The Narthex

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…

As I wrote previously, the EU's liberticidal Chat Control law seemed to have been definitively shelved in October. Strong opposition from Germany and other member states led to the belief that Brussels' Orwellian project had finally foundered. But anyone familiar with the mechanisms of the European Union knows well that…

“Textualism” and “originalism” emerged as approaches to interpreting the Constitution in order to reconnect American judicial decisions with the document they were supposedly applying. The “living Constitution,” so in vogue from roughly the 1950s through 2000 (though not really firmly buried until Anthony Kennedy finally left the Supreme Court), unfettered…

The European Union adopted in October 2025 its “LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026-2030,” a document that immediately sparked heated debate across the continent. The strategy, officially presented by the European Commission, promises to raise the bar on rights, safety, and inclusion for LGBTIQ+ people, but some of its content is generating…

Rod Dreher, of Benedict Option fame, opined on X that countries where “basic patriotism is demonized” are “on the brink of civil conflict.” He made his observation in response to a post by a British man in Devonshire whose display of the Union Jack in his garden elicited a note…