“Separation of church and state? I can think of a couple of other things I’d like to see separated from the state, or connected with the state in only a slender and indirect fashion. One of them is the school. The other is the home…

Americans have largely taken for granted a monstrous bit of historical nonsense, which is that the Constitution forbids the churches to have any influence upon public affairs, as if appealing to Jesus Christ were forbidden, when you will be celebrated for appealing to John Lennon or Margaret Sanger or many another blinkered male or female peddler of social slogans that go stale almost as soon as they are sold. 

What they have not seen is that the influence of the home has faded along with the influence of the churches. I do not believe that that is coincidental. A strong sense of the sacred has this double force: it protects the church and the home from the intrusions of the state, just as it might protect any sacred area from profane use, and it subordinates the state to something beyond itself, something that helps to give it a proper aim in the world. It keeps Caesar from playing God, and it assists Caesar in recognizing what he is for and how he should or should not attempt to attain it… Read it all

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The Irreducible Loneliness of Life On This Earth”

Dr. Martin’s compassionate meditation here reminds us to see and to reach out to others in our postlapsarian human condition from the foot of the Cross, as the Lord taught us. And to patiently bear our own loneliness which in some form accompanies every state in life, and is an ever-present part of the Cross our Lord asks us to carry as we await the fulfillment of all things that St. Paul speaks of in Romans 8:22-24.