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Pope Francis has repeatedly called attention to what he views as a growing rejection of the Second Vatican Council. Speaking to editors of European Jesuit journals on May 19, he related this view: “It is very difficult to see spiritual renewal using old-fashioned criteria. We need to renew our way of seeing reality, of evaluating it … Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of ‘restorers’ — for example, in the United States there are many — is significant … They had never accepted the Council.” Commenting on these remarks, Ed Condon at The Pillar made an important clarification: “Vatican II is more of a feeling, or state of mind, than an historical event that produced tangible documents.” An outright rejection of the Council is rare, although many people have quest...

“The outside observer is apt to conceive of Catholicism as at least a business-like religion,” wrote Ronald Knox in his classic The Belief of Catholics. Knox was a Catholic C.S. Lewis, as smart as Lewis but I think cleverer, with a gift equal to his for popular writing. And, as a Catholic, writing from a deeper and wider and truer understanding of things than Lewis had.   Knox entered the Catholic Church in 1912, at the age of 24, giving up what promised to be a wildly successful career in the Church of England. He became not only one of the great lights of the Catholic literary revival, but one of the Church’s most effective ambassadors to secular and Protestant England. He published The Belief of Catholics in 1927 and died in 1957.  An Affected Style  The Protestant minist...

(Image: Teemu Paananen/Unsplash.com) Why have people become so crazy when there is so much information and so many experts? To answer, we need to know the basic understandings people rely on. These are evidently leading them astray. So here are some that now dominate public discussion: • Scientism. This tells us that modern natural science is our only source of authoritative knowledge. If we want to understand man and society, we should be scientific and rely on statistics, simple causal explanations, mathematical modeling, and the like. • Hedonism. Preferences can be observed and measured. Since we want to be scientific, we should take them as a guide rather than some broader and less concrete idea of the good. • Egalitarianism. All preferences are equally preferences, so they become equa...

My 4 year old son and I were wondering about soccer ball sized hail today. How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do? Michael Grill When you think about it, it’s honestly kind of weird that hailstones haven’t killed all of us already. I mean, they’re chunks of ice that plunge from the sky! Hailstones fall from really high up. There’s a popular myth that a penny dropped from the Empire State Building can kill you. The myth isn’t true,[1]Mythbusters tried it in Season 1 Episode 7 and found that the penny would really sting and make you go “ow!!” but for anyone who believes it, hailstones should be terrifying—after all, they often fall from the height of ten Empire State Buildings. Luckily, the same thing that saves us f...

Justice Antonin Scalia’s writings lent authority and credibility to the pro-life movement, invigorating us in the good times and re-invigorating us in the bad times. In the past weeks, as we Catholics have celebrated the overturn of Roe v. Wade, some of the discussion has turned to credit; that is: who should receive the credit for the overturn. But in this conversation, there has been a strange omission, so let us say it here. Though he passed away in 2016, much of the credit for overturning Roe belongs to Justice Antonin Scalia. A devout Catholic and father of nine, Scalia was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986. For the next 30 years, Scalia proved unwavering in his position that Roe v. Wade was flagrantly unconstitutional; he maintained, therefore, that Ro...