2025
On Not Giving Extremely Little
During his recent “Address to the Participants in the Social Week of Peru,” Pope Leo made some observations well worth noting: “Let us understand that all social action of the Church must have as its center and goal the proclamation of the…
Answering the Right Question – The Catholic Thing
Is our Lord avoiding the question? At first glance, it appears so. The man in today’s Gospel (Luke 13:22-30) asks a simple yes/no question: “Will only a few people be saved?” Jesus doesn’t answer, doesn’t say yes or no. Perhaps to the man’s…
Wisdom about Human Flourishing – The Catholic Thing
Much of our knowledge is inevitably quantitative and additive, but sometimes a good book contains such necessary, valuable forms of human knowledge while also touching, and being graced by, such qualitative insight that it registers as human…
Pope Leo and the Augustinian legacy
We’re a few days into the Novena to St. Augustine for his feast on August 28. To my mind, any excuse will suffice to talk about the thought of that great saint. His feast day in the first year of Augustinian Leo XIV’s pontificate simply can’t be…
What Makes the Man? – The Catholic Thing
One sign of our improbably ludicrous times is that the question, “What is a woman?” has become a point of political contention in recent years. The obvious answer (obvious, that is, until just yesterday) has proven unsatisfactory to the keepers…
The Mellifluous Doctor and Us
Most Catholics, even well-informed Catholics, if asked who were the great medieval saints would reply with a familiar list of names: Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena. But one of the earliest among these great…
The God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
The French polymath Blaise Pascal wrote in his famous “memorial” about his “night of fire”: “The God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob – not of the philosophers and scholars.” We can understand this desire not to turn the personal God in…
Pope Leo XIV Inspires a Rebirth of Gregorian Chant
Leo XIV has done much in the first few months of his papacy to dispel damaging misconceptions about Gregorian chant rooted in ignorance of what Vatican II actually taught. When he stood on the loggia of St. Peter’s in his very first public…
Merriment from Another World – The Catholic Thing
A man with the dopiest face imaginable, always ready to break into a broad grin and a goofy laugh, is talking to Joe the Bartender about the only day he ever went to school. His name is Crazy Guggenheim. “The teacher, she asks me, Who wrote the…
A Cautionary Tale: the ‘French Malaise’
France, once the acknowledged cultural leader of the West, is experiencing what many French men and women describe as ‘La Malaise’ – the societal apprehension, unease, and disillusionment caused by a perceived sense of national decline and…