By Brad Miner.

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

My journey into the Roman Catholic faith began in Rome a long time ago. I was a 20-year-old college student, in Europe for the first time in the summer of 1968. I took the overnight train from Paris, found a room in a small pensione, and began wandering.

At Ponte Sant'Angelo I crossed the Tiber. (As a Methodist kid from Ohio, I did not then know that expression of Catholic conversion.) I turned west to the Piazza Pia and shortly came to the Via della Conciliazione and glanced to the right to see St. Peter's.

That was not the moment I decided to enter the Catholic Church, but I did enter the basilica. Inside, I turned right and saw Michelangelo's Pietà. This was four years before a Hungarian kook named Laszlo Toth took a geologist's hammer to the sculpture, specifically to Our Lady's nose. I found the Pietà beautiful, luminously so. But I found the interior of the basilica overwhelming and, frankly, garish. After all, I was a Methodist.

Back home, I was in the middle of a two-year course on Western Civilization. In the previous spring, my professor - who considered me an otherwise clever student - called me into his office to gently chide me. I'd written in a term paper about the hanging and burning of Girolamo Savonarola by, as I called him, the "fornicating" Pope Alexander VI - father of at least seven children - and stating this was a typical expression of the intolerance and hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church. "However," I added, "it would make a great movie."

Professor Gifford Doxsee, an Episcopalian, suggested that were I to dig just a little deeper into Catholic history I might find my accusations of intolerance and hypocrisy were projections of my own youthful rigidity and shallow intellectualism. He smiled.

"After all," he said, "we're all sinners."

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

In an office meeting in the next academic year, he asked me what I was reading besides European history. "Lately, just this," I said and reached into my book bag to show him a library copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel based upon the author's internment in a German P.O.W. camp during World War II.

"Do you know the book?" I asked.

Dr. Doxsee said: "Yes. And the author."

"Personally?" I asked.

"Intimately," he said. For he too had been an inmate at Schlachthaus fünf.

Es geht los - especially in the education of one's character. So it goes.

Doxsee and Vonnegut were held at Stammlager IVB and were in Dresden when the Allies carpet-bombed the city.

By 1973, I'd read enough and seen enough (and failed enough and suffered enough) to have overcome prejudice against the Church - in part because I'd also shed roseate illusions about mankind's innate goodness (we really are all sinners). And quite suddenly (or so it seemed to me but wasn't really), I did cross the Tiber at the age of 25.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." (Genesis 2:16-17)

Paul VI was pope in 1973, and he seemed to me an austere and mysterious figure.

As I say, I had been a Methodist - but I was functionally a pagan from my late teens and into my early twenties. I shouldn't dignify it so, but it was a "belief system" hard to cast off, this jumble of selfishness, syncretism, and sexuality.

That began to change after I read Humane Vitae, published five years earlier on July 25, 1968 (while I was in Rome, in fact).

I never imagined then that half a century later the Church would begin to consider scuttling the wisdom of that great encyclical. Those theological liberals who rent their garments after Humanae Vitae dashed their fever dreams have lived to fight ano...

By Fr. Brian A. Graebe.

Of all the parables Jesus told, the two most famous are found only in St. Luke's Gospel. Both the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are so familiar even to non-Christians that they've entered into the common lexicon. We have Good Samaritan laws, and we refer to anyone who returns from a wayward path as a prodigal son. That familiarity can induce a certain fatigue. Perhaps, though, we might take a different approach and look at such things, as we should look at all things, through the eyes of Jesus.

For after all, He is the true Prodigal Son, who leaves His Father's house and sets off to a far country. There, He squanders his inheritance, living among the filth of sin with tax collectors and prostitutes, and spends Himself completely, giving away all He has - His teachings and miracles, His own Mother, His very Body and Blood. And having taken our sins upon Himself, He then rises up and returns to the Father's house, where He is robed in glory, never to depart again.

It is a telling detail, then, that in his litany of grievances, the older son in the parable singles out the Prodigal's association with prostitutes. We cannot help but notice what a special place Jesus had for these women, how comfortable He was with them, and how kind He was towards them. A large part of that closeness is surely due to a certain identification that He felt with them. For as odd and even provocative as it may seem, it can be said that Our Lord, too, sold Himself, cheaply, for our benefit, lowering Himself, allowing His body to be used and rejected, simply because He wants our love. He spent Himself fully, this Prodigal of extravagant love.

And isn't that wastefulness a hallmark of Our Lord's ministry? He didn't make decent wine; He made the best wine, and lots of it. He didn't feed the thousands just enough; there was plenty left over. He didn't consent to being anointed sufficiently, but praised the lavish wastefulness - equal to an entire year's salary - that was poured on Him. And why? Because excess is a hallmark of love. Love never asks how much, doesn't know the word enough, never needs to see the price tag. It only asks, "What more?"

But what about us? For all of Our Lord's prodigality, how stingy we can be. How often we respond in mean and miserly ways, not overflowing but measuring, giving back just enough, and even that poorly - fulfilling the letter, with little spirit. We check the boxes: got to Mass, said my prayers, abstained from Friday meat, now on with life.

Too often we can find ourselves asking the spiritual equivalent of, "Is this going to be on the exam?" It's no different than a husband asking his wife what's the least amount he needs to spend on an anniversary gift without her getting mad at him. It doesn't exactly bespeak a flourishing relationship. Legalism might be a science, but love is an art.

So Our Lord calls us to share in his prodigality, to receive as abundantly and lavishly as He gives. This involves examining what parts of our life are not open to Him, honestly asking what interests, amusements, hobbies, perhaps even friendships are holding us back from all that He offers.

And as we see things more and more through the lens of Jesus, as we conform ourselves more to His Cross and carry it with Him, slowly and painfully and not without falls along the way, we can find that we look back on things that once held great attraction for us, only to wonder now what all the fuss was about. Why did I think that person's approval was so important? Why did I think that show was so funny? Why did I think that purchase was so necessary? The lines of that great Lenten hymn come to mind:

The vain delights that charmed me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.

Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.

Yes, He demands everything, this jealous, Prodigal lover. Not just the time we consciously give to Him in our prayer; He demands our recreation, our conversations, our laughter and sorr...

By Elizabeth Lev.

I rediscovered my faith during Jubilee Year 2000. I spent the bulk of that Holy Year living far away from the Catholic faith. I led groups to the Holy Door, explaining art, history, and indulgences before sending people through the door while I stayed behind. Those open doors, however, beckoned constantly, even luring secular clients curious about these mysterious graces. For all the crowds and chaos, the silent invitation of the doors, always open, always expectant, finally wore down my resistance, and by the end of the year, I too crossed that threshold of hope and joyfully returned to the fold of my faith. The 2025 Jubilee, however, may keep others from finding theirs.

Having personally experienced the great graces of a Jubilee and witnessed the amazing conversions of other holy years, I have been eagerly awaiting the 27th Jubilee, the Year of Hope. And yes, there have been many graces already in 2025, but the beacon of the Year of Hope has been dimmed by hasty policy changes at St Peter's Basilica.

This is due to what, one presumes, the basilica administrators considered a clever plan to combat Vatican deficits by drawing a line between tourists and "pilgrims," soaking money from the former while preserving free worship for the latter. Card-carrying Pilgrims continue to access the basilica from the magnificent Via della Conciliazione, but mere "tourists" are routed out of the Piazza San Pietro and lined up along the road leading to the Sant'Anna entrance to Vatican City.

Well-heeled tourists, however, may also skip the line by paying 7 euros for a fast pass into the basilica. Bernini's colonnade, designed to resemble the open arms of a church for the whole world, ready to welcome one and all, has been turned into a web of barriers to enforce the new system, and while the desperate financial straits of the Holy See are common knowledge, it could be that exploiting the pope's basilica will turn out to be robbing Paul to pay Peter. After all, the Holy Year is supposed to be about saving time in Purgatory, not saving time in line.

The new pray-or-pay scheme extends even to the Vatican Museums, where visitors who want to pass from the Sistine Chapel directly into the basilica must now pay 7 euros for the privilege. This passage, traditionally free for those who had paid for the museum ticket, also served as a necessary valve to keep from overcrowding the chapel. But as of March 3, visitors must negotiate a Byzantine system of QR codes, vouchers, and 48-hour wait times to purchase the pass for the 5-minute trip down the Scala Regia to the basilica.

The results have been disastrous. After a year of experiments with how to manage the expected crowds, the Director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta, and her administration found a workable system for the Holy Year. But that system depended on allowing the 15,000 (out of 30,000) visitors a day to the Sistine Chapel to exit via the Scala Regia. Many tourist agencies have refused to pay the basilica tax, increasing the massive overcrowding and confusion in the museum. Some additional restrictions, moreover, have led to absurd results. For example, the rules of the Vatican Museums allow groups of 20, but St. Peter's door tax only accommodates groups up to 15, requiring that 5 people be left behind.

While it's true that most non-religious tourist attractions have a fast-pass option, the basilica's arrangement has created two castes of visitors, the tourist and the pilgrim, under which system the tourist is seen more as a cash cow than a human in need of salvation. In 2024, the Dicastery of Communication thought so highly of the salvific potential of these visits that it devised a pre-Jubilee campaign called "From Tourist to Pilgrim." After my own experience, I was honored to take part in that project, which highlighted how the beautiful art of Rome is indeed a call to conversion.

At present, tourists are channeled through a baffling labyrinth of lanes around the ...

By David Warren.

In John Lennon's ever-popular "Hymn to Mediocrity" (my un-title for this asinine song) the advantages of a non-dramatic, uninteresting life are quickly enumerated:

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky. . .

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace. . .

And so forth. Hatred would be abolished, along with wars of all kinds, for instance that "war on drugs." And with no religion, there could of course be no wars of religion. Evil would, furthermore, disappear upon this "end of history," depicted by all utopian schemers; thus, no punishments or war-crimes trials.

The hippie-trippie should note that Karma will also disappear, along with everything else that has ceased to be necessary. That should, in itself, obviate most of the irritating YouTube videos.

Et in Arcadia ego. . .I, too, was a child in the Sixties, once upon a time.

Or, as readers of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited discover, this classical and Christian message in Latin is inscribed on a sarcophagus in the family crypt, upon which a human skull is depicted.

For even in Arcadia, and in the Sixties, death was there; and even at the very center of mediocrity, there is death, impatiently waiting.

But back to the juke-box:

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one.

Yes, the hymn is declaring, you will and must join us, in a sleepy death. The whole universe is waiting for your extinction. For that is all it comes to, in the end: the "heat death of the universe," or at some other temperature, according to fluctuating physics theories. But whichever, we won't have to feel pain, for all feeling is illusory or transient, according to the experts.

Something may seem to be happening now, but it is all in your head, and will leave no trace after just a few centuries. It won't even be imagined.

And yet I defiantly imagine a dark night of the soul, which, one gathers from Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross, is not a celebration of mediocrity, or even, truth be told, a celebration.

This remains the chief alternative to "Imagine," except that the song does not follow on the mystical way. Its worthlessness appears in this context, and we are perfectly free to hate it, and to hate many other things that we will leave behind, when we make the transition, into a mystical death.

It is something that we perhaps cannot imagine, even though we survive, in an earthly living that anticipates the immortal.

Now, if we immediately turn, away from the "Hymn to Mediocrity" to the sometimes unpleasant Christian reality it rejects, and look through this lens at history generally, we return, delightfully, to hatred.

Indeed, we get it from all sides, as Christ got it from all sides, and from every direction, except from Himself.

His fate was the very opposite of the "peace, love, groovy" that we are promised in pop songs, and that is often presented by other flourishes of "religious mediocrity."

For when Love is presented by itself as if it were the whole story, the whole story retreats into nothingburger empty space.

It is in the contrast with hate that love becomes visible, or as it were, imaginable. Too, I would say, that a nothingburger universe cannot be creative, unlike one made by God.

Hatred is as necessary as love, and viewed from down here, it is just as ineradicable. This is also true within every creature down here, since the Fall of Man, and if that were forgotten while we walked once again though the Edenic paradise, we would be bitten by the snakes.

Indeed, one might say, Hatred would be impossible without Love, and vice versa, as Evil is impossible without Good.

It has a dialectical part to play, in this sublunary sphere, where opposites both attract and repel, and this has been the case from the beginning. Or to quote an ever-popular American hymn, "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" (which has been mediocritized to: "Le...

By Stephen P. White.

In 2022, The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America - where I serve as director - conducted the largest study of American Catholic priests in more than half a century. This National Study of Catholic Priests (NSCP) looked at many aspects of how American priests are faring.

Our study showed that American priests are, by and large, flourishing. They demonstrate high levels of satisfaction in their vocations and enthusiasm for their work as pastors. The youngest cohort of American priests are, by their own description, the most theologically conservative and politically moderate of any cohort.

These young priests are also the most likely to demonstrate elevated signs of burnout in their ministry.

There are several likely reasons for this. For one, older priests are more likely to have settled into the priestly life and adapted to life in the parish or religious community. Then there is the simple fact of attrition. Men in older cohorts who did not adapt well to priestly life may have already left ministry, leaving fewer members in older cohorts who report burnout.

It used to be the case that a newly ordained priest could look forward to five, ten, or even fifteen years as an associate pastor before being made pastor. The first decade or so after ordination served as an apprenticeship in the "tradecraft" of priestly life. Older priests in the parish served as mentors from whom younger priests learned how to handle (or how not to handle, as the case may be) the challenges of running a parish.

For priests in many dioceses, things are very different today. Fewer and fewer parishes have more than one priest in residence. More and more young priests are being asked to serve as pastors at younger and younger ages. One priest I know was, immediately upon ordination, appointed pastor of six parishes. That is surely an exceptional case, but the overall trend is that more is being asked of younger priests than at any time in living memory.

Bishops and seminary formators are aware of these trends and the challenges facing younger priests. In a 2021 study from CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate), young priests reported that, while seminary prepared them well for some aspects of pastoral life (e.g., delivering homilies and celebrating Mass), they felt much less well prepared when it came to personal skills, time management, and handling the stress of parish life. "The areas priests report being least well prepared for," the report said, "are all related to administration, human resources, and leadership."

In 2019, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved a new Program of Priestly Formation which regulates seminary formation here in the United States. It took another three years of tinkering with details before Rome approved the new PPF, which it finally did in 2022. The most noted change was the addition of a "propaedeutic year," which is a period of human and spiritual formation which takes place before philosophical and theological studies begin.

The PPF also added a "vocational synthesis stage" at the end of seminary formation, after a candidate is ordained to the diaconate. This latter addition, lasting at least six months, during which a deacon is placed in a pastoral setting (most likely a parish) full time, is intended to provide practical experience in pastoral leadership. In the language of the PPF, the goal of the vocational synthesis stage is, "not so much acquiring new pastoral skills - though these certainly will be gained - but more adjusting to the life of ministry before advancing to priestly ordination."

While the propaedeutic year has already been introduced, many dioceses are still working out the nuts and bolts of how to structure and implement the vocational synthesis stage. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, just announced last month that its first class of ordinands to follow the new vocational synthesis plan will be ordained in 2027.

T...

By Anthony Esolen.

"This is my geopolitical fiction," Jesus did not say, when He broke the bread at the Last Supper. "The group, though it has many members, is still one group," Paul did not say, when he sought, gently, to lead the fractious democracy-leaning Corinthians back to their responsibilities toward one another and their submission to the truth. "Every man is an island," John Donne did not say in his meditations on death, so that if you hear the church bells ringing, he did not continue, "you need not ask for whom they toll, so long as they do not toll for thee."

It is almost impossible, in our time of social alienation, family breakdown, self-imposed detachment, radical sexual individualism, and loneliness, to ask people to consider what a society is; a prerequisite, one might think, for considering the social teachings of the Church, or the social good or harm to be expected from a proposed policy.

It is as if we were to ask a shepherd on the steppes to build a fleet of ships, when he has never seen one in his life. Or, perhaps more to the point, it is as if we were to entrust our health to a mad doctor for whom an organ in the body is an isolated thing-in-itself, and therefore neither a true organ, nor a member of a true body. Such a doctor would kill the patient to save the spleen, and end up doing good to neither, failing to understand that an organ is what it is only by its incorporation into the whole.

Such unreality, I believe, characterizes many an approach to Catholic teachings, including teachings that are aimed at the good of a society. They are treated as isolated instances, as elements of a mere set. Their relations to one another, outside of a narrow area of common concern, are unsuspected, unacknowledged, uninvestigated, ignored. They are not incorporated.

Take the liberal call to have homosexual relations normalized within the Church. I have made the point before that such a thing is deeply antisocial, as it further undermines the much-battered walls of family life. It takes for granted that fornication is no big deal. It sows confusion in the minds of children. It has disrupted and abused their much-needed period of sexual latency. Someone with a keen social conscience ought to note that our prisons are full of men who grew up without a married father in the home. Why make a dreadful situation worse?

But that is still to remain in the vicinity of the matter in question. What the irresponsible experimenters do not acknowledge is the whole body of Catholic teachings as a body. The whole question of creation itself is intimately bound up with these teachings about sex.

"For since the creation of the world," says Saint Paul, "his invisible attributes are clearly seen - his everlasting power also and divinity - being understood by the things that are made." (Rom. 1:20) But the idolatry of the pagans, "who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator," is made manifest most obviously in their "shameful lusts," their having "exchanged the natural use for that which is against nature." (25-26)

It will not do to try to sidle past the physical absurdity of such lusts, by saying that the actions feel "natural" to those who engage in them, since Paul already notes that the desires of the heart are unclean; they are not to be trusted, much less to be taken as having been created by God. The Father does not create our fantasies.

To read the created world as what the philosopher Russell Hittinger has called "the first grace," that is, the first book of God, is not to explore the labyrinthine caverns of human imagination and passion. It is to see what is right in front of our eyes.

What we see is that male and female are meant for one another, and indeed are what they are, only because they are for one another; otherwise they have no meaning at all. If this is not obvious, then nothing in Creation is; and if nothing in Creation is, we may as well give up on ...

by Randall Smith

There's an old saying, "Choose your enemies wisely; you become like them."

As the years have passed, I have seen more and more illustrations of it - children, for example, who hated their parents but then became like them. Indeed, there was a whole generation of Boomers who made "the older generation" into their enemies. They resented them for standing in the way of "counter-cultural" new things that the younger generation wanted, insisting instead that they stay on the paths their elders had laid out for them. The older generation controlled many of America's institutions, especially colleges and universities, and the younger generation resented that control and strove to break through the stifling hold their elders had on power.

Now, many of those Boomers are themselves part of the older generation that refuses to get out of the way to allow counter-cultural "conservative" youth to stray from the liberal, progressive path the Boomers laid out for them. Boomers who now control most of America's institutions, especially colleges and universities, no longer have a philosophy of "Let a hundred flowers bloom." When they see a little sprig of doctrinal orthodoxy or conservatism starting to shoot up, they stomp it out, much the way their elders did to youth groups they didn't like in the Sixties and Seventies.

So too, in the Church, the counter-cultural Boomers who thought the Church needed to be "updated" and insisted that the oldsters "get out of their way" are now the ones who still act as though it's 1972 and the "spirit of Vatican II" (but not the letter) reigns in the Church, thus everything must go forward the way they envisioned in those heady days when they were overthrowing "the man." But when the younger generation shows any evidence of "counter-cultural" Catholicism - interest in a serious study of the Christian intellectual life and Church doctrine, more reverent worship, and traditional forms of Christian art and architecture - these are treated like weeds that must be starved or ripped out. The Boomer motto seems to be: "You will pry power from our cold, dead hands."

Perhaps the saddest example of this refusal to bow to new, more conservative realities can be found in religious orders that have insisted on closing their doors and turning out the lights on their order rather than allow the members of the younger, more orthodox generation to fill their depleted ranks. So convinced are they of the rightness of their cause and of the path they see themselves as having pioneered, some have gone so far as to claim that more vocations just isn't the will of the Holy Spirit. This is to make the grave error of mistaking their own will and what they took to be "the spirit of the age" for the will of the Holy Spirit.

You might rightly ask me: "You seem to have made these people your enemies. Shouldn't you be careful about doing that?" Absolutely. It is easy to see the speck in someone else's liberal eye, especially when the vision is so blurry because of the plank in one's own.

There seems to be a resurgence of a conservatism of a certain sort. But something one notices is that it sometimes resembles the progressive liberalism it sought to overthrow. It insists that it is devoted to free speech while shutting down or shouting down those who disagree with "the party line." Try, now, among a group of "party" conservatives to defend Zelensky and Ukraine. "There's corruption there!" (And there isn't in Russia?) "They caused the war!" (Yeah, just the way Poland caused World War II.)

But it's not just Ukraine. A host of issues are now out of bounds if they are perceived as contrary to "what Trump wants." And here I thought something we didn't like about liberal progressivism was that it had become a cult of personality around "stars" like AOC and "the squad." I thought we disliked that Nancy Pelosi had so cowed the Democrats in Congress that there was no more "voting one's conscience"; instead, Democrats always v...

by Robert Royal.

Looking at the way that the human race manages its affairs is enough - if such were possible - to make angels weep. Or laugh. For most of its existence, the Church at least offered something of a counterexample, starting with surviving for 2,000 years, which isn't likely to be the case for any current nation, international body, NGO, LGBT regime, or Silicon Valley empire. Longevity may not be proof of much, but it is proof of life, despite radical historical changes.

What kind of life does the Church now enjoy? A question worth probing, because both the Church and the world are now in no little peril.

The terminally tiresome debates over Vatican II now tend to obscure a crucial development. We're often reminded that the Council "opened up" the Church - for good or for ill - to "the world." But is that world the same as today's?

The world then (1962-1965) was undergoing rapid post-WWII change itself, moving away from nationalism, which was partly responsible for the war, and towards progressive internationalism. The U.N. was formed as the war ended, and the first stirrings of what would lead to the European Union were also underway.

Jacques Maritain, the most influential Catholic philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century helped shape the U.N. Three Catholics were prominent in the emergence of the EU: Robert Schuman of France (the first president of the European Parliament); Konrad Adenauer of Germany; and Alcide di Gasperi of Italy. Pope Francis has declared Schuman "Venerable." De Gasperi's cause, too, is proceeding.

These were all admirable men, serious Catholics in their day. It's a sad commentary on human history to see what their good intentions, after the horrors of a world war, have come to.

At the UN, various ne'er-do-wells form the large majority of the General Assembly - and seek to exploit it. Western nations often now use it as an instrument for imposing a woke agenda. Does anyone think the United Nations could help with anything like the Russian attack on Ukraine, or the carnage in Gaza?

The EU's founding documents invoke Catholic principles like subsidiarity, the proper autonomy of individual nations within a general inter-national union. But if duly elected governments in Hungary or Slovakia resist EU policies on, say, LGBT indoctrination, or an even larger group - Italy, the Netherlands, and others - oppose the EU stance on illegal immigration, they're threatened with the withholding of funds and slandered as undemocratic.

Nevertheless, a kind of "populism" is rising, from the UK to Czechia and beyond, somewhat similar to the MAGA phenomenon in America. Large percentages of populist voters - dismissed as "extreme right" of course - have emerged in France, Germany, Austria, etc. In Romania, the EU invalidated a democratic election because the "wrong" candidate won - a nationalist whose party wants to negotiate with Russia.

Even NATO, created "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down," is undergoing necessary readjustments. America, with $37 trillion in national debt, will no longer carry the defense burden for Europe, which has had a free ride since WWII. NATO will not disappear, as some Europeans fear. Mr. Putin has seen to that. But Europe is going to have to re-arm, and its leaders are figuring out how - at what cost.

And what does the Church have to say about all this? It's hardly an exaggeration to say that Rome and several of our bishops in the United States have little appreciation of the moment we're in. The world they're open to seems largely the 1960s and 1970s.

For example, Francis has advised using a percentage of military budgets to eliminate hunger and promote sustainable development worldwide. A neo-Pax in terris vision. Laudable goals, if other threats, pressing contemporary ones - e.g., Russia, Iran, China - were absent.

He has also deplored the rise of "populists" whom he's characterized as proposing simple solutions to complex problems. ...

By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas.

The original purpose of Lent was to provide proximate preparation of candidates for Holy Baptism. With the passage of time, its purpose expanded to provide all the members of the Church the opportunity to return to Baptismal innocence. So, the Sacred Liturgy begins a serious turn toward reflection on the meaning and effects of Baptism in the days ahead. Interestingly, in the early Church, the Sacrament of Baptism was often referred to as either "Illumination" or "Enlightenment."

Which makes it worthwhile asking: "Have you ever lost your sight - even temporarily? Have you ever been plunged into darkness unexpectedly?" It's a frightening, fearsome thing. Darkness/light, night/day, and blindness/sight are themes frequently repeated in John's Gospel in order to teach some important truths about Jesus and the nature of Christianity. It's no accident that we'll shortly be hearing almost exclusively readings from John for the rest of this holy season.

Two passages are examples of what I mean. In John 3, we eavesdrop on the dialogue between Our Lord and Nicodemus, a leading Pharisee who - at the same time - is a disciple of Jesus, but one who approaches Him only under the cover of darkness. Christ reminds Nicodemus that there's an intimate connection between walking in darkness and doing evil deeds - and between walking in the light and performing righteous deeds.

Six chapters later, this theological lesson is dramatized for us in the cure of the man born blind through no fault of his own; he is eager to see, both spiritually and physically - he's open to the workings of God. Then we encounter the Pharisees, who have physical sight, but they have become spiritually blind because they have lost the proper perspective; instead of rejoicing at the healing of the blind man, they react to the fact that Christ has healed on the Sabbath. They're proof of the adage, "There are none so blind as those who will not see." John presents us with two types of people we always have with us: Those willing and those unwilling to accept Jesus as the Light of the World.

I recently watched a video of Francis Poulenc's opera Dialogues of the Carmelites. It lacks the excitement or lyricism of Puccini, but contains a powerful message. The action occurs in France during the French Revolution and zeroes in on one Carmelite convent, which becomes a symbol or microcosm for other religious houses at that time. That period was also known as the Enlightenment, which prided itself on replacing the God of Revelation with the "goddess of reason," blasphemously and sacrilegiously enthroned in 1793 in Notre Dame Cathedral. That "cult of reason" was, of course, characterized by hostility toward Christianity.

As the plot unfolds, revolutionary forces offer the Carmelites a choice: Give up your convents and habits, or give up your heads. As a result, thousands of clergy and Religious were martyred - the first fruits of "enlightenment."

When man exceeds his bounds; when he's blind to his human limitations; when he tries to be God; the enlightenment that follows is, in reality, darkness. The Enlightenment continues to have a pernicious influence on our culture, encouraging every kind of disaster from abortion-on-demand, to family breakdown, to sexual promiscuity, to materialism, to teenage suicide. Man has attempted enlightenment without Christ, with the result that the darkness has never been deeper, the blindness more devastating.

Returning to our opera, as the guillotine hits each nun's neck, the blindness of their persecutors in their hatred for Christ's truth becomes eminently clear. Then true enlightenment dawns on the crowd, which gradually stops barbaric cheering at the violence and is brought to see the witness of these rather unexceptional but holy women - bearers of light in one of history's darkest hours.

They succeeded in bringing people from blindness, to sight, to genuine insight. (An interesting historical note: So impressi...

by Father Raymond J. de Souza.

Is it a sin to follow the news? Or to read commentators upon the news? Or to listen to podcasts that comment upon the commentators? Or to watch the YouTube videos of those picking apart the podcasts?

It's Lent, the season for more than the usual number of Confessions. And this Lent, as has increasingly been the case over the last half-dozen years or so, more and more penitents are confessing that they are following the news.

They don't put it exactly that way. They say that the news is making them angry, more apt to harbor resentments, to making rash judgments, to indulging prejudices, to cultivating ill will, to rejoicing in the misfortune of others - even to wishing harm upon those who disagree. All this is directed at people they have never personally met - this political leader, that famous personage.

For those penitents who know the language, they speak of the news as an occasion of sin, about which they've been careless.

I don't recall hearing that in the confessional ten years ago; if I did, it was rare. Now, I hear it frequently. The volume and ethos of the news is evidently disturbing the peace of those very few Catholics who go to Confession. The pious, one might think, ought to be less troubled than others by the passing scene. Perhaps they are. In which case, imagine the state of the rest.

Our TCT friend Francis X. Maier, confessed here a few days ago that, "Once upon a time, I was a news junkie."

No longer? At least much less so, because "so often these days I find myself locked in my head, in the Land of the Unreal, battling enemies and ideas that blind me to the beauty of the world and the people I love."

Fran notes that marvellous things are available digitally - The Catholic Thing! - but "these information formats also host a generous share of nutcases, liars, and haters. . . .The result is fatigue, tribalism, and (too often) grievance. Grievance culture is venomous. It's also self-sustaining, like a colony of ticks in the secret places of the heart, because there's always another oppressor to expose and indict."

His complaint is by now "tediously familiar," Fran concedes, but the familiarity is breeding so much contempt that a warning is in order.

"Resentment is addictive," writes the former news junkie. "It presumes the wickedness or ignorance of those who disagree. It precludes reasoned discourse because it's a waste of precious time listening to others if, by definition, they're stupid or evil since their views conflict with our own."

The toxins are coursing through public life as entire cable networks, podcasts, and social media platforms are reliant upon a business model that requires the cultivation of outrage to monetize the anger. It's commercially successful, politically powerful, and culturally influential.

"That explains why so much of our nation's current public life is toxic," Fran concludes.

It's much worse than that.

The spiritual life of millions of souls has become toxic too. We can see the degradation of our public life. The interior life is harder to see, but a similar degradation is quite advanced and threatens the sanctity of souls seeking to live close to God.

A few recognize this and seek forgiveness in Confession - and the grace of the sacrament to resist this particularly powerful vice. Good for them. For many more, the interior is life continuously corrupted without awareness or apparent remedy. Their minds, hearts, and souls are daily drenched in the toxins of "our poisoned shared culture."

Years ago, when a searching soul would approach me with inquiries about becoming Catholic, I would generally start with a few words about God's love, our need for salvation and the person of Jesus. Then an introduction to what prayer is and how to do it. After that, more formal study of the truths of the faith.

Now, when a young person approaches me - usually a man (there has been a noticeable uptick among young men) - I begin by discussing his digital habits. I...