Recent News

Some Talking – and Listening – Points

Written by Robert Royal

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Sin, corporate sin, was abundantly confessed this past week during an opening penitential rite for the synod in Rome. And before the whirligig of the news cycle carries off those confessions along with everything else in the coming week – I feel the need to confess myself to a personal temptation to sin in the form of weariness and annoyance with grand gestures that aim at the concrete and spiritual – and result in the abstract and bureaucratic. And pose no little danger. Please bear with me.

The penitential spectacle before the opening of the Synod needs to be viewed through lenses other than pious wishes and all due respect for the doubtless good intentions of the Holy Father. Let us describe it for what it was: Cardinals and others officially confessing sins that they have in all likelihood never personally committed, on behalf of others in the Church, who may themselves be quite personally innocent. (How many people in the Church have in any normal sense of the term sinned against “peace” or women’s contributions or the environment? Repentance on that score is better recommended to the attention of specific criminals, miscreants, terrorists who are not in short supply.)

One might, of course, also start quibbling over why these sins and not others. For instance, how widespread is the “sin” of “using church teaching as weapons to hurl at others.” Particularly as opposed to how frequently this sin is: ignoring Church teaching to please myself. You don’t need a Pew survey to have a fairly good idea of the relative proportions, which now as always tips heavily towards the latter. The Pharisees are a small cohort – the self-willed, especially in our Age of Identity, legion.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

The Beginning of the End Or. . . .

Written by Robert Royal

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

As the second (and final?) session of the Synod on Synodality opens today, many people are still asking: What is synodality? There seems to be no good answer to that question. Indeed, the synod organizers think the very question is wrong. The best that anyone with some authority to say has been able to come up with is that synodality is not a “what” but a “process.” It “is” what it “does.”

What kind of process, other than continued talking with one another, is hard to say. But it’s an open-ended process that is to continue beyond the closing date of the synodal session later in the month – the end of the beginning, so to speak, not the beginning of the end. Not only for the chosen delegates and those appointed by Pope Francis to ongoing “study groups” slated to report at the earliest in June of 2025, but for the future of the worldwide Catholic Church.

In addition to the also somewhat woolly synodal aims of “communion, participation, and mission” – all of which have been going on for 2000 years without benefit of the synod on synodality – there’s been a renewed emphasis during this process on a “new way of being Church.”

For those too young to have been there, “being Church” – not being “the” Church (more on this below) – was an ungrammatical but stylish neologism in the decade or so after Vatican II.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

No Bad Boys: ‘Heart of a Servant, the Father Flanagan Story’

Written by Brad Miner

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

It was originally called “The City of Little Men,” when the Irish-born Fr. Edward J. Flanagan founded the refuge for orphaned and troubled boys in 1917 at 25th and Dodge Streets in Omaha. It became Boys Town a few years later when Fr. Flanagan purchased a farm – a necessary investment since the number of boys under his care had grown from a few to a few hundred. By the 1960s, the population of Boys Town peaked at 880.

A new documentary film – premiering October 8th in one-night-only, nationwide Fathom Events screenings – seems intended to boost the cause of Servant of God Fr. Flanagan’s canonization. Surely, it will help, as people see the documentary, are inspired by the great man’s story, and begin to pray for his intercession.

Edward Joseph Flanagan was born in 1886 in Leabeg, County Roscommon, emigrated to the United States in 1904, and was educated at Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, after which he went to Dunwoodie, as we New Yorkers call it: St. Joseph’s Seminary in (the Dunwoodie section of) Yonkers, NY, which in those days was known as the West Point of American seminaries.

He spent time at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1908 but was forced to take a break because of ill health. (He had been dealing with respiratory and cardiac issues since birth.) His journey continued in, of all places, the Royal Imperial Leopold Francis University in Innsbruck, Austria – in part because it was assumed the mountain air would be good for his lungs – and was ordained there in 1912.

He returned to America and joined his older brother, Patrick, also a priest, and his sister, Nellie, in Omaha.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

Dubia from an Atheist

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, September 16, 2024

A sometimes-tart critic of this site – a self-described atheist who reads this page regularly for reasons unknown – came to the defense of Pope Francis’ recent remarks in Singapore about all religions being a path to God (in the original Italian, Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio): “Even as an atheist I have to feel sorry for him. . . .He can’t get away with anything without the reactionary storm.” St. John Paul II, she reminded TCT, said, “Everybody that is just is called to form part of the Kingdom of Heaven – whether they be Buddhists, Jews, or Atheists – as long as they are good.”

She continued, in a somewhat less gracious vein: “He got away with that completely. . . .I was really fond of him, but I guess he was just another jerk who didn’t understand church doctrine and of course there was no Papal Posse then. . . .He also said. . . .Hell is not a place. . . .that caused some stir but not the mass hysteria that follows any little thing Francis says.”

I’m not quite sure that there is something people call a “frenemy,” i.e., someone who, paradoxically, is a friend by sharply attacking. But if so, she might qualify. Because some questions – we might even call them dubia – about critical reactions to Pope Francis are duly formulated here and, in a way, call for an answer. And it’s almost always good when we’re challenged to think more deeply, more justly, more charitably if we are friends – to the truth.

The first thing that might be said about that moment in Singapore is a dubia: Is that correct?

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

The Curious Career of Cultural Christianity

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, September 9, 2024

Among the many abrupt twists and turns in our online-driven, unstable social life, one of the oddest is the recent career of “Cultural Christianity” (hereafter “CC”). CC refers to the merely passive – and precarious – residue of Christianity in many people’s lives, not a fully living faith. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was often denigrated as a sharp decline from the robust religiosity once quite evident in America. Indeed, back then it seemed there was an emerging “Catholic moment” – the title of a 1987 book by our late friend, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, published three years before he converted from Lutheranism. Evangelicals, too, were lamenting “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” the lack of substance among their otherwise committed and politically influential fellows. There seemed to be a mood for Christian renewal.

Renewals occurred, but even greater defections. The “commanding heights” of the culture, as the Soviets used to say – schools, media, popular entertainment – all fell into decadence and outright anti-Christian stances. We’re now living in a sewer of “cultural post-Christianity.” And there seems to be no way back from the abyss.

And yet. . . .In recent months, we’ve seen Richard Dawkins, the great panjandrum of the “New Atheists,” publicly proclaiming (as he sees Britain being overrun by Islam) that he now considers himself a “cultural Christian.” As, for other reasons, does Elon Musk. And, in his own elusive way, perhaps, Jordan Peterson.

And Ayaan Hirsi Ali – ex-Somali Muslim – (and now ex-atheist) has repudiated Western feminist and progressive nostrums destroying the Western heritage. And has formally embraced Christianity.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

Imitating ‘Reagan’

Saturday, September 7, 2024

Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller imitate Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a new movie about the life of America’s 40^th president. As director Sean McNamara and screenwriter Howard Klausner would have us believe, that life was mostly about anti-Communism.

No one will doubt that Mr. Reagan was opposed to Communism, but one might have hoped a 2:21 movie might go just a little deeper into the complexities of the man’s life than just his dream of toppling the Evil Empire. That and his love for Nancy.

Reactions to the film have been interesting. Audiences have been generally enthusiastic; critics have not. No need to belabor the obvious: those who buy tickets for this film are likely centrist-conservative fans of the late president, and newspaper and television critics are steadfastly Left-liberal and prefer that none of the Reagan mystique should surround the current Republican presidential nominee.

(A personal disclosure: Ronald Reagan sent a handwritten note to me in 1990 praising a column I’d written in National Review opposing the legalization of marijuana. Mrs. Reagan was famous for promoting the phrase “Just say, ‘No’” about drug use. Mr. Reagan is the president I admire most after Washington and Lincoln. Also, I’m a registered Republican.)

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

For the Time Being

Written by Robert Royal

Friday, August 16, 2024

So, the National Conventions are over. Labor Day is only a week away, after which there will be no rest for the wicked until Election Day. (And beyond.) The final session – miserere, Domine – of the Synod on Synodality opens exactly one month after our celebration of labor, though ten “study groups” will grind on for months after, with (likely) predictable results. And here we all are, like old Noah, still dry in the post-dog-days of August, but expecting the deluge.

What, then, is someone who loves America and the Church – and is trying to live a Catholic life within the current toil and trouble of both – to do?

Many people feel the temptation to abandon ship. And it’s entirely understandable when, in several crucial respects, you don’t recognize your country – sometimes even your Church – anymore. But faithfulness and perseverance – two virtues that aren’t as urgent in “ordinary” times (i.e., when things are going tolerably well) – were made for intolerable times like these. Indeed, times like these help us to develop those extraordinary virtues. Which is what we should be doing just now.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

The Frontline is Everywhere Now

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, August 5, 2024

Anja Hoffmann, whom I met with last week in Vienna, is the director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDAC). In the English-speaking world, the word “observatory” is usually reserved for the science of astronomy. But elsewhere – as is the case for Vienna-based OIDAC and several similar organizations in other countries  – it denotes a kind of permanent and systematic observer, an institution that watches very carefully, and reports about what’s going on. And what OIDAC has observed lately should be shocking, not only to Christians concerned about fellow believers, but for all persons of good will who sense that the tolerant and pluralistic societies that we once inhabited in the West are swiftly slipping away.

OIDAC has recorded noteworthy events, especially in Europe, the historic heartland of Christianity, that are occurring for a couple of reasons.

First, as anyone even vaguely paying attention knows, the large influx of Muslims from Africa and the Middle East has brought the traditional Islamic antagonism towards Christians to the very heart of formerly Christian nations. For instance, we just “celebrated” the martyrdom in July of 2016, of Fr. Jacques Hamel, a French priest who was beheaded by two 19-year-old Muslims radicalized by ISIS propaganda.

Fr. Hamel had a friendly relationship with the local imam who headed the regional Muslim council and it’s unclear why the two teenagers decided to attack him in particular.  He was in his eighties and formally retired, and just happened to be helping out that morning in a small parish in Normandy.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

Built with Faith, Renovated with Doubt: Notre-Dame de Paris

Written by Brad Miner

Saturday, August 3, 2024

If you haven’t been to Paris, you haven’t been to Notre-Dame de Paris, which means you haven’t seen the north Rose Window. That’s it, further down this page.

It was placed in the cathedral in around 1250 A.D. Amazingly and ever-so fortunately, the window survived the fire of April 15, 2019.

As you may know, the great cathedral church of Paris is set to reopen in November – a remarkable turnaround and a testament to modern technology and the generosity of donors from around the world.

Formerly known as the “first daughter of the Church,” France has lately become known for its “zombie Catholics”: nominally of the faith but not truly faithful. And President Emmanuel Macron is Zombie-in-Chief.

His baptism notwithstanding, Monsieur le Président has a right to go his own way, just as Joe Biden has. Kultural Katholicism is a kancer, but that’s a subject for another kolumn.

The European Union was founded in 1993; it’s anti-religious bias has grown year after year and shown no sign of withering away. Then again, neither does the traditional Catholic faith of so many Europeans. Secularism, of course, is the official policy of France, and more-or-less has been ever since Jacobins began lopping off heads in 1789. Many French pride themselves on the nation’s laïcité, which became official in 1905, and constitutional in the Constitution of 1946.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

A Cathedral ot Text and Gesture

Written by Brad Miner

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

One of the axioms of contemporary publicity, religious as well as secular, is that modern man in general, and intellectuals in particular, have become intolerant of all forms of tradition and are anxious to suppress them and put something else in their place. But, like many other affirmations of our publicity machines, this axiom is false.

– from the so-called Agatha Christie Letter sent to Pope Paul VI in 1971

That letter, to which 57 notable English names were appended (the mystery novelist’s name being just one), bears Christie’s name because it is reported (reliably) that when the pope saw her name on the list he exclaimed, “Ah, Agatha Christie!”

The letter was a plea to the Holy Father not to “obliterate” the Latin Mass, as rumor had it, he intended to do. Some of the signatories were Catholic; most were not. But all of them admired the Tridentine Mass because “in its magnificent Latin text, [it] has. . .inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts – not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians.”

Among the notable Catholics who signed the letter were Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the non-Catholics included Christie, musicians Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yehudi Menuhin, and Joan Sutherland, art historian Kenneth Clark, writers Robert Graves and Iris Murdoch, poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and included two Anglican bishops to boot. It was a distinguished list. No punches were pulled: “[We] wish to call to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the Traditional Mass to survive, even though this survival took place side by side with other liturgical forms.”

For the rest of the column, click here . . .