Commentary
The Death of Halloween – The Catholic Thing
The night of drunken carousing that now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old. Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace…
Canterbury Fails – The Catholic Thing
When it was announced that the next archbishop of Canterbury would be a woman (Sarah Mullally) with progressive views on homosexuality and abortion, social media erupted with a combination of outrage, congratulations, derision, and triumph. A…
Will MAGA save France? (Monarchy And God Again)
Kristen Ziccarelli, European Conservative Tuesday, October 28, 2025 Modern France is at a precipice. Its Fifth Republic is now widely understood, even in the halls of power, to be on the verge of collapse, as President Macron was forced to…
Abp. Cordileone on why the Solemn Pontifical High Latin Mass is coming to San Francisco
Says Archbishop Cordileone: “It’s occurring because we have a parish here that’s hosting a Rosary congress. There’s a movement of people. And they wanted to bring it here to San Francisco, a Eucharistic Rosary congress. And one of our parishes…
Vatican II at 60 – The Catholic Thing
December 8, 2025, is quickly approaching, a date marking the sixtieth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. “A budding teenager at the time, I paid scant attention to the event, not realizing that it would dominate most…
How Pope St. John Paul II changed my life (and still does)
“I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to meet the saintly pontiff a dozen times or so through the years, most of those while studying in Rome. He never lost his sense of humor even as his health began to fail. I remember handing him a…
Two takes on Pope Leo
Father de Souza discusses two new books about the new pope. We already have an array of first-hundred-days analyses of Pope Leo XIV, as though the first American-born pope could be judged like an American president. Yet Robert Prevost of…
As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens recorded a two-hour conversation in 2007 deriding religion that got millions of YouTube views and was said to have sparked an atheist revolution. No longer. In the fall of…
The Church and immigration sanity
Francis X. Maier, First Things Thursday, October 23, 2025 One can reasonably criticize the Trump administration’s current deportation efforts as too broad and too blunt. Along with arresting gang members, traffickers, murderers, and rapists,…
How Much Does “Dilexi Te” Reflect Leo XIV’s Thinking?
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, First Things Wednesday, October 22, 2025 What lifts people out of poverty? That is not a question the Christian tradition really asks, and neither does the Holy Father in Dilexi Te, a document much more in the line of…