The Catholic Thing

The Catholic Thing
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The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.

  1. 10H AGO

    Politics Does Not Equal Government

    By Daniel B. Gallagher. The 250th birthday of the United States is a good time to remember that 1776 was the year of a new nation, not a new government. It would take another eleven years for the Founders to formulate what the government would look like, and two more to elect the first president. This sequence of events reminds us that it is not a government that makes a nation, but a nation that makes a government. Even peoples who lack a sovereign territory, such as the Kurds or Basques, conceptualize themselves in some way as a nation before devising some sort of governing apparatus. You need something to govern before you can figure out how to govern it. The Vichy regime in France is an example of what can happen if one attempts to establish a government with no true nation behind it. Having been around long enough to celebrate both, I can't help but feel concern about the disquietude surrounding this year's Semiquincentennial celebration in comparison with the Bicentennial fifty years ago. Last summer, a White House task force appointed to plan and to implement the celebrations was already butting heads with a congressional commission established for the same purpose. John Dichtl, president of the American Association for State and Local History, has a point when, referring to plans to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at the White House, asks, "What does a (UFC) fight have to do with America's greatness?" Writing in The Hill, Myra Adams confesses that she feels "less pride" in this Semiquincentennial year, lamenting that "dangerous trends threaten what our Founding Fathers envisioned." Back in 1976, virtually no one hesitated to wave a flag, march in a parade, and join in singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." And all this not even two years after an American President voluntarily stepped aside for the first time. Fifty years later, students no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the elementary school I attended. That said – and especially in light of recent chaos in Minneapolis – I do understand how people could lack enthusiasm for the event if they forget we are celebrating the founding of a nation and not a government. The former is much more worthy of celebration if we take it as the primary locus of the shared values and ideals inspiring a diverse people to form a Union. Chief among those is obviously freedom, including the freedom to vote Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, or even Communist or Socialist, if you like. If you want to know what a one-party celebration looks like, look no further than the Tian'anmen and Kim II Sung Squares. The need to revisit the distinction between a nation and a government became clearer to me when, while interviewing political theorist Patrick Deneen, Bishop Robert Barron asserted that, according to the classical view, the purpose of "government" is to cultivate virtue in its citizens. He claimed to have learned this from philosopher Robert Sokolowski at the Catholic University of America. Msgr. Sokolowski was my professor too, and I don't remember him saying this. I do remember him saying that, according to the classical view, the purpose of the polis was to make citizens virtuous and good. That's not to say government has no role, but the polis is a richer and more expansive concept than "government," even though the extent to which the ancient Greek polis resembles the modern state is debatable. In any case, a polis, according to Aristotle, is a natural community where individuals come together to pursue the good life. The politeia is the way a polis is organized, including – but not limited to – its system of government. Politeia also encompasses the values and practices that make a polis possible. Though much more can be said about the distinction, it is enough to draw attention to the myopic view of "politics" we have today. If we limit politics to what happens inside the D.C. beltway, we easily fall into the trap of thinking that it is primaril...

    6 min

  2. 1D AGO

    Of Forty Days and the Gospel Plough

    By Dominic V. Cassella In the season of Lent, the Church enters the wilderness to fast and abstain. It is a time of testing. The number forty often indicates this throughout the Scriptures. "Forty days" signals a time when God tests the hearts of His people, so that what lies hidden within might be revealed. In Genesis, the deluge that washed the world of living creatures – except for Noah and those on the ark – lasted for forty days. Moses fled Egypt for his life after murdering a man and spent forty years in Midian as a shepherd before God appeared to him in the burning bush. After forty days, the ten spies that Moses sent into the land convinced Israel to distrust God and despair of their ability to take it. For forty years, the Israelites were sent to wander in the wilderness before they could occupy the Promised Land. For forty days and nights, Goliath taunted Saul and his army before David slew him. And Jonah gave the Ninevites forty days to repent before they would be overthrown by God. And in the most famous case of all, of course, Jesus spent forty days in the desert and was tempted by the Devil. These periods of forty days or forty years are not random spans of time. They reveal a pattern in how God deals with His people. As Moses tells Israel: The LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not. (Deuteronomy 8:2) God does not test human beings because he needs to learn about the fidelity of his creatures. He already knows the human heart. (1 Samuel 16:7) The test exists so that the man himself may learn what is inside of him. Abraham was tested by God, and came to learn of his complete trust in the Lord. In contrast, Pharaoh was tested by God and he hardened his heart. Now that we are in the midst of these forty days of Lent, we have entered the same Biblical pattern of trial and purgation. Lent should not be just like any other season in life. During this time, we should especially have our eyes turned toward the heavenly Promised Land, and most especially toward the Way that leads to it: Jesus Christ. Yet Lent often passes in vain. Our hearts are not easily moved. They grow dull and indolent when left unattended. In the stagnation of idle thoughts, the heart becomes a wilderness thick with thorns and thistles, tangled with brambles and covered with stones. This inner wilderness is a consequence of sin, both actual and original. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and attempted to decide for themselves what was good and evil, the curse of that wilderness was the natural consequence. St. John Henry Newman describes this condition: We have stony hearts, hearts as hard as the highways; the history of Christ makes no impression on them. And yet, if we would be saved, we must have tender, sensitive, living hearts; our hearts must be broken, must be broken up like ground, and dug, and watered, and tended, and cultivated, till they become as gardens, gardens of Eden, acceptable to our God, gardens in which the Lord God may walk and dwell; filled, not with briars and thorns, but with all sweet-smelling and useful plants, with heavenly trees and flowers. A careless and frivolous heart gradually becomes a hardened one. But the desert fathers teach that the remedy for such a heart is meditation on the Cross. For instance, St. John Cassian describes this remedy and tells us that we Christians must be "daily and hourly turning up the ground of our heart with the Gospel Plough, i.e., the constant recollection of the Lord's Cross." The hard ground of the heart cannot cultivate itself. The wilderness of the heart must first be cleared of vain thoughts, and then the heart can be broken up with the Gospel Plough, the Cross. As the plough tears into the soil, so the Cross breaks up the hardened heart. Meditation on the Lord's Cross during this season of Lent, and the formation of a habit of frequ...

    6 min

  3. 2D AGO

    Evangelizing Bedlam

    By Anthony Esolen In one of the great ironies of linguistic history, the English word "bedlam," suggesting frenzy, madness, chaos, and noise, comes from what was then the common British pronunciation of the sacred name Bethlehem, in the Hospital of Saint Mary in Bethlehem, a monastery dedicated in 1402 to the housing and treatment of lunatics. Hence we have "Tom o' Bedlam," the name that Edgar assumes in King Lear in his disguise as a madman; first to escape the ministers of law that pursue him, unjustly, as a traitor to England and to his father, the Duke of Gloucester, but second, to remain close to the action, so he can do whatever he can for justice, for his father, and for his country. For the truly mad are those souls devoured with ambition, while the faithful and loyal are called fools. How do you preach the word of God to madmen? How do you preach it in Bedlam? For everyone in Bedlam is going to be afflicted with the twitch. If everyone around you is shouting, you will be led to shout too, if only to be heard at all, but eventually it may come to be a matter of course. If everyone around you howls at the moon, gathering in packs to lift up their hearts and eyes and hollow throats to that satellite, you will likely steal a glance that way too, and maybe join in, at first because you want to meet the madmen where they are, but eventually because you too fall in love with the howling. I ask the question, because Bedlam is where we are, a political, social, educational, and religious Bedlam of distraction in the most literal sense – as of someone condemned to death by horses pulling him apart limb from limb. Let me illustrate. Bishop Robert Barron notes that the Somali welfare scam in Minnesota is a crime against the needy. At a moderate assessment, $1,000 has been filched from every man, woman, and child in the state. He does not launch into a diatribe about it, since he has more important things to do. But for this, I have seen him accused of being as wicked as a Vichy collaborator with the Nazis. Now that, frankly, is not sane. Whatever one may think about what American immigration laws should be (I have yet to hear anybody suggest any specific emendations to the laws in question), it is bizarre to draw any equivalence between American immigration officers and the Gestapo. And as far as an American Kristallnacht is concerned, those bricks smashing the windows of businesses during "mostly peaceful demonstrations" do not have the fingerprints of policemen on them. Nor is it "Nazism" to say that schoolchildren should be taught, first and foremost, to be proud of their country and their culture – whatever of it still remains after the inundations of mass media. It is a part of the virtue of piety, required by the commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother." I expect that Italian schoolchildren will be taught the glories of their artistic and literary heritage, and I would be deeply disappointed to learn that it is no longer so. It was not Matteo Ricci who demanded of the Chinese that they should despise their ancestors. That was the Communist, Mao Tse-Tung. This, too, did Bishop Barron call to mind when he criticized, gently enough, a rather loud but dopey congresswoman who seemed to insist that material goods were all that really mattered to people. For at base, the Marxist, along with too many secularists who consider themselves conservative, really does believe that man doth live by bread alone. But we need to pull back from the madness. Bedlam, even for sinful and addle-pated mankind, is not a normal state of affairs. I appeal to this rule. If political division causes you to break charity with a fellow Christian, if you are pleased to learn that such a person has done or said something bad, if you are eager to magnify its badness rather than to interpret it in a less damning light, if you are the Eternal Oculist, so eager to remove specks from other people's eyes that you delight in gouging them out altogether, ...

    6 min

  4. 3D AGO

    The 'Dark Wood' of Philosophy?

    By Joseph. R. Wood. It's Lent, when our mortifications and the Church's readings give us a sharper opportunity to think about what we love, and whether we are loving the right things. James Patrick was a wise man and a good friend. I met him after he had founded a tiny post-secondary educational institution, St. Thomas More College in Fort Worth. I say "institution" because even aside from its size and situation in a few residential houses near Texas Christian University, it bore little resemblance to anything we'd recognize as a university today. He had previously taught at the University of Dallas, the University of the South at Sewanee, and the University of Tennessee. He had studied architecture, theology, philosophy and just about everything else. He was an Episcopal priest before entering the Catholic Church. Jim was one of the many wise people who have shared with me much of their time and goodness. He was a man of letters, an exemplar of Western civilization. You might say in many ways he was another Fr. Jim Schall. He knew of my interest in philosophy and provided one of the greatest gifts I received as I began formal studies. He warned me, gently but clearly, that when philosophy gets off its knees, it gets into trouble. That's a pithy way of saying that when philosophy, the use of human reason to know the whole truth of "what is," divorces itself from faith, bad things happen. While failure to love God above all throws any life awry, the intellectual life seems particularly vulnerable to losing one's way. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals are very smart and can indeed make considerable progress in knowing reality, so they become overambitious and proud. A paradigmatic modern case was Martin Heidegger, a truly brilliant mind who produced much great philosophical work, jettisoned his Catholic faith, and became a Nazi (the degree of his cooperation with Hitler's regime is disputed). The original case study, though, must be the geniuses who came up with the idea for the Tower of Babel. I'm always struck that God did not say, "Look at those fools, trying to do something impossible." He stopped them because they might have succeeded. He disrupted their logos, confusing their reasoned speech so that such collective endeavors would be less likely thereafter. Reason as used by the Babel builders might have accomplished something that, presumably, God knew would not be their true good. They sought Heaven without depending on God. What does it profit us to gain the world and lose our souls? "Philosophy" is derived from the Greek for "love of wisdom." It's very easy for philosophers to focus on the "wisdom" – the truth of things – and forget about the "love" part. St. Augustine and other Christian philosophers knew this danger and accepted the notion of "I believe in order to understand." I am given faith as my first love – love of God – then I use my reason to seek truth within that love. Jim Patrick and Fr. Jim Schall understood that approach. Some philosophers, including Leo Strauss, who helped revive the study of ancient philosophical wisdom in recent decades, would disagree. He thought it was impossible for a man of faith to be a true philosopher, as faith would constrain the search for the truth, which is itself unconstrained. I wonder whether that kind of thinking brought the poet-philosopher Dante to the point where he begins his Divine Comedy. The beginning of Inferno is one of the most famous starts to any journey in Western literature: Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell The nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh – the very thought of it renews my fear! It is so bitter death is hardly more so.… How I came there I cannot really tell, I was so full of sleep When I forsook the one true way. – Inferno I.1-12 (Hollander trans.) Dante knew philosophy well, including St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and bits of ...

    7 min

  5. 4D AGO

    Orpheus Redeemed: A review of 'Hamnet'

    Hamnet, the 2025 film that has already won a slew of awards and is a favorite to win Oscar "Bests" for Picture, Director (Chloé Zhao), and Actress (Jessie Buckley), deserves its accolades. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's novel, it reimagines the genesis of The World's Most Famous Play. (Spoiler alert ahead, although at the very end.) Hamnet begins with the meeting and mating of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, called Agnes in the book and film, because her father's will refers to her by that name. O'Farrell, who came across Richard Hathaway's will, sees "Agnes" as a kind of revelation about the way, historically, the fame of fathers, sons, and husbands has subsumed female identities. There's truth in that, although probably not in this case. In O'Farrell's novel, the playwright's surname never appears. He's just "Will." So, in a fair exchange for "history's" marginalization of Anne Hathaway, Farrell and Zhao place William Shakespeare in the margins of the book and the film. And, twee as I think that is, it doesn't diminish the movie's power. Besides, we know perfectly well who's wooing Agnes. Hamnet moves slowly through their courtship: a kind of midsummer-night's-dream of wonder in what's probably the Forest of Arden. Agnes is an almost pagan figure, gathering medicinal plants and cavorting with her falcon. Is she a witch? Will, his father being a glover, presents her with a hawking gauntlet. He tells her the story of the ill-fated love between Orpheus and Eurydice. Will and Agnes have sexual intercourse. They marry and have three children. By and by, Will leaves for London. At the heart of Hamnet, of course, is the boy, Hamnet, the Shakespeares' only son, born with his twin sister, Judith, in 1585. (Their oldest, Susanna, had come two years earlier.) The real Hamnet would die of bubonic plague at age 11, and is buried (as are his father and mother) at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. The loss of a child is devastating. It was even in the 16th century when infant and childhood deaths were commonplace. The film does not explicitly suggest that Will retreated to London out of grief, but it seems that way, especially because we are given no hint that this young, grieving father will dominate the literature of the English-speaking world as no one ever had, or has since. Perhaps his success, his fortune, and his work don't justify "abandonment." But, perhaps, there was no abandonment. After all, Agnes was no poor child. When they married, Will was 18, and she was 26. We don't know when Shakespeare left Warwickshire for London, but it was certainly after the births of the twins and may have been after Hamnet's death. Anne would then have been in her early to mid 30s. Coincidentally, Hamnet has appeared within months of the release of scholarly work by Prof. Matthew Steggle that refutes the premise of Hamnet, which is that Shakespeare abandoned his family for London and fame. Steggle has found (and not he alone) that Mrs. Shakespeare likely visited and even lived with Will in London, and that their connection was strong. Of course, that's history, not drama – and new history at that. And it does not matter, in a way, since O'Farrell and Zhao are not engaged in fact but fiction, placed in a historical setting. That said, the premise that Hamlet was inspired by the death of Hamnet is also dismissed by scholars. And it matters not that they don't address the "authorship" or "recussant Catholic" questions. But in a brilliant bit of casting, perfectly aligned with the film's premise, the Prince of Denmark is played by Noah Jupe, the real-life older brother of Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet. Thus, when Agnes travels to London with her brother and they join the groundlings to see a performance of Hamlet, she is doubly shocked to hear a name and a face so like that of her dead son. More about the performance of Jessie Buckley in a moment, but I pause to praise Jacobi Jupe's portrayal of Hamnet. He resembles no one...

    7 min

  6. 5D AGO

    The Glory Secretly Alive

    By Fr. Benedict Kiely. The small but growing Catholic Church in Norway is blessed to have two bishops now, native Norwegians, under fifty-two years old. Bishop Frederik Hansen, appointed the Bishop of Oslo in July 2025, joins the Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden, appointed Bishop of Trondheim, in October 2019. Plans are currently underway to celebrate the millennium of the martyrdom of St. Olaf, the canonized King of Norway, spearheaded by Bishop Varden. It would not be inaccurate to say that the Catholic Church in Norway, with 2030 in sight, is being reinvigorated by the leadership of these two comparatively youthful bishops. Bishop Erik, or Erik of Trondheim, to give him an accurate, though more medieval title, is a gentle Viking, although that moniker might sound warlike. The former Abbot of the Cistercian Monastery of Mount St. Bernard in England, he is also a former professor of Syriac, a man already highly regarded as a spiritual writer, teacher, and exemplary bishop. Yet now, after having been chosen by Pope Leo to give the annual Spiritual Exercises for the Pope and the Roman Curia in the Vatican during the first week of Lent, his stature, principally because of the wisdom and depth of his short reflections, has risen considerably. There is much conjecture that he may be called to lead a dicastery in Rome, something that he would undoubtedly not wish for, and would be a great loss for the Church in Norway. Almost any line or paragraph of Bishop Erik's words would make an excellent subject for Lenten reflection. But there were one or two phrases that speak strongly to a theme that has been much discussed recently in the media, both religious and secular: namely, the appearance of a religious revival, albeit still small, in the West. One of the questions that has yet to be answered is that, despite evidence that attendance has been much higher at celebrations such as Ash Wednesday in many countries, and that baptisms will be up this year at Easter, how many of these people, predominantly young, are returning to regular practice? It's unlikely that a young seeker, quite possibly unbaptized and with little, if any, knowledge of the Christian faith, is crossing the portal of the local Church to hear of either synodality, immigration, or debate over altar rails. Still less will they be seeking music, or something very like it, that was popular when their parents were teenagers, but as Bishop Erik put it sharply, is now distinctly "sounding last-season." More likely, if they are initially searching for beauty to lead them to the experience of the divine, the season they seek will be one long before the advent of bell-bottoms. Varden rightly and perceptively focuses on the reality that, in a highly confused and technocratic age, people are echoing the question of Pilate: "What is truth?" The Church, and ancient wisdom, has long taught that, along with truth, beauty and goodness are paths to God. Bishop Erik warned his audience, with Pope Leo prominently seated in front, that the Church, or certainly many churchmen, imagine that they must ape fashion in order to be 'relevant' and "attract the youth." But this is a great danger for any religious revival. And Bishop Varden echoed, in a sense, Chesterton's belief – which is probably shared by many seekers: "We do not want a Church that will move with the world, we want a Church that will move the world." Bishop Erik, a profoundly cultured man, knows well of which he speaks, both as a university professor and Abbot. Is there anything more embarrassing than a Churchman who is trying to be fashionable? One thinks of Dean Inge's line that a Church that "marries the spirit of this age will be a widow in the next." Bishop Varden gives the Church and, I would argue, every parish, a program for the seeker. In the first place, he argues that those seeking the truth are asking the "question [What is truth?] earnestly – we cannot let it go unanswered." This is the function, not only of the ...

    6 min

  7. 6D AGO

    Caring About Immigrants, Now and Then

    By Randall Smith I will begin with a statement that may seem like pointless virtue signaling, so I hope readers will stick with me. The statement is simply that I think we should care about how immigrants are treated, whether they are legal or not. Now, I don't think this statement is especially controversial – most people don't want immigrants to be abused. But it can seem controversial depending on the context. So why am I saying it? I have been concerned about the treatment of immigrants for a while. I was concerned, for example, when President Barack Obama was deporting 3.1 million immigrants over his eight years in office, a number far in excess of what the Trump administration has carried out. According to DHS, between Trump's January 2025 inauguration and December, the administration had deported 605,000 illegal aliens. ProPublica reports that ICE also detained 170 U.S. citizens during the year, which is true, but according to The New York Post, 130 of them were arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers. Only about 40 or so were detained accidentally or erroneously, and just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours. By contrast, in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (bookings), and four mistaken removals of U.S. citizens. When President Obama's Director of Intergovernmental Affairs was questioned about the Obama record on immigration and replied: "What the president is doing is enforcing the law of the land." To her credit, one person who noticed the problem back then was Maria Hinojosa, whose 2011 Frontline special "Lost in Detention" should be viewed to get a sense of how many of the same issues upsetting people now were happening then, but with much less bitter opposition or controversy. I don't remember hordes of people demonstrating violently then, putting themselves between ICE officers and immigrants. I don't remember masked citizens putting up check points to keep ICE agents out. Even if you lauded all those actions now, you have to admit they weren't happening back then. And back then, Obama was deporting millions more immigrants than Donald Trump has been able to deport. I don't remember the Democrats in Congress shutting down the government to force changes in ICE then. So too, I don't recall a host of Catholic bishops falling all over themselves to stand boldly against the Obama administration. A Google search turned up only one USCCB position paper done by a lawyer on immigration enforcement, a host of praises of Obama for delaying some deportations, and an article in America magazine titled "Catholic bishops urge end to Obama administration's surge of deportations." Which is less overwhelming than the title promises, because, as it turns out, "the bishops" were in fact one bishop and an auxiliary bishop. This was not exactly an overwhelming flood of criticism. Even the website of the Minnesota Catholic praised President Obama's "deferred action" executive order, but did so reassuring people that Obama wasn't too extreme. "Most people with whom I spoke," writes the author of the article, "who were initially opposed to the president's action, supported it when they heard what it did and did not do." The author continued: The confusion surrounding the executive action is emblematic of an immigration debate that has been distorted both by the impassioned dislike of President Obama and a media culture that, unfortunately, turns most political debates into either-or policy choices. . . .Commentary on and reaction to the president's action has generated more heat than light and has fit into the false parameters of the public immigration debate: Either open our borders to all comers and grant "amnesty," or deport all those who are here. The president's order is not "amnesty" in the popular sense of the term, which would mean forgiving undocumented persons, requiring no penalty of any kind, and providing t...

    7 min

  8. MAR 2

    War, Just and Unjust

    By Robert Royal. Nuclear weapons, like other modern technological developments, have placed great strains on traditional moral principles. Just as modern medicine has changed our appreciation of the beginning and end of human life, the tremendous destructive power of modern weapons, nuclear and not, has made careful thought about war not only urgent, but – to use the fashionable term – existential. That's probably the main reason why the Vatican has seemed quasi-pacifist in recent decades. But the Church has a well-developed set of criteria about just and unjust uses of force. Indeed, in the past, it even – rightly – called for crusades. (I'll explain another time.) But those criteria – still valid in themselves – need further elaboration to confront the conditions in which we find ourselves. I have immediate family members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, been active in U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, and worked in the Pentagon managing defense preparedness. Some of my grandchildren have been forced into air-raid shelters in Jerusalem; the others may someday face terrorism at home or, themselves, have to take part in foreign wars. Millions of Americans – and not only Americans – have similar stories. And unless we keep the human costs of warfare front and center in our minds, we may be tempted to take just-war theory as merely a political or intellectual exercise. That said, there are, of course, things worth dying for – and, regrettably, things worth killing for. That's precisely why just-war theory, a tradition of moral reflection that began in the ancient world, was developed – notably by Augustine and Aquinas, and is the common heritage of most modern militaries. Some of the best-informed students I've ever had on just wat over the years learned that tradition during U. S. military training. Academic types often scoff at this, but it's true. A good summary of just-war principles can be found here. (Our friend Phil Lawler has been re-examining them in strict fidelity to the Catholic tradition online here). But I want to look closely at just a few of them here to highlight some special circumstances that they now face. I'm not sure whether the U. S. attack on Iran these past few days is justified. A lot of people already claim to know, one way or the other. But I've seen enough similar situations to be willing to suspend judgment until we know more. (I've misjudged in the past.) Still, I am sure that the way to decide should be on Catholic just-war grounds, not just the wearying and utterly predictable pro- and anti-Trump tug-of-war. The first criterion is last resort. Resort to arms is a life-and-death matter. It should only be done when other means of addressing a threat have failed. But who decides when all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted? You can always claim that something else might be pursued. In the meantime, great evils may spread: Nature's polluted, There's man in every secret corner of her Doing damned, wicked deeds. The answer is that a legitimate authority has the responsibility to decide. But also must explain how everything reasonable has been tried, what the threat is, and why it's necessary, right now, to meet it. The president hasn't said nearly enough about this. There are rumors that Iran was planning a strike against U.S. forces. If so, we need an authoritative statement about that – and more. Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis (and maybe a few campus fellow-travelers) may lose sleep over the fall of the Islamic Republic. No one else will. Everybody has agreed that "Iran must not develop a nuclear weapon" (existential threat), but done little beyond talk – for half a century. So it's good that the president has put the attack in terms of defense, both immediate and long-term. But we still need to know much more. A second criterion is just cause: Wars of conquest, in our tradition, are never just. Our intention must be to achieve some good by righting a wrong, actual or imminent. We c...

    7 min
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4.6
out of 5
31 Ratings

About

The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.

Information

  • Creator
    The Catholic Thing
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    60
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    The Catholic Thing

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