Safe Haven

It seems like a lot of us are caught between the desire for justice, and the desire for stability. I can remember taking a university course on the history of the 1960s, and it was kind of like this. Destructive revolution on the left, and violent reactionaries on the right. Somewhere in my Republican soul, I said, "I draw the line at General Grant." The people who said that the agitation against statues was becoming a generalized iconoclasm have been proven right. I am not in support of racist iconography, but neither do I support the destruction of all iconography. It seems to me that our society in its own way is still very much Christian and Protestant; we just don't read our Bibles anymore. Our religious sense is not going to go anywhere. If we're not going to be Christian, we will be pagan. Secularism was never a real option; we can play at being secular, but we're not good at it. There will have to be something human that we all can latch onto, some lif...

There is an army of moderate-to-liberal Christians, who may be committed to the traditional teaching on human sexuality, but they somehow think that by some combination of political activity and meanness, some earlier generation of Christians forfeited the moral authority to speak to certain groups of people with the words of Jesus, and credibly to the reality of the human person. Such an idea is not completely without foundation, but sooner or later, we come back to the truth about human sexuality, the purposes of our reproductive system, and the limits of self-definition. There is no way that the truth of an authentic human anthropology will survive in the ghetto of private Christian devotion. Much if not all of it is public truth, accessible to reason alone. Do some of these Christians actually believe that the decisions of the secular state about what constitutes a family has no impact upon how ordinary people think about their sexuality? Do you actually think you will be able to...

One of the things that I love about being Catholic is that the Catholic tradition recovered the visible Church in a real sense. The Church that Christ founded subsists in the Catholic Church. The one visible Church is headed by one living person, and governed by visible, living bishops in visible union with him. It's tragic to watch people argue endlessly firstly about what the "Church" has or hasn't done, or does or does not believe, because no one can actually find it, first of all. Secondly, how long does anyone actually think they'll be able to hold the "historic" Christian teaching on anything, without actually being in union with that Church which is tasked with preaching that historic teaching? It should not be news to people, but if the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by Jesus Christ, then she is also protected by Jesus Christ, in a way that nothing else is, except by a special and extraordinary mercy of the Holy Spirit. Even so, t...