When teaching the history of the field of International Relations (IR), scholars tend to start with the classical author of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, then skip immediately to the early modern political theorists Machiavelli and Hobbes. In the process, they …
Category: The Civic Sphere
George Floyd and How the Church Abandoned the Inner Cities
One Sunday morning, during the summer of 2018, when much of America had come to regard the Catholic Church in America as a decaying organization beset by hidden evil, Baltimore auxiliary bishop Mark Brennan paid a visit to my former …
The Conflicted Legacy of American Catholicism
The French Revolution and its daughter movements defined the social question of the 19th century, which, as I have noted elsewhere, the Magisterium from Pius VI to Pius XII answered with authority and clarity. But, as Pope Benedict observed in …
Dictatorships Cure All Our Ills…Sort Of
Dictatorships are not all bad. At least dictatorships from the past. For instance, few people know this, but Joseph Stalin cured malaria. While reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, I was shocked to learn that Stalin totally eradicated malaria from Russia. …
Pope’s Scalfari Message Is for Italians (Not for You)
People on various internet platforms are still expressing their dismay and confusion over the pope’s alleged denial of the divinity of Christ, as conveyed by the Italian journalist and former politician, Eugenio Scalfari. We are certainly at a disadvantage when …
Against Distributism: Who Does the Distributing?
This article comes to 1P5 from an anonymous Catholic. Distributism is an economic theory, articulated by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, that has garnered interest in Catholic circles. While this economic system hasn’t developed in America as a political movement, …
Is Patriotism a Virtue?
Note: Skip to the On the Contrary if you are not familiar with a Thomistic article. Objection 1: It seems that Patriotism is not a virtue. For our Lord said, My Kingdom is not of this world (Jn. xviii. 36) …
Have Platitudes from the Vatican Turned Deadly?
Throughout this month of December, emphasis from the Vatican has been placed on migration and immigrant rights at a near frenzied level. Pope Francis addressed the issue of mass migration almost every chance he had last week, especially his interest …
Don’t Pretend Christmas Can Ever Be a Secular Holiday
For the modernist, Christmas must be stripped of its Christian meaning, separated from the religious holy day it is and always has been. It is not breaking news that traditional Christmas to secularists is the epitome of religious exclusion and …
Catholic Tradition and the Patriotic Question
At first glance, patriotism might seem like an issue of secondary importance, a mere distraction. Our ultimate loyalty is to the Kingdom of God, after all, and we are already pretty busy. Among restoring a desecrated liturgy, salvaging Catholic education, …