The Witness of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

Between 1673 and 1675, Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun in Paray-le-Monial, France, experienced three great revelations in which Jesus shared with her the mystery of his heart—and through her, with the whole world. Jesus revealed his heart, on fire with love: “Behold, this Heart which has so loved human beings that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love.”

Jesus asked Sister Margaret Mary to receive Communion on the first Friday of each month, to pray in expiation for the indifference and ingratitude of so many for whom he died and to work to establish a feast in honor of the Sacred Heart on the octave day of Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

In the revelations made to Sister Margaret Mary, we see Christ’s response to the ingratitude of the human race: the revelation of his ardent love. The core principle of this devotion is the overflowing love of God, a merciful love that overcomes sin and evil. “Unable to contain within Himself the flames of His ardent charity, and yet not able to chastise His ungrateful creatures, He resolved to vanquish them by force of tenderness.” On the cross, Christ’s pierced side is opened, and his heart longs to come forth.

The Heart of Jesus: Revelation, Not Metaphor

When Jesus speaks of his heart in the Gospel, he is not merely offering a poetic image or inviting sentiment. He is revealing the interior truth of his person. In those words, “I am meek and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:29), the Son of God opens to us the deepest center of his human and divine life.

The Church’s devotion to the Sacred Heart arises precisely from these words of Christ. As the tradition—as documented by Jesuit Father John Croiset in the book The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—makes clear, “The particular object of this devotion is the immense love of the Son of God, which induced Him to deliver Himself up to death for us and to give Himself entirely to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar.” The Heart of Jesus, therefore, is not an image to be contemplated, but a person to be known, a love to be received, and a mystery into which the Church is drawn.

When the Church speaks of the “heart” of Christ, we do not contemplate his heart separate from his body. As Pope Francis taught, “Devotion to the heart of Christ is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus. What we contemplate and adore is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart.” When we speak of the heart of Christ, then, we are speaking of Christ’s immense love, which consumed his whole being.

True devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to the love of the Incarnate Son, crucified and risen, who gives himself entirely for the life of the world.

The Heart of Christ and the Wounded Human Heart

In the Gospels, Jesus consistently identifies the human heart as the center of moral and spiritual life: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts…” (Mark 7:21; cf. Matthew 15:19). The disorder of the world; the divisions within families, communities and even within the Church—these are not just structural or political problems. They begin in the human heart.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart speaks directly to this reality. It does so without naiveté, recognizing that the obstacles to conversion are often interior: tepidity, self-love, pride and passions left unchecked. The Sacred Heart is proposed not as a rebuke to our humanity, but as a remedy—the divine response to the wounded human heart.

In the revelation of the Sacred Heart, the Heart of Christ is revealed as full of love and mercy for us. From this heart flows the grace that alone can heal what sin has disfigured. In Christ, God does not merely call us to conversion; he gives a new heart.

I recall the words of Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” Christ came into the world precisely to give us this grace. Perhaps his love is what gives us the motivation to overcome this resistance and to receive and share the immense love of God: Heart speaks to heart.

Christ Dwelling in the Heart of the Believer

The New Testament deepens this mystery by proclaiming that the love revealed in the Heart of Jesus is not something external to us. St. Paul writes: “Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) and “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). Devotion to the Sacred Heart, rightly understood, is profoundly sacramental and ecclesial. It is ordered toward communion and unity: Christ dwelling in the heart of the believer and shaping the believer’s heart according to His own.

The purpose, then, of devotion to the Sacred Heart is not emotional consolation, but transformation. The ultimate goal of this devotion is that the heart of Jesus and the human heart become one. A mature Christian life is one lived in, with, and for Christ—a life filled with, and motivated by, ardent love caught from Christ’s own loving heart. That love is what forms disciples, sustains fidelity, and sends the Church on mission.

Reparation: Love Responding to Love

If devotion to the Sacred Heart begins in the revelation of Christ’s love, it leads toward reparation—not as a burden imposed upon the faithful, but as the proper response of love to love rejected. Reparation must not remain at the margins of Christian life, but at its very center, for it flows directly from communion with the crucified and risen Lord.

To speak of reparation is to acknowledge a sober truth: Love can be refused. St. John Fisher, the English bishop who was martyred in 1535, lamented that “we give no thought to his love, nor do we recognize the extent of his kindnesses to us.… [T]he remarkable mercy that he has continually shown to sinners does not move us to form our lives and conduct according to his most holy command.” Reparation is the Church’s refusal to remain indifferent where Christ’s love has been ignored, forgotten or despised.

Yet reparation is never an attempt to “add” to Christ’s saving work. Rather, it is the grace-filled participation of the baptized in his one sacrifice. As the tradition wisely counsels, “Unite the little which you do to the infinite amount which Jesus Christ accomplishes. Thus, while doing nothing yourself, you shall do much through Jesus Christ.” Reparation is not self-reliance; it is communion.

The Sacred Heart and Eucharistic Communion

The Heart of Jesus is revealed most fully where his love is most completely given: in the self-offering of the cross and in the permanent gift of the Eucharist. As the Church teaches, “The immense love of the Son of God … induced Him to deliver Himself up to death for us and to give Himself entirely to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar.”

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is inseparable from Eucharistic faith, for the Eucharist is the privileged place where the Church encounters the living Heart of Christ. In every celebration of the Mass, the same love that beat in the Heart of Jesus on Calvary is made present sacramentally and offered anew for the life of the world. Eucharistic communion, therefore, is not only reception; it is conformation—the shaping of our hearts according to his.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart finds its most authentic expression here. The Eucharist is the sacramental locus of this treasury, where Christ gives not something of himself, but himself entirely.

For this reason, frequent Communion, Eucharistic adoration, and the offering of daily life in union with the Mass are not just optional devotional practices; they are concrete ways in which the faithful learn to live from the Heart of Christ.

Such communion bears fruit in peace. Where hearts are formed by Eucharistic communion with the Sacred Heart, division gives way to reconciliation, indifference to charity and fear to hope. St. Paul exhorts the Church: “Let the peace of Christ control your hearts” (Colossians 3:15).

All of this calls for interior conversion. Without the right interior dispositions, devotion risks becoming merely performative or routine. But with them, our devotion can become transformative. In an age of distraction and spiritual fatigue, interior recollection is itself an act of reparation. To place the Heart of Jesus before one’s eyes—whether through Eucharistic adoration or through contemplation of a sacred image—is not escapism. It is an act of resistance to a culture that no longer knows how to dwell with love.

The Sacred Heart and the Mission of the Church

The love revealed in the Sacred Heart of Jesus is never self-referential. It is, by its very nature, missionary. The Heart that was opened on the Cross remains open in the life of the Church, sending her forth as a sacrament of Christ’s love for the world. True devotion to the Sacred Heart does not withdraw the believer from the world but configures the Church for her evangelical mission.

This missionary character flows directly from the inner logic of the Gospel. Jesus said: “Where your treasure is, there also will your heart be” (Matthew 6:21). When the Heart of Christ becomes the treasure of the Church, her mission takes on his form—marked by humility, mercy, patience and self-giving love. Evangelization ceases to be strategy and becomes witness, born of communion.

The Church does not invent her mission; she participates in the mission of the Son of God, Jesus. St. Paul expresses this with radical clarity: “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The apostolic life is possible only because Christ first gives himself interiorly, dwelling in the hearts of believers through faith (cf. Ephesians 3:17). Devotion to the Sacred Heart keeps this truth before the Church.

The tradition insists that the Heart of Jesus is “the treasury of all supernatural gifts and of all graces.” Mission does not arise from human zeal alone, but from abiding in this treasury. The Church evangelizes effectively only to the extent that she draws from the inexhaustible love of Christ and allows that love to shape her words, her works, and her witness. Mission without communion is merely activism.

This has concrete implications. Where the Sacred Heart is known and loved, families find unity, communities are reconciled and hardened hearts are softened—not by force, but by mercy. The tradition speaks of the fruit of devotion to the Sacred Heart, “to establish union and peace in the most divided families” and “to obtain victory over the strongest passions.” These are not private benefits; they are evangelical signs in a fractured world.

An Invitation to the Church Today

“Publish this devotion everywhere,” Christ said to St. Margaret Mary, as “a sure and easy means to obtain … a true love of God” for the faithful and “an efficacious means to arrive at the perfection of their state” for clergy and religious. These words of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary are addressed to the Church of every age.

Today, the Lord entrusts this devotion anew to the Church. In a time marked by division, weariness, and a loss of confidence in love itself, the Sacred Heart of Jesus remains what it has always been: the revelation of who God is and who we are called to become.

Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV stated: “In the face of the many questions of the human heart, as well as tragic situations of injustice, violence and suffering that mark our time, our faith needs to be alert, attentive and prophetic. Faith should open our eyes to the darkness of the world, and bring others the light of the Gospel through our commitment to peace, justice and solidarity.” Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus does not close us off from the realities of the world but opens our eyes to the needs around us.

In every age, the Church must ask not only what she proclaims, but with what heart she proclaims it. The Sacred Heart of Jesus provides the answer. The Church is sent into the world bearing not an abstract message, but a living person—Christ himself—whose heart remains gentle and humble, even when rejected.

In a culture often suspicious of truth claims, yet deeply wounded by lovelessness, the Sacred Heart reveals what credible evangelization looks like: truth spoken in charity, mercy offered without compromise, and fidelity lived with patience. The Church does not persuade the world by power, but by love made visible.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart must never be relegated to the past or confined to a particular spirituality. It belongs to the Church’s present mission. It forms priests after the Heart of Christ, strengthens families as domestic churches and sustains the faithful in works of justice, mercy and evangelization. In short, it shapes a missionary Church whose heart beats in unison with the Heart of her Lord.

An Exhortation and Entrustment

Today, the Sacred Heart of Jesus continues to stand before us not only as a mystery to be contemplated, but as a life to be embraced. The Lord who reveals himself as “gentle and humble of heart” continues to invite his Church to learn from him—not in theory, but in the concrete rhythms of daily Christian life.

As a nation soon to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I ask: What would it look like for us as a nation to live this consecration—mutual love, respect for persons, loving the neighbor, working for peace?

I therefore exhort all the faithful to embrace a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in ways that are simple, ecclesial, and enduring, so that faith may take root not only in our words, but in our homes, our parishes, and our daily offering of life.

The end goal of this devotion is greater love—that we may love as we have been loved first by Christ (see 1 John 4:19).

May God always fill us with the love of Christ and lead us to and strengthen our love for His Most Sacred Heart!

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Paul D. Etienne, DD, STL, is Archbishop of Seattle. This essay is adapted from his pastoral letter “Learn from Me for I Am Meek and Humble of Heart.”

There are similar reports out of France and Italy where secularism has devastated once vibrant Catholic cultures. Pockets of a dynamic, growing faith exist even in the most secularized cultures. Although they are isolated and relatively small, something is different.

These are hopeful signs but still the exception. By most empirical data, the faith in Western countries remains on the decline. The numbers available for infant baptisms, confirmations, and marriages provide a more sober assessment of the trajectory of the faith in the United States and Europe, as well as Mexico and South America. It is important to look at this data in light of the Church’s mission of evangelization. What is working and what isn’t are pressing questions facing the Church in the West.

While it is impossible to know exactly what the future holds for the faith in various parts of the world, the global trends provide important information that can guide the efforts to re-evangelize once Christian cultures.

Europe: In Decline

Historically, Europe has been the center of the Roman Catholic Church organizationally and demographically. Christendom has largely been a Eurocentric reality. Pope Francis, as one simple example, was the first Pope in more than a thousand years to not come from Europe. We can also point to the great cathedrals, universities, religious communities, sacred art and music, and so much more that finds its birthplace in Europe.

The days of an observable Christendom, however, are over. When Christendom died is up for debate, but the fact that Christendom is dead is undeniable. The 20^th century saw its peak of ordinations in the 1980s, likely well past the spiritual peak of European Catholic culture. As one indicator, Europe was producing over 2,500 priests per year in the 1980’s—over twice as many as any other continent. However, since then ordinations have plummeted to around 1,000 per year today.1 By 2018 Africa surpassed Europe as the largest source of priests, and just recently Europe was also passed by Asia. Of course, Africa and Asia have far greater populations than Europe and so should produce more priests, but that merely highlights how Eurocentric Catholicism has been.

A look inside Europe reveals that the strongest center of the Church was Poland. While it has declined to around 200 priests per year, in its heyday in 1988 it produced over 800 per year (this analysis of the time-trend starts in 1978, the year of Pope John Paul II’s election, so there may have been a significant John Paul II effect in Poland inspiring young men to join the priesthood). In a far second was Italy (ranging from 300–500 per year).

It is worth noting which countries are not on the list as providing the ballast for Europe. Germany, financially significant for the worldwide Church, and with a very large Catholic population of 19 million, only produced 34 priests in 2023. It’s also worth noting that five years previous they ordained 62 priests, and five years before that 98. So, it’s unclear if 34 is the floor or if it will continue the downward trajectory to almost nothing.

Belgium on the other hand may have hit that floor, barely cracking into the double digits at 10 ordinations and 8.4 million Catholics in 2023. While five years prior they ordained eight men, with the same number as five years before that, and five years before that.

There are Catholics on paper, but not much indication that the Church has a hopeful future in Germany or Belgium. Both countries have ten times more priestly deaths than ordinations per year. (Belgium at 110 vs 10 and Germany at 345 vs 34 in 2023). Baptisms have also tanked. Shortly after reunification in 1993 there were over a quarter million Germans being baptized every year (283,000); as of 2023 it was about half that (142,000). The trend for general Catholic vitality in Europe is quickly reaching a floor.

South America: Large but Tenuous

South America peaked later (2008) and is doing better, but still isn’t doing great. It’s “ordinations per million Catholics” measure is lower than any other continent at around 2.5–3 depending on the year. Consequently, it doesn’t produce as many priests as one might expect, considering how Catholic all South American countries have been traditionally. Specifically, it ordains about 800 men per year—about the same number as North and Central America combined. Brazil, for example, doesn’t ordain that many more priests (424 in 2023) than the United States (342 in 2023) even though its Catholic population is around 115 million versus around 75 million in the United States. As a percentage of its Catholic population, America is ordaining more men.

Still, Brazil provides a high number of baptisms at about 3 million per year (only recently superseded by Africa) and has the highest proportion of births that are baptized Catholic. So South America has its strengths as a traditionally Catholic space that are at least nominally Catholic, but also its weaknesses in terms of devotedness. Additionally, its plummeting fertility and now European-level family sizes militate against it being a major source of Catholic growth in the future. In just one or two generations it is very possible much of South America will lose even a cultural Catholicity.

United States: Hanging in There

The United States is the inverse of South America. The number of priests in the United States declined rapidly from its peak of 600 ordinations per year in the late 1970s to around 400 per year in 1998. It has plateaued there and has not seen the significant drop-off that many other parts of the world have. While there is still a priest shortage, it could certainly be worse.

Baptisms are another story. For three decades, from 1978 to 2008, baptisms hovered at around one million per year. But since 2008 baptisms have nearly halved and now stand at about 590,000. However, those who remain sacramentally engaged with the Church tend to be more than cultural Catholics—a phenomenon less evident in South America, where the gap between Catholic self-identification and actual sacramental practice has historically been far wider. American Catholicism has a core of true, devout believers, but like every developed country it has suffered under the expansion of secularism.

Africa: Hope for the Future

By any measure Africa is the future of the Church. In large part this is because it is the future of the world, with every population projection showing Africa exploding relative to the rest of the world because it is one of the few places still producing enough children to replace itself from one generation to the next. We see the implications of this demography in the number of Catholic baptisms, which have doubled from 1973 at around two million per year to four million per year in 2023.

However, the baptisms per capita measure has actually been fairly stable across the past few decades, suggesting that this explosive growth is simply a consequence of its natural population growth and not of evangelization. Still, it has the highest baptisms and priestly ordinations of any continent, and the second-highest priest ordinations per million Catholics (around 6.3 per year per million Catholics, second only to Asia at 7.5 per million Catholics). It is now a significant exporter of priests throughout the world.

All of this suggests that while the African Church is not making a lot of in-roads from evangelization, the Catholics there are devout and having large families that are successfully transmitting the faith to the next generation, with many of the men discerning into the priesthood or religious life. This core of faithful Catholics, combined with the forthcoming African population explosion, will make Africa the demographic epicenter of the future Catholic faith while other traditional cores of strength like Germany fade.

Pope Leo XIV’s Vision

All of this is certainly on the mind of Pope Leo XIV, who has the responsibility to lead the global Catholic Church of an estimated 1.4 billion Catholics. As a son of the West with deep roots in the United States, South America, and Italy, he is aware of the Church’s situation in the secularized West, perhaps as much or more than any pope in history. What he will do about the crisis remains to be seen, but he is unafraid to talk about the Faith and the power of Christ to transform individuals, communities, and societies.

For the next official gathering of the College of Cardinals in June (a consistory) the focus, as directed by Pope Leo, will be on Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. This is no doubt a clue about Leo’s vision. The exhortation came early in Francis’ pontificate before it became burdened by the weight of what some have argued was a failed pontificate. The document is evangelical to its core and was a stable bridge between the pontificates of Francis and Benedict XVI.

In his letter to the College of Cardinals earlier this month looking ahead to the June consistory where the Cardinals will discuss the exhortation, Leo noted:

[Evangelii Gaudium] refocuses everything on the kerygma as the heart of our Christian and ecclesial identity. It was recognized as a “breath of fresh air,” capable of initiating processes of pastoral and missionary conversion — rather than producing immediate structural reforms — and thus profoundly guiding the Church’s journey…. [I]t calls every baptized person to renew their encounter with Christ, moving from a faith merely received to a faith truly lived and experienced. This journey affects the very quality of spiritual life, expressed in the primacy of prayer, in the witness that precedes words, and in the coherence between faith and life. At the community level, it calls for a shift from a pastoral approach of maintenance to one of mission…. From all of this flows a profoundly unified understanding of mission, which is Christ-centered and kerygmatic. It is born of an encounter with Christ that is capable of transforming lives and spreading through attraction rather than conquest…. Even when the Church finds herself in a minority, she is called to live with confident courage, as a small flock bringing hope to all, mindful that the aim of mission is not its own survival, but the communication of the love with which God loves the world.

If this is the Holy Father’s response to the crisis, and he seems to be telling us it is, then he envisions authentic witness to the transforming power of encounter with Christ as the future of the Church. Numbers tell us something meaningful but not the whole story. This ecclesial mission will take form differently according to different local situations, but the goal is the same: encounter with Christ. The objective is not the preservation of institutions, or the defeat of secularism, or the increase in particular statistics, or the capture of social media space—all of which are good things; rather, we can infer from Leo’s letter that they all come downstream from an encounter with Christ.

What we need now is to take up Leo’s vision, which is also the traditional vision of the Church, and focus our energy on encountering the risen Christ and facilitating encounters for others. The numbers can be discouraging but our faith is not about numbers; it is about a person who desires to be in relationship with each of us. The numbers will take care of themselves if all of us in the Church deepen our relationships with Jesus and help others to do likewise.

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Jayd Henricks is the president of Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal. He served at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for eleven years and holds a STL in systematic theology from the Dominican House of Studies. He has written extensively on the Church in America.

First: the walk, from 45th Street down to the Village. It was a perfect spring day in New York, warm but without the oppressive humidity of July in the city. And the streets were what they always are in the arch-metropolis: bustling with life of a certain variety. I always feel the need to walk very quickly in New York, as if walking slowly would lead to being accosted by someone taking surveys or being tempted to purchase an eighteen-dollar smoothie. I feel the need to talk loudly as well, like children in a large family who feel they must raise their voices to be heard.

Midtown brought its usual array of professionals in business casual attire and AirPods. When I was in high school, one of the assistant principals would encourage us to look at the faces of people on their way to work. He said it would tell you a lot about whether they like their jobs or not. He said this to encourage us to choose a career that we really enjoyed, and that also benefitted others. As I looked at the faces of the people on the Avenue of the Americas—many right around my age—I had to wonder if they had the gnawing sense that they had chosen incorrectly, as though it never dawned on them that working hard at elite schools and getting connected to the right people would lead inexorably to quiet desperation.

Walking past Bryant Park, I was reminded how certain activities which are technically still federal crimes are accepted with studied nonchalance. Near Broadway, a group of about 40 young people were engaged in a choreographed dance, facing—what else?—a camera. In a city full of performers of one kind or another, this performance seemed the least offensive of all.

The further downtown I walked, the happier I became. The forbidding skyscrapers of midtown—an entire city in the sky—gave way to the charming brownstones and colonials near NYU until I arrived at the West Village. Here, a real neighborhood, with human style buildings and a sense of being in a community.

As I walked into the church, I was moved by its elegant simplicity. It is a neighborhood church in the colonial style, clearly built and maintained over the years by people who valued beauty but not ostentation. Those gathering for daily Mass came in reverently: an elderly couple, a few middle-aged Filipino ladies, and students or recent graduates living in the area. A bunch of them. Mind you, this was a daily Mass, and there were easily twenty people there from the ages of 18-25. One young woman had clearly come to Mass immediately after a run. Another young adult had the look of a future Dominican friar. A young couple knelt next to each other in prayer.

I found the New York Times’ recent article on this topic (“Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts”) comprehensive and well researched. It focused mainly on the unique paths that several people in very different places and states of life took to the Catholic Church amid this “surge.” The overarching narrative was that we live in a lonely and anxious age, and the Catholic Church provides an antidote of stability and community. This is undoubtedly true. But I also like the Free Press’ look at this question from a year ago (“How Catholicism Got Cool”). The article begins with a scene from last year’s Easter Vigil at Saint Joseph’s:

The candlelit church in Greenwich Village was packed. After months of study and preparation, 19 adults sat at the front, dressed in white, nervously awaiting their turn at the baptismal font. One by one, they stepped forward. After anointing them with chrism (holy oil), the priest poured water over their heads, baptizing them into the Catholic Church in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

“It was almost as if the veil between heaven and earth had been lifted,” said Jane, one of the adults baptized into the Church that day. She left feeling “more receptive to the supernatural.”

In the end, while human desires for community and meaning—not to mention viral videos of engaging heralds of the Gospel—can provide part of the explanation for why those young people were at Saint Joseph’s for daily Mass, it’s still only a part. Ultimately, the real source lies beyond human nature. The veil has to be lifted.

******

This is a neighborhood known for its counterculture, the place that epitomizes perhaps more than any other the shift away from the Puritan moral codes of pre-Elvis America to a rebellious, transgressive, and libertine set of values. And yet, almost sixty years after Stonewall, a transposition has taken place. The counterculture has wandered up Madison Avenue and, from there, out to every suburban cul-de-sac to become the prevailing ethos of our country, the very air we breathe. Just look at the ads produced in those big office buildings, ads which would have been considered pornographic in 1969. Listen to the professionals—women and men—casually walking down Fifth Avenue using obscenities previously considered inappropriate in public and private, not to mention the words used in what passes for discourse in Washington D.C.

In a world awash with this darkness, suddenly the Village seemed normal, even a tad quaint. Here, and in many places like it across the city and the world, a different kind of counterculture has sprung up: a creative minority gathered around the altar of the Lord to worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As I watched several young people light candles after Mass, perhaps in anticipation of a big exam or an interview or a date, and then gather with a few young Dominican friars on the church steps, I thought of the dry bones of Ezekiel 37. Amid that grotesque vision of death and decadence comes a haunting question, “Son of man, can these bones come to life?”

In other words, the prophet must decide whether the God who speaks to him is capable of bringing life out of death, just as Abraham was asked to trust in God’s power and his goodness as he accompanied his son Isaac up the mountain. Such a decision—which ultimately is placed before each one of us—has been summed up in the theological concept of Credere in Deum; that is, to believe not just that God exists or even the truths he has revealed in Christ, but to believe unto God, to surrender my life and all that I have to him.

In our time and place, this involves answering a few questions: Does he have a plan for me and for others? Do I believe that this plan, even with its sufferings, is better than any hopes or dreams I concoct on my own? Can God really bring about a renewal of faith here and now? God delights in carrying out his work in secret, in the hidden recesses, and in the most unlikely places—even a field of dry bones! It is the Holy Spirit, which hovered over the world at its foundations, the “Spirit of the one who raised Christ from the dead,” which prompts that invitation in our hearts and thus vivifies not just individuals but even entire civilizations. As the Lord God explained to Ezekiel:

“Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you home into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.”

Indeed, filled with the joy of the Resurrection, we can only arrive at one conclusion: that history belongs not to the performers and especially not to the peddlers of obscenity, but to those who emerge from the cave convinced of something more and assent to the true Light which shines amidst the darkness. What we need now more than ever is to embrace this Light, which pierces the darkness of our hearts, which once turned a creative minority into the culture that built Chartres Cathedral and gave us the Victimae Paschali Laudes. Faith in Christ assures us that such renewal is constantly at work within us, even tucked away amid the subways and farmers’ markets of a city that never sleeps.

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Fr. Eric Banecker is a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Read his other WWNN essays.

In its penetrating analysis of “the modern world”, the Second Vatican Council reached that most important point of the visible world that is man, by penetrating like Christ the depth of human consciousness and by making contact with the inward mystery of man, which in Biblical and non-Biblical language is expressed by the word “heart.” Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his “heart.” Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”

-Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, #8

I. Christian Humanism as the Key Project of the Modern Church

Redemptor Hominis was the first encyclical written by John Paul II and with good reason. Its Christocentric theological anthropology was near and dear to everything he believed most constitutively as a Catholic thinker. And I say “constitutively” since for him the truth about what it is that constitutes human dignity was no mere abstraction, but a visceral existential reality of the deepest order. John Paul understood that the central issue of our time is the question of just what a human being is. And he further understood that the source of so much evil in our time resides in the fact that Western civilization has abandoned Christianity’s answer to that question and replaced it with pale but potent secularized substitutes.

Karol Wojtyla, who had lived through the Nazi horrors and the subsequent totalitarian Stalinist oppression of Poland, knew full well the ravages inflicted upon Europe by the various “isms” and secular ideologies of the 20^th century. He had a front row seat to the carnival of carnage unleashed upon the world by the secularized utopian eschatologies of Marxism and Nazi racial theory. But he also understood that the capitalist consumerism and technocratic scientistic reductionism of the liberal West posed in many ways an even greater danger, owing to the fact that it was far more attractive and, therefore, more seductive.

Therefore, what John Paul understood and what we need now, more than ever perhaps, is an anamnesis that constantly re-presents to us, through word and image, the full reality of the house of horrors inflicted upon the human family by the many false doctrines of what a human being is, which were created by the modern project. Or perhaps it is better to say, the false doctrines of what a human being is and “ought to be.”

What Wojtyla and his theological allies (e.g., Henri de Lubac, von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger) understood was that the modern world, especially in the West, had succumbed to the allure of a kind of secular, scientistic, promethean project, mislabeled as a form of “humanism,” attempting to build a newer and more ambitious tower of Babel. Only this time, not really a tower at all, since there is no heavenly realm with gates to breach, and is instead a kind of “anti-towers project” where the demolition and deconstruction of transcendence as the enemy of the human race is the chief goal. What we need, they claim, are not towers leading us into the celestial perfections, but a series of lateral liniments and tendons binding together the skeletal structure of a “brave” and revolutionary new form for human society.

And from that starting point, what we need now is the true counter anamnesis of the God-man Jesus Christ, with an eye toward how his truth provides us with the only authentic anthropology and thus the only true humanism. This is a project that began as a pure negation in the modernist condemnations which, despite the often ham-fisted manner in which they were carried out, bore within themselves certain key insights about the dangers posed to the faith by “critical” modernity. But pure negation could not stand up to the political and cultural tsunamis of our time and therefore a new ecclesial project had to be mounted wherein the Church would repropose her timeless truths as providing us with a deeper, and therefore more attractive, humanism grounded in the true form of what it means to be human, provided by Christ.

This project further required the shedding of all tendencies toward a reactionary and somewhat romantic antiquarianism. Vatican II therefore adopted, as pointed out by Msgr. Thomas Guarino in his book The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II, an analogical rather than a dialectical approach to the problem of modernity. Rather than merely condemn errors—a path that had been trod and which failed to gain traction—Vatican II adopted instead a high-risk approach of seeking to find the overlapping points of contact with the world in order to “engage” that world constructively with its own message.

Joseph Ratzinger viewed this project as thoroughly christological and he referred to such texts as Gaudium et Spes #22 as the hermeneutical key to the whole of the Council. This in turn caused him to view the Council, and Gaudium et Spes in particular, as a “counter syllabus of errors” that, instead of resting in the complacency of condemnations, sought an aggressive, positive, Christological project.

In many ways therefore the papacies of John Paul and Benedict were the capstone on a theological edifice whose construction had begun in the 19^th century, and which exploded in creative power in the early to mid-twentieth century in the neo-Thomistic revival and in ressourcement theology. My point here is not another encomium to those movements, but to highlight the central theological truth that put fire into their equations. And that truth is the Christocentric theological anthropology latent within the Chalcedonian formulas.

Nevertheless, as Tracey Rowland notes in her book, Introducing Communio Theology,

What Guarino describes as the analogical approach and the use of a more irenic philosophical language may have been diplomatic, but it had a negative side effect of fostering numerous competing interpretations.… Moreover, some documents contain unresolved tensions between different theological traditions…. (pp. 110–111)

The controversies surrounding the Francis papacy can in great measure be interpreted as the result of his apparent preference for the so-called “Bologna School” of conciliar interpretation as an “event” that instituted a process of rupture with the past, as opposed to the hermeneutic of “reform within an overarching continuity” of John Paul and Benedict.

It is to be hoped that Pope Leo will move the Church back in that direction and away from the voices of the liberal ecclesial grumblers who are fine with a Christ safely inside Francis Fukuyama’s end of history party bus, but not with the real Christ of intrusive supernatural truths about what a human being actually is.

II. The Necessity of This Project

I am convinced that centuries from now our era will be viewed as a descent into the madness of a “happy faced nihilism” where the darkness of Freddie Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (“nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters to me”) paradoxically coincides with the fevered passions of various “critical, liberationist, queer, anti-‘fascist’, and decolonizing” political movements. But it is only an apparent paradox since modernity has long demonstrated that its commitment to deconstructing moral and spiritual normativity as something socially dangerous has always coincided with the spirit of revolution. The modern project is inherently nihilistic in its metaphysical soul but masks this reality with a series of purely invented, stipulative “rights,” which, having no real foundation, change with the shifting moods of the social contract.

This connection between the essential nihilism of the modern project and the various violent revolutionary movements of our time was presciently described by the Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce many decades ago:

The idea of the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom makes it obligatory to interpret all of past history in terms of repression and violence. …

Hence the idea of responsibility is abolished. But on the other hand, from the standpoint of action, of a new reality that must be built, one must assign responsibility. Therefore, we reach the following paradox: we are not responsible but we are made responsible by others in relation to a project, to the “novelty” to be created. We reach the idea that responsibility is assigned, which means that violence is justified as necessary in order to create a new reality. We reach the mortification of ethics expressed by Nietzsche’s definition: it is the science whose task is to justify successful crimes. (The Crisis of Modernity, pp. 22–23)

Thus we see the rise of illiberal liberalism, grounded in the ethos del Noce describes, and with it the redefining of “free speech” as “hate speech” if it is deemed counter revolutionary. Therefore, the kind of secular “humanism” with which the Church of today must contend is not the rather benign American version of a bygone era, nor even the adolescent thundering version of Nietzsche, but an altogether different kind of animal that isn’t really a form of humanism at all. One of the Church’s toughest challenges today is to convince our culture that the techno-nihilism they are embracing is in reality the death of the entire realm of the humanum.

Through all of it, however, the Christian faith has managed to perdure and has kept alive the “religion question,” much to the annoyance of many of our elites who occupy the finest seats at our cultural and political table of public discourse. In many ways, in the West at least, the Catholic Church remains the single greatest religious obstacle to the nihilism of purely technocratic understandings of the human or, as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, “surveillance capitalism.” Pierre Manent long ago outlined the unique theo-political nature of the history of modern European politics as a long and steady set of renegotiations with the legacy of Catholicism (in An Intellectual History of Liberalism). Therefore, one can sum up the entirety of the ethos of modernity with a simple question: “What do you do with the Catholic Church?” Many folks would not describe it so bluntly and prefer to speak instead of religion rather generically. But as the comedian Lenny Bruce once said, “Why is it that when people speak of ‘the Church’ they always mean the Catholic Church?”

In the Anglo version of the theo-political problem, society was envisioned as a civilization built on the foundational idea that “religions” are both necessary for inculcating the moral virtues necessary for self-governance, but also dangerous to the social peace since they are not verifiable via “public” (aka “secular”) reason except in the most generic of ways, and therefore they must be domesticated for the sake of that peace. Alternatively, in the continental version of that milder Anglo spin on religion, religions are dangerous but also, more fundamentally, retrograde—the recrudescence of superstition, sexual taboos, and bizarre notions of “sacrifice” as appeasement—and therefore the very concept of “God” is to be excluded from our social constructions as a matter of social hygiene. Religions can have “freedom” but only to a point and never in opposition to the principles of “laïcité” (France’s constitutional principle of secularism).

The story of our time therefore really is the narrative of how the Anglo liberal political arrangement gradually lost its mojo and morphed into a version of the continental with its hostility to God concepts intruding into the civil sphere. American style religious “disestablishment,” though in theory “neutral” toward all religions, was in reality simply a kind of pan Protestant, denominational, political peace treaty, wherein the cultural hegemony of pan Protestantism allowed for an unthematized social cohesion that was still largely Christian.

But the end of that Protestant hegemony came with wave after wave of Catholic immigrants, and with the subsequent secularization of America in what amounted to a kind of “second disestablishment,” the pretense of liberal neutrality has been exposed as the tenuous project it always was and that it has never really been theologically or metaphysically “neutral.” Like a cheating card dealer at the Black Jack table, liberalism has always dealt from the bottom of a rigged deck while maintaining the illusion of an honest and equal deal. In reality, liberalism has always already possessed a set of metaphysical commitments that asserts the superiority of purely “secular reason” over all religious claims—unless and until those claims can get beyond their native fideism and appeals to the “unverifiable” supernatural realm, and to thereby position themselves properly as part of this new metaphysical ordo of naturalism, scientism, and an ethics of pragmatic utilitarianism.

The key element here is the pseudo eschatological aspect wherein a certain “perfectibility” of the human condition is envisioned. And I say “pseudo” insofar as there is no true teleological aspect, whether we are talking about human nature specifically or about the manner of historical unfolding in general. To be sure, certain biological and natural physical limits and tendencies are acknowledged, but never as something morally, spiritually, or ontologically normative. Nothing binds us to anything. Or, as it was once famously put by the sociologist Peter Berger, modern people have no “binding address.” Everything is fungible and malleable. Thus, biological and physical “limits” are mere temporary constrictions to be overcome via science and technology, as now seen most paradigmatically in the transgender movement, but also with all of human sexuality more generally.

Therefore, nothing is “home” for us and we are rootless wanderers. Nevertheless, we must not despair. God is real, the Gospel is true, and no matter how attenuated our religious sense has become, and no matter how crudded-over it is with the many digital insults to our soul, there be dragons still, breathing the fire of the divine into us. Nobody is ever really a nihilist. Nobody is ever really an epistemological relativist. People still have spouses and children and friends and jobs. They still sob when they have to put their dog down and they still cry, clandestinely, at saccharine commercials about random acts of kindness. But more seriously, they still feel the sting of injustice when they see it, and despite the near demonic messaging from our social conditioners, they still know deep down that there is a thing called “goodness” and another related thing called “beauty.” And they still know that men cannot get pregnant.

In other words, we are still human beings and therefore the nihilism of our age which I have described is only skin deep. It is as fragile as gossamer and just as transparent. But the Church must face the fact that the well of its reputation has been poisoned. The culture therefore will continue to move in the direction of meaninglessness. The nihilism of our age might be thin, but it is pervasive and covers and smothers everything.

Therefore, the Christocentric theological anthropology I spoke of at the beginning as the essential need of our time, cannot remain a mere theological project. Nor can it be a mostly clerical project. The tragedy of the post-conciliar era was that the empowering of the laity was interpreted clericalistically as a project to see how many lay people occupy positions of power in the chancery (while chanceries themselves morphed into bureaucratic sink holes of useless “ministries” to this and that; salvation by flow charts and PowerPoint alone).

But do we have a laity that is ready to bring the full form of Christ into their world? This requires a skill set and, therefore, the confidence of one steeped in the faith. I think we do have such a laity. And the role of the clergy is to get them to see that they are capable of much more.

I once lived in a neighborhood of anonymous cul-de-sac houses. It was a boring place and nobody knew anybody else. Vinyl sided sound-proof booths with attached garages and no front porches. It was awful. But one day a tornado blew through and many houses were destroyed. People were trapped inside under the rubble, including children. In an instant the surviving neighbors came out and began rescue efforts even while many of them also had injuries. I witnessed heroism. I witnessed charity. I witnessed people doing things they did not know they were capable of. I witnessed friendships fanned into existence from the embers of destruction. All they needed was a reason and a challenge and a provocation.

I witnessed, in other words, human beings. And the Church is blessed with over a billion of them. Now she needs to blow like that tornado through her ranks. I think this is what Pope Francis meant when he asked the young people to “make a mess.”

Indeed, the “mess” of Jesus Christ, God and man.

Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22. Read Larry’s other WWNN essays.

Father George Zabelka was a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force and served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In August of 1945, he was called upon to give the crew of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a blessing for their safety. This was an action that he had routinely performed hundreds of times, if not thousands. In fact, priests are called upon to bestow blessings for a variety of reasons. Blessing people is one of the gifts we priests are privileged to perform.

Just days later, Father Zabelka counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of “Fat Man.” The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock—flesh seared, melted, and falling off. The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: “My God, what have we done?”

Over the next 20 years, Father Zabelka gradually came to believe that he had been terribly wrong, that he had denied the very foundations of his faith by lending moral and religious support to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The moral weight of war falls on human beings precisely because humans bear moral responsibility, and this is as it should be. Reading about a brother priest who wrestled with his conscience and eventually had the courage to speak out against the actions of his country was a moment of prophetic grace and moral righteousness.

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As a bishop of the Catholic Church, and the proud son of a World War II veteran who served as a gunner on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific theater, it is important for me to discern carefully whether today is a historical moment and a key time when I should speak out clearly as a representative of the Catholic Church. And while it is sometimes difficult to know whether one is in an historical moment as it unfolds, it certainly feels that way right now, especially given the confluence of what I take to be two events with dramatic and long-standing implications. And I feel a special responsibility to speak up clearly for the Church’s teaching and vision at this moment.

The first is the Iran military conflict. This last January, the best news reports suggested that Iranian security forces in that country killed tens of thousands of peaceful protesters in the largest revolt since the Islamic revolution. On February 28, Israel and the United States attacked Iran with a series of airstrikes from planes, missiles, and drones. Though Iran has been a horrifically bad actor in the Middle East for decades, sponsoring terrorism by proxy which has killed many people (including U.S. soldiers), was there a clear, imminent threat posed by Iran in February, particularly considering that last June the U.S. had already destroyed a great deal of Iran’s war-machine infrastructure? Debatable. Were they starting to rebuild their nuclear facilities that we bombed last June? Probably. Were they currently capable of firing nuclear weapons on American soil or on U.S. bases in the region? Probably not. Do we have to wait until an enemy is on the brink of attacking us before we can act? Certainly not.

In addition, the goals of the conflict—from the perspective of the United States—remain unclear and sometimes switch day-to-day, based on who is speaking to the media. We’ve heard “unconditional surrender,” “regime change,” and targeting of nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Like many situations in war, the conflict is dynamic and threatens to involve many other countries. Indeed, in retaliation Iran has targeted nearly all of its neighbors with their own strikes. Additionally, the U.S. has called on our allies to help open the Strait of Hormuz—currently blocked by threats from Iran to destroy ships that are passing through or levy massive tolls—not least because it is driving up oil prices and inflation across the globe.

The second situation is the legal/ethical conflict between Anthropic (developer of the popular “Claude” AI system) and the Department of War. The U.S. military has been using Claude in many of its operations (very likely including the extraction of Venezuela’s head of state), but Anthropic has been worried about Claude being put to use for two purposes it considers unethical: (1) AI-directed autonomous weapons (which kill without human oversight) and (2) mass surveillance of U.S. Americans (especially by de-anonymizing data, such as re-identifying individuals in data that were intended to be anonymous). The Department of War tried to change the contract to force Anthropic to allow for this, and when the company refused, they tried to destroy the company by designating it a “supply chain risk,” the first such designation leveled at any U.S. company.

In thinking about how a Catholic moral vision would address these two topics, let’s do a little “Just War Theory 101” by focusing on the teaching in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Our Church is not inherently pacifist and does not mandate the renunciation of all violence. The Catholic Church teaches one has a right to self-defense against an unjust aggressor, even to use lethal defense if necessary. This right to self-defense also applies to nations when faced with an unjust aggressor-nation, but the Church is adamantly skeptical of war. CCC 2307 says: “The fifth commandment forbids the intentional destruction of human life. Because of the evils and injustices that all war brings with it, we must do everything reasonably possible to avoid it.” Pope Leo XIV has recently and repeatedly emphasized this teaching.

The Catholic Church has a long history of developing Just War Theory, going back to the writings of St. Augustine in the 4^th century, and further developed by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century. The framework for a just war requires that war be a last resort, declared by a proper authority, have a just cause, and be proportional. The Latin term for this is jus ad bellum, the justification or reason for waging war.

According to CCC 2309, the following conditions must be met in order for war to be just:

(1) The damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave, and certain.

(2) All other means of putting an end to it must have shown to be impractical or ineffective.

(3) There must be serious prospects of success.

(4) The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the principle of proportionality).

When taken seriously, these are very strict and imposing regulations—ones which, again, reflect a deep Catholic aversion to war. There remain serious moral questions about several aspects of the Iran conflict, especially when it comes to whether it was really the last resort (2) and whether we have serious prospects of success (3), and even whether we have a clear sense of what success looks like.

The second dimension of Catholic Just War Theory is sometimes called jus in bello—the law that governs the way in which warfare is conducted. Even if the conflict in Iran is considered just jus ad bellum—a question that is still very much debated by Catholic moral theologians—we still need to make sure the war itself uses just means. CCC 2312–2314 gives us two core requirements:

(1) Discrimination: Non-combatants and civilians must not be deliberately targeted.

(2) Proportionality: The harm inflicted must be proportionate to the legitimate military objective.

The Department of War is understandably secretive about much of the technology it is using to fight wars, but its reaction to Anthropic suggests that it at least wants to make space to use autonomous weapons, which kill without direct human decisions being made about whether an innocent person is being targeted and whether the force being used is proportionate with the military objective.

But the Church is clear that such weapons could not be used justly, even in a just war, and Anthropic is right to resist here. As Catholic moral theologian Charlie Camosy put it recently, deadly actions in war “require human beings to be the ones morally responsible—and to take moral responsibility—in order for actions in a war to be just.” Camosy was quoted in a story about a group of Catholic moral theologians who submitted an amicus brief in support of Anthropic’s moral position. They wrote that use of AI-directed autonomous weapons, by definition, fails to meet the conditions for jus in bello required for acts of war to be morally licit in Catholic thought. Human involvement is crucial, because judgements of proportionality and discrimination are prudential and require human judgement, not the mere pattern matching of AI.Autonomous weapons do not possess a moral conscience. They cite the Vatican, popes, and the United States Council of Catholic Bishops in support of their position against autonomous weapons.

It is good to see Catholic scholars and Church institutions stand up at this moment, as, again, it does seem like a pivot point in history. Will the U.S. once again get bogged down in a terrible war in the Middle East, one with an uncertain objective and non-violent options on the table? Will that war, and other wars hereafter, be fought with drone swarms and other autonomous weapons which kill without human moral oversight?

One could make the consequentialist, utilitarian argument that—without moving in these directions—bad things will happen. Iran will restart its nuclear program, using the 60% enriched uranium that likely hasn’t all been destroyed or permanently buried, and continue to sponsor terrorism around the world. China and other countries will use autonomous weapons and outpace us on the battlefield. But Catholics cannot accept such arguments. We must follow the principles of Just War Theory, regardless of consequences. Period.

Father George Zabelka died in1992, but his message, in a speech given on the 40th anniversary of the Japan bombings, still rings true today: “War is now, always has been, and always will be bad, bad news. I was there. I saw real war. Those who have seen real war will bear me out.”

I stand in solidarity with Pope Leo and Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in urging Catholics and all people of good will to pray for a peaceful solution to the conflict in Iran. More destruction will only lead to more innocent lives being killed in the crossfire. What we need now is a serious consideration of the just war theory in light of advancing technologies, so that we can create a future without more destruction and bloodshed.

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The Most Reverend James D. Conley, D.D., S.T.L. is bishop of Lincoln. His episcopal motto is the same as John Henry Cardinal Newman’s, “cor ad cor loquitur,” which means “heart speaks to heart.” This essay has been adapted from an article that first appeared in the Southern Nebraska Register. Read Bishop Conley’s other WWNN essays.

We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.1

I understand because the world often reduces Catholicism to its sexual morality teachings, with no understanding of their origins or their relationship to everything else in Catholic life. And outside of these contexts, onlookers understandably find them incomprehensible or even harmful. They further focus on “the rules about sex” to the exclusion of everything else the faith contains, whether about justice, equality, freedom, or the very nature of Christian love. It’s important to push back on this.

But proposing a “ranking” of social teachings—remembering that all sexual expression teachings are also social teachings—doesn’t fix the problem. Because there is not a sliver of daylight between our teachings on sexual relations and those about other social relations, that is, relations with persons outside the family. All emerge from the Great Commandment to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, and all concern and conduce to justice, equality, and freedom. It is simply the case that the former teachings concern those persons strewn on one’s path Good Samaritan-parable-style in romantic and familial relations, while the latter concern those persons outside the family we encounter on the road of life. The Irish bishops’ conference was spot on in their document Love is for Life when they characterized Christian sexual expression norms as an application of the Good Samaritan principle to our romantic interests and to our family.2 As was Pope Benedict XVI when in Deus Caritas Est, he characterized human love in familial and extra-familial contexts as “a single reality” including “love between man and woman, between family members, and love of neighbors outside the family.”3 Both Catholics and non-Catholics need to grasp these truths, or run the risk of dismissing our sexual expression teachings as mere “moralism”—man-made rules—and our social justice principles as mere politics or ideology.

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In what follows, I will consider the necessary interplay between Catholic sexual morality and our social teachings on equality, freedom, and justice in order to overcome these risks. I will first show how our social teachings concerning sexual and family relations grew out of the same religious commitments that grounded our teachings about extra-familial relations. Then I will point to the emergence of a broad and robust empirical literature confirming what the Church teaches—that Catholic teachings and practices concerning sex and family life are most likely to lead to justice, freedom, and equality especially for the most vulnerable members of society. And finally, I will offer a comment about the “architectural” significance of the Church’s sex and family teachings, closely tied as they are to the identity of God, how He loves us, and how we are to love him and one another.

From its beginnings, Christianity was marked both by its “conspicuous chastity”4 and its conspicuous charity to those outside the family, because Christians understood both spheres of human relations to be subject to the Great Commandment to love God and one’s neighbor as one’s self. Through the life and words of Jesus, and the words of his Apostles, Christians came to understand love to be characterized at the very least by: radical self-emptying for the good of the other, most exemplified in Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice; respect for the sacredness of every other human person including his or her body, as indicated by Jesus’ taking on a human body, his care especially for suffering bodies, and St. Paul’s admonition that our bodies are “members of Christ” (1 Thessalonians 4:3); and attentiveness to the natural order God had ordained, as described by St. Paul in that part of his letter to the Romans rejecting same-sex relations, in part because of their divergence from this order: “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).

In the sexual morality sphere, according to noted historians Kyle Harper and Rodney Stark,5 this led Christians to embrace a set of norms drastically distinct from those prevailing in their Roman environment. Roman honor-shame codes proposed different rules depending upon one’s sex and social status, that is, upon whether one was a man versus a woman, or a master versus a slave. Christian norms respecting romantic and familial relations, by contrast, applied equally to everyone because they emerged from an understanding of human beings’ obligation to love as God loves: faithfully, sacrificially, fruitfully, and in order to capacitate each person to be all that God calls and gifts them to be, not hindering or undermining this.

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Thus, for Christians, there would be no killing of the unborn, no infanticide of ill or female newborns, no divorce, no adultery, no polygamy, and no same sex-relations—even if you were a man and a master. Interestingly, historians report that women and slaves were particularly grateful for these Christian innovations, given that these groups regularly suffered disproportionately from the loss of freedom, equality, and justice these practices entailed. In the marvelous words of classics’ scholar Sarah Ruden in her book Paul Among the People, Christianity offered a “new way of thinking that must have been quite exciting, a hope for something beyond exploitation, materialism, and violence – a plan not for competing in purity and the denial of life, but for the sharing of life in full. It offered a chance not to be treated as a thing.”6

This same understanding of love within the family setting grounded Christians’ treatment of persons outside the family setting too. Whether in their “sell[ing] their property and possessions and divid[ing] them among all according to each one’s need” (Acts 2:45), or their taking up a collection to assist the suffering denizens of Jerusalem (see 1 Corinthians 16:1–4; Romans 15:25–31). Whether Christians were pioneering charitable efforts to buy burial land for the poor or to set up free shelters, food distribution, and medical treatment for the neediest in places such as St. Basil’s “Basilead.” In both spheres Christian love sought to be radically for the other, and attentive to created nature and the sacred human body. In the words of eminent Christian historian Peter Brown, because of their understanding of Christ’s radical call and example, early Christians felt a

need to place in society itself a series of concrete, unmistakable – even shocking – “markers” that served to remind believers and outsiders of the unimaginably wide horizons opened up to humanity by the Christian message…. Indeed, the preachers, writers, and organizers who advocated most vehemently the care of the poor were often the same persons who spoke out most passionately in favor of virginity and celibacy. These palpable markers brought the “incommensurable” into society.7

Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has written similarly, saying that while early Christians’ code of conduct in every sphere might seem “hard and legalistic” to onlookers, it should not surprise us, given their conviction that Jesus must be the “norm” in every single relationship, whether in- or outside the family. And that this norm is radically loving beyond what human beings might imagine on their own.8

Just as the more vulnerable members of the Roman world benefited disproportionately from early Christian teachings on sex and marriage, more vulnerable members of today’s society would benefit disproportionately—in the realms of freedom, justice, and equality—were they treated with the respect such teachings require. For it is children and the poor in the United States, including racial and ethnic minority groups, who suffer the most from uncommitted sexual encounters, cohabitation, nonmarital pregnancies, father-absence, abortion, divorce, and same-sex relations. The poor as well as black and Hispanic Americans are less likely to marry, more likely to cohabit, more likely to have serial uncommitted sexual relationships, more likely to experience nonmarital pregnancies, more likely to grow up without a father, more likely to have abortions, and more likely to divorce.9

Children, too, also disproportionately suffer the consequences of adults’ sexual and familial choices. Obviously, every abortion denies a child equality, freedom, and justice when it denies him or her life itself. Children of divorce, those living in cohabiting households, and children reared in single-parent households too on average suffer reduced educational, emotional, financial, and familial outcomes as adults. In particular, children living with a mother’s new cohabiting male partner are drastically more likely to be abused or killed.10 And children reared in same-sex households suffer in every single case the absence of their natural mother or father, or both, as well as diminished outcomes, on average, across a host of emotional, educational, and relational categories.11

In other words, Catholic sexual morality is a powerful force for achieving greater equality among human beings of every race, socioeconomic class, age, and sex and for achieving justice and freedom for some of the most vulnerable members of society. That it does this one adult or one couple or one child at a time does not make it less important than social justice practiced in relations with those many “neighbors” outside the family. For every single person is born into a family. Every person is deeply affected by what happens while growing up. It makes a great deal of difference not only to their happiness, but also to their achieving justice, freedom, and equality, whether they are aborted, adopted, or born, whether their parents are married, whether the marriage is faithful and permanent, whether they themselves experience stable marriage or rather a series of temporary sexual relations or cohabitations, and whether they cohabit, abort a child, or divorce.

This makes all the sense in the world considering Jesus’ admonition regarding “who is our neighbor” in the course of explaining the Good Samaritan parable. He says simply that it is the person strewn on our path of life in need of our help. For virtually all of us, those first neighbors we will encounter strewn on our path of life, and whom we will affect most deeply and indelibly, are family members. Of course we each have an obligation to those in need outside our family whom we encounter on our path of life. Some of us will even take up such obligations as our primary work. But it is all too easy for many to forget that justice and love are required in that first society, of which every one of us is a member, and in which it can be hard to be loving every day on the way to the kitchen and to the bathroom.

A final observation concerning the importance of Catholic sexual morality in the context of our faith as a whole. It is not too much to claim that this area of teaching is “architectural to our faith” because one’s treatment of a romantic partner, a spouse, is such an important path to understanding the identity of God, how he loves us, and how we are to love him and one another.

This is because God himself, in the Old Testament and the New, refers to himself as bridegroom to our bride, inviting us to understand his identity in part by reference to our understanding of romantic and married love. The Old Testament refers to Israel’s rejection of God in favor of other gods from time to time as a form of adultery (see the Book of Hosea; Ezekiel 16; Jeremiah 2–3; Isaiah 54 and 62). And in his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul writes that marriage provides a glimpse of God’s relationship with his people (see Ephesians 5:25–32).

Furthermore, assuming that we are, as Genesis claims, made in God’s “image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26), then it is very important for understanding God to consider that he fashioned us as male and female, capacitated for complementary relations, which he also made procreative. That spouses long for, and promise one another, a permanent, faithful, until-death-do-us-part relationship. These experiences of the meaning and the dynamics of love provide us a glimpse of God’s identity as a never ending, trinitarian community of love. No other relationship offers similar elements.

Clearly, Catholic social teaching encompasses much more than sexual and familial morality. Clearly, its vast body of teachings on relations with persons outside the family—whether respecting labor, the economy, or government—are crucially important to living the Catholic life and remaining in unity with the Church. But both sets of teachings are essential to promoting and protecting what Catholics understand as justice, freedom, and equality.

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Helen M. Alvaré is the Robert A. Levy Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, and has worked for the Church for 37 years in various capacities. Her most recent books include Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide and Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction. Read Helen’s other WWNN essays.

Catholic schools and universities speak frequently, and rightly, about the formation of the whole person. They speak about service, solidarity, human dignity, vocation, and the call to holiness. What they often speak about less confidently is citizenship. One can move through a good deal of Catholic education in America today hearing many worthy things about community and discipleship, while hearing much less about the formation required for life in a republic. That lack is a problem—and an opportunity. In the American context, civic education should not be considered an optional supplement to Catholic formation, but rather essential to that formation. It is one of the ordinary ways in which Christians are called to love their neighbors.

That claim may seem odd to ears accustomed to hearing politics discussed either in procedural, therapeutic, or activist terms. Civics is often reduced to instruction in the mechanics of government: the branches, the separation of powers, elections, courts, Congress, and the Constitution. Those topics are, of course, important and should not be neglected. But they are the base, not the heights, of civics. Sometimes, civics—or a substitute for it—is treated as training for activism under the heading of some politically correct ideology and has for its goal the production of the Social Justice Warrior of common parlance. Neither approach reaches the heart of the matter. Since we all live concretely in the world, and politics concerns the widest field of human action, Catholics need to treat civics as formation in the discipline where we first and foremost meet our neighbors, whom our Lord calls us to love.

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The reason is not difficult to state, though it is easy to forget. We do not love our neighbors in the abstract. We love them as persons living alongside us in families, towns, parishes, neighborhoods, schools, and nations. We share with them a political community, and that political community does not sit lightly atop an otherwise self-sufficient private life. It shapes imagination, conduct, expectation, speech, memory, aspiration, and the ordinary moral temper of a people. It shapes the schools our children attend, the laws under which we live, the level of trust or mistrust in our common life, and the conditions under which friendship and family life themselves flourish or decay. It affords us a field of action and deliberation broader than any other. If that is so, then part of loving one’s neighbor is caring whether he has been formed to think and act well as a citizen—and carrying out our own obligation to make sure that we ourselves are.

Christians should be especially well equipped to see this. The Christian knows that the earthly city is not the city of God and that politics is not the highest thing. But it does not follow from that truth that politics is of little account. We are placed, by providence, among particular persons in a particular order of common life. We do not encounter one another simply as isolated bearers of rights or as disembodied souls passing through neutral space. We meet one another as people formed by a history, a language, a set of institutions, a national inheritance, and a way of life. If one wants to know one’s neighbor in any concrete sense, one has to know something of that inheritance and those institutions. Charity moves through such particulars. It does not hover above them.

For that reason, the old Christian and classical insight into political life remains indispensable. Thomas Aquinas understood the political community as the most comprehensive community in the temporal order. He did not mean that it comprehends man’s highest end. The political community gives broad scope to speech and action concerning the things held in common, and it is in the political community that we find a distinctively rich field for the exercise of human excellence. A republic, such as our own American republic, above all, depends upon citizens capable of ruling and being ruled in turn. It therefore depends upon judgment that comprehends the goods of that republic.

Judgment means the capacity to deliberate about contingent matters under conditions that do not admit of strict demonstration, to weigh goods that are genuinely goods and yet may stand in tension, to discern fitting means in the midst of inherited circumstances, and then to act. This is why civic education, if it is more than information transfer, has an intimate relation to prudence. And prudence, though it is not the whole of moral life, is no small thing. It is among the virtues most necessary to those who must live and act with others in the world as it actually is. And prudence must take into account the various particulars of the political community’s historical situatedness. Catholics have a tendency to want to escape particulars by reference to metaphysics, cosmology, or the principles of the faith, without doing the hard work of transposition into the messier concrete realm where we meet our neighbors. Civics education is an indispensable aid in doing the work of transposition from the more abstract realms of thought into embodied human life, for the sake of charity.

That is also why a serious liberal education remains bound up with civic formation. Liberal education is an education for the responsible exercise of freedom. In the American case, all of this has a particular urgency. Ours is a constitutional republic that presupposes an uncommon degree of moral and intellectual formation among ordinary citizens. It assumes citizens who know their own history, culture, and laws; who are able to make distinctions, to deliberate about means and ends; to weigh claims advanced in the name of the common good; and to bear the discipline that self-government requires. Such a regime cannot finally be sustained by technique alone. Nor can it be sustained by citizens who have been trained chiefly in suspicion.

This is one of the reasons Catholic education in America should recover its confidence in teaching America itself. That does not mean a pious nationalism, or a neglect of all of the various tensions quite obviously present for American Catholic life, still less a refusal to tell the truth about slavery, injustice, hypocrisy, and the many ways in which the nation has failed to live up even to its own standards. But neither does truthfulness require a Howard Zinn- or 1619 project-style deconstructive pedagogy in which the country appears chiefly as a villain and oppressor. A student taught to regard his country primarily as an engine of oppression will be condemned to live out a cynical and demoralizing delusion, more likely to become alienated from the actual inheritance that he must understand if he is to judge, serve, improve, or reform it. What is much more likely to produce young Catholic men and women who are passionately dedicated to serving America under God is not deconstruction, but love.

Every student deserves the chance to discover what is genuinely lovable in his own country. In the American case, that includes real political and moral goods. For all of the flaws and complexities involved in the historic relation of Catholics with America, America has proven to be a place in which Catholics can flourish, serve, contribute, and even lead, in ways that exceed many—perhaps most—of the historically Catholic European countries in which the relation of Church and political order were first charted out.

Catholic institutions have special reasons for undertaking this work. They often describe themselves as preparing students for leadership and service, but service in a republic has an inescapably civic dimension, which must not ignore the particularities of the American republic: its constitution, founding, institutions, history, language, culture, territory, etc. The graduate of a Catholic school or university will vote, hold public office, serve on boards, work in industries with both economic and trans-economic effects, raise children, speak in public, judge laws, weigh political claims, and help sustain or weaken the institutions nearest to him. If he has been formed to be morally earnest but civically unserious, then his education has been incomplete in a way that matters. He may possess generous sentiments while lacking the habits by which one actually contributes to a common life. Or he may carry into public life a religiosity or moralism detached from the texture of American political existence, as though Christian witness could afford to be innocent of institutions, history, and prudence. It cannot.

Something more specific is therefore needed. Catholic education should acquaint students with the American constitutional order and the arguments surrounding it. It should familiarize students with the language, culture, and territorial space that shapes America through time and space. It should teach American history in a way that is truthful without being merely corrosive. It should place the American experiment in relation to the longer inheritance from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Christendom, and early modern constitutionalism out of which it emerged. It should reintroduce students to the language of the common good, to the discipline of prudence as practiced in light of the knowledge of particulars, and to the distinction between technocratic expertise and political judgment. It should help them see that citizenship is not a distraction from Christian discipleship, but one of the ordinary fields in which discipleship must be expressed.

It should also recover a certain confidence that Christians, when well formed, can be among the best citizens. Augustine understood very well the limits of politics, but he also understood that rightly ordered loves shape temporal life. A Christian whose loves are being healed and ordered is not thereby made indifferent to the earthly city. He is made more capable of acting within it without illusion and without despair. He is freed, at least in part, from the intoxications of ideology and from the moral vanity that so often accompanies political fervor. He is better positioned to seek justice without imagining that politics can save him. This is no small civic advantage.

If the Church in America wants renewal, its schools and universities cannot leave civic formation to chance. The Catholic Church is used to taking a counter-cultural stance in America. We should welcome the prospect that, in a time when most institutions of public instruction are ideologically captured by deconstructionists, Christian faith empowers us to teach what is lovable about America and our fellow American citizens under God. It is not only good for us to do so, but also good for our non-Catholic fellow citizens to see us do so. We should form citizens capable of understanding the country we have inherited, judging it truthfully, loving what is good in it, and serving their neighbors within it with charity and intelligence.

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Dr. Thomas P. Harmon is Professor and Scanlan Foundation Chair in Theology at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Texas, where he is also Division Dean of the Core and Centers for Excellence and directs the MA in Evangelization and Culture. He is the author of The Universal Way of Salvation in the Thought of Augustine(Bloomsbury/T&T Clark) and is co-editor of Augustine and Frontiers of Pluralism (Routledge) and Wisdom and the Renewal of Catholic Theology: Essays in Honors of Matthew L. Lamb (Wipf and Stock/Pickwick). He lives in Sugar Land, Texas with his wife and six children. Read his other WWNN essays.

The late Pope Benedict XVI said that “art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith.” This is because they both have the same basic root—beauty. It was the Russian Orthodox novelist and prophet, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who famously said that “beauty will save the world.” This can only be true if there is some essential connection between beauty and the One whom both Benedict and Dostoevsky recognized as their Savior—Jesus Christ.

“You Either Get It or You Don’t”?

Many defenders of belief in God or Christianity will refer to an argument from beauty as something that helped them come or deepen their faith. However, this is often only presented with examples and couched in terms of “you either get it or you don’t.” This can come off as arbitrary to one who doesn’t “get it.” It can also fall on deaf ears in a world that assumes beauty is purely subjective. However, the classical, objective understanding of beauty, indicated by the harmony, clarity, and integrity of the substance, reflects God’s nature and therefore points one to recognition of God’s existence.

Beauty Transforms

Christianity was founded by, and united to, beauty incarnate, Jesus Christ. Therefore, Christianity must reflect this beauty to the world in order to attract it to Christ. Of course, so much work has been done to present the beauty of the Church’s artwork as a way to evangelize. It will continue to be an important way to wake a culture worn-down to the wonder of God’s Creation, and our subcreative participation in it. The Church will also need to highlight how this beauty appears even more prominently in her saints, her children, in a way that cannot be matched.

Many who converted to, reverted back to, or simply deepened their own faith in Jesus refer to something beautiful as a major factor that helped them see the truth. Even when we contemplate truth, what is being contemplated and not just confirmed is the beauty that is found within it. When a story, whether it is mythological or historical, captures our imagination it is the beauty of that story that does so. Beauty is what draws us in and compels us forward. It was the beauty of fair maidens that motivated knights to quest. It was the beauty of the Shire that kept Sam and Frodo’s hearts from despair. It is the beauty of their children that inspires the total sacrifice of mothers everywhere and all times. Beauty changes lives.

What we need now is for the Church to use the beauty of her tradition to point the world back to God.

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The tricky thing about beauty is that we have this assumption it is completely “in the eye of the beholder.” You could put the words “what is beauty?” into Pilate’s mouth when he has Jesus on trial, asking with the same cynicism he asked our Lord “what is truth?” (John 18:38). While it is clear we all have different preferences, the idea that beauty is purely subjective should strike us as deeply unsatisfying. It is not only objective, like truth and goodness, but there are specific features to beauty that we can identify.

St. Thomas Aquinas considered beauty to be an extension of God’s nature as a “transcendental.” In his Summa Theologiae (ST), Aquinas discusses the other transcendentals of oneness (see ST I. Q 11) and truth (see ST I. Q 16). These transcendentals were considered convertible with being, or existence itself (see ST I. Q 16. A 3). Aquinas referred to this as ipsum esse (being itself) and considered it the best way to describe God’s nature (see ST I. Q 4. A 2). This shows how God is not just another part of Creation, nor is God identified with Creation, but the reality in which all other things participate in existence. This includes both the physical universe as well as the invisible realities like truth, goodness, and beauty.

What Is Beauty?

For St. Thomas Aquinas, beauty flows from God’s essence, and since God exists as an objective reality, beauty does as well. Beauty, therefore, does not reside merely in the eye of the beholder or depend on subjective taste. Instead, it can be recognized through objective features. Aquinas identifies three such objective properties of beauty: harmony, clarity, and integrity (see ST I. Q 39. A 8). Beauty must rest upon objective realities if it is to flow from the nature of God, which St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Tradition recognize as the ground of reality itself (see ST I. Q 4. A 2). These properties must also be objective in order to act as essential elements of beauty as an objective reality. Instead of causing beauty as if it were something beneath us, humans participate in beauty when we create things that reflect these three objective elements. All three of these essential elements of beauty serve, and are reflected in, the final cause of the substance. This flows logically from beauty’s convertibility with being. It is also because beauty is the recognition of the goodness that is inherent in the substance itself (ST I. Q 5. A 4). This goodness is realized in the substance’s fulfillment of its purpose, telos, or final cause. This will be shown in the specific descriptions of each below.

Harmony

Harmony names the proportion among parts in relation to one another. It describes how the elements of a thing fit together. We perceive it when certain colors complement each other or when musical notes sound right together—what we literally call harmonizing. We also see harmony in visual symmetry, especially in works of art and in the human face. Harmony points to the beauty of an object because an object whose disparate parts are aligned according to the whole can work toward its own purpose more effectively. The harmony in beauty is proportionate to the goodness to which these parts are ordered.

Clarity

Clarity names the radiance present in a thing itself. We perceive it in the purity of a color or the cleanliness of a room. Its most striking example appears in the contrast between the face of a living person and that of the dead. Clarity is the means by which beauty makes itself known to us. Artists typically want viewers to grasp what a work is saying, and clarity is what enables that understanding. Clarity is a reflection of the “life” that is present within a work. This life is not merely biological, but can also be spiritual and metaphorical. It is recognized in the visual arts by the purity of the color being used. For example, we know a healthy flower by its color, so if one were painting said flower one would also look for a similar hue. It is reflected in the clarity of the object itself. Because life is metaphysically “better” than death, it carries within it a greater reality, a living thing reflects more goodness and is capable of more beauty.

Integrity

Integrity refers to the completeness of a thing: every essential part is present. These parts not only function together but also serve the essence of the whole. Integrity depends on an object’s purpose, or telos, since that purpose determines which parts must be present in the first place. Many people recognize integrity in the beauty of team sports. When players carry out their assigned roles to score a goal, basket, or touchdown, they fit together in harmony and act in service of the game’s purpose. Integrity, similar to harmony, has to do with the working together of parts, with a greater focus on the nature of the substance itself. This speaks to the goodness of identity as such. A thing can only be beautiful if it is a distinct thing in which one can recognize beauty.

How Does This Point to God?

One of the oldest ideas about God, and one of the oldest arguments for God’s existence, is known as the argument from degrees of perfection. A succinct treatment of this argument is presented by St. Thomas Aquinas (see ST I. Q 2. A 3). It states that some things are better, truer, or more beautiful than others. We can only judge things as “more” or “less” by comparing them to something that is the “most,” the standard of goodness, truth, or beauty. This standard of beauty must precede any instantiation of beauty. This standard of beauty must also transcend every beautiful thing that participates in it. Even despite disagreements of what is considered beautiful, there must still be a standard upon which the example falls. This standard, not just of goodness, truth, and beauty, but all existence, is God.

One can find objective markers for recognizing beauty, indicated by harmony, clarity, and integrity. Every beautiful thing then participates on a standard of beauty to various degrees. This standard precedes, transcends, and encompasses all beautiful things. It is beauty itself. This beauty is convertible with all truth, all goodness, and all being. It is what many understand to be God.

How Does the Church Argue for God from Beauty?

There is a well-known, convicting quote in A Severe Mercy, wherein convert Sheldon Vanauken writes that both the best and worst arguments for and against Christianity respectively are Christians themselves. Interestingly, the reasons he gives for Christianity, “joy,” “certainty,” and “completeness,” (location 1268) sound similar to the very concepts of proportion, clarity, and integrity.

The above recognition illustrates a well-established, practical truth about the spread of the Gospel in the world. It also alludes to the fact that the only argument for God from beauty is not an argument at all. The Christians who radiate the joy, certainty, and completeness that Vanauken highlights are those who have fully conformed themselves to the God in whom perfect harmony, clarity, and integrity is found. We call these Christians the saints. Better still, they can only incarnate these three in their own lives because they reflect the One who incarnates these objective qualities of beauty in Himself by his divine nature, Jesus Christ.

In laying out the blueprint for the Christian life, Jesus emphasizes the beatitude of the “peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). Peacemakers are the ones who maintain harmony in relationships and creation. This is the real inspiration behind stories of the saints speaking to animals. Saint Francis taming the wolf at Gubbio or preaching to the birds were illustrations of his identity as a peacemaker that brought harmony to creation.

Saint Paul tells the Christians of Thessalonica they “are all children of light, children of the day” (1 Thessalonians 5:5), emphasizing the clarity that is meant to the found in Christians. This reflects Jesus, “the light of the world” (John 8:12), whose light emanates from His divine nature, the source of beauty. We see this light artistically displayed in the nimbuses one finds in sacred art around the heads of saints. Many who had the blessing of interacting with Saint Teresa of Calcutta in person describe a similar light emanating from her. There is actually biblical precedence for this in Exodus 34:29–35. After Moses speaks with God in Mount Sinai, he descends back to camp and is described as shining brightly. This glorification is found later at the Transfiguration of Jesus whose face “shone like the sun” (Matthew 17:2; cf. Matthew 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36).

Finally, Jesus speaks to the beauty of integration when he calls upon Christians to “seek first the kingdom” (Matthew 6:33). This radical integrity organizes all the disparate elements on one’s identity around the “one thing needful” that Jesus exhorts in Luke 10:42. It is why Christ was able to focus on the will of his Father as He describes in John 6:38. This is evident in the singular focus of saints that enables their otherworldly productivity in serving God and others as well as building up the kingdom of God that they seek.

These examples illustrate how Christ, and those of Christ’s Body, the Church (see Ephesians 1:22–23; Colossians 1:24), truly “incarnate” the three objective, essential elements of beauty which finds its source in God. We members of that same Church, being the Body of Christ, must seek to incarnate these elements in our own lives in order to point the world to the God who is beauty.

So, will beauty save the world? In a way beauty incarnate already has. But God is not content with saving the world, God wants us to participate in transforming it. We have always made beautiful things not because of the money they make or their survival value, but for their own sake. We make beauty for beauty itself. We cannot help it. We are trying to transform the world into something beautiful and in so doing we make it more like God, who is beauty. Now, with God’s grace, we are called to make beauty not just with stone, color or words, but with ourselves.

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Mike Schramm lives in southeastern Minnesota with his wife and seven children. There, he teaches theology and philosophy at Aquinas High School and Viterbo University. He earned his MA in theology from St. Joseph’s College in Maine and an MA in philosophy from Holy Apostles College. He has written for Busted Halo, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, and the Voyage Comics Blog. Read Mike’s other WWNN essays.

These forces are not the Olympian gods of old, but bureaucracies, ideologies, technologies, markets, and abstractions that no one person fully controls—yet which somehow control us. An example of this situation is the internet; it is invisible, it permeates reality and influences us beyond our control, yet no one person fully controls it. Amidst all our materialism, we are quite gnostic. These obscure forces and influences are elusive, vague and lack clarity; we are not living in the black death but the grey life.2

What vision of the human person sits underneath it? Is there hope? Is there a way out? My claim is that, yes, there is hope, and second, that the body is an indispensable element to confront the chaos.

This essay will proceed in two parts: a description of the situation, of the problem that besets us, and second, the importance of the body as a solution.

In the twentieth century, this vision of becoming a plaything became brutally explicit. Nikolai Bukharin—Marxist theorist and revolutionary, who was eventually executed by the very system he helped create—describes the human person as a concentrated package of social influences, held together like sausage meat inside a skin. In other words, you are the sum-total of forces acting upon you. Fast-forward to the present, we see this same principle of various parts being packaged together, lacking depth, in gender ideology, where “gender is essentially a synthetic garment made in a laboratory sweatshop.”3

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Another angle to consider is that we live in an age of monsters. A monster is that which doesn’t fit and is a mixture of various categories. We are obsessed with the strange, the alien, the marginal, the glorification of the exception of things that don’t fit. The monsters are no longer our friends and no longer simply in fictions; they have now left the dark spaces under our beds; they have left our nightmares to come out into the open. However, monsters are important, because they manifest what is at the periphery, the edge. The word monster means to show; we have the word demonstrate, or for Catholics, the monstrance. So, the monsters reveal to us the edge of the world. That is why on medieval cathedrals, we have gargoyles on the outside, revealing the edge of the church. The problem today is that the exception or the edge, has now become the norm. And the type of monster that has gained prominence today is that of the zombie.

We are surrounded by zombies, the walking dead, devoid of vitality. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “the only modern myth is the myth of zombies.”4 A zombie is an animated corpse. They inhabit the indeterminate space of living death, roaming around in packs. The zombie shows us the mindless wandering of the mindless mob with an insatiable hunger for devouring others, for swallowing life, a perversion of authentic communion. Consumption and cannibalism are their modus operandi. If the vampire is the monster of the aristocracy, the zombie is the monster of the masses: the monster of quantitative levelling.

Interestingly, in 1757, Pope Benedict XIV addressed the rampant belief in vampires during the European Enlightenment, not in a dedicated book or treatise, but in a section of a larger document on the canonization of saints. This section was titled De vanitate Vampyrorum, which translates to “On the Vanity of Vampires.”

Within this context it is opportune to reflect once again on Yeats famous poem the Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.5

The widening gyre, the wheel of time is spinning out of control because the center cannot hold, and the edge, where monsters and zombies live, have taken center stage; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. There is a flipping of the center and the edge. As an example, think of punk rockers from the 60s and 70s, who were anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment. But they could only be that if there was already a center of authority and an established order. You can’t revolt if there is nothing to revolt against and if everyone else is doing the same.

As a result, we become awash at sea without a point of reference, lacking all conviction. With eyes to see, we can perceive this worldview everywhere. Healthcare increasingly treats people as biological systems to be optimized, education treats minds as data processors, technology abstracts us from our lived embodiment—screens replace faces, metrics replace presence.

We speak casually of uploading consciousness, going off grid, or escaping biology, as though the body were a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be lived.

And here is the paradox—we have never been more obsessed with the body, nor more uncomfortable with it. The body today is either idolized or despised, but rarely inhabited. Why? I believe it is because the body is the one thing that is not the work of my own hands. It resists my total control. The rejection and opposition to the body seems to be because it is the one thing that eludes the grasp of my own power. Matter is that which is recalcitrant to the will and thus is thoroughly opposed to it today. In other words, it limits me, it shapes me and therefore restricts my freedom. And in a culture intoxicated with power, limitation feels like an insult.

Idolatry paradoxically undermines my embodiment. Idolatry is seen in zombies, not in the resurrection of the body, but in the reanimation of a corpse. “We have become more cerebral and retreated more and more from the senses – especially from smell, touch and taste – as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all.”6 And here we return to the theme of the zombie. If you come into contact with a zombie, infection follows inevitably. We don’t want to be ugly, mindless, homeless, or incommunicable, so when confronted with a zombie, we take care to keep our distance. And yet, touch is the arbiter of the “real.” Touch is the medium of intimacy, and we say that someone is “in touch” if they have a sense of closeness. Assertions of verity are always made with permutations of a touch metaphor. Those with whom we are intimate are more real to us. Objects we have handled are more real to us. Emotions we have felt are more real to us. Losing touch costs us our grasp on reality.

And so here is the hinge of the problem as well as the solution: touch which reveals the body, the body that may be idolized or the source of redemption, for as Hölderlin states, “where there is danger, that which will save us also grows.”7

Solution: The Body

Martin Foss writes in “Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience” that “the body is not so much an obstacle to life, but an instrument to life…. The most essential characteristic of the body is that it disappears as an independent thing the more it fulfils its service.”8

When your body is healthy, you don’t notice it. You live through it, not with it. You only become aware of your body when something goes wrong—pain, sickness, exhaustion. Merleau-Ponty called this the necessary transparency of the flesh. And this is why pornography, interestingly, drains the body of its power. It makes the flesh opaque. It turns presence into a spectacle to be gawked at. It replaces encounter with consumption. It shows the surface without depth. The body becomes something to be looked at, not lived through.

Another angle to look at it is that you cannot be where your body is not. The body is the closest thing to us—and yet the most elusive. I cannot perceive it, but perceive through it. My face is the most unique thing about me, and yet I can never see it directly. Goethe said we are meant to be obscure to ourselves, turned outward toward the world.9

In other words, I only come to know myself through my engagement with what is not me. Man must hear an echo of himself before he can know himself. Any form of identity always includes exclusion, a boundary that defines what it is. This sense of negation or limit is vital for identity, since all identity presupposes exclusion; we discover who we are through what we are not. This primordial experience is found in one’s mother. Hans Urs Von Balthasar says that “in the mother’s smile, it dawns on him that there is a world into which he is accepted and in which he is welcome, and it is in this primordial experience that he becomes aware of himself for the first time.”10

The process of understanding that comes about through knowledge of the other, revealing the boundary of exclusion, finds its grounding ultimately in the body.

Any one thing can be understood only in terms of another thing, and ultimately that must come down to something that is experienced, outside the system of signs (i.e. by the body). The very words that form the building blocks of explicit thought are themselves all originally metaphors, grounded in the human body and its experience. Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context.11

Metaphors, even the simple ones hidden in expressions like feeling “down,” derive from our experience of living as embodied creatures in the everyday world. The body is, in other words, also the necessary context for all human experience. However much language may protest to the contrary, its origins lie in the body as a whole. And the existence of a close relationship between bodily gesture and verbal syntax implies that it is not just concrete nouns, the “thing-words,” but even the most apparently formal and logical elements of language, that originate in the body and emotion.

Metaphors reveal our embodied state. Interestingly, metaphor means to carry across. Metaphor is the only way language touches life. Every concept is grounded in bodily experience. We grasp ideas. We feel down. We stand up for truth. Lakoff and Johnson are clear: the structure of reason itself arises from the body for “the body is the necessary context for all human experience.”12

Which means the body is not something beneath thought. It is the condition of thought. Perception is built from the body up, not from abstract cognition down. Roboticist Rodney Brooks discovered this decades ago. If you want a machine to perceive, you must give it a body. His early robots had no central brain, yet they could respond meaningfully to the world, because perception and action are intertwined. The eyes map directly onto the emotional system. We do not first think and then act—we act and thinking emerges. A child embodies action long before cognition develops. You teach a child physically through the body how to clean their room before they understand what a clean room means cognitively.

Which means you cannot perceive the world without being embodied. Language itself emerges from the body—especially the hands. Speech is an extension of grasping. Words allow us to act at a distance and gives us a necessary distance to engage with the world appropriately. A problem can arise, however, in that the abstraction from the world can be believed to be all of reality. Where the map replaces the territory, where the concepts replace experience, where facts replace encounters. To assuage an overemphasis on abstraction and to prevent domination, a crucial distinction must be made, drawn from Jean Yves-Lacoste, between an object and presence.

An object can be perceived, analyzed, measured—but it makes no demand on me, it does not ask for a response. A presence, on the other hand, calls me; it waits for a response. Presence involves perception, as an object, but also draws from me affection and freedom, which an object doesn’t. A person is not something to be grasped. A person is someone to be welcomed.

Conclusion

What we need now is a return to the Christian focus on the person of Christ. The person whom we must most perfectly welcome is the Word made flesh. Note the movement is towards intimacy, toward concrete matter and perception; it is the word that becomes flesh, not the flesh that becomes the word. The flesh and body are not discarded, but are redeemed from within, God entered matter. The body is not functional; it is sacramental. It reveals the person. It makes love visible. It is created for self-gift, fulfilled in communion, destined for glory. Hope is not an escape from the body. Hope is a return to presence; to touch; to place; to face-to-face encounter. Not ideology; not abstraction; not power. But a person. And in the end, Christianity dares to say that everything is one thing—not a system, not a theory—but someone: Jesus Christ. The one thing necessary. Not an object to be analyzed, but a presence who calls, waits, and invites a response. And that—quietly and stubbornly—is where resistance begins. Because the world can only turn you into a plaything, into a zombie, if you forget that you are a body meant for presence and encounter with the living Word, Jesus Christ.

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Fr. Olek Stirrat, born in Poland, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Adelaide. He was ordained in 2022 and is currently ministering in South Australia. Read Fr. Olek’s other WWNN essays.

By means of the liturgy, the Church draws us into this apostolic work of assimilation. It moves me that she, our Mother, lets us re-read in Eastertide words Jesus spoke on the eve of his Passion. The teaching of the thirteenth chapter of St. John strikes chords then that differ from those struck when we heard it last on Maundy Thursday.

“Love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another.”

When this “new commandment” was given in the Upper Room, the apostles connected it with the gesture just performed: the washing of their feet, including those of Judas, now gone into the night on an errand of betrayal.

The eleven will have remembered how, during the past three years, Jesus had again and again forgotten himself to attend to the troubles of others. They will have thought of the meeting with the hemorrhaging woman, of the healing of the lame man lowered through the roof, of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain.

They will have recalled the detachment required when Jesus, weary, had gone apart to rest, only to find on arrival that a crowd awaited him: no word of complaint was heard; instead he turned towards the interlopers cordially, all theirs. Truly, he had taught them what charity looks like.

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The fact of Jesus’ resurrection raises our reflection into a further dimension. The ethical demands of Christian love remain. They are timeless. By them we shall be judged. Still, “love” in biblical language stands for something more.

“God is love.” Divine love shows itself in kind acts, as when the Lord, sending Adam and Eve forth from Eden, clothes them in garments of skin; when he consoles Hagar in the desert; or sends ravens out to feed his hunger-striking prophet Elijah.

But the love that is God’s Being can terrify, too. It is at work in the Egyptian plagues, in the downfall of Og, in the censuring of David after his calculated adultery with Bathsheba.

We may assume that the opposite of love is hatred. But no. Hatred can contain a passion that does not contradict love but is love’s inverted reflection.

Élie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is indifference, the carelessness that may not itself pursue the destruction of another but does not bother when others do. Love, seen in this perspective, comes to an end in the extinction of compassion, when individuals, communities, or even states pursue no other goal than self-preservation.

In biblical terms, the opposite of love is death. God is love in as much as he is the principle of life, desiring things and beings to exist for the sheer delight of it, without expectation of gain. To love as God loves (“just as I have loved you”) is to nurture the existence and thriving of others while having no truck with death, resisting anger and the other passions that cause us to subsist in a kind of living death. For it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and normal digestion and yet to be soul-dead.

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“Death with life contended,” sings the Easter sequence. It goes on: “Combat strangely ended!”

It seems weird, at first sight, that the cross, an instrument of execution, should be the emblem of life restored—it seems weird until we recall that that which died on the cross was death itself, while life was proved invincible. “Love is strong as death,” we read in the Song of Songs. That proposition was borne out on Calvary, then proved within the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, where Jesus rose.

We must invite this death-defying love into our lives. John proclaims: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” That reality is not for the end of time only; it is to be inaugurated now, in current experience.

But is this possible?

Already in the earliest times of Christianity, critical voices arose saying more or less this: “You Christians claim that Judah’s Lamb has conquered and the power of death has been trampled underfoot. But look around! Wars rage, the innocent suffer, beauty is stifled by ugliness. Friends betray friends; people once united in love hate one another. And you maintain that the kingdom of heaven is in our midst? Of all pretensions, this is surely the stupidest?”

When we consider the world we live in we must admit: the question has not gone away. It calls for an answer.

The Gospel testifies to Christ’s resurrection. He who was once dead is alive, and lives forever. On this conviction of historical, not symbolic, nature our faith is founded. The risen one was fully human, like you and me. The fact that he emerged from death’s clutches shows that death is not life’s end, but a passage from one form of life to another.

Christians of the East, like the Jews, call Easter Pascha—a Hebrew word whose root sense is, precisely, “passage.” It points towards the first Pasch in Egypt, when Israel after long captivity left Pharaoh’s domain. The angel of death passed over the dwellings of the Hebrews, marked with the blood of the Paschal lamb. What was accomplished in mystery then, in order that Israel might live, shows its significance in Jesus’s Pasch. He takes death on himself and explodes it from within.

An inadequate but suggestive image may be drawn from the realm of computers. Think of a virus invading an operating system to render it ineffective. That is what Jesus did to death, with wholly beneficent viral force. Even though death remains for us a physical fact, it is no longer a closed system. We must suffer it, but are not its captives. In Christ, we pass through it. His Pasch is ours.

Jesus calls himself “the living one”: “I was dead and now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of seat and the underworld.” He descended into hell. He knows that sad neighborhood. No cell of the kingdom of death is alien to him.

It is impressive that the evangelists, bearing witness to Jesus’ resurrection, expose the concrete reality of his death. They show us his wounds. Christian faith is realistic. Our religion is no magic. The God we believe in is no wizard.

The living God acts in life as it is. He sets out from what is old, from lived life, and discloses eternally salvific potential within it.

We may find it hard to believe this. It was hard for the apostles, too. Thomas doubted because he had known the meaning of despair. He had put his hope in Jesus. His devotion can be seen in the story of the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus insisted, in the face of threats, on going up to Jerusalem, Thomas cried out: “Let us go up with him, and die with him.” No one has greater love than he who gives his life for his friends.

We can understand what grief the mere thought of Jesus’ wounds must have called forth in Thomas. Jesus’ response to his doubt is no stern correction. It is rather a gentle expression of friendship: “Touch my wounds: you will see that they are not lethal.”

Thomas realizes: Jesus takes away the sin of the world, not its wounds. His blood, though, flows into them and makes them clean, even glorious.

The Lord is at work in pain, also in the pain of our wounded world. The births pangs of the new creation continue, pointing towards a goal. We know the way to that goal. It carries the name of a person. Whoever says that he or she belongs to Jesus, “must walk as he walked.” The greatest temptation to which we are exposed is the temptation of hopelessness. It is to be resisted bravely.

Back then, in Jerusalem, after the first Easter, “those who were ill and tormented by unclean spirits” crowded together in the hope of being touched even by the merest shadow of the Gospel. “All of them were healed.” That can happen now, too, through Christ, with him, and in him.

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Bishop Erik Varden is a Trappist monk who serves as Prelate of Trondheim in Norway. This essay is adapted from several Easter homilies and appeared first in the Tablet.

“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” — St. Paul, Galatians 2:20

“Victory is won through defeat; a crucified body frees us.” — Bishop Erik Varden, Healing Wounds (p. 168)

“Our emblem of freedom remains the Son of God who ‘emptied himself.’” — Bishop Varden, Fourth Conference of the 2026 Lenten Retreat

“Lent Confronts Us with Essentials”

That direct sentence launched the eleven Lenten addresses, or conferences, given by Bishop Erik Varden at the Vatican in late February 2026. Those familiar with the growing body of Bishop Varden’s works—books, essays, and various pieces (many published on his personal website)—were both happy that he was chosen by Pope Leo XIV to give the Lenten retreat and not surprised at how rich and challenging his remarks have been.

In Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lent Book (Bloomsbury, 2024), Bishop Varden had focused on the three themes of “Affliction,” “Transformation,” and “Flourishing.” His recent addresses at the Vatican are more wide-ranging, masterfully interweaving spiritual insights, theological observations, strong exhortations, and the words and lives of various saints, especially St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

But the focus on healing and wounds is very present, as seen in these two remarks, which adroitly capture the deep Incarnational and soteriological currents that run throughout the Lenten conferences:

In Jesus God reveals his saving purpose, pouring it forth upon mankind as fragrant, healing, cleansing oil. (Ninth Conference)

Lent shows us that God, suffering the wound of his philanthropy, is at his most active in his Passion. (Eleventh Conference)

In re-reading Bishop Varden’s eleven addresses, three essentials caught my attention. And all three are prominent during Holy week, forming a connective theological tissue between Lent and the Easter Triduum.

Holy Thursday and True Freedom

In his fourth conference, titled “Becoming Free,” Bishop Varden observes that the “notion of ‘freedom’ has become contentious in public discourse. Freedom is a good to which we all aspire; we rise up against anything which threatens to curtail or confine our freedom.”

But, what makes freedom good? And is freedom best understood as freedom “from” or freedom “for”? And what are the immediate goals and ultimate telos of freedom? The pathological obsessions today with identity, actualization and such are unmoored exercises in “freedom,” but without any more sense of origin and final purpose than one’s own passions and desires.

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“This state of affairs poses a challenge for Christians,” says Bishop Varden. “It is essential to qualify what we mean when, in the context of faith, we speak of becoming free.” Referencing the great Cistercian, he remarks:

For Bernard it is evident that true freedom is not “natural” to fallen man. What seems natural to us is to have things our way, to satisfy our desires and realise our plans without interference, to flaunt and be vaunted for our own brilliant lights. Bernard, addressing man in this state of delusion, is deliciously sarcastic: “What do you fancy yourself as, you smatterer?! You have become a beast for which captors’ snares are laid.”

Speaking of snares laid, the Gospel Reading for the evening Mass on Holy Thursday presents us with two contrary examples of freedom—one flowing from sacrificial love and the other from self-absorbed snares:

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end. The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. (John 13:1–2)

Jesus’ knowledge of his hour was not a matter of abstract or detached acceptance, but of perfect humility and active love. It was knowledge revealed in both word and deed. This is famously expressed, with startling power, in an early Christological hymn recounted by the Apostle Paul:

Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6–8)

As Bishop Varden emphasizes, “Our emblem of freedom remains the Son of God who ‘emptied himself.’”

How often do we think, “If only this were so or that was in place, I would be free to choose the good, rebuff what is bad, and to love well”? That is, I suggest, the thinking of Judas, who used his freedom in an attempt to force into existence what he thought was best. Like Adam in the Garden, walking with God, Judas in the Upper Room, in the presence of the God-man, freely chose to believe that his prideful desires were for the good of all—beginning, of course, with himself. Judas apparently wrapped his greed and self-importance in a cloak of political aspiration, as if the worries and trials of this world could be overcome through the ways and thinking of the world. Such is the road to ruin, where all vanity and rot are revealed in unsettling ways (cf. Acts 1:18).

Jesus, after instituting the profound mystery of the Eucharist, freely moves toward the Cross, taking Peter, James, and John with him to Gethsemane. There he experienced deep agony, precisely because we, as sinners, have misused and abused our freedom. “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done” (Matthew 26:39).

True and perfect freedom is found in the painful embrace of the Father’s will—not because the Father demands suffering but because love in a fallen and broken world is perfectly revealed in suffering and demonstrated in death: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12–13).

“Rooting his understanding of freedom in the Son’s Yes! to the Father’s will,” writes Bishop Varden, “Bernard works a revolution in our grasp of what it means to be free. Christian freedom is not about seizing the world with force; it is about loving the world with a crucified love magnanimous enough to make us freely wish, one with Christ, to give our lives for it, that it may be set free.”

Good Friday, Ambition, and the Saving Truth

Bishop Varden opened his fifth conference, “Splendour of Truth,” with a consideration of temptation and ambition, noting that while we dread temptations, “God submits us to them because they are useful.”

How so? Because, in resisting temptation, we are strengthened in our commitment to the truth. Like athletes who use resistance to develop and hone particular muscles, the proper approach to temptation aids our spiritual fitness.

Ambition, insists Bishop Varden, “represents a particular form of capitulation to untruth. Ambition is a not very subtly sublimated form of cupidity.”

This reference to “cupidity” is an excellent, even ingenious, use of a mostly neglected word. The word “cupidity” sounds inviting and beguiling (roll it on your tongue!). But it is poison, for it is greed, avarice, covetousness, rapacity.

Judas again comes to mind, for he was clearly ambitious. Drawing further upon St. Bernard, Bishop Varden notes that ambition is “an artisan of deceit; it is the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the origin of vices; it is kindling for crimes, causing virtues to rust, holiness to rot, hearts to be blinded. Remedies it turns into illnesses. From medicine it extracts apathy.’”

He then goes a step further, in a blunt and remarkable remark:

Ambition springs from an “alienation of the mind.” It is a madness that comes about when truth is forgotten. The fact that ambition is a form of insanity makes it ridiculous in any instantiation, but especially so when it occurs in persons given to a state of selfless service.

Bishop Varden said this in the Vatican to bishops and priests, but we cannot ignore the fact that every one of us—ordained, religious, single, married—are called to a state of selfless service. We are, in other words, all called to be holy: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Ambition is the pursuit of perverse perfection. The madness of ambition can often take overt and dramatic forms—think of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, or Hitler. But it can also be hidden deeply, in the bowels of a destructive life; it can fester for years and decades, with truth slowly being corroded, crushed, and deconstructed. “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice” (James 3:16).

At the beginning of the lengthy Gospel reading for Good Friday, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, who walked with the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus, the New Adam, stands in the Garden—innocent and completely free. Judas, the willing slave of the serpent, brings soldiers, guards, priests, and Pharisees—he is ambitious and now devoid of freedom.

The next act and question by Jesus deserve more attention than we usually give them: “Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’” (John 18:4).

Who, indeed? Are we looking for truth? For who is Truth? And, when we stand before Him, do we say His name and then fall to our knees in love and adoration? Or do we, like Judas and those with him, turn away and fall to the ground, our cupidity and ambition exposed?

Or do we, like Pilate, ask:

“Then you are a king?”

Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38)

Much has been written about Pilate’s famous question. I’ll simply note that Pilate was also consumed with ambition. He comes across as cold, efficient, ruthless, calculating—and he was all of those things. But, more importantly, he was insane. He looked into the very eyes of the Logos—the Word—and with pristine, secular political intelligence, he chose the wisdom of this world. In doing so, he clutched at the gilded robes of ambition and fell into the darkness of spiritual madness.

We, however, are called to truth and holiness. “We need our best resources,” says Bishop Varden, “to uphold substantial, essential, freeing truth against more or less plausibly shining, more or less fiendish substitutes.”

He reminds us of a core teaching of Vatican II too often ignored:

Was not the universal call to holiness, the call, that is, to embody truth, the strongest note struck by the Second Vatican Council? It resounded splendidly like a gong throughout its deliberations. The Christian claim to truth becomes compelling when its splendour is made personally evident with sacrificial love in sanctity, cleansed of temptations to temporise.

Easter Sunday, Paradox, and the Promise of Glory

Which of the disciples were at the Cross? In his seventh conference, Bishop Varden reminds us, “Two followers only remained: his Mother and John, the Beloved Disciple.” Why so few? Do we think that we would have stood beside them?

“John,” notes Bishop Varden, “gives a stark account of Jesus’s kenosis. It plays out at two levels: that of divine, compassionate love crushed in the wine-press of the Cross; and that of the betrayal of human loyalties. Yet John insists that this scene of dereliction manifests Christ’s glory.” The Cross is a profound paradox. “The cross cannot be defeated,” remarks a character in G.K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross (1909), ‘for it is Defeat.” Or, as is sung repeatedly in Eastern churches on Pascha: “By death He conquered death!”

From Christ’s death and apparent defeat shines forth eternal life and glory. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God,” St. Paul wrote, “When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:3–4). The Resurrection is, as I’m fond of saying, the cosmic “big bang” within history itself; all is made new—if only we die to ourselves. In his kenosis is our theosis.

The Church, Bishop Varden observes, “reminds women and men of the glory secretly alive in them. She shows us that present mediocrity and despair, not least my despair at my own persistent failures, need not be final; that God’s plan for us is infinitely lovely; and that God, through Christ’s Mystical Body, will give us grace and strength, if only we ask.”

This “hidden glory,” he emphasizes, is manifested in the saints and in the sacraments. The Eucharist, in particular, instituted in the darkness of Holy Thursday, shines with dazzling power for those with eyes to see. This is one reason, I think, that the Gospel Reading for the Easter Sunday afternoon/evening Mass is St. Luke’s famous account of the two disciples journeying to Emmaus.

The two disciples were talking about the death of Jesus. Distraught and distracted they were kept from recognizing him when he joined them on the road. But this failure to see was not so much physical as spiritual; it was a failure to “know the truth concerning” the real nature of Jesus, his life, and death (cf. Luke 1:4). He said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25).

Here again are the three essentials of freedom, truth, and glory—united in and flowing from the Paschal Mystery.

Jesus did three things for the two disciples going to Emmaus, all of which he offers to do for every one of us: he walked with them, he spoke with them, and he broke bread with them. In walking with them, he demonstrated his patience and care; in speaking to them, he imparted his wisdom and words; in breaking bread for them, he gave himself to them in love—a Eucharistic act.

And that is what we need now. That is the healing the world needs now. As Bishop Varden stated in his eleventh and final retreat at the Vatican:

Our time is crying out for the Gospel in fullness. The young lamenting in our parks with heavy hearts hunger for it. They do listen when it is presented “with authority” by Christians able at once to expound and display the truth of it without compromise, showing Christ’s gracious power to renew and to transform lives.

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Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report. He is the author of Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, co-editor/contributor to Called To Be the Children of God, and author of the “Catholicism” and “Priest Prophet King” Study Guides for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. His recent books on Lent and Advent—Praying the Our Father in Lent and Prepare the Way of the Lord—are published by Catholic Truth Society. Follow him on Twitter @carleolson. Read Carl’s other WWNN essays.

In the Beginning

The modern period is a peculiar epoch of history. It has evolved around a strange paradox. A terrible irony really. The culture that placed so much emphasis on law and order, the sovereignty of the ruler, and the rigid compliance to established norms was, surprisingly, a society on its way to creating a new kind of freedom. Liberalism did not pop up suddenly in the 1960’s but had been emerging gradually over centuries. I recall many years ago standing at the headwaters of the Missouri river up near Helena, Montana. I could hardly believe that this little spring eventually gathered enough water and energy to become one of the largest rivers in the United States. Two philosophical moves formed the headwaters of the modern age.

Scholars generally attribute the spirit of Liberalism1 to the philosophy of voluntarism first articulated by William of Ockham in the late fifteenth century—over 500 years ago.2 The shorthand definition of voluntarism is redefining freedom as pure autonomy—that freedom cannot exist if the will is subject to anything other than itself. The second was the philosophy of nominalism. With nominalism, we see the first step toward radical individualism as well as skepticism toward truth, wherein philosophers questioned the metaphysical relationship between beings and the correspondence between the human mind and the world of things outside the mind. How can we really know that we know things? While these two philosophies are integrally related, I would like to reflect only on voluntarism.

According to some, the roots of voluntarism go back to the influence of the Muslim scholars, and their interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of the soul. While I find it difficult to trace the earliest sources of this influence, it appears in a decisive way in the writings of Blessed Duns Scotus, who took exception to Thomas Aquinas’ psychology of freedom and the human will. Scotus defined the will as a power endowed with “superabundant sufficiency.”3 William of Ockham, a disciple of Scotus, brought this idea to its logical conclusion by asserting that the will cannot be subject to anything if it is also free.4

Ideas Have Historical Consequences

Voluntarism has had many implications for the unfolding philosophy of freedom during the modern period. On the one hand, it led to the perception that the idea of divine freedom requires God’s will to be arbitrary in the determination of moral truth.5 From the perception of God’s subjects, the obligations of divine law were, thus, what they were simply because God determined them as he wished. At any time, he could legislate something completely opposite of what he had previously demanded. The net effect of this theological shift is that it placed God and creatures in a kind of metaphysical competition with each other. As Bishop Baron explains,

A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. . . . God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas’s participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam’s reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. . . . Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection between the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God’s relation with his rational creatures is therefore primarily legalistic and arbitrary.6

Some might ask, what is wrong with that? Is it not true that God is all-powerful and can do whatever he wants? This is how most moderns saw it. The answer is difficult to understand, but—no, not in that way. God’s will does not operate apart from the divine intellect or the Logos (see CCC nos. 214-217). In fact, the true is always prior to the good, since being is prior to a thing’s value. In one sense, a thing has to be and be known before it can be loved. Likewise, God would never will anything contrary to the being of his creatures. Every law of God (his every utterance of wisdom) is perfectly rooted in being—in what is. God said, “Let there be . . .” He spoke, created and then he looked on all he had made and said, “It is very good” (Genesis 1:31). Jesus says, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John8:32). Notice the priority of truth over freedom (or being over goodness) in Jesus’ words. Freedom proceeds from knowledge of truth. Willfulness is actually ignorance and servitude. Voluntarism is a pernicious distortion of the Christian belief in freedom. Pastorally speaking, it makes God a despot not a loving Father.

Eventually this manner of conceiving law also absolutized the will of human rulers in similar fashion. As things progressed along this philosophical trajectory, voluntarism implicated the will of the governed, leading to the idea that governance was a matter of opposition between the will of the ruler and that of the ruled.7 What lay at the root of the opposition was a conflict between two absolute freedoms to which political philosophers gave equal standing in the social order.8 Law thus became the mediator of rights (i.e., individual autonomy) through the construction of social contracts. This unique way of conceptualizing liberty led gradually to a novel understanding of justice, which we could define as egalitarianism. The march for absolute autonomy beat to the drum of absolute equality, a gradual leveling of social hierarchies and interdependencies. In this conceptualization of society, cultural architects increasingly identified liberty with freedom from social structures of authority and dependency.9 This now has become practically the only meaning of justice.

Again, from a Catholic perspective, what is wrong with that? Are we not in favor of these uniquely modern conceptualizations of equality, justice, and freedom? The simple answer is, no, as I explained in my two-part essay on Critical Theory. While human beings are equal in dignity and value before God, we have real distinctions among us of roles, race, sex, responsibilities, age, and talent. The Trinitarian God prefers unity in distinction, and he seems to prefer social hierarchies and interdependencies as well.

The circumscription of rights established a way of navigating the limits governments had to impose on the exercise of freedom. This is what created an excessively formalistic and legalistic political milieu. Rights helped define when the exercise of one person’s freedom imposed upon the freedom of another. The law and the lawyers carefully adjudicated everything. Thus was born the modern concept of the “rule of law,” which set limits to the exercise of freedom according to a mutually agreed upon social contract. Upon a close examination of modernity, one cannot imagine the emergence of Liberalism—the desire for absolute autonomy—without the simultaneous commitment to political absolutism, and vice versa. In a sense, they created each other. Voluntarism leads to both absolutism and Liberalism all at once.

At its root, the spirit of Liberalism developed as a deep suspicion towards first divine and then human authority, especially any human claim to divine authority. What evolved philosophically over many centuries was a fundamental conviction that the history of politics is nothing more than a history of making authority claims for the sake of attaining power over others.10 The spirit of Liberalism has always been a spirit of liberation from the hidden agendas of those in power, those who use appeals to authoritative truth claims as a way of controlling others. What eventually gets lost when we read history like this is the idea of legitimate authority. What emerges by ever-increasing degree is the right of the individual person to become an absolute self-determining being who subjects him or herself to the authority of another only by means of a social contract, or as we would say today, by personal consent.

The modern convolution of law and liberty developed gradually over roughly 500 years through a series of four “liberal” revolutions—the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Sexual Revolution. While it would be helpful to provide an account of how Liberalism developed through these revolutions, there is not space here to do so. Allow me to note only that each went into effect through the imposition of a new order of law that favored the liberation of one group in relation to another. Insofar as individual liberty is the highest political end of Liberalism, the final solution has always been freedom from all social dependency through individual autonomy.

Against this historical backdrop, let me suggest that what we need now is the restoration of the West’s classical psychology of human freedom (and action), which developed within the Christian understanding of personhood as fundamentally relational—and not atomistic, voluntaristic, and dialectical. What this means, on a practical level, is that law (justly promulgated) is not an imposition from which the individual needs liberation. The moral law, especially, is an expression of divine wisdom—the Logos—and not the will to power. In general, law establishes us within an order of right relationships.

God directs us through law (even properly constituted civil law) to human flourishing, and he desires that human beings attain that perfection voluntarily through our rational participation in eternal wisdom. The problem with Liberalism is the assumption that human freedom exists in the conflict of autonomous wills, rather than the voluntary movement of the will through the knowledge of truth. That’s the genesis of the rupture with Christian anthropology. Only in truth can we act voluntarily and thus attain true liberty from slavery to concupiscence. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).

While Liberalism opposes law to liberty, the Christian tradition sees the moral law as a pedagogy in true freedom. This distinction is the axel upon which the entire modern history of the West turns. It’s not the Liberal notion of “the rule of law” that should govern us, therefore, but the Classical-Christian tradition of “political prudence” that leads to a truly free society, rooted in virtue. Now that we are 500 years into the via moderna, the discrepancy couldn’t be more obvious.

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Michel Therrien is President of Preambula Group. He is host of The Wise Guys podcast and author of The Catholic Faith Explained (Sophia Institute Press, 2020) and Wounded Witness: Reclaiming the Church’s Unity in a Time of Crisis (Three Keys Publishing, 2023). Read Michel’s other WWNN essays.

In the Church’s teaching Christian stewardship falls under the Seventh Commandment of the Decalogue. The Church has always used the basic rules of the Ten Commandments as starting points for thinking about all the elements of Christian moral living. So, when it comes to the use of our financial resources—in whatever way—the Church points us toward the Seventh Commandment.

But there is an even tighter association between the Seventh Commandment’s prohibition against stealing and our charitable giving than just that both involve money. Quoting St. John Chrysostom, the great 4^th century Father of the Church, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following: “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs” (no. 2446).

We tend to think of our charitable giving as a free gift that we are free to make, or free to choose not to make. But recall that in the famous judgment scene in Matthew 25 Jesus condemns, for all eternity, those who fail to help the ones He calls “the least of these my brethren” (vs. 40), that is, the poor, the naked, the imprisoned. We are actually obligated in justice to help them, not just free to do so or not. To fail to do so is what we would call a sin of omission, and obviously our Lord considers it a serious one.

That is why the Catechism goes on to say in the same paragraph quoted above,

“The demands of justice must be satisfied first of all; that which is already due in justice is not to be offered as a gift of charity” [AA]: “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.” [quoting, St Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule]

Note that what we often call “charity” is said here to be “due in justice.” That means that even on the natural level, even without the wonderful gifts of grace that we have received in Baptism—one of which is specifically called “charity” (or supernatural love)—we are obligated to give to the poor, it is their “due.” Having been given the gift of supernatural love, we are still more deeply obligated to give to the poor.

The Catechism tells us, “In the beginning God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind to take care of them, master them by labor, and enjoy their fruits (citing Gen 1:26–29). The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race” (no. 2402). In the same paragraph we are told that private property is also part of the divine plan so that we will have the resources to care for our families and others.

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This principle of Catholic social teaching is called “the universal destination of goods” and tells us that absolutely everything that God has created was given us to benefit the whole human race. The Catechism is not proposing a socialist scheme, of course, we’ve just seen it says that private ownership is also an important principle in its moral teaching. So, how are we to think about the interplay of universal destination and private property? The Catechism tells us at paragraph 2404,

“In his use of things man should regard the external goods he legitimately owns not merely as exclusive to himself but common to others also, in the sense that they can benefit others as well as himself” [GS]. The ownership of any property makes its holder a steward of Providence, with the task of making it fruitful and communicating its benefits to others, first of all his family.

God’s Providence is an expression of His omnipotence, which first includes His power to create everything and to preserve it in existence, but then also to order the events of time and history to effect His loving purposes. And from all these things that He has made for the benefit of the human race, which only continue to exist because He upholds them in being, we are able to acquire some as property through our initiative, hard work, and creativity. Everything we rightly think of as ours, is ultimately still His, and this is radically true, not only of the things we “own,” but of their owners, too! We can only really be “stewards of Providence.”

This is the root of the Church’s teaching about love and care of the poor and also her Fifth Precept that obligates us “‘to provide for the needs of the Church’… each according to his own ability” (CCC no. 2043). It would be easy for us to assume that this precept is merely an expression of self-interest on the part of the Church, that she is just looking out for herself in requiring that we give to her. But, in fact, because we are stewards of Providence and the means by which God distributes His blessings to others, we have a positive obligation to give alms, and the Church is making sure that we don’t risk sin by failing to meet it. That is what we see in the dramatic judgment scene in Matthew 25 at the end of time—those who choose to help Jesus bless others will be the “blessed of my Father,” while those who reject their stewardship will hear those frightful words, “Depart from me you cursed” (Mt 25:34, 41).

You may be wondering why the support of the Church would be associated with the care for the poor. The answer is that there are different sorts of poverty, material and spiritual. Our Church, of course, does a great deal to directly feed and clothe the poor. But when we help supply the needs of the Church, our parish and diocese, or other Catholic apostolates that help to spread the Gospel for the salvation of souls, we are caring for the religiously or spiritually poor. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta often said, this kind of poverty can be far worse than material poverty. We are only materially poor in time, it is temporary; but spiritual poverty, the lack of faith and salvation in Christ could last for eternity! The Catechism tells us,

“The Church’s love for the poor . . . is a part of her constant tradition.” This love is inspired by the Gospel of the Beatitudes, of the poverty of Jesus, and of his concern for the poor. Love for the poor is even one of the motives for the duty of working so as to “be able to give to those in need” [Eph 4:28]. It extends not only to material poverty but also to the many forms of cultural and religious poverty. (no. 2444)

We are called to love and care for both the materially and spiritually poor. Our generous stewardship of God’s Providence should include both of what are called the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, as, again, the Catechism explains.

The works of mercy are charitable actions by which we come to the aid of our neighbor in his spiritual and bodily necessities. Instructing, advising, consoling, comforting are spiritual works of mercy, as are forgiving and bearing wrongs patiently. The corporal works of mercy consist especially in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead. Among all these, giving alms to the poor is one of the chief witnesses to fraternal charity: it is also a work of justice pleasing to God. (no. 2447)

The support of those who provide the Gospel through evangelization, catechesis, and the grace of the sacraments is a vital part of our love for the poor. We should try to aid souls directly, of course, through our own efforts of sharing and witnessing to our faith, but it is also important that we support the Church in doing so. We can see this in the “Temple tax” required of Jews in the Old Testament, which even Jesus directs Peter to pay through the miraculous provision of coins from the mouth of a fish (see Mt 17:24–27).

This Temple Tax was instituted by God and described in this way: “half a shekel as an offering to the Lord” (Ex 30:13). The Lord tells Moses, “You shall take the atonement money from the people of Israel and shall give it for the service of the tent of meeting, that it may bring the people of Israel to remembrance before the Lord, so as to make atonement for your lives” (Ex 30:16).

Our gifts to the Church are gifts made to God which atone for our sins by providing for the “services” (evangelistic and liturgical) that we receive from the Church. In addition to this Temple Tax, God also commanded Israel to offer a tithe, a tenth of everything from their herds, flocks, and fields as “holy to the Lord” (see Lev 30:30–33). As we have already seen, the witness of the early Christian Church did not set a percentage as did the Old Law, it just stressed that all the poor be cared for and that we think of all our possessions as “holy to the Lord,” as belonging ultimately to Him, and of our ownership as a stewardship.

But the tithe of the Old Testament is a good way to think about our stewardship of the resources God provides us. As we noted before, a Christian should think of what we often call “charity” as really a matter of justice. The “tenth” of the Mosaic tithe suggests that this is the just amount, since the number ten is associated with law and justice in the Old Testament (think of the Ten Commandments).

St. Augustine taught in De Doctrina Christiana that the number ten in the Bible means the wise understanding of things in time and eternity. The eternal God intended that all His people be cared for throughout time when He distributed the goods of creation to all men. While Jesus did say, “the poor you will always have with you” (Mt 26:11), perhaps He was aware that we wouldn’t be as generous as He wished we would be.

Often the reason we withhold our goods from the materially and spiritually poor is that we fail to trust God. We fail to note that everything—literally everything—is only here because God constantly loves the world and us into existence. The God Who holds us and all our resources in existence, Who holds us in His hand, can be trusted for our wellbeing. God assures us, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer 29:11, ESV). Spiritual and material generosity, or what is sometimes called liberality, come with trust that God will not let us down if we give until it hurts.

There is a fascinating corroboration of this prophecy of wellbeing in the Prophet Malachi, who prophesies to Israel, both priests and people, about the need to reform their Temple practices. With reference to their tithes, the Lord says, “Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you” (Mal 3:8-9). That is, God Himself tells Israel that its lack of wellbeing, described as a “curse,” is on account of their lack of generosity, which he describes as stealing from God. Again, the definition of theft is wrongfully taking what belongs to another, what is owed in justice.

But then God makes a surprising promise to Israel and even asks them to test His veracity and generosity, saying,

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts. Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts. (Mal 3:10-12, ESV)

Of course, we wouldn’t say that we should give generously because we want God to pour down blessings. That would be a superstitious use of God for selfish purposes, and so a sin. Our whole intention must be governed by the Great Commandment, to love God and our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus tells us that “where your treasure is, your heart will be also” (Mt 6:21, ESV). That is, love is the greatest treasure and when we “spend” what we have received well, in accord with love of God and neighbor, we store up treasure in heaven. In fact, He tells us plainly, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth…. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Mt 6:19, 20).

Jesus tells us that we must prefer heavenly to earthly blessings and that our intention in giving can’t be to simply amass more earthly treasure, which will only erode anyway (by way of moths, rust, and thieves). But God does hold all things in His hand, and He promises to care for us—and even in Malachi invites us to test His trustworthiness for our wellbeing. Jesus tells us that our love must not expect any return, but then says, “your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High” (see Lk 6:32–35, 38). That is, if we love without seeking a “return on investment,” we will become like God’s own Son, Who gave us the whole of Himself without gaining any benefit at all. The simple but paradoxical principle of the Gospel is that if we love selflessly, we will gain ourselves; if we are selfish, we will lose what we love inordinately on this earth and ourselves.

What we need now is a revival of the Church’s ancient teaching that what we hold in excess is owed to the poor. When we consider in this Lenten season how to be good “stewards of Providence,” we must have echoing in our ears and hearts the question that Jesus puts to us at the end of this teaching on loss and gain, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mk 8:36). Children of the kingdom will give alms liberally, trusting the Father to supply them with treasures, both here and hereafter, so long as our hearts are in the right place—so long as He is our greatest Treasure.

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Dr. Sean Innerst is Full Professor of Theology and Catechetics at the Augustine Institute in Florissant, Missouri. He was the founding Academic Dean at the Institute and the founding Provost of St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. In addition to his academic work, he has also been a writer and presenter for many of the Augustine Studios productions, such as, The Search, Symbolon, Beloved, Reborn, Eternal Rest and, most recently, Foretold, all available at FORMED.org.

In 2016, in Chapter 8 of his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Pope Francis proposed a new approach to people in “irregular” marital situations (e.g., second marriages after civil divorce). Interpretations of this chapter differed widely. Was he recommending situational exceptions to moral norms, or only a more sympathetic pastoral approach to people who find themselves in these situations?

In one striking passage, however, he implied that the former was his intent:

[C]onscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal. In any event, let us recall that this discernment is dynamic; it must remain ever open to new stages of growth and to new decisions which can enable the ideal to be more fully realized. (no. 303, emphasis added)

Earlier teaching documents of the Church described permanence, exclusivity, and openness to new life as characteristics of what authentic conjugal love “demands” (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1643). Earlier in Amoris Laetitia, Francis was already referring to them as an “ideal” (e.g., no. 292). Now he seemed to describe not living up to that ideal, and specifically to “the objective ideal,” as consistent with still doing what God himself is asking the person to do here and now. This suggested that more than a compassionate pastoral response was being proposed. How could anyone suggest to people in this situation that they are erring by obeying God?

Jesus seems to have had his own demanding message on the Christian ideal. Asked how one can gain eternal life, he first cited the commandments against adultery and other sins. When his questioner said he was following all these, Jesus said that to be perfect—to live up to the ideal—one should sell one’s possessions, give to the poor, and follow him (see Matthew 19:16–21; cf. Mark 10:17–21). When all we do is obey the commandments forbidding grave sins, we should see ourselves as “unprofitable servants” doing only what we are obliged to do (Luke 17:10).

To be sure, Pope St. John Paul II in his 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio had spoken of a “law of gradualness” in helping married couples live up to the demands of the Gospel. But he added:

Married people too are called upon to progress unceasingly in their moral life, with the support of a sincere and active desire to gain ever better knowledge of the values enshrined in and fostered by the law of God. They must also be supported by an upright and generous willingness to embody these values in their concrete decisions. They cannot however look on the law as merely an ideal to be achieved in the future: they must consider it as a command of Christ the Lord to overcome difficulties with constancy. “And so what is known as ‘the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with ‘gradualness of the law,’ as if there were different degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations.” (no. 34, emphasis added)

Pope Francis did repeat this distinction between the law of gradualness and gradualness of the law (see Amoris Laetitia, no. 295); but he—and especially theologians who then proceeded to take up his theme—seemed to approve what John Paul II warned against.

Those theologians broadened his approach to reconfigure Catholic morality generally. In 2022 the Pontifical Academy for Life published a volume that its president, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, said was “aimed at applying Pope Francis’ Magisterium to the field of moral theology.” It was titled Etica Teologica della Vita (Theological Ethics of Life). The volume was based on a symposium that included many non-members of the Academy, and it was convened by Academy leadership without involving most rank-and-file members.

To cite just two of its chapters: Professor Sigrid Müller of the University of Vienna observed that moral theology must place its preference either on the Church’s objective moral norms or on individual conscience—and after entertaining the idea that one might try to balance the two, she concluded that one must prefer the subject’s individual conscience, which after considering a moral norm may override it in light of that person’s current situation. And William Murphy of the Pontifical College Josephinum also emphasized “subjective” or situational factors in assessing moral actions, criticizing the emphasis of some bishops and theologians on the “intrinsically evil” acts that Pope St. John Paul II wrote about in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). Catholic sexual ethics came under special scrutiny in this regard.

Both writers claimed that this paradigm shift in theology was based on the “personalism” of the Second Vatican Council—the documents of which, in this author’s view, they do not seem to have read or understood. For in the council’s document on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), that council made the following observation on matters such as birth control:

[W]hen there is question of harmonizing conjugal love with the responsible transmission of life, the moral aspect of any procedure does not depend solely on sincere intentions or on an evaluation of motives, but must be determined by objective standards. These, based on the nature of the human person and his acts, preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love…. Relying on these principles, sons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law. (no. 51, emphasis added)

To have the same nature as other humans means that one is bound by the same moral principles.

And no one who has read that document can forget its ringing condemnation of a series of “infamies” that “poison” human society and constitute a “supreme dishonor to the Creator” by their very nature, beginning with crimes against life itself such as genocide, murder, abortion, and euthanasia (no. 27). These were condemned without reference to particular circumstances.

As has often happened, the supposed “spirit” of Vatican II was being cited by authors of the Academy for Life volume while neglecting what the council documents actually said.

Francis himself, perhaps encouraged by such support, advanced this trend in his November 2023 motu proprio Ad theologiam promovendam (for promoting theology), presenting revised statutes for the Pontifical Academy of Theology. “Promoting theology in the future cannot be limited to abstractly reproducing formulas and models from the past,” he declared (no. 1). He called for a “paradigm shift,” a “courageous cultural revolution” committing theology to be “fundamentally contextual,” “capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women daily live” (no. 4). He urged theological reflection using an “inductive method,” starting from “the different contexts and concrete situations in which people exist, allowing itself to be seriously challenged by reality” (no. 8). He rejected what he saw as a deductive approach, “extrinsically adapting now-crystallized content to new situations, as if they were mere particular cases of an immutable and universal law” (no. 3).

The Academy of Theology statutes have been revised before. Francis’s revision made changes in those approved earlier by John Paul II. Remarkably, however, Francis ordered that his own directives be given “stable and lasting force, notwithstanding anything to the contrary,” and that the accompanying statutes remain in force “in perpetuity” (no. 10). In this one instance, it seemed that future popes were told to reaffirm formulas from their past.1

Finally, a synodal working group on doctrinal, pastoral and ethical issues, established by Pope Francis, reported in October 2024 that in this field

it is not a matter of proclaiming and applying abstract doctrinal principles, but of vitally inhabiting the experience of faith in its personal and social relevance so that we will be open to the ever new promptings of the Holy Spirit…. Only a vital, fruitful, and reciprocal tension between doctrine and practice embodies the living Tradition and is able to counteract the temptation to rely on the barren scleroticism of verbal pronouncements. (I §2, emphasis added)

While the word “scleroticism” is rare in English, an online thesaurus describes “sclerosis” as “any pathological hardening or thickening of tissue.”

The working group continued: “Ethically speaking, it is not a matter of applying a pre-packaged objective truth to different subjective situations, as if they were mere particular cases of an immutable and universal law. The criteria of discernment arise from listening to the live self-gift of Revelation in Jesus in the today of the Spirit” (II §1). The group offered to develop these themes further and offer guidelines on “sexuality, marriage, the generation of children, and the promotion and care of life” (II §3).

The trend here is from the objective to the subjective, from moral norms to each individual person’s judgment of conscience, from intrinsically evil acts to the discernment of circumstances that can mitigate or set aside moral norms in practice. Taken to its logical conclusion, this approach would seem to tend toward the “situation ethics” promoted decades ago by the lapsed Episcopalian Joseph Fletcher.

In response to this trend, a group of theologians and others, including this author, contributed to a 2024 volume edited by Professors Deborah Savage of the Franciscan University of Steubenville and Robert Fastiggi of Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, titled Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality. Based on this publication, three considerations may assist us in judging the new paradigm valuing “lived experience” over tradition.

First, as Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, wrote in The Acting Person, and as Professor Savage observes in her own contribution to this volume, moral issues do indeed emerge from lived experience. But it is through reasoned reflection that one comes to recognize one’s past or proposed actions as promoting or obstructing the flourishing of oneself and others as whole human persons—that is, as being right or wrong. The situations encountered in one’s lived experience raise important moral questions—but arriving at answers requires stepping back from the immediate experience to reflect on what kind of person my action will make me and others into.

Second, tradition itself is a repository of the lived experience of believers encountering moral issues over many ages and many cultures—freeing each of us from what G.K. Chesterton called “the degrading slavery” of being a child of one’s age. This “democracy of the dead” liberates us from the self-absorption (and yes, the self-deceptions) that tempt us to justify our own departures from moral norms. As Chesterton said, it “refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” That oligarchy can become small and arrogant indeed when “reality” is restricted to what I am willing, here and now, to see for myself.

Third, experience of the fruits of the Sexual Revolution provides ample evidence on what does and does not contribute to human flourishing. The revolution has had many casualties, especially among women. This has been documented in great detail by authors such as Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, and Helen Alvaré, as well as Mary Eberstadt who contributed to this volume. Another contributor, Anne Maloney, recounted what she learned from over 30 years of teaching at a Catholic women’s college: the growing incidence of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and even self-cutting and suicidal feelings among young women trying to get with the supposed “liberation” offered by hook-up culture. Other contributors, including this author, described how striving to follow the somewhat unpopular moral teachings of the Church on issues like family planning has led them to a stronger marriage and a more fulfilled life.

In short, lived experience, while open to all animals, is uniquely human only when it is subjected to reasoned reflection. In a community like the Church, the fruits of such reflection are shared by its members across time and space, not trapped within the limited perspective of each individual, and are embodied in the Church’s moral tradition. Moreover, to a great extent, that tradition’s wisdom is confirmed by contemporary experience among those who have lived by its guidance and those who have departed from it. In light of these considerations, tradition and experience can be seen not as rivals, but as partners in building up a truly living tradition.

For his part, Pope Leo has already spoken more critically of using one’s own subjective experience as a determining factor in moral decisions. Citing St. Augustine, he has said in an interview that human experience should be a door leading us to God, and hence to a greater solidarity with other people. But he warned: “So often today, in the highly individualistic society that people are growing up in, people think that my experience is the criteria. ‘Am I happy or not happy?’ What that might really be is, ‘Do I feel pleasure or don’t I feel pleasure?’ Or, ‘Do I feel selfish?’ And if I feel okay, then that’s all that matters.”

Then on January 26^th of this year, Pope Leo delivered an important speech to the bishops of the Roman Rota on the theme of “speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15), emphasizing that these are not in opposition but must be advanced together. Referring to cases involving matrimonial nullity and other issues in canon law, he warned:

Sometimes there is a risk that excessive identification with the oft troubled vicissitudes of the faithful may lead to a dangerous relativization of truth. In fact, misunderstood compassion, even if apparently motivated by pastoral zeal, risks obscuring the necessary dimension of ascertaining the truth proper to the judicial office.

Particularly in cases involving matrimonial nullity this “could lead to pastoral decisions lacking a solid objective foundation.”

He also warned against “a cold and detached affirmation of the truth” that neglects the need for “respect and mercy.” But he said the bishops’ work should

always be motivated by that true love for neighbour that seeks above all else his eternal salvation in Christ and in the Church, which entails adherence to the truth of the Gospel. We thus find the perspective in which all ecclesial juridical activity must be placed: the salus animarum as the supreme law in the Church. In this way, your service to the truth of justice is a loving contribution to the salvation of souls.

What we need now is clarity on whether the Church’s future teaching and practice will be guided by Pope Francis’s “paradigm shift,” or by the harmonious union of objective truth and Christian charity proposed by Pope Leo.

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Richard M. Doerflinger has conducted doctoral studies in Theology at the University of Chicago and the Catholic University of America, and served as Associate Director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. A Fellow with the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, he presented a version of this article last year at the Center’s 25th annual Fall Conference, “‘That Which I Also Received’: Living Tradition.”

What We Need Now: Before we talk about the book, can you tell us about when and how you developed an interest in theology? And, specifically, your first encounter with Communio theology? What attracted you to it?

Rowland: I started to read theology when I was in secondary school. My religious education in primary school was excellent. Four out of seven of my grade teachers were holy nuns—kind and intelligent women. The schools over which they presided were little oases of Catholic culture.

But then, in my secondary school years, the whole approach to religious education changed. The spirit of the 1960s arrived. Instead of reading the lives of the saints and learning the faith through them, or reading the classics of Catholic literature, or Conciliar documents—all things with some intellectual content—we were made to sit around coffee tables, hold hands, light candles, and sing pop songs. It was an ordeal for introverts and mind-numbingly boring for everyone.

I survived because I complained to my parish priest, who supplied me with “samizdat” literature, including recordings of homilies by Fulton Sheen that were peppered with Thomistic principles. Bishop Sheen was my gateway drug to other American Catholic scholars. I discovered the books of James V. Schall, SJ and got myself onto the Ignatius Press mailing list.

In my honours year (1985), I read The Ratzinger Report. Before that time, I was reading a lot of Thomist authors, especially Jacques Maritain, but when I read The Ratzinger Report, my theological interests broadened. I started to read everything by Joseph Ratzinger I could find and a bit of Hans urs Von Balthasar.

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When I arrived in Cambridge, the first question my supervisor asked me was: What kind of Catholic are you? Do you prefer Rahner or Balthasar? They were the only options I was given, so I answered Balthasar!

At the time, Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP was also in Cambridge writing a trilogy he privately called his “Balthasar for Idiots”: The Word Has Been Abroad, No Bloodless Myth, and Say It Is Pentecost. These introductions to Balthasar were for me “the low door in the wall” that led from superficial to deeper understandings of the world of Communio scholarship.

WWNN: You state that Communio theology is better understood as “more of a theological sensibility” built on essentials of fundamental theology rather than a school of theology. Why is that, and what are some of the key characteristics of that theological sensibility?

Rowland: Unlike Thomism, which offers a system built upon tightly defined concepts, Communio theology is not typically systematic. Balthasar certainly produced his 15-volume theological triptych, but a lot of what passes under the banner of Communio theology would be described as interventions in the field of fundamental (not systematic) theology.

This is because Communio scholars are often drawn to the project of resolving pastoral crises with theological foundations. They are like theological pathologists, analyzing a cancerous growth in some part of the body of the Church and working out how it developed and what needs to be offered as an antidote. This is especially true of the publications of Joseph Ratzinger. They are not trying to build a new system but to fix cracks in old systems or draft plans for small extensions thought to be necessary for some pastoral reason.

WWNN: As you note, Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ has described as “neo-Cappadocian” the ‘founding trio’ of Communio theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger. How would you summarize the thought and importance of each?

Rowland: Balthasar shows us how to contend with the German philosophy undergirding the cultures of modernity and post-modernity. Any Catholic who has had to deal with Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, etc., can go to Balthasar for help.

Balthasar also offers a theological framework related to the transcendental properties of beauty, goodness, and truth, in that order. He understood that for many people, the gateway into the faith is first through the portals of beauty or goodness before approaching the portal of truth.

Ratzinger offers several master classes in fundamental theology. He is the absolute master of getting the theological foundations right, and he is the master of scriptural exegesis, showing how one can use the historical-critical method within the horizon of the faith itself.

Lubac is the great pathologist of secularism and the retriever of Patristic insights necessary for the development of a Eucharistic ecclesiology. This is the antidote to the contemporary pathology of treating the Church as if she were some kind of multinational philanthropic corporation to be run according to the latest fads in corporate management theory.

WWNN: What was the relationship between the Second Vatican Council and Communio theology/theologians? And how does Communio theology help us better understand the Council and its documents?

Rowland: Lubac and Ratzinger were both theological advisors at the Second Vatican Council, so when they wrote about their interpretations of the documents, they were speaking as men who took part in the debates on the drafting commissions. They are sure guides for understanding what was behind the documents, the ideas, and the pastoral concerns driving them.

As with many documents, legal, political, or theological, the interpretation of Conciliar documents requires the application of a hermeneutical framework. The different interpretations of the Council are due to the application of different frameworks.

For example, it makes a huge difference whether one reads Gaudium et Spes through a quasi-Hegelian hermeneutic that views contemporary social movements as the work of the Holy Spirit in history, or as a document that offers what Ratzinger called a daring new theological anthropology, based on a belief that Christology is essential for understanding the human person.

The hermeneutical frameworks applied by Communio scholars are all very Trinitarian and Christocentric, and thus they are said to offer a Trinitarian-Christocentric reading of the Council.

WWNN: What has been the approach and work of Communio theology with Scripture scholarship and exegesis? And why is it important after two centuries of scholarship rooted in secular assumptions and the limitations of the historical-critical method?

Rowland: The Communio approach to scriptural exegesis reads the Scriptures within the horizons of the faith itself.

The historical-critical method, though not rejected by the Church, cannot supply all that is needed for a Catholic understanding of the Scriptures. It can be useful but not sufficient. The great Hungarian Cistercian, Denis Farkasfalvy, who was a contributor to both the Hungarian and English-language editions of the Communio journal, famously remarked that “excluding the experience of faith from the exegetical process on methodological grounds is like subjecting a musical piece for the judgment of a jury whose members must be deaf, so that their aesthetic experience would not interfere with the unbiased objectivity of their judgment.”

Joseph Ratzinger dealt with this issue in his Erasmus Lecture delivered in New York in 1988. He also presided over the drafting of The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994), a document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission offering guidance on scriptural hermeneutics.

A book that brings these various threads together is Fr. Aaron Pidel’s The Inspiration and Truth of Scripture: Testing the Ratzinger Paradigm (Catholic University of America Press, 2023). I highly recommend it for young Catholic scholars grappling with the problem of how to approach scriptural exegesis.

WWNN: In the chapter titled “Christocentric Moral Theology,’ you discuss the important relationship between the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and moral truth. What are some insights into that relationship from recent Communio thinkers?

Rowland: The Communio scholars see the moral life as a process whereby people grow into the likeness of Christ by participating in the virtues of Christ.

Holiness is therefore about participating in the life of the Holy Trinity itself. It cannot be separated from sacramental theology and spirituality as a stand-alone moral code, easily comprehended by any rational person. It best makes sense in a Trinitarian context, which explains why some of the Church’s moral teachings, such as those found in Humanae Vitae, are so hard for those outside the Church to comprehend.

Some of the big names associated with Communio moral theology include Livio Melina, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, José Noriega, and José Granados. They argue that what is required is a freely willed participation in the divine law, wherein love and reason coincide.

WWNN: How would you describe the relationship—historically and currently—between Thomistic theology and Communio theology? Do you have a foot in both camps?

Rowland: My short response would be “rocky but stabilizing,” and I do feel comfortable in both camps, though most of my work is in the Communio territory because of my focus on Ratzinger.

A longer response would be that I started reading Thomist books when I was in secondary school (part of the haul of samizdat literature I received from my parish priest), and I lapped them up. I especially loved all the Latin maxims.

However, in my undergraduate years, I started to realize that not all those who claimed the “Thomist” label had the same ideas. The more Thomist authors I read, the more it became clear to me that there were different “species” of Thomists, like there are different species of big cats at a zoo. They are all, in a sense, feline, but some have differently colored spots and stripes from the others. I started to realize that I would need to decide what species of Thomist I was. I was drawn to the Thomism of Alasdair MacIntyre because he was the most history-sensitive of the Thomist “big cats.”

When trying to understand why it was that, after the Council, ecclesial leaders all over the world ditched Catholic high culture for pop culture and sought to market the faith by correlating it to popular culture, I tracked the problem to theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner.

Unfortunately, in the immediate post-Conciliar period, Thomism was treated as if it were some kind of garbage recycling plant where any kind of ideology could be fed into it, and then the system was supposed to separate the good bits from the bad bits and then hoover up the good bits. We had a generation trying to synthesize Thomism with all manner of social theories. Even Rahner called this “gnoseological concupiscence”! A lot of the garbage was never filtered out.

It was because of my opposition to cultural correlationism and to the post-Conciliar belief of Rahner that we all had to be moderns now that I ended up attracted to Lubac, Balthasar, and Ratzinger, and thus Communio theology. This attraction was not, however, synonymous with any opposition to classical Thomism.

Similarly, I would argue that the “neo-Cappadocian trio” were also never hostile to classical Thomism, but they were hostile to particular appropriations of Thomism, especially Suárezian Thomism or what is sometimes called “baroque Thomism” and to elements of early twentieth century neo-Thomism that were running on a sharp separation of nature and grace and faith and reason, and thus philosophy and theology. In other words, they were opposed to varieties of Thomism that had bought into dualisms fostered by Protestant theologians in the sixteenth century and people like Kant in the eighteenth.

Nonetheless, when Lubac criticized Suárezian Thomism, he found himself opposed by members of his own Jesuit Order and, more overtly, by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP. Today, if one reads Rad-Trad blogs, Garrigou-Lagrange is presented as the superhero who defended the Church from the modernism of the evil Lubac.

If, however, one reads the works of Communio scholars, Lubac was no modernist. He was retrieving what he believed to be the position of St. Thomas. He read St. Thomas through the lens of his Patristic predecessors, rather than reading him backwards, as it were, through the lens of his later commentators, as was the common practice.

Further, in the late 1960s, when the priesthood and the papacy came under attack, and ecclesial leaders were marketing the faith with reference to the cultural tropes of Californian hippies, Lubac and Balthasar were two of the biggest names sounding alarm bells. Balthasar’s The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church was the strongest defense of the papacy written in that era and perhaps of any era. Moreover, Balthasar was a strong defender of Thomistic metaphysics.

Since the 1940s, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. A new generation of Thomist scholars has arisen. This generation understands the debates of the 1940s and the different appropriations of Thomist thought, the different sub-species of Thomist “cats” mentioned above. There is now a Thomist Ressourcement. The most successful project of this group has been the large number of publications produced under the banner of “Biblical Thomism.” Biblical Thomists present the Thomist corpus in a non-dualistic manner, keeping the theological and philosophical elements together.

My experience has been that the Thomist Ressourcement types and Communio scholars have no trouble respecting each other’s contributions and working together. Balthasar described truth as “symphonic.” Thomists and Communio scholars are members of the same orchestra, following the same score, but playing different instruments. The Thomists are usually quite gifted at analytical work, while the Communio scholars tend to shine at synthetic and interdisciplinary work. Typically, Communio scholars have a greater interest in history and culture. These descriptions are just sociological generalizations. They are often summarized by the suggestion that Thomists are left-brain dominant and Communio scholars are right-brain dominant.

There are some people who are completely at home in both parts of the orchestra. Aidan Nichols, OP is a good example of this. He made the point that one important distinction between Thomists and Balthasar is that Balthasar thought that, to contend with the German philosophy of the past three centuries, he needed to expand the philosophical range of Thomism. I agree with this judgment.

When people ask me: “Why do we need Balthasar when we have Thomas?”, my response is “because Balthasar understands modern German philosophy, and if we are to do something about the epic disaster that is the Catholic Church in the German-speaking parts of Europe, we need some heavy Balthasarian artillery.” We need the insights of someone who survived the German tertiary education system with his faith intact, someone who knows about Lessing’s “great ugly ditch” and how to get around it. Balthasar and Ratzinger were such men, and both owed much to Lubac.

Finally, I would recommend Matthew Levering’s The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Aidan Nichols’ Balthasar for Thomists for those who long for a harmonious alliance—an entente cordiale!

WWNN: The final chapter, titled “Genealogies of Secularism,” is an important and fascinating one. You write that “a non-dualistic relational mode of thinking is the frame through which scholars in the Communio circles analyze social pathologies.” Can you unpack that a bit, explaining why this is what we need now?

Rowland: Secularism is not a virus that floats around in the biosphere and comes into the home through the air-conditioning system. It is rather a mental attitude or pattern of thought that develops when the critical couplets of the Catholic intellectual tradition get broken up and separated from their intrinsic relationships to one another.

We have ended up with a secular culture because nature got separated from grace, faith got separated from reason, history got separated from ontology, scripture got separated from tradition, and, in short, humanity got separated from the Holy Trinity. These relationships need to be restored, and their place in the Catholic intellectual tradition explained and highlighted in our ostensibly Catholic educational institutions.

Fortunately, large numbers of Generation Z are so sick of living in a disenchanted, materialist cosmos that they are searching for alternatives. Many have discovered Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire podcasts. At least through watching these podcasts, they can start to discover pieces of the “jigsaw” of a Catholic cosmology where nature and grace, faith and reason, etc., work together in tandem.

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Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report and Ignatius Insight. He is the author of Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”?, co-editor/contributor to Called To Be the Children of God, and author of the “Catholicism” and “Priest Prophet King” Study Guides for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire. His recent books on Lent and Advent—Praying the Our Father in Lent and Prepare the Way of the Lord—are published by Catholic Truth Society. Follow him on Twitter @carleolson.

I wish to reflect with you on these themes, especially as they touch two essential pillars of any Christian society:

1. Charity — love of neighbor

2. Respect for the rule of law

These do not stand apart from the principles of our social teaching, but they flow directly from them.

Our Catholic Social Teaching makes clear that rights also come with corresponding duties. Every person has the right to what is necessary for human decency — food, work, safety, health care — but also the responsibility to ensure these rights for others.

The purpose of this essay is to help us understand these basic principles and to commit ourselves to building a better society.

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1. The Dignity of Every Human Person

Catholic Social Teaching begins with the unshakeable truth that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. This fundamental dignity forms the bedrock of all moral life and a just society.

It is up to every person to evaluate how the complex realities of our present world are in “compliance with or divergence from the Gospel teaching on the human person and his or her vocation, a vocation which is at once earthly and transcendent; its aim is thus to guide Christian behavior” (Compendium of The Social Doctrine of the Church, #72). Referring to the Catholic Social Doctrine, St. Pope John Paul II said: “This teaching … is to be found at the crossroads where Christian life and conscience come into contact with the real world. It is seen in the efforts of individuals, families, people involved in cultural and social life, as well as politicians and statesmen to give it a concrete form and application in history” (Centesimus Annus, #59).

Our task is to continually seek righteousness in our own life — to seek and follow the will of God — to live according to the natural moral order written on every human heart.

“Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in company with scoffers. Rather, the law of the Lord is his joy; and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted near streams of water, that yields its fruit in season.” — Psalm 1:1-3

Pope Leo XIV reminded the world that the right to life is the foundation of every other right. When societies disregard the sanctity of the unborn, the vulnerable, or the marginalized, they undermine justice at its root. Authentic respect for life also extends to refugees and migrants, to those who suffer discrimination, to the elderly, the poor, and the weary. Every life is sacred, regardless of the actions of the individual, and every individual is capable of living in right relationship with God.

Love of neighbor begins here — by seeing Christ in each person and responding with reverence and compassion. We practice it daily in the way we treat a person who is homeless, how we talk to one another, how we respond to our neighbors, including those who may appear to be shunned by the broader community.

2. The Common Good and the Rule of Law

The common good, as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council taught in Gaudium et Spes, consists of the social conditions that allow all people and communities to flourish. At the heart of these conditions stands respect for the rule of law.

The Rule of Law as a Moral Pillar

The rule of law is not simply a political convenience. It is a moral achievement. It embodies the conviction that justice, not force, must govern human relationships. Laws grounded in moral truth safeguard the weak, hold the strong accountable, and restrain the impulses of domination that St. Augustine identifies with the “city of man.”

Pope Leo XIV warned that when nations and leaders abandon dialogue in favor of coercion, they erode “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.” When the law becomes a tool of power rather than a guardian of justice, society begins to fracture.

St. Augustine’s Wisdom

St. Augustine’s idea of “the tranquility of order” helps us see that peace is not merely the absence of conflict — it is the presence of right order. Just laws, rightly applied, form the framework within which charity, freedom, and human dignity can flourish.

Thus, respect for the rule of law is an expression of our commitment to the common good. It ensures that justice, rather than self-interest, shapes our shared life. To be valid, the rule of law must be applied with due regard for the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of life. Violence begets violence. Whether it is an individual or a nation that has strayed from the rule of law, as Pope Francis stated, “the logic of hatred and violence” can never be justified.

3. Solidarity: Love in Social Form

Solidarity is the social expression of charity. It calls us to recognize every person as a brother or sister and to bear one another’s burdens.

“I call you friends.” — John 15:15

Today, Pope Leo XIV draws attention to the suffering of countless Christians facing persecution across the world. He also warns of subtle but real forms of discrimination in nations that once heralded religious freedom.

At home, where division and suspicion are rising, solidarity takes the form of a renewed commitment to love of neighbor:

• Resisting contempt and division

• Protecting the vulnerable

• Welcoming the stranger

• Standing with those who suffer injustice

Solidarity is charity lived at all levels of society: family, neighborhood, city, state, nation, international community. Solidarity includes international assistance. Solidarity involves compassion for those fleeing their homeland due to violence or persecution or any number of realities that violate human dignity and safety. Solidarity is lived when Catholic Charities entities serve anyone who comes to them. Solidarity is speaking up to protect all human life from conception to natural death.

Solidarity, perhaps more than any other principle of a well-ordered society, emphasizes the necessity of good relationships in a world that has so many levels of interdependence. The Compendium of The Social Doctrine of the Church makes this quite clear:

Solidarity is also an authentic moral virtue, not a “feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good. That is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.” Solidarity rises to the rank of fundamental social virtue since it places itself in the sphere of justice. It is a virtue directed par excellence to the common good, and is found in “a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the Gospel sense, to ‘lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage.” (#193)

4. Subsidiarity and the Freedom to Love

Jesus commissioned the 12 apostles (Matthew 10) and sent out the 72 disciples (Luke 10). Jesus entrusts real responsibility to individuals and communities to demonstrate that participation and responsibility belong at every level.

The principle of subsidiarity affirms that decisions should be made at the most local level possible, respecting the integrity of families, parishes, and communities. This principle only functions when those local communities are animated by charity — the daily, practical love that strengthens relationships.

Pope Leo XIV’s concern about the manipulation of language and the erosion of truth reveals another danger: When truth is distorted, families and communities lose the freedom to act rightly. Subsidiarity requires truthful discourse, moral clarity, and the freedom to pursue the good.

“Jesus said: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’” — John 14:6

5. Charity and Love of Neighbor: The Heart of Christian Society

While the rule of law ensures order, charity ensures humanity. While the law provides structure, love provides meaning.

Jesus Christ makes love of neighbor the second greatest commandment, inseparable from love of God (Matthew 22:37-40). No society rooted merely in legality can flourish; it must also be rooted in mercy, compassion, and self-giving love.

Charity is not optional; it is the soul of Christian social life.

Where charity is absent, the law becomes cold. Harsh enforcement of laws in ruthless and intimidating fashion lacks the basic demand of human dignity, respect and compassion.

Where the law is absent, charity becomes vulnerable. Together, law and charity form the harmony St. Augustine envisioned and Pope Leo XIV calls us to rediscover.

A Call to the Church

Dear friends, mindful of the foundational principles of our Catholic Social Teaching and the corresponding responsibility of every person to act accordingly for a sound society, I invite you to:

1. Deepen your faith.

Return to the sacraments, Scripture, and daily prayer. Christ Himself is our peace. Renewing and strengthening our relationship with and in Christ is a lifelong journey.

2. Practice charity intentionally.

In your homes, workplaces, and communities, choose mercy over judgment, service over self, encounter over suspicion. A daily examination of conscience keeps us on the path of conversion and growth according to the wisdom of God.

3. Honor the rule of law and promote justice.

Work for a society where laws protect the weak, uphold truth, and serve the common good.

4. Strengthen families and local communities.

These are the primary places where love is learned and lived, where the Gospel is put into action.

5. Pray and work for peace.

Let us intercede for nations in conflict, for leaders who bear heavy responsibilities, and for all who long for security and justice.

Conclusion

The principles laid out in this instruction are the building blocks, the basic foundation for a well-ordered society. When these rights and responsibilities are lacking or ignored, the human family begins to live in discord, disharmony, chaos. Many people today are asking what we can do to recover a more tranquil experience of life. Paying attention to these principles is a good place to find the answers to that question.

Brothers and sisters, the world around us is undergoing profound change and we are experiencing no small amount of fragmentation, but Christ remains our sure foundation. Pope Leo XIV’s Augustinian vision reminds us that the destiny of society depends on the love that shapes it. May we choose, again and again, the path of truth, justice, charity, and peace.

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Paul D. Etienne, DD, STL, is Archbishop of Seattle. This essay is adapted from his pastoral letter of the same title.

For St. Augustine, Lent was about re-ordering our desires so that we love God above all else (not just in word, but in action).1 When we view the season as a training ground for love and humility, it’s easier to envision a Lent that permanently changes us. Small growth that we sustain the rest of the year will serve our souls far better than heroic penances whose fruits perish in Easter.

But before determining in what ways we might change, let’s start with why we need to be changed in the first place.

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Back to the Beginning: Sin in the Garden of Eden

Due to original sin, we fallen humans have an inclination to sin, which the Church terms concupiscence. Lent is a time of special fasting, almsgiving, and prayer to specifically combat what the ancients called the threefold concupiscence: “lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life” (1 John 2:16).

These sins are not a new struggle for mankind. In fact, they’re present at the beginning of our history. Back in the Garden of Eden, we find Eve tempted in these three ways right before she chooses to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit.

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6).

Eve “saw that the tree was good for food”: here we have lust of the flesh. Eve is surely right that the tree was good for food, but even a good bodily pleasure can become sinful outside of its proper context. Although the fruit was good in and of itself, it was prohibited by God. So eating this good fruit was not good for Eve.

Eve then saw “that it was a delight to the eyes”: here we have the lust of the eyes. Eve didn’t need to eat this fruit (she could freely eat from all the other trees, as is clear from Genesis 2:16) and it wasn’t hers to eat (which God explains in Genesis 2:17). It’s unfortunate how often the desire for something we don’t need is coupled with the desire for something that belongs to someone else.

And lastly Eve saw “that the tree was to be desired to make one wise”: here we have the pride of life. At first glance this doesn’t seem like pride because there’s nothing wrong with Eve’s desire for wisdom. We should all seek true wisdom. The problem is that “the Lord gives wisdom” (Proverbs 2:6) and Eve was seeking wisdom without Him. In fact, Eve was grasping wisdom in a manner expressly against His will.

Eve’s desire was stoked by the Devil’s take on the tree: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The Devil insinuates that since eating of the tree makes one like God, and God doesn’t want Eve to eat from the tree, God must not want Eve to be like Him. Since God wants us to be just like Him, this is an impressive maneuver. But we can’t be like God without God. As the Catechism notes, “Seduced by the devil, [Adam] wanted to ‘be like God,’ but ‘without God, before God, and not in accordance with God’” (CCC 398, quoting St. Maximus the Confessor). We can only become God-like by doing God’s will, by bringing our wills in line with His.

Lenten Practices to Combat Sin

The three traditional Lenten practices are intended to help us do just that: align our wills with God’s by combating the three categories of sin St. John identified. Let’s look at each in turn more formally and the Church’s proposed remedies.

Lust of the flesh refers to a desire for: a) disordered bodily pleasure (e.g., lust);

b) bodily pleasure outside its proper context (e.g., sex outside of marriage). For this the Church recommends fasting, which restrains our good, normal bodily desires so we are better able to: a) overcome temptation towards any disordered bodily desires; b) seek bodily pleasure only in its natural or appropriate context. Fasting encourages self-mastery, so that when we know God’s will, physical desires will aid us in pursuing it, rather than obstructing us.

Lust of the eyes refers to excess desire for things of this world that a) we need; b) we don’t need or that don’t belong to us. For this sin the Church proposes giving alms, wherein we part with some material goods so that we become less attached to: a) material things (including the material things we genuinely need); b) intangibles that material goods obtain for us (e.g., power, prestige, etc.). By freeing ourselves from some of the goods of this world, we’re freer to pursue God’s will.

Lastly, pride of life refers to: a) excessive self-love; b) the desire to be God or to be like God all on our own, without God. Some scholars even define it specifically as the desire to determine what’s good and evil for ourselves—a vice particularly embraced by the modern era, which has been busy redefining both. For pride of life the Church proposes prayer as a remedy. By conversing with God (which includes both talking and, more importantly, listening), we: a) immerse ourselves in His transforming love so as to become more like Him; b) learn more of His will, which makes it possible to live more fully in accord with it.

Our Particular Practices

Now that we’ve covered why the Church proposes the practices of fasting, almsgiving, and prayer, we can better design them to bring about change that survives the season of Lent.

We usually think of fasting as giving up some kind of food, but it need not be. In fact, since the Church requires food fasts via abstaining from meat on Fridays and meal fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, we will still partake in bodily fasts even if we choose an alternate fasting penance for Lent. I recommend fasting from a vice that you have a reasonable hope of conquering in 40 days, so you’re more inclined to keep up that habit of holiness beyond Lent. For instance, St. John Chrysostom encouraged his flock to fast from gossip and slander: “For what doth it profit if we abstain from birds and fishes; and yet bite and devour our brethren?”2

One Lent I fasted from impatience by following all the rules of the road, which in my case meant coming to complete stops at stop signs and obeying the speed limit. In addition to growing my patience, it grew my humility because the city drivers behind me often weren’t pleased. As you can guess, this is a practice I continued, and it has had the unexpected side benefit of challenging some of the relativism of my upbringing (after all, why had I decided that 5 miles over the speed limit was ok but not 10?). Through this fast, the Lord helped me see I was choosing my own will over his desire that I follow all just human laws.3 More generally, fasting usually increases our humility because we often fail despite our best intentions, and it will increase our charity if we can direct it toward love of God (and neighbor, where applicable). Whatever you choose as a fast, don’t forget to offer it up.

Likewise, almsgiving is usually thought of in terms of money, and in our materialistic society, we’re usually more attached to money (or our stuff) than we think. Traditionally, money saved by fasting went toward almsgiving, and this could be practiced by forgoing a weekly meal or coffee out. Or we could give bigger chunks out of our savings and let it hurt a bit more. Almsgiving is unlike the other two practices in that it directly benefits another materially, so it’s worthwhile even if we only give during Lent. Even so, it’s helpful to think about ways in which almsgiving might be sustained beyond the season. When I moved to Denver, I started giving gift cards to the (far too prevalent) homeless during Lent. This is a practice I’ve continued year-round—but now I bump up the dollar amount during Lent.

While distributing gift cards I have often thought of the quote attributed to Mother Teresa, “Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” As a born and bred New Yorker, smiling at strangers is a skill I’ve acquired over much time and disinclination; and yet, in some encounters it has been obvious the person appreciated the smile and brief conversation more than the gift card. It’s a good reminder that almsgiving need not be purely monetary. It could also look like visiting an older relative who doesn’t get out much, volunteering at the local food pantry, offering friends free babysitting so they could have a date night—with an eye to activities you could continue after Lent (even if with less frequency). Almsgiving grows both our humility and charity, since recognizing another’s need implicitly recalls our own, and seeing Christ in them evokes our love.

Lastly, prayer is perhaps the most important Lenten practice since it directly affects your relationship with the Lord. For anyone who doesn’t have a daily prayer practice, this is the thing to establish during Lent and continue afterward. For beginners, an easy routine is 5 minutes of reading Scripture, 5 minutes of sharing your thoughts with the Lord about the passage, and 5 minutes of silence and listening. (Note that at the beginning, the latter will usually be more like 4.5 minutes of combatting distractions and 10 periods of 3-second silences. Nearly all of us have atrophied silence muscles, so it takes practice.)

For those of us who are already faithful to daily prayer, it can be challenging to think of things we could continue after Lent that aren’t simply adding more time to one’s regular prayer schedule. During one Lent I began making flashcards for Scripture I wanted to know by heart. I was already reading the Bible, but memorizing several Scripture passages during my prayer time was beneficial long after Lent was over. Similarly, throughout your day you might add aspirations (“Jesus, I love you,” “Jesus, I trust in you,” “Make my heart like yours,” “Not my will, but yours, be done,” etc.), which add practically no time, can be adjusted to your given situation/mood, and are very easy to continue beyond Lent. For those comfortable with adding a bit more time permanently, starting a 3–5 minute examen at night can be a small but impactful practice that is short enough to be easily continued beyond Lent. Or you could go bigger with daily Mass for Lent and then keep it going scaled down to one daily Mass a week in Easter. (Though, since Mass is the single best thing we can do to glorify God,4 it too is worthwhile even if only attended daily during Lent.) Prayer grows our humility when we stop to ponder that the Lord of the universe makes himself available to us, day and night, because he wants to be in relationship with us that much. And the more we recognize and feel his love, the more our own charity grows. Faithfulness to regular prayer grows both virtues: the former especially on days when we fail to keep our commitment, and the latter especially on days when it’s hard or we don’t want to but we pray anyway.

Virtue that Lasts

There’s nothing special about the examples I’ve mentioned—they’re merely ideas to help you start brainstorming. Sociologists say we overestimate what we can attain in the short term and underestimate what we can attain in the long-term. So this Lent, whatever you discern, I hope you’ll choose one practice you can continue beyond Lent. If we do this each year, in a decade we’ll all be holier humans—and the Church in America will be better for it.

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Denise Fath is editor of What We Need Now. She has a Masters in Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville and has previously worked in the publishing departments of the Augustine Institute and Lighthouse Catholic Media.

I’ve been thinking about that line a lot lately as I’ve taken part in Pope Leo’s invitation this year for the faithful to read and reflect on the documents of the Second Vatican Council. I cannot help but marvel in returning to the texts themselves, and to accounts of how the Council fathers arrived at them. (In this respect, I have particularly enjoyed Stephen Bullivant and Shaun Blanchard’s Vatican II edition of the Oxford Press’ Very Short Introduction series, incredibly good and circumspect given its relative brevity.) What a miracle, I find myself thinking.

It is dramatic to read about and must have felt that way at the time. For decades preceding the Council, biblical, liturgical, ecumenical, and ressourcement movements grew and coalesced into Pope John XXIII’s conviction (he himself pope for only four and a half years total) that he was meant to convene thousands of prelates and some of the most remarkable minds in recent memory. Then, for four years, almost all of the leaders of the Church and its brightest intellectual lights, simply, argued. Thousands of bishops and theologians contended, seriously and at length, over ideas that mattered because they were ordered toward the life and mission of the Church.

What strikes me most in these accounts is not only the brilliance of the participants, but their willingness to fight: charitably, fiercely, and publicly, for ideas they had thought deeply enough about to care deeply about. When I look at the Church today, I find myself thinking, we could use more of that again.

With our divisions still as apparent as ever, I do not really see sweeping debates about important ideas happening, writ large, in the Church today. Perhaps this is the product of the intense digital scrutiny we all undergo and broad hyper-polarization. Still, I see many things in the culture and in the life of the Church worth arguing about and I would like to see us do so again as a Church, the way we once did.

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But what, exactly, are we to argue about today?

Do we keep relitigating (as some seem wont to do) questions around priestly celibacy, women’s ordination (or the diaconate), or ecclesial governance and papal authority? Or are there more interesting and consequential questions worth our energy?

Whatever one’s assessment of them, Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis each had a recognizable program for their papacies almost from day one: the New Evangelization, hermeneutic of reform-in-continuity, joyful missionary discipleship, respectively. In many ways, the animating force behind each pontificate flowed from the pope’s own experience (or reception) of the Second Vatican Council and his interpretation of how it ought to be received and implemented. Conversely, only a few months from the end of the first year of Pope Leo’s pontificate, no such program is yet discernible.

Some have tried to name one. I have seen Leo called “the Pope of Communion.” Elsewhere, “unity” has been suggested as a theme. But nothing Pope Leo has done thus far has clearly supplied a hermeneutical key for understanding his pontificate.

That has to be by design. The question is: what are we to make of it?

Bishop Erik Varden, one of the most interesting figures in Catholicism today, offered a remarkable contribution(worth reading in full) in his introductory remarks to a panel at this year’s Napa Institute Summer Conference. There, he provides a metaphor that perfectly captures where the Church now finds itself.

As a student of monastic history I have noticed that a predictable crisis occurs in the life of a community when the reins of government pass from the second to the third generation. The founders set about their task with clear purpose and the exhilaration of starting something new. The second generation positions itself in relation to the founders. Some will adulate them, some will be more critical; but the founders’ experience, direction, and vision remain, for better or for worse, a criterion of collective discernment. This dynamic changes at the next generational juncture, by which time the founders will be dead, or quite ancient. All of a sudden the second generation’s search for particular identity seems like much ado about not very much. The truly pressing issues are more fundamental: What are we all about? How can we find our place within a tradition that transcends us? Are we on the right track? The third generation is faced with the challenge of continuity. To carry on faithfully it needs more than the history—or myth—of heroic origins. It must at once integrate and relativize its specific heritage, looking forward as well as back, up, not down.

This dynamic, I believe, now touches the universal Church with regard to a modern event that has proven foundational for Catholic experience: the Second Vatican Council.

This is where we find ourselves today—a third-generation Church, living at some distance from the Council itself, with much of the “emotional heat” (Varden’s term) drained from earlier debates, and under a pope who has not proposed a preferred symbolic framework for its implementation. While this may feel unsettling for some, I think this is a very good place for us to be. It allows the central question before us to be reduced, at last, to its essentials: Who are we, as a Church, and what are we meant to do?

Bishop Varden’s observation captures something else crucial about this moment: for the vast majority of Catholics today, the Council carries no particularly strong emotional charge—neither animus nor enthusiasm. We are living, for the first time, in an era where the Council is simply the presumed state of things. Even many who attend the Traditional Latin Mass are fundamentally formed by the post-conciliar theological landscape. The Council is not a contested memory but the backdrop of their entire experience of Church. This emotional cooling is precisely what allows us to move forward with the confidence Varden describes.

As the choppy waters of the post-conciliar period recede, and as those leaders for whom the Council was a defining personal experience pass from the scene, we have an opportunity to move forward with greater confidence and less insecurity into our identity and mission. But this will require that we argue about how to do that.

If he did not introduce it, George Weigel at least popularized the idea that much of the Church’s internal debate over the last sixty years involves the splintering of the “reformist camp” at the Council. But the division is more complex than a simple binary.

There were, and remain, essentially three trajectories: First, a very small minority who viewed many of the Council’s reforms as mistakes altogether. Second, a progressive camp (often associated with Concilium) that saw Vatican II as a good first step requiring continued development (women’s ordination, optional celibacy, reformed notions of papal authority) perhaps at a Vatican III. Third, a “reform in continuity” camp (associated with Communio) that accepted the Council’s reforms fully but believed the urgent task was no longer anxious institutional tinkering but mission: allowing the reforms to settle so the Church could busy itself primarily with proposing Jesus Christ to the world again.

These divisions remain very much alive. Think of your exemplar today of the “liberal bishop” and the “conservative bishop.” Chances are they fall, more or less, along these lines.

What is worth recalling, however, is that both camps were originally on roughly the same team. Both were animated by a shared concern that the principles of aggiornamento and ressourcement lead to a genuine renewal of the Church as one capable of addressing itself to “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age” (Gaudium et Spes, #1). Both understood the Council, fundamentally, as a missionary and pastoral event. This is evident in the four aims articulated in the opening paragraph of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council’s first promulgated constitution:

[The Council] desires to [1] impart an ever-increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful; [2] to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change; [3] to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ; and [4] to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church.1

All of the reforms envisioned in adapting “those institutions which are subject to change” were ultimately ordered toward mission: greater vitality among the faithful and more people encountering Christ.

Here, perhaps, we arrive at the heart of the matter. If these two camps: still very much present in contemporary ecclesial leadership and its debates over synodality, women deacons, liturgical reform, and more, could agree on this shared end, even while disagreeing sharply about how best to achieve it, they might finally be able to argue again.

They could debate. They could wrestle honestly with differing judgments about means. But debate requires trust. Without trust in one another’s intentions, healthy conflict is impossible.

If we do not agree on that end, then we have a much bigger problem, God help us. If, however, we could recover agreement about the reality that, we do in fact agree on the point of all of this, that the Church exists for mission, then I believe that we would find the means would be worth arguing about, even at length and vociferously.

Supposing “unity” does, in fact, soon become seen as the clear and definitive interpretive lens for understanding Leo (as examples like his recently released message for this October’s World Mission Day increasingly suggest is sound), it seems that unity that also, in Leo’s words, “embrace(s) diversity as a treasure,” requires this radical agreement on the nature and end of the Church as a First Principle and courageous willingness to have healthy, charitable, and direct conflict about the best means to accomplish that end.

We would also gain in this pursuit the benefit of an objective criterion: pastoral efficacy.2 We have now sixty years of lived experience flowing from the Council. We could ask, with sincere interest and without defensiveness: where has genuine vitality among the faithful actually emerged? Where have people come to know Christ for the first time, and how? Where did certain reforms foster missionary confidence, and where did they produce a Church so uncertain of itself that it lost the capacity to address the “griefs and anxieties of the men of this age” because it forgot that it still had Jesus Christ crucified to offer? The purpose of the Council, articulated by Pope Paul VI in his opening address of the second session as, “The starting point and the goal [of the Council] is that here and at this very hour we should proclaim Christ to ourselves and to the world around us,”3 must be the final arbiter of any particular perspective’s value.

The alternative, I suppose, is to remain in our echo chambers, allowing ecclesial politics and hardened “sides” to replace sincere engagement around the shared vocation given to us in baptism.

If we take the example of the Council seriously, we see that prudent and charitable argument, rather than a threat to communion and mission, is one of its necessary preconditions. Sixty years after the Council, what we need now is to recover its heart, to allow its deepest concern to interrogate us anew: are Catholics becoming more vital signs of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in such a way that those who have never known him come to? If we can recover that shared concern, then disagreement may once again become not a sign of division but a sign of the Church’s vital concern for the world and the Gospel.

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Tim Glemkowski is the Executive Director of Amazing Parish, which equips pastors to build vibrant, mission-driven parish cultures. From 2022–2024, he served as the founding CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress, directing the first-ever National Eucharistic Pilgrimage and the 10th National Eucharistic Congress. He is the author of Made for Mission: Renewing Your Parish Culture and coauthor, with Bishop Andrew Cozzens, of For the Life of the World: An Invitation to Eucharistic Mission. He resides in Colorado with his wife and four children.

Some 900 years ago, in A.D. 1118–19, a small group of men came together in Jerusalem to form a religious community. They were pilgrims. The First Crusade had retaken the city from Muslim rule in 1099. The men, who were all from Europe’s knightly order, had come looking for a life of common prayer and service. They got both, but not in the way they intended.

Having trained as warriors, the men had certain skills. As knights, they came from respected families with important connections. At the time, the roads leading to Jerusalem and other holy sites were infested with brigands and Muslim raiders that would rob, rape, murder, or abduct many of those making the journey. The Christian rulers of the city needed help in protecting the travelers. The men had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Patriarch of Jerusalem. And their first task, under obedience, was to patrol the roads.

They began that work with nine men too poor to afford anything more than the clothes they were given by pilgrims. Twenty years later, the Holy See approved the rule of their religious community, the Poor Brothers of the Order of the Temple of Solomon—the Knights Templar. The Templars went on to become the most effective Christian fighting force in the Holy Land for nearly 200 years.

A lot of nonsense has been written about the Templars. If you want facts, read Malcolm Barber’s The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple, or the work of serious historians like Jonathan Riley-Smith or Thomas Madden. Or read St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s great reflection on the Templars, “In Praise of the New Knighthood.” But we need to pay special attention to that expression “the new knighthood.”

Knighthood in medieval Europe began as a profession of heavily armed male thugs—men obsessed with vanity, violence, and rape. It took the Church centuries to tame and re-channel those passions. But in the process, she provided the ideal at the core of the Templars: 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, especially the weak. And the astounding thing is how often and how fruitfully this ideal of “a new knighthood” was embraced, pursued and actually lived by the brothers, rather than abused.

My point is this: C.S. Lewis described Christianity as a “fighting religion.” He meant that living the Gospel involves a very real kind of spiritual warfare; a struggle against the evil in ourselves and in the world around us. Our first weapons should always be generosity, patience, mercy, forgiveness, an eagerness to listen to and understand others, a strong personal witness of faith, and speaking the truth unambiguously with love.

But at the same time, justice and courage are also key Christian virtues. And they have a special meaning in the life of the Christian man.

Men need a challenge. Men need to test and prove their worth. Men feel most alive when they’re giving themselves to some purpose higher than their own comfort. This is why young men join the Marines or Rangers or SEALs. They do it not despite it being hard, but exactly because it’s hard; because it has a personal cost; because they want to be the best and earn a place among brothers who are also the very best. In like manner, men joined the early Capuchins and Jesuits not to escape the world but to engage and convert the world by demanding everything a man had—every drop of his energy, love, talent, and intelligence—in service to a mission bigger and more important than any individual ego or appetite.

This is why the ideal of knighthood can still have such a strong hold on the hearts and imaginations of men. Men are hardwired by nature and confirmed by the Word of God to do three main things: to provide, to protect, and to lead—not for their own sake, not for their own empty vanities and appetites, but in service to others.

Men are meant to lead in a uniquely masculine way. The great saint of the early Eastern Church, John Chrysostom, described every human father as the bishop of his family. All fathers are, in that sense, bishops. And every father shapes the soul of the next generation with his love, his self-mastery, and his courage—or the lack of them.

So what does that mean for today? It means that the world needs faithful Catholic men with a hunger to be saints. The role of a Catholic husband and father—a man who sacrifices his own desires, out of love, to serve the needs of his wife and children—is the living cornerstone of a Christian home. Barring a miraculous change in our culture, the Church in this country will face a hard road in the next 20 years. So men need the friendship of real brothers in the Lord—other men who are living examples of justice, courage, and self-mastery—to be the disciples and leaders God intends them to be.

“The new knighthood” St. Bernard once praised has never really disappeared. It’s new and renewed in every generation of faithful Catholic men. And the rules of a genuinely new knighthood—all 22 of them—were written down 500 years ago by the great Catholic humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his book, The Manual of a Christian Knight. It’s a dense text for the modern reader, but here’s the substance of what he says:

Rule 1: Deepen and increase your faith.

Rule 2: Act on your faith; make it a living witness to others.

Rule 3: Analyze and understand your fears; don’t be ruled by them.

Rule 4: Make Jesus Christ the only guide and the only goal of your life.

Rule 5: Turn away from material things; don’t be owned by them.

Rule 6: Train your mind to distinguish the true nature of good and evil.

Rule 7: Never let any failure or setback turn you away from God.

Rule 8: Face temptation guided by God, not by worry or excuses.

Rule 9: Always be ready for attacks from those who fear the Gospel and resent the good.

Rule 10: Always be prepared for temptation. And do what you can to avoid it.

Rule 11: Be alert to two special dangers: moral cowardice and personal pride.

Rule 12: Face your weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

Rule 13: Treat each battle as if it were your last.

Rule 14: A life of virtue has no room for vice; the little vices we tolerate become the most deadly.

Rule 15: Every important decision has alternatives; think them through clearly and honestly in the light of what’s right.

Rule 16: Never, ever give up or give in on any matter of moral substance.

Rule 17: Always have a plan of action. Battles are often won or lost before they begin.

Rule 18: Always think through, in advance, the consequences of your choices and actions.

Rule 19: Do nothing—in public or private—that the people you love would not hold in esteem.

Rule 20: Virtue is its own reward; it needs no applause.

Rule 21: Life is demanding and brief; make it count.

Rule 22: Admit and repent your wrongs, never lose hope, encourage your brothers, and then begin again.

Maleness is a matter of biology. It just happens. Manhood must be learned and earned and taught. So our prayer today and every day should be that God will plant the seed of that new knighthood in the hearts of every Christian man—and make them the kind of “new men” our families, our Church, our nation, and our world need.

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Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia. Read the Archbishop’s other WWNN essays.

The philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas has long been considered within the Catholic Church to be a sure footing on which one could walk the path toward truth. One of the staunchest principles in the thinking of Aquinas was the delineation between faith and reason. This was not with the end of keeping these disciplines separate in the minds of his students, but so that they would be able to address audiences accordingly. It is this delineation that will help when comparing and contrasting the topic of human and artificial intelligence. The foundation for the human intellect is the rational soul. While the existence and powers of the soul are part of the Christian faith, they can also be known by human reason. When Aquinas addresses the principles of human intellect, he does so on the basis of philosophical argumentation and not from Christian revelation. This makes his thinking important in the conversation about Artificial Intelligence, which is developed and operates independently of Christian revelation.

Artificial Intelligence is defined by Dr. Copeland and Britannica as the ability of a “digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.” This article also acknowledges, “The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience,” but, “Despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match full human flexibility over wider domains or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge.” Even the most widely accepted definition acknowledges that the “I” in AI is largely metaphorical.

Taking a classical philosophical approach to the question of the nature of AI, one discovers the nature of a substance by examining its four causes: the material, formal, efficient, and final. It makes sense that the material cause, the stuff of which AI is made, is the data itself. That’s what AI is working with, similar to us when we think. The formal cause, which shapes the action as thinking, we would call the intellect. In AI this would have to be the code or operation that tells it to think. Skipping ahead to the final cause as there is a point of agreement here, the telos of AI one could also say is to perform functions. This is true for us when it comes to practical knowledge, but not speculative knowledge. AI has no capacity to desire to know for the sake of knowing, for contemplation. This shows that there is no agreement in efficient cause, that is, the agent providing the result. Any artificial intelligence finds its origin in human intelligence but communicated through a machine.

Are Humans Just Slow Computers?

The modern comparison of human thinking to Artificial Intelligence sees the human as a machine running off a slow computer. While there are strong parallels between computation in the brain and logical inferences drawn in a computer, this assumption is reductive. It must be addressed in a way that does not appeal to special revelation nor succumb to the mind/body dualistic trap of Descartes. What Aquinas has to say, which will conclude with the distinctions between human thinking and Artificial Intelligence, begins with the essential connection that thinking has with the soul. Because it rests on this foundation, we must first address the nature of the soul.

Aquinas presents “the nature of the soul” as that which is “the first principle of life of those things which live” (ST I. Q 75. A 1. Resp.). Aquinas provides some insight into what life is that helps in making these distinctions. Earlier in the Summa, when discussing the life of God, Aquinas speaks “of life” as “self-movement and the application of itself to any kind of operation” (ST I. Q 18. A 2. Resp.). In contemporary philosophical language this self-movement or “self-perfection” is called “immanent causality.”1 This is characterized precisely by the internal self-movement that flows from the nature of the substance itself. One could consider the capacity for life “built-in” to the DNA of the living thing in question. Immanent causality is contrasted with “transeunt causality,”2 which is understood as movement that is externally powered into the substance. Even if the agent of movement exists within the body of the substance, a battery inside of a machine for example, but the agent is not inherently part of that body, it would still be transeunt causality.

One cannot argue that there is self-movement of immanent causality in any machine because any movement afforded it is produced by something outside of it, either a separate human agent or energy supply. The soul is not simply the battery for the machine because of the soul’s unity with the body. The battery is never part of the substance of the machine, but the soul is the form of the body. There is a much closer unity between the soul and the body in a person than any part of a machine. Even the enlivening part of a machine like the battery cannot be said to form the machine like a soul does for a body.

There is nothing in Artificial Intelligence, which is organized information, that is naturally ordered toward self-movement. This means that Artificial Intelligence could never have the property of life, which means it could never have a soul. Because it cannot have a soul, it cannot have a rational soul. Without a rational soul, AI cannot have the power of intellect. Without the power of intellect, a rational soul, or life itself, AI can only imitate the nature and functions of humanity, but cannot have human intelligence per se, even if it can perform some of these functions to a very high degree.

One could argue that Artificial Intelligence is really the network of information, or the connections between that information. If this is the case, then the important question arises of whether AI can exist without a “body” like a physical computer or bits of information. To strain an analogy to swallow a conclusion, is the information like the cells and the AI like the soul that enlivens it?

The most significant connection Aquinas makes between the intellect and the soul is analogous to the relationship between the soul and the body. When discussing the union of body and soul he says, “the intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the human body. For that whereby primarily anything acts is a form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed: for instance, that whereby a body is primarily healed is health, and that whereby the soul knows primarily is knowledge; hence health is a form of the body, and knowledge is a form of the soul” (ST I. Q 76. A 1. Resp.). The form of AI is not anything related to the intellect itself but simply the code input into the machine by, eventually, a human agent.

Going beyond just the gathering of data, which it need not be argued is possible in AI, Aquinas still affirms that the body and soul must work together in order for “the intellect to understand actually, not only when it acquires fresh knowledge, but also when it applies knowledge already acquired, there is need for the act of the imagination” (ST I. Q 84. A 7. Resp.). Aquinas articulates the difference between data and sense knowledge using the example of “the nature of a stone,” but he says this applies to “any material thing,” which, “cannot be known completely and truly, except in as much as it is known as existing in the individual” (Ibid.). However, the individual is first known “through the senses and the imagination” (Ibid.). Applying this to how AI “knows” data, it is not sensing the information, but only has the information imprinted on it. It is like having a picture printed on paper. The paper has the information, but it is not sensing anything about it.

Can Computers “Think”? Does It Matter?

Once we have established the uniqueness of the rational soul, which is due to its intellect, and that the intellect necessarily operates through imagination, and that the imagination requires sense imagery in order to form a phantasm, then the next question for Aquinas and for us and that the distinctiveness of human intellect relies upon is that of which the sensitive part consists.

For Aquinas, “the sensitive part” consists of “four interior powers” that makes thinking possible (ST I. Q 78. A 4. Resp.). These powers are the “common sense, the imagination, and the estimative and memorative powers” (Ibid.). The most important of these for our purposes is the common sense. Aquinas calls the “common sense” that which acts as the “root and principle of the exterior senses” (ST I. Q 78. A 4. Ad 1.) This means that the common sense is tied to the physical senses, but it is the one that “discerns” amongst them. Not only is the common sense necessary to know when one is seeing or smelling, and not only what one is seeing or smelling, but that seeing or smelling that thing is part of what makes it that thing. The common sense is the one that unites the others together and informs the intellect as to the substance of it.

With this in mind, there is no way one could grant that AI is capable of the common sense. As priest and AI expert Fr. Eric Salobir mentions, “we don’t know how to code this common sense that makes a child quickly know that a cat is a cat, that nettles sting and that a flame burns.” Fr. Salobir quotes Marvin Minsky saying, “there is no computer that is aware of what it is doing, but most of the time, neither are we.” The only thing close to mimicking this action is when one puts together a typical list of features, products of the exterior senses, and assigns them a certain substance. If (I see) it walks like a duck and (I hear) it quacks like a duck, then (I know)...you get the idea. But this is just human intellect applied to a machine. We are still coding, or to return back to Aristotle’s philosophical language, forming the intellect.

It seems like the closest thing AI does to “thinking” is the type of thinking sometimes done when we are on auto-pilot. Our brain gets used to the uniform data and “discerns” at the minimum level, which is why we are primed to make mistakes. It is when we are doing this sort of sub-thinking that machines are like us. The difference is when we do it, we know it is a defect. We catch our mistakes, or someone else does, and we readjust. When AI does it, however, it is an achievement.

Why Does AI Fail Metaphysically?

The Turing test is a famous test for determining what AI is. Posited by Alan Turing, it tests whether a person can have a conversation with an AI unit without realizing the unit is AI. I have always found it ironic that the true test of human intelligence is a machine’s ability to lie. But the machine itself is not actually lying because it is not an “unreality” from the perspective of the unit. To the unit, it is still doing what it is programmed to do, which is the “realest reality” it knows. It is only by standing outside the situation that we would see the scenario as deceptive. This is the difference between human, rational intelligence and artificial intelligence. It is not data, but wisdom. It is seeing how all the pieces fit together. This unifying principle Aquinas recognizes is the intellect.

The philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, especially that which relates to the soul, its essential power of intellect and its relationship to the body, are not based in Christian revelation but in human reason. What we need now is for the Christian, who presupposes the uniqueness of the rational soul and the intellect that proceeds from it, to converse intelligently and challenge the mechanical notions of intellect that the Artificial Intelligence movement purports.

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Mike Schramm lives in southeastern Minnesota with his wife and seven children. There, he teaches theology and philosophy at Aquinas High School and Viterbo University. He earned his MA in theology from St. Joseph’s College in Maine and an MA in philosophy from Holy Apostles College. He has written for Busted Halo, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, and the Voyage Comics Blog. Read his other WWNN pieces.