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Credit: Shutterstock. The Supreme Court on Friday issued its a decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, overturning Roe v. Wade in a 6-3 decision and returning the power to legislate limits on abortion to the states. The decision represents a seminal victory for the pro-life movement, one for which generations of lawyers, activists, and legislators have fought. To discuss the significance of the decision and what happens next, Charlie Camosy talked with Carter Snead, a law professor and director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame — and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Snead is author of “What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics,” which was named one of the “Ten Books to Understand the Abortion ...

It seems impossible that I am writing the following words: Today, the United States Supreme Court overturned the two decisions that had invented out of whole cloth a constitutional right of legal abortion: Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center means that the Constitution no longer protects abortion. Abortion is once again — as it was before the date of the Roe opinion, Jan. 22, 1973 — a matter for state lawmaking.  This lengthy paragraph from the majority’s opinion summarizes its conclusions: Roe was on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided. Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent. It...

The Church this week celebrates the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist — the feast, effectively, of John the Baptist’s birthday. “St. John the Baptist,” Raffaello Sanzio. 16th century. Public domain. Like John the Baptist himself, there is a lot unusual about this feast.  For example, in most places in the U.S. the solemnity will be celebrated on Thursday, June 23. But if your church is named for John the Baptist, or he’s the patron of your diocese, you might be celebrating the feast on Friday, June 24.   And the Church celebrates nativity feasts only for three people – Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. John the Baptist.  So why does John the Baptist get an ecclesiastical birthday feast in the first place?  The Pillar aimed to find...

Runaway inflation has raised fears that the economy is headed towards a return of stagflation but a host of Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs and HSBC believe there remains opportunities for investors to safely navigate this tricky backdrop. UCG | Getty Images What is stagflation? Stagflation is a term coined in the 1970s when there was simultaneous high inflation and economic stagnation or high unemployment, according to Jonathan Wright, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. While there were some nasty recessions back then, many economists aren’t expecting a return to anything like that now, he said. “The sense in which you had stagflation in the 1970s is not one that I think is at all in the cards,” Wright said. However, high inflation is prompting t...

“In the culture, if you stand for virtues and principles and morals, you are far right,” went a Facebook post I stumbled upon. “In the Church, if you are devout and follow ‘all’ of the teachings of the Church, you are rigid. Got that?” Not untrue, though I’d want to qualify both claims. The second sentence is the one that interests me here. It may be meant for encouragement or for virtue-signaling. In either case, the question to be answered is what “follow the teachings” means. It has more possible meanings than we might think, and some of those deceive us into thinking we’re doing better than we are. A Catholic can follow without following. Does it mean follow as in following a legal commitment? The kind of thing almost everyone does when they hit “agree” to the pages and pages-long lega...

Listen to this story: ROME – Security around the Vatican is on high alert after a renegade vehicle sped erratically towards St. Peter’s Square and broke through police barricades just before the pope’s noontime Angelus address on Sunday. At around 10 a.m., just two hours before Pope Francis was scheduled to appear for the weekly Angelus, a gray BMW was seen swerving at high speed down the Via della Conciliazione, the main street leading up to St. Peter’s Square. Police stationed near the square shouted and motioned to the car in an attempt to get it to stop. However, the car continued veering up the street and then turned and drove along the lefthand colonnade, eventually turning into the Piazza Sant’Uffizio, where tourists were lined up doing security checks and stopping at cafés prior to...