Francis X. Maier
Senior Fellow
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
Mr. Maier served as senior adviser and special assistant to Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., for 23 years in Denver and Philadelphia. He previously served as editor in chief of the National Catholic Register and as a story analyst and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and New York University’s School of the Arts, he is a former Fellow of the American Film Institute’s Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies, and the inaugural Senior Research Fellow (2020–22) at Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. He is a cofounding board member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture and a board member of the Napa Institute and the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).
His bylined work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, First Things, National Review, The American Spectator, The Catholic Thing, Crisis, This World, America, Commonweal, the New York Times Sunday magazine, Christian Science Monitor, and other national and foreign outlets. His book True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, will be released by Ignatius Press in early 2024.
To Make All Things New
Francis X. Maier
Renewing the soul of a culture (and through it, the political and economic structures it sustains) is the expertise of the Christian Church. And renewing the Church in our age will not primarily be a matter of technical skill or organizational structure or material resources – as important as those things are – but the persuasive power of faithful lay witness.
Articles
The Catholic Thing / March 4, 2020
Thoughts on the Lay Vocation
Francis X. Maier
The chronic, underlying illness of the Church in our country, in our day, isn’t prone to quick fixes, and real lay “power” doesn’t reside in money or professional skill or positions of influence within or over a Church bureaucracy. It proceeds from a personal witness of holiness.
Articles
The Catholic Thing / February 5, 2020
Sex, Celibacy, and the Latest Curiosity From Rome
Francis X. Maier
Matters sacramental and supernatural cannot be reduced to the pragmatic, the functional, and the utility-driven. But critics of priestly celibacy—however good their intentions—inevitably do exactly that, to the detriment of the believing community they seek to serve.
Articles
First Things / January 15, 2020
Salvation Is From the Jews
Francis X. Maier
The Holocaust is the single greatest moral catastrophe of the modern West. But its lessons seem too easily forgotten.
Articles
The Catholic Thing / January 8, 2020
Crisis, Church Reform, and the Lay Vocation
Francis X. Maier
Peace, purity, and unity for the Church are aberrations in her temporal life, not the standard. And the reason for that is brutally simple: she’s inhabited and led by sinners.
Articles
Crisis Magazine / October 1, 2019
Prosperity Breeds Idiots
Francis X. Maier
As a gulag survivor, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought.
Articles
First Things / September 3, 2019