And John Allen was the one who told us about it. 

Thin, bespectacled, and sharp in mannerism and analysis, John Allen was the first journalist, in my experience, who unfolded the intricate operations and abiding faith of the Vatican with the nose of a newsman and the heart of a Catholic. He was this rare blend of beat reporter and believing Catholic, almost unheard of in the soulless landscape of the modern media. 

And John Allen was the best. 

As a Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, a senior Vatican analyst for CNN, and editor in chief of the Catholic news website Crux, John spent decades telling us about the operations of the Church in the modern world. He never shied away from explaining the Vatican’s mechanisms of power and operators of influence. After all, the Vatican, run by human beings, was not devoid of faction and frustration, intrigue and machination. 

But John didn’t stop there. 

He also reminded us that the Church is the locus of God’s mission on earth. Somehow, John’s analysis could uncynically blend sausage-making with the Sacraments, politicking with praying, clay feet with a heavenward gaze. His sense, conveyed so well in his reporting, was that while the disciples walk in the grit of the trenches, they are forever trying to journey toward God. John’s reporting asserted one thing above all else—there is nothing so majestic and so intriguing as the Church on Earth. Nothing. 

At Word on Fire, we were blessed to have John co-author To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age with Bishop Robert Barron. John also served as the fellow of communications and media with the Word on Fire Institute. Of the eight pillars informing Word on Fire’s mission, John embodied “Affirmative Orthodoxy” to his very end. 

Several years after enjoying John’s trenchant, faith-filled analysis of the late Pope John Paul II and the coming conclave, I was received into the Catholic Church. John’s seriousness and joy as both Catholic and newsman set an enduring standard for the kind of Catholic I daily strive to be. 

Thank you, John, for being our friend at the Vatican.

Requiescat in pace.

The post John Allen, Our Friend at the Vatican appeared first on First Things.

The concerns raised are serious and, in important respects, legitimate. Yet the statement’s imprecise terminology and unexplained omissions weaken its effectiveness and risk obscuring the very issues it seeks to address.

There are also puzzling features of the document itself. The signatories are not listed and not all the Churches have published the statement on their official websites. This contrasts with a similar statement issued by the Patriarchs in 2006, which was signed, more carefully framed, and explicitly directed against extreme forms of Christian Zionism—those that undermine the possibility of a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That earlier statement at least suggested that not all Christian Zionisms were identical.

The core concerns of the 2026 statement are legitimate. The current Israeli government includes religious Zionist figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who claim that Gaza and the West Bank belong to Israel and who envision the departure of Palestinians from these territories. Were such views to prevail, the likely outcome would be the disappearance of Arab Christian communities from the occupied territories. (Christian populations within Israel proper remain relatively stable.) These religious Zionist ideologies tend to make little distinction between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs. Their strand of Jewish religious Zionism, drawing on the theology of figures such as Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, is also explicitly hostile to Christian presence in Israel. 

These concerns are intensified by the influence of American Christian Zionists, especially in the United States. Their political reach is substantial, and the appointment of a Christian Zionist such as Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador heightens fears that Jewish religious Zionists and foreign Christian Zionists together exercise disproportionate influence over policy affecting local Christian communities.

Yet if this alignment is the central concern, the statement raises questions it does not address. Why does it single out Christian Zionism while remaining silent about political Islamist ideologies that also seriously threaten Christian life and institutions across the region? Further, it falsely presumes all Christian Zionists hold the same theological and political views.

Figures such as Ihab Shlayan, an Armenian Christian Israeli Zionist, long-serving IDF officer, and chairman of The Israeli Christian Voice, illustrate the complexity the statement overlooks. Or the Jewish Catholic Zionist Yarden Zelivansky, also an IDF member who established the Association of Hebrew Catholics in Israel. Shlayan is connected to Israeli and American political actors but has not been endorsed by Armenian Church authorities. He may be resented for appearing to speak on behalf of Christian communities. This could explain the statement’s vague reference to unnamed “local individuals,” but it also underscores the diversity concealed by the term “Christian Zionism.”

This leads to the central difficulty: The term “Christian Zionism” is used far too broadly. It presents a flattened and misleading picture of a diverse phenomenon. There are many Christian Zionists, myself included, who reject extremist political agendas and support a two-state solution (but are open to other models). They are deeply concerned about the survival of Palestinian Christian communities, whether threatened by Israeli policies or mainly by the rise of political Islam. There are Anglican Zionists, like Gerald McDermott, who, like me, reject evangelical dispensationalism and work within a post-supersessionist theology. To classify all Christian Zionisms as “damaging ideologies” is both poor theology and obscures the big issues. 

A second major omission is the statement’s silence regarding Jewish–Christian theological developments, particularly post-supersessionist teaching within Churches represented by the Patriarchs themselves. By saying nothing about the Jewish people or about the theological legitimacy of Jewish attachment to the land, the statement risks alienating Jews and Christians committed to post-supersessionist theology. It leaves unanswered a fundamental question: Is there any legitimate place for Israel at all, or is Zionism—Jewish or Christian—understood solely as a project of colonization and empire-building? This silence is especially striking given that the Latin Church formally recognizes the State of Israel and consistently supports a two-state solution grounded in natural law. 

The situation in the Holy Land is complex and fragile. The statement rightly identifies genuine dangers facing Christian communities. But by employing imprecise language, overlooking crucial distinctions, and leaving key theological and political questions unresolved, it misses an opportunity for genuine peacemaking and bridge-building. Instead, it risks generating unnecessary controversy—fireworks that distract rather than illuminate—at a moment when clarity, nuance, and careful dialogue are urgently needed.

The post The Problem with the Jerusalem Statement Against Christian Zionism appeared first on First Things.

My first time there, I was surprised to see that so many of the laity were college students. Instead of partying or studying late, they walk over from Catholic University of America’s campus to the priory for Compline. While the lay people will go home and return to their usual routines, the Dominicans will be back for Lauds at 7 a.m. to begin the day, a day where the bell will toll four more times for the Liturgy of the Hours. In between, brothers rush off to classes on the second floor, consecrating their minds to everything from Latin to metaphysics, as each one will have read Aquinas’s entire Summa Theologiae before they are ordained to the priesthood.

How do I know all this? President Dominic Legge appointed me as the McDonald Agape visiting scholar, a position reserved for Protestants. What has caught me off guard is the way the Dominicans expect me to be a participant rather than a mere observer. I am lecturing in class (on Protestant theologians, no less), joining Thomistic conferences with some of today’s most erudite intellectuals, leading soirees over topics of my choice, and participating in their spiritual retreats for university students. I am used to Protestants saying “ready, aim, fire” if there’s a Catholic in sight, but here I encounter Dominicans not the least bit defensive, confident that if they have truth, it will show itself.

I expected to see Dominicans devoting themselves to Lectio Divina—reading, meditating, praying, and contemplating the Scriptures. I did not expect to see Dominicans traveling the world at a neck-breaking pace for the Thomistic Institute, engaging universities with the truths of Thomism. My son caught on quick. “Why is there a dog in the statue of St. Dominic outside?” he asked. “Well, we are called the barking dogs because we bark the gospel everywhere we go,” said Fr. Dominic Langevin. Ready to engage the intellectual life wherever they find it, they see the whole world as their stage.

The experience has given me hope. In the past, ecumenism often meant debating distinctives that date back to at least the sixteenth century. This exercise has not generally been fruitful. Imagine two men arm-wrestling in a pub, each staring at his opponent. Suddenly, a storm erupts, and its wind brings the four walls crashing down. They are so caught up in themselves they don’t even realize the house has collapsed around them.

What should happen instead? The arm-wrestlers must lock arms, only this time to rebuild the walls. Their strength is far more effective together. The storm of secularism has hit Christianity, bringing down its walls. On this side of modernity, it’s time to link arms and rebuild, although neither side must compromise its distinctives to do so.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants have tried to unite around their theological distinctives, which usually results in them being watered down. What we need is a common architect around which we can unite, one who is especially equipped with the metaphysical tools that can help us rebuild the walls of Christianity: Thomas Aquinas. Sadly, while Dominicans have been applying the metaphysics of Thomism to the culture for centuries, most Protestants today are not. If the walls that have fallen are First Principles, then Protestants desperately need the metaphysical tools of Thomism.

In a world of skepticism, Thomism believes theology is a science, an organized body of knowledge dependent on the principle of non-contradiction. In an age of materialism, Thomism believes not only in matter, but form and therefore can give every person hope that their body is informed by their soul (hylemorphism). In a culture rampant with nominalism, Thomism says that universals are real, explaining all the otherwise meaningless particulars of our everyday experience. In an era swept up in naturalism, Thomism believes in causality, capable as it is to move from our sense experience to a First Cause by which all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28), thereby infusing our lives with purpose, or telos. In a day of expressive individualism, Thomism puts forward a real distinction between our essence and existence, one that reminds us we are dependent on a Creator who is simple. And, perhaps most importantly, in a world in constant motion, subject as it is to potency and act, Thomism asserts that our security resides in one who is pure act. As the unactualized actualizer, he can direct the fluctuating course of history to its fulfillment.

If real ecumenism is to have a future, it must oscillate around the perennial metaphysics of Aquinas. First, Protestants must learn from the Dominican rule of life. After my experience with them is over, I will be applying its basic principles by starting Anselm House, a school of philosophy and theology through Trinity Anglican Seminary where its fellows consecrate themselves to contemplation for the formation of virtue, as well as participation in the liturgy at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church. What’s distinctive about Anselm House? It is classical, retrieving the ecumenical creeds. It is Thomistic, committed to Aquinas’s First Principles and his way of doing philosophy and theology. And it is Anglican, allegiant to the reformed catholicity of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer. If Stewart Clem is right that the twentieth century “was the golden age of Anglican Thomism,” then the story of Anglican Thomism in the twenty-first century has yet to be written. In a small way, Anselm House will turn the page to that next chapter.

Second, talking across battle lines is not enough; real partnerships must begin. I am linking arms with Tory Baucum, director of the Center for Family Life at Benedictine College, and Msgr. Stuart Swetland, president of Donnelly College. Together we will launch Aquinas KC, a school for Thomistic catechesis, whose genesis began when Archbishop Naumann tasked Tory Baucum to find a creative way to do Thomistic catechesis. When Tory met me, a Thomistic Protestant, that original idea took on flesh. Our first project is a conference at Donnelly in Kansas City, where Catholic and Protestant scholars will gather around Aquinas as their “common doctor” to answer objections to Christianity in the culture. Then, we will launch Thomistic Fellowship Circles modeled after Jacques Maritain. Christians from various traditions will embark on a five-year tour, beginning with Aquinas’s biblical commentaries, then his homilies and hymns, and eventually his philosophy and theology, all for the sake of sharing Thomistic wisdom with the world.

Many Protestants will keep arm-wrestling, even if the walls have collapsed. It’s time to start building.

The post An Anglican in the Dominican House appeared first on First Things.

The commentator George Weigel wrote a short book outlining the qualities conservatives wanted in the next Pope, and, in 2020, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, arranged for copies to be sent to all the cardinals who were expected to vote in the next conclave.

With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: How do I correct thee? Let me count the ways:

1) How does a book calling for the pope to recognize the New Evangelization as the Church’s “grand strategy” for the twenty-first century qualify as “conservative” Catholicism, rather than mainstream, living Catholicism?

2) By the same token, how does the trigger warning about Catholic “conservatives” and their alleged longings adequately reflect the content of a book that calls on the papacy to promote Christian humanism, deepen the Church’s appropriation of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, broaden the consultations through which bishops are selected, intensify seminary reform, empower lay men and women to be missionary disciples, undertake a root-and-branch reform of the Roman Curia, and deepen the theology of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue?

3) How is it “conservative” to urge the bishop of Rome to keep 1.4 billion men and women focused on the person of Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God and the answer to the question that is every human life?

4) As to specific fact-checking: If Paul Elie or his editors had bothered to contact me, Cardinal Dolan, or Mark Brumley, the president of Ignatius Press, he would have learned that my book, The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission, was sent to the members of the College of Cardinals by Ignatius Press; that Cardinal Dolan did not initiate that; and that the cardinal merely provided a cover note suggesting the book was worth reading. But no, one can only assume that the misrepresentations about this initiative concocted by Elie’s progressive Catholic contacts, which have been corrected more than once, were left unexamined. Why bother fact-checking when the facts, if ascertained, might get in the way of a good trigger warning or a slap at a leading American churchman?

There were numerous other problems with Elie’s article, including the usual, tiresome dismissals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as rigorists and authoritarians; the author also seems quite ignorant of the Vatican’s febrile atmosphere during the latter years of Pope Francis. I can’t quarrel much with Elie’s conclusion, though: that Pope Leo’s “mission” might be to be “an American in a position of great power who is decent and humble—a no-drama Pope whose very ordinariness is his message.”

Except to offer two more corrections.

First, Pope Leo has made it clear from the night he stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica that his “message” is Jesus Christ, not himself. Elie’s description of Leo’s pre-papal career contains some interesting information (as well as some unfortunate distortions about Catholic movements and personalities in Latin America), but it tends to elide over something crucial: that the pope is a man of God, a man of prayer, and an evangelist who wants the world to know the Lord he loves and serves.

Second, it was clear to those of us in Rome during the 2025 papal interregnum that Cardinal Robert Prevost was not thought of primarily as “an American,” for if he had been, his election would have been quite unlikely. The Latin American cardinal-electors thought him one of their own, given his many years in Peru; others considered him a prominent figure in the universal Church, with broad international experience. No one was focused on the fact that he was a White Sox fan from the south suburbs of the Windy City.

Various scribblers and talking heads (and, of course, churchmen) have been spinning Pope Leo from the day of his election, the direction of the spin being dictated by the spinner’s position in Catholicism’s ongoing debates over identity and mission. Enough is enough. The Holy Father has a very tough job, and no one trying to capture him for any particular party or agenda is doing him, or the Church, any good service.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

The post Fact-Checking the <em>New Yorker</em> appeared first on First Things.

“I sure am,” I replied. About fifteen minutes later, Fernando Mendoza, the quarterback of the Indiana University football team, walked into the lobby of the St. Paul Catholic Center on campus with the Heisman Trophy. I have received wonderful Christmas presents, but holding the Heisman Trophy and celebrating with the winner—who is one of my parishioners—on Christmas Eve is undoubtedly the most outstanding Christmas present I have ever received.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (15:11). Jesus had the joy of doing the will of the Father and sharing the fullness of revelation with the apostles. Joy, from a Christian perspective, is a gift to be shared. 

What a blessing it was to share the joy of the Heisman Trophy and the team’s success with Fernando. On top of that, the joy of the moment was an opportunity to marvel at how this IU football team has reversed more than a century of suffering for Hoosier fans. As the Psalmist says, “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy” (Ps. 126:5). 

Standing in the stands at the Rose Bowl and the Peach Bowl was an act of communal catharsis for generations of Hoosiers. We always seemed to be on the other side of those outcomes. As the pastor of the university’s Newman Center, I have been particularly edified to see some of the biggest contributions coming from the student athletes who are also faces in the pews on Sundays. 

My joy, however, is not limited to the success of Fernando Mendoza and the IU football team. Rather, my hope and joy are rooted in the marvels of the young church. For nearly a decade I have served as a priest on the campus of Indiana University. Like many other ministries, ours is a rapidly growing one. Our young people flourish, not because they are finding in the faith what is culturally acceptable, but because they are finding something far greater than what the world offers. In the din of a college campus, the silence of a church becomes attractive. In a world that permits everything but forgives nothing, deep, intimate friendships and the priest in the confessional are powerful antidotes. 

We faith leaders, therefore, must respect our young people, prioritize their needs, and provide a place where their faith can be nourished and can flourish. Moreover, if we want our students to take their faith seriously, we leaders must make the essentials of the faith the priority of our work. This demands that priests like me (and other ministers) work all the harder to create a ministry that helps our young people incorporate faith into their pursuit of excellence, to integrate the freedom that comes from faith into every aspect of their lives. 

In a world marked by division, hostility, and confusion, striving after holiness is often seen as impossible or the work of the extraordinary saints. Others believe that holiness requires detachment from the world. However, despite the challenges, it is possible to be holy and good in the world. It all starts with faithfulness and love; placing our trust in God’s providential care and extending his love to all through our actions. 

How one goes about doing good, living one’s faith, and loving one’s neighbor is not some hidden secret. We are made for relationship with others. We respond to the invitation of the Lord to worship in the church, to pray without ceasing, to share the goodness of the Lord with others, and to love those who are in need simply by doing those things. 

Football games are great. Winning the Heisman Trophy is an incredible accomplishment. Not all of us can show up at our church with the Heisman Trophy or be part of a successful football team, but all of us can share our lives, our joys and sorrows, and our hearts with others. The best place to start is with the Lord. Prayer, far from being extraordinary, is the most reasonable act for a person who seeks clarity and focus. God wants to be all in all. Prayer opens the door.

More and more young people—like Fernando and so many others—are responding to God’s fidelity by entrusting their hearts and lives to him. They then light other hearts on fire, and that fire is spreading. I am grateful to be a Hoosier fan. My faith is being deepened by the witness of our young people who are courageously and zealously proclaiming and living their faith.

The post The Joy of Being a Hoosiers Fan appeared first on First Things.

The Catholic Church never condemned the theory of evolution nor came close to doing so. One might have expected otherwise: Many of the factors that had led to the Galileo fiasco two centuries earlier were present again. Darwin, like Galileo, was proposing a radical theory that struck many people as absurd—and that seemed contrary to the “plain meaning” of certain scriptural verses as they had generally been construed. Both theories were at first controversial even among scientists and faced weighty scientific objections, both observational and theoretical, which could not be resolved until decades later. Both theories contradicted aspects of the Aristotelianism that prevailed among Catholic theologians. Finally, both Galileo and Darwin promulgated their theories at times when the Church faced powerful challenges to her credibility and authority, as a result of which her doctrinal defense mechanisms were on high alert. Even if the Vatican’s condemnation of Galileo did not formally and irrevocably commit the Church doctrinally, it put the Church, for a time, on the wrong side of a scientific issue. The same could easily have happened with On the Origin of Species.

Indeed, in some ways, the circumstances facing the theory of evolution were even less auspicious than those Galileo contended with. Galileo’s offending ideas, after all, concerned astronomy, which ­Cardinal Bellarmine admitted at the time pertained to the faith only “incidentally,” whereas the theory of evolution, as applied to human beings, concerned matters of the highest theological importance, such as the nature of man and the doctrine of original sin. And whereas in Galileo’s day no one was using heliocentrism to attack Christianity and virtually all scientists were Christians, by the late nineteenth century religious skepticism and scientific materialism had gained many adherents, and evolution was being used as a cudgel against religion. As a result, many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, were disposed to be deeply suspicious of the new ideas and the people who advocated them.

And yet, no condemnation by the Catholic Church ever came. In fact, the universal magisterium of the Church said nothing about evolution until 1950, more than ninety years after Darwin published his Origin of Species. Part of the reason for this caution, no doubt, was that Church authorities were keenly aware that science had long since vindicated heliocentrism and they had no desire to repeat past mistakes. Moreover, discoveries in geology and paleontology in the preceding century had shown that both the planet and the life upon it were of much greater antiquity than a literal reading of Genesis would suggest. This had a strong impact, since it was an accepted principle in the Catholic Church, at least since St. Augustine, that Scripture should not be read in a way contrary to what is known with certainty from reason and experience. Even so, the Church’s forbearance with regard to evolution is remarkable.

The full story of how the Church did react to the theory of evolution is told in a fine new book by Kenneth W. Kemp, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism, 1831–1950 is a monumental work of scholarship: massively researched, comprehensive, nuanced, restrained in judgment, and clearly written. Its focus is on the ideas of the many Catholic scientists, theologians, and philosophers who either advocated evolutionism in some form or at least defended its ­compatibility with Catholic belief, and on how their ideas were received within the Catholic Church and by her magisterium. Kemp seems intimately familiar with the vast body of primary sources, from the writings of the Catholic evolutionists and compatibilists themselves to discussions of their ideas in ­contemporary Catholic periodicals, encyclopedias, theological textbooks, and internal Vatican deliberations.

If there was one key factor in the Church’s restraint, it would seem to be the prudence of the popes of that era with regard to natural science. The reigning pope when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871 was Pius IX, who famously denounced eighty errors of the modern world in his 1864 Syllabus Errorum, and yet not one of the eighty concerned evolution. Nor was evolution mentioned, directly or indirectly, in the decrees of the First Vatican Council, which Pius IX convoked in 1869.

The next four popes, including the fiercely anti-Modernist Pius X, likewise made no pronouncements about evolution. In the case of Pius IX’s immediate successor, Leo XIII, the reason can be guessed from a comment made in a private letter in 1892, quoted by Kemp:

There are restless and peevish spirits who press the Roman Congregations to pronounce on matters that are still uncertain. I am opposed to that; I will stop them because it is not necessary to prevent scholars from doing their work. One must give them the time to suspend judgment or even to make a mistake. Religious truth can only gain from that. The Church will always be in time to put them on the right road.

Though there was no shortage of “peevish spirits” in the Church who wanted to see evolution condemned root and branch, they were by no means predominant. There was a wide spectrum of attitudes within the Church at all levels, with regard both to evolution as a scientific ­theory and to the philosophical and theological issues that it raised.

Some (under the influence of Aristotelian biology and metaphysics) thought the evolution of species was impossible. Others thought the scientific evidence for some evolutionary change was strong but doubted whether it could have produced the great qualitative differences that exist between plants and animals or among kinds of animals. Still others were open to the idea of the common ancestry of all living things on earth but drew the line at man himself, either because they found the idea of an animal ancestry for man “repugnant” or because they thought Genesis 2:7 taught that God had formed the first human body directly from the dust of the earth. And finally, there were many who had no such reservations but agreed with the English biologist and Catholic convert St. George Mivart (“St. George” being his given name), who in On the Genesis of Species (1871) defended the idea of a natural evolution of species, all the way up to and including the human body, as “perfectly consistent with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology.” Here the distinction between the human body and soul is crucial. No Catholics, whether scientists or theologians, were arguing that evolution, or any purely material process, could produce the human spiritual soul, with its powers of intellect and will. All agreed on the metaphysical impossibility of that, and on the Catholic teaching that the spiritual soul is directly created by a supernatural act, not only in the first human beings, but in every human being.

Though many Catholics denied or doubted Darwin’s theory, or aspects of it, on ­scientific, philosophical, or theological grounds, few theologians thought that the idea of evolution of species was per se contrary to Scripture. Writing in the influential Catholic journal the Dublin Review in 1896, Fr. David Fleming, OFM (later to be secretary to the Pontifical Biblical Commission), wrote, “the great majority of Catholic theologians hold . . . that evolution in itself is not excluded by the text of Genesis.” Nor was it considered by most ­theologians to be contrary to the Catholic faith. As early as 1868, we find St. John Henry Newman writing in a letter:

We do not deny or circumscribe the Creator . . . if we hold that He gave matter such laws as by their blind instrumentality moulded and constructed through innumerable ages the world as we see it. If Mr Darwin in this or that point of his theory comes into collision with revealed truth, that is another matter—but I do not see that the principle of development, or what I have called construction, does.

Among theologians and Church authorities, doctrinal concerns were focused primarily on the origin of man, and in particular how the bodies of the first humans came to be. Some theologians argued that it was authoritative Church teaching (even if not de fide) that Adam’s body was created directly and ­immediately from the dust of the earth. For example, in a review of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) in the Dublin Review, Fr. John Cuthbert Hedley, OSB (who was later made bishop), wrote:

It is not contrary to Faith to suppose that all living things, up to man exclusively, were evolved by natural law out of minute life-germs primarily created, or even out of inorganic matter. On the other hand, it is heretical to deny the separate and special creation of the human soul; and to question the immediate and instantaneous (or quasi-instantaneous) formation by God of the bodies of Adam and Eve—the former out of inorganic matter, the latter out of the rib of Adam—is, at least, rash, and, perhaps, proximate to heresy.

On the other hand, Newman wrote in a letter to Edward Pusey in 1870:

‘All are dust’—Eccles iii, 20—yet we never were dust—we are from fathers, why may not the same be the case with Adam? I don’t say that it is so but if the sun does not go round the earth and the earth stand still, as Scripture seems to say, I don’t know why Adam needs to be immediately out of dust.

Many theologians were willing to concede that natural processes, including evolution, may have played a large role in the formation of the first human bodies, but some of them thought that direct divine intervention would also have been required to make those bodies capable of receiving a spiritual soul.

The numerous complex issues concerning evolution and the contending views about them were vigorously, but civilly, debated in many Catholic fora, both popular and scholarly, over many decades. Kemp quotes a passage from H. L. Mencken that gives an interesting glimpse of this. In commenting on the Scopes Trial of 1925, Mencken, no friend of any religion, wrote:

The current discussion of the Tennessee buffoonery, in the Catholic and other authoritarian press, is immensely more free and intelligent than it is in the evangelical Protestant press. In such journals as the [Commonweal], the new Catholic weekly, both sides were set forth, and the varying contentions are subjected to frank and untrammeled criticism. Canon de Dorlodot whoops for Evolution; Dr. O’Toole denounces it as nonsense. . . . The [Commonweal] itself takes no sides, but argues that Evolution ought to be taught in the schools—not as an incontrovertible fact but as a hypothesis accepted by the overwhelming majority of enlightened men. The objections to it, theological and evidential, should be noted, but not represented as unanswerable.

Of course, limits on freedom of discussion among Catholics could be placed by the Roman Congregations, specifically the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books (which existed in one form or another from 1559 to 1966), the Pontifical Biblical Commission (founded in 1902), and the Holy Office (called the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition from 1542 until 1908, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after 1965). It was the Congregation of the Index that was most active with regard to evolution, especially in the 1890s, when it leaned decidedly against ­evolutionary ideas. However, unlike the Holy Office, it was not empowered to issue doctrinal pronouncements or condemnations, but only to act against specific books, generally by listing them on the Index without publicly stating its reason for doing so.

Though some books written by advocates of evolution were placed on the Index, it was generally for reasons other than the author’s advocacy of evolution: Some of these books were either explicitly anti-religious or atheistic and ­materialistic in outlook; others were reductive in their philosophical anthropology or gave inadequate accounts of the difference between human beings and lower animals; still others proposed ­unacceptable theories about the inspiration of Scripture.

There were, however, two important cases in which the Congregation of the Index did restrict books for their views on evolution: L’Évolution restreinte aux espèces organiques (second edition, 1891) by Dalmace Leroy, OP, and Evolution and ­Dogma (1896) by John A. Zahm, CSC. What offended the Congregation about these two books was primarily their position on the origin of the human body, which was essentially that of Mivart, namely that a Catholic could hold that the first human bodies (though not the soul) had arisen through evolution without any direct supernatural intervention. (It should be noted that Mivart’s own book was never censured, and ­Mivart was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Pope Pius IX after its publication.) In a key passage, Leroy wrote:

The human body is composed of matter and form. And the soul, its substantial form, comes directly from God, of course. But the matter, where does it come from? It comes from the slime of the earth, that is also certain, as the Church and tradition clearly teach. But was the human soul infused immediately into this slime, that is to say, without any preparation? And if it underwent preparation, as Genesis indicates, could it not have been evolution which effected it? That is the question that may still be asked.

Unfortunately, the Congregation thought otherwise, persuaded by a few “peevish spirits,” especially a Dominican theologian bitterly opposed to evolution named ­Buonpensiere (which, ironically enough, means “good thought”). Even in the cases of Leroy and Zahm, however, the Congregation decided not to put books on the Index but to command the ­authors—priests under religious obedience—to ­disavow them publicly and do what they could to remove them from circulation.

The issue came to a head in the 1920s and ’30s, when the Holy Office (which had not previously involved itself in evolution cases, but had recently been given responsibility for the Index of Prohibited Books) became concerned about the views on the evolution of the human body of the theologians Henry de Dorlodot, who died in 1929, and Ernest Messenger, whose 1931 book carried on Dorlodot’s work. After consultations that dragged on for several years, the Holy Office on June 10, 1936, voted eight to two that Messenger should be enjoined to withdraw his own book from sale. The next day, however, Pope Pius XI decided to accept the minority’s recommendation that the book be ignored for the time ­being; he also requested “an authoritative account of the scientific data of ­anthropological paleontology.” That report, which he received a year later, concluded that “our best attitude with regard to the question of the descent of man, so far as his bodily form is concerned, must be a patiently expectant one, with an evenly balanced mind, waiting till further discoveries and ­researches give us . . . a decisive result.” In the end no action was taken with regard to Messenger or Dorlodot. At no point did the Holy Office consider issuing condemnations of propositions connected with ­evolution.

The watershed for Catholic evolutionism came on August 12, 1950, when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis, in which he wrote:

The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred ­theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

Clearly implied is the position that Mivart put forward in 1871: that a natural, evolutionary origin of man at the bodily level is not contrary to the Catholic faith.

Humani Generis did not, of course, resolve the numerous important theological and philosophical questions surrounding evolution that have been discussed in the Church from Darwin’s day till now. Indeed, there has been relatively little official guidance for the ordinary Catholic concerning how to navigate these questions. Evolution is not explicitly mentioned, for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And antagonism to the idea of evolution—even the evolution of plants and animals—has begun to seep into some corners of the Catholic Church.

An excellent new book by Daniel Kuebler, professor of biology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, titled Darwin and Doctrine: The Compatibility of Evolution and Catholicism, is therefore timely. In the first five chapters, Kuebler (who I should note is a fellow officer of the Society of Catholic Scientists) reviews the Church’s understanding of the relation between faith and reason, the history of her engagement with evolution, the ­theology of creation, and the ­science of evolution, helpfully clearing up common misconceptions along the way. Each of the remaining chapters addresses an important theological or philosophical issue raised by ­evolution.

Chapter 6 is about the role of “chance,” which many see as opposed to God’s providence. Kuebler notes that this is hardly a new issue or one that arose only in relation to evolution: “Any cursory glance at our individual histories reveals a ­staggering number of chance events upon which our existence is predicated.” But, whether in evolution or in everyday life, chance in no way detracts from divine providence, since 

a God who sustains creation at every moment, [and] who allows created things to act as causes in their own right, also sustains all the chance encounters that occur among created causes during the evolutionary process. Those chance events that we actually observe in evolution are his plan, although from God’s atemporal perspective, it’s hard to call such events “chance” at all.

Others think that chance undercuts arguments for design or purpose in nature, as if it rendered everything in nature adventitious. Kuebler notes, however, that the role of chance is greatly overemphasized in most discussions of evolution, which in reality is an interplay of chance and order. For biological or evolutionary processes to occur at all requires a great deal of order at the level of physics and chemistry, as Kuebler illustrates with many examples.He discusses the order in the properties of atoms, reflected in the Periodic Table, which allows them readily and spontaneously to form amino acids and the other building blocks of life. He shows how much of the structure of proteins follows from strong physical constraints on how they fold up into “alpha helices” and “beta sheets.” At a deeper level, the fundamental laws of physics appear to have many fortuitous features, called “anthropic coincidences” by physicists, that seem designed to make the existence of living things possible. All of this underlying order powerfully shapes evolutionary outcomes.

Kuebler argues that in evolution “it is the order that exists in nature that is primary, and it is the chance aspects of the process that are secondary. In fact, the chance aspects of evolution, by and large, operate in such a manner as to uncover” all the biological possibilities allowed by this order. This thesis is dramatically illustrated by the ubiquitous phenomenon of “convergent evolution,” in which evolution keeps stumbling upon the same designs and innovations over and over again. “It turns out that there is hardly a structure or behavior that one can find in living organisms that is not convergent.” The camera-like eye, for instance, has evolved independently “at least seven different times, including in vertebrates, cephalopods, marine annelids, gastropods and even jellyfish.” Meanwhile, “Ovoviviparity, in which the egg is retained within the female reproductive track prior to a live birth, has evolved over one hundred times [independently] in lineages as diverse as amphibians, reptiles, and fish.”

The next chapter deals with objections perennially raised by some Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers against even the metaphysical possibility of species’ evolving. Such discussions can hardly avoid arcana, but Kuebler does a good job of explaining why these objections are not insuperable, making use of the insights of modern Thomists ranging from Jacques Maritain to Mariusz Tabaczek, OP. Indeed, he shows how evolution can be seen as a process by which the potencies inherent in the material world are actualized.

The next two chapters deal with the many complex questions relating to human origins and original sin. In chapter 8, ­Kuebler reviews both Catholic theological anthropology and the current state of our rapidly increasing knowledge of extinct hominins and early man. He introduces the crucial distinction between “biological humans,” that is, those who are human according to some physiological criteria, and what some authors have called “theological humans” or “true humans,” that is, those endowed with immortal rational souls. Whereas Homo sapiens as a biological species arose (as all species do) in a gradual way by the spread of new traits within populations, the appearance of beings who were theologically human must have been sudden, logically speaking, as one either has an immortal soul or hasn’t. And though genetic evidence clearly indicates that the ancestral population of biological humans was never less than many thousands, that does not necessarily imply that the first theologically human beings—those who “fell”—had to be more than two in number. Various authors, both Catholic and Protestant, have speculated that God might have conferred a rational soul initially upon just one pair out of an ancestral population of biological humans, as well as upon the descendants of that pair. There could be scientific as well as theological reasons to entertain this possibility. It would dovetail, for instance, with the suggestion of Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick in their 2015 book Why Only Us that the neurological basis for the human language capacity might have appeared at first in just a few individuals.

In other words, the biological polygenism implied by the scientific evidence does not logically preclude the theological monogenism—the one pair of original “true humans”—taught in Humani Generis. It should be noted, however, that many theologians have suggested that Pius XII did not intend definitively to condemn theological polygenism. Rather than saying that Catholics must reject it, he said that they must not “embrace” it, a formulation that allows for suspension of judgment. And he gave as the grounds for not embracing it the fact that “it is in no way apparent” how a multiplicity of first true humans could be reconciled with the Church’s teachings on the fall of man and original sin; but he did not rule out its becoming apparent at some later time. The idea that Pius XII intentionally left the door open to further development is supported by Kemp’s recent study in the Vatican Archives of the preliminary drafts of that encyclical, which have only recently been made available to scholars. The preliminary drafts were more definitive in their rejection of theological polygenism than the final text.

Many Catholic theologians have acted as though the door that Pius XII left slightly ajar were wide open and rushed through it to embrace theological polygenism. Though doing so might help in resolving certain issues, such as whom the children of Adam and Eve could have married, it creates others, such as how to understand St. Paul’s statement that “by one man sin entered into the world.” Some caution seems still to be justified.

In chapter 9, Kuebler masterfully treats the subtle questions evolution raises about original sin and its consequences. He notes that some theologians have suggested that original sin is just the fact that humans have inherited from our hominin forebears the natural drives and impulses that often lead to aggression, lust, and selfishness. However, as Kuebler explains, those drives and impulses are not in themselves faults, nor the result of the fall of man. Rather, what resulted from the fall was the loss of those “preternatural gifts that allowed [the first true humans] to live in a state in which these drives were perfectly ordered [by reason] toward the good.” Similarly, he dispels some misconceptions about the sense in which death is a consequence of the fall. The human bodies that arose through evolution were just as naturally mortal as those of our animal ancestors but were conditionally granted immunity from death as a preternatural gift. Kuebler quotes St. Augustine: “It is one thing . . . not to be able to die, like [the angelic] natures which God created immortal, while it is quite another to be able not to die; and this is the way the first man was created immortal, something to be granted him . . . not by his natural constitution.”

Many have wondered how original sin can be inherited (or, in the words of the Council of Trent, acquired by “propagation, not by imitation”). It is surely not a physiological trait passed on genetically. But if it is a spiritual trait, how can it be propagated, given that the spiritual soul of a child is not produced by the parents but created directly by God? Kuebler helpfully explains that the fallenness we inherit is not a positively existing thing, susceptible of transmission, but a lack. What is passed on to us biologically is an animal nature with all its evolved drives and urges, raised indeed to the level of rationality by God, but without the gift of sanctifying grace and the preternatural gifts that were bestowed on the first humans and forfeited by them. “This is the state in which we find ourselves, saddled with the burden of attempting to order our desires without the aid of [those original gifts].”

At the end of his book, Kuebler presents a number of very interesting theological observations, which include some striking parallels between evolutionary history and salvation history. In neither history, for example, do we find a smooth triumphal progression, but rather vicissitudes, reversals, and even disasters that throw what had seemed to be the divine plan far off course. In evolutionary history, there were dead ends, environmental catastrophes, and mass extinctions. In salvation history, there were the sin of Adam, the Israelites’ lapses into idolatry, the Babylonian captivity, the destruction of the First Temple, and Judas’s betrayal. And yet, from failure, destruction, and death, new life arose.

Many Catholics and other Christians are just as unsure what to make of evolution theologically and how to integrate it into an orthodox Christian view of the world as were their predecessors in the nineteenth century. They will be helped immensely by these two excellent new books and the many fascinating discussions and analyses that they contain.

The post True Humans appeared first on First Things.

If Paul VI was right about witnesses being evangelists, then Jimmy Lai—the Hong Kong entrepreneur, newspaperman, and human rights advocate who has now spent more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement in Stanley Prison, and who was recently “convicted” in a sham “trial” of being a threat to Hong Kong’s “national security”—is one of Catholicism’s most compelling evangelists. For like other modern Catholic heroes such as Fr. Alfred Delp, Bl. Omelyan Kovch, Bishop Francis Ford, Sr. Nijolė Sadūnaitė, and Cardinal George Pell, Jimmy Lai has turned his imprisonment into a spiritual retreat. And he has shared what the Spirit has taught him in those cruel circumstances through works of religious art sketched in colored pencil on ruled paper, as well as through his letters to his family.

One of those sketches—a portrait of Our Lady at the Annunciation bearing the simple inscription “Yes!”—was the Lai family’s 2025 Christmas card. The card also included one of Jimmy’s most moving confessions of faith. After asking himself in a letter to his wife and children, “Why is my mood not down at all, sometimes even light-hearted?” and then answering his own question—“I guess because so many people whom I have even never met are praying for me is the main reason”—this twenty-first-century martyr-confessor gave thanks for what his conversion to Catholicism and his current ordeal had taught him, in words reproduced on that Christmas card:

I am always in God’s presence because of [those] prayers. I am so thankful the Lord gave me a new life, a life I was [previously] blind to—a life of true peace, joy, spiritual concreteness and meaning—as opposed to my muddling in life in pursuit of purposes bound into the narrowness of my ego before. Now I am free because I can see.

Jimmy Lai would never claim to be a theologian, but he displayed here a profound grasp of what we mean by professing our belief in the “Communion of Saints” when we pray the Apostles’ Creed. Just as the human eye cannot see itself, human beings can be blinded to the truth about ourselves, our obligations, and our eternal destiny when we’re caught in the trap of our egos. To be liberated into human and spiritual maturity, we need others—others who can help us see ourselves clearly, thereby giving us the capacity to see the world truly.

That is what happens in the Communion of Saints. Others introduce us to Christ. Others help us to see ourselves as forgiven and redeemed, thereby helping cure us of the myopia caused by egotism. Others sustain us and help us grow by their prayers, for no authentic prayer ever goes unheard. Jimmy Lai knows that and lives it. Through the prayers that sustain him, he can “see” his suffering during almost five years of an otherwise wretched imprisonment as an occasion of grace, in which he participates in Christ’s continuing redemption of the world.

The policies of Xi Jinping, the absolute ruler of China, aim to make China the world’s preeminent power, in payback for what Mao Zedong called its “century of humiliation” at the hands of exploitative foreign powers. Greatness as measured in the immediate moment can be illusory, however. In the first half of the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII bestrode England like a colossus. Yet today, it’s Thomas More—the man Henry Tudor unjustly imprisoned for refusing to bend his conscience to the autocrat’s will—who is remembered as the “man for all seasons”: the man whose example has drawn others into the Communion of Saints for over four centuries.  

Those who find an analogy here with twenty-first-century Catholicism’s most famous political prisoner, Jimmy Lai, will understand what Pope St. Paul VI said about witnesses being evangelists, and what that means for living the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19) today.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

The post The Evangelist in Stanley Prison appeared first on First Things.

Elsewhere, I have argued that President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela and threat to annex Greenland by force do not meet the conditions set out by just war doctrine. But in online Catholic circles, some have suggested that precedents from Christian history lend support to an expansionist foreign policy. Some point to the Crusades. Others suggest that the Catholic empires’ colonization of the New World shows that wars of conquest can be legitimate. Among those taking such a position is the popular podcaster Matt Walsh.

These arguments, however, are entirely without merit. Whatever one thinks of the Crusades and the history of the Catholic empires, they provide no theological or moral justification for actions like taking Greenland by either military force or the threat of it.

This is obvious enough in the case of the Crusades. The Crusades were military actions authorized by the pope for purposes such as recovering territory that had been unjustly taken by Muslim conquerors, protecting Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, and suppressing heretical movements that endangered the social order. Notoriously, serious evils were sometimes committed during the Crusades. But as Catholic apologists often rightly point out, the extent to which this is the case has been somewhat exaggerated. Nor does it entail that the causes for which the Crusades were fought were always bad ones.

However, all of that is irrelevant to the question of whether it would be legitimate to take Greenland by force. Such an action would not involve the U.S. reclaiming something that once belonged to it, much less protecting pilgrims or suppressing heresy. Nor, of course, would it have papal authorization. The Crusades, therefore, provide no precedent at all for what the Trump administration may have in mind.

It might seem at first glance that the Spanish Empire’s colonization of the Americas affords a more plausible precedent. But it does not. The fact that the empire happened to be Catholic does not by itself prove anything. What matters is what the moral teaching of the Church had to say about the matter. As I have documented in the second chapter of my book All One in Christ, a series of popes from the sixteenth century onward vigorously condemned the harsh and unjust treatment of the American Indians, including their enslavement. The greatest Scholastic theologians of the day, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas, did the same. Their teaching was often ignored. But what should matter for Catholics is the teaching itself, not the bad example of those who ignored it.

Nor did the Church of the day or her theologians teach that taking another country’s territory by force was a legitimate cause for war. On the contrary, as Vitoria wrote in On the Law of War, “enlargement of empire cannot be a cause of just war. This proposition is too well known to require further proof.” The standard teaching of the Scholastics, following in the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, holds that the only just cause for a nation to go to war is in response to harm inflicted by another nation. This by itself suffices to condemn as unjust any U.S. attempt to take Greenland by force.

Does this necessarily entail that Spanish colonization was in every way unjust? No. Where colonization is concerned, the Scholastic tradition came to draw an important distinction. On the one hand, there is territory that is already owned or occupied by a state or by a people who are organized in such a way that they may be regarded as an incipient state. For another nation to attempt to seize such territory by force would be unjust aggression. On the other hand, there is territory that is unclaimed by any state, is uncultivated and undeveloped, and sparsely populated by nomadic peoples without even any incipient central political organization. This sort of territory could—under certain circumstances—be colonized. 

This too gives no support to any U.S. invasion of Greenland. Denmark has for centuries already had a claim over it (one long recognized by the U.S.). And even if it were given complete independence from Denmark, it would be considered an incipient state.

Then there are the reasons that Catholic theologians gave at the time of colonization for its purported legitimacy. Vitoria provides a classic treatment of these in his work On the American Indians. Some argued that the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope had legal jurisdiction over the whole world, and that the pope had given the New World to Spain (whose ruler, Charles I, was also the Holy Roman Emperor). Some argued that the American Indians had lost any right to the land because of their sins, or because of their refusal to become Christians. 

Vitoria presented compelling objections against these and other arguments, but he held that there were also some cases where conquest could be legitimate. One such case would be if the American Indians had themselves shown aggression toward Spaniards who were simply exploring territory; or if they had positively tried to prevent the Spaniards from spreading the gospel; or if Indian rulers were gravely oppressing their own people, for example, by practicing human sacrifice. Obviously, though, neither the arguments Vitoria rejects nor those he accepts have any application to the Greenland situation, nor do the Trump administration’s own arguments in any way resemble them. Once again, we have nothing here that provides justification for a U.S. war to annex Greenland. 

So, the claim that the history of the Catholic colonial powers provides a basis for defending a U.S. military action to seize Greenland is completely bogus. But there is one more argument that some commentators online have been trotting out. 

The Old Testament famously describes ancient Israel’s conquest of Canaan. This, some argue, provides a model for a legitimate American conquest of Greenland. But the comparison is absurd. In the scriptural account, the ancient Israelites were not acting on their own authority. Rather, they were acting under divine authorization, mediated through prophets. And since God has authority over life and death that no human being has, he may command certain things that no human being could do on his own authority. Nothing like that applies today—and indeed has not applied for over two millennia, given that the Church teaches that no prophets have been sent since Jesus. The Trump administration in particular can hardly claim divine authorization for a Greenland invasion.

There is, then, no theological support to be found for such an attack. It would clearly violate the traditional natural law criteria of just war doctrine. U.S. seizure of Greenland by military force would be as manifestly unjust a war as any in recent memory.

The post Church History Does Not Support Trump’s Expansionism appeared first on First Things.

By the time we traveled to Washington, this painful preoccupation had faded. Georgetown was a disappointment, but we visited the museums and monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial on our last night in the city. It was late when we visited, the grounds were deserted, and the solemn grandeur of the perpetually illuminated memorial was a revelation. But even more revelatory was my reaction to the chiseled writing on the limestone wall. With my sensitivity to the problem of schism seemingly behind me, I was unprepared for the devastation I felt when I read the dedication—IN THIS TEMPLE / AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE ­PEOPLE / FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION—and realized there had been no comparable person in Christendom.

In the year 1500, in Stourton Castle in Staffordshire, England, a third son was born to Sir Richard Pole and his wife, Margaret. A Plantagenet like his mother, and cousin to the reigning Henry VIII, young Reginald stood almost as close to the throne as the king himself, a double-edged privilege that would prove fatal to the Poles in the future. But in the early years of Henry’s reign, which augured stability and peace, the two families were bound by strong ties of affection. ­Reginald’s mother was a close confidante of the queen, as well as Princess Mary’s godmother and governess, and Reginald, whose father died when he was five, regarded his vigorous cousin with something like hero-worship. As for the king, he treated his young kinsman with indulgent affection, subsidizing his education at Oxford and later in Italy.

From an early age, Reginald was intended for the Church, but though he showed aptitude in that direction, he was a long time committing himself. His was a prolonged adolescence, underwritten by royal patronage and prestige. Despite the strong influence in his early life of men like John Colet and Thomas More, and despite the ominous contemporary challenges to the unity of the Church in Germany, Pole in his twenties was the kind of young Italian dilettante Erasmus dismissed as “more interested in literature than piety.” This began to change, however, when Henry, having showered his young protégé with the usual ecclesiastical preferments, looked for payback in the form of support for his divorce.

Playing for time, or perhaps genuinely unsure, Pole acceded to the king’s initial demands. In ­Paris, he was part of a successful diplomatic effort to enlist the faculty of the Sorbonne on the side of the king’s “great matter.” But Henry wanted more. In 1530, having recalled Pole to England, he offered him the archbishopric of York on condition that he declare his support for the divorce. A decisive meeting followed, during which Pole found himself literally speechless—an impediment he later attributed to divine Providence—and then, contrary to his intention to propose a compromise, he blurted out his opposition to the whole affair. Both men were shocked—the intensity of their shock testifying to the strength of their bond—and the king quit the room in a cold rage, leaving Pole in tears.

A few years earlier, testing the pliancy of the aristocracy, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s ­notorious enforcer, asked Pole what he considered the most important quality in a statesman, to which Pole earnestly replied: concern for his sovereign’s honor. Ridiculing Pole’s idealism, Cromwell told him to read Machiavelli, which Pole did and pronounced the author of The Prince “an enemy of the human race.”

Now Pole put his idealism to work. He wrote a long, carefully reasoned letter to the king, explaining his opposition and buttressing his concern for Henry’s honor with politically astute observations and predictions. The letter was eloquent enough that Thomas Cranmer, when he read it, said that if it were shared with the people, “it were not possible to persuade them to the contrary.” In the same letter, Pole asked permission to resume his studies in Italy, but the king, uncertain how best to neutralize Pole’s influence (keep him close, or send him away?), delayed his decision for almost a year. In the end, he let Pole go, and even reinstated his allowance, perhaps with an idea of buying his silence.

So Pole returned to Italy, to Padua where he had been happy in his youth, and eventually to Venice. He would not set foot in England again for more than twenty years.

In Italy, in the 1530s, Pole was increasingly drawn into the great theological debates of the age, including the controversy over justification, or the right relationship between faith and good works. It is important to remember that ­Martin Luther was not an anomaly in his generation, but only an extreme interpreter of a question that was preoccupying the whole of Christendom. If, in the history of the Church, there have always been individuals who suffer from scruples, agonize over moral choices, and even despair of their salvation, in sixteenth-century Europe this was a collective condition, a general crisis of spiritual anxiety set in motion by a Church that for too long had emphasized works at the expense of faith—the agency of the individual at the expense of an interior dependence on God—as if men had not only to earn but in some cases even to buy their salvation. The pressure this distorted theology placed on the individual Christian, a pressure aggravated by the same Church’s catastrophic dereliction of her pastoral duties, triggered across Europe a determined search for reassurance, and effectively opened the door to Protestantism. But committed Catholics, too, suffered the same anxieties and sought out the same remedies. Encouraged by John Colet and ­Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Étaples in Paris and Juan de Valdés in Spain, concerned individuals gravitated to small groups to pray and read the Scriptures together, with a special emphasis on the letters of St. Paul.

When Pole moved to Venice, he became part of just such a small group, a circle of ­reform-minded Catholics which included Gasparo Contarini, the Venetian statesman who would become the point man for Catholic reform in Italy; Gian Pietro ­Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV; and the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in whose gardens the group gathered. The intellectual stature of these clerics and laymen notwithstanding—picture a small, contemporary Bible study, half of whose members would shortly be made cardinals of the Church—the goals of the group were less intellectual than spiritual. Fundamentally, what Pole and his contemporaries were seeking was personal assurance of the saving mercy of Jesus Christ, the one sure solvent for the anxieties of the age. In the case of Contarini, who had undergone a crisis comparable to Luther’s, relief had come at the hands of a sensitive priest in a confessional, a resolution that explains Contarini’s unshakeable devotion to the sacraments, and his firm conviction that the Church could be reformed from within.

Pole’s breakthrough experience was less obviously ecclesial. A monk known to us only as Mark facilitated “a release from bondage,” “nurtured [Pole] in Christ,” and “[separated] human works from divine, redirecting everything to its one source.” If one wishes to make sense of Pole’s approach to Church reform in the future—his idealism or naivete, depending on one’s point of view—one has only to refer back to these watershed, charismatic experiences. From this point on, the ­Holy Spirit was never an abstraction for Pole, but a living, breathing Person capable of reinvigorating and redirecting an entire life.

Meanwhile, in England, Henry had annulled his marriage to Katherine, married Anne Boleyn, and broken with Rome, setting himself up as head of the English church. Never rash in his judgments, and concerned for the safety of his family, Pole remained silent on these developments. But privately, it was impossible for him not to compare the so-called reformation in England—a cynical power grab motivated by lust and greed—with the idealistic, soul-searching movements he was familiar with in Italy. Whether the men he now spent time with were committed to reforming the Church or tempted to leave her, all seemed to him motivated by genuine consternation over her condition, as well as by sincere, urgent questions about salvation and the true means of obtaining it.

It probably didn’t hurt either, as Pole’s disillusionment with Henry intensified, that Contarini and Carafa, both of whom were old enough to be Pole’s father, were filling a place in his emotional life that had long been occupied by Henry himself.

But if Pole, in his thirties, was finally growing away from the king, the king was not done with Pole. Maddened by his silence, Henry demanded again, through intermediaries, Pole’s approval of his affairs, and again Pole delayed, until the news came that changed everything: the beheadings of John Fisher and Thomas More. In the aftermath of the murders, Pole’s temporizing came to an end. Horrified by Henry’s butchery (“You have destroyed the best men of your kingdom, not like a human being, but like a wild beast”), he wrote a letter to the king that turned into a three-hundred-page book, charging Henry with his crimes, urging him to repent, and, if he should not repent, threatening to petition the pope to excommunicate him and the English nobility to rebel.

But the letter was not only a personal attack on the king. It was also a trenchant analysis of Henry’s politics and a passionate defense of papal primacy, issues Pole had been turning over in his mind for a long time. It is no accident that the common title of the missive is De Unitate, or De Unitate Ecclesiae (On the Unity of the Church), given that, from this point on, concern for the unity of Christendom would become the defining passion of Pole’s life. Whether or not he was familiar with the patristic adage that schism leads to heresy—an adage borne out in England when Henry’s son, Edward, succeeded him—Pole would have agreed with it. The Church, he now believed, needed to be ­united as well as reformed, and indeed, only in unity would real reform be possible. The dedication in the Lincoln Memorial makes the same case, ­prioritizing Lincoln’s preservation of national unity over his opposition to slavery. Because if the American South had successfully seceded, by what authority could the North have prohibited slavery in her territories? Similarly, if men leave the Church, how can she preserve them in truth? Once schism has been accomplished, the time for persuasion is past. When Henry separated his people from the Church, even before outright heresy came to power in his country, he opened the door to every kind of lawlessness, from the plundering of the monasteries to the undermining of the succession itself. The truth of these matters, Pole insisted, had been manifested by the deaths of Fisher and More. Martyrs to Church unity and the papal authority that guarantees it, they were God’s letter to England: “Writings from the finger of God . . . written not with ink but with blood.”

Once the letter was sent, ­consequences swiftly followed. Within three months, Pole and his Venetian companions were called to Rome, where the newly minted Cardinal Contarini charged them with producing a seminal document on Church reform. A month later, with the pope overriding his objections, Pole himself was made a cardinal and a legate to England, where a serious challenge to Henry’s schism was gathering momentum in the North.

The legation, for the time being, turned out to be a dead letter, as the Northern rebellion was put down and Pole tried and failed to return home, prevented by European politics and the necessity of eluding Henry’s kidnappers and cutthroats. When Cromwell read De Unitate, he swore he would make its author “eat his own heart,” and when he failed to lay hands on Pole himself, he and Henry took their revenge on Pole’s family. Pole’s oldest brother and a brother-in-law were beheaded, accused of plotting to marry Reginald to Princess Mary and put Mary on the throne. Pole’s mother survived Cromwell, whom Henry executed 1540, but in 1541 she, too, was beheaded, accused of the same intrigue as her son. Short of a martyrdom like More’s, the price Pole paid for his principled stand could hardly have been higher. An orphan now as well as an exile, he was also, so long as Henry lived, a hunted man.

Increasingly, in the years that followed, the Church was Pole’s home. In 1541, he was made governor of a papal state and moved to Viterbo, where he and his circle became known as the spirituali, a group that saw no contradiction between loyalty to the institutional Church and a radical, Pauline understanding of grace. The outcome the spirituali prayed for and worked toward was the integration of the orthodox elements of Lutheranism into the life and teaching of a purified Church, an eminently reasonable outcome in their view, given that, in Pole’s succinct phrase, “heretics be not in all things heretics,” or as Contarini had written as far back as 1537, many vehement Catholics, “­believing that they . . . contradict Luther, actually contradict St. Augustine, Anselm, Bernard [and] St. Thomas.”

When Contarini died in 1542, Pole became the group’s de facto leader and a spiritual counselor to many, including wavering individuals whom he persuaded to remain in the Church. A conciliator by nature, whose mind worked in syntheses (fides in caritate, “faith expressing itself in good works,” was a favorite phrase), in the years leading up to the Council of Trent he came up with his own mediating formulae. He counseled one troubled mentee, for example, “to believe that she could only be saved by faith, but to act as if she could only be saved by works.” Ploughed up by his own sufferings, and all too familiar with the tragic consequences of schism, Pole was both a respecter of consciences and a loyal son of the Church. But though he was beloved by those closest to him, and revered by many at a distance for his integrity and virtue, he was also, as positions hardened and the rupture in Christendom deepened, regarded with suspicion by a potent few, a minority that eventually included his friend and mentor, Carafa.

It was in Viterbo that Pole’s leniency first came under attack, with some in the College of Cardinals accusing him of harboring heretics and others muttering that too few people had been put to death during his governorship. In the verdict of one historian, it was Pole’s misfortune to be a conciliator in an age increasingly uninterested in conciliation. But to be fair to his detractors, by the 1540s in Europe there were strong reasons for concluding that a reunion of Christians was no longer possible. At an ecumenical colloquy in Regensburg in 1541, Catholic and Protestant delegates actually came to an accommodation about justification, but then failed to agree about everything else: the priesthood and the sacraments, the saints and the contemplative life. To an observer capable of reading the writing on the wall, it was not doctrine per se but the Church herself that was the real sticking point—the question “of whom this doctrine should be learned.” Here, Pole lamented in ­hindsight, “begins the greater trouble and dissension in religion.”

A year after Regensburg, the spirituali suffered an even more devastating blow: the apostasy of two of their own, popular preachers whom they had trusted to hold the line against heresy in ­Italy. When Peter Martyr Vermigli and ­Bernardino ­Ochino abruptly fled over the Alps, anyone less idealistic than Pole would have been forced to reconsider his position. But Pole, still committed to the soft ­power of patience, refused to relinquish his dream of unity. The Inquisition may have been reestablished, with Carafa as its head, but until the Church officially decided the disputed issues, surely the question of heresy remained open? Between hardline Catholics and rebellious Protestants, with individuals on both sides suspecting him of disingenuousness, Pole remained noncommittal. Unwilling to back a solution that excluded the Lutherans, he was waiting for the Church to speak, on the record, at a General Council.

The wait was long. Not until December 1545 did the first session of the council on which Pole had fastened all his hopes finally assemble at Trent, and when it did, simply getting there posed the usual challenges for Pole. With Henry’s assassins still on his trail, he had to send a decoy ahead, disguised as a cardinal, while he himself took an alternate route.

On arriving, Pole was disheartened by the size of the gathering. Trent was supposed to be an assembly of the universal Church, to speak on momentous matters, yet here were only four cardinals, four archbishops, and twenty-six bishops! More to the point, where were the Lutherans? In Pole’s view, to address the issue of justification without first listening to the Lutherans was to court catastrophe. But in the meantime there was an even more fundamental problem he was determined to address. As one of the three papal legates in charge of the council, Pole presided over its opening, and in January a speech he had written was read aloud by a secretary, a speech that deserves to be as famous as ­Campion’s Brag.

The council’s first order of business, Pole had written, must be repentance, “an unveiling of our sins,” with the assembled leadership taking responsibility for “the very evils we have been summoned to mend.” All of the evils in question—the spread of heresy in the untilled fields of the Church, her scandalous pastoral failures, and even the endless, futile wars between the emperor and the French king—Pole laid at the hierarchy’s feet, blaming all on “our ambition, our avarice, and our cupidity.” Judgment had begun with the house of God, he warned, and without heartfelt repentance, the council would end in failure. Why? Because only on a penitent Church would the Holy Spirit descend, and bring about the reforms and reunion they were incapable of bringing about by ­themselves . . .

Expecting the usual platitudes and blandishments, and certainly not expecting such a passionate exhortation from the usually reticent Pole, the council was transfixed. There was silence, and then all stood and began to sing Veni Sancte ­S­piritus (Come, Holy Spirit), and for a brief moment, Pole must have allowed himself to hope that his warning had been heard. But the moment passed, business as usual resumed, and his appeal went unanswered.

In the weeks that followed, Pole persevered in the council’s business, influencing an important early decision on the interdependence of Scripture and tradition. But as the time approached for the question of justification to be taken up, with the Lutherans still absent, his health broke down. He carried on a little longer, imploring the council in June to consider the issues impartially, to listen to the Lutherans or at least read some of their works, and to pray ever more earnestly for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But after this last, desperate appeal, having received from the Vatican permission to withdraw on account of his health, he left Trent and did not return.

Some historians, treating of Pole’s illness, have taken it at face value. Others have accused him of feigning and peevishness. Still others, while acknowledging the reality of his collapse, have used words like “psychosomatic” and “nervous breakdown.” But if Pole’s illness was psychosomatic, it was psychosomatic not only in the usual sense of the term. In Pole’s sensitive constitution, larger disturbances than personal disappointment were clearly at work. It might be most accurate to say that what was happening in Christendom was expressing itself in Pole’s person, even as the sin of schism­—in Christ’s words to St. Faustina describing his suffering on the cross­—“tore at [Christ’s] Body and Heart.” Whether Pole and his circle were right about the possibility of reunion is beside the point. Undoubtedly they were wrong, and things had gone too far to be retrieved—even if the Lutherans had been invited to the council, they would probably not have attended—but that would not have made the inevitable outcome any less devastating. Whatever was making Pole sick, it affected his heart, and left one side of his body—his left eye, shoulder, and arm—virtually paralyzed.

Interestingly, Pole’s close friend Alvise Priuli ­also suffered a breakdown at this time, leading one to wonder whether there were others who were similarly afflicted. Were there many ordinary Christians, in other words, caught between men like Carafa and Luther, who suffered, in their unrecorded lives, the traumatic disintegration of Christendom? One of the many reasons for becoming acquainted with Pole and his circle is the visceral reminder they afford us of the momentousness of schism: what it was like to live through it and, for some, like the spirituali, to have to find a way to go on living, on its other side.

The years following the council were difficult for Pole. His health improved but was never the same. Always obedient to the Church, he submitted to her decrees and ­eventually embraced them wholeheartedly, but the process of interior reconciliation cannot have been easy. Meanwhile, close friends died and opponents flourished. At the conclusion of a papal conclave in 1549—a conclave during which Pole came within one vote of the papacy and could have accepted the office by acclamation if he had not, characteristically, refused “to come in by the back door”—Carafa violently attacked him for his supposedly heretical opinions, an attack Pole easily refuted, but that left him shaken and depressed. His essential loneliness, he wrote later, was strongly brought home to him during that conclave, where he found himself surrounded by men with whom he had little in common, “neither country nor kindred.” Henry had died in 1547, but with Edward on the throne, a militant Protestantism was in power in England, and in any case, an attainder for treason and a warrant for Pole’s arrest were still in force. Relieved of the Viterbo governorship in 1551, and increasingly distant from the Curia, he disappeared for a time, only to turn up eventually at a Benedictine monastery on Lake Garda, where he is believed to have been discerning a vocation.

Only then, when his worldly career seemed to be coming to an end, did the unthinkable happen: Edward died, and Mary came to the throne. It was an outcome so improbable that Pole and many others judged it inexplicable apart from God’s will. After Edward’s death, his circle in London controlled the Tower, the Armory, the Treasury, and the Great Seal. They had put the Protestant Jane Grey on the throne and had the resources to defend her, while Mary, fearing for her life, had fled north with a few household servants. She was essentially alone in East Anglia, as the central government assembled an armed force of more the six thousand men to apprehend her.

Only the English people, at this point, could have put Mary on the throne, which they did, in a breathtaking reversal. At a time when the crime of sedition was punishable by the cruelest of deaths, gentry and commons alike rallied to her cause. The details of the shift in fortunes make for exhilarating reading, but for our purposes, the point is that Catholicism was not dead in England. On the contrary, in the country at large, Protestantism had failed to take root, and the joy that greeted Mary’s accession—the crowds that followed her to London, the feasting and the bonfires in the streets—were “hardly credible,” in the words of one ambassador. “From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna,” another wrote. “I am unable to describe to you, nor would you believe, the exultation of all men.”

It was a joy that embraced Pole, too, when he finally made his way home. When he landed at Dover, more than a year after he was reappointed legate to England—the emperor was orchestrating Mary’s marriage to his son and feared Pole’s ­interference—his progress to London resembled a triumphal procession. As he traveled, Parliament repealed the Act of Attainder against him, and within days of his arrival a delegation representing “the whole body of the realm” declared the country “repentant of the schism” and asked to be received again “into the bosom and unity of Christ’s Church.” Accordingly, on the feast of St. Andrew, with the new king and queen and a representative assembly kneeling before him, Pole formally absolved England of “all heresy and schism . . . in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

This happened at night, by torchlight, and again, the surging crowds in the streets, the tears and the joy, strained credulity. For Pole personally, the ceremony was undoubtedly the high point of his life. Not only had his country returned to the Church, he himself had been the instrument of her return. Moreover, his very instrumentality was the kind of ecclesial, sacramental charism he had sacrificed home and family to defend. If he had died that night, he would surely have died a happy man.

Instead, with the sacrament of reconciliation behind them, Mary’s and Pole’s real work began: the work of reversing the damage ­done to the Church under Edward. In his six years in power, in one of the largest government confiscations of private property in English history, churches and cathedrals had been stripped, altars pulled down, statuary and stained glass shattered, crucifixes and books ritually burned. The entire repertoire of sacred music had been swept away, vestments and consecrated vessels destroyed. The task of ­reconstructing the ­material world of Catholic worship was overwhelming, but there were political challenges as well—what to do, for example, about Church properties that had passed into private hands under Henry—and spiritual challenges above all, especially the need to educate and rehabilitate a demoralized clergy. Ever mindful of the scandalous capitulation of the episcopate under Henry, Pole wanted a new kind of bishop—­resident, pastoral, loyal to the pope, and orthodox—and a new kind of priest. He wanted sound preaching and ­effective catechesis, ­especially on issues dividing ­Catholics and Protestants. He wanted seminaries and vocations, and a return of tithes and First Fruits to the Church. Most of all, he wanted England’s return to orthodoxy to be an inspiration to a Christendom in disarray. If he had failed to prevent the breakup of the Church as a whole, he hoped to reverse the effects of schism in his own country. This was the opportunity England had been given, he exhorted Parliament in his first address: to be an example to other nations and a beacon of hope in discouraging times.

Indeed, what he and Mary accomplished in four years—with her Spanish husband often abroad, Mary met daily with Pole—was nothing short of astonishing. By the end of the reign, all of Pole’s projects were in hand: seminaries established and universities recalled to the faith, new bishops appointed and Catholic worship everywhere restored. The material restoration alone—the ­refashioning of crucifixes and books, vestments and sacred ­vessels—was an impressive achievement, if ­largely concealed from us by subsequent iconoclasm. Even the public burnings of outspoken heretics, the one horrifying stain on the regime, were effective, viewed as part of a larger, multi-pronged campaign to discourage dissent. In his revisionist history, Fires of Faith, which refutes dismissive assessments of Mary’s reign, Eamon Duffy goes so far as to call the burnings inevitable, since, with good reason, the regime identified hardline Protestantism with sedition.

But then why, if everything was going their way—hardcore heresy in retreat and vocations to the priesthood surging—did Pole and Mary fail? The simple answer is that Mary died, and ­Elizabeth reversed the restoration. But if Mary alone had died, Elizabeth, when she attempted to overturn what Mary had done, would have faced a formidable opponent in Pole, a man of sterling virtue who enjoyed widespread support, and in 1556 had been made archbishop of Canterbury. Not even Mary’s poor health and childlessness discouraged Catholics in those days, with Pole regarded as a strong defense against future reversals. It was not simply Mary’s death, in other words, but Pole’s death, coinciding with hers, that spelled the end of the Catholic restoration in England.

But there is more to say on the subject, because not only did Pole and Mary both die, they died on the same day. Secular historians pass over the ­startling coincidence as a curiosity, but for the Christian, believing as he does that God’s providence is the true driver of history—“All times belong to him and all the ages”—it is impossible to avoid an impression of divine judgment. Those burnings, in other words, that we are sometimes encouraged to excuse—280 all told, in less than four years—are we really to suppose that God approved of them? And even if it is true that no ruler of the time countenanced competing religions in his realm, and no pastor doubted that his first duty was to protect his flock from contagion, might not Reginald Pole have turned out to be the exception to those rules? Pole, after all, had resigned from the Inquisition because he could not approve of its methods. He was ­famous—notorious in some circles—for his patience and gentleness. He was a man who knew how to keep his own counsel and resist the pressure of his peers—a man of sorrows, accustomed to loneliness and misunderstanding. Moreover, like the Protestants whose strengths he appreciated, he was a man of the Scriptures, his thought permeated by the Bible, who might have countered the conventional wisdom that one brazen heretic can pollute a whole polity with the parable of the yeast in the dough, which proposes an opposite, if slowly fermenting, triumph of orthodoxy. He would have been familiar, too, with the parable of the wheat and the tares, which forbids premature uprootings and assigns the burning of the tares—the burning!—to the angels at the end of the age. Alone among his contemporaries, Pole had qualities that might have enabled him to rise above the brutal exigencies of the age, and when he did not, it is as though God simply said, No, not in this way will my Church be restored. Indeed God, who always takes the long view, was content to wait three hundred years for Catholicism to return to England, and then only as a minority religion.

Some early commentators, beginning with John Foxe, portrayed Pole as a bystander and blamed the burnings on Mary alone, but subsequent scholarship rendered that position untenable. More recent historians, while acknowledging Pole’s complicity, insist that there is no real contradiction between early and late Pole, and attribute the apparent discontinuity to the different responsibilities assumed by Pole along with hard power. Others have pointed out that the heretics Pole confronted in England were very different from the anguished waverers he had been accustomed to counseling in Italy. By the time he came home, English Protestantism was organized and defiant, publicly blasphemous and often violent: Animals dressed as priests were strung up in the streets, a preacher was knifed at Paul’s Cross and a priest attacked with a machete during Mass, and there were widespread outrages against the Eucharist. Horrified by the violence, and the belligerence that seemed to him devoid of all humility and charity, Pole may have judged his earlier self naive, and so resigned himself to the harsh measures the times prescribed.

But there are other possible explanations, which are part of a larger story. In the years following the first session of Trent, as the Inquisition gained strength, it turned its attention to the remnant of the spirituali. Ever since Viterbo, Pole had been suspected by certain clerics. But once the Church had officially spoken on the issues, at a time when “development of doctrine” was a formula far in the future, individuals who had come to the council with views the council subsequently condemned, found themselves subject to a retroactive, intensifying persecution. Rumors about Pole multiplied and spread, malicious fictions probably fanned by Carafa. On the advice of the pope, Pole chose not to defend himself, until, one Lenten evening in 1553, he and Carafa unexpectedly crossed paths in a church in Rome. A two-hour conversation followed, at the end of which Carafa declared himself convinced and confessed that he had been mistaken. Afterwards he assured his colleagues on the Inquisition that Pole was blameless.

In the aftermath of the reconciliation, it is Pole’s emotional reaction that is revealing. From the ­poignant intensity of his joy and relief—relief at being exonerated, and joy at being received again into the good graces of Carafa’s friendship—we can infer how great his suffering had been. Clearly, years of defamation and loneliness had taken their toll. In England a year later, when he found himself in an unaccustomed position of power, there may have been many reasons for his pursuing the policies he did, but psychological and emotional reasons were surely among them.

Pole was no coward. He had lived for years under a sentence of physical death. But after a lifetime devoted to promoting the unity of the Church, his own unity with her was now seriously imperiled. In 1557, after Carafa had become Pope Paul IV, he turned on Pole again, in a half-crazed, murderous frenzy reminiscent of Henry VIII. Revoking Pole’s legation, he tried to extradite him from England in order to feed him to the Inquisition, and failed only because Mary refused to let Pole go.

For Pole, the situation would have been unbearably familiar. (“Two men,” he wrote incredulously, in a long letter to Carafa, “I worshipped . . .”) But this time the sordid drama was playing out in the Church itself, with the reigning pope—the earthly father above all earthly fathers—determined to excommunicate him. And how did he defend himself? In the same letter to Carafa in which he compared him to Henry (a letter he never sent, because “Thou shalt not reveal the nakedness of thy father”), Pole defended his orthodoxy by pointing to his campaign against heresy in England, a campaign, in his words, entirely devoted to the protection of the faithful.

No longer, in other words, was Pole the person standing in the breach, trying to mediate antagonisms, accused by Protestants of being a Nicodemus (one who acknowledges the truth only by night) and by Catholics of being a secret Protestant. After long years in exile, he was home, with his own people: a late-life experience of belonging that may have affected him, and his decision-making, more than he knew. Certainly, in England, he became more like everyone else, not by choosing sides exactly, because in fact he had always chosen the Church, but by pursuing policies that made it perfectly clear which side he was on.

The irony is that when he became more like everyone else—when he set limits to what would be tolerated and pursued the worldly strategy of the burnings—he died. In this conclusion, there is something reminiscent of Moses, who, for a far less significant failure of fidelity—yet a failure of the same kind, a failure to manifest God’s holiness to the people in his charge—was prevented from entering the Promised Land. Pole, too, in England, died on the near side of a metaphorical Jordan, prevented from seeing any of the fruits of his labors.

He did not live to see, for example, the exemplary fidelity of his bishops, who, at the price of their freedom, exactly reversed the arithmetic of the episcopacy under Henry. When Henry ­demanded fealty, all but one bishop apostatized; under ­Elizabeth, all but one stood firm.

Nor did he live to see the influence of his reforms in England on the future of the Church as a whole. Ideas that were first entertained in a small Bible study in Venice ended by inspiring the final sessions at Trent. So many of the hallmarks of post-Tridentine Catholicism that we take for granted—seminaries above all, but also a strong papalism and an anchoring reverence for the ­Eucharist—were nurtured under Pole, in a country Eamon Duffy called “a laboratory for counter-­reformation experimentation.”

From subsequent generations, too, Pole’s achievements have been concealed. Compared with the posthumous notoriety of Henry VIII—a main character in an endless churn of Tudor ­entertainments—Pole’s posthumous reputation resembles an unmarked grave.

In fact, he is buried in Canterbury Cathedral, in the chapel of Thomas Becket, another saint like Thomas More who, for speaking hard truths to power, went out in a remembered blaze of ­martyred glory. Though he spoke truth with the best of them, Pole was not martyred. His ­assassins having missed their mark, he had to live on and on in the very different, fractured world his king bequeathed him. If he had been murdered, he would probably be counted a saint, having been spared the difficult decisions he faced in England.

But if he died an apparent failure, his legendary charity compromised and his dream of a Catholic England indefinitely postponed, he died at peace. Not even the news of Mary’s death and all it portended disturbed the tranquil resignation of his departure. In the anonymity of his afterlife—the quiet obscurity to which he has been consigned—there is something like the contemplative life he might have chosen, had the choice been his. Instead, in obedience, he tried to do what was asked of him. Now, at leisure, he contemplates what followed, in the strong light of the just judgments of God.

The post The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole appeared first on First Things.

A Catholic priest is ordained to give God. The priest exists to mediate in the name and power of the one Mediator—to be an instrument who gives glory to God in sacrifice and the grace of God to souls. At every ordination, each new priest, just moments after being ordained and clothed in priestly vestments, kneels before the bishop, who slathers the priest’s palms with perfumed chrism and exhorts: “May the Lord Jesus Christ, whom the Father anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, guard and preserve you, that you may sanctify the Christian people and offer sacrifice to God.” Such became the ambit of my activity henceforth. Such became the concerns of my heart.

For every newly ordained priest, hands still fragrant, the first months of ministry are precious. There is the awe of the first confession and the fanfare of the first Mass, and perhaps other ­Masses of Thanksgiving and celebrations, too. But it is always the deeper mystery at hand that is so striking. For the new priest begins to perform acts he ­previously could not have performed in any respect. I had ­prepared for these acts for some seven years but had never actually done them. One cannot ­simulate instrumentality. So I, the new priest, must act. I must do the priestly things, at once confident in the God who has ordained me and humble ­before the God who is yet saving me. “Understand what you will do, imitate what you will celebrate, and conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s Cross,” the bishop also told each of us, passing ­into our ­anointed hands a paten and chalice filled with bread and wine, the principal tools of our new trade.

In my Dominican province, the Province of St. Joseph in the Eastern United States, it is common for newly ordained friars to be tasked with two months of intense pastoral ministry before returning to Washington, D.C., for a final year of studies in theology. Usually, one priest is sent to the Dominican Healthcare Ministry, an apostolate and bioethics center based on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that provides spiritual care to patients at several hospitals throughout the city. Such was my lot in the summer of 2024.

For the new priest, hospital ministry is a plunge into the deep. First, compared to the priest’s ordinary orbit, the hospital is strange. The smells and bells of the patient floor are not those of the sanctuary. A white thirteenth-century habit with a ­fifteen-decade rosary swinging from the side announces itself among scrubs and white coats. It ­signifies a different kind of physician-ship, ordered to a different though complementary end. The body, after all, exists for the sake of the soul, and the soul for the sake of God. Order and priority: The good of grace in just one soul, St. Thomas Aquinas explains, exceeds the good of nature in the entire universe.

Second, there is no warm-up at the hospital. My orientation meeting at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was interrupted by an emergency call for a patient who was actively dying. I was not the priest on duty, but I was the priest most immediately available. So I was instructed to go up—orientation could wait. Later that day, a ­Spanish-speaking patient returned to the sacraments for the first time in some sixty years. These sorts of things, I would soon learn, occur frequently. God is serious about his desire to go the distance, to save all and bring all to full knowledge of the truth, especially in the final moments. Which actually happened on one emergency call at 2:30 a.m., when a woman expired just as the last drops of baptismal water graced her head, poured from a pill cup no less, in the presence of fourteen members of her family. Heaven enveloping earth—now, at the hour of death, right before our bleary eyes.

Memorial Sloan Kettering, which the Dominican Healthcare Ministry serves day and night all year round, excels in its area of expertise. Everyone who has been to Sloan, whether as patient, family, employee, or visitor, knows this. Go to any floor of the main hospital at 1275 York Ave., and competence abounds. The environment is energetic, hopeful. Doctors conduct research and perform trial treatments that are available nowhere else, and adept and cheerful nurses wear T-shirts that read, “imagine a world without cancer.”

Yet the obvious, uncomfortable truth remains that the human mortality rate is absolute. Modern medicine, with all its marvels, can heal and enhance human life but, in the end, only delays the inevitable. “If we ever do achieve freedom from most of today’s diseases, or even complete freedom from disease,” wrote Lewis Thomas, onetime president of Memorial Sloan Kettering, “we will perhaps terminate by drying out and blowing away on a light breeze, but we will still die.”

Cancer is peculiar among diseases that kill. Viruses, bacterial infections, parasites—these cause death from without. Heart disease, organ failure, and genetically transmitted illnesses are closer to cancer, for in these cases, the body gives way of itself. And then there are the autoimmune diseases, which, like cancer, attack the body from within, but, unlike cancer, do so through an immune system tricked into assailing what is itself healthy.

For all the harm these afflictions wreak, the physical evil at work in cancer is more profound. For cancer is life turning against itself at its core. The DNA of a healthy cell—that most basic ­material principle of life—mutates, and then the cell divides and divides and divides, multiplying with chronic vigor. These new mutant cells, which can begin in almost any tissue or organ, do not buttress the life of the organism of which they are part, as cells are designed to do. No, they mock it. Like parasites produced by one’s own body, cancer cells can evade immuno-detection and shirk the natural death cycle that healthy cells obey. In turn, cancer cells can replicate infinitely, inundating one’s body with what is inimical to one’s body. It is sick irony: By their immortality, cancer cells reap our mortality—from manic mitosis to malignant mass to metastasis to the morgue. Only then does cancer finally die.

Considered in the light of divine revelation, cancer may well be the most primordial lethal curse consequent on Adam’s sin. Though cancer does not figure much in the Scriptures (the Philistines ­suffer an outbreak of tumors after capturing the Ark of the Covenant in 1 Samuel 5), death figures from the outset: “You shall not eat of the fruit . . . neither shall you touch it, lest you die” (Gen. 3:3). But they touched and ate, and so we who are dust must return to dust. If a man is not killed by another organism, a natural disaster, or a freak accident, or by the failure of his own organism, the very principle of his life will revolt against him. His own cells will destroy him.

When a priest leads an OCIA class or a marriage preparation meeting, death is mostly an abstraction. It is something we need saving from, yes, but something still far off. In the hospital, however, and especially the cancer ward, the Catholic priest must deal with death directly. Usually, there is time to broach the subject with patients and family: the diagnosis, the prognosis, the ultimate implications, both physical and spiritual. And naturally, patients vary in their willingness to face what lies before them. Some are aware and preparing: “I trust in God, Father, and am coming to terms with this.” Others exhibit a stoic indifference: “We all have to die.” Yes, but what of dying well? Still others stand in denial: “I’m fine. I’ll beat this and get back out there. I have more things to do.” And then? Or if not?

No one can avoid ultimate questions. But in our age, so underinformed on spiritual matters, these questions have become all the more intimidating. When the crucible comes, many fumble about, despairing of real answers and trying to “­meaning-make” their way to a noble death. Yet the truth is that we are not left to our own devices in our search for answers. God himself has already made the meaning. Moreover, God has commissioned the priest to manifest that ­meaning—not because the priest of himself has particularly keen insights into the nature of disease or the ­meaning of life and death, but because the priest bears God’s insights, which impart God’s peace. Because there are, in fact, real answers: God’s providence is infallibly good. No diagnosis, and no response to treatment, is an accident in his loving plan. And God really has appointed death as our ultimate and universal punishment since Adam, though only to unveil a greater glory: that he should redeem us from eternal death in and through the death and resurrection of his Beloved Son, and in and through our own death and resurrection in him. These soaring, saving truths converge in chiaroscuro mystery: Earthly life ends in darkness, even as the light of eternal life dawns. And here we stand together—patient, family, medical staff, priest—at the threshold.

The austerity of this mystery struck me at the beginning of the summer, at that very first orientation-interrupting call. But the impression only intensified over the next two weeks, when, almost daily, I would visit Jack, a gregarious and athletic twenty-three-year-old man from Long Island suffering from neuroblastoma, a rare, typically childhood cancer. I met him on my second day at Sloan, three weeks exactly from the ordination and only about an hour before celebrating a Saturday evening Mass of Thanksgiving across the street at the Dominican Church of St. Catherine of Siena. Jack’s referral sheet read “­declining condition,” and when I walked in, he was very weak, and his mother, his older sister, and her fiancé were seated around his bed. The room was heavy. I didn’t know it, but the night before, one of his doctors had reported that Jack’s liver was failing, and all options were exhausted.

Jack had been battling for more than two and a half years, since his senior year of college, but in recent months, his cancer had pulled ahead decisively, though only physically. For after his initial diagnosis, Jack had come completely alive in the Catholic faith of his upbringing. He began, whenever he was able, to join his father at daily Mass. He studied the Scriptures, watched apologetics­ ­videos, and read theology and the lives of the saints. And then he discussed these things over long walks with his father, and while hanging out with his sister and brother and friends, and at a men’s prayer group at a nearby parish, and in so many priceless moments with his mother, who, herself a nurse, cared for him indefatigably at home and in the hospital. The result was that Jack began to see and embrace God’s ­purposes at work in and through his sufferings. And with his humor and charm, Jack spurred others to join him—from his ­extended family and large circle of friends, to fellow patients in Sloan’s pediatric unit, to his own doctors and nurses, whom he spared neither the daggers of his wit nor the double-edged sword of the gospel. He once dared ask his mother, who was grappling with his worsening state: “Mom, whom do you love more, God or Jack? You know the right answer.” And when there was hesitation, he doubled down and asked again.

Eleven days after I met Jack, God forced our hands on this central question. He had prepared Jack with all the rites of the Church and a speck of Holy Communion for a final meal. And then, early in the fourth watch of the night, as Jack’s family and nurses kept bedside vigil, God consumed Jack in a blazing fire of divine love and human suffering (Heb. 12:29, Song of Sol. 8:6). It was a pleasing offering, a holy death: one beloved son by divine grace, conformed to another Beloved Son by divine nature. Had Jack recovered—an outcome for which so many had prayed and from which much goodness and spiritual fruit surely would have come—Jack’s life would have been too human, too this-worldly, too predictably heroic. God’s ways are more mysterious, more cruciform, more sublime.

The night Jack died, he appeared in near-­perfect health in the dreams of two of his closest friends. “Jack, you look great. You beat the cancer!” one friend exclaimed in his dream. “Yeah, I pulled through,” Jack affirmed, but with his eyes down, as if he knew something his friend did not yet know. In the morning, both friends awoke to a group text from Jack’s younger brother delivering the news. Mysterious, cruciform, sublime. Which spoke for itself at his wake and funeral, packed with hundreds of family, friends, peers, even nurses from Sloan, each pondering what Martha and Mary pondered at their loss: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, 32). But the Lord had in fact been there all along, right in the thick of it, and our task was to ponder how—to make sense of what God had just done through Jack, and of what Jack had just done with God.

“Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” Jesus said to those gathered outside Lazarus’s tomb before he raised the man from the dead (John 11:40). The responsibility of the Catholic priest is to point to the glory of God—to help others see what God is really doing beneath the surface, at the deepest level of things—and to make this glory really present through the sacraments.

The preeminent virtue that the priest must bring to the hospital, then, is living faith. “We walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), and never more intensely than at the hour of our death, the hour of glory (John 17:1–3). Because at death, whether one’s own or that of a loved one, the sheer invisibility of the gospel addresses us in its purest form. The naked eye sees only a living body, racked, about to reach its end. And as death closes in, an entire life’s worth of misdeeds and regrets can return in a frontal assault. The horror. What comes next—for me, or for my loved one?

But the mind illumined by faith beholds an eternal horizon opened up by the mercy of God at work in the cross of Christ. By this faith, the hospital priest understands that he spends his days at the foot of Calvary, “the place of the skull.” He looks death in the face again and again, though never alone. Rather, the priest stares down death together with the Living One, the Conqueror, who died but now holds the keys of death and Hades in victory (Rev. 1:18).

So poised, the priest testifies to what he sees when he looks at death with Christ. With a conviction and compassion that render him credible, he encourages the patient lying before him that death is not the end, that the deathbed is, in truth, an altar, a living crucifix, and that Christ looks back in love from highest heaven, beckoning us to offer ourselves with him and so come to him. And then the priest, as only he can, makes present the full power of Calvary by performing the saving signs thereof: I Absolve You . . . Through This Holy Anointing . . . The Body of Christ. Through these sacred acts, the priest outdoes his own humanity: He forgives what no man can forgive, heals what no doctor can heal, and feeds as no food can feed. “If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever” (John 6:51).

Inevitably, a priest is affected by his ministry, as also the Incarnate Word, our great high priest, was affected by his ministry. He marveled; he wept; he sweated blood; he died in ministry. And above all, he was perfected in love through his ministry—not that he ever loved imperfectly, but rather that he performed greater and greater acts of love, until he performed the greatest act of love a man ever has performed or ever will.

Every priest is privileged to experience something of Christ’s priestly affections. The holier the priest, it would seem, the more profound his experience, but for the new priest at least, for whom everything is so novel, this deeper love he has begun to share with Christ is to be especially savored. He sees, through the new lens of his instrumentality, that the same redemption God is working in his own soul, God is also working, through his ­unworthy hands, in the souls of others. He likewise sees how the truths of faith that he has contemplated and studied with great fervor for many years are both real and useful for souls. Because only the truth sets free, only the truth has grace, only the truth perfects in love.

In the hospital, everything is intensified because the finish line is approaching. We cannot flee from the finish line but must run toward it in faith. There, ministering on the homestretch, I found that for the believer who is prepared to ­exit this life, death is often easier to accept than it is for the loved ones who are looking on. Patients pronounce striking utterances. One man in his late seventies—a retired contractor and heavy-machine operator fondly described by his son as a “hot dog connoisseur”—looked forward blankly after receiving Holy Communion and declared before a full room, “God is present.” A formulation, his son assured, that was not in his father’s register. The man died a few days later. Another time, a rapidly declining forty-two-year-old woman, who had desired to convalidate her seven-year civil union into a sacramental marriage, came to clarity of mind just long enough to exchange vows with her husband during a ceremony in her hospital room. (The nurse even brought up a cart of celebratory treats from the café.) When it was her turn, the bride answered “Yes!” five times over, then added the only two words prescribed: “I do.” Already anointed and no longer able to eat, she died the next morning—a seventeen-hour marriage, the last sacrament she received. And then there was the forty-seven-year-old wife and mother of two who signed her last will and testament, confidently professed the creed, and received full last rites with the apostolic pardon and viaticum, all about an hour before she died.

For the loved ones who look on, seeing God accomplish such works up close has its own impact. Many family members open up to the light of faith through their exposure to suffering. The dying point them to life beyond the veil. And by grace, those who remain can come to see that notwithstanding death’s sting, what has happened is ultimately good, because St. Paul’s assertion to the Philippians is true: “to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). So much so that when one helps others attain that gain enough times, one mysteriously begins to wish it for oneself. “To depart and be with Christ—it is much better” (Phil. 1:23). But we do need priests, and so “it is more necessary that I remain in the flesh” (Phil. 1:24).

God knows what he is about. In ways that exceed human understanding, he unites us to himself precisely through the scourge of death. “I have cancer,” the elderly woman ­announced—freshly absolved, anointed, and ­communicated—from her hospital bed high above York Avenue. “But cancer is not the sickness. Cancer is the cure. Because cancer brings you close to God.”

Such is the logic of the cross, the true logic of our life on this earth. “When I am lifted up,” Jesus promised, “I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). For some, God uses cancer unto death to draw them once and for all, as in the case of a daughter of Hungarian gypsies, who was born into Nazi captivity and reared in communist ­atheism but baptized, confirmed, and anointed on her deathbed in the ICU. For others, God uses cancer unto discharge, sending them back into his vineyard, at least for a time—like the faithful captain of an FDNY ladder company forced into early retirement by cancer from 9/11, his second day on the job, or the tech executive, also with 9/11 cancer (he was working in the towers), who returned to a beautiful practice of the faith after decades away. And down the line, whether they reach remission or return for readmission—as did the captain, who died with such grace last June—God still knows what he is about. For the lifting up only began on Calvary. It was perfected on the third day, and especially forty days after that.

Fourteen months after Jack’s passion and death, God granted a taste of resurrection. Jack’s older sister married her fiancé, and there, for the first time since Jack’s services, we all were together again—Jack’s family and friends, including the two who saw him in their dreams, and even one of his ­nurses from Sloan. Jack, too, made his presence known. During the homily, which made reference to him, the lights suddenly flickered. They flickered again when the newlyweds recessed: a double sign, we dared to hope, of the family forerunner at the nuptial banquet on high, descending to grace another with his approval. Because God knows what he is about.

This magnificent mystery of salvation through suffering goes widely unknown in our day. Assisted suicide proliferates, and so many slide into serious error about the true ­meaning of life and death, either unaware or in denial of the divine glory at hand. “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” (John 11:40).

We know there is much work, indeed much praying and preaching and policymaking, to be ­done. But we also take confidence from the fact that God yet accomplishes his greatest wonders where few, if any, are there to witness—as in the hospital room, through the ministrations of the priest, especially at the end of life. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). Salvation, after all, is clinched only at the end, in the final moment before death. The priest wants to be there. The priest exists to be there, to give God’s presence there: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).

The post Cancer and the Cure of Souls appeared first on First Things.

Our flight from reality has other and earlier ­sources, however. As Henry Vander Goot details in Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought, a great deal of modern theology has turned its back on God’s creative work. Theologians concede the task of analyzing reality to modern science, purporting to focus on the greater truth of salvation in Christ. The effect, Vander Goot argues, is acquiescence in a practical atheism beneath the veneer of a “personal relationship with Jesus.”

Vander Goot’s nemesis is Karl Barth. Vander Goot argues that the great Swiss theologian overdetermined his thought in reaction to National Socialism. By Barth’s reckoning, German Christians were susceptible to blood and soil ideology, because they had already been seduced by “natural theology.” The notion of a created nomos paves the way for the perversion of a Volksnomos. Barth’s solution was to absorb creation into salvation history. From the very beginning, God was “saving” reality from the dark void of “nothingness.” In Vander Goot’s reading of Barth, redemption in Christ becomes the be-all and end-all of Christian revelation. In practical terms, this “Christomonism” means that theology does not contend with secular academic culture’s statements about everything else, ceding the terrain. Again, a practical atheism reigns.

As Vander Goot recognizes, there were deeper forces at work in twentieth-century theology than the crisis of National Socialism. At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant claimed to solve the difficulties in Enlightenment theories of knowledge, which swung uneasily between dogmatic rationalism and despairing skepticism. Kant shifted the quest for certainty away from our perception of things, urging us to place our trust in the ways in which we analyze and synthesize our mental images of things. Put differently, according to Kant, we don’t know things “objectively.” To use his terminology, we can’t know the “thing-in-itself.” Rather, we know things rationally, which is to say in accord with reason’s a priori patterns, which impute cause and effect and other relations.

 Kant developed an elaborate technical vocabulary to describe these forms of understanding, but we need not be detained by the details. More important is the overall effect. After Kant, philosophical emphasis fell on how we think rather than on what the world is like. Very quickly, philosophers questioned Kant’s presumption that reason’s pre-set patterns are universal. Having articulated the project of modern idealism (the mind frames reality), Kant opened the way for the many modern reflections on how our thinking is shaped by historical, social, and psychological factors. 

Karl Barth’s theology had tremendous influence in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He ­defended the “realism” of God’s revelation in Christ, which was an exciting break from liberal theology. But he did so without challenging Kant’s anti-realism, his strictures against knowledge of things-in-themselves. This accommodation of modernity was as much a source of Barth’s influence as his theological bravado.

Vander Goot offers an especially astute assessment of Jürgen Moltmann, who followed in Barth’s footsteps. Vander Goot wryly notes that “the future” is the topic of Moltmann’s book, The Future of Creation—not creation as we experience it here and now. In this conception of Christianity, the power of reality rests in the future, the coming realization of Christ’s lordship over all things. Theology is thus excused from the task of describing (and defending) the order and distinction of things established “in the beginning” by God’s creative Word. Again, the upshot may be lots of theological talk about Christ, but everything else falls under the authority of science. Practical atheism.

Vander Goot does not wish to gin up a revival of Aristotelian metaphysics. He endorses an aspect of Kant’s skepticism about knowledge of things-in-themselves, noting that we lack firm bases on which to determine which metaphysical schemes are correct and which are misguided. But we are not unmanned. Following ­Calvin (and the Dutch Reformed tradition), Vander Goot holds that Scripture provides Christians with a divinely authorized construction of reality, as it were, one that avoids metaphysical conundrums and vindicates things as they appear.

The inspired text authorizes us to trust our common-­sense perceptions. The matter-of-fact tenor of the creation account in Genesis licenses us to reason about the nature of things without worrying about philosophical foundations. Moreover, the first chapter of Genesis does not encourage speculative efforts to get underneath or above what we experience. Vander Goot quotes Calvin to good effect: “It must be remembered that Moses does not speak with philosophical acuteness on occult mysteries, but related those things which are everywhere observed, even by the uncultivated, and which are in common use.” Moses was the first ­common-sense realist.

St. John Paul II often spoke of the anthropological crisis of modernity, our confusion about what it means to be human. He regularly cited a passage from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, which teaches that we discover the truth of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. I don’t think Vander Goot would disagree. But he recognizes that modernity has fomented a metaphysical crisis, a despairing sense that we cannot know the stable, enduring place in which we live out our lives. Modern science offers little consolation, because most presume that its tacit metaphysics is a mute materialism, epitomized by Richard Dawkins’s metaphor of a blind watchmaker.

Vander Goot warns against too much talk of the ­doctrine of creation. By his reckoning, Scripture authorizes us simply to talk about things, all things, as Christians formed by the self-same Scripture. He ­recommends what the Church Fathers called Christian philosophy, by which they did not mean an academic discipline, but the wisdom that arises when the eyes of faith are trained on all things—and report what they perceive.

I would add liturgical worship to Scripture as the divinely authorized means by which our perceptions of reality are trained and sharpened. And I’m inclined to defend the precision found in the Catholic tradition of natural law, which Vander Goot criticizes. But we should take to heart the larger point of Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought. Vander Goot often returns to an epigram: “Life is religion.” God asks us to live in accord with his creative will, here and now. This vocation will not get us to heaven. But it is religious nonetheless, because it cleaves to the order and purpose God has ordained “in the beginning.” That God has ­done more, that he offers us fellowship, despite our sin and defilement, is another matter, more important, to be sure, but distinct. And this offer does not efface or supersede the way things are. As St. Thomas teaches, grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.

The post Recovering a Christian World appeared first on First Things.

It is popularly held that religion is a matter of individual and collective feeling and that all historical religions are merely culturally dependent expressions of these feelings. In this vein, no religion is deemed to have a monopoly on truth. But the Church positions itself as the authority appointed by God precisely because it understands itself as the divinely mandated teacher of the revelation given once and for all in Christ and, therefore, as the sacrament of salvation in him. 

In his final major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, the new Doctor of the Church John Henry Newman gave Catholic hermeneutics a modern form. Today, however, the error of double truth often reappears under the guise of a “paradigm shift.” While such shifts may be appropriate for theory formation in the natural sciences, where hypotheses are provisional, their application to theology is disastrous, as theology is grounded in the definitive fullness of truth and grace revealed in Christ. Modern philosophies such as those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which make truth dependent on perspective or on its disclosure within a particular historical epoch, render truth time-bound. Christ, by contrast, is the truth in person, revealed in the fullness of time. In him, all epochs of salvation, ecclesiastical life, and doctrinal development are united within the Church’s consciousness of faith across past, present, and future. By assuming human nature, the Son of God brings every believer and the whole Church into direct communion with the one true God, who in the unity of his divinity and humanity encompasses all ages.

One destructive consequence of the doctrine of double truth is the demand that pastoral care take precedence over the revealed truths of faith and morality, such that what is dogmatically true can be pastorally false, and vice versa. For example, marriage between a man and a woman is recognized to be grounded in the Logos of the Creator and Redeemer, in whom all things came into being. Yet, for supposed pastoral reasons (namely, the subjective well-being of individuals), homosexual couples may be led into the illusion that their objectively sinful relationship is nevertheless blessed by God. 

To provide another example: On the one hand, the Church professed in Vatican II the hierarchical and sacramental constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium). On the other hand, the Synod of Bishops is at times treated as a forum of participants from all and any areas of the Church, whose opinions are then, contrary to genuine episcopal collegiality, endowed by the pope with the authority of the ordinary magisterium. Yet the ordinary magisterium properly refers to the regular proclamation of revealed truths by the bishops in communion with the pope (for example, preaching the Incarnation of the Son of God at Christmas), not to the promotion of their private political views. Nor can the Church in Germany call itself Catholic while the Synodal Council, a humanly constituted decision-making body, undermines the teaching authority and jurisdiction of the bishops under divine law (iuris divini) and effectively allows the episcopal office to dissolve within an Anglican-style parliamentary structure.

One cannot separate Christ as teacher of truth from Christ as good shepherd in a neo-Nestorian manner, for he is one and the same divine person who both teaches divine truth and grants his disciples the divine life of grace, conversion, and renewal in the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, we must overcome the dualistic opposition between dogma and pastoral care, between truth and life. We must also guard our thinking and judgment against ideological categories that divide the one and undivided body of Christ, the Church, into traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and liberals.

Apostolic tradition recognizes progress under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church’s understanding of revelation, especially through the preaching of those who, in succession to the apostolic office, have received the sure charism of truth. Only in the one and same Christ, however, is the full depth of truth about God and the salvation of humanity revealed, since he is “both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (Dei Verbum).

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Conversion is a gift of grace, yet human hands participate in God’s providence. In her new book, Melanie McDonagh provides a narrative for the rise of converts between the 1890s and the 1950s. Similar accounts have been given before—notably Joseph Pearce’s Literary Converts—but McDonagh’s book is peculiarly ambitious in bringing to light the conversion stories of all kinds of artists and intellectuals: writers, painters, poets, philosophers. 

The book covers the most likely factors: the influence of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement; the search for meaning prompted by the horrors of the two world wars; the desire for a connection to one’s national past as England entered the modern age. And though she plays the role of broad-stroke sociologist, McDonagh’s forte lies in meticulous biography. She chooses fifteen influential figures, from artists to writers to academics, and recounts their stories in light of the single most defining event of their lives: conversion. 

For most of the twentieth century, becoming a Catholic was seen as an eccentricity at best; at worst it resulted in ostracism. In a Daily Express article “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me,” Evelyn Waugh listed some of the standard charges against converts: “The Jesuits got hold of him,” or “He is captivated by the ritual.” A certain kind of twentieth-century existential dread is often cited as another catalyst: George Orwell thought that, for idealists, Catholicism had a similar appeal to communism. The charge of sentimentalism was a common one, too. 

McDonagh tells stories of conversion that don’t square with these stereotypes. Many of the characters in Converts, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that “The ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree”; Maurice Baring was “less interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments” and declared that “candles and incense never did . . . affect me”; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a “rational” approach to his faith, “remarkable for a lack of emotion”; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was “dogmatic rather than emotional.”

This kind of intellectual conversion often had something to do with the trauma of the two world wars. McDonagh observes that conversion numbers were particularly high in times of political uncertainty. Catholicism provided not only an eschatological sense of hope but also a tie to a forgotten national identity. The priest and writer R. H. Benson was one of many who became disillusioned with the Church of England’s variety of beliefs and was attracted to Catholicism’s “continuity with the pre-Reformation church”; Baring, McDonagh tells us, “was moved by the sense that he was returning to the old religion of England.”

Perhaps no one was as incisive as Waugh, who went as far as to say that, in the 1930s, it was “no longer possible . . . to accept the benefits of civilisation and at the same time to deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests . . . Christianity is essential to civilisation.” Around a decade later, T. S. Eliot would make a similar claim in The Idea of a Christian Society, but he would emphasize that society couldn’t be saved from collapse if it meant instrumentalizing the Christian religion. “To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.” Almost a century on, such debates about the role of cultural Christianity are as relevant as ever.

McDonagh’s book ends with the decline of conversions: “Whether in reaction to the liturgical changes following the [Second Vatican] Council . . . or to the endless arguments about contraception . . . or to a sense that the Church was in disarray, the number of converts dropped dramatically. . . . The numbers have never recovered.” Yet now many are talking about a “Quiet Revival,” and it seems there is cause to hope that the next generation is returning to faith—to Catholicism in particular. McDonagh’s narrative of post–Vatican II decline, while convincing, may turn out to be overly pessimistic after all.

So much for the “why” of turning to Christianity, and especially to Rome. But there’s another—in my opinion, more interesting—discussion happening in Converts, and that is the issue of the relationship between art and faith, creation, and contemplation. What does it mean, in other words, to think, make, and write as a Catholic? Some of the figures in McDonagh’s account actively disliked the label of “Catholic writer” or “Catholic artist.” Graham Greene famously didn’t want to be referred to as a “Catholic novelist”; neither did Muriel Spark, who maintained that “there’s no such thing as a Catholic novel, unless it’s a piece of propaganda”—precisely what R. H. Benson has often been accused of in his own works, such as the apocalyptic Lord of the World. 

Spark and Greene may have felt that it is possible for a certain kind of pietistical religiosity to stifle artistic production, but they were also adamant that the very concept of the artist—even the very “sense of craft”—is inseparable from belief in God. According to Richard Greene, Graham Greene’s biographer, the latter thought that “Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions . . . this was . . . a failure of craft—[Woolf’s] characters are defective because [they are] ontologically adrift.” Waugh passed a remarkably similar judgment, this time with Henry James and other secular writers as the target of his critique: “They try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creatures with a defined purpose.”

Dorothy Sayers argued in her seminal book The Mind of the Maker that humans have an impulse to create because we’ve been made to participate in God’s own creativity. McDonagh proves that Sayers’s intuition was right: Artistic production is not in conflict with but is rather fueled by belief in God. “I think that even if the Catholic religion weren’t true,” concluded the poet and painter David Jones, “you’d have to [as an artist] become one.” Perhaps, if the Quiet Revival is real, there is another Catholic artistic revival on its way.

The post Why Creators Convert appeared first on First Things.

Leo should be warmly commended, then, for trying to find good fruit in these conciliar decrees, and to sketch more fully what Congar desired: a clear statement on the identity and mission of the priest today. 

The pope highlights several crucial themes found in the decrees: Ordained ministry is a gratuitous gift from God; fidelity to one’s vocation is strengthened by staying close to the Master; living a faithful life is “a journey of daily conversion”; and spiritual formation is a life-long process. Priests are called “to follow Christ every day,” and to develop a “rich and solid spiritual life,” placing all their trust in the Lord.  

The pope also puts a strong accent on priestly fraternity and communion even while stating, wisely, that such fraternity “can never be established by the standardization of individuals and the charisms or talents that the Lord has granted to each one.” Leo’s comment reminded me of Tocqueville’s remark in Democracy in America: Besides the legitimate passion for equality among persons, there exists a “depraved” notion as well, which seeks to drag all men down to the same level. By accenting uniqueness, Leo sagely proscribes this warped notion of fraternity.  

The apostolic letter is rich in its analyses. I offer here some related, theological points. 

There is much in Leo’s letter on the priest as a man of service (the word appears frequently), but little on the priest as teacher. Generous service, of course, is at the heart of ordained ministry. Yet Presbyterorum Ordinis also insists that priests must be “strenuous assertors of the truth, lest the faithful be carried about by every wind of doctrine.” And the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (which is central to any reflection on priesthood), underscores the priest’s teaching role when it states that the “ministerial priest, by the sacred power he enjoys, forms and rules [efformat ac regit] the priestly people.” Of course, the primary way priests mold God’s people is by teaching the truth of the gospel. The critical role of the priest as teacher would be a welcome addition to this document.

Given our times, it comes as no surprise that Leo strikes an egalitarian note, insisting that the service of priests takes place “within the equal dignity and fraternity of all the baptized.” Of course, with all the Christian faithful, priests are, first and foremost, disciples of Jesus Christ, called to live their baptismal vocation. But just here, it might have been beneficial to note, with Vatican II, that while all the faithful participate in the priesthood of Jesus, the ministerial priesthood differs from the baptismal “in essence and not only in degree.” This phrase, originally used by Pius XII in 1954, is decisive since it makes clear that while his ministry is always oriented toward the faithful, the priest at the altar, offering the one sacrifice, stands uniquely in the person of Jesus Christ. Asserting this singular status is not priestly “domination” nor clerical “exaltation” over others—stances that Leo rightly denounces. Such uniqueness is, rather, a crucial and defining element of priestly identity.     

Leo also refers to the sentence in Presbyterorum Ordinis that reads, “Therefore, on account of this communion in the same priesthood and ministry, bishops should regard priests as their brothers and friends.” As an American, Leo is no doubt aware of the incisive 2022 National Study of Catholic Priests that revealed a yawning chasm between priests and bishops in the United States, largely because of the draconian implementation of the Dallas Charter. Although this letter was not the place to address it, one hopes the pope has directed the American bishops to attend to two tasks: to root out actual abuse wherever it occurs and to ensure that just processes exist for priests who have been accused on the basis of little or no evidence. Ensuring that accused priests are treated justly, with due process, will stimulate the priestly vocations that Leo, at the conclusion of his letter, so vigorously encourages.  

One of the wisest counsels of Optatam Totius is this: “No difficulty of the priestly life is to be concealed from seminarians.” When I was teaching, I often referred to this conciliar passage before discussing the Dallas Charter and its Essential Norms. It was and remains my conviction that seminarians need to understand the obstacles presented by the Charter’s implementation—not for the sake of inculcating fear—but so they can make an informed and free decision to continue toward the priesthood. I never wanted a man to tell me, years after ordination, that he was ignorant of the severe penalties meted out to a priest merely accused of abuse.  

Leo’s apostolic letter offers solid teaching and wise reflection on many topics. I hope at some point he issues a full-bodied, deeply theological encyclical on the priesthood. Such a document, encompassing the entire history and tradition of the Church, would greatly benefit this currently embattled office.

The post What Leo Gets Right About the Priesthood appeared first on First Things.

But when the moment finally comes for Blanc to lay bare the wickedness and shame of the guilty, he chooses silence, inspired by the example of the parish priest, Fr. Jud Duplenticy. Blanc decides not to expose the murderer. He gives the murderer the chance to make a free-will confession, and this allows the priest to exercise his sacramental ministry. 

Nearly two years before the release of Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson invited me to read a draft of the script and provide feedback from the perspective of a Catholic priest. Shortly thereafter, I became the film’s Catholic Technical Consultant. I was a resource for the production team. I answered questions related to costumes, set decoration, and props. I even had some “coaching” conversations with Josh O’Connor, the actor who plays Fr. Jud.

From my first read of the script, I was struck by the poignant portrayal of the priesthood through Fr. Jud. He seemed to be one of the best priests I had come across in film in recent years. But would other priests agree with me? Was I biased because of my association with the movie’s production? 

With the film’s recent release on Netflix, I have now been able to discuss this character with many priests. We are largely in agreement: Wake Up Dead Man respects the priesthood and shows us the heart of a good priest through Fr. Jud. As one priest wrote to me, this movie made him feel “very seen.” 

While the film contains plenty of objectionable and inaccurate things, the character of Fr. Jud is a compelling portrayal of the priesthood. Wake Up Dead Man gets four things right about Catholic priests.

The early experience of being a priest. When we are introduced to Fr. Jud at the start of the film, he tells us that he was “young, dumb, and full of Christ!” He jumps into parish ministry with genuine zeal and a passion for talking about the transformative power of Jesus. He tries to be friendly with his parishioners, but many treat him as naive and useless. Fr. Jud means well but he oversteps his bounds sometimes, like when he tries to have a prayer meeting without telling the pastor. These are likely familiar experiences for any man in the first years of priestly ministry.

Accompaniment of people one-on-one. In the early part of the movie, Fr. Jud does a stellar job of trying to meet each parishioner in the concrete circumstances of their lives. He listens to their stories. He asks questions. He offers insight when there is an opportunity. This is a daily task for parish priests. When we preach one message for an entire congregation of people who are in different places in their relationship with God, our homilies likely land differently for each person. Preaching that is coupled with the one-on-one work of accompaniment often has great impact. Unlike Msgr. Wicks, Fr. Jud does not raise up “culture warriors” who are more concerned with the evils of the world than the goodness of God. His model of ministry is taught by Jesus himself: It is personal, Christ-centered, and an invitation to walk a converted life. Fr. Jud is a great model of the patient father figure who is willing to walk alongside the people.

“Louise moments.” There is a scene in which Fr. Jud is completely caught up in trying to discover clues with Blanc. He finds himself on a phone call with a chatty woman named Louise, as he needs some information from her. When Fr. Jud impatiently tries to get her off the phone so that he can get back to solving the mystery, she suddenly asks him: “Father, can you pray for me?” Fr. Jud’s demeanor changes. He steadies his breathing and makes himself completely present to Louise. He listens. He prays with her for her sick mother. The mystery takes a backseat.

Every priest knows this experience. We may be in a rush or in the midst of something “important” when suddenly we are interrupted by someone in need. At first there is the tug of annoyance or frustration, which is a natural response. But if the priest is attentive to the Spirit and allows the Lord to lead, that moment becomes a powerful experience of God’s grace. This can be a vocation-affirming gift from the Lord in the midst of the more unexciting duties of priesthood, such as dealing with complaints and worrying about parish finances. Through these moments, the Lord invites the priest to step out of the chaos and into God’s presence, allowing him to feel—in the words of Fr. Jud—“like a priest again.” I have started to refer to these experiences in my own ministry as “Louise moments.”

The persistent invitation. Every priest can think of people who seem particularly resistant to conversion. Not everyone in the pews is deeply in love with the Lord yet! We encounter people who are hostile, apathetic, or inconsistent in their relationship with the Lord. We must persevere in proclaiming Christ and offering the invitation over and over again, “in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2). Fr. Jud’s persistent invitation pierces the final scenes of the movie. As the murderer is dying in his arms, he helps her to make an integral confession, urging her to confess a sin she is still clutching. 

Later, as the story closes, we see Fr. Jud’s persistence again when he invites Blanc to attend his first Mass in the reopened church. Fr. Jud probably knew that Blanc would say “no,” but his invitation is the planting of a seed: a reminder to the detective that the Lord is always ready to welcome him back. Priests must be persistent in making the invitation to Christ, reminding even the most hard-hearted that the Lord has not abandoned us and is waiting for us to turn to him.

Wake Up Dead Man is by no means a perfect movie, nor does it get all the Catholic stuff right. In the real world, faithful priests do not use the Lord’s name in vain, go to confession to their parochial vicars, make fake confessions (a sacrilege), try to create division in their communities, or let others listen in on confessions (even if the person is a dying murder suspect). Those instances aside, I think that many priests will be adding this film to their list of movies that capture the beauty of priestly ministry.

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