinks that would be a good idea), no, the song is about perpetuating the feeling of Christmas for the rest of the year:

. . .a glow fills my heart I'm at peace with the world As the sound of their singing fills the air.

Oh why can't every day be like Christmas Why can't that feeling go on endlessly For if every day could be just like Christmas What a wonderful world this would be.

I'm not sure that's much better. I fear it might be a little like asking, "Why can't I have this warm, glowing feeling currently filling my heart about my spouse and baby every day of the year?" Good luck with that. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a good thing. But if you expect the feeling to last, you'll likely be disappointed. And if your "peace with the world" depends on maintaining that feeling, you likely won't have much peace, nor will the world. Feelings come and go. If you expect that, you'll be better off.

Okay, so let's bypass all this business about the song and get right to it. Wouldn't it be great if we could perpetuate the spirit of Christmas all year long? If by that "spirit," we mean the spirit of kindness, compassion, generosity, humility, and selfless giving throughout the year, then yes, absolutely. But how could that be done? I mean, we don't need a national holiday to do it. We have other national holidays that don't inspire those virtues - or any virtues - mostly more vices.

Well, I don't mean to be controversial, but it might have something to do with the "Christ" part, the Incarnation, the whole business about the God who created the world out of love so loving the world that He became man, a baby in fact, born of a woman an - act of love so great that it culmina...

By Robert Royal

But first, a note from Robert Royal: This column originally appeared in a slightly different form some time ago in Crisis magazine, but we thought that - amidst all the turmoil this year - it bears reprinting as a reminder of where the truly important things lie. All of us at The Catholic Thing - Dominic Cassella, Brad Miner, Karen Popp, Hannah Russo, and myself - wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Holy New Year. God bless us every one. Now for Robert Royal's column...

There are two, and only two, rational attitudes towards the Christmas season. One is P.G. Wodehouse's: "It was December, and another Christmas was at our throats." (I quote, accurately I hope, from memory). Whether it is the forced fellowship of most Christmas parties or just a sign of descent into premature curmudgeondom, each year I find myself more and more of this persuasion, as soon as Thanksgiving disappears and the real shopping craze begins.

The other attitude, which I wish I could say is more my own, may be best represented by a man criticized sometimes from the Jansenist/"Sourpuss" chorus (to invoke a sharp category of Pope Francis's) within the Christian persuasion:

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap, His hair was like a light. (O weary, weary were the world, But here is all aright).

G.K. Chesterton may have smoked, drank, laughed, and enjoyed himself more than a certain type of Catholic thinks seemly. At least he was enough of a Catholic that he never tried to argue that his own religious (and other) practices should become a universal rule for the whole Church: that we should, say, try to draw out particularly uncommunicative Trappists or tell abstemious Franciscans to lighten up a little. He performed the useful service of reminding us - us weary, adult Catholics - that joy and repose either are the very heart of our faith or we may have no true faith at all.

He also reminds us that joy is a true gift, not a brutally sentimental assault at brotherhood once every twelve months or something we earn during the rest of the year by exercise programs, self-improvement schemes, political reforms, or even religious practices.

The various princes of this world - and especially the scheming politicians and other demagogues in it - have a lot at stake in making us believe that they can devise policies and promote technologies for putting real happiness within the reach of human hands. They know that even when such illusions fail, they can always offer a new tonic, charge twice as much, and get an even bigger market share of the pursuit of happiness.

The Christian faith is quite different:

The Christ Child lay on Mary's breast, His hair was like a star. (O stern and cunning are the kings, But here the true hearts are.)

True hearts! Who even talks about such things anymore? Even in the Church? Instead, we have gone back to an ancient pre-Christian refrain: What is truth? And what are hearts, for that matter? Give us psychology, sociology, neuroscience, centering prayer, "wellness retreats." Above all, let us "take charge of our own lives." We already know what we want. The heart wants what it wants.

The Christ Child lay on Mary's heart, His hair was like a fire. (O weary, weary is the world, But here the world's desire.)

Many Christians profess this belief, but how many are willing to practice it? Saint Thomas More is reported to have said to his judges after they sentenced him to death, "I verily trust, and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation." Any man who can think about future merriment and hope for his executioners' salvation in the shadow of the axe can truly claim the name Christian. He knows what the world desires, whether the world knows it or not.

The faith is such an odd turning of everything we might have expected upside-down, bringing down the high, raising the...

By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

Now here is a curious thing. The Blessed Virgin Mary - the epitome of humility, faith, and obedience - does something that we do not typically associate with those virtues. She asks a question: "How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?" Of course, the whole point is that she asks the question in all humility, faith, and obedience. In so doing, she teaches us how to question and, thus, how to think properly about our faith.

And we have to think about our faith. Not to do so would be a disservice to the faith itself. God's revelation is addressed to rational creatures and must be received and responded to by such. Jesus Christ, the fullness of God's revelation, is the Logos - the word, idea, and or thought - made flesh. God is our "reasonable worship." (Romans 12:1) The failure to think warps and distorts the Catholic faith. It begets a superficial, superstitious, and brittle faith, apt to be shattered the first time someone asks a good question.

Unthinking faithful become easy prey. They are the seed along the path: "When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in his heart." (Matthew 13:19) An unthinking magisterium becomes tyrannical, not teaching God's word authoritatively but just imposing its own power.

Now, to appreciate our Lady's question, we have to contrast it with Zechariah's question from earlier in Luke's Gospel. (cf. Luke 1:5-23) The angel Gabriel appeared to him in the temple. Standing at the altar, he announced the answer to Zechariah's prayers, the birth of John the Baptist. In response, Zechariah asked, "How am I to know this?" At first glance, his question seems similar, practically the same, as Mary's. But the difference is profound.

How am I to know this? Well, God's messenger is standing in front of you. That should be evidence enough. If God's sending of an angel isn't enough, what will be? In modern terms, Zechariah's question would be something to the effect of "Yeah, right" or "Oh, yeah? Prove it." He is not receptive to the truth being announced to him. Rather, he insists that God prove Himself. Zechariah is a skeptic, not seeking to conform his mind to reality but insisting that reality prove itself to his liking. Which makes Zechariah an apt image of most modern thinkers.

Mary's question is different. "How can this be?" could be translated How shall this be? or even How is this going to be? Point is, she accepts that what the angel said will be. But she also wants to know how. Mary first trusted - she had faith - that God's messenger spoke the truth. Then, she wanted to understand how such a miraculous thing would occur.

So, this is the first lesson our Lady teaches us about thinking: to ask questions in faith. Theology is defined as Faith seeking understanding. First, we believe what God has revealed; then we seek to understand it more. We don't make our own understanding the condition of faith. We don't say, "Once you convince me, then I'll believe." That's what Zechariah did - and was punished. Faith in what God has revealed is necessary for the proper kind of thinking in the Church.

Indeed, faith is necessary for any kind of thought. Every teacher understands this because what their students need first is to trust them. If the student doesn't have this natural kind of faith, if he refuses to trust, then he will never be able to receive what the teacher has to impart. The bumper sticker exhorts us: "Question Authority!" That is the narrow mantra of those who refuse to be taught and will therefore never learn to think.

Second, Mary shows that we should ask questions with the willingness to receive the answer. Zechariah's question was the only answer he wanted. Our Lady's question shows an openness to instruction. Here it's good to recall Newman's line that "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt." A difficulty is a puzzlement or wonder about some aspect of the faith. It leads ...

By Anthony Esolen

"God is love," says Saint John, and "Our God is a consuming fire," says the author of Hebrews, for "it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

But we have fallen. We are sinners, slow of mind and hard of heart, nor do we rightly know what love is. We are apt to take it for our sentiments. If you think that hardness of heart is incompatible with sentimentality, consider that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the sentimentalist author of Emile, on the education of children, abandoned the five illegitimate children of his own to an orphanage in Paris.

I've never met a person who couldn't justify the wrong he had done because of some kind of love. Stalin could say that he loved Russia, and that he burnt out his soul with that love. Other people could take him at his word. You might check out, for example, the fulsome tribute that the otherwise brilliant W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to commemorate the death of Stalin.

It makes that mass murderer out to be an alloy of iron commitment to justice, and warm feeling for downtrodden man who, Du Bois says, stands in solemn acclaim for this courteous leader, conciliatory whenever he could be, inflexible only when he must be. Stalin - loving and beloved.

Dante says, in Purgatory, that love - meaning desire - is the seedbed of all the good we do and all the evil. That's a corrective to what his predecessors in love poetry sometimes seemed to say, that erotic passion of the noble and courteous kind, whether within marriage or outside it, is its own justification. A desire may, considered abstractly, be good, but it may be evil in the form it takes when we act upon it.

Most of the great poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is devoted to just this problem of love. Shakespeare says, with only apparent contradiction, that "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds." He does not say "It" is not love, but "love" is not love. That's no mere play on words. He is distinguishing between love and love, between something that we call love, and that we mostly feel as love and mistake for love, and what love really is.

People in the heat of lust talk much of love. But "such love is hate," says the poet Edmund Spenser, who was surely no prig. After he had written and published his first three books of The Faerie Queene, he says he got some sharp criticism from people who objected to his poetry of love, thinking that it might lead youth astray.

"Such ones ill judge of love, that cannot love," says he, "Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame." The word "kindly" there means "natural," "according to kind," as God created us in the beginning, in our kinds, and commanded us to be fruitful and to multiply. It names the prime end for sexual desire.

John Milton, who took heat from both high church Anglican and low church Presbyterian, defended his decision to portray Adam and Eve in all the naked glory of their innocence and their passionate marital love:

Hail, wedded Love, mysterious law, true source Of human offspring, sole propriety In Paradise of all things common else! By thee adulterous lust was driven from men Among the bestial herds to range; by thee, Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, Relations dear, and all the charities Of father, son, and brother, first were known. Far be it that I should write thee sin or blame, Or think thee unbefitting holiest place, Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets, Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced, Present, or past, as saints and patriarchs used.

In affirming that innocence would have made relations between Adam and Eve more delightful, not less, Milton is careful to show us the dampening and glooming effects of sin. For the first thing that Adam and Eve do after the fall is to make love, not in their sacred marital bower, but in the open air, and then they fall into a drunken kind of sleep, one that brings no rest.

That this seal of their sin was not an act of love, though they are married and though t...

By David Carlin

According to the ancient Greeks, the differentia between gods and men is that the former are immortal, the latter mortal. This belief in human mortality, it should be noted, was not incompatible with another widely held belief, namely that the souls (or ghosts) of dead humans live a miserable underworld life in Hades. But this "life" was hardly entitled to be called living. It was the antithesis of immortality. Only the gods were truly immortal.

In time, however, certain teachers came along - the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato, and others - who held that human souls too are immortal, or at least are capable of immortality. But given that immortality was the distinctive privilege of the gods, this was tantamount to saying that human souls are godlike; they're actual or at least potential gods.

That Socrates and certain others came to believe that humans are actual or potential gods means that they placed a very, very high estimate on the value of a human person. An Athenian contemporary of Socrates, older than himself by a generation, the tragedian Sophocles, gave classic expression to this sentiment when in his Antigone he wrote the famous choral ode that begins with the words:

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man. (Fitts & Fitzgerald translation.)

Given this high estimate of man, doesn't it make sense to believe that humans, like the gods, live forever? How weird it would be for God or Nature to bring so wonderful a being into existence and then, after a few days or years, utterly destroy him!

In the following centuries, this belief in the immortality of the human soul spread widely, though not universally, throughout the Roman world. And then along came Christianity, which confirmed the view that humans could become gods (though Christianity called them saints, not gods). The new religion also confirmed the other Greek belief, the dark belief in the eternal misery of Hades. Persons who had been virtuous in this earthly life would become gods/saints; persons who had been wicked would be sent to the inescapable prison called Hades.

Well, that was a long, long time ago. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And then, as the Empire dissolved, it remained for many centuries the religion of both Western and Eastern Europe. And when Western Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries split into Catholic and Protestant parts, both parties continued to believe that earthly humans are potential gods/saints - and potential devils as well.

But here we are today, in the 21st century. In a highly modernized country like the United States, many in our society, including especially those in our culturally elite sections, have repudiated the old religion and its belief in immortality. Of course, many ex-Christians have not yet repudiated Christianity by making an express verbal declaration; no, they remain nominal Catholics or Protestants; but, in effect, they've abandoned the old beliefs of their ancestors.

They continue to believe, based on empirical observation, that humans are capable of great goodness and great wickedness. But they no longer believe that good souls become gods/saints after death; nor do they believe that Hitler and Stalin go to Hell.

Now, if once upon a time the Greeks' exalted estimate of the value of the human person led, quite logically, to the belief that we humans have the capacity to become gods and to live, like gods, forever, what happens when we cease to believe in our immortality and godlike potential? Will we continue to have a very high estimate of the worth of an individual person?

Or will we think of humans as nothing more than biological entities, subject to death as are all other biological entities? Will we think of ourselves as things like birds and bees, flowers and trees, things of small worth that have their brief day and then vanish forever?

Will we inscribe tombstones for ourselves similar to ancient tombstones...

By Michael Pakaluk

But first a note: Be sure not to miss tonight's 8 PM broadcast of EWTN's "The World Over." Fr. Gerald Murray, Robert Royal, and host Raymond Arroyo ("The Papal Posse") will be discussing the latest document released by the Vatican - Fiducia Supplicans - which has raised a firestorm of commentary in its claims that priests may perform blessings of "same-sex couples" (as long as such blessings don't give the impression of being the equivalent of marriage), while maintaining that it's impossible for the Church to bless "same-sex unions." This will be one not to miss. And, as always, episodes of the show will be available on the EWTN YouTube channel shortly after first broadcast.

Now for Professor Pakaluk's column...

The U.S. Bishops issued a statement earlier this week on the Declaration Fiducia supplicans, reassuring the faithful that "The Church's teaching on marriage has not changed." But to say this is to miss the point, wildly.

More pertinent is whether the Church's teaching on non-procreative sex acts has changed; also, whether by the Declaration the Church now wishes to recognize a distinct type of relationship, which it regards as good - call it "spousal friendship between members of the same sex." Either change would mark a major shift in the Church's teaching on human nature and, it seems, a repudiation of St. John Paul II's theology of the body.

Let us return to a time long ago, back in 2021, when the Vatican taught that "the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex." More telling than the holding, however, were the three reasons given.

The first reason was that blessings are sacramentals, so that, "when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace." But such is not the case, it taught, for relationships that involve sexual activity outside of marriage: "[God] does not and cannot bless sin." The Vatican emphasized that the presence of good elements in such relationships could not negate this point.

In support, the Vatican cited no less an authority than an Ecumenical Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 61. In that passage, tellingly, the Council Fathers refer to "the liturgy of the sacraments and sacramentals." The Vatican back in 2021 assumed, naturally enough, that since blessings are sacramentals, they are by their nature liturgical. That a blessing by a priest in a cassock at the back of a Church would be non-liturgical, in the broad sense of "liturgy", would be an absurdity. A blessing did not need to be situated in a ritual to be liturgical.

The second reason was that blessings of persons are inherently related to sacraments, so that, if a relationship were blessed, the blessing could not fail to import the significance of marriage, regardless of the intentions of the persons involved.

The third and related reason - apparently the least important - was that the blessing of same-sex couples would create confusion in the faithful, as it would lead them to think that the nature of marriage had changed.

If the Church is to purport to do in 2023 what it said in 2021 that it could not do, these reasons must be "handled." Fiducia, accordingly, handles the first by claiming that blessings are among the most rapidly "evolving" sacramentals. Then it identifies a new class of blessings, "pastoral" blessings ("of mercy"), which apparently are not even sacramentals. It supposes that if these blessings appear to be spontaneously sought after, and non-scripted, they will be non-liturgical.

However, already Fr. James Martin has tweeted a picture of himself in clerics at the back of a church holding up his hand in a priestly blessing over a professed "married" same-sex couple. And he himself explained the radical change of the document by saying, "Today I can do what I was forbidden to d...

By David F. Forte

But first, a note: Be sure not to miss tomorrow's 8 PM broadcast of EWTN's "The World Over." Fr. Gerald Murray, Robert Royal, and host Raymond Arroyo ("The Papal Posse") will be discussing the latest document released by the Vatican - Fiducia Supplicans - which has raised a firestorm of commentary in its claims that priests may perform blessings of "same-sex couples" (as long as such blessings don't give the impression of being the equivalent of marriage), while maintaining that it's impossible for the Church to bless "same-sex unions." This one will be a not-miss. And, as always, episodes of the show will be available on the EWTN YouTube channel shortly after first broadcast.

Now for Professor Forte's column...

"Put Christ back into Christmas," we are told, often from the pulpit. "Take time out to pray and meditate upon the Advent season. Don't be distracted by all the shopping advertisements." All well and good. But I would also argue the contrary. It's in the noise of the Christmas season that we find Christ. Mary and Joseph and the Magi sought not to escape from the commotion, the drama, and "noise" surrounding the great moment. They traveled into it.

Consider these scenarios.

She finally has the Christmas cards addressed. Darn! Not enough stamps, and the post office has run out of the religiously themed ones. Is her address list up-to-date? It took forever to compose the Christmas letter, trying not to leave out any important events and people. She still has to fold the letters, insert them into the envelopes, seal them, and take them to the post office. It's all such a rush.

When that happens, we should think of Mary. As I once heard Mother Teresa explain to her nuns, "What did Mary do, after she heard that she was to bear the Savior? Did she stay at home and meditate on the great mystery? No, when she heard that her elderly cousin Elizabeth was also with child, she immediately got up to go on a long journey - a very long journey to help her. To wash the pots and pans and do whatever needed to be done."

Our Christmas cards are messages of love to people that we perhaps have not seen in years. So when the rush of Christmas cards is upon us, we should think of Mary and offer a grateful prayer, for every card we send is a visit to Elizabeth.

It's three days before Christmas and the roads are packed. There's hardly a space available in the mall parking lot. Too late for an Amazon delivery, the husband fears. "Have I got the right gifts for the kids? Or am I spoiling them again? I still haven't bought the one for my youngest - that doll she asked for - and I almost forgot my wife!" His budget is stretched. He worried about his credit card statements come January. It's all such a rush.

When that happens, we should think of the Magi. If indeed, these "wise men" had come from Persia, it was a journey of over 1,000 miles over often inhospitable terrain, a daunting trip in that era. Uncertain of the kind of greeting that they would receive, especially by the Romans, they pressed on, transiting the Parthians, the Decapolis, crowded marketplaces, hostile stares. It wasn't an inexpensive journey even for them, and they too sought to bring just the right gifts for the child.

Our travels to the mall and the Christmas sales can be nerve-wracking. Frustrating, too, if that special gift is now out of stock. And then there is the wrapping, the shipping to distant friends and relatives. But at such moments we should remember the Magi, and meld our journey into theirs. We, too, look for the right gifts for the right persons, objects of our love.

It's Christmas Eve. The children and wife are asleep at last. But besides the electronic gifts, there are still toys to put together: the tricycle, and wagon. "Why are there so many bolts and screws to this thing? I'm so tired that I can hardly read the directions, and they are so confusing anyway." In just a few hours, the children will wake him and his wife as they burst into t...

By Father Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.

Yesterday, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published a Declaration, with the signed approval of Pope Francis, entitled Fiducia Supplicans, "On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings." This Declaration articulated the importance of blessings in Biblical, historical, and ecclesial perspectives.

The Declaration states that it "remains firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church about marriage, not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion. The value of this document, however, is that it offers a specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings, permitting a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings, which is closely linked to a liturgical perspective."

So, the Declaration wants to uphold the doctrinal integrity of the blessing given within the sacrament of marriage, while simultaneously wanting to allow a blessing that is "linked to," but not similar to, a liturgical blessing given in marriage, thus, not causing confusion between the two. The Declaration boasts that this provision "implies a real development" that is in keeping with Pope Francis's "pastoral vision."

It continues: "It is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church's perennial teaching on marriage." Here, one perceives the real reason for which this Declaration was written - to bless "couples in irregular" marriages and to bless "same-sex couples."

The Declaration elaborates on these two situations. Within this pastoral vision "there appears the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex, the form of which should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage."

Nonetheless, although these blessing "do not claim a legitimation of their status," they "do beg that all that is true, good, humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit." The Declaration sees such blessings in accord with what's been traditionally called "actual grace. " The purpose of this grace is "so that human relationships may mature and grow in fidelity to the Gospel, that they may be freed from their imperfections and frailties, and that they may express themselves in the ever-increasing dimension of divine love."

In all the above, there is the appearance of reason, but also a great deal of jargon, sophistry, and deceit.

First, the Declaration professes that what is being offered is a development of doctrine in keeping with Pope Francis's "pastoral vision." In Essay on the Development of Doctrine, St. John Henry Newman provides criteria for judging what is true and what is erroneous doctrinal development (a "corruption"). Ultimately, he concludes, it's the infallibility of the Church that validates authentic development.

Newman puts forward, however, a hypothetical, though frightening, hypothesis. What if a council or a pope were to teach a doctrine that would contradict a previous council or pope? Newman declares that it would shatter the notion of doctrinal development, for who then would be able to judge what is authentically revealed and what is not?

Newman's alarming hypothesis is not so hypothetical today. Despite its claims to the contrary, the Declaration blatantly contradicts the perennial magisterial teaching of the Church concerning irregular marriages and the sexual activity of same-sex couples. Must one conclude, with Newman, that such teaching eradicates the very notion of doctrinal development and ultimately the very notion of doctrinal truth itself?

Here I would offer a thesis that Newman did not consider ...

Robert Royal and Fr. Gerald Murray discuss a new document — Fiducia supplicans — that came out today from the Dicastery on the Doctrine of the Faith, and approved by Pope Francis, that seeks to “broaden” and “enrich” the concept of “blessing” in the Church. This innovation, its seems, will even permit blessings for “same-sex couples” — just as long as they don’t give the impression of being the equivalent of traditional marriage.

By Brad Miner

Where has the time gone?

In 1990, when I was Literary Editor of National Review, I suggested that we do a college guide. It had the obvious title with a less obvious subtitle, "America's Top Liberal Arts Schools." I recruited Charles J. Sykes to help with the project. He'd recently published a fascinating book, ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. We then recruited five conservative scholars, flew them to New York, and developed, with them, criteria for evaluating American colleges and universities.

William F. Buckley Jr. wrote the Introduction.

I insisted that at the end of our endeavors, Charlie and I choose the school we'd want to attend were we 17 again. He considered the University of Chicago, University of the South, and St. John's College (the 2-campus liberal arts school), opting for the last. I titled my squib, "Somewhere in Indiana," and made the case for Wabash College and Notre Dame, opting for the Irish.

The second edition of the book came out exactly 40 years ago. My, how things have changed!

Of course, the term "politically correct" was very much in the air in the 1990s, so prophetic commentators might have seen our current (then future) madness coming, although even the most Isaiah-like seer couldn't have imagined the extent to which higher education would become subordinated to indoctrination. Transgenderism? Really?

One hears and reads a great deal these days about the rise of repressive leftism on campuses - of the kind that demands ideological conformity and rejects intellectual diversity: promoting LGBTQ-ism and refusing to allow dissenting voices on campus - or shouting them down if they try to speak. I've wondered if this is statistically valid or just the repetition of anecdotes blown up into a faux crisis.

For insight, I turned to the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings from College Pulse and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).

The rankings are not prophecies, of course, so the 2024 date is meant to suggest what students (and their parents) should expect to encounter on campuses in the next school year. The survey is based upon responses to a battery of questions from 55,102 students enrolled in 254 colleges and universities. That's a small number of the nearly 4,000 institutions that might have been surveyed, but it's certainly enough to indicate trends and differences.

I'll concentrate here just on Catholic schools. Out of the several hundred in America, the present survey looked at just 13. You may find it interesting that, overall (religious and secular), the best school for free speech is the Michigan Institute of Technology (score of 78.01) and the worst is poor, beleaguered Harvard (0.00).

Here are the Catholic schools listed in the FIRE report:

(Rated) Average:

DePaul (Chicago, IL) 53.18

Slightly Below Average:

University of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA) 40.84

Below Average:

University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN) 39.92

Creighton University (Omaha, NE) 38.58

Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, CA) 38.47

Loyola University Chicago (Chicago, IL) 38.09

University of Dayton (Dayton, OH) 33.83

Poor:

Boston College (Boston, MA) 29.94

Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI) 29.60

Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA) 25.25

Fordham University (Bronx, NY) 21.72

Very Poor

Saint Louis University (St. Louis, MO) 18.74*

Georgetown University, Washington, DC) 17.45

[*Saint Louis is a school that "clearly and consistently states that it prioritizes other values over a commitment to freedom of speech." With 5 others, it was "excluded from the rankings and. . .scored relative to" only those 5 others.]

Take all that as you will, but one thing in the FIRE overview struck a nerve:

More than half of students (56%) expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done, and just over a quarter of students (26%) reported that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes. Twen...