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Worried eyes peer above a mask in a supermarket while customers attempt to dodge each other in the aisles. Someone does not see the floor stickers and back muscles tighten. The sharp condescending tones of a young and tired cashier remind me of a middle school teacher. In the chaotic wreckage of post-shelter-in-place America, childhood insecurities have reclaimed ground once lost to adulthood, and the smallest act of non-compliance solicits fierce if unspoken reactions. Anxiety and concern for safety suck the air out of humor and graciousness – in a world where the only smiles we can offer are hidden and at a distance.  Yet, the Lord is present in this tenseness of it all, waiting for that one moment where He might unveil his glory. This would seem to be one of the tasks of the ...

Joe Biden will be only the fourth Catholic major-party presidential nominee in U.S. history, following John Kerry in 2004, John F. Kennedy in 1960 — the nation’s only Catholic president — and New York Governor Al Smith, the Democratic nominee in 1928. Biden was the first and only Catholic vice president in U.S. history, although the current vice president, Mike Pence, was raised Catholic (he is now a practicing Protestant). There have been a number of Catholic vice-presidential nominees over the years, including Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2016. A presidential candidate’s religion, I think it’s fair to say, is less of a factor now that it has been in the past — including the nation’s fourth presidential election in 1800 w...

CNA Staff, Jul 25, 2020 / 02:25 pm MT (CNA).-   Game show and talk show host Regis Francis Xavier Philbin died July 24 at 88. Philbin was a Catholic, and a longtime proponent and supporter of Catholic schools. “I think it made a great difference. Solidified me….taught me an awful lot. Everything that I am right now I attribute to” Catholic education, Philbin said in a 2009 interview. What made a difference at Catholic schools, he told reporters in numerous interviews, was formation in virtue, and in faith. Before joining the Navy, and eventually making his way to Hollywood, Philbin attended the University of Notre Dame, and before that the Catholic schools in the Bronx, where he grew up. Philbin was named in part for Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier. But his unusual first name cam...

An episode of the old Batman series offers an exposé on the pretentiousness of modern art. The secret’s out. My dual identity has been discovered. By day, I spend my time in the company of serious writers and thinkers, such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Thomas Aquinas, but by night I sit down with my 11-year-old daughter to watch episodes of Batman, the 1960s television series starring Adam West and Burt Ward as the dynamic duo. The reason for my living a double-life is simple enough. I want to share with my daughter the innocent pleasure and rambunctious fun that I had as a child. I remember enjoying Batman when it was first aired in England back in the late sixties, when I was a wee lad of only 5 or 6 years old. I remember receiving a toy Batmobile for Christmas and playing with it in...

The famous phrase “the medium is the message” comes from Marshall McLuhan in his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan was a Catholic and really should be more widely read in our day. The quip means that the very way that you receive something is perhaps more important than what you receive. We can thank McLuhan for his prophetic message that new media doesn’t just provide new means of culture; they are a new culture. His thesis is now proven beyond any doubt. A new media doesn’t just have a message – it is one. Discerning what that message is, however, can take time. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the 60s about electronic media. Perhaps by now we can begin to get a glimpse of its message. Unless of course its message is simply to erase all others. Thus, if McLuhan was right...

By Tom Hoopes, July 23, 2020 “I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” That is what Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says in his seminal work After Virtue, and it explains why in the Gospel this Sunday, the 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A) Jesus speaks in parables for the third and final week in a row. Jesus tells us stories that give our whole life a context, and we need that badly. Without these stories we are each like Jason Bourne, trying to guess who we are without the most important information. In the Bourne movies, based on the novels by Robert Ludlum, a man with amnesia is pulled out of the water by a fishing boat at sea. He has no idea who he is, but he soon begins to ...