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.

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.

Holy Saturday in Breezy Point. What should have been the most joyous weekend on the Catholic calendar became one of heartbreak when a fire tore through St. Edmund Church.

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.