Symposium on the Greatest Threats to the Church
Ed. Note: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NOR hosted a trio of symposia. We relaunched the format, after more than a 30-year absence, with a two-part Symposium on Catholics & American Political Life in our December 2024 and January-February 2025 issues. The relaunch, we are happy to report, was well received — so much so that an expanded version of that symposium (with additional contributors and lengthier contributions) is now available in book form from Arouca Press, titled Catholics and the American Polity: Approaches and Contestations (visit aroucapress.com/catholics-and-the-american-polity for details). In this issue, we revisit the format, which we hope to make an annual feature, with a brand-new topic.
One of the great things about being Catholic — specifically, a Catholic who pays attention to world events — is that throughout the history of the Church, heroism and scandal have both been in high supply. From the brutality of the Roman persecutions (and the incomparable witness of the early martyrs) to the triumphs of the Crusades (and the dark sides of defeat and degeneracy during the same), from the agrarian populism of the Peasants’ Revolt to the wealth and debauchery of the Medici popes, from the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent to the Sexual Revolution and Vatican II — there’s rarely been a dull moment. This rollicking history is the glory and shame of the cradle Catholic and the fascination and delight of the convert.
Neither is the present moment dull. Earlier this year, the Church closed the book on one of the most turbulent papacies in modern times, during which decision-making was erratic, the magisterial teaching voice cacophonic, and public witness inconsistent. It felt at times as though the very Deposit of Faith were at risk. After that 12-year, nausea-inducing rollercoaster ride, the Church would surely welcome a little tranquility — a time to regroup and refocus on her essential mission. Such a welcome respite, if it occurs at all, isn’t likely to last long. There are too many pressing matters at hand.
Inwardly, the Church must address the “mess” the late Pope Francis made: a curial body in disarray, a distinct lack of doctrinal clarity, an intensified Liturgy War, a burgeoning financial scandal, and system-wide uncertainty regarding what’s permissible and even what’s possible. All the while, the Body of Christ continues to hemorrhage believers, an outflow she must figure out how to stanch, and still fails for the most part to form (or re-form, as the case may be) those still willingly under her care.
Outwardly, the Church is beset on all sides by competing interest groups, institutional rivals, and even outright enemies. The world stage on which she must act features wars and other territorial and ideological disputes, religious persecutions, increased disparity between the haves and the have-nots, mass migration and human trafficking, the legacy of a failed Sexual Revolution, rapid technological change, a fracturing of community and a concomitant rise of personal isolation, and the diffusion of lifestyles that contravene her core moral teachings.
In short, the incoming pope, Leo XIV, has his hands full.
There is only so much that can be accomplished in any given period, and we must adjust our expectations accordingly. As he begins composing the opening chapters of his pontificate, Leo will have to discern carefully how to proceed — or risk repeating the chaos and confusion that characterized his predecessor’s pontificate. The Church he has been called to lead is in a precarious situation, and the threats to her mission and identity abound. Leo must contend with difficult internal dynamics and negotiate the demands of a polarized world and an increasingly unlearned yet hypercritical world population — all while constantly and consistently presenting the face of Christ and Him crucified to a rebellious mankind as the origin and the objective of human existence. How ought Leo to go about ordering his papal priorities?
To aid in the sifting, we’ve asked thinkers of different temperaments and in different parts of the world the following questions:
1. What is the greatest threat facing the Church today, whether internal or external?
2. Is the Church equipped to overcome that threat?
3. What can Leo XIV do to address the threat?
Respondents were given the choice of answering the questions directly or addressing the themes therein. As this is a symposium, no attempt was made to achieve uniformity of response.
Sarah Cain
The Great Erasure
According to a 2025 Pew Research study, for every 100 Catholics who join the Church, 840 leave. This should not surprise us, because for decades the mission of the Church has been articulated in such a way that Catholics have little reason to stay. Under the auspices of ecumenism and “interfaith dialogue,” clergy and Church leadership have taught a religious indifference that amounts to self-erasure.
The mission of the Church was once clear: the salvation of souls within the Church as the “sacrament of salvation.” Over time, teaching of that foundational maxim has become tepid and convoluted such that even though the dogma has not changed, Catholic laymen believe altogether different things about salvation than they would have in 1925 or 1425 or 925.
Throughout most of the Church’s history, it was understood that since Christ founded the Church for the salvation of souls, she is the divinely instituted route to eternal union with God. While the nuances of extraordinary means of salvation were discussed by theologians, the vast majority of Catholic laymen never heard about them. Concepts like invincible ignorance were not emphasized in the Church’s messaging. Instead, there was focus on what we are to do to merit our last end.
Even as recently as 1919, Pope Benedict XV declined an invitation to an ecumenical “Faith and Order” conference held by Protestants. He thereafter issued a decree prohibiting all Catholics from collaborating with non-Catholic societies formed “to procure Christian unity.” In 1959 Pope St. John XXIII wrote Ad Petri Cathedram, in which he addressed non-Catholic Christians with the exhortation, “All God’s children are summoned to their father’s only home, and its cornerstone is Peter.”
The message was clear and consistent. Yet, from the 1960s on, there was a demonstrable shift in the way the Church’s teaching is understood and conveyed, even while the dogma stayed the same. This shift was not limited to how we relate to non-Catholic Christians but included people of other faiths as well. In 1985 Pope St. John Paul II spoke to a group of Muslims in Morocco, saying, “The Catholic Church regards with respect and recognizes the equality of your religious progress, the richness of your spiritual tradition.” This would have been shocking a century earlier.
In 2018 Bishop Robert Barron, one of the most high-profile prelates of our time, engaged in a public dialogue with Orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro, in which he failed to give any reason to convert to Catholicism. “Vatican II clearly teaches that someone outside the explicit Christian faith can be saved,” he said. “Now, they are all saved through the grace of Christ indirectly received, so I mean the grace is coming from Christ, but it might be received according to your conscience. So, if you’re following your conscience sincerely, or in your case, you’re following the commandments of the law sincerely, yeah, you can be saved.”
Are the millions of lay Catholics who saw that exchange supposed to discern a nuanced understanding of the way extraordinary salvation might be granted by God, who is not bound to the sacraments even though we are? Or is it more likely they inferred that all faiths are a route to salvation, so there is no reason to be Catholic? Barron mentioned Christ, preventing a direct fall into pluralism, but for most people this nuance is easily lost. A 2014 Pew survey showed that 68 percent of Catholics believe non-Christian religions can lead to eternal life, which is the heresy of pluralism.
For some, ecumenism involves merely polite exchanges with non-Catholic Christians in the hope that they may better understand our faith and eventually come into communion with the Church. It works as an almost phonetic you-come-in-ism. This type of communication was favored throughout history and did not bear the ecumenism label. However, modern dialogue proclaims a neutrality that is itself a Protestant notion, which is to say that as long as you believe in Christ, all is well, and you will be saved.
It is significantly easier to engage in the parlance of mutual acceptance, especially at a time when tolerance is heralded as a chief virtue of secular society. Clearly delineating our differences requires a courage and fortitude rare in modern man and verboten in polite company. Yet overemphasis on what we have in common represents an injustice to both Catholics and Protestants. Non-Catholics have a right to know the truth of our faith, and further, they have a need for it, in both this world and the next. Because we were made for the glory of God, we are restless without Him.
While the Church has long taught concepts like invincible ignorance, she acknowledged throughout most of her history that such a route to God was arduous and rare. After all, we know how difficult it is for ourselves, who have access to the graces of the sacraments, to live virtuous lives. How much more so for those without such access! Anyone who has ever committed a mortal sin has need of sacramental confession. The assertion that it is easy to be moral goes against the experience of us all and the perennial teaching of the Church. Because Original Sin has caused our attraction to evil, we need the sacraments to help overcome it.
It is an offense against Catholics to encourage religious indifference because this makes it harder for them to practice their faith. Why would they follow the laws of the Church and live a virtuous life if it’s implied that joining a Protestant church that promotes the “once saved, always saved” heresy is just as good? Moreover, if Christ comes through the malformed conscience of a person of another faith entirely, why can we not choose an easier one?
St. Edmund Campion penned Decem Rationes, his ten reasons why Catholicism is true and worth dying for, as he ultimately did. Church leaders today seem unwilling to name a single reason we should die for the faith. Until this changes, the Church will continue to bleed members, and souls will continue to be imperiled.
Sarah Cain, known online as The Crusader Gal, is a political and cultural commentator. She makes videos about the decline of the West and is published regularly at CrisisMagazine.com, CatholicWorldReport.com, CatholicAnswers.com, and her Substack, Homefront Crusade. She converted to the Catholic faith in 2022 and is the author of Failing Foundations: The Pillars of the West Are Nearing Collapse.
John A. Perricone
Synodality: Self-Discovery over Salvation
As to the greatest threat to the Church today there can be no doubt. It is synodality.
Synodality represents the full maturity of the modernism condemned by Pope St. Pius X over a century ago. Quite simply, modernism and synodality venture to make the concrete Depositum Fidei into a malleable mass of subjective impressions. Here, Hegelian dialectic supplants creedal exactitude. More mincing souls would find that description too harsh or overbearing, but it expresses the truth. No less than the former prefect of the Holy Office, Gerhard Cardinal Müller, summarized the whole synodal enterprise with a damning indictment titled The Seven Sins Against the Holy Spirit: A Synodal Tragedy. Against the faint of heart I stand with this titanic Catholic intellect.
Overintellectualized approaches to this question only lead to abstract solutions offered by pipe-smoking theologians in their cosseted faculty lounges. The Son of God, however, never dealt in abstractions, which is why the Creed is expressed with such thunderous clarity. Heresy always hides in the shadows of so-called lacunae. Synodality is not heresy, because it does not possess the gravitas of heresy. This makes it more perilous, for it is not as obvious. Synodality does not take truth seriously. It is more comfortable in the gnostic demi-monde of privileged knowledge available to an anointed few. Try eavesdropping on synodal “dialogues.” Better yet, force yourself to read the official documents launching the new synodal year. There you will find the true gnosis despised by St. Irenaeus in his Adversus Haereses. Today, it would go by the less elevated term word salad: an accumulation of sounds meaning nothing. Kinda like a California consciousness-raising exercise.
Therein lies the problem: meaning. Meaning is the reward for embracing the truth. It is terribly specific, like a slap across the face. Enemies of truth hide in the tall grass of manufactured meanings, allowing them cover in worlds made of their own fancies. Lewis Carroll mocked it in Alice in Wonderland. George Orwell terrified us with it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And Aldous Huxley called it a Brave New World. Each of these authors sounded dire warnings against departing the uplands of truth for the redoubts of invented words — and worlds.
Can synodality simply be called rationalism? Sadly, no. Even that ruinous venture, tumbling down the rabbit hole of reason without truth, makes at least some attempt at reason. Not synodality. It swims in the brackish waters of self-congratulatory newspeak. It substitutes the truth with titillating soundbites attractive to the unhinged cognoscenti, helpful to the more serious crowd whose mission is to forget the divine mission of Christ’s Church.
In the teeth of a culture careening toward moral collapse, the Church should be bellowing, “And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them!” Instead, Church officials hand us Fiducia Supplicans and swing open the Holy Doors in Rome to a gang declaring war on God’s designs. Rather than leave science to do its careful work in arriving at evidence-based conclusions, the Vicar of Christ blesses hunks of ice as he invokes a newly minted moral category called “climate justice.” All the while, he is deeply doubtful about taking any action against the indubitable injustice of the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass.
Observe the two-tiered world of synodality. The “made for public” façade of everlasting dialogue without truth. Beneath it lurks the hardfisted suppression of anything deemed “inflexibly” Catholic. In the free-floating carousel world of synodality there no longer exist penalties, because every sincerely held position is sacred — save one: that which was once considered sacred, such as the moral law and the Church’s irreformable doctrines.
Synodality redefines faith as a journey into self-realization rather than a steep climb up the hill of Calvary. Instead of lovingly pondering the riveting truths of divine revelation, it invites the sterile invention of new paths of meaning.
Synodality trumpets that we have no answers, only endless self-discovery. A major archdiocese recently commissioned a study as to why it is dying. Eschewing that blunt term, in true synodal fashion, it renames its dire situation “a changing landscape.” It reports that since 1998:
- Mass attendance is down 53 percent
- Baptisms are down 61 percent
- Marriages are down 75 percent
- Funeral Masses are down 56 percent
This assessment becomes more frightening when the archdiocese discloses that it has only 127 priests under age 50, and by 2044 it will have fewer than 131 pastors for its 212 parishes.
Any clearheaded onlooker would call that fact sheet a death march. Not the synodalist, who sees it as one more step toward the Omega Point of greater dialogue. In the light of such rattling news, what does the archdiocese recommend? Teaching the faith more clearly? No. Greater emphasis on sacramental confession? No. More prayer and sacrifice and a return to traditional acts of piety? No. The Rosary and increased devotion to the Mother of God? No. Invocation of our guardian angels and prayers to St. Michael the Archangel? No. What does it suggest? Synodality. And then more synodality. And after that, yet more synodality. This is like quenching thirst with saltwater.
This cul de sac is not surprising. This is the synodality which recently advertised a photo of a few octogenarians of a dying religious order giddily signing its death certificate as they smiled gleefully into the camera.
Synodality causes the world to look upon the Church as guilty of a profound lack of seriousness. Once, even our enemies marveled at the martyrs who accepted death rather than compromise one iota of the Church’s sacred patrimony. Now they see a Church whose stock and trade is compromise.
Without fear of appearing unappreciative of “ambiguity,” I say that synodality is the greatest menace the Church faces in the 21st century. The present Catholic intelligentsia as well as the greater number of higher clerics might disagree, but — post hoc, ergo propter hoc notwithstanding — the current collapse of the Church on every continent seems to have happened on their watch.
Put bluntly, synodality is in the business of promoting parlor games rather than saving souls.
Hmmm. Saving souls. When was the last time a Catholic heard that phrase? It’s one more fatality of synodality.
Fr. John A. Perricone, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor of Philosophy at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York. His articles have appeared in St. John’s Law Review, The Latin Mass, The Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, and at CrisisMagazine.com.
Robert McTeigue
The Suicide of Theology
“Here, with due apology, I am going to be obliged to play the thankless role of one who denounces errors, not only among his adversaries but among his friends.” — Étienne Gilson
Brevity requires bluntness: The intellectual life of the Catholic Church is in grave danger. I say that not simply because I’ve been told by religious superiors (NOT Jesuits!) that “there’s no room for reason in religious life” (Aquinas, anyone?) and “there’s no room for controversy in a life of devotion” (Catherine of Siena? Bellarmine?) but because of the anti-rational and linguistically slovenly pronouncements from various quarters, including among the senior ranks of the Catholic cadre of the People-Who-Should-Really-Know-Better Club.
Thesis: the public suicide note of Catholic intelligence is Pope Francis’s Ad Theologiam Promovendam (2023). So understood, the publication a few months later of Fiducia Supplicans was the beginning of the Farewell Tour of Catholic Theology. I’m mindful that as I write this, the apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te has made its debut — marked by familiar and expected tropes and themes.
Ad Theologiam Promovendam demands an “enculturated theology,” as opposed to the hitherto dominant “desktop theology” (sic) of limiting ourselves “to abstractly re-proposing formulas and schemes from the past.” If this statement means only that “theology is not like Euclidian geometry — derivatives of postulates and applications of principles to no concrete reality,” then, yes, let’s avoid that kind of theology. But does anyone seriously advocate that kind of theology? If such a statement means only that “theology is undertaken by real people in times, places, and circumstances, and promoted to real people in times, places, and circumstances — and these times, places, and circumstances are not irrelevant to theology,” then no one can object. Except for the strawmen summoned for the occasion, who practices theology apart from real people, times, places, and circumstances?
Does this apostolic letter facilitate “the dictatorship of relativism” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger warned against in 2005? It seems like license for those invoking the (apparently) categorical imperative of “speaking my truth” and then calling it “theology.” Do I exaggerate? This October, Loyola College in Chennai, India, hired Dr. N. Jency as assistant professor of English. He claims to be a “transgender female.” A website run by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India praised Jency’s appointment as “a momentous stride for transgender representation in higher education.” Jency is referred to as a “changemaker.”
With an eye toward ecumenism as practiced during most of my lifetime, I note that Canterbury Cathedral placed on its walls graffiti from “marginalized communities” because, well, does it really matter? Isn’t it sufficient to say “enculturation” and just move on?
A world gone mad needs a sane and wise Church led by savvy stewards of the skills, heritage, and virtues of a distinctively Catholic intelligence. The roots of these treasures are ancient indeed, yet we don’t have to reach very far to find their champions and exemplars. We can plant the perennially valuable seeds of this heritage in the soil of our own here and now. I hereby propose a project: “Refreshing Catholic Intelligence — Recalling Catholic Habits and Heroes of Mind.” I offer here but three samples.
- Étienne Gilson. He mined deeply the thought of Catholic, secular, and sectarian sources, writing eloquently of “The Intelligence in the Service of Christ the King.” He laments, “One of the greatest evils from which Catholicism suffers today is that Catholics are no longer proud enough of their faith…. Instead of confessing in all simplicity what we owe to our Church and to our faith, instead of showing what they bring to us, and we would not have without them, we believe it good politics or good tactics, in the interest of the Church itself to act as if, after all, we distinguish ourselves in no way from others. What is the greatest praise that many among us may hope for? The greatest that the world can give them: He is a Catholic, but he’s really very nice. You would never think he was one.” Gilson’s work embodies a properly Catholic humility and audacity.
- Christopher Dawson. An historian with a prophet’s eye for judging the present and foreseeing possible futures, he wrote that “the failure of modern civilization is directly related to its secularism…there is more occasion than ever before to assert the Christian alternative of spiritual renewal and spiritual order. For it is here, and not in the region of political and economic organization, that the real centre of the problem is to be found.”
- Josef Pieper. His lapidary prose reflects the lucidity of the Catholic mind. He wrote, “Pseudotheology highhandedly determines its own domain and proclaims to be its own master. True theology is well aware of its obligation to respect the antecedent norm of divine revelation while at the same time recognizing its need for the partnership of an unbiased approach to the reality of nature. Furthermore, you can penetrate its inner sanctum only through an antechamber…. The borderline, of course, between antechamber and inner sanctum must not be blurred. It is important to preserve the distinction between philosophy and theology. And yet their strict separation from each other seems to me not only virtually impossible but above all illicit; for in that process each would be left sterile.”
These noble Catholic intellectuals lived, wrote, and spoke with such confidence precisely because they were Catholic, having received what they as humans, called by God to God, need: a healing of their fallen nature, a strengthening of will to love the Good, and an illumination of the intellect to perceive indispensable truths. It’s not impossible for us here and now to live, write, and speak as Catholics, for the greater glory of God, love for our neighbor, and the salvation of our souls.
Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is a member of the U.S. Eastern Province of the Society of Jesus. He is the host of The Catholic Current, a radio talk show that airs on The Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network, and is a member of the National Ethics Committee of the Catholic Medical Association. His latest books from Ignatius Press are Real Philosophy for Real People: Tools for Truthful Living (2020) and Christendom Lost and Found: Meditations for a Post Post-Christian Era (2022). His work can be found at heraldofthegospel.org.
Pete Jermann
What Adam Knew
“Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived….” — Genesis 4:1
The history of man in a fallen world begins with a sexual act in the first verse of Genesis 4: “Adam knew Eve.” The commentary in my Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition) describes knew as a biblical euphemism for sexual relations. For the benefit of the modern reader, the New International Version skips right to the meat of the matter and records that “Adam made love to Eve.” The New American Bible (Revised Edition) tells us that “Adam had intercourse with his wife Eve.” The latter two translations differ significantly from the first. If making love is a euphemism for the sexual act, it is a misleading one, because in current popular usage, making love refers to an act in which love is usually not involved and nothing is actually made. Intercourse, on the other hand, simply describes a biological act that admits no distinction between man and beast.
Maybe the Ignatius Bible is wrong to consider knew a euphemism rather than a word that significantly expands the suggested meaning of sexual relations. Adam’s knowledge included the consequent conception of Cain. Adam knew both himself and Eve as complementary, sexual persons capable of procreating life in the act of intercourse. The word knew humanizes the sexual act and distinguishes man from beast. No animal has ever known or will know that this act is life-giving. In this knowledge, man crosses a threshold from pre-moral innocence to moral culpability. He transcends his animal nature and becomes a person made in the image of God, a person who can choose or refuse to participate with God in a love that creates and perpetuates life.
In 1960, when the FDA approved the birth control pill in the United States, many considered sex and procreation definitively separated. In forgetting what Adam knew, however, the new “sexuality” destroyed the thing it considered liberated. In marginalizing the possibility of a baby and the responsibility a new life requires, the new “sexuality” considered its various expressions amoral rather than moral, thereby erasing the line between man and animal that Adam had crossed long ago. In separating procreation from sex, the new “sexuality” also rejected its animal nature. Being neither human nor animal, the new “sexuality” was no longer truly sexual at all.
Separating sex from procreation rendered the idea of “sexuality” meaningless. The Sexual Revolution replaced biologically objective sexuality with subjective feelings. To fill the void it had created, the new “sexuality” granted every person the right to define his own sexuality and to personalize its expressions. Sodomy and intercourse become variations of personal preference with no functional difference. Without meaning or moral value, all “sexual” expressions became valid. Rather than conveying any biological reality, to be male or female became a matter of the imagination. When every person can create his or her own meaning, what remains is the antithesis of meaning.
Human life, however, requires meaning. The Catholic Church knows that contraception breaks the bond that gives our sexuality its meaning. Until 1930 all Christian communions agreed with the Catholic Church. That year the Lambeth Conference, a decennial meeting of the Anglican Communion, allowed limited contraception within marriage. Pope Pius XI responded with Casti Connubii, an encyclical declaring contraception incompatible with marriage. With the introduction of a chemical solution in 1960, one that altered a woman’s fertility as opposed to earlier barrier solutions such as condoms, many, including many Catholics, considered the birth control paradigm shifted. In 1968 Pope St. Paul VI, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, clearly stated that this was not so. Contraception of any kind was incompatible with marriage.
Humanae Vitae asserted the inseparability of the procreative and unitive natures of our sexuality. Whereas the procreative can exist without the unitive, the unitive requires acknowledgement of the procreative. We cannot reject the inherent sexuality of another and, at the same time, claim communion with that person. Human sexuality is not an addition to, but an inherent part of, human personhood. We are not persons plus fertility; we are persons capable of procreating new persons, male and female, in the image of God. In contracepting the marital act, we do not withhold our fertility — we withhold ourselves. Contraception is more than the rejection of sexuality. In rejecting what Adam knew, we reject ourselves as persons made in the image of God.
To Paul VI’s dismay, Humanae Vitae was widely rejected. A mock reply referencing the celibate and Italian pope reflected popular opinion at the time: “He no playa da game, he no maka da rules.” Many priests agreed with their parishioners and counseled the “primacy of conscience” even if it contradicted magisterial teaching. An overwhelming majority accepted that some sexual couplings could be open to life while others did not have to be — as long as some were, maybe someday, but maybe not. Rather than marriages open to a possible other, like a flower blooming, marriages turned inward, like a bud that never opens. Sex became about oneself and not another. Many Catholics, either with their pastor’s counseling or in the scandalous absence of teaching from the pulpit, assumed innocence, normalized contraception, and unknowingly accepted the destruction of human sexuality and the reduction of their own humanity.
What is real and true cannot be redefined into something else. It can only be destroyed. In retrospect, Humanae Vitae was right in asserting the inherent procreative nature of our sexuality. Separating the procreative from the unitive destroyed both. Rather than life, it brought unprecedented death, beginning with the death of billions of children slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs and continuing with the death of marriage, the death of the bond between mother and child, the death of natural families, the death of masculinity and femininity, and the death of sexuality itself. The death of sexuality further required the death of meaning, and without meaning we cease to be truly human.
Humanae Vitae was and remains an antidote to the poison of the Sexual Revolution. It invites us to a life of love and meaning, as men and women made in the image of God. Only in knowing as Adam knew is that life possible.
Pete Jermann is a retired craftsman and father of three adult children. He resides with his wife in Murphy, North Carolina, and is active in adult faith formation at St. William Catholic Church. His essays have appeared in Touchstone and at CrisisMagazine.com, TheImaginativeConservative.org, and CatholicWorldReport.com.
Alexander Riley
The Existential Threat of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is as profound a moral and existential threat as man has ever faced. AI is a moral threat because it prompts us to distance ourselves from aspects of our nature. It promises to reduce — under the deceptive language of “liberation” — a number of the most essential human activities. It offers to read for us, write for us, and produce creative content (art, music) for us at the command of a few clicks. I teach in a university where we laud the life of the mind. I already see the transformation of that institution and the people in it by AI. Students eagerly accept AI’s offer to do their work for them, and their thinking is becoming more restricted as a result. Too many faculty members are unconcerned about and even support this phenomenon, often pretending its positive consequences outweigh the negative. Those of us who recognize the threat are finding options for action increasingly limited as AI colonizes more and more space in our broader culture and thus normalizes its invasion of our intellectual life.
Christians celebrate human freedom and creativity because they reflect the essence of the God who made us. The threat of AI is thus also a direct danger to the Church.
Yet even more than a threat to our intellectual capacities, AI jeopardizes our very existence.
The Church has recognized the broad outline of that threat. Alas, Church authorities, like most of those outside the faith, are insufficiently concerned about its gravity. The Vatican released a doctrinal note this January on some of the risks accompanying AI’s development. Antiqua et Nova looks critically at potential AI colonization of fields of human work, the dangers of AI-produced political propaganda, and the potential weakening of cognitive skill as we cede to AI intellectual exercises we have always done, among other practical concerns. “AI is but a pale reflection of humanity,” the note rightly tells us, and it is important that the Church be clear about delineating AI from human intelligence so as to distinguish and champion the latter. AI cannot be us, and this alone is of some reassurance. But that is not the most important point.
What should concern us most about AI is what it might do to us — perhaps inevitably, given its nature. Antiqua et Nova looks fleetingly at the existential question but downplays the “theoretical” risks of AI in favor of “the more immediate and pressing concern” of how “individuals with malicious intentions might misuse” it.
The Church’s tone is in general entirely too convinced that AI will be beneficial, and that it can be kept under human control. Many others have a similar perspective. In Henry Kissinger’s last book, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, for example, he and his two tech co-authors reach a thoroughly positive conclusion: AI is inevitable, but it will be a good thing; we need only take appropriate precautions, and everything should be fine.
Political authorities have been equally unconcerned. Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech this February in which he made it clear that the Trump administration is not thinking much about the existential threat of AI but mostly about global competition with China to see who develops it first. Vance called such technologies “dangerous in the wrong hands” but “incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.” He gave no reason that they might not be a problem even in “the right hands.”
But the generative AI that is now seemingly everywhere is already negatively altering our lives by making us intellectually lazier and fooling us with misinformation. Efforts to limit these effects are proving impossible given how totally the broader culture has surrendered to AI’s charms. The difficulty is only going to increase as the technology spreads.
Superintelligent AI — that is, artificial intelligence that significantly surpasses human intelligence — will pose the ultimate threat. In a recent book with an appropriately alarmist title, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who between them have been working in the AI field for decades, provide a careful articulation of the real stakes. We can reasonably predict how a form of intelligence superior to us — which is a stated goal of every national and corporate interest driving AI research — might deal with us simply by looking at our own history as stewards of life and the world. How have we done? We put our closest primate relatives in zoos, and we are decimating their habitat, so they are close to extinction in the wild. We are in the process of turning all life on the planet, including ourselves, into repositories for microplastics. And we are causing losses of populations of species unlike anything seen in history outside mass-extermination events.
A crucial point is the massive capabilities of intelligent entities to use deception to achieve their ends. All life in the organic world uses deception — camouflage, for example, or strategies to increase mating opportunities that harm others — to improve survival and reproductive fitness. Human life is saturated in deception, despite the Christian recognition of how destructive it can be. Why would we imagine that superintelligent AI would not be still more competent in deception and just as eager as we are to use deception to its advantage? Advocates often try to argue that since AI is not a biological entity, the natural-selection mechanisms that drive deception in the biological world are inapplicable. But this is patently untrue. The world in which AI exists, after all, is an organic world. The struggle to survive in such a world presents opportunities for deception.
Recognizing a threat is the first step. The second step is suggesting solutions. Fortunately, there exists a Christian thinker who has tackled the broad issue of the enslaving and dehumanizing character of technology in the post-industrial world, and aspects of his work could be put to use in understanding AI. His name is Jacques Ellul.
Once widely read, and now mostly forgotten (in large part because the technological world he criticized has grown still more potent in the years since his death in 1994), Ellul explored the incompatibility of Christian faith and the technological colonization of the human sphere. Though his political position-taking was often too radical for traditionalists, his faithful way of thinking through the threat of technology is nonetheless a reasonable starting point for a Christian critique of AI and a plan for resistance that is consistent with our faith.
Alexander Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. His Substack newsletter can be found at alexanderriley.substack.com. All the views he expresses are his and do not represent the views of his employer.
Edmund B. Miller
The Danger of Dualism
About 500 years ago occurred one of the most disastrous events in Church history, as the teachings of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon radiated across Christendom. Their teachings did not challenge any particular doctrine but went for the jugular: the conviction that divine life flows through the mortal realm. We can have weak or bad bishops (as certainly we have had), yet the Church herself, as the Body of Christ, will live. We can have mediocre liturgies and sing “On Eagle’s Wings” from now to the end of time, yet the Church herself will live. We can have bad catechetical programs, in which we teach in obscure mystical fashion how Baptism washes us clean, yet the Body of Christ will live. However, if we come to the point of denying that there’s even such a thing as the Body of Christ, then Paul will die and Saul be resurrected.
Of course, my reference here is to Saul on the way to Damascus, with letters of authority to pursue the persecution of the Christians, when he receives the revelation that in his persecution of insignificant, flesh-and-blood individuals he persecutes God Himself. For Saul, the zealous Jew, the notion that the transcendent Creator would mix with His creation was vile heresy. Hence, in Caravaggio’s painting of Saul’s conversion, God makes sure Saul gets the point. Directly over Saul’s prostrate form and dead center in the canvas is a large hoof — the fleshiest, dirtiest thing in the neighborhood. It’s as though God were saying, Yes, Saul, I can be found even in this.
Without the conviction that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it), we can’t discuss weak or bad bishops because there are none. Without an incarnate deity, we can’t complain of insipid liturgies because there are none. Nevertheless, there prowls within popular culture a destructive dualism, disastrous to the ideal of a sacramental Church. Certainly, it did its damage 500 years ago in the form of Lutheran theology. There was one fellow, more or less in the time period, who saw the destructive capacity inherent to this theology. His name was William Shakespeare. In Hamlet the Bard puts a bit of apparent gibberish in the mouth of the title character. When the king asks him where he has hidden Polonius’s body, Hamlet responds that Polonius is at supper — “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet.” Was Hamlet dualistic? Certainly. This is the lad who quipped to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And here, with this unmistakable reference to the Diet of Worms, young Hamlet is linked to Luther. The results of Hamlet’s dualism are evident in the bodies scattered across the stage at the end of Act 5 — not as the result of his “indecision” but of actions either of the body or passively plotted in the mind.
But it’s 500 years later now, and we seem to have survived pretty well. After all, no one is out there confiscating Church property or distributing Jesuit body parts. Meanwhile — great news! — almost 70 percent of practicing Catholics believe in the Real Presence. But let’s abate our enthusiasm a moment to consider this: Such surveys are conducted among a dwindling few. In other words, most of the people who should be there to take the survey aren’t there — because as many as 85 percent leave the Church by the time they get to college. They cite various reasons; however, based on my conversations with older high schoolers, the essential reason is that Catholicism makes no sense to them. It is hard for the young to accept a Church which teaches that particular objects and actions, including the physical details of their individuality, project far beyond those details. So, on the physical level, water is water, for example, with the capacity to kill or to refresh and save. Correspondingly, Baptism takes us into the realm of death, while simultaneously restoring us to life. This kind of fusion of the physical with the metaphysical is increasingly difficult for a modern mind to grasp. That’s because, in the modern dualism, the ideal is divorced from the material. Examples are not hard to find. Modern art rejects an ideal of beauty, even as it instructs us that the orange canvas is art not by virtue of certain objective criteria but by virtue of the act of the will, which says it is art. Gender, as well, is established by self-determination, not by biological reality. Personhood itself is established by the will, or the choice, of the parent. And, once again, bodies are scattered across the stage.
Looking beyond the extremes of these examples, dualism’s radiation is all around us, most pervasively in screen technology. The screen allows the shopper to buy without entering the crowded store. It allows the enthusiast to play football without having his torso ground into the turf; the accountant to deposit checks without greeting a grumpy, overworked teller; the traveler to arrive at a destination without unfolding and analyzing a large, stained roadmap; the amateur to call himself a musician without studying music theory or ever touching the keys of a piano. The screen allows us to distance ourselves from the physical, to live more and more completely within the realm of the mind. Accordingly, Elon Musk’s proposition that we are our minds soon will be entirely justified.
No, God will not be found within bread, water, words, and oils — simply because in the dualistic world, the delightful intermingling of form and matter, thing and ideal, man and God, cannot be acknowledged. As a matter of fact, with the abandonment of texture, touch, taste, and smell, and the sense of individuality invariably announced by physicality, affirmation of a personal God will be increasingly difficult. A big force of some kind? Yes. A dude with biceps and a flowing white beard? No.
Edmund B. Miller teaches at Father Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is President of Guadalupe Workers, a nonprofit group focused on sidewalk counseling and assisting single mothers in the Detroit area.
Timothy D. Lusch
An Ancient Threat, Presently Misunderstood
The greatest external threat facing the Church today is Islam. The greatest internal threat facing the Church today is her ignorance of that threat — or, perhaps, more precisely, the cowardice and willful blindness of so many of her priests, prelates, and princes toward that threat. How did it come to this? How did we come to be spiritually, theologically, and intellectually disarmed? When did we forget, or were asked to ignore, nearly 1,500 years of Islamic violence, conquest, and aggression? Consider the following:
The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom. (Nostra Aetate, no. 3; italics added)
And there it is.
Now consider this from Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan, a leading Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar: “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is a part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.”
The discerning mind will notice a stark difference between what the Church thinks about Islam and what a leading Islamic jurist declares about Islam. And al-Fawzan’s statement is Islam. That is, he states what is theologically and legally correct according to Islamic texts. It is not a radical position. It is, quite simply, a faithfully Islamic one. So is dhimmitude (the legal treatment of Christians and Jews as an oppressed class), jizya (the tax dhimmis must pay Islamic authorities), the lack of any rights of a kafir (an unbeliever), the treatment of all women under sharia, but especially dhimmi and kafir women, and so on. Muslims may worship Allah through “prayer, almsgiving and fasting,” but they also do so through jihad (something Nostra Aetate conveniently leaves out). And not only through jihad of the pen or the purse but jihad of the sword. Fighting in the way of Allah is the preferred jihad, the most esteemed of the means available. Why? Because Muhammad fought in the way of Allah. Muhammad, according to Islam, was the perfect man. He is to be emulated in all things. Muhammad waged war against Jews and unbelievers. Is it a wonder that Jews and unbelievers are the targets of jihadis? Of course not. The jihadis are simply emulating Muhammad.
If Islam is not a proper heresy, it is most likely descended from one. Arianism undoubtedly ranged far into the Arabian Peninsula and seems to have influenced Muhammad’s bizarre notions of Christianity. Such heretical beliefs likely bolstered his claim that Christians got both God and revelation wrong and only he got it right. Islam, then, is not an Abrahamic religion (as Jews and Christians understand the Abrahamic covenant). Allah is not the God of the Jews or the Christians. Therefore, Muslims do not “adore the one God, living and in Himself” as Jews and Christians do. The Isa of Islam is nothing like the Jesus Christ of Christianity (any more than the Jesus figure in Gnostic gospels is). At what point, then, will the Church recognize that the claptrap of Nostra Aetate needs correction? Now. Now would be great.
The Church is more than adequately equipped to overcome the Islamic threat. But it will require courage and honesty, two virtues severely lacking in an episcopate hellbent on giving awards to pro-abortion senators, blessing gay couples, and encouraging open borders. Bishops and cardinals need to read, or read more closely, the writings pertaining to Islam in St. John Damascene and St. Thomas Aquinas. A refresher course in world history, specifically the history of jihad from the time of Muhammad to the present day, would also correct some of the most persistently ignorant assumptions about Islam pedaled by our prelates. Lastly, and most importantly, Islamic law and theology should be mandated courses for all Catholic seminarians. If Islam is not viewed as an existential threat to Holy Mother Church — as it was for nearly 1,500 years before the Second Vatican Council — then we have quit the field of battle. We should engage Islam in all its varieties with the hard reality of its own teachings and not, as Nostra Aetate pretends, a monolithic and mythic Islam that exists nowhere but in deluded progressive minds.
His Holiness Leo XIV should initiate an ecumenical council to reassess and revise the Church’s understanding of Islam. He should suspend all interreligious dialogue with Islamic entities pending conciliar deliberations and should direct the episcopate to do the same. Vatican City should maintain diplomatic relations with Islamic countries (whether structurally, politically, or culturally dominated by Islam) to ensure the rights of Catholics are respected and to advocate for those who are persecuted.
Timothy D. Lusch is an attorney and writer. His work has appeared in National Catholic Register, Toronto Star, New English Review, and at CatholicWorldReport.com, CrisisMagazine.com, CatholicExchange.com, and elsewhere.
Thomas Storck
A Crisis of Confidence
“If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle?” — 1 Corinthians 14:8
The greatest threat to the Catholic Church today comes from her unwillingness to set forth her mission and doctrines with any degree of confidence or clarity. The reason appears to be that among both ordinary clergy and the laity, as well as many members of the hierarchy, there is a widespread lack of belief in the Church’s doctrines — or at least a failure to take them seriously, to realize that, if true, then they are of utmost importance, crucial for our life in this world and in the next. Too often members of the hierarchy seem not to see their task as preserving the faith once delivered to the saints and proclaiming it to an unbelieving world. This attitude is not usually explicit, but it is suggested, implied, and insinuated as much by their actions as by their words. It is implied in statements regarding other Christian bodies, in which unity no longer seems to be centered on Christ’s teachings but merely for unity’s sake, and in dealings with non-Christian religions, in which Catholics seem hesitant to tell others of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind. Other religions undoubtedly possess elements of truth, but that is not the point. The point is that we have been commissioned by Our Lord to teach all nations, not to exchange pleasantries.
Whence comes all this? It comes from what amounts to a capitulation to the modern world — a capitulation all the more strange as it followed immediately upon a Catholic intellectual revival rivaling that of the 13th century in its brilliance, which devoted considerable energy toward exposing and refuting the very errors of modernity to which the Church has since largely succumbed. Several outstanding characteristics of that revival are worth noting. One was its clarity, its often scornful rejection of muddled reasoning. The modern mind, Hilaire Belloc wrote, “is the spirit which has lost acquaintance with logical form and is too supine to reason.” Catholic thought was grounded in the foundations of reason. If X is true, then Not X cannot be true. If the Catholic Church is the one true Church established by Jesus Christ, then obviously no other religious body can claim that title, and we must work to bring the entire human race into the Church. If the Church teaches that something is true, “either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal teaching,” as the First Vatican Council put it, then Catholics must believe it, and it does not change with the passage of time. Our beliefs have come to us from Christ and His Apostles; they are not a reflection of the ever-shifting opinions of the world. There was a hard edge to Catholic thought then, which attracted some and often compelled respect even by those who disagreed. Thinking mattered to us.
All this was ultimately based on a recognition that any intellectual activity, whether in theology or philosophy or anything else, must conform to reality. The human mind does not create reality; rather, its task is to discover it. The modern mind, though, in its multifarious manifestations, generally does not agree. At root is the Kantian rejection of the idea that we can know reality. And if we cannot know reality, then, as the theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., put it, I am limited to investigating not whether my knowledge agrees with reality but “whether my knowledge of the object agrees with my knowledge of the object.”
As late as 1954 Étienne Gilson, one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, edited a volume titled The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XIII. It contains the text of 12 of Leo’s encyclicals together with Gilson’s introduction and notes. The subtitle must be understood in a wide sense, for Gilson includes encyclicals on Thomistic philosophy, the foundations of the political order, and marriage. Why is this volume important? Because fewer than ten years before the Second Vatican Council was convened, Catholics could offer the unvarnished teachings of Leo XIII as the Church’s message to modernity. But within a decade, it was seen as rather embarrassing to offer the teachings of a 19th-century pope as our message to the modern world.
I do not deny that the Church has issued numerous excellent and clear documents in the intervening years, especially under Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. But how often did Catholics take them seriously or did the Church attempt to enforce obedience to them? The concept of the development of doctrine was and is often used as a way of forcing doctrinal change, of saying that although we believed X in the past, we can now believe Not X. More often, however, no one bothers to make arguments anymore but simply affirms something without attempting to justify why the Church was supposedly mistaken in the past about some point of faith or morals.
Does the Church possess the resources to overcome this? Undoubtedly. She always has access to the supernatural aids needed for any situation she faces, but this grace will be granted only if we ask for it and cooperate with it. If, however, we do not recognize our need for it, we will hardly ask for it.
On the natural level, we are also well equipped to counter the sloppy thinking that afflicts so many Catholics. As mentioned above, just prior to our own times, Catholics subjected modernity to a searching critique. As a result, we possess ready-to-hand a powerful battery of intellectual weapons that already laid bare the errors of the modern age.
At one time, we Catholics possessed a confidence that we have the truth and can show why it is the truth. We were not afraid of the intellectual currents of the day, however powerful they might have been. That confidence can be reclaimed. We have but to ask for it and then do our part.
Thomas Storck, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has written widely on Catholic social teaching, Catholic culture, and related topics for many years. He is the author, most recently, of Economics: An Alternative Introduction (Arouca Press, 2024), co-editor of Catholics and the American Polity: Approaches and Contestations (Arouca Press, 2025), and host of The Open Door on WCAT radio and TV.
James Noel Ward
Rendering to Caesar What Is Ours
The greatest threat facing the Church, both internally and externally, is the profound arms-length treatment we inhabitants of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) nations give to the supernatural. Zooey — or life abundant — is our supernatural hope. We Catholics depend on supernatural grace, and we have ignored our absolute dependence on it and failed to give it the respect it deserves.
In Baptism, Catholics are supernaturally and indelibly marked as “Christ’s own, forever.” For those following the arguments of the integralists, Baptism as the mark of membership in the Church also marks us as members of a kingdom invisibly operating in this world, and also not of this world, and profoundly eternal and even more profoundly supernatural. It is on this last point that modern Catholics have gone backwards in our daily consciousness, back to the bottom of Plato’s cave, lured into somnolence, where we have ceded our supernaturally assigned mandates, which will be supernaturally sustained when we perform them: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, harboring the homeless, visiting the sick, ransoming the captives, and burying the dead. To whom or what have we Catholics ceded this divine mandate? Here in the W.E.I.R.D. nations of Europe and the United States, we have ceded it to the state. We must repent of this and take up these tasks, for Our Lord and King commended them to us.
How have we come to this dismal state of shirking our mission of saving souls through these mercies? Historians quibble that it goes all the way back to the medieval guilds, or to Cardinal Richelieu’s 17th-century construct of a state managed by clerks, but I place it in the expropriation of the corporal works of mercy by the state through mission creep initiated by bureaucrats, formulated in its modern incarnation by Max Weber and Alexander Kojeve, and initiated in the United States by Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt under sway of John Maynard Keynes.
The acceleration of political or violent rejection of the bureaucratic state in the W.E.I.R.D. world also is fueled by the simultaneous rise of technology and cybernetics and the tension this creates. Technology has ushered in the “panopticon,” celebrated as a public good by Jeremy Bentham and the Fabians. Everyone will behave when everyone continuously is observed by the state, in a monstrous aping of God’s sovereign omniscience. Mercifully, intellectuals such as philosopher Shirley Robin Letwin, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller, and French philosopher Michel Foucault have cautioned against the dangers of the state’s acquiring the power to extend this model with technology. Our current camera-rich world and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at least inspire conversation about its boundaries and the panopticon’s good and evil utility.
The technocratic-bureaucratic panopticon state perhaps is somewhat held in check by the autonomous cybernetics of individuals and their own chosen use of technology, but we consumers know the freedom technology allows also has a price in the data we unwittingly surrender. And it still is a question that concerns man whether technology ends in Heidegger’s vision of cybernetics in which technology has retreated from the foreground of the “at-handedness” of a tool to being merely an integral, forgotten part of us. Obviously, this challenges many Church teachings and should frighten us, for while wearing Google glasses might be fine, genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization are only the beginning of the horrors. Imagine nanobots in the womb invisibly sorting spermatozoa in an extension of an intra-uterine device undreamed in the nightmares of sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick.
The resources of the state misdirected at failed corporal works of mercy but justifying the state’s bloat; an ever-expanding bureaucracy of sinecures forever commanding more resources; the illegitimate power to subjugate people with surveillance, technology, and thickets of regulations; and the use of violence reserved only to itself are simultaneously dystopian fears and the recipe for the collapse of the state through bloody revolution.
Our help is in the Lord. The Church is well equipped to overcome these threats of a collapsing and resource-misdirecting state, and our Pope is also well equipped — a bit as an American but more profoundly as the Vicar of Christ on Earth — to re-proclaim loudly, consistently, vigorously, and by example that there is a supernatural reality, and the Church and her mission are sustained by it and will not be defeated.
How do we participate in that? With the supernatural gifts of grace through the spiritual works of mercy: instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, admonishing the sinner, bearing wrongs patiently, forgiving offenses willingly, comforting the afflicted, and praying for the living and the dead. The happy spiritual life leads to zooey, or life abundant, and makes for a happy yoke of the corporal works of mercy. A virtuous circle of graces. Zooey: our supernatural hope.
In my ideal world, Leo XIV would pick up the yoke of Christ, the cross across his shoulders, and solemnly pronounce to the Church and the world (Urbi et Orbi): “The State has failed at Our job. For in Our world there still are hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, sick, prisoners, and unburied dead. The State is failing and should abandon these services, for they are Ours, given to Us by Our Lord Jesus Christ’s command, life, example, and glorious Resurrection. As His Vicar on Earth, I command you States to cease. Children of His kingdom, you have your orders.” In faith, we must trust that Christ’s supernatural intervention will sustain us in our reclaimed supernatural mission, an abundant life, in zooey.
James Noel Ward is a Catholic layman, husband, father, son, brother, godfather, and Professor of Finance and Mathematics. He lives in the French countryside and teaches at the American University of Paris, Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and Chavagnes International College. Previously he was Professor of Economics at Deep Springs College in Deep Springs, California.
Victor Bruno
Awakening from a Decades-Long Slumber
“Increased political influence” wasn’t on the lips of political commentators that sad September day when Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah. But as soon as it was revealed that not only was he going to Mass but a St. Michael’s medal hung from his neck when a hole was blown into it by a .30-06 caliber gunshot, Catholicism became a talking point.
Not since the 1960s — with Camelot, that vanished kingdom — has Catholicism been so important in American politics. The president at the time was Catholic, as is the current vice president, and the current pope is American. The latter seems to have assimilated a Latin American identity, but journalists rarely seem to refrain from asking him about current American affairs.
The renewed popularity of the Church among the public, too, is palpable, especially among the young.
In other words, Catholicism is fashionable again. It is “a thing” among young people. Yet, for all its popularity, Church hierarchs seem hopelessly out of touch with today’s political climate. Bishops and cardinals, with this and that exception, seem stuck in the 1960s or simply ashamed to say what they mean. This includes the Bishop of Rome, as we will see below.
What, then, can the Church do to adapt? Below I propose three realistic ideas for a vibrant and virile positioning in today’s world. I stress the word realistic because it’s not a matter of ringing the bell backward, as if the 1960s never happened. Without a doubt, the regime enthroned with Vatican II is partly to blame for the current state of affairs. But the fault also lies elsewhere.
1. The Church Must Regain Her Identity.
The Church is not an NGO, but she often positions herself as such. It’s not a matter of speaking about climate change or social inequality or the Palestinian question. The rationale of some of Rome’s positions is unclear and leads to the charge that the Church is either becoming globalist or has surrendered to naturalism and civil religion. For example, there’s nothing intrinsically bad about Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, but when he says “our common home” is “like a sister” or a “beautiful mother,” or elsewhere that the “service of the common good” has been left behind and capital has become “an idol,” it looks like the encyclical could have been written by the Greenpeace PR team.
That the Church has sought since at least the 19th century to articulate a third position between capitalism and socialism is hardly news. And it’s that third position that leads to her environmental stance. Why doesn’t the Church explain her stances more clearly? Why does she choose to look like a left-wing NGO? This brings me to my second point.
2. The Church Must Offer Clear Teachings.
In the 1960s the new regime thought “pastoral” care was better than “doctrinal” declarations, but all this has done is muddy the waters and render Church action tepid. All the reasons why economic inequality is wrong, whence it comes, and what impacts it has on spiritual life are missing. “The culture of relativism,” wrote Francis, “is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labor on them or enslaving them to pay their debts.” Correct, but what does he mean by debt here? Is he referring to usury or something else?
This problem isn’t exclusive to Francis. Leo XIV said, “Whoever seeks justice transforms wealth into the common good; whoever seeks domination transforms the common good into the prey of their own greed.” Is the problem that some people have too much money? Is it the capitalist system? Or is it something else? This murkiness in papal utterances about political and economic topics leads the hearer to either apathy or antipathy.
These are points the Church has defended for two centuries now, but we hardly ever hear mention of that. Among the many reasons why is such language isn’t “pastoral.” In the name of pastorality the Church jettisoned clarity.
3. The Church Must Brace for the Postliberal Age.
The third point is the hidden grammar of the second. The 1960s was the height of the Third American Republic, when the zenith of American values — liberal democracy — made its influence felt in the Vatican in the election of Pope John XXIII and the convening of the Second Vatican Council. Pastorality is a concession to liberalism, as is synodality. But that age has come to an end.
On at least three continents (Europe, the Americas, and Asia) autocratic forms of power have arisen with the full consent of the population, which means people are willing to relinquish representation to someone who’ll “put the house in order.” This doesn’t represent the “death of democracy,” but it does represent the collapse of the Western order (which ultimately killed Christendom; see my article “Who Murdered Christendom?” Jul.-Aug.). The younger generation has noted this. Their preference for tradition is clear evidence. But tradition is more than a form of liturgy. If there are mass conversions to Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy, it is because in the regions where they are stronger, these religions are part of the public life. What would this look like for the Catholic Church?
Some of these suggestions will inevitably be acted on over the next 30-40 years. The current generation of leaders (including Leo) was born in the 1950s and 1960s, meaning they came of age in the heyday of Vatican II’s failed policies. That’s the world they know. As new generations rise to the bishopric and cardinalate, Vatican II will diminish in importance and impact. God and time will have filtered out the excesses and misguided rationales of that era. This will happen either out of necessity or out of strategy. My hope is that these three steps are taken quickly — and strategically. If done out of necessity, we’ll be in straits as dire as the West is as a civilizational force.
Victor Bruno is an author whose writing has been featured in The Political Science Reviewer, In Medias Res, The Fortnightly Review, Sacred Web, and elsewhere. He has two books published in Portuguese, the latest being René Guénon Revelado (2023). He also writes the newsletter Cartas da Tradição on Substack.
Robert James Stove
Fewer but Better Catholics
The following presupposes several generally conceded political phenomena, among them that we are, for the time being, stuck with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Christophobic génocidaires as protection racketeers to the Western world; that Vladimir Putin will remain in power for the rest of his odious life, and no Damascene conversion to basic decency will make him regret his loyal service as KGB thug; and that the West’s seminaries, monasteries, and convents will continue to be almost empty, given their protracted and abject dependence on the same massive Third World immigration it is socially suicidal to keep maintaining.
The foregoing uncomfortable assumptions having been accepted, we can concentrate on what the reality-based Catholic lay community can do henceforth (at least in the English-speaking world, where most of us necessarily live). For our guiding principle, we should look to the wittiest line from the 1939 film Ninotchka. Readers familiar with that movie will recall the title character’s reference to Stalin’s purges. (Yes, Virginia, once upon a time Hollywood actually lampooned communists.) These purges, Ninotchka announces, have guaranteed “fewer but better Russians.” Joking aside, that is precisely the Church’s most urgent need at this time: fewer but better Catholics.
If any benefit has emerged from Catholicism’s cultural, political, and moral collapse since Vatican II, it is the absolute discrediting of the ludicrous falsehood that universalism means attracting at least 50-percent-plus-one of the multitudes. Those among us lucky enough to have undergone proper catechesis know full well that the Church was every bit as universal when she had no followers outside the Apostles’ Upper Room at Pentecost as ever she was under any confessional Catholic government.
Humanly speaking, the modern Church’s most conspicuous need is for what Jacques Maritain called “prophetic minority shock-troops.” Through them do social and cultural changes, for good or ill, come about. Mindless braying about “people power” should be eschewed. Whatever special virtue the masses qua masses might hitherto have possessed ended forever when they screamed, “Barabbas!”
Implementing the following recommendations will be well within the competence of “prophetic minority shock-troops.” Indeed, implementation is unviable for anyone else.
1. Most putatively Catholic universities and high schools in Anglophone nations should be closed, and homeschooling made the default Catholic mode of education.
The only reason formal Catholic education systems more-or-less worked, until the 1970s, was their near-total reliance on unpaid sacerdotal, conventual, or monastic workforces. Those workforces have permanently vanished.
Even the most college-addicted Americans have discerned that mass education (sacred or secular) is an idea whose time has come — and gone. Quite apart from the continuing scandal of undergraduate debt, the unenforceability of student attendance following the COVID-19 lockdowns points to this inescapable conclusion, as does the exodus from the teaching profession of almost everyone talented enough for employment elsewhere. The sheer demographic craziness of compelling Catholic youngsters to waste their time at college during their most fertile years can no longer be concealed, disputed, or ignored.
Besides, mothers whose chief domestic concern is the rearing and teaching of their children in the faith are, by definition, mothers who can resist being conscripting into wage slavery. Big Business, robbed of this tyrannical power, will need to start paying Catholic fathers the family wages Pope Leo XIII commanded back in 1891. And that will do more to annihilate the feminist privilegentsia’s hatreds than what a hundred Andrew Tates can achieve.
2. Pro-abortion, pro-sodomy, and pro-euthanasia politicians who call themselves Catholic must be excommunicated.
This punishment still occurs on occasion (just ask Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi) but not often enough. Without such punishment, we ordinary Catholic non-politicians have little or no motive to abide by Catholic moral teachings.
3. Enough already with demonizing Caucasians.
Terms like racism and white supremacy are, as Orwell said about fascism, meaningless except to connote “something not desirable.” If you prefer — as you should — Bach and Beethoven to Diddy and Cardi B, you are a “white supremacist” by current baby-Marxist criteria. And as long as Rome officialdom (rightly) refrains from throwing open the doors of St. Peter’s to every tinted terrorist on the planet who wants to acquire permanent residence through squatters’ rights, it should stop demanding identical masochism from the rest of us.
4. Clergy should proclaim from the pulpit that Humanae Vitae belongs to the infallible magisterium.
Most millennial and Gen Z Catholics — incredibly, to those among us who have vivid memories of 1968 — are unaware that Humanae Vitae even exists. Someone had better tell them.
None of the above recommendations will require the spending of one extra dollar by the Church. Most would ensure gigantic savings for the Church. (What Catholic would not rejoice at the spectacle of fashionable heretics being forced off campuses and onto food stamps?)
Contemplating these recommendations will probably make all too many bishops, to quote Gen. William T. Sherman’s expressive phrase, “whine like curs.” Let them whine. The episcopate’s job, to cite a subsequent and still more renowned American warrior, George Patton, is to lead us, follow us, or get out of the way.
Melbourne-based historian and organist Robert James Stove is the author of Kings, Queens and Fallen Monarchies, published in October 2024 by Pen & Sword (Yorkshire).
Pieter Vree
The Great Feminization of the Church
Helen Andrews recently articulated something startling: “Wokeness is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions.” What are those patterns? Empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition. “Female modes of interaction,” she writes in “The Great Feminization” (Compact Magazine, Oct. 16), “are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions…. If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?”
Consider the preceding “greatest threats” to the Church in this symposium. Now ask yourself what their origin might be. Might it be the feminization of the priesthood and episcopacy?
Leon Podles in The Church Impotent (1999) noted that Catholic seminarians at the time were “far less masculine than any other male group of their age.” The priesthood attracts men whose “masculinity is somewhat doubtful,” including “a certain type of homosexual.” The NOR’s own Michael S. Rose in Goodbye, Good Men (2002), a barn-burning bestseller, exposed seminaries that had become hotbeds of homosexual activity. A decade hence, Thomas G. Plate reported in the journal Pastoral Psychology (2013) that in a national sample, 67.3 percent of priests identified as homosexual. By now, many of those priests likely have risen to leadership positions, enjoying the protection and promotion of a powerful network of similarly inclined priests and prelates. This network links “one person to another, through a sequence of appointments,” said psychotherapist Richard Sipe, an expert on clerical sex abuse, “the sequence of who follows whom in what position, and how they got there.” Known as the Lavender Mafia, it reaches from the bottom of the pool of potential priests to the top of the episcopal hierarchy. Its figurehead, until 2018, was Theodore Cardinal McCarrick.
Once known as the “kingmaker” of the American Catholic Church, McCarrick is said to have orchestrated the appointments of numerous prelates, including Donald Wuerl, Blase Cupich, Joseph Tobin, Kevin Farrell, Michael Bransfield, and Robert McElroy. He even boasted of influencing Francis’s elevation to the papacy. Several of McCarrick’s episcopal protégés have retained power after he was prosecuted as a homosexual predator. And it would be naïve to believe that these men don’t have protégés of their own. Who is complicit, who is compromised, and who is too cowardly to confront the network (it does, after all, act like a mafia) isn’t easily determined. But in rare instances, we get a brief glimpse behind the velvet curtain.
Consider the case of Jeffrey Burrill. Ordained in 1998 (around the time Podles and Rose wrote their books), he served as a parish priest before becoming director of apostolic formation at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. In 2016 he was elected associate general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and general secretary in 2020. His ascension up the ladder was proceeding apace — until journalists at The Pillar outed him as having engaged in “serial sexual misconduct,” frequenting gay bars and using Grindr, a homosexual hookup app. Burrill then resigned from the USCCB.
What was the reaction of the bishops who’d elected him? We’re still waiting for it.
Burrill later sued Grindr for selling his personal information, because, per his lawsuit, his “upward trajectory to the position of bishop has been permanently derailed.” Why would he believe that to be the case? Had he received assurances that the track to the bishopric already had been laid down for him?
Yes, the Lavender Mafia protects and promotes its own — until its own become a liability, as did Burrill and McCarrick before him.
The greatest threat to the Church is the feminized men who populate her institutions and bureaucracy, careerists who are more concerned about comfort than mission. Sure, careerists care about the company — it’s the hand that feeds, after all — but the company’s core values are mutable to them. Recall how quickly major corporations shifted from waving the flag after 9/11 to going “woke” after George Floyd. Likewise the Church. Gone is the “swashbuckling spirit,” as classically feminine traits have displaced masculine ones. The result? Stagnation manifested in an utter lack of doctrinal and disciplinary determination. Instead, we have empathy over rationality (in sexual teachings), safety over risk (acquiescing to COVID lockdowns), cohesion over competition (a.k.a. synodality), nuance over clarity (in theology), dialogue over decrees (in doctrine), and accommodationism over conviction (a.k.a. ecumenism).
Feminized men have given us laxity and ambivalence in pastoral matters, a studied reluctance to hold anyone to fixed standards. Artificial contraception? Follow your conscience. Communion for the divorced and “remarried”? The Eucharist isn’t a reward for the perfect. Communion for pro-abortion Catholic politicians? We mustn’t politicize the Eucharist. Intercommunion with Protestants? It’s an ecumenical imperative. Ordination of women to the diaconate? Form a study group. Pederast priests? Reassign them. Misbehaving bishops? Have their friendly brother bishops investigate them. Blessings for same-sex couples? Make it policy. (Of all the pressing issues of the time — war, immigration, human trafficking, food insecurity, persecution of Christians — who deemed this a matter of utmost concern and why? Sadly, Fiducia Supplicans will be seen as Francis’s parting “gift” to the Church.)
Until the Lavender Mafia is excised from the Body of Christ, nothing much will change.
What can Leo do about it? Probably not a lot. What is one man against a vast, inwardly focused, self-replicating network burrowed into a labyrinthine bureaucracy? Even as the head man, he’s greatly outnumbered. Pope Benedict XVI, “God’s Rottweiler,” found this out the hard way. Shortly upon elevation, he decried the “filth” in the priesthood — and then he basically went silent on the subject. He had been effectively defanged. Benedict quit the papacy rather than continue the battle. Francis occasionally shouted into the wind, but he had a pattern of defending episcopal coverup artists.
As for Leo, it’s not clear he wants to do anything about this problem. In a September interview, he said in response to a query about homosexuality, “We have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says.” He seems to believe that Church teaching could and perhaps should be changed. That’s far from encouraging.
In the meantime, we wait, trusting that the Church will, as she always has, outlast the knavish imbecilities of her human leaders, especially those of the present wicked generation. They too shall pass and, we may hope, give way to a new generation of masculine leaders, and the Church will be purified of the scourge of feminized men and restored to full vigor.
Pieter Vree is Editor of the NOR and co-editor of Catholics and the American Polity: Approaches and Contestations (Arouca Press, 2025).
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