The Catholic Thing

By An Ancient Author.What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.Truly He goes to seek out our first parent like a lost...

By Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.It seems to be a fact of human psychology that when death approaches, the human heart speaks its words of love to those whom it holds closest and dearest. There is no reason to suspect that it is otherwise in the case of the Heart of hearts.If He spoke in a graduated order to those whom He loved most, then we may expect to find in His first three words the...

By Stephen P. White.Beginning in 1979, Pope John Paul II took up the habit of writing an annual letter to priests which would be published on, or just before, Holy Thursday. These letters allowed John Paul II an outlet for repeated meditation on the nature of the priesthood. Read together, they provide a detailed account of his understanding of the priesthood and thus, necessarily, of both...

By Joseph R. Wood.This is the week when we contemplate, more than any other week, how much we are loved.This is the week when the words of John's Gospel, that we are "given power to become children of God," are brought to fulfillment.This is the week when we are restored to the possibility of having a great soul.God is love, claims St. John. At the Last Supper, Christ tells us repeatedly to love...

By Randall SmithWe pride ourselves on the fact that we don't have a "caste system" in America, with higher and lower castes and those at the bottom who are "untouchables." I sometimes wonder, though, whether we have something analogous in the way we distinguish "the elite" from the "deplorables." As for "untouchables," try going to a "Not a King" rally and saying, "I like some of the things Trump...

By Brad Miner."The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous."– Michelangelo to Benedetto Varchi, 1549The greatest artist of the Renaissance is famous for something he may never have said: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." There are other versions of the quotation, as in the epigraph above, that are genuine, and they may seem to suggest that...

By Fr. Paul D. ScaliaAll of Lent is an exercise in holy sorrow. We don't know how to mourn as we ought – especially not our sins. So, we need these 40 days of penitence, to train us how to be sorrowful in the proper way. We need to learn genuine contrition. How not to skip over the gravity of our sins, nor to catastrophize them as if there were no Redeemer. To be sorry for our sins, not because...

By Fr. Raymond J. de SouzaThe feast day of the newest Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman, is not his dies natalis (death) but 9th October, the day of his conversion in 1845. That date was definitive for the shape of the Catholic Church in England. So much good for the Catholic Church followed.On March 29, 1986, Scott Hahn was received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. So much...

By Francis X. MaierScience is an odd theme to choose on the brink of Holy Week. Or maybe not so odd. In a way, science is miraculous. It's an expression of man's dignity and genius. It offers our species two deep satisfactions: the joy of discovering how the world works, and the means of using what we learn to improve our lives and the lives of others. It also seems to answer the "why" of things....

By Michael PakalukA correct Catholic approach to AI becomes clearer, I think, if we approach a foundational text in Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum novarum, not as about structural issues in political economy, but rather as about claims on time and claims of authority.The workhouses of the Industrial Revolution, by paying only a subsistence wage to the father, forced wives and children into the...