“If you forgive men their trespasses,” says Jesus, “your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt. 6:14-15). In permitting divorced and remarried Catholics to partake of the Eucharist, Pope Francis may seem to have such words in mind, words that warn us that they […]

At every pass we have absorbed laws, not of morality, which are liberating, but of etiquette, which is a curb on adventure and genius, and of security and sloth, which deaden the soul. In his wonderful and artistic autobiography, Chuck Amuck, Chuck Jones, the principal creator of such animated comic geniuses as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, reminds us of […]

The Lord has commanded us to assist the poor. This is not an option. How shall we do it? One of the paradoxical results of obsessive political agitation is that it makes political discussions almost impossible. Imagine someone on a sickbed, afflicted with a disease that makes the lightest touch upon the skin feel like a thorn or a lighted […]

Why do young people leave the Faith? I was asked that question the other day, and I replied, off the cuff, that it was two things: Their imaginations had not been formed by the Faith and our magnificent heritage of arts and letters, and they wanted to have sex. Most of the reasons that people give are either variations of […]

A few years ago, in Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity, I wrote that the recognition of same-sex pseudogamous relations—the acceptance of a lie, that a man can in fact mate with another man, or a woman with a woman—would make it even harder than it already is for us to see that man is made for woman and woman for man, and […]

It has been just six years since I wrote Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity, warning against the fantasy that two members of the same sex can marry one another, when they cannot even have sexual relations but can only mimic them. I founded my arguments not upon Scripture or the teaching of the Church—indeed I did not refer to them at all—but […]

We are trying to live the faith in a bad time. The engines of the mass phenomena are all ranged against us: schools and colleges, television, newspapers, Hollywood, and government. Our leaders bring to mind the state of affairs that Donne describes in his plea to God to take him by storm: Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, […]