The Hard Truths of Responsible Governance
You cannot have peace by merely assuming that people are going always to be pacific, reasonable, restrained in their desires, deferent to authority, and considerate of others.
You cannot have peace by merely assuming that people are going always to be pacific, reasonable, restrained in their desires, deferent to authority, and considerate of others.
In all the calls to remember the “marginalized,” one group that doesn’t even get mentioned is boys. Yet marginalized they are.
It is one thing to tolerate your brother’s sin—because you yourself are a sinner, after all. It is another to accept it in principle, explicitly or implicitly.
Many young people appear to have fallen into the most antihuman way of life that any civilization has ever settled into.
Having consigned reason to that impoverished realm of human experience that can be subjected to controlled experiments and the quantification of their results, we are left with no basis upon which to make moral judgments except for feelings.
Sin does not grow sweet by majority practice; truth is not altered by a vote. The Church is not a political party.
The upshot is that two boys or two girls should not be a couple at all because that exclusivity is not what friendship is for; it is, in fact, an obstacle to the full flourishing of friendship.
Certain seminaries became pink palaces, where seminarians and priests commonly shrugged away their vows of chastity, treating such sins with a thoroughly modern wink and a nudge.
It is no surprise that the call to ordain (or to pretend to ordain) women as priests comes mainly from people who wish to marry (or to pretend to marry) a man with a man or a woman with a woman.
The pope is not a free agent. His authority, humanly considered, flows from his submission to and dependence upon Peter, that fisherman, that first pilot of the bark of the Church.
Everywhere you turn in the Catholic Church of the last fifty years, you find the spirit of Rupnik. All of the pseudo-primitive pseudo-childlike church art since my boyhood has been of a piece.
In this land we live in now, people are so dis-integrated that they have often no love for the bodies God gave them but, instead, must have them mutilated, just as their families so often have been.
In spite of the pope’s seeming preference for soccer over dogma, proclaiming the truths of the Catholic Faith—i.e., being “dogmatic”—leads to more joy and happiness, not less.
Our church leaders are ignoring the wounded man lying in the ditch to “minister” to the thief who attacked him.
What is at stake in our current controversies regarding male and female? Nothing less than creation itself.
While the world was being overwhelmed by the Sexual Revolution, too many Church leaders decided to ignore the hard work of opposing it while appearing busy by meddling in affairs which needed no fixing.
How does the Church evangelize men and women of the West, who don’t even recognize basic reality?
The winners of the recent Pontifical Academies Sacred Architecture Award speak in a thing I shall call The Language of No.
The purpose of schooling—which is not the same as education—is to encourage people to express confident platitudes, which they are pleased to call their opinions, about things they know nothing of.
One of the demands of Catholic social teaching is that there should be societies, and one of the most obvious features of contemporary life is that it is destructive of societies.Â