Columns
A Good Friday Death: Vittorio Messori, RIP
A Good Friday death – even for a Catholic giant of the last fifty years – meant that less attention was paid than deserved. On the other hand, it was fitting for the author of Patì sotto Ponzio Pilato? – Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate? …
A Saintly Patriotism: Lessons from St. Joan of Arc
On her Feast Day today, May 30, Joan of Arc is remembered as one of the greatest saints of not just her time, but all time. The Maid of Orleans inspires us all with her military victories for France, fearlessness in battle. and extraordinary…
Not About AI – The Catholic Thing
Much is already being written at the moment about AI and the suitable Catholic response to it. So this column will not be about AI. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov has been driven, by his revulsion to evil in…
Coherence in Continuity – The Catholic Thing
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, was released earlier this week. It is long for an encyclical, and unexpected in some ways. It is worth reading, worth sitting with. What follows is not a summary, still less a “review” of the…
Trusting the One who ‘Knows What He’s About’
During this past academic year, I was honored to hold the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College. (This was especially an honor since this same Chair was held initially by TCT’s own Robert Royal and then…
Dante and the Office – The Catholic Thing
Some people have trouble reading Dante’s Commedia. For a “comedy,” it doesn’t seem all that funny. Teachers will tell you it is a “comedy” in the sense that it has a happy ending in Heaven. Some people might chuckle at some of the punishments…
Thoughts About the Vocation of Soldiers
The great French preacher Lacordaire once said the vocation of a soldier is next in dignity to the priesthood, not only because it commissioned him to defend justice on the field of battle and order on the field of peace, but also because it…
Heartburn and Broken Ribs – The Catholic Thing
Philip Neri had the custom of rising late at night or in the first hours of morning, making his way through the sleeping city of Rome, outside the city walls, to the Basilica of Saint Sebastian. There he would descend beneath the church, to the…
Folly in the Seat of Wisdom
Reports out of New York say that the state’s Department of Health has issued warnings to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, whose order has, for over a century, run a hospice for patients dying of incurable cancer. Indeed, the village where…
The Perennial Question: “Who Is Man?”
Modern philosophy flatters itself by claiming it was responsible for the “turn to the subject,” i.e., the human (and, usually, a very subjective understanding of the human). But focus on the human is hardly a modern discovery. St. Irenaeus, a…