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Must Catholic politicians — or Catholic voters, for that matter — support only legislation that completely jibes with Church teaching? For example, can they justify voting for a law that permits exceptions in the cases of rape and incest? Well, if the alternative is either maintaining — or risking––an abortion-on-demand legal climate, then supporting an imperfect law — or politician, for that matter — is the most prudent moral option available. As St. Thomas Aquinas conveyed in his Summa Theologiæ, we cannot live in the idealistic abstract, divorced from reality, lest we make pointless pontifications, or, far worse, effectively concede a defeat with great moral fallout. “What is done by us, is possible to us,” say St. Thomas in Article 5 of Question 13 of the first part of the second part ...

Nowhere in the Gospels did Jesus enable, look over, ignore, or otherwise gloss over someone’s sins. Jesus never simply patted anyone on the head and sent them on their merry way, telling them to not worry about being sorry for their sins. In other words, the Jesus many have concocted and cobbled together as an oversized stuffed animal sitting there and smiling an empty smile, comforting them without judging, is not the Jesus of the Gospel. Nor is He the ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’ who is just waiting for you to sin so He can laugh as you drop into hell. No. The Jesus of the Gospels is quite different. He is a Jesus calling us to turn from sin and embrace holiness. He desires to show mercy. He wants to forgive. He is pained by those who place themselves above His mercy. He makes ...

VATICAN CITY — So far it has emerged that two academics recently appointed full members of the Pontifical Academy for Life have expressed their public support for legalized abortion, another has advocated universal abortion access and use of artificial contraception among the poor, and a fourth new member, a Jesuit moral theology professor, has made it clear he supports artificial contraception in some cases.  Pope Francis also appointed to the academy’s governing council a French theologian and head of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, who has appeared to similarly promote contraception and approved of liturgical blessings for same-sex couples under certain conditions.  The Pope’s appointments, announced Oct. 15, have caused cons...

Over the years, I, and many others I know, both before and after getting married, have grappled with the issue of giving up dreams. It is difficult and nuanced. And it is especially important for how we think about, and live, marriage. My basic conviction is this: the now common assumption that we can have it all, or do it all, can undermine our marriage, as well as our deepest dreams. We become convinced we should pursue every dream, and we miss a great truth. The willingness to purify and sometimes give up our ‘dreams’ can actually lead to a deeper fulfillment. And no where can this become more clear than in marriage. I want to share three short videos I recently recorded exploring this topic. Occasionally I must forego a more extended written reflection. In that rare occurrence, I will ...

Teeny tiny jumping spiders, with their wondrous eyes, seem to be able to do something we’d only ever seen before in vertebrates: distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects. In a 2021 test, wild jumping spiders (Menemerus semilimbatus) behaved differently when presented with simulated objects of both kinds, in ways that indicated an ability to discern between them. The research didn’t just suggest that this ability can be found more widely in the animal kingdom than we knew; it demonstrates that the team’s experimental setup could be used to test other invertebrates in the same way. “These results clearly demonstrate the ability of jumping spiders to discriminate between biological motion cues,” the researchers wrote in their 2021 paper. “The pr...

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 24, 2022 The famous Gospel passage has many applications: “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’” (Lk. 18:9-14) The Pharisees took sinful pride in abiding by visible religious observances disconnected from virtue, and/or ruined their goodness by taking pride in it. All of us can become Pharisees, especially when we claim “devout Catholic” status, and comply with the external practices of the faith, but pay no attention to authentic Christian virtue. Here are some carefully assembled facts. President Joe Biden President Biden has announced that i...

Catholics attend a mass at the government-sanctioned St. Ignatius Cathedral in Shanghai on Sept. 30, 2018. Photo: johannes eisele/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The Vatican announced on Saturday a two-year extension to its provisional agreement with Beijing governing Catholic affairs in China. On the same day, Hu Jintao, China’s former Communist Party general secretary (2002-12) and president (2003-13) and Xi Jinping’s immediate predecessor, was forcibly removed from the party’s National Congress. That body’s convention, which occurs every five years, marks a signature event in the nation’s political life. This year, it anointed Mr. Xi to an unprecedented third five-year term. Whether Mr. Hu’s very public exit was owing to age-related health issues or a brute display of Mr. Xi’s new pow...

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 17, 2022 God created us in His image and likeness, and after the Fall, the Cross, and the Resurrection, we overcome evil with God’s grace by following the precepts of the law written on our hearts. Scholars and theologians reasonably consider our natural inclinations and codify them into a natural-law system. But natural law collapses without the light of God’s Revelation. God gave the Ten Commandments to the Israelites through Moses, and those Commandments are compatible with our natural inclinations. (Every child knows it’s wrong to disobey Mom even before memorizing the Commandments.) We become what we choose. As individuals, when we choose the good, we become godly and respectful of our parents, life, sexuality, propert...

There’s an old saying that goes, “Faults in others I can see, but praise the Lord, there’s none in me.” One is snared in sin by the very act of claiming to have no sin! In fact, it’s the biggest sin of all: pride. In the Sunday Gospel, the Lord illustrates this through the parable about two men who go to the temple to pray. One man commits the sin of pride and leaves unjustified. The other, though a great sinner, receives the gift of justification through his humility. Let’s look at what the Lord teaches us. Prideful Premise – Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness. When it comes to parables, it’s easy to gloss over the introductory statement, which often tells us what prompted Jesus to tell the parable. Many people simply see this parable as be...

The house was empty. “Where is everyone?” I thought. I was 9 years old, and had just returned home from school. We lived in a quiet town, and my parents were rarely away. “Mom?” I called out. Nothing. I began to feel anxious. It occurred to me that my parents may have been “raptured,” taken up suddenly into the heavens by Jesus. Was I “left behind?” But I knew that my urgent prayer to Jesus at the age of 5 had saved me once and for all. If my parents were raptured, the Tribulation was now beginning, and seven years of horrific trials would follow, and I was all alone and — “Carl? Is that you?”  My mother came through the door. She had been visiting the neighbor. My anxiety about the Rapture evaporated. For a while.  A turning point came in my second year of Bible college. One day...

LOS ANGELES — Roberto Dell’Oro, a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, publicly urged support for legal abortion prior to the possibility of fetal pain during a recent panel discussion sponsored this month by Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.   During an Oct.12 panel discussion, entitled “Confronting the Dobbs Decision: A Conversation About the Legality of Abortion,” Dell’Oro, a bioethicist and theologian at the university, and two other LMU panelists criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the 2022 landmark decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.   In prepared remarks, Dell’Oro attacked the Dobbs ruling for failing to uphold democracy, which “maximizes rather than restricts a space of personal freedom...

Jesus is God, and he has been listening to us pray all our lives. And after all he has heard, he wants to tell us how it sounds from his perspective on the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C. He asks us a question he already knows the answer to: Are our prayers — yours and mine — more like the proud petitioner who thinks he is doing pretty great in his spiritual life, or are they more like the sad sinner who knows he isn’t doing very well at all? It’s statistically very likely that you and I are more like the proud guy than the humble one. St. Luke begins by saying “Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness.” If you asked those who know us, the chances are that they would put us in that group. Nearly 90% of respondents thought Christians were judg...