Being pro-life means, first of all, feeling the urgency to restore the right to life of each innocent human being in law.

It is obvious that when Truth itself falls apart then morality itself decays.

The Church wastes a huge amount of her capital, her unique opportunities to speak to people who put themselves in the position of hearing what she has to say.

Doing an activity – even work – in a leisurely spirit, in an awareness of God’s presence, is one of the most useless activities we could do. 

"The more we try to ignore death, the more it fascinates us. The more we tell ourselves that mortality doesn’t apply to us, the more it surrounds us."

The sooner we reject false fatalism, the sooner we can get on with addressing the Church's deepest problems at their root.

We should demand bishops who are willing to accept their "special responsibility." And we should strive to be as harmonious as possible.

For all the failures of the American bishops, it would be foolish to suppose they're anything less than successors to the Apostles. But if we believe this, we should vigorously demand it. 

The future direction of the Catholic Church following the 2018 Youth Synod will be revealed only as our present youth begin to take on leadership in the Church.

We can't possibly be part of a solution to the current crisis. We are also not part of the problem. But we'll never know enough to resolve it.

A return to the Reagan-era political messaging of unfettered capitalism, libertarian autonomous individualism, and globalist foreign policy is not the way forward for conservatism. 

The youth synod is timely, but extremely ironic. We can't really hope that trends in faith or vocations will change anytime soon.

So much of living in a secularized culture is doing the work of translation and authentication: restating God’s truth in terms the world can understand and identifying the true works of God and his church from the false ones.

My Catholic identity still rests on elements of faith instilled in my childhood. Not on a keen sense for sniffing out good churchmen.

Insofar as there is an infusion of grace, a new order of peace, reason, and justice ought to reign among those grafted onto Christ in baptism.  

The concept of Just Peace is highly problematic and the Church should resist the siren call of those who advocate its adoption as doctrine. 

The answer seems self-evident. We need to build a jurisprudence of life. A Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade would be the endpoint, not the start, of the process.

A Trump court is our best protection against the onslaught that may be coming our way. And Brett Kavanaugh is still a good man.

When the daily patterns of life in our culture do not align with our true ends as virtuous persons, we all have a problem. 

There are three falsehoods I'd like to avoid, and that I'd like to make clear in case they weren't before. "Enlightened civic discourse" demands nothing less.