Recent News

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 . . .

If It’s not the Apocalypse

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, July 22, 2024

Let’s begin with a simple point, so simple that many otherwise intelligent people deny it. Any country – however many and great its virtues – that sacrifices 1 million children yearly to demonic idols (under fashionable euphemisms like “reproductive health”), deserves, if Scripture and right reason are to be believed, chastisement.

Or if the Biblical term is too strong for us today, call it: nemesis, karma, cosmic justice.

That’s us now.

With perhaps even worse to come, over time, given that the Republicans have dropped their longstanding call for a national abortion ban.

But our situation is serious, so let us not just react but reflect.

This week, the Faith and Reason Institute is holding the Twenty-Fourth Free Society Seminar in the Slovak Republic, a yearly event for American and European university students and young professionals founded by the late Michael Novak. We discuss the things – political, economic, moral/cultural (in Novak’s tripartite scheme) – needed for a society that is both free and good.

Classic questions, but sometimes something surprising turns up.

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

A Revolution of Tradition

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, July 15, 2024

“Take care. It is easy to break eggs without making omelets.” Thus, the great and wise C. S. Lewis sixty years ago as his Anglican communion was making jarring changes to the liturgy. It’s a principle that goes far beyond forms of worship and prayer, though, to most of what constitutes a good life for beings like us who straddle eternity and time. Especially in a radically unstable time like ours, the stability rooted in what never changes is often the only immediate recourse amidst much that, in the short run, cannot be fixed.

That can be a hard saying to follow, even for Christians. Students of the classics will recall the famous passage in the ancient Roman historian Livy who, writing while Jesus still walked the earth, lamented “these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” God ultimately had a bright path prepared for Rome, but it took centuries – and the suffering and death of many believers – before it fully showed itself.

There are moments, to be sure, when radical change is necessary – especially the kind of radical change that the Scriptures call metanoia, a whole-hearted “turning back” to God Himself. But for the most part, it’s better for most of us, at most times, in most places – if we are already on a steady way – to change slowly, with caution, deeply aware of how little we know about ourselves or the world, unseduced by the secular and ecclesial politicians of every age who campaign on “change.”

Ironically, it was Karl Marx who may have first recognized what was coming about in the modern age. As he wrote in the Communist Manifesto:  “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Marx thought a sober materialist revolution would lead to human liberation. We know how that turned out.

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

‘Non possumus’ (Thoughts about ‘Kidnapped’)

Written by Brad Miner

Thursday, July 11, 2024

Some years ago, Steven Spielberg speculated about making a film about Edgardo Mortara, a Catholic priest who as a boy in 1858 – a 6-year-old Jewish boy – was forcibly taken from his loving parents in Bologna and raised as a Catholic in Rome.

In the 21st century, it is difficult to understand why a pope – in this case, Pius IX – would have tolerated the seizure of a Jewish child for any reason, let alone on the flimsy assertion made by the Mortara’s illiterate, teenage Catholic housekeeper that, when she overheard the infant Edgardo’s parents praying in Hebrew over his crib, she feared for the infant’s imminent death and secretly baptized him.

Mr. Spielberg decided not to make the film, so we cannot know what sort of movie he might have produced, but it would almost certainly have been superior to (and likely more even-handed than) Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped (Rapito in Italian), which is, generally, anti-Catholic and, specifically, slanderous about Pio Nono, as Pius IX was affectionately known.

To quickly summarize the story’s outline (historical and cinematic): It was years after the surreptitious baptism that the housekeeper – by now dismissed by the Mortaras – confessed what she’d done, and word of it reached Bologna’s ecclesiastical inquisitor. The law then in force in the Papal States stipulated that all Catholic children must have a Catholic education, so the inquisitor sent the civil police (carabinieri) to the Mortara home. They seized the boy, and he was spirited off to Rome and, quite literally, into the loving arms of the pope.

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