The Catholic Thing

The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.

The Catholic Thing is a religion podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 60 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts The Catholic Thing, a religion show with 60 episodes published.

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  Episode #60

  The Pope, Hemingway, and 'Moi' in Paris

  Oct 3, 20266 min

  By Brad Miner Late last year, my wife began carefully, meticulously planning a week-long trip to Paris for the whole family. She did so, as she noted to the other eight of us, because she meant to celebrate in style her upcoming "significant" birthday. She wisely decided on late September: the weather would be cooler and the crowds smaller. So, flights and hotel reservations were made, and restaurants and tours were booked. And then it was announced that, during our dates, Leo XIV would be in Paris; Fashion Week Paris would get underway; and Celine Dion would begin her "residency" at the Plenitude Arena. All that meant a plenitude of people in Paris. Oh, well . . . Still, the only real difficulty this caused us was on a private boat ride up the Seine. It was a glorious Friday afternoon, and the Eiffel Tower was as dramatic as you can imagine against the bright blue sky. But just as we were about to reach Notre-Dame and the Île de la Cité, a police boat appeared and demanded we turn the boat around. (Nothing dramatic, mind you – just a signal our "captain" understood.) The pope would soon be at the cathedral. Indeed, on September 24, 25th, and 26th, many places in Paris were designated périmètres de sécurité. Guides, drivers, and others often told us, "The pope is to blame." But that, of course, was untrue. He was a guest and a great boon to Catholic France. And Paris appeared as it must have before the 1905 institution of laïcité. In principle, that means France is (and the 1958 constitution states ) un État laïque, a secular state, although I'm told it's better to say France is neutral towards all religions. But that's the government, and the French people appear to be enthusiastic about Catholicism. The papal Mass at the Place de la Concorde filled the area around Avenue des Champs-Élysées with between 700,000 and 800,000 people. That is an impressive number, although in 1997, Pope St. John Paul II's closing Mass for World Youth Day (at Longchamp racecourse) drew over 1 million. Before, during, and after the papal visit, one saw clusters of Dominican sisters, sundry priests of various levels of ecclesiastical dignity, and many images of the Holy Father, so that Paris again seemed, if only briefly, the capital of the "Eldest Daughter of the Church." That phrase has its roots in the late 5th century, when St. Rémi baptized King Clovis. Throughout subsequent history, the Catholicism of France was unquestioned until the French Revolution of 1789-1799, and the nation has been sliding into deeper levels of secularism ever since. Thus did John Paul II, during his first papal visit to Paris in 1980, ask, "France, fille aînée de l'Église, es-tu fidèle aux promesses de ton baptême?" ("France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?") In 2026, it remains an important question, one I can't answer. But in recent days, we certainly saw reasons for hope. I took a morning for myself, partly to visit churches and partly to wander the streets that Ernest Hemingway haunted in the 1920s. Hemingway had become a Roman Catholic but, by his own admission, was not a very good one. He was, after all, part of what his friend Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation," a comment made directly to Hemingway. He'd become Catholic (apparently after receiving catechetical instruction) so that he could marry Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Catholic from Arkansas. This, of course, is where the "difficulty" of his Catholicism begins. He had been married previously in a civil ceremony, and it's unclear if his union with Pauline was strictly canonical, according to, ironically, the Pauline Privilege. Hemingway was a troubled person, no doubt. He would divorce Pauline and have two more wives after her. He was a distant parent to his three children. He would commit suicide (as his father had), and a Catholic priest would officiate at his funeral, although that cleric, Fr. Robert J. Waldmann, believed (as the press had repo...

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  Episode #60

  'The God Who Gives Joy to My Youth'

  Oct 2, 20267 min

  By Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas I am writing within the octave of the beatification of Fulton J. Sheen, and find myself still basking in the glow of that blessed and long-awaited event, which had many personal associations for me. As a schoolboy, I was quizzed every Wednesday morning by Sister, who routinely would ask the class, "What did 'The Bishop' say last night?" (In those days "The Bishop" didn't mean the local Ordinary, but Sheen!). In third grade, he autographed my First Holy Communion prayer book, declaring to my father, "Sir, someday this young man is going to be a priest." On the brink of priestly ordination, I wrote him a note confirming his "prophecy" of nearly two decades earlier, to which he graciously responded with a promise of prayers and best wishes for my priestly life and ministry. I concelebrated his Funeral Mass. The recent event in St. Louis was a veritable tour de force, worthy of the man who was a first-order clerical showman, in the best sense of the word. What impressed me most was the youthfulness of it all. One thousand priests (95 percent of whom were not even born when Sheen died) and 850 seminarians in cassock and surplice, along with many young families. Meanwhile, out of nearly 450 bishops in our country, only 89 deigned to attend (of course, Sheen was envied by the bishops in his own day). That element of "youthfulness" led me to connect some dots from recent personal observations and musings. The Mass of the Holy Spirit to open the academic year at The Catholic University of America in Washington was most impressive: All sung parts of the Mass in Latin; an outstanding homily by our new papal nuncio; the profession of faith and oath of fidelity by new faculty members; the palpable reverence of the more than a thousand students. All of this from an institution that wallowed in heresy from 1968 through the 1980s! The Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame was the site of the final profession of vows of four young members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Once more, the liturgy was inspiring, as well as the demeanor of the students who filled that beautiful worship space. And recently, the University was consecrated to the Sacred Heart – an act of piety that came about through the initiative of the students themselves. The Diocese of Wichita opened a new college seminary (yes, "opened," not "closed") owing to the vocations glut they have been experiencing over the long haul. Can this be explained because it is the only diocese in the country with a totally free Catholic school system? Youthful American Catholicism has even crossed The Pond. Ave Maria University has established a beachhead in the Irish Diocese of Waterford on the land of the once-legendary Cistercian Abbey of Mount Melleray. Yet again, the inaugural liturgy was characterized by beautiful music and reverent participation, topped off by a stirring homily by the diocesan bishop on the importance and meaning of Catholic education. We know that Ireland's faith has been in the doldrums for a long time now. Will this spark of American Catholicism reignite the flame of faith in what once was known as the "Isle of Saints and Scholars"? In all these liturgies, certain commonalities were apparent: Traditional forms, accompanied by generous servings of Latin, Gregorian chant, and Renaissance polyphony; the young people attired to encounter the King of Kings; and, especially, reception of Holy Communion with great devotion – the vast majority receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, and many kneeling. The ecclesiastical Cassandras in our midst, I thought, should recall Mark Twain's quip: "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." It also made me wonder how the "Lefebvrists" can behold such phenomena and conclude that the Faith is dead? Admittedly, we still have a lot to work on, but that's why we have the mantra, Ecclesia semper reformanda ("The Church is always in need of reform"). Which was also in ful...

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  Episode #60

  Pascal on the Good Use of Illness

  Oct 1, 20266 min

  By Casey Chalk The man was at the top of his game. His professional career was at full throttle, moving from one success to another. Yet he was also admired for his love and sacrifices for his family. Though many disagreed with his religious convictions, no one questioned his virtue or sincerity. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. Then, without warning, a debilitating illness struck. His wealth and prestige assured him quality medical care, but availed the man little. His condition kept deteriorating. In short order, the man expired. Perhaps you've known such a person. I've known some, and their stories are undoubtedly tragedies, especially when spouse and children are left to grieve a dramatic, unexpected departure. You can't help but wonder if you might become that person, despite relative youth or good health. "That won't happen to me," we say. But many people whom we thought it could never happen to . . . well, it happened to them. The great seventeenth-century French polymath Blaise Pascal could very well have wrestled with such thoughts. He made impressive contributions to math, science, and philosophy before his thirtieth birthday – including creating a calculator that has been called the first "computer." The horse-drawn carriage system that he developed for the city of Paris earned him recognition as the father of public transportation. Yet as he was making these incredible contributions, Pascal was suffering a painful, progressively debilitating illness, with intense migraines, hypersensitivity to light and sound, severe abdominal pains, dental abscesses, and eventually partial paralysis. After four years of this torment, he died in 1662. During that period Pascal wrote "Prayer Asking God for the Good Use of Illness," a striking and spiritually penetrating Catholic reflection on human suffering. Pascal's Prayers, a new book by philosophy professor William C. Hackett, features both the prayer and illuminating commentary, as well as offering a valuable counterweight to the health and longevity obsessions of modern America. One of the most arresting qualities of Pascal's Prayers is how the French savant comprehends suffering as an extension of God's gracious providence: "Not only the blessings but even the misfortunes that befall your chosen ones are effects of your boundless compassion. . . You are no less God whether you afflict and discipline or console and show mercy." Even if we recognize God's hand in our suffering, we moderns – votaries of a catechesis of comfort – want the suffering to end, to get back to the way things were. Pascal pushes us even further. He perceives his sickness as a form of divine discipline to help him to detach himself from worldly things: "Render me incapable of enjoying this world either by weakness of the body or by the zeal of charity so that I may find my joy in you alone. For you have made me unable to enjoy the comforts of health and the pleasures of the world; you have already annihilated for my benefit the deceptive idols." It leads one to wonder: if God so obviously blesses us with material goods – natural beauty, delicious food and drink, beautiful art – does it make sense that He asks us to be detached from them for His sake? Part of the answer seems to be that, though creatures are indeed designed for our happiness, they are also intended to generate gratitude and worship: "Yes, Lord, I confess that I esteemed health as a good. Not because it is an easy means to serve you with utility, to dedicate more care and vigilance to your service, and to help others, but because through it, I could abandon myself with less restraint to the abundance of life's pleasures and better savor its destructive joys." Pascal realizes that his appreciation of good things often obscured God. But there's even more. Lesser, contingent goods present us with an opportunity to see them properly in relationship to God, the infinite, eternal good. "Take away from me, Lord, the sadness that ...

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  Episode #60

  The Forest and the Trees

  Sep 30, 20266 min

  By Stephen P. White In his new book, A Catholic Guide to Being Human, Dr. John Grabowski offers a reminder that the term "person" is more freighted with theological implications than we often consider. Identifying and unpacking those implications is the first step toward answering what is, perhaps, the greatest question of our age: What does it mean to be human? The Christian West once had a confident answer to that question, one rooted firmly in the mystery of the Incarnation. The strength of that confidence served as a foundation for a great and humane civilization. That is not to say a sinless civilization, but one in which even the most egregious failings prove the rule of its underlying humanity. Understanding the human person properly requires that we think carefully about man as both a "what" and a "who." Today, we seem to have lost confidence in our answers to the great question. Accordingly, as we have lost sight of both God and man, our world has become less humane, even as we have grown in power and technological mastery. Our sense of ourselves and our place in the world is distorted. We are in danger of becoming, as Grabowski puts it, both "technological giants and moral midgets." As Pope Leo XIV made clear in Magnifica Humanitas, one of the great temptations of our technological age is, in fact, a very ancient temptation: the temptation to construct for ourselves, in all our hubris, a new Tower of Babel. A world "conceived without reference to God" must necessarily also be a world constructed without reference to man – a world that is quite literally inhumane. The changing rhythms and patterns of our way of life shape the way we understand ourselves. Sometimes, threats to our self-understanding come about abruptly – as in the case of the advent of nuclear weapons or, today, the rise of AI – and so provoke a great deal of self-reflection. Sometimes the change is much more subtle and, particularly when the change is perceived as benign or beneficial, it proceeds almost unnoticed. However profoundly our surroundings and circumstances shape us (and they do!), we are never merely the product of our circumstances. Human nature itself guarantees that, as Pope John Paul II insisted: It cannot be forgotten that the manner in which the individual exercises his freedom is conditioned in innumerable ways. While these certainly have an influence on freedom, they do not determine it; they make the exercise of freedom more difficult or less difficult, but they cannot destroy it. Even devout Christians sometimes need a reminder that our self-understanding is conditioned by the world around us, often in ways which are not easy to perceive. And even devout Christians sometimes need to be reminded that the threats and challenges which we do perceive – clear and present as they may be – are only a part of the story, and perhaps not the greatest part. In short, when it comes to understanding ourselves and our place in the world, we must be careful to ensure we are seeing both the forest and the trees. And here is where Professor Grabowski's new book really shines. "Some of the Fathers of the Church," writes Grabowski in his introduction, "saw man as a microcosm of the macrocosm – a miniature version of the universe as a whole. Human beings are both material (like the physical world and animals) and rational and spiritual (like angels and God himself). In this way, the human person stands as a summation of creation and in the center of salvation history." It takes a mastery of many subjects to write intelligently about such a vast subject. Yet here Grabowski shows his long years of experience as a teacher and his command of the subject matter. He clarifies without oversimplifying; he condenses without distorting; he writes with precision without relying on jargon or overly technical terms. The result is a compelling account of Christian anthropology which is both eminently accessible and readable yet without any watering down. Perh...

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  Episode #60

  A Parable of the Desert War

  Sep 29, 20266 min

  By H.W. Crocker III Rod Dreher is hard at work on a book about "Weimar America." The disquieting trends that trouble Dreher – rising anti-Semitism and social alienation, the decline of Christianity, and the likelihood of civilizational war – are also the subject, in a different context, of Kruger's Korps, my most recent book, which I'd like to tell you about because there's more to it than its cover of spiraling Lugers might imply. On the face of it, Kruger's Korps is a breathless World War II action-adventure story about American spies penetrating the German Afrika Korps. At that level, I'd like to think it offers high-caliber entertainment and has everything a reader would want from that genre: battles, mystery, a beautiful woman, shocking plot twists. And it has some things – in fact, a lot of things – you would not expect to find, including references to Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger; a guest appearance by Fr. Marcel Lefebvre (!); and a good deal of humor. But this is also, in some ways, a tragic book. The Fatherland plays a big role in it, of course, but so does fatherhood – both the nobility of fatherhood and the tragedy of it. Without giving too much away, the plot hinges, at least in part, on the misdoings of a prodigal son who grew up with every advantage and was well-tutored in duty, honor, and piety, in a family that lived those virtues, and who yet still went astray – badly and wickedly astray to an extraordinary degree. I imagine that this part of the story will be painfully relevant to many Catholic parents. The prodigal son in Kruger's Korps is a German who grew up during a pressure-cooker of a time, spanning the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi rule. If we think raising young men today is difficult, think of raising young men then. The hero of the story is another young man, Rolf Kruger, born in Germany but raised in the United States – in Hollywood, of all places – where his father works as a carpenter/set-designer and Kruger himself works as an extra and fencing instructor. The contrast between these two German-born young men – the prodigal son and Kruger – is a major theme of the book. The prodigal son has rebelled against the best of German culture (and against his father who represents it; "a Habsburg man, not a Hitler man" is a repeated line), while embracing the worst, losing his moral compass (and therefore his mind) completely in the process. If America is going through its own Weimar moment, it's important not to make the common but serious category error that Adolf Hitler was a "traditionalist," as, for instance, former Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing recently did on his podcast. Hitler was anything but a traditionalist. He was a radical, atheistic, anti-Christian (he much preferred Islam) modernist, which is why Evelyn Waugh could say that the Hitler-Stalin Pact represented "the modern age in arms." It is a point emphasized not only in Kruger's Korps but in my history of the Catholic Church, Triumph, where I quote the great historian John Lukacs, who notes that the "greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century was not Lenin or Stalin. It was Hitler. . . His greatest reactionary opponent, Churchill," was the traditionalist. The prodigal son in Kruger's Korps rejects traditionalism and his inherited Catholic faith in favor of political radicalism, first National Socialism and then Communism (a not uncommon occurrence, though it usually worked the other way round). The young German-American Kruger, however, takes another path. He remains a Catholic and holds fast to his father's traditional values. He becomes an officer in the U.S. Navy and then a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (and doesn't neglect praying his rosary). He embraces all the heroic virtues that Hollywood once proclaimed in its films and becomes a hero himself. For a book that appears to be a sheer adventure story, the intent is to give the attentive reader much to ponder. A few historical characters have passing ...

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