The good and wise Pope Leo XIII never condemned an error without commending a truth. In this series on Catholic Social Teaching, then, I believe I should follow the Holy Father’s example. It’s easy to inveigh against what Leo condemns; more rewarding, though, to reveal the beauty of what he commends. In this essay, then, … Read more
The great error of most economic thinking these days is not that it is too keenly focused on the economy, but that it has all but forgotten it. A good friend of mine, a wise theologian, has encouraged his students to distinguish between what Aristotle calls chrematistics, the craft of amassing wealth, which Aristotle viewed … Read more
The student congress at Harvard, America’s most prestigious “institution of higher learning,” as the euphemism goes, has voted to provide funds to a campus group promoting sadomasochistic sex. Members of the Love and Fidelity Network, a group promoting chastity before marriage and faithfulness within, voice their opposition, and are widely denounced and ridiculed. A female … Read more
In Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878), Pope Leo XIII deplores those who “under the motley and all but barbarous terms and titles of Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists, are spread abroad throughout the world,” striving in alliance for “the purpose long resolved upon, of uprooting the foundations of civil society at large.” It may sound odd to … Read more
In my first installment, I looked at Pope Leo XIII’s early encyclical Inscrutabili (1878), on the evils affecting modern society, wherein the Pope decried the state’s displacement of the Church’s institutions established for charitable work and the education of youth. I kept in reserve Leo’s severe condemnation of new laws regarding marriage. The issue is … Read more
Imagine someone appealing to Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, to justify the activities of gangs in Los Angeles. Why not? Lord Baden-Powell wanted boys to do risky things, and what’s more dangerous than running guns or smuggling cocaine or fighting another gang in a shooting spree? He enjoined upon the Scouts a stern … Read more
It’s been more than ten years since I first noticed something odd about the generally pleasant—and generally Catholic—students at the college where I teach. The boys and girls don’t hold hands. Let that serve as shorthand for the absence of all those rites of attraction and conversation, flirting and courting, that used to be passed … Read more
By now everyone paying attention to the presidential race has heard of the tasteless double-entendre ad the Obama campaign has put out, comparing voting for the President to losing your virginity. I am trying—I am failing—to imagine the astonishment if someone had suggested the like to the leaders of the Democratic party of my youth … Read more
One thing that defenders of the sexual revolution will not understand is that, although the act of intercourse is private (or better be), everything else about sex is public. I don’t simply mean that people will know that John and Mary are in a “relationship,” horrid denatured word, or that sexual intercourse results in those … Read more
What strikes me most powerfully about the defenders of the sexual revolution is their immovable abstraction. Always the matter is couched in terms of rights, or individual desires—what I want, what I may pursue. That this sexual laissez-faire destroys the common good, by undermining families and rotting whole neighborhoods from within, seems not to matter. … Read more
Thomas Aquinas, practical fellow that he was, understood that not all bad things can feasibly be proscribed by human law. It isn’t because people disagree about what is bad, but rather that a well-governed polity should require few laws, easily promulgated and understood, broadly promoting the common good, wherein the lawgiver can attend to things … Read more
President Clinton, wagging his finger in accusation, has said that the Republican philosophy of government is, “You’re on your own.” The sheer absurdity of the statement staggers the mind. I doubt there is a single person in the nation who knows, even approximately, the number of government programs at all levels instituted to assist the … Read more
“Are you interested in painting, sir?” asks the cheerful curator of the modern art museum. “No, not me,” says the detective. He passes his hand across his rumpled hair. “Now, Mrs. Columbo, she’s different. That woman is into everything. She does a little painting herself.” “She does?” “Oh, yeah, all the time. She buys these … Read more
In recent days, the Canadian Christian television show, 100 Huntley Street, has been uncharacteristically aggressive in its denunciation of the anticulture about us. The topic is teenagers and smut—sometimes it is good to return to direct and morally charged words. Their guest has been Josh McDowell, who has spent his whole adult life bringing Christ … Read more
Recently I caught ten minutes of a ghastly television show called House. It’s a medical drama whose scripts, filming, direction, and acting cover the spectrum from dour to grim. The doctors were attempting to determine why an eighteen-year-old girl was suffering life-threatening convulsions. One guess was that they were severe reactions to an allergen. “But … Read more
Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me…for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” I’ve suggested in an earlier essay that chastity is but the giving of due reverence to the goodness and the holiness of sexual being, male and female. A land where chastity—not mere abstinence, and not prideful scorn of … Read more
One of the more puzzling things about contemporary arguments regarding what things a good or free society ought to allow and what things it ought to forbid is our turn toward the “expert,” the ethicist, the person who has made a professional career of teasing out deductions from moral premises. But what really qualifies such … Read more
“Where,” asks the editor, “will your town get the money to build new school rooms, and pay better salaries to more teachers? Thousands of communities are wrestling with this problem, or will soon be faced with it. We offer a suggestion.” It is really quite simple. Everyone, from the PTA to the local Rotarians, should … Read more
When Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, insinuates himself into the garden of Eden, he encounters a perfect riot of beauty: lush grapevines hanging over grottoes and heavy with fruit, grassy meadows full of browsing cattle and sheep, streams splashing their way over the rocks, and flowers literally pouring forth at the bidding not of dainty … Read more
In the coming months we will learn whether America’s long experiment in ordered liberty must finally be declared dead. It has of late been coughing up plenty of blood. Consider the public school system: nor forget that what is implied by the word “system” is a vast coordinated network of elementary and secondary schools nearly identical … Read more