Death, decries the novelist Alan Harrington, is “an imposition on the human race” from which we will be saved by “medical engineering and nothing else.” Though the dark hearse of death drives fear of that moment when “everything will go black . . . our messiahs will be wearing white coats.” In Pale Horse, Pale … Read more
“Whenever I feel bad,” Binx Bolling confesses, “I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.” Walker Percy’s professional moviegoer hasn’t concluded whether he’s a liberal or a conservative; nevertheless, he confesses to being “enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other.” Binx, who fancies himself as being on an existential “search,” is plagued … Read more
We have had our “Year of Mercy.” Now it’s time we had a Year of Justice. Of course, a Year of Justice wouldn’t be the antimony of the Year of Mercy—but, rather, its necessary corollary. A person is said to be merciful, Aquinas observes, when he knows sorrow in his heart (miserum cor) over the miseries … Read more
During the heady days of Vatican II, while spirited disputes over the schema raged on, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre proposed that the governing structure of the episcopal conferences undergirding the Council was “a new kind of collectivism invading the Church.” Lefebvre wasn’t fearmongering when he told the missionary-journalist Fr. Ralph Wiltgen that a handful of bishops … Read more
In his treatise The Rise and Fall of Elites, Vilfredo Pareto proffers the thesis that “the history of man is the history of the continuous replacement of elites: as one ascends, another declines.” Unduly reductive as this contention is, Pareto attunes us to the persistent presence of elites in even the most revolutionary and populist … Read more
In his essay “Why No Civility is Possible Today,” Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. writes that, “A common good can be worked out among those citizens who may prudentially disagree on this or that point of policy.” It is necessary for citizens to come together and debate because there is almost never one single way … Read more