In his book The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451, Fr. Adrian Fortescue argues that the essential Catholic claims about the authority of the pope can all be found in patristic texts from […]
In Catholic theology, the Church is not to be identified with a mere aggregate of her members, not even those members who happen to hold ecclesiastical office at any particular moment. She is an institution […]
A neglected insight of Scholastic political philosophy and traditional conservatism is that institutions can have a personal nature. The Church, a government, a business firm, a university, a club, and similar social formations are like this. They […]
A “preventive war” is a war undertaken proactively against a merely potential enemy, who has neither initiated hostilities nor shown any sign of intending imminently to do so. The Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl […]
The Western world is the creation of the Church, and the crisis of the West is always at bottom the crisis of the Church. This is especially so where the Church has receded into the […]
Editor’s note: This essay was originally posted on September 15, 2019. It is reposted in light of new statements by Pope Francis, in the encyclical Fratelli tutti, that, “Today we state clearly that ‘the death […]
Condemning racism (or “racialist prejudice,” as he referred to it), Pope St. Paul VI affirmed that: The members of mankind share the same basic rights and duties, as well as the same supernatural destiny. Within a […]
I haven’t done a “Physicists say the darndest things” post in a while. People usually ask me to write one up every time a Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll, or Stephen Hawking (well, lately not Hawking) […]
Our forebears in the Faith were much stronger than us morally and spiritually. Not for them the lax observance and flaccid sentimentality that characterize so […]
John Finnis is a prominent Catholic law professor and chief apostle of the “new natural law theory” (NNLT) invented by the late Germain Grisez in the 1960s. At Public Discourse, Finnis and I have been […]
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