You have to be careful how you talk about animals nowadays, especially domestic animals. They’ve taken on a sort of pseudo-human status. The internet has almost as many reels about dogs and cats as it does about people. And that’s understandable; animals are easier to have a relationship with than other humans. I mean, for starters, animals don’t speak! If they did, they would be much less popular, I’m sure.

But that doesn’t stop people from anthropomorphising pets. Books like, What is Your Cat Thinking and How to Talk to Your Dog are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole world where the comparative value of human and animal life is debated. And there are actual subreddits like “DebateAVegan” where you can argue about animal rights versus human rights. One “ChangeMyView” subreddit posted the challenge, “There is no reason to value humans over animals,” and the debate was vigorous, with a good deal of support for animals being more important.

It’s so funny how opinions like this swing from one extreme to the other. It was just 30 years ago that the New Age movement was telling everyone that we are gods. That spawned a whole industry of books that’s still going today, with titles like, Proof that You’re God and Discovering Your Divinity, and my personal favorite, I Am a God.

This swing from being lower than a house pet to literally being a god reminds me of that saying that humanity is like a drunken man trying to mount a horse: first he falls off one side, and then he falls off the other.

This inability to place ourselves correctly in the food chain, or figure out where we belong in the hierarchy of living things, comes from the fact that we really don’t fit in anywhere. We are unique. We are one of a kind. Chesterton addressed this in his book All Things Considered in which he wrote:

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off his head.

This is the reason we struggle so hard to understand ourselves—we’re a one-off. There’s no one else like us in all of creation. It’s kind of agonizing, in a way, to be a creature who can understand Quantum Physics and do the New York Times Crossword puzzle, but to not know why you’re here or how you got here. No wonder we envy the cat lying in the sunshine, or the dog who hasn’t a care in the world.

And although our pets give us comfort, they don’t completely cure the loneliness of our isolation. We are constantly looking out at the universe and asking, “Are we alone?” When we ask this question, we’re not asking, “Are there dogs on another planet?” We mean, is there anything like us humans out there? When we dream, and look up at the sky at night, and ponder our existence, we aren’t thinking of cats. We want to know, are we alone?

The answer is probably “yes.” Let’s face it, the universe is empty space. Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, is now over 16 billion miles from earth. It takes a radio signal 24 hours to reach it. So far, it’s encountered nothing.

But wait! You say, how did it make it through the asteroid belt without being smashed to bits? I got news for you—there’s a lot of space out in space. You could drive a truck through the asteroid belt. Voyager 1 has spent fifty years rushing headlong at 38,000 miles an hour without a steering wheel, and it doesn’t have a scratch in the paint.

And it’s hardly making any headway. It just finally left our solar system in 2012. It would take 80,000 more years just to reach the nearest star. Even at the speed of light, it would take two and a half million years to reach just the next galaxy.

If something is out there, we’ll never know it. Unless, of course, it finds us. But think about that for a moment. If something can reach us, there’s no way it’s anything like us. Nothing human-like, with a physical makeup like ours and a life span of 80 years, is going to travel millions of light years to find us. So even if aliens do show up someday, they won’t be anything like us. We will remain unique, an exception to everything else around us.

William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, realized how precious and unique we humans are when he finally went into outer space for real at the age of 90. As he recounted recently:

While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

Shatner probably doesn’t realize it, but he just turned the entire Copernican Revolution on its head. What he learned in space is what the Catholic Church knew all along—the Earth is the center of the universe. Copernicus may have been right about the motion of the planets, but not about the central role of Earth in the cosmos. Why? Because the Earth is where life is. The Earth is where we are. And that’s all that matters.

Humanity gives everything meaning, literally. When Berkley asked that famous question, “If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make any noise?” he was onto something. If us humans do not notice or comment on something, it is “as if it never happened.”

Berkely built that question into the philosophy of subjective idealism, that “to be is to be perceived.” And while the Catholic Church would clarify that nature does exist independently of whether or not it is perceived by humans, no one can deny that a housecat does not ruminate on a theoretical tree falling in a theoretical forest. No black lab can turn a silly question into a complete philosophy.

Only humans can love trees and honor them with poems like:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Yes, humans are poetry-making, philosophizing, tree-loving exceptions, whatever else we are.

Now, if you’re wondering why I would even bother making this argument, be aware that human exceptionalism is being challenged, and not just by pet owners. Click here or here to see what I mean.

Our best defense against this nonsense is to celebrate our humanity, our exceptionalism, and our responsibility for all of creation.

“The glory of God is man fully alive,” as St. Irenaeus famously said. We give God glory when we embrace our exceptional gifts and the unique opportunities we have for a brief period on this Earth.

So let’s live our lives to the fullest, and let our joy, our flourishing, our wholeness reflect God’s divine presence and love to a world struggling to bear the weight of glory that comes with being made in the image of God.

Editor’s Note: For those seeking God in the chaos of the twenty-first century, Peter Giersch invites you to accompany him in his latest release, Talking of Michelangelo: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in the Burgundy Region, available from Sophia Institute Press.

Follow along for more in this series on “Chesterton and the Mystery of Man” here.

Photo by Tien Vu Ngoc on Unsplash

In a culture where the emphasis on self-fulfillment is the goal for personal happiness, the pro-life witness of a mother in Italy in the 1960s is rather counter-cultural. Gianna Beretta Molla was a Catholic wife, mother, and medical doctor, who sacrificed her life for her baby. She was an ordinary, contemporary working woman, who believed wholeheartedly in the dignity of every human being, including those in the womb, even to the very end of her earthly life. She is a much-needed saint in our present culture, which Pope St. John Paul II identified as a “culture of death” in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”).

To be able to fully appreciate the pro-life impact which the sacrifice of this woman has on today’s society, it is important to reflect on the present scourge of abortion, specifically in the United States.

The Scourge of Abortion

There are many reasons for a woman to have an abortion: poverty, lack of family support, sexual assault, or medical complications putting her life at risk, just to name a few. Whatever the reason, it is very difficult, serious, and heart-wrenching for everyone involved.

Be that as it may, no one can deny the overwhelming increase in contraception and abortion worldwide for the past six decades. Just in 2020 alone, in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center and the CDC, there were over six hundred thousand abortions. Hundreds of thousands of babies were being aborted yearly. Then came a major blow to the abortion advocates.

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization saw the overturning of Roe v. Wade, returning the issue of abortion to the states. Pro-life advocates were ecstatic at this turnaround, and the hope was that the abortion rate would go down given that thirteen states enacted bans on abortion and six states implemented early gestational restrictions. Yet quite the opposite has happened; in the three-and-a-half years since the Dobbs ruling, abortion rates have increased in the United States.

According to an April 10, 2026, article in OSV, abortion provider Planned Parenthood’s “latest annual report reflects its fiscal year as of June 30, 2025,” and shows that they “performed 434,450 abortions, an increase of over 32,200, or 8%, from the previous year’s report.” Furthermore, according to a January 7, 2026, article in KFF, the steady increase in yearly abortions is due in part to the rise in virtual healthcare compared to in-person medical exams, the ability to receive abortion pills through the mail (“Medication abortion via telehealth now accounts for 27% of all abortions.”), and the increase in interstate travel for abortion access across state lines which “nearly doubled from 2020 to 2024, with Illinois, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Kansas experiencing the highest volume of out-of-state abortion patients last year.”

These data demonstrate that the abortion industry is growing stronger despite the achievement of overturning Roe v. Wade, with the monthly average of abortions increasing every year.

This is why pro-life groups remain tireless in their efforts advocating for the lives of the unborn. This is also why the story of Gianna Beretta Molla is so important. She was a modern woman who refused the recommendation of her doctors to undergo a hysterectomy to save her own life because it would have killed her child in her womb.

A Modern Saint for the Present Culture

Given the proliferation of contraception and abortion in our society, the story of St. Gianna is both essential and inspiring for the pro-life cause. So, who was this woman? Let us explore her legacy.

Gianna Beretta was born in Magenta, Italy, in 1922. A fervent Catholic, she was an active member of the community and of her church. She lost both her parents when she was twenty years old. She persevered through her studies at the University of Milan and graduated as a medical doctor and a surgeon in 1949. This was also the year she met her future husband, Pietro Molla, an engineer.

Gianna specialized in pediatrics in 1952, opened her own medical clinic near Milan and provided care for mothers, babies, the elderly, and the poor. She was an active member of Catholic Action. In short, she was an ordinary, modern working woman who lived according to her faith.

Gianna and Pietro persevered through six pregnancies in all, with Gianna losing two of her unborn babies in miscarriages before her final high-risk preganacy in 1962. It was during her sixth and final pregnancy that Gianna was diagnosed with a uterine tumor: “She allowed the surgeons to remove the tumor but not to perform the complete hysterectomy that they recommended, which would have killed the child.” Gianna was determined to save the life of her unborn baby, at great risk to herself. Being a doctor and surgeon herself, she was quite informed about the dangers involved if she continued with the pregnancy.

On April 21, 1962, the couple’s fourth child, Gianna Emanuela, was safely delivered by a Caesarian section.

After the birth of her daughter, Gianna was weak, ill, and bedridden. She would have only one week with her beloved child, husband, and three other children. The 2004 documentary Love is a choice is a must-see. In it, Pietro recounts that final week with his wife. Gianna fully realized and accepted that she was dying. She had no regrets. The life of her child came first. She had made the choice for both love and life.

Gianna Beretta Molla, beloved wife and mother, died of peritonitis on April 28, 1962, at the age of thirty-nine.

In 1980, the cause for beatification of this heroic wife and mother began, paving the way for her eventual beatification in 1994. Ten years later, Gianna was canonized by Pope St. John Paul II, on May 16, 2004, with her husband and children in attendance. It was very moving to see her grown daughter, who’d been saved by her mother’s decision. She is a medical doctor just like her beloved mother, who is now the patron saint of doctors. How very fitting.

In closing, may a culture of life permeate the world. May the holy example of St. Gianna Beretta Molla inspire women everywhere, and may they choose love and life always.

St. Gianna Beretta Molla, pray for us. 

Author’s Note: This article was adapted from the original, March 21, 2026, longer version, previously published on my website.

Photo by Muhamad Harun Rabiyudin on Unsplash

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Jesus drew near and walked with them.

The risen Christ draws close to walk with His unfaithful disciples who abandoned Him during the suffering of His passion (see Luke 24:13-35). They also abandoned the community of faith after they heard news of His resurrection. They were discouraged when He spoke to them. “They stopped, looking downcast.” They are overwhelmed and disappointed by all the events of Christ’s death, explaining, “But we were hoping that He would be the one to redeem Israel.” They did not believe His words or the words of those who had said that He had risen, as He promised.

Despite their past failures, present confusion, discouragement, lack of faith, and infidelity to Jesus and the community of faith, the risen Christ still drew near and walked with them because they belong to Him much more now after His death and resurrection. In the words of St. Peter, “You were ransomed from your futile conduct handed on by your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver and gold but with the precious blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished lamb” (1 Pet. 1:17-21). The risen Christ does not draw close to them because they are faithful and loyal to Him; He draws close to them because He has purchased them with the price of His blood and by His resurrection.

Our risen Savior does the same with us. He is always drawing near to walk with us, no matter our infidelities to Him, sufferings, confusions, discouragement, or sadness. He does not draw near because we are faithful and have our lives in order. He draws near to us because the blood that He has shed for us has made us His own. He is indeed the Good Shepherd who never abandons His weak and sinful flock.

With faith in the power of His blood that makes us His own, we too should draw closer to Him all the time. Why do we fail to realize the presence of the risen Christ in our lives? We do not realize His presence with us because we are not intent on drawing near to Him as He is intent on drawing near to us. We knowingly or unknowingly settle for a “long distance” relationship with Jesus Christ, trying to keep a safe distance from Him, mainly because of our failures, hurts, struggles in life, or fear of what He may ask from us.

The disciples eventually recognized Him “in the breaking of bread.” Let us learn from them five sure steps to draw near to Jesus in our daily walk and begin to recognize His presence in our lives.

1. Cultivate Gratitude for Christ’s Sacrifice

First, we must cultivate profound gratitude for the price that Jesus has paid for us to belong to Him. When we know that Jesus has paid the price of our belonging to Him, we don’t express our gratitude in words alone. Most importantly, we begin to “conduct ourselves with reverence during the time of our sojourn” (1 Pt. 1:17). We express our gratitude by honoring, respecting, adoring, and showing awe for Jesus in all our thoughts, words, and actions. In short, we do all things to please Him, and we live for Him alone.

Do our lives today show that we are truly grateful for the blood that Jesus shed for us on the cross? Are we living for His honor or for our selfish desires and agendas? Do we honor and reverence Christ in us and in others? Unless we show our gratitude to Him by our actions, we are not drawing near to Him, and we cannot recognize Him.

2. Engage in Honest Prayer

Secondly, we engage in honest and trustworthy prayer. The risen Christ draws near and invites the disciples to speak to Him honestly from their hearts, “What are you discussing as you walk along? […] What sort of things?” The disciples responded to His invitation to honest prayer and freely expressed all their thoughts, desires, expectations, shock, confusion, disappointment, etc.

They also listened to all that Jesus spoke to them, even His rebuke, “Oh how foolish you are.” Their hearts were enflamed with love through this honest conversation; “Were not our hearts burning within us while He spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” They took all His words to their hearts too.

How do we approach our prayer? How do we respond to Jesus’ unceasing invitation to intimate dialogue with Him? Do we express our desires, frustrations, thoughts, feelings, hurts to the Lord? Do we try to hide things from Him? Are we open to Him revealing Himself and His saving plan to us?

Do we allow Him to enlighten us on the meaning and purpose of suffering and pain in our lives? Are our prayers monologues or true dialogues with Jesus? Are we allowing Jesus to deliver us from our inappropriate images of God? We recognize Jesus with us only when we frequently engage in honest and trustful dialogue with Him.

3. Practice Fraternal Love and Hospitality

Thirdly, we practice fraternal love and hospitality to all. The disciples invited a mysterious stranger to stay with them, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” This was their saving grace because Jesus had “given the impression that He was going on farther.” They may have missed out on recognizing Him if they allowed Him to walk away that night.

We too must practice hospitality and friendship to all persons if we are going to draw close to Jesus. Earlier in the Gospel, speaking to His disciples about a little child, Jesus had promised, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Mk. 9:37). We cannot recognize the risen Christ with us when we are not open to truly loving relationships with others whom Christ has redeemed with His blood. We recognize and enter into communion with our risen Savior by humbly welcoming and serving all those whom we meet along the roads of life.

This is why chaste living allows us to experience the presence of the risen Lord in our lives. We love others in a way that reverences Christ in them and not because of the sexual pleasure or benefit we can get from them. Any form of unchastity, either in thoughts, words, or deeds, by which we reduce others to objects of pleasure, makes us blind to presence of the risen Lord.

4. Be a Witness to Christ in the World

Fourthly, we strive to be Jesus’ faithful witness in our world. The disciples were ready to return to Jerusalem as witnesses of the risen Christ to the community they had abandoned earlier. They did not even wait for dawn to come before they returned to give witness about the risen Christ they had seen, “So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem.” They did not give in to any fear of what their companions would say to them or whether they would believe them after they had initially deserted their company.

We too draw closer to Jesus when we are His faithful and courageous witnesses to others. We give witness to Jesus despite our past failures or present struggles. We just make Him known to others by our words, deeds, and prayers. We do not worry whether they believe or not, whether we are listened to or not, whether we are accepted or rejected. We just make Jesus and His words present in all our relationships and endeavors.

5. Receive the Holy Eucharist Faithfully

Lastly, and most powerfully, we draw close to Jesus through faithful reception of the Holy Eucharist. This is the climax of the risen Christ’s self-revelation to His disciples: “It happened that, while He was with them at table, He took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him, but He vanished from their sight.”

Jesus continues to draw close to us today and forever through His Eucharistic presence. By His Eucharistic presence, He does not vanish from our sight anymore. He remains and draws close to walk with us in all our conditions and experiences of our lives, in our fidelities and infidelities, our joys and sorrows, etc. We recognize Him more when we approach the Eucharist at Holy Mass and Eucharistic adoration with a lively faith and expectation to receive Him and all the graces that He brings.

In each Eucharist, Christ does not just draw close to us. He also gives us the grace to draw close to Him. By the grace of this Eucharist, let us also strive to draw close to Him at every moment so that we too can recognize the abiding presence of the risen Christ with us all the time.

Glory to Jesus!!! Honor to Mary!!!

Photo by Lawrence Walters on Unsplash

One of the great monarchs of Christendom was the pious King of France, St. Louis IX. Reigning from 1226 until his death in 1270 during the Eighth Crusade, St. Louis was a model of Christian chivalry whose virtuous reign set the standard for Christian kingship in the 13^th century.

It is not Louis’s reign we are concerned with here, however, but his observations on the matter of propriety of dress as it relates to one’s station in life. It seems that Catholics are perpetually disputing about dress: what is appropriate for Mass, what is modest attire for various occasions, pants vs. dresses for women, and much more. The secular world seems equally confused. Nobody seems to have any propriety in appropriate dress. We see the most debauched rappers loaded down in ostentatious displays of gold while billionaires go about in casual wear trying to convince everyone they are “just one of the boys.”

There is an interesting anecdote from St. Louis’s life that offers us helpful guidance on this matter, especially relating to how much is too much when it comes to dress. We read in Jean de Joinville’s Life of St. Louis that at Whitsunday the saintly French king happened to be feasting with his knights at Corbeil. A dispute arose between Joinville, the king’s chief steward, and some other knights over a matter of the propriety of certain kinds of dress. Joinville relates that a knight chastised him for being dressed more richly than the king himself. Joinville relates:

One Whitsunday the saintly king happened to be at Corbeil, where all the knights had assembled. He had come down after dinner in the court below the chapel, and was standing at the doorway talking to the Count of Bretagne, when Master Robert de Sorbon came to look for me, and taking a hold of the hem of my mantle, led me towards the king. So I said to Master Robert: “My good sir, what do you want with me?” He replied: “I wish to ask you whether, if the king were seated in this court and you went and sat down at a bench, at a higher place than he, you ought to be severely blamed for doing so?” I told him I ought to be. “Then,” he said, “you certainly deserve a reprimand for being more richly dressed than the king, since you are wearing a fur-trimmed mantle of fine green cloth, and he wears no such thing.”

Robert’s gripe was no mere hypothetical; to dress better than the king could be taken as a grave insult to the royal dignity. Joinville, however, protests his right to dress richly:

“Master Robert,” I answered him, “I am, if you’ll allow me to say so, doing nothing worthy of blame in wearing green cloth and fur, for I inherited the right to such dress from my father and mother. But you, on the other hand, are much to blame, for though both your parents were commoners, you have abandoned their style of dress, and are now wearing finer woolen cloth than the king himself.” Then I took hold of the skirt of his surcoat and of the surcoat worn by the king, and said to Master Robert, “See if I am not speaking the truth.”

At this point the King St. Louis himself got involved in the dispute, along with his two sons, taking first one side, then the other, in a discussion about the propriety of clothing, especially among men of authority and high rank and how much is too much and what is dignified versus what is just gaudy. In the end, St. Louis eventually takes the side of Joinville, admitting that it is right for a man of rank to dress according to his rank, and that it is not fitting for him to dress lower than his station out of some misguided sense of humility. He concludes with this advice:

As the Seneschal [Joinville] rightly says, you ought to dress well, and in a manner suited to your condition, so that your wives will love you all the more and your men have more respect for you. For, as a wise philosopher has said, our clothing and our armor ought to be of such a kind that men of mature experience will not say that we have spent too much on them, nor younger men say that we have spent too little.

St. Louis is advocating moderation in clothing, neither spending too much money on clothing that it is ostentatious nor spending so little that one looks meager. But notice that moderation for St. Louis is governed by station in life. Always dress with moderation, but “in a manner suited to your condition.” A prince or prelate or person in authority does not exercise moderation by abandoning the dress and symbolic vesture of that authority. A man must dress according to his station, “so that your wives will love you all the more and your men have more respect for you.” This is a statement about respect; the implication is that respect is diminished when a man does not dress according to his station.

Moderation must always be exercised, but St. Louis’ point is that moderation looks different for those in different stations in life. Louis does not insist on an absolute universal standard of dress; he insists on moderation relative to station in life. It is proper for a wealthy man to display his wealth through his clothing. It is proper for a laborer to go about in the clothing befitting a laborer. Louis’s statement that “men of mature experience will not say that we have spent too much on them, nor younger men say that we have spent too little” displays exceptional wisdom—men of maturity are experienced enough to see through facades, and we must therefore be aware that ostentation will be quickly (and disapprovingly) spotted by the wise. The young, on the other hand, are easily impressed by appearances; in moderating our dress, we should not go so far that the young despise our appearance.

If virtue is the mean between extremes as the ancient philosophers teach, then St. Louis wisely locates the virtue of moderation in dress as the mean between the value judgments of the young and the old, as representative of the balance between greatness and humility.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

As kids count down the days until summer, parents are beginning to look for fresh ways to make memories over the summer break. If you’re one of those who’s trying to plan ahead, look no further! Here’s a list of fun, wholesome activities for families with kids of all ages.

Audio Dramas to Inspire Imagination

If you’ve never listened to an audio drama before, your family is in for a treat! The experience of listening to a high-quality audio drama is like watching a movie, complete with great actors and soundtrack. However, the experience is more interactive because instead of watching images on a screen, you are visualizing the action in your imagination as you listen to a breathtaking story.

I listened to a lot of audio dramas as a kid, and the good news is that there are new ones created every year! Here are just a few recommendations to try out:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia (Focus on the Family Radio Theatre)

Hands-down, this is my favorite audio drama series. Focus on the Family created audio drama versions of C.S. Lewis’ seven Chronicles of Narnia books, where children stumble into the enchanted world of Narnia and are forever changed by their adventures. Although these fantasy stories are intended for children, adults can enjoy them just as much because of the deep messages about facing life with courage, integrity, and forgiveness of others and self. This series provides hours and hours of fun, so it’s great for road trips!

2. Welcome to Hope Springs (Augustine Institute)

Easily accessible on YouTube, “Welcome to Hope Springs” is a new release made for middle-schoolers. During the opening of Hope Springs’ revamped historic train depot, a group of kids stumbles across two mysteries. First, someone has stolen important historical artifacts from the facility. As if that isn’t enough, why is the old telegraph office receiving messages purporting to be from a different era? Kids will enjoy the humor and suspense of Season 1, and the good news is, there is more to come!

3. Brother Francis: The Barefoot Saint of Assisi (Augustine Institute)

The adventurous story of St. Francis of Assisi is brought to life through this award-winning audio drama. I first listened to it as a teenager and could not get enough of it. In my opinion, the St. Francis story is presented in a way that is deeply inspiring without coming across as preachy. If your parish subscribes to Formed, your family can listen for free!

Growing In Faith Through the Big Screen

Looking for some faith-filled movies and shows to enjoy this summer? Here are some recommendations for families with kids in a variety of age ranges!

1. Chime Travelers (2026-)

First, for the little ones: the brand-new TV show Chime Travelers is a fun and entertaining way to learn about the saints. The two main characters, siblings Patrick and Katie, not only get to time-travel to meet the saints, but the saints’ stories are directly tied to the relatable struggles these kids are going through in the present day. The episodes are short and fun, and they can be accessed through Formed or Hallow.

2. I Can Only Imagine (2018)

When I watched I Can Only Imagine in the movie theater as a teenager, I was completely blown away. I had grown up listening to MercyMe’s hit song, for which the movie is named, but I never knew the real-life story that inspired it.

The film portrays the relationship between singer Bart Millard and his father, who was physically abusive, and the inspiring true story of how faith can truly work miracles in families. The reason that I Can Only Imagine is such a genuinely fantastic movie is that it doesn’t gloss over the challenge to forgive. The emotion in this movie is hard-earned. It’s definitely worth a watch but is best for families with older teens and young adults, since the movie does include intense content such as physical abuse.

3. The Baxters (2024)

The issue with a lot of faith-based content nowadays is that it can come across as preachy or just not entertaining. This is definitely not the case with The Baxters, a three-season Amazon family drama that is never predictable and always deeply moving. The show includes mature content, so it’s up to parents to discern whether this would be appropriate to watch with their older teens or their young adult children. However, this show is a beautiful portrait of a contemporary Christian family struggling to stay united in the midst of heartbreak.

Great Books for Reading Out Loud

One of the best things my mom did for me when I was a kid was reading aloud to me.

From those nostalgic nights of snuggling up and listening to stories unfold, I discovered my love for reading, which led me to want to write my own stories one day. Reading books together fed my imagination and was also great for boosting reading and listening comprehension skills.

As someone who has taught writing at the university level, I have to say that students who demonstrate good reading comprehension stand out from the crowd. (In fact, when my sister was applying for medical school, one of the schools she found online said that they pay more attention to the MCAT reading comprehension section than they do on the science sections!)

This summer, I challenge you to read out loud as a family, even if it’s just once a week. Not only is it good intellectually, but it can be a great bonding experience!

Some classics that make for great story-time fun include:

1. Heidi by Johanna Spyri

This sweet classic is perfect for girls in elementary school and early middle school. This story follows the adventure of young Heidi, an orphan who moves to her grandfather’s home in the Swiss Alps and who teaches everyone around her the life-changing power of showing love to others.

2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Young Anne Shirley is one of those larger-than-life characters who seems more like a friend than a figment of the imagination! L.M. Montgomery’s beloved classic is perfect for girls of all ages, who will laugh out loud at Anne’s crazy misadventures as the young orphan strives to find a home in Prince Edward Island, Canada. As a bonus, Focus on the Family Radio Theatre also has a great audio drama version of the book!

3. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Full of cutthroat pirates, sea-faring adventure, and treasure-hunting, Treasure Island truly is a great book for reading aloud. Boys of all ages in particular will enjoy this action-packed story for its suspenseful twists and turns!

4. Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

Boys who enjoy learning about history and battles will be huge fans of this wonderful classic, set in the American Revolutionary War. Teenaged Johnny Tremain is an arrogant apprentice silversmith living in Boston when a terrible tragedy, as well as the chaos of war, turn his whole world upside down. Because the story is action-packed and easy to follow, this is perfect for reading out loud!

I hope that you’ll pick a few of these wonderful stories to accompany your summer fun. Make this summer break unforgettable by engaging in audio dramas, films, and books that will bring your family closer together and make your imaginations soar!

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Dawson, MacIntyre, Virtue, and War at the End of a World

The other evening I had the pleasure of watching with my father a film from my youth, Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. It is often remembered as a romantic epic—sweeping landscapes, heroic sacrifice, and a tragic love story set against the French and Indian War. Yet beneath its aesthetic power lies something far more severe: a meditation on the death of culture, the eclipse of virtue, and the transformation of war.

Read in light of Christopher Dawson—especially Religion and Culture and Dynamics of World History—the film emerges as an unexpectedly precise diagnosis of modernity’s spiritual costs.

Culture Does Not Die in Battle

As a sociologist and metahistorian, Dawson was acutely aware that societies are not sustained equally by all social institutions. Of the five fundamental spheres—family, education, religion, politics, and economics—he insisted that a civilization cannot be rebuilt from politics and economics alone. These may administer life, but they do not generate it.

Society is formed by religion, expressed in the arts, and rendered intelligible by philosophy. This is Dawson’s central claim: cultures do not fundamentally live or die by economics, technology, or military power. They live or die by religion, understood broadly as a shared spiritual orientation toward reality. A culture survives only so long as it can transmit a common vision of life—embodied in ritual, moral imagination, memory, and a sense of ultimate meaning.

Where that transmission remains possible, renewal is not only imaginable but historically plausible. The Last of the Mohicans depicts precisely the moment when such transmission fails. The Mohican people are not wiped out in a single massacre. They are cut off from continuity. The death of Uncas is decisive not merely because he is brave or noble, but because he is the last bearer of a living tradition. When Chingachgook mourns him in the final scene, he is not lamenting political defeat; he is witnessing the end of a world that can no longer reproduce itself.

Dawson would recognize this immediately. In Dynamics of World History, he observes that traditional cultures often perish not through annihilation but through absorption into a civilizational system incapable of carrying their spiritual form. Modern civilization survives by abstraction—institutions, contracts, administration—whereas older cultures depended on embodied transmission: land, kinship, ritual, and memory. Once these are severed, survival becomes hollow.

Virtue Without a World

This cultural death has moral consequences. The film is filled with virtuous characters—above all Uncas, but also Hawkeye and Cora Munro—yet their virtue appears strangely homeless. Courage, loyalty, chastity, and self-sacrifice still exist, but they no longer belong to a stable moral ecology.

Here the film converges with Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis in After Virtue: virtues can survive for a time as personal excellences even after the traditions that once sustained them have collapsed. Uncas’s courage is real, but it has no future. There is no community left in which such courage can be taught, expected, or honored as a norm. It is admired precisely because it is exceptional—and therefore doomed.

Hawkeye survives, but only as a moral exile. He carries memory forward without being able to found a culture. Virtue, detached from a living tradition, becomes heroic rather than ordinary. Dawson warned that this is a hallmark of civilizational transition: morality becomes individualized and nostalgic rather than socially formative.

War After Justice

The film’s portrayal of war deepens this diagnosis. Indigenous warfare in The Last of the Mohicans still bears moral weight: memory, vengeance, responsibility, and personal risk. Violence is tragic, but intelligible. Magua is not a nihilist; he is a man formed by a world in which injury demands reckoning.

European war, by contrast, is procedural and administrative. Forts are surrendered by treaty, alliances broken by calculation, and lives exchanged for advantage. The most chilling moments are not battles but negotiations—where moral responsibility dissolves into bureaucracy.

From an Augustinian perspective, this marks a decisive shift. War, for St. Augustine, could only ever be justified as a tragic means ordered toward justice and peace. When war becomes a mechanism of control rather than an extension of moral order, it belongs fully to the civitas terrena.

Dawson complements this insight historically. As civilizations expand, he notes, warfare becomes increasingly technical and impersonal, detached from the moral formation of those who fight it. Violence no longer shapes character; it dissolves it. War becomes mechanical, just as citizenship becomes bureaucratic.

Empire, Bureaucracy, and the Loss of the Common Man

This process was already visible in the late Roman world and reached a refined form in Byzantium: the rise of bureaucracy as a substitute for culture. Administration replaces participation; regulation replaces virtue. An empire grows more complex precisely as it grows more distant from the lives that once sustained it.

At this point, a civilization loses contact with its rooted human types—the common citizen, the soldier, the peasant. Power is exercised through procedures rather than shared forms of life. Loyalty becomes compliance; culture becomes management. The empire continues to function, but it no longer forms men.

Modern Europe exhibits the same pathology. Like Byzantium, the European Union increasingly governs through impersonal norms and technical expertise. Authority is exercised far from ordinary lives. The result is not unity but alienation: an empire detached from the cultures that formed it.

Modern Europe is therefore no longer Christendom. It retains administrative coherence but lacks the spiritual soul that once unified diverse peoples without erasing their differences.

Europe After Faith

Recent maps showing that, in many European cities, the most common newborn names are now of Islamic origin have provoked alarm or denial. Both reactions miss the point. These data do not primarily speak about Islam. They speak about Europe.

To understand them, one must descend beneath demographics to the spiritual and cultural level. Here three thinkers— Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Christopher Dawson—remain instructive.

Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God” was not a celebration but a diagnosis of catastrophe. A civilization that severs its bond with transcendence hollows itself out. The “last man”—comfortable, risk-averse, sterile—is the result: a man who no longer sacrifices or generates.

Spengler transformed this insight into a philosophy of decline. In The Decline of the West, he described the West as a civilization entering its terminal phase: technique without soul, declining birthrates, religion reduced to residue. His Faustian mechanistic analysis often appears prophetic, but it comes at the price of fatalism.

Here Dawson proves decisive. Civilizations, he argues, do not die of biological old age but of spiritual apostasy. What arises from a choice can be reversed by a choice. A culture without cult does not become neutral; it disintegrates. It no longer generates children, names, or reasons for existence.

Seen this way, today’s anxieties signal not conquest but abdication. A civilization that ceases to believe also ceases to generate—children, meaning, future. The source has not dried up; it has been abandoned.

Civilization: Fate or Vocation?

At this point a crucial distinction must be made between Oswald Spengler and Christopher Dawson. For Spengler, culture inevitably hardens into civilization through a quasi-mechanical process. Civilization is the final, exhausted stage of a culture’s life: urban, technical, bureaucratic, and spiritually sterile. Once this transition occurs, decline is irreversible. History follows necessity, not freedom.

Dawson decisively rejects this fatalism. For him, civilization is not in itself the enemy of culture, nor is its emergence a biological destiny. The decisive question is not whether a society becomes “civilized,” but whether its civilization remains animated by a living spiritual principle. Christian civilization, in Dawson’s account, is not the suppression of cultures but their redemption. It does not flatten differences or erase identities; it provides a soul capable of unifying diverse peoples without destroying their particular forms of life.

This is the distinctive genius of Christianity. Just as grace does not annihilate nature but heals and perfects it, so Christian civilization does not abolish the individual person or culture, but elevates them. Where Spengler sees civilization as the tomb of culture, Dawson sees in Christianity the possibility that civilization can become its guardian—provided it remains rooted in worship, moral imagination, and a shared orientation toward transcendence.

The Last Europeans?

What ultimately triumphs in The Last of the Mohicans is not a better culture, but a more durable system. European powers will build states, archives, and institutions. The Mohicans leave behind memory—but memory entrusted to those who no longer inhabit it.

This is Dawson’s most unsettling insight: modern civilization does not defeat rival cultures morally. It outlasts them biologically and forgets them spiritually. What survives is not culture but nostalgia—beautiful and powerless.

The film is therefore not merely an elegy for a vanished people. It is a meditation on what happens when a civilization loses the men and women who once embodied it. When the common citizen, the soldier, and the peasant disappear, culture loses its human face. What remains is administration without memory and rights without roots.

Christianity, Dawson insists, is not a technique for managing decline but a response to nihilism. By affirming that life is a gift and a vocation, it keeps history open.

As St. Augustine learned after 410 in The City of God, and as Europe rediscovered after 1918, a civilization is not finally judged by the collapse of its institutions but by the ordering of its loves—and if modern Europe remembers again the source of its faith, then the question posed by The Last of the Mohicans need not mark an ending, but the possibility of renewal still open within history.

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“If I could move into that neighborhood, then I would be content.”

“If I could become friends with that person, then I would be content.”

“If I could travel to that place and eat at that restaurant, then I would be content.”

“If I could get that job and make that much money, then I would be content.”

“If I could be in a position of influence where people listen to me, then I would be content.”

“If my kids would listen to me or my neighbor would respect me, then I would be content.”

These are contingencies of contentment, statements we make thinking of the possibility of happiness and joy. For most of our lives, so far as we can remember, a seemingly infinite litany of these statements infiltrates our thoughts and desires. Many, if not most, of us exhibit a proclivity to not being or remaining content, because, you know, “the grass is always greener.” But how do these contingencies affect our interior spiritual lives, our families, our broader communities, our jobs?

In the post-World War II era, Venerable Fulton Sheen noticed the lack of contentment was spreading across the American cultural landscape (and across western culture more broadly, perhaps), and he began addressing it in his writing and preaching. Specifically, he laid out the broad contours of his message, which he would deepen in other places, in a couple of his earliest newspaper columns. One was titled “Joy From The Inside” (July 2, 1950) and the other, simply, “Contentment” (Sept. 9, 1951).

In both columns, Sheen identified the phenomena at the center of all discontentment: egotism. In “Contentment,” he defined it as the belief that all else should revolve around one’s self. In “Joy From The Inside,” he provided a stark description of egotism as a spiritual parasite. “The ego is always insatiable, if it is in command,” he wrote, “no indulgences and no honors quiet its craving.”

The pastor listed other causes of discontentment that are inextricably tethered to egotism. Envy, covetousness, and jealousy were the three he listed specifically. All of these work together insidiously to create in us “an inordinate desire to have more, in order to compensate for the emptiness of our heart” (“Contentment”). Any person’s quest to amass more things, experiences, influence, or wealth would have a deleterious effect out of these egotistic motives. “Occasions for despondency and sadness are thus multiplied,” he wrote, “for all of us are bound to be denied some of the things we want…the more things a man needs in order to be happy, the more he has increased his chances of disappointment and despair” (“Joy From The Inside”).

Rather than dwell on the problem at length, however, Sheen quickly turned to identifying the solution, which had two prominent parts. First, he identified a different source of contentment: “One of the greatest mistakes is to think that contentment comes from something outside us rather than from a quality of the soul.” Beyond that, he sought to impress upon his audience that cultivating contentment within one’s soul requires excising at least some of the lesser goods we frequently seek. “The condition of our contentment is to be contained, to recognize limits. … Contented man, limited and bound by circumstances, makes those very limits the cure of his restlessness.” Boundaries, limits, he wrote, are an essential part of the cultivation of “a quiet spirit and a happy heart” (“Contentment”).

In essence, Sheen was asking his readers, including us, to consider a perennial psychological and spiritual question: “And then what?” What will happen when the contingencies of contentment—the natural and social pleasures we seek—come to pass? Or, more to the point, when they do not come to pass? When any of us experience the loss and sadness of being denied something we want, something we think we ought to have, the bishop noted that “it is our choice whether this loss shall be accepted with a cheerful good grace or taken as an outrage and an affront to us” (“Joy From The Inside”).

As we ponder Sheen’s words, though, we realize he was merely echoing a much more ancient tradition. He was not the first to identify these concepts or preach the antidote. No, the contentment complex is a problem of fallen human nature that the Incarnate Lord came to heal and redeem. Beyond Jesus, the earliest Christians of New Testament-era exhorted the citizens of that era to give up the “If…then…” mentality that would rob them of contentment and peace.

Jesus Himself included the principle in His foundational moral teaching, the Sermon on the Mount. “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Mt. 6:33-34). Our Lord meant that chasing inordinate desires and fleeting pleasures as the source of contentment would always lead to a poisonous anxiety. Rather, one was to seek right relationship with God first and let the other pieces fall into place according to the Lord’s will.

The great teachers of the Apostolic Age, specifically St. Paul, added to Jesus’ direction. First, the Apostle wrote to the Church at Corinth about having been afflicted by the Lord and being denied his petitions: “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). To the Christians in Philippi, he wrote that he had learned to be content.

I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Phil. 4:11-13)

And, to his spiritual son, St. Timothy, Paul wrote that “godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world.” The desire to be wealthy and influential, he continued, were “senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” It is through inordinate cravings—both physical and emotional—that people stray from right relationship with God (1 Tim. 6:6-10).

More than nineteen centuries later, Sheen echoed these basic truths about contingent happiness mistaken for truly blessed joy. He concluded “Joy From The Inside” with an exhortation to exchange “legitimate pleasures” for “deferred joys” and “full happiness.”

The Saviour of the world Himself told us that the best joys come only after we have purchased them by prayer and fasting: we must give up our copper pennies first, out of love for Him, and He will pay us back in pieces of gold, in joy and ecstasy.

The “copper pennies” for which Jesus asks are the constant cravings we think will bring contentment. He asks us to give up our own expectations in favor of allowing Him to provide happiness—blessedness—within the set of circumstances He has already arranged in our lives. We will do well in our own day to heed the instruction of Our Blessed Lord, the first Christian teachers, and Venerable Fulton Sheen.

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An earlier article examined how misreadings of key phrases and terminology in Catholic prayers and doctrines had a lasting impact on how believers practiced their faith for many years. These issues were serious enough to require rectification, as in 2019, when the Italian Episcopal Conference—with Pope Francis’s approval—revised the Italian Missal, changing “do not lead us into temptation” to “do not let us fall into temptation.” 

In comparison, the history of Bible printing provides a lighter catalogue of errors that aroused amusement rather than doctrinal crises. These errors were typically corrected quickly, but not before they embarrassed printers and delighted collectors, along with future historians with a taste for the footnote-odd and the archivally absurd. In this article, I offer a glimpse into some of the best-known printing errors—curiosities that reveal both the fallibility of human hands and the small pleasures of textual oddities.

If we close our eyes and imagine how early copies of the Bible were first mass-produced in the 15th century, we might see a worker, hunched over tiny pieces of lead type scattered across a work area, exhausted from such demanding labor. Or, before that, a proofreader dealing with copious amounts of text inside a room lit by dim candlelight. Such tedious conditions were ready-made for errors and resulted in several copies of “bibles of blunders.” From commands to commit adultery to parables about salad dressing, indeed, if one must make a mistake in sacred text, better a condiment than a creed.

Printed Bibles and the Humor of Archaic Words

Early English printings, especially in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, produced errors that now read as quaint archaisms. For instance, the 1568 Bishops’ Bible rendered Jeremiah’s question about healing, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” using the word “treacle,” a medicinal term rather than the modern sweet syrup—a lexical shift that gave the edition its nickname, the “Treacle Bible.” Theologically, the verse remained intact; linguistically, it now sounds as if the prophet were inquiring after a pastry glaze.

In the sixteenth-century, the English Bible remained in flux. Translators were wrestling with the nuances of the Hebrew and Greek languages, while printers were still figuring out how to keep their “p’s” and “q’s” straight and their “u’s” and “v’s” from staging a coup. This is the background in which the “He and She Bibles” of 1611 were produced. In Ruth 3:15, one impression read, “and he went into the city,” while another read, “and she went into the city,” a minor pronoun difference that became a bibliographical curiosity rather than a theological problem. However, according to Norton (2005), it did result in a kind of informal gender-pronoun scavenger hunt for seventeenth-century book collectors. One suspects that, for once, exegetes were genuinely content to say, “Either reading will do.”

In Psalm 91:5, the Coverdale and Matthew Bibles informed readers, “Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.” “Bugges” was, of course, the Middle English word for “bogeys” (i.e., ghosts or “terrors.”) However, as the word evolved—referring currently to “insects”—the verse became increasingly ridiculous. Later versions updated the word to “terror,” which is arguably more correct but significantly less humorous than “bugs” (Hudson, 1988). One imagines generations of devout readers less spiritually edified than relieved that their piety came with a divine guarantee against bedbugs.

The Golden Age of Omissions

If the sixteenth-century examples above revealed odd vocabulary, the seventeenth-century ones showed why the word “not” should not be mishandled. In 1631, printers Barker and Lucas (1631) set out to print a new King James Version of the Bible. The infamy of this copy can be attributed to Exodus 20:14, where printers forgot to add the word “not” in the Seventh Commandment, encouraging readers with “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

King Charles I, who was not amused and evidently did not welcome this unexpected revision of marital ethics, summoned the printers, fined them £300 (about the same value as a small manor at the time), and revoked their license. Although most of the 1,000 copies were seized and burned, a few of these “adulterous Bibles” survived—now considered prized possessions of Bible collectors (Barker & Lucas, 1631; Norton, 2005). It may be the only instance in which a typographical error produced both royal outrage and a spike in future auction prices.

Amazingly, around the same time, another editorial offence was committed. In Psalm 14:1, the text “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” was incorrectly published as “The fool hath said in his heart, there is a God,” thus reversing the logic. Although this was corrected almost immediately, it remains a reminder that in theology, a simple omission can transform a basic confession of one’s lack of faith into an awkward, if unintended, affirmation of it. Even fools, it seems, can be edited into orthodoxy.

The “Vinegar Bible” and the “Baskett-Full of Errors”

By the 1700s, the printing industry was more sophisticated and less prone to human error, yet spectacular examples still abound. In 1717, J. Baskett at Oxford produced a beautiful edition of the Bible intended as a collector’s masterpiece. Unfortunately, the heading for Luke 20 read “The Parable of the Vinegar” instead of “The Parable of the Vineyard.” Aside from not being able to tell the difference between a fruit and a condiment, this did not have a disastrous impact and was corrected in later printings.

Fortunately, no one ever took it as a meaningful textual reading, although perhaps the publisher’s ego may have been bruised, as this version was mocked by contemporaries as a “Baskett-full of errors.” At the very least, the blunder ensured that Baskett’s name would be preserved in the history of printing—even if not quite in the way he intended.

A 1716 edition offered another memorable slip in John 5:1, which was meant to read “sin no more,” but was printed instead as “sin more,” a change that turns moral counsel into comic provocation (Feather, 2006). I wonder how fast this translation sold out. It unintentionally supplied what might be the closest thing to a biblical slogan for the chronically unrepentant.

Sometimes a typo can also serve as a creative cry for help. In Psalm 119:161, King David said, “Princes have persecuted me without a cause.” However, in the “Printers’ Bible,” the text read, “Printers have persecuted me without a cause.” Given the low pay, long hours, and the high-pressure, backbreaking work of eighteenth-century printing houses, perhaps this wasn’t an accident at all. Was it a worker’s way of crying out and sharing their pain? This may be the first recorded instance of meta-humor in a biblical publication; a marginal protest smuggled into the main text (Darnton, 1979).

Modern Grammatical Gaffes and Murderous Claims

In “The Murderers’ Bible” incident, we find, in Jude 16, a verse describing certain people as “murmurers” (complainers). However, an 1801 edition accidentally changed the “m” to a “d” and a few other letters, resulting in: “These are murderers, complainers…” That was how an annoying habit almost escalated to a significantly higher level of crime. Since then, the nickname “Murderers’ Bible” stuck, mainly because the jump from a quiet mumble to a felony was so hilariously abrupt. It is arguably one of the few times a typographical error has single-handedly raised the stakes of bad manners.

Finally, in the “To Remain” Bible case, a proofreader noticed a comma was missing in a passage in an 1805 printing of the KJV. He wrote the correction in the margin and added the note “to remain,” meaning the original word should stay. The typesetter, unfortunately, took the note literally and inserted the words “to remain” directly into the middle of the verse (Gal. 4:29). This resulted in a nonsensical hybrid of scripture and office memos—or a nineteenth-century equivalent of someone hitting “Reply All” to a company-wide email. The sacred text thus briefly doubled as a record of workplace miscommunication.

Conclusion

The examples above indicate several things. First, faith is remarkably resilient to bad typesetting and proofreading; no creed has ever hinged on the “vinegar” versus “vineyard” distinction. Second, no human—especially those tasked with the enormous responsibility of mass-producing the Word of God—is perfect. These minor and amusing errors demonstrate the limitations of human messengers as conveyors of God’s words—a point that scribes, printers, and translators have been illustrating, sometimes unintentionally, for centuries.

Finally, regardless of the technologies involved, human error is constant, but faithful Bible readers will always spot and correct them. As such, the history of biblical misprints is not only a comedy of silly typos, but also a testimony to the vigilance of generations of readers who, by noticing what is wrong, affirm and bear witness to what is right.

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This Sunday’s readings teach us about the care of sheep—they need a gate to protect their sheepfold, a shepherd who will lead them to good pasture, and ears to hear the Voice they should follow.

Gospel (Read Jn. 10:1-10)

This reading is best understood within its context in John’s Gospel.  In the previous chapter is the account of Jesus’ healing of the man born blind, a Lenten lectionary reading.  Recall that it was a lesson about spiritual sight and blindness.  The simple blind Jewish man whom Jesus healed was able to see and worship Jesus as the Messiah.  The Pharisees who interrogated him, however, wanted nothing to do with Jesus:  “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from” (Jn. 9:29). 

If we remember that the Pharisees considered themselves to be the spiritual leaders of Judah, able to instruct the people in the fine points of the Mosaic Law and thus preserve their identity as God’s people, we will comprehend why Jesus begins speaking in John 10 about sheep gates, shepherds, and flocks.  The Pharisees repeatedly acted as blind guides for God’s people, trying to insure a following for themselves.  Jesus is about to expose them.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber” (Jn. 10:1).  To make His point about the Pharisees, Jesus uses the well-known imagery of Israel as God’s flock and God Himself as their Shepherd (read Ez. 34:11-16).  Everyone willing to hear Jesus that day would have understood this metaphor.  They knew that the sheepfold was where various flocks of sheep spent the night after a day of grazing.  It consisted of a wall, to protect the flock from thieves and predators, as well as a gate. 

The gatekeeper would admit the shepherds in the morning as they came to take their flocks back out to pasture.  Each shepherd’s flock responded to his call, because his voice was familiar to them.  It was not a stretch for those listening to Jesus to understand that He was taking about God’s relationship with His people and leaders who had been given charge of them.  

They knew the beautiful prophecy from Isaiah:  “He will feed His flock like a shepherd, He will gather the lambs in His arms, He will carry them in His bosom, and gently lead those that are with young” (Is. 40:11).  However, notice the blindness of the Pharisees:  “Although Jesus used this figure of speech, the Pharisees did not realize what He was trying to tell them” (Jn. 10:6).  So, what was He “trying to tell them”?

In the extended teaching of this chapter (some of which is not included in this reading), Jesus identifies Himself as both the sheep gate and the shepherd of Israel.  The Pharisees were trying to lead God’s people without entering the sheepfold through the gate of Jesus.  No one can teach and nurture God’s own flock apart from Jesus, because he is the Way, the Truth, the Life.  The Pharisees believed the Law of Moses was an end in itself.  Why would they need Jesus?  The reality was that the Law pointed towards Jesus and was fulfilled in Him.  Without Jesus, teachers of Israel robbed the flock, coming only to “steal and slaughter and destroy” (Jn. 10:10).

Jesus also describes how the sheep recognize the voice of the one who has properly entered the sheepfold and who calls to them in a familiar, trusted way:  “…they do not recognize the voice of strangers” (Jn. 10:5).  The sheep know they will find good pasture when they follow their true shepherd, not an impostor:  “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly” (Jn. 10:10).

Let us now follow, through all the other readings, this metaphor of sheep hearing their beloved shepherd’s call.  How do they recognize His Voice?

Possible response:  Jesus, Good Shepherd, You (and You alone) will lead me into abundant life.  I trust in You.

First Reading (Read Acts 2:14a, 36-41)

If we are curious about how God’s flock will hear the Voice of the Good Shepherd, this reading in Acts provides us with an excellent demonstration.  We are again on the Day of Pentecost, and Peter addresses the large crowd gathered around the hubbub caused by the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles.  We can almost hear his raised voice booming out over the buzz:  “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:14a). 

Here we have a “voice” calling out to God’s people (“the whole house of Israel”).  Will the sheep recognize the voice?  Will they trust the one calling to them?  The rest of the story answers our questions.

“Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart…and they asked Peter and the other apostles, ‘What are we to do, my brothers?’” (Acts 2:37).  The sheep recognize this as a call from God, delivered by His servant, Peter.  They are convicted of their error in consenting to Jesus’ death.  In deep humility, they seek reconciliation with the Father.  Peter has approached the sheepfold through the gate of Jesus.  He speaks to them on the basis of what Jesus has done, as well as about Jesus Himself.  And it worked! They are ready to listen to the shepherd’s instructions.  They believe he can lead them to safety.

Peter directs them to “repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38).  In this, they will receive forgiveness of their sins (for which now they are earnestly seeking), as well as the gift of the Holy Spirit (whose dramatic appearance got their attention in the first place). 

See how Peter acknowledges that what he announced to the people there that day was actually a call from God (and not just a man speaking):  “For the promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call” (Acts 2:39).  The Voice of the Shepherd is spoken through the human voice of Peter, the one to whom Jesus gave charge of His Church.  How very Catholic!  If we want to hear the Voice of Jesus, we must listen to His Voice in the Church.  No wonder all bishops carry shepherd’s staffs to this day.

Possible response:  Jesus, Good Shepherd, thank You for appointing shepherds to lead Your flock.  We are never without our Shepherd’s Voice in the Church.

Psalm (Read Ps. 23)

How did the psalmist hear the Voice of the Shepherd?  He prayed to Him in grave danger, but with great intimacy: “Even though I walk in the dark valley, I fear no evil; for You are at my side” (Ps. 23:4a).  We hear the Shepherd’s Voice when we make the effort to hear it, especially in prayer. 

This is sometimes harder than it sounds.  How easy it is for us, when we find ourselves in calamity, to focus primarily on the details of everything that is going wrong. 

The psalmist, however, looks for the Shepherd’s staff, talking to Him, and finding courage: “You are with me, Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me” (Ps. 23:4b).  The psalmist has given us words to use as a prayer when we seek to hear the Good Shepherd’s call to us:  “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.”

Possible response:  The psalm is, itself, a response to our other readings.  Read it again prayerfully to make it your own.

Second Reading (Read 1 Pet. 2:20b-25)

What does the epistle have to say to us about hearing the Voice of the Good Shepherd?  Actually, Peter gives us the most important key:  we must acknowledge that we are like sheep, wanting to go astray (1 Pet. 2:25).  We must be willing to follow in the footsteps (1 Pet. 2:21) of the One Who is the “guardian” of our souls (1 Pet. 2:25). 

The most obvious lesson is the one sometimes most difficult to accept: we are sheep who need a Shepherd.  We need the humility of the crowd on the Day of Pentecost, but we are so susceptible to the pride of the Pharisees, who wanted to lead instead of follow.  If we are humble enough to be led, we will hear our Shepherd’s Voice, and, because we know we can trust Him, we will be willing to follow wherever He leads, even into suffering like His own.

Possible response:  Jesus, Good Shepherd, I confess that sometimes I want to stray, trying to lead rather than follow.  Please give me grace to walk in Your footsteps, wherever they might take me.

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How do we understand consciences today? Oftentimes they are used as an excuse for moral relativism or subjectivism. This is not so. Consciences, and our duty to form them in truth for the sake of our freedom, are an integral task of the moral life.

Conscience Must Be Joined to Virtue

For St. Thomas, conscience is never detached from the larger moral life. A good moral act involves object, circumstances, and end (ST I-II, q. 18, a. 4), and it also requires that reason rightly order the will toward the good (ST I-II, q. 18, aa. 5–6). That is why conscience must be joined to virtue, especially prudence. Prudence is not timidity or caution, but the virtue that judges rightly about what must be done in concrete cases. More deeply, prudence depends upon love of the good and the just. One of the great truths modern man resists is precisely this: we do not only sin because we think badly; we also think badly because we sin.

A person who is morally compromised will not see clearly. Vice clouds judgment, bends perception, and makes reality harder to recognize. A man ruled by lust will not see chastity clearly. A man ruled by ambition will not judge justice clearly. A man who lies habitually will lose the ability to recognize truthfulness with ease. The problem, then, is not merely intellectual but moral and spiritual. St. Thomas says as much when he asks whether blindness of mind is a sin (ST II-II, q. 15, a. 3) and whether folly is caused by lust (ST II-II, q. 46, a. 8). In the treatise on temperance, he goes further, listing among the “daughters of lust” blindness of mind, thoughtlessness, and rashness (ST II-II, q. 153, a. 5). Vice, then, does not merely lead us to choose badly; it can make us see badly.

This is why conscience is not formed by information alone, but through conversion. Blessed Columba Marmion puts the point memorably when he warns that the spiritual life cannot be governed by sentiments alone, any more than a fork can be used to drink water. Feelings have their place, but they are not adequate instruments for judging divine and moral realities. If a person relies only on what feels comforting, peaceful, or intense, he will remain spiritually shallow and morally unstable.

St. Augustine helps us go deeper still. In the Confessions, especially in his meditation on time, he shows that the human person is not healed all at once. We live stretched in time, and conversion ordinarily unfolds within that condition rather than outside it. We do not become truthful in a single instant simply because we have heard the truth; we must be converted to it gradually. Augustine is deeply realistic about this. Even after his conversion, the pull of old temptations does not simply vanish. The disordered habits of the old life continue to linger, and the soul must be patiently purified.

In that sense, his experience stands close to St. Paul’s account in Romans 7: man can delight in the law of God and yet still experience within himself the resistance of sin. St. Paul makes a similar warning in 1 Corinthians 10, after recalling Israel’s passage through the sea and through the desert: “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12). A people shaped for generations by Egypt did not become inwardly free overnight. Bad habits take time to unlearn, and good habits take time to acquire.

That is why we cannot accept the theory of the “fundamental option,” as though a basic orientation toward God could remain untouched by particular grave acts. As St. John Paul II insists in Veritatis Splendor, our deepest moral orientation is lived and tested in concrete choices, and can be contradicted by them (Veritatis Splendor, 67–70). Conscience, then, is formed not only by instruction, but by repentance, grace, prayer, and the patient reordering of the heart. St. John Henry Newman is often misread on this point. He did not understand conscience as a permission slip for private judgment against truth or doctrine. He understood it as the inward witness to moral obligation, sacred precisely because it binds the person to the truth before God.

Vatican II Did Not Teach Moral Subjectivism

Many Catholics speak as though the Second Vatican Council somehow canonized the modern notion of conscience. It did not. Gaudium et Spes beautifully describes conscience as man’s “most secret core and sanctuary” (GS 16). But the same passage says that in conscience man discovers a law “which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience.” That is decisive. Conscience is not the source of moral truth. It is the place where the person hears and responds to truth.

Unfortunately, in the decades after the Council, much Catholic discussion kept the language of conscience while quietly dropping the demand that conscience be rightly formed. After Humanae Vitae, for example, many Catholics were told that if they disagreed with the Church’s teaching on contraception, they could simply “follow their conscience.”

That formula did enormous harm. It weakened catechesis, emptied doctrine of force, and taught generations of Catholics to think of conscience as a right to exempt oneself from the Church’s teaching. Conscience is not a permission slip.

Conscience, Truth, and Freedom

St. John Paul II addressed this confusion directly in Veritatis Splendor. Conscience, he taught, is not a private source of moral truth. Its dignity lies in its openness to the truth (Veritatis Splendor, 54, 60–64). Freedom of conscience, then, does not mean freedom from truth. It means freedom in truth.

Joseph Ratzinger says something similar in On Conscience. He speaks of anamnesis, a kind of moral memory written into the human heart. Conscience is not the ego talking to itself. It is the person listening to the truth that comes before his own preferences and judges them. We do not create the good. We are called to recognize it and obey it.

This also explains why conscience does not merely reassure. Sometimes it disturbs. Sometimes it accuses. Sometimes it wounds before it heals. Modern people often treat guilt as the enemy, but guilt can be merciful. The silence of conscience is often more frightening than its sting. A conscience that never troubles us may not be peaceful but really be deadened.

This is not just a debate for moral theologians, nor is it simply about moralism. At stake is communion with God. To be cut off from God is not only a moral issue; it is an ontological one. Sin does not merely break a rule. It wounds our relationship with the living God and deforms the soul.

If conscience is reduced to personal sincerity, then confession becomes little more than therapeutic self-expression. But we know that in the sacrament of Penance, the matter of the sacrament is not the sin but the contrition for the sin. We must be sorry before God for the sin we have done. We cannot offer something bad to God. What we offer to Him is the good of contrition for the sins we have committed. To be contrite, my well-formed conscience must tell me it is.

If conscience is understood rightly, everything changes. The question is no longer, “What do I feel okay with?” but “What is truly good?” Then examination of conscience becomes serious. Confession becomes liberating, and moral teaching becomes meaningful. Spiritual direction becomes possible, and freedom becomes something richer than willful self-assertion. A rightly formed conscience does not imprison us but frees us from illusion.

The Real Task: Forming Conscience

The Catholic tradition offers something far more demanding and far more humane than the modern myth of conscience. It tells us that conscience is sacred because it is ordered to truth. It must be obeyed, but it must also be educated. It binds, but it does not rule as a private lawgiver.

To form one’s conscience is not to become more self-authorizing. It is to become more truthful, more humble, and therefore more free. That formation requires study, prayer, virtue, repentance, and the willingness to be corrected. It requires the Word of God, the teaching of the Church, the sacraments, and the help of wise guides. It requires the humility to admit that sincerity alone is not enough.

The real question is not simply, “What does my conscience say?” The real question is: Has my conscience been formed by the truth? That is what conscience is meant to be: not the triumph of the self, but the place where truth is heard, welcomed, and obeyed.

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Did you know that the apostles had students? The New Testament was not the only thing being written in those early years. We have writings from Christians that either existed during the time of the New Testament or immediately following. Those that wrote some of these texts personally knew apostles. They heard them preach, they followed them as students, some may have been baptized by them, and some became the next generation of leaders.

In an age that lacks Christian unity—and when young people are seeking a religion that is stable, ancient, and true—getting to know the students of the apostles helps shed light on the faith surrounding the New Testament.

These students, not including those like St. Mark who wrote a portion of the New Testament, are referred to as the Apostolic Fathers.

While the list of these texts differs, most will agree that it includes: the Didache, St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp, St. Hermas, and St. Papias. The Didache is believed to be the kind of guidance the apostles would leave with churches. St. Clement of Rome was an early pope; Tertullian explains that St. Clement was ordained by St. Peter, and Eusebius holds that he knew St. Paul (cf. Phil. 4:3).

St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote several letters on the way to his execution in Rome. He was a student of St. John the Apostle and because of St. Peter’s being the first Bishop of Antioch (cf. Gal. 2:11), he played a part in St. Ignatius becoming Bishop of Antioch. St. Polycarp of Smyrna was a bishop known to be associated with multiple apostles; in particular, he was a student of St. John, a colleague of St. Ignatius, and the teacher of St. Irenaeus of Lyons from the generation of Christians after the Apostolic Fathers.

While so much more could be said about each of these individuals, let’s review some initial insights that may inspire you to one day read the Apostolic Fathers and their spiritual descendants.

The Church was Apostolic

The existence of the Apostolic Fathers shows how important the apostolicity of the Faith was for early Christians. Yes, the apostles chose St. Matthias to replace Judas (Acts 1:12-26), but they also trained and chose other men to be their successors. This apostolic succession is mentioned by St. Clement (no. 42). They also held to the content of faith as something coming to them from Jesus Christ and the apostles (Ignatius to the Magnesians, 13; Polycarp to the Philippians, 6).

The Early Church had a Leadership Structure

What we find in the Apostolic Fathers is a period of clear development. The New Testament mentions, with varying translations, bishops, presbyters, and deacons. While other ministries may be mentioned in the New Testament and in the Apostolic Fathers, these three ordained ministries come into clear focus as central ministries of leadership for the growing Church.

In varying degrees, this is mentioned in nearly all of the Apostolic Fathers. For example, St. Ignatius writes, “we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself” (Letter to the Ephesians, 6), and “See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8). A view of a ministerial hierarchy instituted by God was not unknown to them.

The Early Church was Sacramental

From the Didache to the other documents, we find an early Church that loved Jesus Christ and also had rituals, liturgies, which were seen as unique and necessary. They didn’t simply gather for spontaneous prayer, music, and preaching. They had set prayers, ritual standards, and emphasized the necessity of Baptism and the Eucharist for salvation and the Christian life; most of the other sacraments are indicated in some fashion as well.

The Didache gives the words to be used in Baptisms, the different ways the water may be used, and even teaches that Baptism is necessary for the Eucharist (Didache, 7, 9). Hermas explains that Baptism forgives sins (The Shepherd, 2:4:3). The Didache describes the Eucharist as a sacrifice/offering (Didache, 14), and St. Ignatius describes some that fail to confess “the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again” (Letters to the Smyrnaeans, 7).

The Faith was of Greatest Importance

One thing they uniformly witnessed to was how the Faith was not just one value or idea among many, but of the greatest importance. They witness to this by dying as martyrs.

There were Correct Beliefs and Wrong Beliefs

Like we find in St. Paul’s letters within the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers didn’t think that it was sufficient to just believe in Jesus as savior and God, but one had to also believe correctly in other matters as well. There were correct beliefs, and there were incorrect beliefs.

After St. Polycarp explains the importance of believing correctly in Jesus Christ, he then lists other things that need to be believed and observed (Letter to the Philippians, 7). St. Ignatius even speaks against incorrect views of Jesus and the need to have a proper understanding of Jesus (Smyrnaeans, 2), and to another says:

For as many as are of God and of Jesus Christ are also with the bishop. And as many as shall, in the exercise of repentance, return into the unity of the Church, these, too, shall belong to God, that they may live according to Jesus Christ. (Philadelphians, 3)

The Early Church was Pro-Life

When the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the Church has condemned abortion as a “moral evil” since the “first century” (CCC, 2271), one of the references is from the Didache. After promoting the Way of Life, it then gives a list of sins. One of them: “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten” (Didache, 2).

The Early Church gifted us the name “Catholic Church”

Just as the followers of Jesus were first called Christians in Antioch (Acts 11:26), it would also be from Antioch that we have the first record of the phrase “Catholic Church.” St. Ignatius wrote, “Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (Smyrnaeans, 8).

While the Apostolic Fathers, and their descendants, do occasionally demonstrate differences in vocabulary, ideas, emphasis, or degrees of development, taken as a whole they make evidently clear that the early Church was Catholic. The evidence is even more striking when we examine their students, and their students’ students. Like the early Church, let us confess with boldness and resolve of will that Jesus Christ is King and that He is uniquely found in the Catholic Church.

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