The Narthex

This coming Monday is Columbus Day. It also happens to be the date traditionally associated with Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Americas: October 12, 1492. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 moved the federal observance away from the historical anniversary and onto the second Monday in October. Columbus Day…

At the invitation of a friend from Siena, last April we attended a retreat at the Lecceto Hermitage, just outside the city. The retreat was led by a very talented priest. The Benedictine nuns write on their website, "We dedicate seven moments each day: our day begins and ends with…

The highest court of the European Union is currently considering a Belgian case where the petitioner is asking the EU to order a Catholic diocese to expunge his record of baptism from the baptismal books under the Union’s “right of erasure” rules. In the name of continent-wide harmonized data protection…

What some call Walker Percy’s weirdest book, Lost in the Cosmos (1983), suggests one reason we feel lost is that we don’t know who we are. The question of our identity is especially important in an ever-expanding cosmos. The Big Bang to which cosmologists trace the origin of the universe…

Pope Leo's trip to France could have been considered just another trip that takes place according to the usual protocols. Instead, it proved disruptive, both spiritually and, perhaps above all, culturally. The trip was to one of the most secularized countries on the continent, where the secularity of the state…

On September 27, Pope Leo XIV addressed pilgrims consisting of the sick and their caregivers at the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes on the subject of assisted suicide, speaking of it as false compassion. In the wake of that event, I bring to your attention two women of our…

“My Three Sons” was a 1960s hit sitcom about a widower raising three boys. I suspect many Catholics who heard Sunday’s Gospel would have preferred a parable about the man’s three sons. But Jesus gave us only two. In Christ’s parable, the first son is told to go work in…

"Joe Biden is perhaps on par with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as one of the most pro-abortion presidents in U.S. history," writes LifeNews. Biden's radical abortion agenda apparently met with approval from Planned Parenthood, as America's largest abortion organization presented Biden with an award at a luxury gala in…

I recently penned an essay on the threats imperiling the existence of Catholic colleges. I identified four: demographics, costs, people’s perceptions of the need for college degrees, and AI. Not all of them carry the same weight. For example, how AI may affect college graduates (especially in terms of entry-level…

The trigger for the latest wave of AI-related alarm is Jacob Coxon, a researcher who moved from OpenAI to Anthropic, the company developing Claude. In resigning, Coxon accused both companies of rushing toward a self-improving superintelligence without, in his view, behaving responsibly enough. "They are gambling with our lives," was…

Two weeks ago, I shared a heartfelt lament with my editor: “Woe to me if I do not philosophize.” Feeling my pain, she replied, “Just do it,” or words to that effect. And so, gentle reader, you now find me still contending with “the great chain of being.” It’s the…

Saturday, September 19, is the feast of Our Lady of LaSalette. The Blessed Mother appeared 180 years ago, in 1846, to two children in the French Alps. Her message was simple, which is perhaps what I find most attractive about it. She lamented three things: that people didn’t pray, that…

A recent New York Times article was one of those pieces that make you think -- not necessarily because its conclusions are profound but because its questions are. The author of “The Most Promising Worlds Beyond Our Solar System” writes about research documenting the existence of planets orbiting other stars…

Faced with the escalating public debate on end-of-life care, the Catholic Church in Italy is undergoing one of the most dramatic theological and political reversals in its recent history. This is no longer a silent retreat or passive tolerance in the face of secularization, but a veritable genetic mutation. Led…

Here we wrap up my four-part series on suggestions for improving the pastoral letter on immigration by the Archbishop of San Antonio, the Most Rev. Gustavo García-Siller, MSpS. The Archbishop cites St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (2:19) in support of his statement that “by Baptism we are incorporated into…