The Catholic Thing

By Daniel B. Gallagher.The 250th birthday of the United States is a good time to remember that 1776 was the year of a new nation, not a new government. It would take another eleven years for the Founders to formulate what the government would look like, and two more to elect the first president.This sequence of events reminds us that it is not a government that makes a nation, but a nation that...

By Dominic V. CassellaIn the season of Lent, the Church enters the wilderness to fast and abstain. It is a time of testing. The number forty often indicates this throughout the Scriptures. "Forty days" signals a time when God tests the hearts of His people, so that what lies hidden within might be revealed.In Genesis, the deluge that washed the world of living creatures – except for Noah and...

By Anthony EsolenIn one of the great ironies of linguistic history, the English word "bedlam," suggesting frenzy, madness, chaos, and noise, comes from what was then the common British pronunciation of the sacred name Bethlehem, in the Hospital of Saint Mary in Bethlehem, a monastery dedicated in 1402 to the housing and treatment of lunatics.Hence we have "Tom o' Bedlam," the name that Edgar...

By Joseph. R. Wood.It's Lent, when our mortifications and the Church's readings give us a sharper opportunity to think about what we love, and whether we are loving the right things.James Patrick was a wise man and a good friend. I met him after he had founded a tiny post-secondary educational institution, St. Thomas More College in Fort Worth. I say "institution" because even aside from its size...

Hamnet, the 2025 film that has already won a slew of awards and is a favorite to win Oscar "Bests" for Picture, Director (Chloé Zhao), and Actress (Jessie Buckley), deserves its accolades. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's novel, it reimagines the genesis of The World's Most Famous Play. (Spoiler alert ahead, although at the very end.)Hamnet begins with the meeting and mating of William Shakespeare and...

By Fr. Benedict Kiely.The small but growing Catholic Church in Norway is blessed to have two bishops now, native Norwegians, under fifty-two years old. Bishop Frederik Hansen, appointed the Bishop of Oslo in July 2025, joins the Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden, appointed Bishop of Trondheim, in October 2019.Plans are currently underway to celebrate the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Olaf, the...

By Randall SmithI will begin with a statement that may seem like pointless virtue signaling, so I hope readers will stick with me. The statement is simply that I think we should care about how immigrants are treated, whether they are legal or not.Now, I don't think this statement is especially controversial – most people don't want immigrants to be abused. But it can seem controversial depending...

By Robert Royal.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 power of modern weapons, nuclear and not, has made careful thought about war not only urgent, but – to use the fashionable term –...

By Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky.The Transfiguration reveals the mystery of Christ's Person. In His glorified body, He stands as the fulfillment of the Law with Moses and of the Prophets with Elijah. He is the beloved Son of the Father, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Yet Tabor cannot be separated from Calvary, nor Calvary from Easter morning.The Apostles could not grasp this at once....

By Kristen ZiccarelliMy generation, Gen Z, has been graduating from college for about ten years now, and is typically told some variation of the same message at Commencement: go forth and change the world. But not everyone can change the world. And perhaps it's worth considering that not everyone should. The charge to change the world presupposes something of a utilitarian calculus: try to...