Francis X. Maier

Real people, both within and outside the Church, are messy creatures. We all have divided hearts. As a result, the real world is filled with conflict. Here’s what we can do.

Roger Scruton died in January 2020.  But he remains our era’s leading philosopher of common sense and the wisdom of lived experience.

Every pontificate gets mixed reviews.  So, too, the current one.

The Word of God is water in a desert. And a lot of thirsty hearts are out there. So this isn’t a bad time to be a Christian. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s the best time, because what we do now matters.

When preached by today’s apostles of urgent change, and then chanted endlessly in everything from fashion blogs to mainstream news reporting to athletic shoe commercials, magic words like “equity” and “inclusion” infect our language with a kind of hypnotic voodoo.

Today’s sharp decline in sexual activity among the young has everything to do with the isolating cocoon of pornography and the collapse of any higher meaning in sexual relationships. Sex without love—real love, the kind that comes with obligations and unexpected burdens, but also unexpected joys—kills the taste for both.

One of the disagreeable facts about members of every elite modern leadership class—take the Boston to Washington corridor, for example—is that they tend to nibble, metaphorically, on the people they lead.

In the past, our private and public lives played out within the framework of a broad, biblically inspired set of beliefs and moral behaviors. Politics is now, in effect, our religion—but without the irritating, aerodynamic drag of a “God” to act as a brake on our hatreds.

An unpleasant fact of book publishing today is that Big Authors can suck the oxygen out of a market. Two smaller but important books by equally gifted but lesser-known names deserve generous praise and a wide popular audience.

Andrée Emery was a woman of extraordinary intellect and zeal, who quietly counted some of the Catholic greats of the last century as friends, and spent a lifetime mending, connecting, and stitching together hearts searching for God.

In every age, it’s the converted mind and heart that God uses to make all things new, whatever the obstacles.

We need to remember — and remembering is a sacred task — that there will be no real novus ordo seclorum, no genuinely “new order of the ages,” without the kingship of Jesus Christ.