By Robert Royal. But first a note. We hope you all had a restful Memorial Day with family and friends. But we're back now and need to do business again. Our mid- year funding campaign resumes with good progress made and more that needs to be made. Soon. We intend to be here for everything that will happen in the Church and the world for the rest of 2024 and beyond. Are you willing to do your part? Setting up automatic monthly donations is easy, and a possible option for those who can't give much all at once. And there are other ways: all fully tax deductible. If you click the button you can see several ways by which you can make your own, personal contribution to the ongoing work of The Catholic Thing. Please do so, today. And now for Robert Royal's column...

Sociology is the softest of the sciences - according to sociological surveys - and its practitioners, with noteworthy exceptions, largely lean - and more than lean - Left. Which may explain why a recent New York Times essay seems puzzled and not a little irritated by the fact, noted by the sociologists, that conservatives are measurably happier (and have been for half a century) than liberals in our radically rabid era.

Their explanations tend towards the judgment that conservative happiness may be deplorable - for instance, that conservatives are (allegedly) less troubled than their liberal counterparts by inequality and injustice in the world. But it doesn't take much insight into human existence to see that, on the question of happiness, the sociological dogs may be barking up several wrong sociological trees.

Let's stipulate at the outset that, to a reflective mind, it's not immediately evident what it means to be conservative or liberal. Pope Francis recently remarked in his CBS interview that conservatism is "a suicidal attitude," characterizing conservatives as people whose hearts are "closed up inside a dogmatic box." The world is wide, and it may indeed contain such strange creatures.

But that rather illiberal judgment doesn't come within a country mile of the vast majority of persons - inside or outside the Church - whom a sociologist would classify as a conservative.

Meanwhile, recent surveys show that almost all younger priests in the United States and large majorities in Germany (!) are what the pope would doubtless regard as conservative without showing any signs of clinging to the past and failing to engage the present. In fact, for many of us, their resistance to many currents in the world offers a viable shelter while the world - especially the Western world - seems hell-bent on suicide.

But for the sake of a manageable argument, let's say that the sociologists have a street-level understanding of who counts as a conservative. And for the same reason, let's accept that what they mean by such a person being happier than liberals is also - in ordinary, everyday terms - an adequate description. The reasons for this, however, seem to lie elsewhere than usually thought.

Now for today's column..

In philosophical terms, happiness, too, is no simple term to define. I've written here recently about what Christians might learn - actually re-learn - from the great ancient pagan philosophers. Happiness in a high, rational sense among the ancient philosophers was the aim of human life. And Christianity took over that concept from the pagans with obvious additions about the happiness we'll find in the next life.

The Dominican Servais Pinckaers, whose book The Sources of Christian Ethics remains our best account of the subject, writes: "quite frankly. . .there would have been no Christian theology or 'philosophy' were it not for the contribution of Greek wisdom."

To be clear, happiness in both its ordinary and deeper meaning does not mean an absence of suffering and disappointments. As any mature person knows, those are features of the world in which we live and come to all of us in greater or lesser degree.

Rather, it means the sense of satisfaction of training ours...