Catholic Church

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine - The difference between a healthy culture and a sick culture is not that the former is full of saints and the latter is full of devils. It is that the healthy culture raises high walls against evil and consciously directs its young people to what is good and noble, faithful and pure, while the sick culture hardly raises any wall, and, worse than failing to direct the young, fairly pushes into some participation in wickedness the last few souls who are by nature most averse to it.

By Msgr. Charles Pope - One of the dangers in presenting New Testament moral teaching is reducing the gospel to a bunch of rules to follow using the power of one’s own flesh. This is an incorrect notion because for a Christian the moral life is not merely achieved; it is received. The moral life is not an imposition; it is a gift from God.

By Peter J. Leithart, First Things - We live in a world of systemic evil. Asian and Latin American drug cartels produce and transport their merchandise with impunity because they have bought off or killed the public officials who would stop them and the journalists who would expose them. On the other side of the world, corner dealers battle for turf to sell to the wretched addicts who stumble and sleep on the sidewalks of American cities.

By David Nussman, Church Militant - I'm grateful for my job (and no, I'm not getting paid to say that), for my parish, for the roof over my head, for money in the bank account and for food in the cabinets... If we want to talk about thankfulness in relation to something specifically religious, a natural place to start is the Holy Mass... As some readers may have heard before, the Greek word for the Eucharist — "eucharistia" or "ευχαριστία" — means "thanksgiving."