Francis X. Maier writes. ,

“… We live in unsettled times.  Elites in the developed world have been shedding Christianity like dead skin for decades.  Their grip on our popular entertainment, news content, and emerging technologies has dragged many millions of otherwise good people along with them.  Big corporations wield inordinate political power.  Unelected government agencies function, in effect, autonomously.  We have a senile presidency unable and unwilling to control the nation’s borders, and a pontificate simultaneously authoritarian and morally ambiguous.

For the Christian believer, the present moment can look daunting, and it’s certainly apocalyptic – “apocalyptic” in the original Greek sense, apokalyptein, which means “to reveal” or “to uncover the concealed.”  But uncovering the artfully concealed is good, because the hidden hypocrisies in our institutions, in our leaders, and in ourselves are no longer avoidable.

Jesus said the truth would make us free; not comfortable, but free to think clearly and act faithfully – in other words, to be holy; to act differently from the world.  We moderns are fixated on the present.  It’s an expensive mistake.

As Catholics, we ignore a Church history that’s rich both in hard lessons and luminous reasons for hope.  The process of suffering, purification, and fresh life in the Church is not new; it’s only new for us… Read it all

Thomist Philosopher Josef Pieper: Christians have always been called to endure with courage.

— The Great Conservative Death Wish