The Catholic Thing

By Joseph R. Wood.This is the week when we contemplate, more than any other week, how much we are loved.This is the week when the words of John's Gospel, that we are "given power to become children of God," are brought to fulfillment.This is the week when we are restored to the possibility of having a great soul.God is love, claims St. John. At the Last Supper, Christ tells us repeatedly to love...

By Randall SmithWe pride ourselves on the fact that we don't have a "caste system" in America, with higher and lower castes and those at the bottom who are "untouchables." I sometimes wonder, though, whether we have something analogous in the way we distinguish "the elite" from the "deplorables." As for "untouchables," try going to a "Not a King" rally and saying, "I like some of the things Trump...

By Brad Miner."The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous."– Michelangelo to Benedetto Varchi, 1549The greatest artist of the Renaissance is famous for something he may never have said: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." There are other versions of the quotation, as in the epigraph above, that are genuine, and they may seem to suggest that...

By Fr. Paul D. ScaliaAll of Lent is an exercise in holy sorrow. We don't know how to mourn as we ought – especially not our sins. So, we need these 40 days of penitence, to train us how to be sorrowful in the proper way. We need to learn genuine contrition. How not to skip over the gravity of our sins, nor to catastrophize them as if there were no Redeemer. To be sorry for our sins, not because...

By Fr. Raymond J. de SouzaThe feast day of the newest Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman, is not his dies natalis (death) but 9th October, the day of his conversion in 1845. That date was definitive for the shape of the Catholic Church in England. So much good for the Catholic Church followed.On March 29, 1986, Scott Hahn was received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. So much...

By Francis X. MaierScience is an odd theme to choose on the brink of Holy Week. Or maybe not so odd. In a way, science is miraculous. It's an expression of man's dignity and genius. It offers our species two deep satisfactions: the joy of discovering how the world works, and the means of using what we learn to improve our lives and the lives of others. It also seems to answer the "why" of things....

By Michael PakalukA correct Catholic approach to AI becomes clearer, I think, if we approach a foundational text in Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum novarum, not as about structural issues in political economy, but rather as about claims on time and claims of authority.The workhouses of the Industrial Revolution, by paying only a subsistence wage to the father, forced wives and children into the...

By Matthew WalzFor Lent this year, I resolved to pray the Angelus in the morning, at midday, and in the evening – a practice, of course, long a part of Catholic piety. In my adult life, I've been up and down in adhering to this practice, and this year I wanted to fix that. (Please don't ask how I've done thus far!)I was inspired to make this resolution by a passage in St. John Paul II's Gift and...

By John M. GrondelskiI take the subway to work. I like doing that because it gives me uninterrupted time to do things. Read. I get at least two books done per month. Write. Some of those book reviews get sketched out on the Orange Line. Pray. The trip to work can be a good 20 minutes for silent prayer.Recently, looking around at my fellow passengers, I wondered how many others might avail their...

By Robert RoyalLet's begin with a pointed question: Are we, almost all, today, Sadducees? If your knowledge of the groups who appear in the New Testament is hazy, we might put it thus: Do almost all of us now, even Christians who claim otherwise, like the Sadducees in Jesus' day, basically discount eternal life and think physical death the absolute end, and worst of evils? If so, a war may do us...