In this raw, emotionally overwrought moment in our public life, few topics generate more passion than gender ideology and the associated practice of gender “transition.” Several Catholic leaders have tried to address the ideology and the practice calmly, informed by science, philosophy, theology, and pastoral experience. The most recent is Bishop Daniel Thomas of “Toledo in America,” as the Vatican’s Annuario Pontificio designates the Ohio diocese centered on the Glass City.

America needs the example of a real hero: I give you Calvin Edwin Ripken Jr.

War is raging in Ukraine, a beleaguered, brutalized country that looks to the United States for support in its struggle for survival — and Americans are obsessing over Cracker Barrel logos?

Assuming that the synodal process is not an end in itself and recognizing that the synodal process of 2021-2024 has produced some good fruits, perhaps it may be suggested that it’s now time to move from synoding to applying the fruits of the past three years to mission and evangelization. 

Pope Leo XIV’s spiritual lodestar is St. Augustine. In his first months in office, the Holy Father summoned the Church to pray, fast, and work for an end to the 21st century’s wars. That spiritual orientation and that summons invite us to consider what “peace” is possible in this world.

Robert Royal and I have been friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators for nigh on four decades. 

Vatican II did not call the Church to just “meet the modern world.” The council called the Church to convert the modern world. How? By offering Jesus Christ as the icon of a genuine humanism and the sacramental Church as the icon of authentic human community.

Karl Rahner, SJ (1904-1984), one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century, is a favorite whipping boy for many traditionally minded Catholics. Yet, Rahner was something of a split personality.

“Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” was printed on the punch cards that fed data into IBM computers in the 1950s, when those primitive machines could occupy the entire floor of a building. That admonition came to mind when, as has happened with depressing frequency over the past four decades, the just war tradition of moral analysis was folded, spindled, and mutilated — not to mention distorted, inverted, and rendered unrecognizable — in a lot of the secular and religious commentary on the military action undertaken by Israel and the U.S. in Iran in June. Let me try to repair some of the damage with a few reminders of what the just war method of moral analysis isn’t and is.

How appropriate that Flannery O’Connor should have been born on the solemnity of the Annunciation: the liturgical feast celebrating the willing acceptance of a God-given vocation.