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Among the peculiarities marking the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI is the fact that he neither condemned nor ignored one of the most influential German philosophers of our era, Friedrich Nietzsche, the one who famously proclaimed the death of God in our times. In the first and most moving encyclical of his pontificate, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), released on Christmas Day in 2005, Benedict unpacked the significance of divine love in relation to human desire, or what the Greeks call eros. To do so, he quoted an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated — into a vice.” According to Nietzsche, Christianity ruins what is highest in us, the jubilant celebration of life that is erotic desire, by infecting i...

The arrival of a new year is traditionally associated with making resolutions. It’s a natural and salutary thing, because the change of the calendar is an occasion to take stock of ourselves, to see where we are and to make those course corrections we need to get us where we want to be. The cynical might say that we make resolutions to see how quickly we can break them. Will we fall? Maybe. Even likely. But we won’t fail unless, upon falling, we don’t get up again. That’s the difference between falling and failing: one letter, and a world of difference. Resolutions should not be whatever pops into one’s head. Take some time in these first days of 2023 and ask what you want to see different about yourself in the last days of 2023, provided God gives you them. What should I work on now to ac...

It was one last family walk in the garden.   Benedict XVI’s family accompanied him down the hill from the Mater Ecclesiae residence to St. Peter’s Basilica Jan.2, just as they had often walked with him in the same Vatican Gardens during his pontificate and in his retirement, often praying the Rosary in the afternoons.  Viewers may have wondered who the five women were who gathered around Benedict’s mortal remains in the chapel and then followed him to the basilica. They are who Benedict called his “family”: his secretary, Birgit Wansin, notable for being one of the few people able to decipher Benedict’s tiny handwriting; and the four consecrated laywomen of Memores Domini, Cristina, Carmella, Loredana and Rosella.  [embedded content] The Memores Domini, members of Communion ...

Some years ago I wrote a blog post, Is the Church a Cruise Ship or a Battleship? I was surprised at the amount of negative commentary I got. For example, “How dare you compare the Church to an instrument of war!” Other comments lamented recourse to any violent imagery, ever. Still others called for bans on songs such as “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “I am On the Battlefield for My Lord,” and so forth. You might say that the response from the anti-military group was “militant.” I certainly wasn’t feelin’ the love! Most of those comments I didn’t publish because I didn’t want “war” to erupt in the combox. Of course the reference to a battleship was by way of analogy, not literal. No one is insisting that the Church should actually use sixteen inch guns against unbelievers or purveyors of sin....