Francis X. Maier

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.

History, and science fiction, show how attempts to “follow the science” often lead to dark and cruel places.

To what degree have the current Holy Father’s good intentions, and the ambiguity embedded in his meaning of “synodality,” fed the turmoil his papacy now faces in Germany?

EPPC Senior Fellow Francis X. Maier reflects on Nathaniel West, the mercy of God, and the writing of “one of the most idiotic and embarrassing movies ever made.”

Recovering a humility about our own silent apostasies, the need for our own deeper conversion, and clarity about the challenges for Catholic life in our country that lie ahead – these things begin the renewal of our Church and our nation.

The vocation of Catholics, here in the real world, is always the same: Make disciples of all nations, including our own; and be leaven in society, especially our own. If we pursue that with all our hearts, we do the one necessary thing.

Innovation is part of the special American genius. But real progress is never merely material; unless it also ennobles the human spirit, it isn’t “progress” at all.