The name “neoconservative” is often bandied about, usually in a way that shows its user to be ignorant (or at least very vague) whereof he speaks. All sorts of people are called “neoconservative” who are merely “conservative” or “new right” or something else quite different. Jerry Falwell is new right; Irving Kristol is neoconservative; Irving … Read more
Next month, this journal begins its tenth year. It hardly seems possible, so fast has the time flown. In November, 1982, Ralph Mclnerny and I contributed $2,000 to put out the first, thin issue (14 pages) of what was then called Catholicism in Crisis. We chose for our first editorial several quotations from Reinhold Niebuhr’s … Read more
What passes for theology nowadays has had gratifyingly little effect on the religious lives of people. Many dissenters, angry that it resists their efforts at redesign, portray the Bark of Peter as having sprung so many leaks that submersion is imminent. Yet one tempted, like Lord Jim, to jump ship and leave the pilgrims to … Read more
From his major philosophical text The Acting Person to his first social encyclical Laborem Exercens, Karol Wojtyla has been fascinated by the human capacity to originate action, by initiative and by “creative subjectivity.” His embrace of “creation theology” in Laborem Exercens led him to his articulation of “the fundamental right of personal economic initiative” in … Read more
The pope’s splendid new encyclical, Centesimus Annus (dated May 1, 1991), adds a new characteristic to his defense of liberty. It has been clear for many years that Pope John Paul II supports democratic institutions more than any previous pope and sees them as the best way to secure human rights. It has also been … Read more
Over the years, there is no sentence I have more often quoted, I suppose, than this conviction of Charles Peguy: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” This conviction gives the metaphysician, the poet, and the mystic the courage to believe that he or she can make a contribution to the political life of … Read more
It was a bitter cold day in March 717 years ago that Thomas Aquinas died among the Benedictines in the hills south of Rome, in his forty-ninth year. On the feast of St. Nicholas three months earlier he had stopped writing. After a vision of God, he felt contempt for what he had done—it seemed … Read more
The January 15 deadline for Saddam Hussein’s retreat from Kuwait will soon arrive. Having murdered, raped, and plundered Kuwait’s cities, leaving nothing of value untouched, and having carted off to Iraq every precious thing down to faucets and silverware, will not Saddam Hussein simply depart and declare victory? Can he not now boast: “I came, … Read more
Next year will mark the one-hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and it is much to be hoped that Pope John Paul II will issue a new encyclical summarizing and developing the papal understanding of the economic side of human development. He could hardly do better than to extend his reflections on the fundamental … Read more
We encounter the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas in practically every court of law, in which criteria of full or diminished guilt are applied; in every attempt to contrive international law; in the conceptual separation of the things of God from matters proper to the state; in the use of concepts which he was the … Read more
Ever since Vatican II, various theologians have declared that Thomism, natural law theory, and indeed philosophy itself are dead. Was that announcement premature? Too many Catholic thinkers have tried living by a kind of philosophical fideism collapsing all rational analysis into opinions derived, they say, from “the gospel.” Perhaps surprisingly, this tendency has been observed … Read more
Two odd facts in Eastern Europe arrest my attention. First, the label that Communists latch onto when the name “communist” becomes a liability is “social democracy.” The Communist Party in Poland, e.g., is now called The Social Democracy Party. One wonders if this makes Americans who call themselves Social Democrats nervous. It should. The program … Read more
For some years now, it is no secret, the ideas that Crisis stands for have taken quite a beating in the National Catholic Reporter, the New Oxford Review, and elsewhere. For some of this, we have been grateful; it has forced us to go more deeply. Much of it, however, has persuaded us that the … Read more
“I’ll tell you what chills the blood of liberals,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) told Juan Williams of the Washington Post. “It was always thought that the old bastards were the conservatives. Now the young people are becoming the conservatives and we are the old bastards.” The sprightly Senator was, or course, speaking of … Read more
Thomas Jefferson once wrote of North America that with respect to rights, “there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American Whigs thought alike on these subjects.” By Whigs he meant “The Party of Liberty”; believers in republican government or government by the people; and those intent upon creating, in accord … Read more
Long ago as a child, in saying the family rosary, I learned to recite the Apostle’s creed, even before fully comprehending its many large and pregnant words. As an altar boy and choir boy, I learned to sing by memory the Nicene Creed at Mass on Sundays, Holy Days, and other occasions. In those days, … Read more
Catholic thought proclaims the primacy of morals over politics and economics. The reason for this is that any social system apportioned to human liberty must recognize the moral activism and responsibility inherent in the use of liberty. In a free society, individual persons exercise far greater liberty of economic action than in any totalitarian, authoritarian, … Read more
One of my priest friends hates the phrase “war of ideas.” St. Paul didn’t — and neither did Erasmus. To the very depths of one’s mind and heart, they thought, a Christian does combat against “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” and true Christian faith is constantly attacked from all sides. Today, moreover, some … Read more
Back on November 2, Father Richard P. McBrien and I had lunch together at the Morris Inn at Notre Dame. Not four hours later, at a formal function, a university official asked me how the lunch went: “Were there explosions?” Surprised that a pleasant lunch had become an “event,” I replied: “Hey! We don’t agree … Read more
Christmas is the special day every year in which the Catholic Church celebrates the mystery that symbolically excludes women from the priesthood. Saints and doctors of the Church women have been and are. They have proven often to be the most faithful of all Christians, the dearest to God as Mary is first among all. … Read more