My dad, Vincent LeVien, works for the Diocese of Brooklyn. As a result, my family is often invited to attend special Church events. In April, we traveled to Italy for the canonization of then-Blessed Carlo Acutis, but it was canceled after Pope Francis died. So, instead of the canonization, we were there for the funeral of a pope, which is something I never thought I would get to witness.
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.
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.
I was in Chicago on June 14 to attend Trinity Sunday’s vigil Mass at Rate Field, the home park of the Chicago White Sox, Pope Leo XIV’s favorite baseball team. More than a dozen priests and bishops, led by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, concelebrated a special Mass to mark the election of the first-ever American-born pope.
