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So much of what it is to be human is at stake in how we eat. No wonder we need several arts and virtues really to do it well. Thomas Aquinas has much to say about eating. A starting point is how the art of medicine, rightly understood and practiced, should have a key role in what we eat. “The regulation of food, in the point of quantity and quality, belongs to the art of medicine as regards the health of the body.” It seems that today in the weakening of the tie between the medical art and our diet both have been impoverished. Practitioners of medicine too often undervalue or sideline what should be central in their art: giving good direction regarding the ‘quantity and quality’ of what we eat. A significant step in making our eating what it can and should be is to refocus on the obvious i...

By Fr Hugh Mackenzie St John Paul II is widely accepted as having made a major contribution to the 1989 downfall of the Soviet regime. For him this was the victory of the Christian vision of the human person over the Marxist one. The truth about Man ‘will out’ as long as we are ‘not afraid’ to live and teach it. This was the vision he courageously preached to the people of his native Poland, from the post-war pulpits of Krakow, the 1950’s lecture halls of Lublin university, through to the massive papal stages of his 1979 and 1983 pastoral visits to the land which formed him.    Person as rooted in Word and Work In 1941, aged 21, during the Nazi reign of terror over Krakow, he helped found the ‘Rhapsodic Theatre’. This was building upon the trad...

It is remarkable how many words we use—often even important ones—without a clear notion of what they mean. Glory has been one of those words for me. Then one day I read a definition in Thomas Aquinas that fairly stopped me in my tracks. “The word glory properly denotes that somebody’s good is known and approved by many.” Honestly, I kept reading this over and over, smiling. Every word other than ‘is,’ ‘and,’ and ‘by’ is significant here: somebody, good, known, approved, many. All right at hand in this definition are a whole worldview, the meaning of life, and a deep moral challenge… not to mention a new sense of the ‘glory’ of autumn! Let us begin with the second and third terms. There can be glory when goodness is manifest; there is no glory if goodness remains unperceived. And it must be...

Can the Vatican-China deal move forward without looking back? Skip to content The Holy See announced Tuesday that it has renewed for four years its “Provisional Agreement regarding the Appointment of Bishops” with the Chinese government — an increase from the prior two-year renewals signed after the deal was originally struck in 2018. Alamy stock image. The renewal of the agreement comes “in light of the consensus reached for an effective application” of the deal into the future, according to the Vatican’s press statement. “The Vatican Party remains dedicated to furthering the respectful and constructive dialogue with the Chinese Party, in view of the further development of bilateral relations for the benefit of the Catholic Church in China and the Chinese people as a whole,” the statement...

[embedded content] One of the biggest schools of thought in the Protestant world is known as Arminianism, and today we’re going to find out if an Arminian would need to change his views in order to become a Catholic. Over thirty years ago, I wrote a piece called A Tiptoe Through Tulip, in which I explored how close a Catholic could be to Calvinism without violating Catholic teaching. I concluded—based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas—that he could be very close indeed! This piece led some to think that I, myself, am a Thomist, though I am not. I’m not a member of any particular theological school within Catholicism. I’m just an orthodox Catholic. For a long time, I meant to write a balance piece on how far away from Calvinism one could be without violating Catholic teaching, but I have...

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 18, 2024 To me, October 31st is Halloween. No, not the gruesome Halloween. Not the celebration of the occult that our culture has increasingly leaned into since at least the 1990s. October 31st is, rather, the more innocent Halloween of my 1970s childhood. An opportunity for treats, not tricks. A fun time for our youngest, still in grade school, to dress up in a costume that gets no closer to the occult than, say, Casper the Friendly Ghost. And most importantly to our family, it’s All Hallows Eve. The first day of a mini-Triduum that carries into All Saints Day and All Souls Day. A sacred time to think about—in a good way—what lies beyond. For some of my Protestant friends, though, to say the very date “October 31st” out loud, ...

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 10, 2024 Having lived through quite a few synods over the past two generations, most of us are aware that, like all human meetings, they are opportunities for people to try to win approval for their own particular ideas of the best way forward in the situation faced by the institution in question, in this case the Church. And just as with most meetings, the individual participants have a variety of attitudes toward the past image and past policies of the organization they purport to represent. The result is that despite the actual necessity and even the (relatively rare) benefits of formalized meetings, they often spark the formation of factions, exacerbate conflicts, and waste more time in their process than they save later th...

COMMENTARY: A university should be a place where students can pursue ultimate truths about God and the human person, not merely a place where they learn skills to help with employment. Over milkshakes and burgers, one of my student’s fathers said to me that he could not thank me enough for the kind of formation his daughter was getting in the classics and in the faith at my university. He said we were providing her something that he himself could not have provided, and he even suggested that we run a summer program for parents at our satellite campus in Rome. Did this father make a prudent choice for his daughter? After all, many people whose judgment I trust counsel their kids to forgo Catholic universities and instead attend subsidized state institutions. “The No. 1 rule,” they routinely...

By Clement Harrold October 11, 2024 Many skeptics and even some Christians struggle with the idea that the Bible not only fails to condemn slavery, but actually seems to justify its existence in places. What are we to make of the Mosaic Law’s detailed prescriptions for how slaves are to be treated, for example? And how about St. Paul’s injunction to slaves to “obey in everything those who are your earthly masters” (Col 3:22)? If the Bible is the inspired Word of God, how can it be so complicit in something as evil as slavery? There are a number of points worth making here. At a basic level, we need to remind ourselves that the kinds of slavery sanctioned by Moses in the Old Testament are nothing close to the chattel slavery which plagued the New World following the discovery of the America...

ITHACA, N.Y. (OSV News) — While cleaning out your house or a loved one’s, you come across a batch of rosaries, crucifixes and other religious artifacts. You hesitate to throw them out, recoiling at the thought of treating such spiritually significant items as mere garbage. Yet you may not wish to keep them for yourself. What to do? One popular option — as Erika Lindsell knows from experience — is to leave the goods at the local parish. Lindsell, the administrative assistant at Immaculate Conception in Ithaca, has often found boxes full of religious objects on the office doorstep upon arriving for work. “People leave stuff there figuring the church will know what to do with it,” Lindsell remarked. The rub, she said, is that it’s not so simple for parishes to place the objects, especially if...

As the brutal fighting in Ukraine approaches its third winter with no end in sight, the Vatican has once again dispatched Italian Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi to push for peace. Cardinal Zuppi, who is Pope Francis’ special envoy to Ukraine, embarked on his second visit to Moscow on Monday, where he will “assess further efforts to facilitate the reunification of Ukrainian children with their families and the exchange of prisoners, with a view to achieving the much-hoped-for peace,” according to Matteo Bruni, director of the Holy See Press Office. One million people have now either died or been injured as result of the conflict in Ukraine, according to recent estimates, including 200,000 dead Russians and 80,000 dead Ukrainians. Ukrainian infrastructure has also been severely damaged, as long...