The Catholic Thing

By Randall SmithAt Mass the other day, the priest said, "Today, we face a pivotal choice." He was referring to the challenges of artificial intelligence. AI presents a challenge, but it's important to understand that the challenges we face and the pivotal choices we must make are the ones mankind has faced repeatedly – ever since the beginning.It is often said that we are in a "new age" where...

By Robert RoyalSurveys of young people show that many lose their faith because they believe religion has been disproved by science. Among many other factors, this error is a major challenge for the Church – which doesn't get nearly enough attention. I thought of this when my longtime friend Phil Lawler and I were emailing a few weeks ago – always an enlightening thing – and we discovered that we...

By Fr. Paul D. ScaliaWell, he got more than he bargained for. In today's Gospel (Matthew 22:34-40), all the scholar of the law wanted was a Gotcha! moment by catching Jesus in some controversy. As with the other tests, however, our Lord not only bests his opponents but rises above them and raises the discussion to a level they had not anticipated. Thus, the scholar asks for only one commandment....

By K.E. ColombiniThanks to the wisdom of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Catholics who came of age after the Second Vatican Council have gotten a taste of Catholic liturgical tradition previously unavailable, and many have decided that they like it.First and foremost, this has come about via the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) of the 1962 Roman Missal, the last one produced before the...

By Brad MinerIn 2019, I wrote here that, "When I was a 4-year-old, I sat on the fire escape of our apartment and thought: 'What if there were nothing?' (But I'm sure, back then, I didn't use the subjunctive.) And then thought: 'I'm here.' I stared into the slate-gray sky and knew or sensed that 'nothing' is the one thing that cannot be."It was that slate-gray sky, of course. I don't suppose I've...

By Michael PakalukI read Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country backwards, chapter-wise, and I'd recommend you do the same. The end of the book tells us about Samuel Alito, the great-hearted man and patriot, while the beginning of the book, academically more respectable, to be sure, dives right into the state of the...

By Francis X. MaierReaders with a taste for history may remember the story of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). For those who don't, it was a high-end military simulation from a couple of decades ago, run by the now defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Described as "the key to military transformation," it cost about $250 million – a huge expense for such a thing at the time. The game's premise was...

By Steven Jonathan RummelsburgFew criticisms of modern education have aged as well as C.S. Lewis's 1943 The Abolition of Man. In "Men without Chests," Lewis explains, "we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. . . .We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." The chest, in this context, is the trained heart that...

By Robert RoyalToday is the Feast of the North American Martyrs, a group of French Jesuits and religious – Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Jean de Lalande, Antoine Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, Noêl Chabanel, and Br. René Goupil. It's worth recalling each of them by name as a reminder that they were individuals like us (though holier and more heroic), not merely some distant...

By John M. GrondelskiThis Sunday's Gospel showcases one of those teachings people can always quote and think they understand what Jesus meant – until you talk to them about it: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." (Matthew 22:21)The context of Jesus's teaching was, of course, attempted entrapment: the Pharisees were seeking a "gotcha" moment...