The Catholic Thing

The Catholic Thing
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  • Christianity
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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. 6h ago

    On Recovering the Christian Man

    By Francis X. Maier But first a note from Robert Royal: The editor of The Catholic Thing has many surprises, almost daily. But how about this from today's author: Bob, just in case you'd like to offer those first two grafs in High Elvish (Quenya) for your Middle-earth readers, here you go. No need to thank me: Sín, órelyen loqui neldëa quillië, ar avanyárë enquë-epenquë loilli lúteva vanyë ar handë Amandil nissemen, láman lesta anta titta sanwi lesta vanya "Erunítë veru." Ú-antaleva, haryas mári: yávëa antando; mára atar; alassëa mi yárë lanyar; ar nítë mal tanyë carva mardë andë loilli. Mettë colla ná foina-andavárea. Tana colla mapë ístëa ar netya Erunítë veri andavë tanna andalúmë. I casta ná calina. I ilvanya veru ná illumë titta hampa ollo ilvanyessë — aí quë lastas quallë. I ask you: How can you NOT donate to a publication like this? Now in my late 70s and the veteran of 56 annual performance reviews by a beautiful and highly intelligent Catholic female, I feel licensed to offer a few thoughts on the nature of an acceptably "Christian man," married variety. In no special order, he must be: a fruitful provider; a good dad; fun, within traditional moral parameters; and an endearing but stubbornly long-term construction project. This last trait is deceptively vital. It keeps even the most gifted, crafty, and impatient Christian wife engaged for the duration. The reason why should be obvious. The perfect husband is always just a few (dozen) well-meaning tweaks away from perfection – if he would only listen. So much for humor. In the real world, the Christian man needs, above all, to be faithful: faithful to his wife and children, faithful to his Church, and faithful to Jesus Christ. No exceptions. No excuses. No escape clauses. Fidelity matters. This is the Big One. There's more to becoming a man, of course. Check out the relevant comments here of a great Catholic pastor; Philadelphia's emeritus archbishop, Charles Chaput. Note the 22 rules for a Christian man's conduct that he borrows from Erasmus. Note, too, his reflection on the history and essence of Christian knighthood. His whole talk is worth branding on the masculine heart – but especially its closing thought: "Maleness, brothers, is a matter of biology. It just happens. Manhood must be learned and earned and taught." How does a young man do any of that? Let's start with a few simple facts: Mothers shape the early lives of their sons. Wives anchor their husbands in reality and purpose. But in the end, men are made better men by the example and friendship of other, better men. Over the space of my lifetime, American culture has recognized the dignity of women more fully than ever before and created fresh avenues for their leadership in dramatic new ways. As a man with an extraordinary wife, daughter, and granddaughters, I can welcome that enthusiastically – absent the anarchic sex and homage to unborn child-killing "rights." But in the process, the same culture has too often neglected and even deliberately debased the formation of young men. And that has ugly consequences. "Toxic masculinity" isn't fixed by effeminizing young males. The result of that mistake is a bumper crop of drones, Peter Pans, predators, porn addicts, and Lost Boys; in other words, a shortage of good, unselfish men of virtue, trained to provide and protect. Which is the pressing problem we now face. So how do we deal with it? Exactly 900 years ago, a new religious order of fighting men took root in the Holy Land, the "Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon." They're better known to history as the Knights Templar. The animating core of the Templars, as the archbishop stressed in his remarks above, was a uniquely demanding form of love; one urgently needed by the times: "to build a new order of new Christian men, skilled at arms, living as brothers, committed to prayer, austerity, and chastity, and devoting themselves radically to serving the Church and her people, especial...

    8 min

  2. 1d ago

    Against 'Minor Attracted Persons'

    By Brad Miner But first a note from Robert Royal: Today Brad Miner puts his finger on a worrisome development in the current carnival of sexuality. "Minor Attracted persons" may be going away as yet another step toward perdition, but only because we, along with many others, have kept the pressure on across a wide spectrum of cultural issues in many places. It's a slow and challenging battle, but if we don't do it and many other things like it, who will? Which is why I am emboldened to ask you again: Time is growing short for our campaign and there's still far to go. I have great confidence in TCT readers. Please show us all, yet again, precisely why we're right to think that way. Support TCT. Bravely, strongly, exuberantly. Now for today's column... If we were to travel to the distant past, say, way back to 1976, I'm pretty sure we'd find nobody advocating for adults having sex with children. Then came the revolution of 1978. What revolution, you ask? I refer to the founding of the homosexual pedophile group, the National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Adults having sex with children has never had much approbation. Yes, the Greeks and Romans (the ancient ones) tolerated pederasty – in the Greek context, the union of men (erastes) with adolescent boys (eromenos). And there was also male-female pedophilia in the sense that young girls were often taken in marriage, although sexual consummation usually awaited puberty. But if menses came before age 12 . . . All good reasons to praise the Incarnation, Christ's ministry, and the birth of the Church. Still, these things – these sins – have gone on, but without the passive toleration, let alone the approbation of society. This is part of what makes the recent clergy sex-abuse crisis so sickening (and costly), even if the majority of those cases involved hebephilia (boys 11-14), ephebophilia (15-19), and just plain old homosexual liaisons with other adult males. Do we say that this last is as sinful as the others? I don't think that matters, since each is mortally sinful and, therefore, in the absence of repentance, forgiveness, and reform, soul-killing. Lately, we haven't heard much about NAMBLA, and I suspect that's because, sinners though these men remain, they don't entirely lack prudence. But they do lack progress, and so they've decided to slink back into darkness and let other activists in the ongoing transgressive movement rebrand pedophilia. The new term (and it's not all that new) is Minor Attracted Persons or MAP. Brilliant! Desensitize (maybe even anesthetize) people to the horror of pedophilia by wedging MAP into scholarly journals and scientific forums, all designed to do for pederasty what's already been done with homosexuality ("gay" and "lesbian") and the whole LGBTQIA+ panoply. Pedophiles even have their own flag because you can't be "queer" without a flag. Sarcasm aside, the historical and global existence of same-sex attraction, cross-dressing, and other variations from what can only be called the heterosexual norm (which, after all, is based on nature itself, and, therefore, natural law, and, above all, God's law), suggests that tolerance is required of Christians; if not by all, then certainly by compassionate believers. We can live and let live. But the same cannot apply to pedophilia. Pedophilia is child abuse. It is only "consummated" by the criminal manipulation of an innocent child by a corrupt adult. Surely, we agree on that. This is why we have age-of-consent laws. Of course, the range of ages in "consent" laws throughout the U.S. has a baseline of 16 (31 states), which surprises me, because I thought it would be 18, which it is in 11 states, with 8 states opting for age 17. Still, it's a remarkable improvement from 1920 and even 1980 In the Roaring Twenties, the age of consent in the Deep South was criminal. Delaware isn't technically a Southern state, but it had the lowest age of consent at 7. Six states were at 10, and the rest were at other ages...

    8 min

  3. 2d ago

    Markets, Mercy, and True Prudence

    By Alden Abbott But first a note from Robert Royal: So, we're back at our fundraising – and need to be. We're well into the campaign but need to pick up the pace. I know this isn't a great economy at the moment, but we have to ask you to pray and dig deep. It's a good deal. I'm told the reward for generosity will be even greater in Heaven. Now for today's column. Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas thoughtfully speaks to one of the great anxieties of our moment: whether artificial intelligence, data platforms, robotics, and global capital will serve the human person or reduce us to a disposable input. Its concern for workers, the poor, families, and the marginalized is recognizably Catholic. The economy exists for man, not man for the economy. On that much, Catholics should readily agree. But good moral ends do not guarantee sound economic means. The encyclical criticizes market economics for allowing profit, technological efficiency, and concentrated ownership to outrun solidarity. It warns that automation may displace workers, data may become an instrument of control, and the benefits of innovation may be captured by a narrow elite. It therefore calls for stronger public oversight, redistributive taxation, social criteria for innovation, protection of workers, and regulation of AI and data so that economic life becomes more inclusive from the beginning rather than corrected after the fact. The moral worry is serious. Yet the policy instinct is less convincing. Historian Thomas E. Woods, in The Church and the Market, makes a distinction that Catholic social thought badly needs: the Church speaks authoritatively on moral principles, but technical economic analysis is a matter of prudence, evidence, and reason. A pope may rightly condemn indifference to the poor; it does not follow that wage controls, industrial planning, redistributive schemes, or technology regulation will actually help them. Markets are often caricatured as cold machines for rewarding greed. At their best, they are systems of social cooperation. Prices communicate information that no official can fully possess. Profit and loss discipline production by showing whether resources are being used to serve real human wants. Competition limits power more effectively than many regulations, because it gives customers, workers, and entrepreneurs alternatives. When property rights, contracts, sound money, and the rule of law are secure, markets draw dispersed knowledge and talent into productive service. This matters, especially for labor. Wages are not simply the result of employer benevolence or employer oppression. Over time, wages rise when workers become more productive, when capital per worker increases, when firms compete for labor, and when people are free to move, learn, start businesses, and bargain with multiple potential employers. Policies that make hiring more costly or innovation riskier may protect some visible jobs today while preventing the creation of better jobs tomorrow. [caption id="attachment_357703" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Leo XIV signs Magnifica Humanitas [Vatican News via YouTube screenshot][/caption] Automation offers a clear example. A robot or AI system may replace a particular task. That loss is concrete and painful. But productivity gains also reduce prices, improve quality, create new firms, and free labor for uses no planner could have specified in advance. The poor often benefit first from cheaper necessities: food, energy, transport, health tools, education, communication, and financial services. When regulation slows innovation in the name of protecting workers, it may instead preserve stagnation and deny low-income families the gains that innovation makes possible. The same caution applies to AI and data rules. Some law is necessary: fraud, coercion, theft, privacy violations, and genuine abuses should be punished. But heavy, vague, or premature AI regulation may entrench the very corporate power Catholics fea...

    8 min

  4. 3d ago

    A Good Friday Death: Vittorio Messori, RIP

    By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza A Good Friday death – even for a Catholic giant of the last fifty years – meant that less attention was paid than deserved. On the other hand, it was fitting for the author of Patì sotto Ponzio Pilato? – Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate? Vittorio Messori, a few days shy of his 85th birthday, died on Good Friday evening last month, drawing to a close one of the most important Catholic lives of recent generations, a life that shaped how people think about Christ and about His Vicar on earth. Messori gave definitive shape to how the voices of popes are heard, and thus to the papacy in our time. Catholics know well the impact that the convert-journalist can have, even more than the gifted theologian. English-speakers have G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge and Richard John Neuhaus, and French-speakers Andre Frossard. Messori grew up in a Communist and anti-clerical Italian family, a student of rationalism who professed agnosticism. In 1964, during the summer break from his university studies, he had something of an instantaneous conversion after reading Matthew's Gospel. He applied his rationalism to his newly professed Catholic faith. What could reason tell us about Catholic claims, and their coherence? At a time when apologetics was falling out of fashion, Messori devoted himself, with a journalist's frame of mind and skills, to a project that would consume more than a decade. In 1976 he published Hypotheses about Jesus in Italian, the fruit of his work, appealing to history, reason, data, and experience to make arguments for the faith. It was a sensation, selling more than a million copies in Italy – and translated all over the world. (English here.) It made Messori a major cultural figure – a Catholic journalist, not just a journalist. He became the Church's leading apologist in the 1970s, a lay witness who engaged atheists, materialists, and Communists on the reasonableness of the faith. In 2002, he adopted the same approach to the passion, examining the extra-biblical evidence for the crucifixion and death of Jesus in Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate? Messori's greatest influence, however, was not made in his own voice, but in two book-length interviews he conducted, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church (1985) and, with Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994). The interview book format, now routine for senior prelates, was a genre that Messori did not invent, but elevated. In 1984, Andre Frossard had published Be Not Afraid (in French), the fruit of lengthy conversations with St. John Paul the Great. The book had little impact. At the same time as Frossard's book was being released, Messori persuaded Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to sit over several days for interviews on the state of the Church, some twenty years after Vatican II. The prefect of doctrine, and most important figure in the Roman Curia, was unsparing in his frank criticisms of a range of lamentable trends, rejecting what he would later call the "hermeneutic of rupture," and even using the combustible word "restoration". John Paul had summoned an "extraordinary synod" for October 1985 to evaluate the lights and shadows of the post-conciliar period. It would give rise to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Messori's interview with Ratzinger set the terms of debate – to the frustrations of those progressives who realized that Ratzinger's book was a turning point. "This is a synod about a council, not a book!" protested Cardinal Godfried Daneels of Belgium. It was, but the book provided the synod's script. Messori proposed an unprecedented television interview with John Paul for the fifteenth anniversary of the pontificate in 1993. The Holy Father agreed but the interview never came off. John Paul kept the questions Messori wanted to ask and gave him written responses to do with as he thought best. Crossing the Threshold of Hope was the result, a publishing phenomenon tha...

    7 min

  5. 4d ago

    A Saintly Patriotism: Lessons from St. Joan of Arc

    By Kristen Ziccarelli But first a note from Robert Royal: We've reached the end of another week in our mid-year funding campaign and we're about two-thirds of the way to our goal. We can't slack off now. What we do in these days makes a difference between TCT continuing and – well – let's not think about that. Don't make me beg, please. We need your help, today, to make the coming days all they can be at The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... On her Feast Day today, May 30, Joan of Arc is remembered as one of the greatest saints of not just her time, but all time. The Maid of Orleans inspires us all with her military victories for France, fearlessness in battle. and extraordinary trial and martyrdom. And yet, the most important thing about Joan was none of those things, but the fact that she was obsessed with the will of God. As Alexandre Havard writes from her perspective in Coached by Joan of Arc: Lessons in Virtuous Leadership, "my love for France was not the fruit of an extreme patriotism. It is true that my father was a patriot. However, what obsessed me was the will of God. My patriotism did not give birth to my visions; my visions gave birth to my patriotism. My voices advised me to do things I could not imagine; they commanded me to do things I found repugnant. I felt sorry for the French because God felt sorry for them. I loved France for God." At her canonization in 1920, Pope Benedict XV's Divina disponente declared that St. Joan of Arc would be added to "the number of Saints, so that, from her example, all Christians may learn that obedience to the will of God is holy and devout, and obtain from her the grace to convert their fellow citizens to obtain heavenly life." At thirteen years old, Joan began receiving visions from God and the saints. France at the time was fractured by the Hundred Years' War. England had claimed much of northern France, including Paris, and the French throne itself stood empty. As the English laid siege to the city of Orléans along the Loire River, the nation appeared close to collapse. Illiterate and barely more than a child, eighteen-year-old Joan sought the help of her uncle to bring her to the Dauphin, the future Charles VII. She told him that she had been sent by God "to raise the siege of Orléans and to aid you in recovering your kingdom. God wills it so." Against every worldly expectation, Joan helped lead French forces to a series of victories against the English and safely escorted Charles to Reims, where he was crowned at the cathedral King of France in 1429. On May 30, 1431, she was put on trial and burned at the stake for "heresy" in Rouen. Both in 1431 and now, nearly 600 years after her trial, the distinction between patriotism and obedience matters enormously. Her response to serve God faithfully in the concrete circumstances He placed her in changed the course of history. Many devoted faithful are often tempted toward one of two extremes. Some withdraw from public life altogether, convinced that retreat is more noble or exhausted from the civic decline they witness around them. Others immerse themselves in political identity so completely that faith becomes secondary to partisan allegiance. Reading her trial documents or the many accounts of her life, it is clear St. Joan of Arc did not possess a partisan soul, nor did she fight for the nation as an end in itself. That is a kind of patriotism that is profoundly Christian, because it does not ignore a nation's failures, nor does it idolize national identity. Instead, it asks what God's will is: discerning our duty toward our own (the ones closest to us in our neighbors, our communities, and our country). Saint Joan of Arc understood that love of country could become a form of Christian service when it was ordered properly by a prior love of God. St. Joan of Arc's life also helps us to recover a richer understanding of the virtue of piety. St. Thomas Aquinas describes piety as the virtue by which we render "duty an...

    7 min

  6. 5d ago

    Not About AI

    By Joseph R. Wood But first a note from Robert Royal: As Professor Wood lucidly explains today, the choice of path - between a desire for comfort and doing what's right - is not new. And in several ways the stakes are even clearer now. Which reminds me that we're well into our finding campaign now. And I need to urge more of you to choose what's right and support our work. There are no guarantees for a venture like The Catholic Thing. No endowment, no government grants, no assurances about the morrow. All we have is you. Please, if you're here, you know why you're here. Just do it. Support TCT. Today. Now for today's column... Much is already being written at the moment about AI and the suitable Catholic response to it. So this column will not be about AI. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov has been driven, by his revulsion to evil in the world, to "rebellion" against God, and perhaps to the edge of insanity. He has written a poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," which he recounts to his brother, the devout (if perhaps a bit naïve) Alyosha. The poem is set "in Spain, in Seville, in the most horrible time of the Inquisition, when fires blazed every day to the glory of God." Ivan does not admire Western rationalism and science, nor the Roman Church. After centuries of pleading from Christians, Christ has appeared in Seville, and he is immediately recognized by all. "All" includes the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, the aged Jesuit responsible for determining which heretics will be turned over to civil authorities for immolation. Just after Christ had raised a girl from the dead on the steps of the Seville cathedral, the Grand Inquisitor orders his arrest and confinement. Ivan paints the people of Seville as "so tamed, submissive, and tremblingly obedient to his will" that the Grand Inquisitor can lead the Savior to prison without protest. He enjoys a totalitarian grip on the people, who will not oppose him even in the presence of the One they know to be Christ. The Inquisitor proceeds to interrogate his prisoner, though the interrogation turns out to be a monologue of recrimination aimed at the silent man of sorrows. "You may as well not come at all now, or at least don't interfere with us for the time being." The Inquisitor's case against Christ centers around the question of human freedom and our capacity to endure it. Christ, claims the Inquisitor, often said that he wanted to make men free. "But we have finally finished this work in your name. For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished and well finished." The Inquisitor doesn't want any disruptions to his work, not even from the One in whose name he conducts it. "These people [in Seville] are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet." He and his colleagues "have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy." Such is the usual trade-off proposed by totalitarians: hand us your freedom, and we'll secure your happiness in peace and safety. This happiness does not consist in the Aristotelian and Catholic understanding of the human telos as contemplation of the divine, an activity of soul in accord with virtue. It's rather a version of pleasure-seeking, with material needs met and no need for difficult choices. No inconvenience, just pacified ease and comfort. The Inquisitor sees in the three temptations of Christ "three questions [in which] everything was so precisely divined and foretold, and has proved to be so completely true, that to add to them or subtract anything from them is impossible." In answering those questions as He did, Christ chose freedom over obedience to the "dread and intelligent spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-being." But in offering such a possibility of freedom to humanity, Christ erred, charges the Inquisitor. He greatly ove...

    7 min

  7. 6d ago

    Coherence in Continuity

    By Stephen P. White But first a note from Robert Royal: We're moving along nicely with our mid-year fundraising and we're grateful to all who have already donated. But we still have a way to go, and the time grows short. Please help me to stop annoying you daily. Make your contribution and let's get this done for the sake of The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... Pope Leo the XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, was released earlier this week. It is long for an encyclical, and unexpected in some ways. It is worth reading, worth sitting with. What follows is not a summary, still less a "review" of the document, but some reflections provoked by the encyclical. First a story: At a conference some while back, I met a man who works for a large, Catholic, charitable organization. During our conversation, he made an important point about the work he and his colleagues do every day. Reading this encyclical brought that conversation back to mind. The goal of their efforts, he said, is not simply to serve the poor; the goal is to meet Christ in the poor they serve. And to illustrate the point, he told this story. An enterprising and well-meaning manager of a local branch of his organization had implemented a new distribution system by which someone could pull up in their car, receive their allotment of charitable contributions without leaving their car, and be off again in a matter of seconds. And that, my interlocutor insisted, was a huge problem. It was enterprising, efficient, and totally impersonal. What was distinctively Christian, or even distinctively human, about such "drive-thru charity"? Where was the opportunity to meet Christ in another or to be Christ to them? It is not too difficult to see how such a critique of efficiency at the cost of interpersonal (that is, human) interaction could be applied to artificial intelligence. And Pope Leo does just that in Magnifica humanitas, for example, when he writes: When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion. Technology that removes human imperfection and brokenness – or leads us to remove the broken person altogether – removes a privileged place to encounter Christ Himself. In the suffering of Jesus, man's weakness, his frailty, and even his poverty take on an entirely new dimension. The difference between entering into human frailty and eradicating it has profound implications: Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited 'upgrades,' in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people's wounds. Notice, while such warnings are appropriate to the uncritical use of artificial intelligence, they are hardly unique to the looming challenge of AI. Many of the critiques of AI in this encyclical are of this kind: more generally applicable to modern technology and less specific to the challenges of AI than some readers (myself included) may have expected. This encyclical declares its subject to be "On Safeguarding the Dignity of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." And while this encyclical certainly deals with AI, the heart of the document is much more a positive defense of human dignity than it is a thoroughgoing or definitive critique of AI. Which brings us to the next observation about this encyclical: Magnifica humanitas is, in a way, as much an encyclical about Catholic Social Teaching as it is a contribution to that corpus of teaching. Pope Leo spends the first 15,000 words or so, laying out ...

    7 min

  8. May 27

    Trusting the One who 'Knows What He's About'

    By Matthew Walz But first a note from Robert Royal: Professor Walz reminds us today of a fundamental truth: that underneath all the challenges we face, it all comes down to trusting the One who deserves our trust. This evening, we'll be starting a short course on the Augustinianism of Pope Leo, which will look at some additional home truths that our world ignores at its peril. Please join us by enrolling (click here). And please, also, remember why it's important to support everything we do at The Catholic Thing. Now for today's column... During this past academic year, I was honored to hold the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College. (This was especially an honor since this same Chair was held initially by TCT's own Robert Royal and then by Joseph Pearce.) Soon after accepting this appointment, the Church announced that she was going to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor or Teacher of the Church, which she did last November. For me, this was a happy coincidence or a "God-incidence," as a priest once suggested I call such a happening. I was being asked, I thought, to ponder the significance of Newman as a Doctor. The "of" in "Doctor of the Church" (the genitive case of Ecclesia) certainly expresses a relationship of possession: a Doctor belongs to the Church; he or she worked and still works on behalf of the Church's evangelistic mission. The "of" also suggests, it seems to me, the object of a Doctor's teaching (in Latin, Ecclesiae can be read as an "objective genitive"). Thus a Doctor not only represents the Church, but also teaches the Church herself, bringing her to a greater realization of revealed truth. The Church learns something new from Newman. Newman mined the depths of the Church's Scriptures and Tradition in illuminating ways, and in turn he articulated novel insights that have now become part of the Church's intellectual treasury. Newman taught the Church a whole host of things, ranging from the development of doctrine to the primacy of truth to the nature of conscience. But I want to consider here something that the newest Doctor teaches the Church by reflecting on a captivating phrase that he uses, a phrase altogether pertinent to those who desire to be sanctified in truth. The phrase comes from a meditation written by Newman called "Hope in God – Creator," one of the most powerful of his numerous Meditations on Christian Doctrine. God the Creator, Newman says, "knows what He's about." God knows what He's about! Perhaps more than any Doctor, Newman teaches us how to take this phrase as a touchstone for our lives. Do we know what we are about? Do we trust that God knows what He's about? What does it even mean to know what one is about, especially since we encounter so many shadows and images on our way toward and into truth? (Newman had the words Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem cut on to his tomb). Humanly speaking, to know what one is about is an achievement, perhaps of a lifetime. Great minds have long recognized it as such, though not as pithily as Newman. Consider, for example, Socrates, undoubtedly a man who knew what he was about. The Delphic oracle revealed that none is wiser than Socrates. Thus provoked, Socrates probes this assertion, eventually seeing that its truth lay in Socrates' knowing-that-he-does-not-know. As Plato recounts it, moreover, Socrates' knowing-that-he-does-not-know stood at the heart of his apologia, his defense against those fellow Athenians who accused him of spreading harmful teachings. Newman, of course, also delivered an Apologia in response to similar accusations from his fellow countrymen. Like Socrates, Newman narrates just how far he probed his own knowing-that-he-does-not-know in pursuit of the fullness of truth. It was a relentlessly honest probing that led him into the arms of Mother Church and the intellectual sanctuary of her infallibility. We know, of course, that there exists an even greater model o...

    7 min
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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.

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

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