The Tamed Liberal West Doesn’t Understand the Threat of Islam (Chronicles): “25 years after the 9/11 attacks, the West is not exporting democracy; it’s importing Islam.”
Tracking Catholic Belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist (What We Need Now): “What rate of belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist did our latest evaluation yield? The answer: 29 percent.”
TAC-Sponsored Johns Hopkins Study Details Changes in the SAT (Thomas Aquinas College): “On Thursday morning, Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy released a new study — sponsored by Thomas Aquinas College — that compares earlier versions of the SAT with the test as currently administered.”
Oates vs. O’Connor (First Things): “From where I stand, Oates’s shameful attempt to discredit the faith of a talented Catholic writer who was an unflagging champion of orthodoxy and who died of lupus six years before Oates won the National Book Award for Them in 1970 seems like a textbook case of what philosophers call ressentiment.”
Venite ad me (2) (Charlotte Was Both): “We have migrated from the heart of the Gospel to other issues that are neither understood nor appealing without that heart.”
China-Shop Bull & Lord of the Manor (The Imaginative Conservative): “While José R. Ayllón’s new popular biography of Chesterton, translated by Aurora Rice, may not be quite in the ranks of Melville, Dickens, and Austen, I must say that the opening line is in that category: ‘This is an attractive biography because Chesterton is an attractive figure.'”
The Georgia Martyrs: Dying for the Sanctity of Marriage (The Catholic Thing): “After two years of preaching the Gospel to the Guale people along the coast of modern-day Georgia, Friar Pedro de Corpa had much to be thankful for.”
‘Woe To Me If I Do Not Preach’ (The Catholic Thing): “It is difficult to proclaim Christ in conditions of hostility, as I know only too well from more than ten years helping persecuted Christians across the Middle East.”
Leo XIV: A Pope who wants to be a Citizen (Monday Vatican): “The Pope himself, through the Holy See Press Office, announced that he wanted to vote and encouraged all citizens to do so.”
God does not bless sin: the theologian who criticized that document joins the Theological Commission (Infovaticana): “Claudia Leal Luna, professor at the Juan Pablo II Institute and consultant to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2024, described the anthropology of the document that denied those blessings as ‘somewhat taxidermic’ in 2021.”
Christianity and Slavery in the 12th Century: Ransoming Captives and Counterintuitive Intercession (Fr. David Langford – Substack): “Everyone has the same God in heaven who created all men to be equal and not slaves by nature.” – Pope Alexander III
(*The posting of any media in our Extra, Extra! does not imply support or endorsement of the opinions or views within said media.)
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Re #1 – The Tamed Liberal West Doesn’t Understand the Threat of Islam –
says it all.
And the threat of Islam goes to the heart of Divine Revelation—the Incarnation as the divine Self-disclosure. Instead of a relational or Triune One, Islam acknowledges only the infinite transcendence of God, but not the charity of his gifted immanence within His creation. Therefore, no coherence of Faith and Reason, only the dictates of the Qur’an. The symmetrical comparison is not between the two scriptures but rather between the historical event of the incarnate Jesus Christ (as then witnessed in the Bible) versus the dictated Qur’an (“the word made book”).
In the West a distinction (not a divorce) is discovered and articulated between Church and State, but within Islam such a distinction—between Mosque and State—is not only blasphemy but inconceivable.
Partly scandalized by the libertarian rationalism of radical secularism that now degrades the West, radical Islam concludes that its ahistorical and Original Purity (from before history began) must be imposed. Where Christian anthropology assigns evil to a “sin” original to ourselves (the Original Sin) rather than to God, Islam asserts a totally inscrutable Allah under whom the contradictions even within the Qur’an are attributed to the freewheeling Will of a self-contradictory Allah…. The non-demonstrable philosophical principle of non-contradiction is replaced (!) by the so-called “principle of abrogation.”
How then is the West to dialogue coherently with the pre-Christian (not chronologically) jihadist zealots within the alternative universe (!) of Islam?
“Leo XIV: A Pope who wants to be a Citizen (Monday Vatican): ‘The Pope himself, through the Holy See Press Office, announced that he wanted to vote and encouraged all citizens to do so.'”
The Pope thinks he’s entitled as an American citizen to vote in US elections even though he’s now the Head of the Vatican City-State – a Supreme Pontiff.
Let’s have Leo consider a future scenario wherein a Cardinal from Communist China is elected Pope. Should he, as Pope, be involved in the operations of the Chinese government where he is expected to vote (presuming the ChiComs have elections)?
I don’t think dual citizenship should be allowed at all.
Well that’s just silly. After all, that would have prevented Elon Musk from getting the government contracts that have made him the world’s first trillionaire.
Actually not. He was quite willing to simply be a naturalized American, and his creativity has created millions of jobs. Not surprising productivity would offend simplistic world views.
LOL. Musk has three citizenships in order to maximize profit opportunities. It’s cute that you are such a fanboy 😉
Did you mind the wealth Jeff Bezos gets from government, specifically AWS? The rest of the “tech bros”?
Do you mind the pardoned criminal Dr. Mengelfauci’s government windfall? Moral cretins like Lois Lerner? Peter Strzok and Lisa Page canoodling on out=r tax money?
Don’t constantly advocate for the growth and expanse of government and then find out that there’s people who know how to give it what it wants-you are Frankenstein complaining about your monster. Perhaps if NASA was focused on landing rockets instead of dumping them in the ocean, and making outreaches to Islam during the Barry Soetero era, he’d be a little less wealthy.
I do love your seething envy though.
“Now, don’t hang on
Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money won’t another minute buy”
Kansas, “Dust In The Wind” October 1977. Even though they are wrong about the permanence of the earth and sky, since the sun will eventually exhaust its hydrogen and go red giant, they remind us of
Gerard seems to have moved on, so maybe we should reopen the contest for CWR VI. You’d certainly be a leading candidate.
Well, I’ll be in trouble then.
🙂
Don’t feed the trolls!
Oates vs. O’Connor: Oates is full of ressentiment, guilty of envy, projection, and Kierkegaardian leveling. Oates is described as presuming to know—thereby to insinuate or to further—erroneous Catholic belief: “…[Oates] offered up (as evidence of civilizational progress) her own wildly inaccurate conception of the unbloody sacrifice of the Holy Mass, which, according to Oates, is bloodless insofar as Catholics pay lip service to the Mass as a ‘literal’ sacrifice while knowing deep down it’s really just ‘metaphorical.'”
FT author Nelson thus sums: “…no amount of disparagement can unsettle the One whose consistency has been setting worldly teeth on edge for over two thousand years, or those who rest in his peace.” Amen.
@ ‘Woe To Me If I Do Not Preach’
Fr Benedict Kiely addresses that charisma of preaching Christ come hell or high water in a deadly violent, Muslim setting. Dangerous perhaps foolhardy although if we lose our sharp edge in preaching we’re dishwater.
On a less dangerous plane here at home we remain largely dishwater. Whereas why should we give a damn what the repercussions will be if we preach the Word with fire and conviction? Isn’t that why we were ordained?
Would I remain silent under a Weisenburger? No. I pray not. Parishioners thirst for the real Christ, for religious passion. Conviction. The willingness to brave the satanic in the guise of Apostolic defenders of the faith. Whereas it’s resoundingly clear they are enemies. Life on Earth is short. Our Church can and will recover if we preach the Eternal World under any conditions.
That’s Eternal Word not World. Fault of Google auto correction.
There is a lot of contention, involving different sides, over the meaning and/or scope of ressentiment.
Oates seems to have a fixation on the macabre. She was really pretty when she was young looking like a youthful heart; however she is ageing badly looking gaunt and ghastly. She outlived two husbands and it looks like damage control! How will she recover her jeunesse!
O’Connor had her peace to the end you know.
‘ Smith died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly.
In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer, “Since my husband’s unexpected death, I really have very little energy […] My marriage – my love for my husband – seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment.”
After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith,[70] Oates met Charles G. Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home. In early 2009, Oates and Gross were married. On April 13, 2019, Oates announced via Twitter that Gross had died at the age of 83. …
…..
Many of Oates’s novels and stories fictionalize historical events, in a mode the Times of London calls “a genre best described as faction.” Examples include: ….. ‘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Carol_Oates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
Re No. 1: “The Tamed Liberal WEst”
Today’s Western Christians are moving fast toward dhimmitude.
The leaders of the CC are in fact well advanced in the direction of becoming good, obedient dhimmis.
See:
“Dhimmitude of Christians in Pakistan: Native Christians and the Betrayal of Jinnah’s Pluralism
Documents Blasphemy Laws, Forced Labor, and Social Segregation Targeting 3.3 Million Pakistani Christians
“April 20, 2026
Craig Considine
“French Capitulation to Islam: Liberté, Égalité, Soumission
The Nation That Invented the Rights of Man and Secularism Is Turning Itself Halal Without Even the Modesty of an Explicit Conversion.”
May 13, 2026
Giulio Meotti
https://www.meforum.org/mef-online/french-capitulation-to-islam-liberte-egalite-soumission
See this article in the Catholic World Magazine:
“Life as a dhimmi in medieval Islamic Spain
And what it can teach modern day Christians in America”
By Marvin Olasky
https://wng.org/authors/dario-fernandez-morera/
RE No. 1
This is the missing link to the article I posted on the terrible situation of Christians in Pakistan, about which the Pope says nothing
https://www.meforum.org/dhimmitude-project/neo-dhimmitude-in-the-land-of-the-pure-pakistans-native-christians-and-the-betrayal-of-jinnahs-pluralism
Just a technical note on the comparison of two surveys years apart on the belief in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. No one really cares but statistically one needs multiple samples in each year to make a comparison from one year to the next.
What you can say is that most Catholics don’t have a clue about their Faith.
#1 The Tamed Liberal West (Oscar 12:33 p.m.) –
Yes.
Also check out Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern.
Or several articles from Fr. Schall.
What is that book by Cdl. Sarah? The Time Is Getting Late.