"Left flank to base. Left flank to base. We have lost radio contact with the right flank. Please come in. We have lost contact with the right. Please come in. Give us your bearings. Over."
How about some respect for Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease?
The great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac once wrote, "Suffering is the thread from which the stuff of joy is woven. Never will the optimist know joy." Those seem like strange words, especially for Americans.
As the political leaders of Europe come together to try to save the euro, and with it the very project of European Union, I believe the time has come for religious leaders to do likewise, and I want to explain why.
To "pay the piper" originally meant just footing the bill, as the Earl of Chesterfield used it when writing to his son.
The Genesis account of creation tells us that from the beginning, humanity was created to work.
The conventional wisdom operative in American Catholic social justice circles neglects the role of virtue.
If you borrow money you are obliged to repay it. And you should repay it by earning the sum required, and not by borrowing again, and then again, and then again. For some reason, when it comes to the state and its clients, those elementary moral truths are forgotten.
Theodore Dalrymple worked as a prison doctor and psychiatrist in Britain for 15 years. He's known serial killers, petty thieves and everything in between. As he puts it, with a mischievous grin, "I've probably spent more time in prison than the average murderer."
If we lined up all the major issues of Catholic social teaching and compared them to the Himalayas, the "dignity of the human person" would be Mount Everest the most magnificent and tallest peak dwarfing the rest.
