Francis X. Maier

As a nation we’re neither as good as our pride imagined, nor as bad as America’s chronic haters – their name is Legion – want us to believe.

We have limited time. So how should we use it? What will our lives mean when we finally look back on them? Like it or not, we inevitably choose a path, either by our love or refusal to love; by our actions or our refusals to act.

Nations change when we change. And the latter is the much harder task.

Technology instinctively reshapes a culture toward purely practical action and results. To the Church falls the task of forcing the questions that get people to think about what it means to be truly human.

Easter is the victory of life over death, our deliverance and liberation in the resurrection of God’s Son. But if our Easter joy this year is mixed with a taste of Good Friday’s myrrh and loss, and a hunger for the Eucharist we can’t satisfy, we should accept it as a gift. It’s a reminder of the precious things we too easily take for granted.

The “civilizational change” wrought by the coronavirus may be less drastic than pandemics in the past.  But for American Christians, it may clarify loyalties in a sobering and uniquely painful way.

Catholics have an obligation, rooted in love, to treat the Holy Father — any Holy Father — with the respect due his office. But as in any healthy family, respect does not preclude criticism on matters of substance.

Unless we reconfigure our lives to understand and act on it, the “new evangelization” will remain just another pious slogan.

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.

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.

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.

The Holocaust is the single greatest moral catastrophe of the modern West.  But its lessons seem too easily forgotten.