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.

That national civic renewal will begin when, one by one, “We, the People” rebuild the link between freedom and virtue; recommit themselves to republican constitutionalism; refuse to countenance demagoguery by holding elected officials accountable to adult standard; and conduct ourselves in a manner befitting the maturity we should have achieved in two and a half centuries of national life.

The Ascension is thus crucial in the Church’s response to the crisis of our time, which is the crisis in the very idea of the human person. That crisis comes into sharpest focus when we consider the loathsome practice that goes by the Orwellian moniker “natural organic reduction,” in which thermophile microbes reduce the mortal remains of men and women to compost, which can then be used like the compost you buy at Home Depot.

In its recent nondecision in St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Catholic School v. Drummond, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an obtuse Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that excluded St. Isidore’s from the state charter school program. Notre Dame Law Professor Richard Garnett, in a fine article at Law & Liberty, explains why they got it wrong.

In late May, Trump administration officials at the highest level, frustrated by what they regard as Vladimir Putin’s incomprehensible obstreperousness over his war on Ukraine, suggested that their patience was running out, after which the United States — which has not approved further military supplies for Ukraine in months — would leave the combatants to their own devices. “It’s not our war,” was the mantra of the day.

Those of us in Rome in those electric days could not fail to have been impressed by the enthusiasm that greeted the 267th bishop of Rome. Yet it struck me then, as it strikes me now, that there are potential downsides to the Petrocentrism — the tight focus on the papacy and the pope as the index of “all things Catholic” — that has been on display throughout the Catholic world for some time now.

Why are so many U.S. colleges and universities in crisis? Drew Gilpin Faust, an accomplished Civil War historian, gave the answer, perhaps unwittingly, at her 2007 inauguration as the 28th president of Harvard University.

Rhetorical restraint is not prominent in D.C. these days. Given the volatile personalities involved and the escalatory effects of social media, one hesitates to declare that the apogee of apoplexy has been reached — or ever will be.

Within a few hours of the election of Pope Leo XIV and his masterful presentation of himself to the Church and the world from the central loggia of the Vatican basilica, I received an email from an old friend, a member of a prominent Catholic family in Nicaragua:

The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics were less than 1% of the population of Japan. Today, 80 years later, Catholics are still less than 1% of the Japanese population, although Japan — with a below-replacement-level birth rate for decades — is in demographic free fall.