In his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia, the recently elected Pope Benedict XVI said that one main task of the Second Vatican Council had been to clarify the relation between Church and state. The pope stated that in the twentieth century, “Catholic statesmen demonstrated that a modern . . . . Continue Reading »
Russell A. Berman’s essay (“State of Emergency,” June/July) about our nation’s instability in various areas of public life is an insightful and valuable analysis of the fraying of the social bonds that hold together our multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation. There is one sentence, however, that . . . . Continue Reading »
The Holy Father says that he wants the Church to be a listening Church. If so, then he should be listening to a wide variety of voices in the U.S. before making claims that there are a significant number of Catholics in this country who reject Vatican II. Continue Reading »
I am grateful to Edmund Waldstein for his kind response to my essay, and for his writings on these subjects generally. I am especially grateful in this case for his crisp elucidation of the Maritain–De Koninck debate and its implications for contemporary arguments, a subject whose subtleties I . . . . Continue Reading »
How should contemporary Christians react to the decline of their churches, the secularization of the culture, the final loss of Christendom? Perhaps, one important author has suggested, they should reconcile themselves to the new dispensation, accepting that the “modern age is not a sacral, but a . . . . Continue Reading »
In November 1945, Jacques Maritain wrote a letter to his friend Étienne Gilson in which he complained about “the integralists in Quebec” who were accusing him of “neo-liberalism, neo-individualism,” and “neo-Pelagianism.” Maritain was particularly frustrated because he saw the . . . . Continue Reading »
Chad Pecknold joins the podcast to discuss his recent Postliberal Order articles, “The Religious Nature of the City” and “Imago Dei as a Political Concept.” Continue Reading »
Professor Vermeule and his fellow integralists might consider whether they’re reprising 19th-century French royalist mistakes. Continue Reading »
For the last fifty years, from the Second Vatican Council onward, it made sense to speak of an American Catholicism fully reconciled to liberal democracy. On the fringes there were still some noteworthy anti-liberal and radical Catholic periodicals and writers, but the mainstream was defined by the . . . . Continue Reading »
As society crumbles, can the Church restore a new kind of universal communion? Continue Reading »
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