The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.
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By Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky At times it's enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to question whether we need priests, bishops, and popes – or even the Church. (Protestants have, for 500 years.) Why not dismiss them all as complicating factors and enjoy the bliss of sola Scriptura? Well, a few nagging details are noticeable. The Gospels recount Jesus' words and glorious deeds. After the miraculous multiplication
By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza This summer I got a new favorite song – Bob Dylan's Chimes of Freedom. It's not a new song; it dates from the early 1960s. It remained entirely unknown to me until a few months back at Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen used it as the final song on his Land of Hope and Dreams tour. He used it, too, on his European tour last year. I am not the only one who often prefers cover versions to Dylan himself. Is Bob Dylan's music a Catholic thing? Many a homilist has quoted his 1979 song Gotta Serve Somebody, especially against the argument that unbelievers are f
By Msgr. Charles Fink Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something such that it has the remarkable capacity to evolve into the complex yet orderly universe we behold, so orderly that predictability and science are possible? Why do even the simplest living cells contain genetic information analogous to complex computer codes? These are not meaningless questions. Nor is it obvious why the only intelligent answer to such questions is simply a roll of the dice. Or that's just the way things are. In all areas of human endeavor, we look for reasons and causes to account for the
By Michael Pakaluk Search the Catechism, the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, indeed the entire Vatican website – search all you want – for teaching about what we call the "national debt." You will not find it. You can find teaching about the debt that poorer nations owe to wealthier nations, "foreign debt," but not about the debt that a government accumulates through financing deficits. Some background: Each year the U.S. federal government spends roughly $2 trillion more than it takes in and issues bonds to finance this deficit. Each year's deficit, when not repaid, gets added to the
By Francis X. Maier One of my favorite, if cynical, figures from Reformation history and Europe's Wars of Religion is Henri de Bourbon. Raised as a committed (Calvinist) Huguenot, he succeeded to the French throne as Henri IV. But in a dominantly Catholic nation, he faced fierce resistance. So he did the pragmatic thing. He converted. His motives may have been dubious. But a line attributed to him – it's not clear that he ever actually said it – echoes down through the centuries: Paris vaut bien une Messe; "Paris is well worth a Mass." Simply put, he did what he needed to do to get what he wan
By Kristen Ziccarelli 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 Christian history, these divisions would have seemed all but impossible. Today's feast of King St. Louis IX of France (August 25) offers us an opportunity to recover a gem of medieval wisdom, which is the prospect that political authority can be truly ordered toward Christ. King St. Louis IX, who ruled France from 1226 to 1270, is re
By Brad Miner 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 vote on its Magisterium, its authoritative application of that depositum fidei. It receives, guards, and transmits that ancient faith. Doctrine can develop in the sense that St. John Henry Newman described it, growing in clarity and application, as an acorn becomes an oak tree. But it cannot be renegotiated – or reversed! – by majority sent
By Fr. Paul D. Scalia 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.") Today's Gospel (Matthew 16:13-20) gives evidence of this truth. God doesn't ask questions because He needs the answers, but because we need to reflect on them and to find in them more spiritual fruit than human answers can provide. Our Lord has taken His Apostles into the pagan territory of Caesarea Philippi. It's a calmer place becaus
By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza Pope Leo XIV is traveling to Rimini today for the annual cultural festival organized by Communion and Liberation (CL). Few use its formal name, the "Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples." It's simply "Rimini." It might be the only thing many know about the Italian coastal town, which draws major figures from the worlds of religion, the arts, and even Italian politics for its summer gathering. Some 80,000 participants attend, with three-quarters of a million more following online. Communion and Liberation inaugurated the Rimini meeting in 1980, and already in 1982 S
By Joseph R. Wood As I write, on the day celebrated by some Orthodox as the feast of the Transfiguration on the Julian calendar, I've had several experiences of beauty just this morning. The sunrise through the West Virginia trees, the sunlight streaming into an Orthodox monastery church and illuminating the rising incense smoke around the icons, the chant, the memory of the faces of those I love, on and on. While I drove across the country this summer, I imagined, or at least hoped, that I was more aware of and attentive to the beauty surrounding me than I had been on similar voyages earlier
By Stephen P. White But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight – Thursday, August 20 at 8 PM Eastern – to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing debates about synodality and liturgy, liberal nuns who challenge Church teaching, and other current issues in the Church and the world. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for today's columns... I r
By Robert Royal We recently reached the 250th anniversary (a quarter-millennium) of the dominant nation and culture of our time – and of one of the greatest countries in world history. Yet just a few weeks later, you'd hardly know it. And only a month ago, everyone was talking – even here – about a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, a 3000-year-old foundation stone of our civilization. That, too, passed quickly and is unlikely to become a classic. The Church keeps better time – witness the recent Feast of the Assumption. But we need much greater attention to what's important, deep, steady, an
By Fr. Gerald E. Murray 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 cooperates in the same mission according to their own charism and ministry. In a special way, those in religious life are called to become experts in synodality due to the opportunities afforded by community life to practice it, as well as the very way that your congregations are organized. What, though, is "a synodal Church" in
By Randall Smith I sometimes hear people say something like this: "I want to believe, but I just can't," or "I would like to believe, but I just don't." I don't wish to be critical of such people. I assume their reserve about "faith" comes out of a good-willed desire to be honest about themselves – like someone admitting, "I wish I were a calm, temperate person, but I'm just not." So, although I respect the goodwill, I still would wish to ask this person: "What do you think faith is?" "What do you think having faith is like?" I fear sometimes that people think "having faith" is the same as "be
By David G Bonagura, Jr. A wave of egalitarianism, swelling for over two centuries, has broken over every corner of the West, including the Church. In its backwash, among other aspects of Catholic life, the approach to vocations in the Church has slowed. Older Catholics would have heard in their youth that a vocation to the priesthood or to religious life is the "higher calling" compared to the Church's other vocational sacrament, holy matrimony. For younger Catholics, this label and this comparison have seemingly been swept out to sea. It's not that the Church has given up promoting religious
By Michael Pakaluk Why debate what the development of doctrine looked like in distant eras of Church history when we have three instances in front of us, two of which were seen and commented upon by that great Saint of Development, John Henry Newman? By "right in front of us," I mean the extended present of the Church's self-consciousness, which reaches back to Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility in 1870, and Pius XII's definition of the Assumption in 1950. These are three examples of the Church developing its
By Christopher Kaczor Who is Notre Dame's MVP? I don't mean the Most Valuable Player on the football team. I mean the Most Valuable Professor on the faculty. If there is any justice on earth, John Cavadini deserves that honor. At a time when many complain of poor university teachers and defections from Catholic truth, he has excelled not just for one season, but for over thirty years. More than any single person during that period, he has preserved and transformed Notre Dame and the Church for the better. Cavadini earned his Ph.D. in 1988 from Yale University. As a grad student, he rose before
By John M. Grondelski The Institute for Family Studies just released "The Demographic Dead End: Without Action, American Population Will Soon Decline," the most recent of many studies pointing to the impending cataclysm for Western societies from extended periods of below-replacement fertility rates. The IFS study is hardly unique: more and more people and institutions are talking about population decline and aging societies. Despite the handwringing, however, few politicians or other public figures are doing much about it, and their suggested solutions are polarized: the Left mostly proposes
By Robert Royal I've been in Central Europe for the past few weeks for two educational projects, one that will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2026 and another that's just beginning. Both of them, though I left Washington thinking I was too tired to keep it up and really should be taking some vacation time, gave me – to put it simply but truly – hope. I've been teaching in and running the Slovak Summer Seminar on the Free Society for about twenty years. My friend Michael Novak founded it and left it to me when health problems started to hamper him. We both have family ties to Slovaki
By Brad Miner In the Mile End Road, opposite to the London Hospital, there was . . . a vacant greengrocer's which was to let. The whole of the front of the shop, with the exception of the door, was hidden by a hanging sheet of canvas on which was the announcement that the Elephant Man was to be seen within . . . – from The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Frederick Treves (1923) I am not here concerned with moral matters, as in the beauty of the virtues – of love or of honor. This is about the human experience of physical objects and of sensory impressions – of faces and bodies; of art
By Francis X. Maier In late July, some 60,000 migrants surged into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. The migrants were mainly young males. And since 99 percent of Moroccans practice Islam, most were almost certainly Muslim. Ceuta is not a Spanish colony. It's an "autonomous city" integral to the Spanish state, with Spanish sovereignty dating back to 1580. It's thus a (hoped for) gateway to the European Union, and a priority target of "undocumented" immigration. Spanish police pushed most of the migrants back across the border. They left behind – as the Wall Street Journa
By K.E. Colombini 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 previous month become the cathedral for the new diocese south of Los Angeles. Not much seemed different with the passing of nearly half a century, yet the evolution of the cathedral for the Diocese of Orange in the intervening years is itself an interesting story. There was nothing spectacular about Holy Family, which was built in the la
By Daniel Guernsey The state of Florida is threatening to pull over a billion dollars of school choice funds from Catholic schools because those schools refuse to admit unvaccinated children in obedience to the policy of the Florida Catholic Conference. The Florida Attorney General's notice to the Conference urges it to respect the conscience rights of those Florida citizens who do not want to give their children vaccines derived from aborted fetal tissue. The notice requires clarification of the Conference's religious basis for denying conscience exemptions by yesterday (August 7th). The Flor
By Stephen P. White Next week, my wife and I will celebrate our 20th anniversary. We were just out of high school when we first met – barely a year older than our oldest daughter is now. It's enough to give even a somewhat cynical middle-aged man a case of feelings. Mostly, though, I am grateful for all the unmerited blessings that have shaped our lives over the past two decades. As is always the case with gratitude, it moves one to share. So, it is in a spirit of gratitude that I presume to inflict on you, dear reader, a few unsolicited bits of advice about marriage from someone who has been
By Kristen Ziccarelli Today, August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, commemorates one of the most mysterious moments in Christ's public ministry. Ascending Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John, Jesus is transfigured before them. His face shines "like the sun," and His garments become dazzling white, Moses and Elijah appear beside Him, and the Father's voice declares, "This is my beloved Son. . . .listen to Him." Peter immediately responds, "Lord, it is good that we are here." The Transfiguration is recounted in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It happens in the final year of Jesus's l
