Does Rick Perry want to undermine traditional marriage? This question leaps out from his new 20 percent flat-tax plan, which would eliminate all tax advantages for married couples where one spouse is the primary breadwinner. For more than 60 years, the federal income tax has treated the family as an economic unit. A husband … Read more
Appearing the other night on the Catholic network EWTN, I was asked by Raymond Arroyo what should be done about Muslim students at Catholic University demanding that the school provide them with prayer rooms, from which crucifixes and all other Catholic symbols that they found offensive had been removed. After a nanosecond I replied, … Read more
A non-Muslim activist lawyer has filed charges of discrimination against the Catholic University of America with the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights (OHR). The university is discriminating against Muslim students, he contends, by “forcing” them to conduct Islamic prayer services in rooms filled with crucifixes and other symbols of the Catholic faith. The … Read more
If you had to use just a single word to express the human condition, which would you choose? This isn’t a Cosmopolitan Magazine quiz, so think for a moment before you fill in the blank. Maybe take out a pen and make a list. Weigh your options against each other, and see if you can … Read more
L’Osservatore Romano’s English edition (Jan. 29—Mar. 5 1997), ran five essays on “Satanism.” Reference was made there to an earlier study written by an unnamed French theologian entitled “Faith and Demonology,” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in 1975. The latter document covers the history of papal and Church thinking on … Read more
Can we fight a war, kill foreign leaders, declare victory, and then leave? How about travelling the world looking for monsters to slay? Will this keep us free and safe? In recent weeks, three events occurred around the globe that have great implications for American freedom. On Oct. 20, Col. Moammar Kaddafi, the acknowledged … Read more
First, the context: Modern political science — which readily understands imperialism, resistance, and clash of competing interests– does not similarly understand “the wasting away of nations.” That, says David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too), is because political scientists tend to assume that people will follow their rational … Read more
Last October, my 12-year-old son stood in the aisle of our local pharmacy and held up a life-like foam replica of a human skull. “How about this one?” I winced. My son rolled his eyes. “Come on!” he coaxed. “St. Francis had one!” Of course he did. I placed the skull in our cart, along … Read more
As Halloween approaches, our thoughts turn to horror movies — at least mine do, since I am a Halloween baby and have a disordered soul. I have followed this genre avidly and find that it contains some interesting and unexpected messages beyond Boo! While working for the Reagan administration, I was once dispatched on a … Read more
Do we need a supranational authority to enforce social justice? The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (PJCP) seems to think so. Its new document, “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” calls for global economic regulation by a supranational body and a central world … Read more
Two weeks have passed since the indictment of Kansas City’s Bishop Robert Finn. The bishop’s critics are demanding his resignation, while his defenders protest his innocence. Let’s step back a pace, and put the matter in perspective. The indictment of an American bishop is a big story—a huge story, an unprecedented story. Yet oddly enough, … Read more
Events unfolding in the Middle East are proving that Henry Hyde was right and George Bush was wrong on the wisdom of a foreign policy focused on promoting democracy. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared in Hyde’s House International Relations Committee on Feb. 16, 2006, she presented written testimony touting Bush’s messianic policy. “In … Read more
Judging from the hundreds of thousands of Germans who attended and watched Pope Benedict XVI’s September trip to his homeland (not to mention the tsunami of commentaries sparked by his Bundestag address), the pope’s visit was — once again — a success. And, once again, it was also an occasion for self-identified dissenting Catholics to … Read more
Forty years ago, the sexual revolution broke through the last barricades of Victorian propriety. A whole generation drifted toward moral anarchy in its fitful pursuit of sexual liberation. At the end of the day, the casualties of this revolution surround us—AIDS patients, aborted children, and single mothers. But only recently have the intellectual elite come … Read more
With many intricate illustrations, John Henry Newman argued that the highest teaching office of the Church, cathedrated in Rome, is by paradox negative in the most positive sense. The Pope does not invent truths: he defines them against challenges. This is the essence of conservatism, not in a political sense, but in a pastoral ecology. … Read more
Many thoughtful Catholics dismiss concern for style as an affectation, an indulgence in personal taste. Like Puritan prelates, they pull their hems back from what they regard as an overemphasis on ornament and human ceremony. These are distractions from the true ecclesia, the living temple that is the people of God. If Christ is found … Read more
Distributists and followers of the “Austrian school” of free market economics are notoriously at odds with each other over what constitutes a just economic order. We disagree, at times vigorously, on how to structure an economy that best guarantees the rights of the family and that offers the best opportunities for prosperity and liberty. We … Read more
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding “people before profits” — as if profit motivation were the source of mankind’s troubles — when it’s often the absence of profit motivation that’s the true villain. First, let’s get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by … Read more
“Nowhere is the need for ongoing development more acutely felt,” writes Father Thomas D. Williams, L.C., “than in the area of the Church’s social teaching” — which makes Catholic social thought “one of the most exciting areas of theology in which to be engaged.” In his new book The World As It Could Be: Catholic … Read more
Let’s say you go to the doctor with a pain in your gut, and the doctor very astutely discovers that you have been poisoned. He knows how and when it happened. He knows the precise kind of poison that victimized you. Then he gives your prescription: more poison in higher doses. You would be at … Read more