Pride, After a Fall, by Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen, The Catholic Thing, November 5, 2024

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is Distinguished Professor at Thales College. Be sure to visit his new website, Word and Song.

I am relieved to find that Pope Francis has refrained from saying that someday we may be conferring, or pretending to confer, Holy Orders upon women.  It keeps alive the possibility that the churches East and West may reunite.  It averts an inevitable and devastating schism.  It allows the faithful to retain their trust that, as Sigrid Undset’s convert Paul Selmer says in The Burning Bush, it is the Church’s boast not to have changed her doctrine, so that what we believe is but an organic development of truths revealed already to the apostles.

Nor do I think it wise to attend to anything at all that the current culture, or whatever we call whatever it is that is widespread and that mimics the action of a culture without its soul, has to say about sex.  Al Capone, I have heard, repented of his crimes in prison, but before he did that, I would not consult him for moral advice, nor would I have him fill out my taxes. Yet I think that even the unrepentant Capone would be a more reliable guide on right and wrong than our society is on sex, marriage, and the raising of girls and boys.  I am not going to order food from people who come unwashed from swimming in a sewer. ….