Jesus Christ
Caravaggio’s ‘The Incredulity of St. Thomas’
There was once a monument in Rome called Milliarium Aureum: the Golden Milestone. The Emperor Augustus erected it in the Forum in about 20 B.C. All distances in Ancient Rome were said to be marked from (or to) that spot. There’s still a round…
Holy Hypocrisy – The Catholic Thing
In a world where formal pronouns have disappeared from almost every language, and where good manners are not merely rare but actively ridiculed, we are gradually turning into grotesque versions of Shrek. Even the dwarves from Tolkien’s tales, as…
The Church in Dialogue: What Approach? And With Whom?
The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes says that the Church has the duty of responding to “the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to…
Fulton Sheen: Casting Fire on the Earth
In 1945, Louis Budenz – a Communist activist and managing editor of the party’s newspaper The Daily Worker – was received back into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen. The two men had met earlier because Sheen had been publishing devastating…
Defending the Social Kingship of Christ
There are few things more foreign to the modern imagination than the idea of a Christian king. We are accustomed to separating the sacred from the political, faith from public life, and the Church from the ordering of society. But for much of…
Synodality Will Kill Catholicism – The Catholic Thing
The Catholic Church has always distinguished itself from other Christian bodies by its claim to possess, and be bound by, a deposit of faith handed down from the Apostles. The Church comes from Christ, and the Church doesn’t invent, revise, or…
Good Questions – The Catholic Thing
Soon-to-be-Blessed Fulton Sheen once quipped, “The questions of God are more satisfying than the answers of man.” (That’s a variation on his friend G.K. Chesterton’s line, “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”)…
Selling Radical ‘Synodality’ as ‘Social Prophecy’
The recent annual Assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious received a video message from Pope Leo XIV, in which he said: All Christians are called to be builders of Christ’s communion, formed in a synodal Church in which everyone…
Cathedrals Old and New – The Catholic Thing
On a trip back home to Southern California, I had the opportunity to visit the church of my baptism, my “mother church,” as they say. When I became Catholic at the age of twelve, in April 1976, Holy Family, in the city of Orange, had just the…
Freedom from (Airline) Religion – The Catholic Thing
Earlier this month, Orlando-based evangelist and social media influencer Whitney Lynn posted a video of herself offering a brief preaching session as passengers prepared to debark an airplane in San Diego. Below the clip – in which most people…