Hadley Arkes: For Democrats, abortion is a “right” that extends beyond pregnancy and entails nothing less than the right to kill a child born alive. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act finally came before the Senate in the last days of February. This was the sequel to the Act passed in 2002, the Act that […]
Randall Smith: You either habituate people in the Catholic virtues or watch the culture habituate them to vices – and get used to failure. Sometimes an article is just so important you have to draw people’s attention to it. That article is “Why Faithful Catholics Get Divorced” by Tom Hoopes, written fifteen years ago, but […]
Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky is a conservative, a label sometimes distracting; an invitation for controversy. But preaching the truth and acting on it is a Catholic thing. At times, priests reveal intimate secrets about themselves from the pulpit. I’ve always hesitated to do so mostly because a sermon should be about Jesus, and innermost secrets and […]
Randall Smith: Modern secular views of religion purport to have respect for each of them but often breed a sort of dilettantish disrespect for all of them. Periodically, I find myself wanting to learn more about other religions. It might be a major world religion such as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, or something more obscure, such as what Mormons […]
Filipe Avillez: What could be more harmful in the long run than bringing up your child to think that nobody they love will ever die? Somebody alerted me the other day to a podcast by a child psychologist. He was asked whether children should attend funerals and firmly replied that they should not. Funerals are very […]
Robert Royal: Despite ambiguity in the pope’s post-synodal Exhortation, there are no doctrinal changes. An olive branch to tradition or a strategic retreat? Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis’ Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (released yesterday) is, at a first reading, a mostly pleasant surprise. It shows little of the freewheeling radicalism that bulked large – in the synod […]
Michael Pakaluk: The evidence is strong that the Lord clearly taught that unrepented sin leads to eternal damnation. Thus, if Hell is invented, it’s Jesus who invented it. Hell is on my mind, and it is not even November. Presumably, any one of the Four Last Things can serve as matter for reflection any time […]
Alessandra Nucci: The Vatican’s response to poverty fails to acknowledge real-world examples of what has worked and, quite clearly, does not work. Pope Francis’s headline-grabbing words last year – “inequality is disastrous for the future of humanity” – reflected the long doctrinal dialectic following Vatican Council II. At the Council, the focus of social justice increasingly […]
Hadley Arkes: The logic of the Constitution’s separation of powers should be enough to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that disfigured our laws and altered the moral sensibilities of our people. As we reached the 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers gathered again in the March for Life, in what is usually the coldest […]
David Carlin: Morality declines when exceptions are made for “hard cases” and collapses when the fundamental rules become merely unobtainable “ideals.” One of the distinctive things about Catholic moral doctrine is that it has a number of absolute or exceptionless rules, many of them involving or at least associated with sexual matters. For example: One […]
Michael Pakaluk: Hell is a truth that Jesus teaches and indirectly affirms on many occasions. It exists because we have freedom to reject God and the good. Why Do Christians Believe in Hell? Because Christendom has affirmed it, Jesus clearly teaches the reality of Hell in the Bible, and Hell’s reality resonates with an honest […]
Casey Chalk: The Jewish people and their faith are more than a historical curiosity – they are one sign of the credibility of the God of Revelation. The American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once asked: “Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, […]
James Matthew Wilson: To encounter Christ and to abide with him is not just the Good News, it is the only news that stays news, forever. Simon During has made a dismaying but perceptive argument about the relationship between religion and culture in, of all places, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the flagship of today’s academic world. […]
Robert Royal on the Sino-Vatican pact: We hear we must be patient and not give up hope, but facts on the ground show the Church has been had. China is a large, strange, complex, contradictory thing, even before you get to the large, strange, complex, contradictory, and murderous form of Communism that has come to dominate […]
William Kilpatrick: Church leaders continue to insist that Islam is not a threat, despite the fact that an abundance of facts shows Muslim hostility to Catholicism. In comments last year, Marcello Pera, a prominent Italian intellectual and non-believer, criticized Pope Francis for “openly going against tradition, doctrine, and introducing inexplicable innovations, behaviors and gestures.” A philosopher […]