Truths, half-truths and ‘The Two Popes’ →

A half-truth, the Catholic historian John Lukacs frequently warned his readers, is more dangerous than a lie. The element of truth gives the half-truth a veneer of credibility that the lie does not have, and it often leads those who should know better to doubt their own judgment.

A few minutes into the pre-release screener of Netflix’s “The Two Popes,” I began to wonder what Lukacs, who died last spring at the age of 95, would have thought of it. The producers of “The Two Popes” have been forthright in acknowledging that the film is a work of fiction, and Lukacs would have been the first to admit that fiction can often reveal deeper truths than a mere recitation of the facts ever could. But works of fiction involving historical figures too often fall more into the category of half-truths, and “The Two Popes” is no exception.

Put not your trust in princes →

While the politicization of every aspect of human life is more advanced in the United States than in many other countries, the increasing expansion of politics well beyond the narrow sphere that it occupied in the Christian centuries has been one of the primary marks of the modern world since the early Renaissance. From the French Revolution through the Russian Revolution through Nazism, the attempt to replace religion — and especially Catholicism — with politics, or at least to subjugate religion to politics, has been unrelenting.

Here in the United States, this revolutionary elevation of politics over religion has been more subtle, but in many ways that has made it more effective.

As we approach the manger, remember God is with us →

Thirty-three years ago, on the night before the First Sunday in Advent 1986, I came home to the Catholic Church. Technically, that makes me a “revert,” but describing myself as one seems overly dramatic, since I had been physically absent from the Church for only four weeks. There are more than a few able-bodied Catholics who consider themselves practicing if they make it to Mass once a month.

But for me, those four weeks toward the end of my first term at Michigan State had been rough. I was lost, and I knew it.

At Mass, do we recognize the greatest of all mysteries? →

In the wake of the Pew study on the belief (or lack thereof) of Catholics in the Eucharist, most proposals to address this problem have focused on education. But the problem is more than an intellectual one. At the root, it’s about experience. We can drill the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation and the Real Presence into children studying for their first Communion and confirmation, and priests can (and should) use every opportunity throughout the liturgical year to remind those of us in the pews that Christ is truly present under the forms of bread and wine.

But if we say those words and then act as if that reality means nothing, why are we surprised when that teaching becomes an abstraction and then gets tossed aside?

To whom should we go? →

We ask for, and receive, the gift of faith at our baptism. We receive the grace to know Christ — not to know him as we know George Washington or Martin Luther, but as I know my parents and my sisters and my wife and my children. This is the substance of our faith: to enter into a relationship with Jesus, with the God-made-man who is not an abstraction but is as real as the faces gathered around our dining-room table at Thanksgiving.