Entries by The Catholic Thing

You Do Belong Here

Robert Royal: Toleration and openness are not infinitely elastic. Democratic institutions depend on principles and social habits derived from Judeo-Christian notions of liberty ordered to God. We’re quite prone, in these days of political hysteria and fragility, to blow up discrete incidents – sensationally circulated on social media – into cosmic proportions. But every now and […]

Homo Utopianus

David Carlin: How strange it is that the most famous champions of that lovely dream, heaven-on-earth, should turn out to be mass murderers.   Sometime between the 18th and 19th centuries a new type of human being appeared in Europe.  Not a biologically new type. No, a new psychological type.  Let’s call this type homo utopianus. For […]

A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence

Anthony Esolen: Jeannine Gramick, a nun, indulges men who dress up as Catholic nuns. Does she also condone their grooming, enticing, and seducing? Ever quick to embarrass faithful Catholics who do the hard and thankless work of attempting to reintroduce sanity to a society gone mad with sexual sin, and rendered lonely and embittered amidst the […]

What the Imposing of Ideological Fantasies Reveals

Father Jerry J. Pokorsky: Science is the study of the handiwork of God. Christians must not object to legitimate science, but we must object to the abuse of science. There is an instructive story about an American hostage who asks his Iranian captors to listen to reason. They agree, but add, “Then we kill you.” Ideologues […]

The Queen of Queer Hill

David Carlin: Transgender ideologues are nothing less than monsters.  And the very worst monster of this kind is the parent (usually a mother) who encourages her little boy/girl to believe that he/she is a girl/boy. Just as there are degrees of hot and cold, so there are degrees of political leftism, some very mild, some stronger, […]

Last Words of the Last Nuremberg Prosecutor

Michael Pakaluk: The life of Benjamin Ferencz was defined by his defense of the innocent.  On Good Friday, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials died at an assisted living home in Boynton Beach, Florida.  Benjamin Ferencz was 103 years old.  Three years earlier, his wife, Gertrude, had passed away.  They were married in […]

Giving New Heart to the Wounded

Note: The following text is a slightly edited version of remarks that the author gave recently at the Catholic Information Center in Washington D.C. to mark the publication of her book Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, with an introduction by the late Cardinal George Pell. – Robert Royal Mary Eberstadt: As pressure mounts on the Church to capitulate […]

Imagining a Heretical President

John Horvat II: Calling a Catholic president heretical clears the air around debate by dispelling the theatrics surrounding “Catholic” figures who betray Church teaching. Bishop Thomas Paprocki recently pointed to a crisis in the Church with his article “Imagining a Heretical Cardinal.”  The learned canon lawyer masterfully laid out his case by quoting the positions of a “hypothetical” […]

Enough Is Enough

Francis X. Maier: The media revel in trashing the Catholic Church for its patterns of clergy sexual abuse but are in denial that the overwhelming majority of abusers are gay. A number of lessons can be drawn from a recent Washington Post story.  On March 9, the Post published a nearly 4,000-word story on the work of Catholic Laity and Clergy […]

Two Commentaries on the McElroy Controversies

Note: Two articles by Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego have caused a major stir in the American Church, even leading another American bishop, Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, to “imagine a heretical cardinal” quoting from, without naming, McElroy. Much further commentary has occurred, and much more is needed, which is why we publish here […]