The 20th Century spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, was reflecting once on an experience that he had shortly after entering the monastery. Father Louis (as Thomas Merton was called in religious life) describes a particularly powerful experience he had one day while shopping for the abbey:

This past week, Pope Francis participated in another apostolic journey, this time to Hungary and Slovakia. These apostolic journeys of the pontiff are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of the Church and have proven to be a powerful means of transmitting the closeness of the Holy See to the Church worldwide, as well as an effective means of spreading the Gospel.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has sued Texas to shut down a pro-life law, the Texas Heartbeat Act, which prohibits women from receiving an abortion after the baby’s heartbeat is detected.

The world as we know it has changed forever. We’ve heard that statement repeatedly since COVID-19 took root and spread around the world.

Wherever news is made that signals the need to alleviate human suffering — Afghanistan, Haiti, the latest efforts to rein in COVID-19, the rapid responses to aid victims of Hurricane Ida, and more — there is an accompanying story: The Catholic Church is there with a compassionate, effective infrastructure of service.

What we have witnessed in Afghanistan over the past few weeks is a nightmare. Yes, the United States has been in Afghanistan for far too long, and the lives of countless young American men and women have been lost in the defense of a nation so far from our shores.