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Tag1/Tag2 (automatically injected) Jonathan Bender When you start a new job, the first thing you might think about is where are you going to sit. It turns out presidents are the same. There have been only six desks in the 113 years that a president has worked in the Oval Office. Each desk was designed with a specific purpose, a reflection of the style and moment in history that they were made. This is how each piece arrived at the White House. Let’s go back to 1909. Cars raced at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the first time. Alice Huyler Ramsey became the first woman to drive across the United States (It took 59 days.). The Manhattan Bridge opened on the very last day of the year. In October of 1909, President William Howard Taft began working in a newly built spot in The White House...

Catholics should not be content to be trapped in our own age, unable to look outside this time and place for good and heroic companions. Back in 1991, The Jerry Springer Show debuted on American television. The show was presumably intended to shock viewers, as the host paraded out bizarre guests engaged in even more bizarre situations — most of them falling within the realm of weird and multiple violations of the sixth and ninth commandments. A 2020 article in The Guardian aptly described the show: “On a daily basis, it served up a clumpy gruel of screaming and fistfights that first defined and then accelerated the concept of the Ugly American across the world. It was a low-rent, knock-down, barroom brawl of a show that splashed around in humanity’s very worst excesses. And people couldn’t...

Editor’s Note: Hartford Archbishop Leonard Blair wrote the following homily for Laetare Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, and delivered it March 10 at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut. His homily begins at around the 20-minute mark in the video embedded below.. As a bishop, I have conferred the sacrament of Confirmation many times. As part of their preparation the candidates for this sacrament are expected to attend classes, go on retreats and do service projects. This is all well and good, but I feel the need to tell them at the Confirmation liturgy that ultimately, Confirmation is not about what they have done or are doing — it’s about what God has done and is doing. Confirmation, like all the sacraments, is a gift freely and mightily conferred by God. It will be powerful in ...

Seven hundred and fifty years ago Thursday (March 7), St. Thomas Aquinas died, having written some 8 million words in two decades of intensive work, including his masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae. He was only 49. His admirers over the ages include many in North America. The Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor, memorable for her gritty realism, famously read a passage of Aquinas’s Summa every night, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision inspired a nation, drew from his thought while in prison. Advertisement Aquinas, too, was incarcerated. His parents objected to their teenage son’s religious vocation and locked him in a tower. Aquinas’ older brothers thought they could undermine his resolve by tempting him with a prostitute, but Aquinas pulled a hot poker from the fire and chas...

If you want to get upset about the state of our world today, then open an Internet browser and run a search for “anxiety,” “depression” and then “smartphones.” Now add one more trendy term to that search — “hockey stick.” At this point, let’s head straight into some summary material from one story that pops up in the search results, a Financial Times piece with this headline: “Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health.” … Liberal youths simply spend more time online than conservatives. Second, we see the same rising trend among conservatives — it’s just lagging. Some suggest that modern society is more open about discussing mental health, so what we’re seeing is just a rise in reporting, not prevalence. But British teens who spend five or more hours a day on soci...

‘You proclaim by your patience, your endurance and your joy the mystery of Christ’s redeeming power. You will find the crucified Lord in the midst of your sickness and suffering.’ —Pope St. John Paul II I have constant pain. I’m sure there are others who have more pain than I do, but I’m sure I have more pain than many. A quick summary: My spinal pain, even after two surgeries, has persisted for about 12 years. I need morphine to get through the day. Then liver cancer was diagnosed six years ago, which likely affects my immune system and leaves me more tired than I should be. Then in December, I thought I was having a toothache. That would be easy to deal with. However, it turns out it has nothing to do with my teeth but something wrong on the left side of my face. At its best I feel like ...

I’m seeing a meme on social media which quotes Pope Francis as discouraging fasting, recommending people to “eat whatever you want” and instead seek “a better relationship with others” during Lent. The quote, as far as I can tell, is false. I can find no evidence that the Holy Father said any such thing. However, somebody said it. It reflects a popular sentiment among Catholics. And it raises some important questions. Why fast? Why do penance? Isn’t more important to just love one another? Perhaps penance is important because we need it if we want to get better at loving. Last time, we talked about our covenant relationship with God — how he gave and gives himself to us completely, down to the very last drop of blood, and how following him means that we offer our very selves to him in retu...

Fear is a complex passion. On the one hand, there are things that we ought to fear such as grave physical and spiritual dangers. The fear of being near the edge of a cliff might well save our life. The fear of serious sin and the punishment we might experience or the offense to God (who loves us) is both appropriate and holy. Sadly, more people lack this holy fear rooted in the possible loss of what is most precious to us: our eternal life with God. There are also things we fear that we should not, and things that we fear more than we should. These sorts of fears are usually rooted in our disordered and inordinate affections. A disordered affection is a love for something that is sinful. We ought not to love it at all, but we do; this causes us to fear anyone or anything that interferes wi...

Rupnik still listed as Vatican consultant as DDF trial continues Skip to content Fr. Marko Rupnik, the disgraced religious artist and alleged serial sexual abuser, remains listed as an official consultant at a major Vatican department, despite his ongoing canonical process and past expulsion from the Society of Jesus. According to the website of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the priest remains listed as an expert consultor to the Vatican department following his appointment to the post in 2022. Fr. Marko Rupnik. Pillar file photo. Consultants to Vatican dicasteries serve as officially appointed expert advisors to the Roman curia on issues central to the governance of the universal Church. The appointments are usually made for a set, renewable, term ...

Are we, on Earth, the lone intelligent inhabitants of this vast universe? The Catholic tradition teaches us that there are other rational creatures, namely angels, who are purely intellectual, non-physical beings. But do we humans share the cosmos with any other embodied intelligent forms of life? Today, speculation about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is livelier than ever in our culture. Yet many who contribute to this intensifying interest in ETI, especially Catholics, fail to realize that the contemporary discussion is only the most recent portion of a debate in Western thought that stretches back at least twenty-six centuries. Fathers and Doctors of the Church, Catholic philosophers and theologians, popes and bishops, friars and priests, scientists and saints hav...

Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, stepped down from the papal ministry in 2013. But before he did, he began drafting an encyclical on the nature of Christian faith. His goal was to finish his ongoing thoughts on the three theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—and their implications for true human development. For Benedict, faith was the foundation and informing energy of the other two virtues. And to his great credit, a newly elected Pope Francis adopted Benedict’s draft upon his accession. Francis added “a few contributions of [his] own.” Then he issued the resulting text as Lumen Fidei (“The Light of Faith”), his first encyclical and the inaugural document of his pontificate. Given later events, it’s telling that some of the new pope’s strongest supporters were ...