The new Prime Minister of Italy. Wow. pic.twitter.com/fkKTM8I9Fs — Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) September 26, 2022 Robert Royal: The rise of populist Giorgia Meloni in Italian politics reflects a Europe-wide reaction against open borders and attacks on traditional culture, including the family. If exit polls hold, yesterday Italy elected its first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The […]
Blessing or a Curse? Stephen P. White The Flemish bishops of Belgium published a document this week on pastoral care for homosexual persons. The most notable aspect of the document is its inclusion of a text for blessing same-sex couples. The bishops plan to present the text to Pope Francis when they travel to Rome […]
John M. Grondelski: Pro-lifers should find ways of simplifying the message. Hold up an aspirin in a school board meeting, and ask why that, truly for healthcare, requires in schools parental knowledge and consent, but an abortion does not. In the wake of Dobbs, pro-abortionists will leave no stone unturned to use – as they did before Roe – the […]
John Grondelski: Employers are beginning to offer paid abortions and even out-of-state transportation to have them. It’s about cash not compassion. As Catholics in the United States mark Labor Day, two key elements of Catholic social thought deserve our attention: the intersection between the right to life and work. Until now, the abortion debate has largely […]
David Carlin: Evangelical Protestants do not feel they had to prove that they were good Americans. Catholics do. By making San Diego’s bishop, Robert McElroy, a cardinal, many pro-life Catholics feel Pope Francis has added significantly to America’s many “soft-on-abortion” bishops. To be fair to our Catholic bishops, it must be acknowledged that they took an emphatic stand […]
Casey Chalk reviews a new book about how, beginning in earnest in the mid-twentieth-century, Catholics traded their parochial, traditionalist, and often ethnic clannishness for the domesticity of bourgeois, suburban America. American Catholics made a trade. You may not be aware of it or have personally participated in it. But it’s likely, if you’re a Catholic living […]
David Carlin: Catholics must face unpleasant facts: we are surrounded by enemies of our religion; and they are not moderate enemies like the Protestants of old. During the 19th century, Catholics found themselves settled and growing in numbers in the United States, a great Protestant country that was relatively tolerant and hospitable toward Catholics. This, even […]
Francis X. Maier: The U.S. is not a despotic state. . .but we are closer to it than ever before. Consider: hostility to religion; disregard for law; expansion of administrative power, and the rise of a biomedical security state. Can it end well? I started this column hoping to focus on Václav Havel’s great 1978 essay, […]
Michael Pakaluk: A crucifix, rather than just a cross, is simply a better sign that, indeed, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.” I want to put before you some thoughts on the meaning of the crucifix (Lat., “A crucified is my beloved”). I have in mind the standard crucifix found in a parish […]
Stephen P. White: Instead of following St. John Paul II to liberation and salvation, the new dispensation reduces the moral life to this: “What is the least I can do and be saved?” August of next year marks the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of Pope St. John Paul II’s magisterial encyclical on moral theology, […]
Robert Royal: As happened after Soviet Communism unexpectedly fell, the fall of Roe will lead to serious conflicts. But our new freedom to speak the truth is now the foundation for great hopes. Abortion “rights” were always a tissue of lies. A lie about the U.S. Constitution, to be sure, but before that the lie that “a […]
Randall Smith: Our opponents have made clear what they intend. Let’s make clear what we intend: to make any sacrifice to protect unborn children and their mothers. Whoever decided to release the Dobbs decision on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was a genius. My priest at Mass that day could not conceal his joy […]
Robert Royal: In America, we are not going to kill 1 million of our children annually now in mere absence of mind. That’s the main thing. The rest we’ll debate. And the hysterics are not going to make us lose sight of that. After thirty years living in Washington D.C., nothing – nearly nothing – politicians […]
Robert Royal: Programs at Houston’s University of St. Thomas seek to bolster Western civilization and, perhaps, bring about a new and needed Catholic renaissance. People often ask: What can we do, given all the problems that exist in the Church and the world? Most of what we’re thinking of when we pose that question has to […]
David Carlin: Contemporary hedonism is moral liberalism, which holds that we may do as we wish, provided we do no harm to others. In the world of ancient moral philosophy, there were two very different schools of hedonism. They agreed on the fundamental principle of hedonism, namely, that feelings of pleasure are the only intrinsically […]