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Government’s Sex Abuse Hypocrisy Comes Due

Francis X. Maier

I worked in senior staff positions in Catholic dioceses for twenty-seven years. For nearly all of them my duties included, in part, dealing with the legal, political, and media...

Have American Catholics Given Up on Evangelizing?

Francis X. Maier

Here’s a simple, biblical truth: We’re never as smart as we think we are, and we’re never as wise as we need to be. The best intentions can have...

AI and the Miracle that Makes Us Human

Francis X. Maier

It occurred to me recently, like a lit match in a black vault, that I’ve never been unloved. The same applies to my wife, our children, and grandchildren. None...

History’s Pro Tips on Iran

Francis X. Maier

Nothing in human experience compares to the wars of the last 120 years. Their scope has grown as the world has shrunk. The international laws governing conduct in war...

The Church and Immigration Sanity

Francis X. Maier

Let’s start with a thought experiment. A foreign-looking family knocks on the door one evening and asks for a place to stay. I’ve never seen them before. They look...

Course-Correcting the Sexual Revolution

Francis X. Maier

Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us Allby nathanael blakeforeword by ryan t. andersonignatius press, 272 pages, $18.95 John Lennon was an artist. And like any good...

Annunciation School and the Cost of Denying Reality

Francis X. Maier

On the surface, Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, and Mattias Desmet might seem to have little in common. Kingsnorth, based in Ireland, is an author of essays and novels. McGilchrist...

More and More and More

Francis X. Maier

Thomas More: A Lifeby joanne paulpegasus books, 624 pages, $39.95 Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Collins described the new biography Thomas More: A Life as a “worthy...

The Flawed System of Sexual Abuse Settlements

Francis X. Maier

There was a window from the late 1980s through the early 2000s when the sex abuse of minors seemed to be a predominantly Catholic Church problem. At least in...

Aging and the Quest for Immortality

Francis X. Maier

Nobody wants to live to be a hundred, except the guy who’s ninety-nine. Or so the saying goes. But it’s not true. Plenty of people have an appetite for...

China, DeepSeek, and American Complacency

Francis X. Maier

History is a heartless teacher. Three hundred years before Christ, Carthage was a prosperous commercial empire dominating the Mediterranean, sustained and protected by the world’s most powerful navy. Rome...

Advent from a Prison Cell

Francis X. Maier

The recent (and sadly flawed) movie Bonhoeffer reminds us that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and Lutheran theologian, is rightly revered for his courage in resisting Nazism—a path that...

Woke Ideology Is Not Dead and Buried

Francis X. Maier

I spent the evening after November 5 on YouTube. The site was full of time-compressed videos that tracked news media icons and Hollywood celebrities as election night wore on....

Roses, Chocolate, and Ambiguity

Francis X. Maier

I staffed a bishop-delegate in Rome at the 2015 Synod on the Family. Asked, at the time, for possible themes at the next synod, the delegate pressed for (among...

On the Politics of Joy

Francis X. Maier

Founded in 1946, the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York, has taken place in every presidential election year on the third...