What’s at stake in Cardinal O’Malley’s recent claims on women priests is not the teaching of the Church, which he presents eloquently, but an all-too-human limitation of comfort and common sense.

Cold war communism checked the sorts of freedom that western markets responded to. In its wake, Catholic social teaching offers a corrective to the instability of creeping, globalized markets.

Christians will live in a distinct way from the way of the empire, and their way of life will draw those who didn’t realize that this was Christianity all along. When the liberal ideology collapses, the Church will remain, the gates of Hell not prevailing against it.

Let’s all agree that the synod was a disaster. But let’s also be honest that the readings on Francis are starting to stink a bit of groupthink, and are beginning again to project the same corporatist impulses that drove the Church toward a much steeper precipice in the first place.

It’s hard to deny, especially now, that the fight for marriage has been or will likely soon become anything other than a shellacking by the revisionists. Language of “commitment” befits a scene more like Thermopylae than the Battle of the Bulge.

A toxic Francis is a function of our un-imagination. And anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is dumping a liability.

There are many good reasons to oppose both unchecked immigration and abortion; these are mostly obvious. Yet when developed full circle, some of these reasons stand at odds with one another.