The Catholic Thing

By Stephen P. White

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight – Thursday, August 20 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 debates about synodality and liturgy, liberal nuns who challenge Church teaching, and other current issues in the Church and the world. 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 columns...

I remember a moonless summer night at a campsite in North Dakota, almost forty years ago now, when the stars were so innumerable and bright, it was difficult to pick out the familiar constellations. The night was so black that I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, but the stars hung so thick and low I thought I could reach out and pluck them from the firmament like bunches of grapes. Billions of stars. It was, in an older and truer sense of an abused and overused word, awesome.

My late father loved astronomy. He knew a great many constellations and most of the names of the brightest stars. I remember on dark nights at home in the Midwest, he would point them out. Straight above us there were Vega, Altair, and Deneb. They make up the Summer Triangle. There was Cassiopeia. And the Corona Borealis. Over there, in the South, was Scorpio with the great red giant, Antares. As autumn comes on, Scorpio will sink below the horizon, and Orion will rise; the great hunter chasing a quarry he will never catch.

He taught me that our eyes see color best in the center of our focus, but light sensitivity is slightly better just beyond the edge of the center of sight. The dim star you might not see if you gazed at it directly might be just visible if you looked just to one side or the other. That's how he taught me to find the Andromeda Galaxy – the most distant object visible with the naked eye. I have only seen it once. But I have seen it.

Dad eventually got a telescope – a quality amateur instrument with a mirror eight or nine inches in diameter – and he would bring it out on clear nights to look at the nebula in Orion's belt, or to see the rings and moons of Saturn, or to gaze at the crescent of Venus following the sinking sun. The telescope was really overkill for inspecting the craters of the moon; binoculars were best for that.

We used to talk about the most amazing night skies we had ever seen. There was that night in North Dakota – never seen anything like it or since – where we could see the Milky Way clear overhead, the aurora to the north, and lightning crawling over thunderheads, like luminescent cauliflowers, to the south.

Over the years I realized that those nights with Dad, staring up at all those pinpoints of ancient light and wandering planets, were a kind of theodicy.

Dad was a family doctor. He spent his days around people who were sick and suffering. He helped many of them get well and even thrive, but he also knew that everything he did was ultimately a stall. He fought a losing battle against mortality every day. We all do, of course; he just saw that more clearly than most of us.

Dad's fascination with the stars wasn't merely therapeutic – though it was that, I suppose – it was closer to contemplation in gratitude. It was an exercise in wonder. See what unfathomable glory the Lord has made? What greater remedy to the problem of suffering, the problem of human frailty, than to gaze with wonder upon God's own handiwork?

Wonder is not, strictly speaking, a virtue. But it does inoculate the soul against cynicism. Wonder begets humility and gratitude – which are virtues – both of which go a long way to transforming the suffering of this life from something one hopes to avoid or at least endure into something that opens into redemption.

And I find that looking up is a remarkably effective way to inculcate a sense of wonder....

By Robert Royal

We recently reached the 250th anniversary (a quarter-millennium) of the dominant nation and culture of our time – and of one of the greatest countries in world history. Yet just a few weeks later, you'd hardly know it. And only a month ago, everyone was talking – even here – about a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, a 3000-year-old foundation stone of our civilization. That, too, passed quickly and is unlikely to become a classic. The Church keeps better time – witness the recent Feast of the Assumption. But we need much greater attention to what's important, deep, steady, and (relatively) lasting even in our passing world.

Now and then, we get it, for instance, Patrick J. Deneen's new book American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls. Many know Deneen as the author of Why Liberalism Failed and one of the brighter lights at Notre Dame. But he has had a long interest in the Odyssey and its connections to the American experience. And he deliberately timed the book to come out at this moment.

At first sight, connecting modern America to Bronze-Age Greece may seem a stretch. But in this brief, lively, and approachable treatment, Deneen ably uncovers several valuable truths. To begin with, as the book's subtitle indicates, Deneen sees a deep divide particularly in American souls, and one that has existed from the beginning.

The Pilgrims, he notes, crossed the wide Atlantic on their "errand into the wilderness," but also in search of a true home. They were not just explorers, like Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci (who gave America its name), but also somewhat similar to Odysseus in seeking their proper place. At the same time – and here's the divided soul – in a sense they were explorers, leaving home in search of a better life, "a city on a hill."

Deneen traces this paradox through American culture. We are, more than most nations, a people who are both restless and seeking rest – but a rest that lies over the horizon. Augustinian echoes are obvious here, in that all human beings are seekers, of course, often not knowing that the only real rest is in God. But in America that perennial search also has had this-worldly personal and social dimensions.

As an Italian friend of America wrote decades ago, we're the only people on earth whose very Constitution confesses to seeking a "more perfect union," mere perfection being not enough for us.

Deneen explores this ambivalence in the American soul via several landmarks in American popular culture. In The Wizard of Oz, for instance, especially the film version, Dorothy yearns for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." And she gets it in Oz where – like Ulysses – she encounters strange beasts and multiple adventures. But it's precisely those experiences that help her to realize "there's no place like home," even a plain farm in Kansas.

In a later chapter, Deneen notes a similar division in the film It's a Wonderful Life. The young George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) wanted to see the world, do great things, escape the "limits" of small-town life. But forced to take over the family business, he never has the chance. Yet – as the heartfelt Christmas conclusion makes clear – he did achieve great things, even had adventures of a sort, by not leaving and therefore living the heroic life of "ordinary people."

Several of Deneen's comparisons are surprising. The Laura Ingalls Wilder series "Little House on the Prairie," set in Mankato, Minnesota, may seem as distant from the Odyssey as a story can be. But Deneen traces exactly what must have been the attitude of many settlers who journeyed into the wide-open American West, an odyssey and errand into the wilderness to be sure, but also a search and a discovery of a new home.

These readings can at times also be a little strained. Field of Dreams, a great film about the quintessential American sport – baseball – displays elements of voyaging and nostalgia, to be sure. But it takes no little forcing to fit it into the overal...

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray

The recent annual Assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious received a video message from Pope Leo XIV, in which he said:

All Christians are called to be builders of Christ's communion, formed in a synodal Church in which everyone cooperates in the same mission according to their own charism and ministry. In a special way, those in religious life are called to become experts in synodality due to the opportunities afforded by community life to practice it, as well as the very way that your congregations are organized.

What, though, is "a synodal Church" in which women religious are "called to become experts in synodality"?

An answer to this question was given by Sister Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ Undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, who addressed the Assembly in person:

Synodality is not a programme to be implemented, not a project with a 2028 deadline, not one more meeting. It is about our deep identity as Church, rooted in the mystery of the Trinity. It is not about being another Church but about being the Church in a different way. . .to move from one culture to another: from a culture of clericalism, hierarchicalism and institutional self-sufficiency to a culture of listening, co-responsibility, discernment and genuine exchange.

She went on to describe synodality as a "social prophecy" and a "grammar of peace." She also said, "What I have learned in these years accompanying the synodal process of the Universal Church is this: the Holy Spirit is not waiting for us to be ready. The Spirit is already at work."

Sister Becquart's comments are opaquely revelatory: synodality is presented as a necessary innovation, a different culture, a much-needed reform effort to reclaim the Church's true identity and vitality. Synodality means the birth of a new style of "being Church," but it is not "another Church" at odds with the pre-synodal Church. Incoherent reassurances such as these are a smokescreen hiding what is obvious: the synodal project is an attempt to remake the Catholic Church into a new entity akin to various Protestant churches.

A close look at Sister Becquart's remarks reveals them to be an exercise in sloganeering. Slogans are useful in advertising. Synodality is a new, unknown product on the market. Wary customers need to be convinced to buy into it.

But a number of questions arise:

The Holy Spirit is always at work within God's Church. How does Sister Becquart know that He is now at work calling us to embrace the emergence of a synodal "Church in a different way"?

Sister Becquart's remarks are confirmation that synodality is a largely meaningless word that is used by those in charge of the synodal process to promote a set of ideas that are shockingly revolutionary in nature – and thus in need of semantic camouflage.

The people in charge of the Synod have created a semantic shield for their project. They attempt to hide the plain truth that they want to create a new Church with a new doctrine in which the hierarchy will share governing authority with lay people and in which heterodox impositions will be characterized as the community's discernment of where the Holy Spirit is leading the Church.

They present themselves as reformers, not revolutionaries. They simply want to do away with an outdated clericalist and "hierarchicalist" culture, lingering from a lamentable past, that diverted the Church from her true synodal nature which will now be restored by the common effort of all the faithful, guided by the Holy Spirit (and the Synod Secretariat) to throw off that outdated culture.

The synodality steamroller is a danger to the Church. It needs to be seen for what it is, and stopped before it wreaks any more havoc upon the Church.

By Randall Smith

I sometimes hear people say something like this: "I want to believe, but I just can't," or "I would like to believe, but I just don't." I don't wish to be critical of such people. I assume their reserve about "faith" comes out of a good-willed desire to be honest about themselves – like someone admitting, "I wish I were a calm, temperate person, but I'm just not."

So, although I respect the goodwill, I still would wish to ask this person: "What do you think faith is?" "What do you think having faith is like?" I fear sometimes that people think "having faith" is the same as "being certain," or that "having faith" is a feeling you get when you're sure of something. What if it's not? What if it's something else? What if it's like love – not quite a feeling as much as a way of living?

Before we could explore the question of faith, we would need to get clear on something else. People don't just "have faith"; they have faith in something. In God. In God's love for us. That God's love for us is expressed and embodied in Christ. So, we wouldn't just ask about faith – that's much too vague. We would start by asking what this person believes or doesn't believe in.

So, for example, we might ask: Does it seem reasonable to you that the entire universe, with all its beauty and order, and especially with human beings capable of knowing, loving, and sacrificing for each other, came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing? It is hypothetically possible, but is that what you believe? Some people do. Do you?

Are you convinced that life – all life – and all existence is essentially meaningless? Because if you're not convinced of that, then it is possible that life is meaningful. And in fact, don't you live your life that way? Haven't you shown by the way you live your life – caring for people, trying to do good things rather than selfish things, appreciating beauty, and trying to understand the things around you more profoundly – that you do believe in something?

If we look at the way you actually live, wouldn't we have to conclude that you actually believe that living this way is meaningful, not meaningless? You act as though selfless care for others is meaningful, as though acting with love and care for others is good. You don't have any scientific proof that this sort of life is intrinsically meaningful and good. But you live as though it were. That's a kind of faith.

So what if I said to the person who claims they wish they had faith but just can't: "But wait, you actually do have faith; you just haven't realized it or reflected on it." That presupposition you bring to the way you look at the world and the way you live your life when you assume that courage and kindness and generosity and care are better than cowardice and cruelty and arrogance and selfishness – that is part and parcel of what Christians call "faith."

There's no scientific proof that this life is better. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to suppose that being selfish makes more sense than being selfless. Do you sometimes say to yourself: "I must be crazy to live this way, giving myself selflessly to others rather than just getting everything I can for myself?"

So, what keeps you coming back to selflessness and care and generosity? Is it something you've noticed in your experience? Is it something you just sense is true? That sense you have that something you can't touch or measure or prove scientifically is in fact true – true with the kind of truth you would be willing to bet your whole life on, even though sometimes you're not entirely certain about it – this is what Christians call "faith."

There's no need to get caught up in the word. Call it what you like. But just so you know: you have faith. You just haven't examined it.

So, for example, if you realized that you do believe that life is intrinsically meaningful – not only your life, but the life of all creatures – then you might start asking other questions, such as: How could that be? How coul...

By David G Bonagura, Jr.

A wave of egalitarianism, swelling for over two centuries, has broken over every corner of the West, including the Church. In its backwash, among other aspects of Catholic life, the approach to vocations in the Church has slowed. Older Catholics would have heard in their youth that a vocation to the priesthood or to religious life is the "higher calling" compared to the Church's other vocational sacrament, holy matrimony.

For younger Catholics, this label and this comparison have seemingly been swept out to sea. It's not that the Church has given up promoting religious vocations – far from it. In the United States, we have National Vocations Awareness Week each November and Good Shepherd Sunday after Easter as designated annual occasions for this effort, to say nothing of others less prominent. And during these periods, I have heard fine homilies and read good pieces on the beauty of priesthood and religious life.

Alongside this constructive work, I have often heard, sometimes even in the same sentence of a petition read at Mass, the promotion of vocations to the diaconate and to marriage. These are legitimate and holy vocations within the Church. Each has produced wonderful saints who have lived their respective callings with heroic fervor. But are these vocations all equally worthy to be prayed for within the same sentence?

Let's be honest: the priestly and religious vocations are, in a certain sense, in competition with marriage, which is the normal form of life for adults within the Church – and, again to be frank, one that does not require hours of discernment. Humans are biologically attracted to marriage.

The religious vocation asks prospective men and women to sacrifice their natural desires on behalf of something that cannot be seen, touched, or heard. That's a tough sell in itself. When this sell is pitched as one vocational option as good as the other, the abysmally low number of seminarians and religious novices vis-à-vis the Catholic population will come as no surprise.

How, then, do we "sell" priestly and religious vocations? What if that "something" we cannot see, touch, or hear is the ultimate Good, the Cause of our existence, and our Destination when we die? What if that "something" is both the source and the fulfillment of happiness? What if that "something" has created me and designated me for Him for all eternity?

Here we return to that phrase washed out to sea: the priestly and religious vocations are indeed a higher calling because its primary object is the highest thing – God. To represent God directly as the priest does, to espouse God directly as the religious does, these things fulfill their life's mission as immediately united with God.

The primary object of marriage is service of one's spouse. God, as the object of the service, is then the secondary object of marriage.

It should hardly be controversial, then, to call the priestly or religious vocation "higher."

Since God is the highest Good, the be-all and end-all of existence, the first discernment question a young person should ask himself is not "What am I called to?" but "Am I called to serve God directly as His priest or as His spouse?" What greater thing is there in this life than to anticipate eternal life in one's being? Whether through the offering of the Mass or the full consecration of the self to God, the priest and religious manifest God's saving power in the very structure of their lives.

Could there be any other call more noble, more joyous, and more exciting?

From this initial question, many others follow. Some pertain to the individual Catholic discerning what exactly God has planned for him; others arise in protest to a hierarchical ranking of vocations. The two lines of questioning are not exclusive.

First, those not called to the priesthood or religious life are not "inferior" – meaning "bad" or "inadequate" – Catholics. They simply have a different calling. Should someone be upset about this fact, he...

By Michael Pakaluk

Why debate what the development of doctrine looked like in distant eras of Church history when we have three instances in front of us, two of which were seen and commented upon by that great Saint of Development, John Henry Newman?

By "right in front of us," I mean the extended present of the Church's self-consciousness, which reaches back to Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility in 1870, and Pius XII's definition of the Assumption in 1950.

These are three examples of the Church developing its doctrine. That is why today's Feast may be viewed not simply as teaching a truth, that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven, but also as exemplifying a truth about what development amounts to.

More than examples, they are paradigms, that is, examples which serve as standards. We hear a lot from some clerics about "paradigm shifts" in the Church's teaching. These men are using "paradigm" in Thomas Kuhn's sense of a conceptual framework. When one such paradigm is replaced by another, Kuhn said, there is no continuity between the older and the newer frameworks. What Newton meant by "force," for instance, is not the same as what Einstein meant by "force," although the words are the same.

But the older and original meaning of a paradigm is an example that serves as a standard, such as when (perhaps) you learned amo, amas, amat as a paradigm of first conjugation verbs in Latin. "You want to construe laudamus?" The teacher says, "Look to your paradigm."

These paradigms of development point to sameness, not difference, in the Church's teaching. They teach that the crucial move in development is not "we used to believe this, but now we believe this," but rather, "we see that we have believed this all along."

To develop, in the first instance, is to define explicitly and sharply what was held implicitly and, to some extent, inchoately. It is to make uniform what was left in rough form, and it is to make binding on all what formerly was held in the manner of a loose "consensus." In the second instance, it is to become clear that one doctrine, not yet defined, has belonged to the same family as others, already defined.

In a letter to J.D. Dalgairns on January 22, 1855, Newman says that he has received a copy of Pope Pius IX's Bull on the Immaculate Conception. He quotes the key words in Latin (here in translation), underlining some: "We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful."

He says that the words seem to leave open precisely how she was so preserved: he does not think the definition endorses Scotus's view that the work of the Redemption was applied to Mary retroactively. And then he adds, "It is remarkable that the Bull does not define the doctrine, but defines that it is revealed, and therefore of faith."

That is to say, all that the pope does is transfer a truth from "believed" to "needing to be believed." In various places he says that he finds, when he reflects upon the matter, that he has always believed this truth: "it really does seem to me bound up in the doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve," he writes in his Letter to Pusey.

Newman's problem becomes, then, to explain why Anglican Christians of goodwill do not, likewise, already hold it. He finds two reasons.

The first is that they confuse active and passive conception: the doctrine is not that Anne conceived Mary in a way that would not have passed on Original Sin (active immaculate conception, a heresy), but rather that Original Sin would have been passed on to Mary, except for a singular ...

By Christopher Kaczor

Who is Notre Dame's MVP? I don't mean the Most Valuable Player on the football team. I mean the Most Valuable Professor on the faculty. If there is any justice on earth, John Cavadini deserves that honor. At a time when many complain of poor university teachers and defections from Catholic truth, he has excelled not just for one season, but for over thirty years. More than any single person during that period, he has preserved and transformed Notre Dame and the Church for the better.

Cavadini earned his Ph.D. in 1988 from Yale University. As a grad student, he rose before dawn to work as a garbage collector to support his growing family. It happened that one day, one of his Yale professors spoke to him amidst a group of other Yale professors and grad students: "John, you do fantastic work." Waiting to hear praise about his insight into Augustine or his exegesis of Origen, John heard the professor continue, "You always put the lids on the cans and return the cans right where they go."

Indeed, the other garbage collectors also recognized his talent and elected him the president of their union. As they used to say, "Business is picking up."

In 1990, he joined the Notre Dame Department of Theology and retired from collecting garbage (mostly). I met John in his class on ancient Christianity in the Fall of 1992 and again for a class on Augustine of Hippo. When speaking in class to his students, he called us "friends," and he meant it. Like an older and wiser friend, he mentored us, challenged us, and nurtured us. He invited our entire class of more than 20 students to his house to share an Italian dinner and meet his wife Nancy and his seven children.

But I didn't know then, nobody knew then, how important John Cavadini would become not just to his students, but to the Department of Theology, to the University of Notre Dame, and to the wider Church.

In 1997, he was appointed chair of the Department of Theology, the first chair who was not an ordained priest. At this time, the overwhelming majority of Notre Dame's theology faculty wanted to relax, abolish, or paint over in beige what is distinctive, weird, and challenging about Catholicism.

These faculty thought they would fulfill the "spirit of the Council" by pushing the Church of Rome to become like the Church of England. In academia, few things are more difficult than changing the orientation of a large department full of tenured professors. The professors determine who is hired, and they almost always want to hire scholars who think in similar ways to themselves.

But as chair, from 1997 to 2010, John hired experts in Newman, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Cavadini advocated for an intellectually rigorous, historically informed, and vibrant Catholicism. Despite all odds, he transformed the department.

The nourishing fruits of these changes have been astounding. By contrast with the theology departments at other Catholic universities which are in crisis – with few majors and minors – the theology department at Notre Dame has 306 majors and 585 minors, a full 10 percent of the student body. They have hit record highs for ten straight years. Unlike departments that have changed in reality from Catholic theology to secular religious studies, the Notre Dame Department of Theology is actually a department of theology.

This strengthening in faith has happened with a corresponding increase in reputation. The Notre Dame theology department is currently ranked number one in the world, ahead of Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, and Yale. If you are interested in the question, "How can a Department of Theology achieve top rankings given the dominant intellectual trends that are ranged against it?" you can read Cavadini's "6 Easy Rules for Achieving a Top Ranking."

The transformation of the Notre Dame theology department alone is enough to merit MVP status for Cavadini.

But in 2000, Cavadini also became Director of the Mc...

By John M. Grondelski

The Institute for Family Studies just released "The Demographic Dead End: Without Action, American Population Will Soon Decline," the most recent of many studies pointing to the impending cataclysm for Western societies from extended periods of below-replacement fertility rates. The IFS study is hardly unique: more and more people and institutions are talking about population decline and aging societies.

Despite the handwringing, however, few politicians or other public figures are doing much about it, and their suggested solutions are polarized: the Left mostly proposes importing Third World "replacement" populations, especially to do hard work, while the Right recommends helping the market's "invisible hand" with pro-natalist government subsidies.

Both sides fail to recognize a basic postulate of Pope St. John Paul II's thought: Culture is upstream from politics and economics. We are not going to fix our demographic dearth without first fixing our culture. And that means grappling hard with the "ethic of choice."

Liberal Western societies enshrine free "choice" as a basic value. The United States, in particular, has long espoused laissez-faire choice.

But that embrace of choice was tempered in our societies by other cultural factors. American society, when it was still shaped by mainline Protestantism (with a Catholic immigrant minority), tempered unfettered choice with moral norms.

Even in Western societies that consciously sought to tear up their religious roots, e.g., France laïque, Christian cultural holdovers kept partially in check the worst impulses of free-ranging choice, not least because of their concrete experience of what happens – e.g., the Reign of Terror – when those checks were ignored.

Those societies are largely gone. Secularization has dissipated cultural Christianity, even in America to a large degree. Many Christian denominations have abandoned normative goods: take a look at the fractures, mostly over sex, in the American Protestant Mainline. There are also those in Catholicism who would like to accompany those neo-Protestant Pied Pipers. And contrary to charges that opposing those infidelities is importing "pelvic theology" into a Christianity that has "moved on" to "more serious" matters, pelvic matters are hardly incidental inasmuch as no one would exist without them.

Mainstream Christianity recognized that people had choices. But there are good choices and evil choices, whose value depends not on the intention of the doer but the nature of what is chosen. That was before the dominance of what Joseph Ratzinger called "the dictatorship of relativism," a phenomenon fostered by modern philosophy's resistance to recognizing normative good and evil, abetted by a flaccid "Christianity," concealing its cowardice behind the seemingly virtuous phrase, "Who am I to judge?"

Alongside that relativization of the good came the exaltation of freedom. Atheistic existentialism, especially post-Sartre and Camus, shifted the very role of freedom. Free choice, not pre-existing reality, became constitutive of the good. Rather than making the good (or evil) mine, freedom now made morally amorphous acts "good." We got "my good" and "your good" but not "the good." (The previous president of Harvard, fired after disastrous testimony in front of Congress about antisemitism, lamely complained that she hadn't been able to express "my good.")

That redefinition of choice has had profound consequences for children. Instead of being a gift of God received as good, children now became "choices." The whole abortion ethic in the United States (and much of the Western world) was grounded in an ethic of "a woman's choice." If she chose to continue her baby's life, that was good, but if she chose to end it, that was good, too.

Pro-life bumper stickers captured a deep truth: "It's a child, not a choice." The ontological dignity of every child (the fundamental truth of our being made in the image and likeness of G...

By Robert Royal

I've been in Central Europe for the past few weeks for two educational projects, one that will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2026 and another that's just beginning. Both of them, though I left Washington thinking I was too tired to keep it up and really should be taking some vacation time, gave me – to put it simply but truly – hope.

I've been teaching in and running the Slovak Summer Seminar on the Free Society for about twenty years. My friend Michael Novak founded it and left it to me when health problems started to hamper him. We both have family ties to Slovakia, and the point of the project at the start was, after the fall of Communism, to help form students in Central and Eastern Europe – but also students from America who make up half of each session – in ideas of what it takes to preserve a free political, economic, and moral/cultural order – the tripartite division of Novak's classic The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

A quarter century later, with the bizarre rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and similar aberrations in the comfortable but precarious societies of Western Europe, the need is, if anything, of renewed urgency. It may seem hopeless with the rise of partisan polarization throughout the West, but in such circumstances, we have to play the long game: to keep reminding people that foundational principles closely associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition are the only things that truly underwrite our freedom and dignity. Not charismatic politicians. Not political parties. Not even sheer military power.

And sometimes the long game – as with St. John Paul II, with the assistance of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – can turn into the short game, and lead to the sudden downfall of powerful tyrannies, such as bringing about the end of the Soviet Union, which no one, humanly speaking, could have predicted.

The great Czech writer and dissident Václav Havel – later president of the Czechs after Communism – wrote an often-quoted article about the "Power of the Powerless." But you might refocus that article, too, to say that in the long run, against the power of truth, power itself is powerless. It showed itself in the failure of Soviet power when confronted with moral and physical virtue in the Cold War.

Our European alumni have gone on to influential posts in the European Union and national governments, business and journalism, and even founded educational enterprises of their own. And the Americans typically leave with a much richer understanding of the history of our Western nations and – my even greater hope – with a deep sense of friendship with their fellow students from Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, England, Canada, Australia, Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippines.

And this year we moved into something quite new that also has certain resonances even for people in the United States. We tacked on a new program to the old one, what we are calling Enrichment Days, in the Eastern Slovak city of Košice, not far from where Slovakia, Ukraine, and Hungary all come together, with the hope of how Eastern and Western Catholics might mutually enrich one another.

Several interesting themes emerged. We organized this in cooperation with the Greek Catholic archbishop of Košice. Greek Catholicism is loyal to Rome, in union with the pope, but has its own beautiful and strong Eastern traditions of liturgy, prayer, and spirituality.

Their "Mass," for example, is similar to the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, like the Orthodox, but it is chanted in the vernacular language – Slovak, and also Ukrainian and Hungarian Greek Catholic parishes, which celebrate the Catholic liturgy in their own languages. There is – notably – none of the bitterness over the celebration of Old vs. New Rite, or the use of Old Church Slavonic vs. the vernacular, such as we see in the Latin Church these days with regards to the Traditional Latin Mass.

And what ...

By Brad Miner

In the Mile End Road, opposite to the London Hospital, there was . . . a vacant greengrocer's which was to let. The whole of the front of the shop, with the exception of the door, was hidden by a hanging sheet of canvas on which was the announcement that the Elephant Man was to be seen within . . . – from The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Frederick Treves (1923)

I am not here concerned with moral matters, as in the beauty of the virtues – of love or of honor. This is about the human experience of physical objects and of sensory impressions – of faces and bodies; of art and music; and tastes and smells. And about the sensory differences between the beautiful and the ugly.

My first observation is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. That phrase was popularized by Voltaire, who got it from an earlier 17th-century Italian source, Il meglio è l'inimico del bene, which is the more plausible, "The best is the enemy of the good." Better because perfection exists only in God.

Augustine saw beauty as the materialization of the good. On the sixth day of Creation, "God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good." Aquinas was of a mind with Augustine and, especially, with Aristotle in seeing beauty as integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony), claritas (radiance). For me, however, integritas, which is also understood as "perfection," is problematic.

Many continue to accept that formula. I do not, but that's not because I deny the classical conception. I think proportion, radiance, balance, etc.– all this passion for symmetry and order is fine, because when you see that in a face, for instance, you viscerally know beauty. Or ugly when the qualities are missing. I'll make this personal.

This is true whether we're looking at a beautiful human face (above) or an ugly skyscraper.

I live just north of New York City's borough of Manhattan, which has been (and seems always to be) undergoing a construction boom, and some of the new buildings aren't beautiful and suggest a revival of Brutalist architecture. Manhattan embraces ugly in part because buildings must be tall and straight to accommodate the millions of people who live and work there. Much of Washington, D.C. and Paris, France, remain lovely because laws protect their mostly horizontal skylines, the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower notwithstanding. And they are the only exceptions.

Speaking of tall and straight in New York City, consider 111 West 57th Street. It's 300 feet shy of being as tall as One World Trade Center (1WTC) in Lower Manhattan, which is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. My friend George Marlin, former Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey some years before the 9/11 attacks, told me that in his office high in the North Tower, you could feel the building sway in strong winds.

Imagine what it's like at 111 West 57th, where the width-to-height ratio is 1:24. The old North Tower was 1:6.5, and today's 1WTC is 1:8.88. 111 West 57th is ugly and scary.

There's a Japanese concept that's interesting in this regard: Wabi-sabi. The etymology of Wabi is rooted in the rustic simplicity of a life lived close to nature, through the observation of simple things: of a smooth, time-worn stone, even if irregular in shape, shining in the rippling water of a stream. It's "the quiet, understated beauty found in humble, irregular things."

Sabi is "the beauty and serenity that comes with age, wear, and weathering," as in the face of an older woman – whose white hair and facial lines make her all the more alluring, as in the photo below.

It must be noted that art need not be beautiful. As there is ugliness in the world, there will be ugliness in art, and that's hardly a profound statement, just a simple fact.

Yes, but sin is ugly because it distorts beauty, and, therefore, ugliness is everywhere, which is why some modern art celebrates ugliness.

Classically, ugliness was also defined as the...