Suffering, atheists frequently assure us, is not what we would expect if God exists. You might suppose, then, that where there is greater suffering, there will be fewer believers in God, and where there is […]
In Summa Theologiae (II-II.168.2-4), Aquinas discusses the essential role that play and humor have in human life. They are necessary for the health of the individual, insofar as in their absence the mind becomes weary […]
Consider two groups of Catholics: First, divorced Catholics who disobey the Church’s teaching by forming a “new union” in which they are sexually active, thereby committing adultery. And second, traditionalist Catholics attached to the Extraordinary […]
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 […]
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