Entries by The Catholic Thing

Argentina’s Anti-Abortion Wave

Carlos Caso-Rosendi: Don’t cry for Argentina but pray for her strong pro-life movement, which has the potential to generate a global anti-abortion wave. Over the weekend, the eclectic political coalition currently in power in Argentina suffered a massive defeat to a resurgent progressive wing of the Peronist party. If the Peronists win the final round of elections […]

Joe Biden’s Adventures in the Natural Law

Hadley Arkes on a fair trade: The Church will not instruct a Biden or a Cuomo about politics, if they’ll stop misleading Catholics about Church teaching. William Blackstone, that venerable commentator on the English law, remarked that it was a contradiction in terms to suggest that the law may recognize a principle of revolution.  And yet, […]

Coming Out as Catholic

Randall Smith, with tongue in cheek, writes of a woman who has finally found the courage to accept her true identity. I have a friend who came out to me recently – as a Catholic.  “I identify as Catholic,” she told me. “I didn’t know there was a name for what I was at first, and I grew up […]

Our New Civil War

David Carlin: American “progressives” oppose Christianity and Americanism and endorse secular humanism and a borderless world. Catholics should not. The American Civil War has often been called the “Second American Revolution.”  Well, I have the feeling that we are now living through what may be called the “Second American Civil War.” On the one side […]

Pray for Poland

Stephen P. White reports on sex-abuse in the Polish church. How bishops handle the crisis in this very Catholic nation is key to the Faith’s uncertain future. KRAKÓW, Poland—The drama of the past year in the Church in the United States can sometimes distract from the global dimensions of the crisis of clerical sexual abuse and […]

Adding ‘P’ for Pedophile to LGBT

EDITORS NOTE: In an April 1977 report, co-authored by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, professor at the Columbia Law School and Brenda Feigen-Fasteau, former director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s women’s rights project, titled “SEX BIAS IN THE U.S. CODE A Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights” recommended 18 U.S.C. §2032 be changed […]

Three Liberalisms: The Good, the Bad, the Disastrous

Michael Pakaluk: Americans believe that God’s purposes are discerned in creation, and that our institutions should affirm not negate them.  One liberalism is a personal style and way of life.  It means favoring strong-mindedness and independence of thought.  These require good education and, especially, a good culture.  It means aiming to be genial, frank, and magnanimous – traits […]

Cato and St. Paul

Note: Many people think that the Church in America is in crisis because of sexual abuse by priests and bishops going back decades. That’s true, but after the bishops’ meeting in Baltimore this week, at least beginning to be resolved. A deeper and perhaps more long-lasting crisis is the Church’s weakness in proclaiming Catholic faith and […]

The Church Is Not an NGO

Brad Miner: If we take awe and reverence and the quest for holiness and heaven out of religion, faith becomes little more than a campaign for votes. An Italian priest visits our parish a few times a year to say Sunday Mass. He’s remarkable: tall, ascetic, and very serious. When he elevates the host and […]

WANTED: The Good Guys

While I was recently reading The Tale of Troy with my fifth-grade class, a hand shot up from the back of the classroom.   The student wanted, desperately, to know, “Who are the good guys?”  The thread of good and evil, right and wrong, had been lost in confusion and machination, in plots and treachery, and in […]

Rebuilding Notre Dame: Form Is Not Fashion

James Matthew Wilson: It is not merely sentimental concern for historical preservation to insist that Notre Dame be restored just as it was. As the world watched Notre Dame burn, everyone wondered what else was on fire.  Of what was the partial immolation of this, one of France’s finest Gothic cathedrals, a symbol?  The extinction […]