thoughts in and out of season
Can Christendom be restored?
Every society is based on some understanding of man and the world that is comprehensive enough to define good and evil, moral obligation, the nature of the good life and so on. But that is just to say that every society is based on a religious understanding.
The issue then is … More ...
Communism, in its concrete sense as a political movement based on the writings of Karl Marx, has been one of the three main variants of political modernity. The others have been liberalism and fascism. As such it combined liberal goals (emancipation of the individual from restraint) with fascist means (struggle in solidarity against an enemy … More ...
Europe refers to a geographical area and a civilization. In the former sense it stretches in the West from Gibraltar to the British Isles, in the East to the Urals, and on the South to the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian Sea. In the latter sense it has usually been more restricted. Napoleon said … More ...
The question regarding man today is whether man is simply a natural object like any other, the qualities of which can be explained in the same way as those of a maple tree or computer program, and if not, whether he has a particular substantive essence—a necessary character that makes him what he is—or whether … More ...
Christendom is the part of the world inhabited by Christians, understood as a polity ordered toward Christ though recognition of the authority of the Church. The ordering of course has never been perfect, but Christ was nonetheless once understood as the principle of unity and the highest possible authority. As such, Christendom endured until the … More ...
The West is a sort of abstract version of “Europe”, which in turn is a secularized version of [Christendom]. As such it is not completely clear what it is or was, except that it wasn’t the “East” (thecommunist world) or the “South” (the Third World). It included New Zealand but not Argentina, for example, and … More ...
The “world” can be taken in more than one sense. It can mean the sort of thing that promotes “worldliness”: things like career, politics and life in a consumer society. In that sense, “the world” refers to human things to the extent they ignore God:
… More ...“Love not the world, neither the things that are in
Catholicism is a community, a tradition, a vehicle of revelation, and a world. The word means “universal” or “all-inclusive.” The Catholic Church is therefore the Church that is not partial but possesses by right the whole of Christianity and truth. The extent to which particular Catholics, including Church officials, exercise that right of course varies.… More ...
Tradition is a collective term for the beliefs, habits, attitudes, institutions, stories and so on that grow up among a people living together and give them a common mind and spirit that enables them to make a life together. Tradition is also the knowledge of things that can’t easily be put into words, diffused and … More ...
The three must be understood together. Each comprehends, in its way, the whole of the setting in which we live. Catholicism is the explanation of all things from the standpoint of the most basic realities. “The West”—the political world that surrounds us—is the remains of Catholic Christendom, now in disorder because it has lost touch … More ...