Robert Royal
War, Just and Unjust – The Catholic Thing
Nuclear weapons, like other modern technological developments, have placed great strains on traditional moral principles. Just as modern medicine has changed our appreciation of the beginning and end of human life, the tremendous destructive…
Two for Catholic Schools Week
Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg If you send your children to a Catholic school, you should ask the principal or a teacher if they can answer two questions: “What is a human person?” and “What is the purpose of an education?” You’ll likely hear about…
War – The Catholic Thing
War is a dreadful thing. If we find glory in it, it’s because we admire soldiers for their bravery, prowess, and sacrifice. I’ve known soldiers who march in parades on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July and are proud of their service, exactly as…
Sacerdotal Storytellers – The Catholic Thing
The patron saint of journalists is St. Francis de Sales – whose feast is today, 24 January. The Holy Father’s annual message for the World Day of Social Communications is dated for the feast in his honor. St. Francis (1567-1622) was certainly a…
The Special Anthropology of Transgenderism
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 13 in the cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., involving Idaho and West Virginia laws banning males who identify as female from competing in girls’ sports. Most commentators…
Pope Leo’s New Notes – The Catholic Thing
The late American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once remarked that the contemporary vision of a human being is a brain connected to a pair of “genitals” (the actual term he used is a bit salty for the present site). There seems to be nothing in…
Cardinals in Conflict: The Future of the Latin Mass and Synodality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgIzmM8Q6mU A battle royale is underway inside the Vatican—and the stakes couldn’t be higher. On this edition of The Prayerful Posse, Raymond Arroyo, Fr. Gerald Murray, and Robert Royal break down new details from…
The Lives of Christian Moms
When I taught CCD, I used to tell my kids, ‘If everybody else is doing it, it’s probably wrong.’ The Christian life is difficult. The truth is difficult.” So said Kelley (as we may call her) when I interviewed her, in January 1999, a few…
How They Died: Martyrdom of the Apostles
In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that Christ invited St. Peter “to the supreme followship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied. . .thereby forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship…
Comedies, Earthly and Divine – The Catholic Thing
A good friend and long-time prominent Catholic commentator called me this week to ask my perspective on current American foreign policy. Not for the first time, I had nothing coherent to offer. This has been the situation for some 15 years now.…