What We Need Now, by Francis X. Maier

Billboard Posters Defending the Traditional Liturgy Appear on Streets of Rome, by Edward Pentin
March 30, 2023
Abp. Charles J. Chaput: ‘The Splendor of Truth,’ and Why It Still Matters
March 30, 2023

*Image: Desolation by Thomas Cole, 1836 [New York Historical Society, New York, NY]. This is the final canvas from Cole’s series, The Course of Empire. Cole described Desolation as showing how “violence and time have crumbled the works of man, and art is again resolving into elemental nature. The gorgeous pageant has passed, the roar of battle has ceased – the multitude has sunk into the dust – empire is extinct.”

By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing, March 30, 2023

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Note: TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal will join Fr. Gerald Murray and host Raymond Arroyo (the Papal Posse) on EWTN’s The World Over tonight at 8 PM ET to discuss threats to the seal of the confessional, the German Synod, Pope Francis’s recent remarks on the future of moral theology, Cardinal McElroy’s banning of EWTN, and much more about the Church and the world. EWTN segments are repeated (consult local listings) and are usually also available on the station’s YouTube channel shortly after their initial broadcast.

 

Having criticized the Washington Post for its March 9 hit-job on the unpleasant but revealing work of Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal (CLCR), I now feel a weird kind of gratitude.  Though not intending it, the WaPo article triggered an interest in some of CLCR’s broader work.  And among that work is a new Substack site – What We Need Now – worth following in the months ahead.

This summer is the 30th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s great encyclical, Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendor of Truth”).  Veritatis Splendor is an ongoing bone in the throat for a whole, unhappy cohort of today’s theologians and Church leaders.  Hostility to it was obvious at, but even well before, the 2015 synod.  So the new Substack’s inaugural article, by Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Philadelphia’s archbishop emeritus, is a great – and needed – reflection on the encyclical’s enduring importance. …

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