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The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski
Paul Mankowski, S.J., who died unexpectedly four years ago this past fall, was the kind of priest who seemed to spring from pages of the best Catholic fiction—a larger-than-life...
Why Catholics Voted for Trump
As Democrats and others assess the fallout from last week’s red bombshell, they’re looking at surprises in the exit polls. Here’s one that shouldn’t be missed: The nation’s Catholic...
The Boys in the Bandwidth
Red and blue Americans are locked in a hostile custody battle right now. But if they agree on anything, it’s that “the gender gap has never been wider,” as...
The Baby Bust Isn’t Just Political, It’s Personal
In a 2021 interview on the Tucker Carlson show, vice-presidential nominee JD Vance said that “we’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats . . . by a...
Catholics Against Anti-Semitism
On October 7, the terrorist organization Hamas decided to follow the Nazi playbook once more. As one observer of World War II put it, the Nazis “ripped the lid...
1968 Is So Over
In 1883, speaking not as a novelist but as a bystander describing a terrible scene of carnage, Leo Tolstoy observed of what he documented: “We cannot pretend that we...
Men Are at War with God
Solzhenitsyn famously defined the principal trait of the twentieth century in four words: “Men have forgotten God.” So far, the twenty-first century might be summarized in six: Men are...
A Tale of Two Pregnancies
Most people who believe abortion to be wrong believe it to be wrong intrinsically. By contrast, those who do not believe abortion to be wrong make a utilitarian deduction:...
Six Rules for Pro-Life Radicals
This essay is adapted from a speech delivered January 25, 2020, at the first annual meeting of The David Project, a new pro-life organization whose members represent every Ivy...
Goodbye to “So What?”
The case for American nationalism is clear. The United States is the most diverse nation on earth. If we will not have a nation and its constitution, then we...
The Prophetic Power of Humanae Vitae
One recurring theme in Pope Francis’s teaching is that human realities trump scholarly abstractions: “La realidad es superior a la idea.” His signature phrase about pastors who have the...
The Zealous Faith of Secularism
Begin with a sobering fact. During the past ten years, some of the sharpest observers of our time have come to believe that the tectonic plates underlying Western civilization...
Michael Novak by the Sea
Once upon a time there was a lion . . . and the lion had a voice like a lamb. The day Michael Novak died, that unbidden couplet mysteriously...
The New Intolerance
In November, Cardinal Walter Kasper gave a speech at the Catholic University of America in which he said, “Mercy has become the theme of [Pope Francis’s] pontificate. . ....
Revolving Revolutions
The mariners of the sixteenth century could not have imagined that people would ever cross the ocean in anything but a ship. Not only technological facts but also moral...