The Catholic Thing

By Joanna BogleThis summer, as in so many summers past, I will be making a pilgrimage to Walsingham. This Norfolk village is the home of England's national shrine to Our Lady, and I'll be on a coach from London, and telling the story of the shrine along the way.One result of our country's complicated history is that many Catholics – here at home but also abroad – don't know the story of some of...

By David WarrenOne of the best ways to keep everybody angry, and thus to let us share in the modern experience, is to use words in a left-brained sort of way.I refer, of course, to Iain McGilchrist, the writer who has given us the most thorough and accessible account of our two brains. For we, like the other senior animals, have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. Both are in use for...

By Stephen P. WhiteI am in Poland, as I am every July, for the Tertio Millennio Seminar, a three-week meeting on Catholic social teaching and the thought of John Paul II. As we often do, we began our seminar with Mass in the St. Leonard's chapel. It was there that a newly ordained Karol Wojtyla offered his first Mass on November 2, 1946.The chapel dates from the 11th century. Built in the...

By Msgr. Thomas G. GuarinoAs everyone knows by now, the ordination of bishops carried out by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has resulted in the automatic excommunication of the six bishops involved. No matter how it may spin its canonical status, the Society is now definitively outside of the Catholic Church.Insofar as the SSPX denies the authenticity of Vatican II, this outcome was inevitable....

By Randall SmithMagnifica humanitas has been widely discussed for its approach to artificial intelligence. Pope Leo emphasizes the importance of the schools for training people to retain their humanity in the face of these challenges. If we took the encyclical as a guide to education, what sort of education would that be?An essential goal would be to educate students about the dignity of the...

By Michael PakalukWhen J.D. Vance's memoir of his path back to Christianity, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is described at a high level of generality, we see immediately that it is a book of the highest importance. Here is a leader on the world stage who grasps, and is not afraid to say, that Christianity has been the source of social unity for European – that is, Western –...

By Msgr. Charles FinkThere are terrible injustices in our country. There are people in jail who don't belong there and people on the street who belong in jail. But there is no country on earth where one is likely to get a fairer trial or where one will have a better chance of having a wrong righted or an injustice undone.There are glaring inequalities in our society. There are very rich and very...

By Robert Royal and Brad Miner and Francis X. Maier and Michael Pakaluk and Joseph R. WoodIn Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo invokes the Biblical story of Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem as a poignant alternative to the Tower of Babel's effort to reach Heaven without God. It's a good reminder – but of something more than the pope indicated. In the days of walled cities, rebuilding walls...

By Fr. Raymond J. de SouzaIn the early days of July 1826, Thomas Jefferson "marshalled his will toward the realization of one last mission: He wanted to survive until the Fourth of July." So writes Jon Meacham in his marvelous biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.Jefferson did, repeatedly asking in his final agony in the evening hours of July 3: "This is the Fourth?" He finally heard the...

By Fr. Gerald E. MurrayThe canonically illegal consecration/ordination (the terms are interchangeable) of four new bishops by two Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) bishops who were themselves illegally ordained by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre 38 years ago is a renewed wound upon the Mystical Body of Christ. This schismatic act of disobedience carried out in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV's public...