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Advent Season is upon us and families across the globe are marking the 4 weeks before Christmas by opening Advent calendars and lighting Advent wreaths every Sunday. Taken from the Latin adventus for 'coming,' the season is an opportunity for every Catholic to prepare one's heart and mind for the coming of the Christ-child and remember the promise that the Lord will come again. And to pray.

“It’s putting religious institutions in a position in which, if they want to get the money, or to accept money that goes to parents, they have to enter a Faustian bargain in which they agree to basically give up their faith. In the Catholic Church, we have 2,000 years of Church teaching. We’re not giving it up to get federal money for child care or pre-K,” Carroll said during a roundtable discussion in Washington on Wednesday, Dec. 1, sponsored by U.S. Senate Republicans.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could upend Roe v. Wade. At the very least, Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the most significant challenge to legalized abortion to date. In question in a Mississippi law known as the Gestational Age Act. If the court decides the law should stand, the power to determine and limit abortion rights would effectively be returned to the states.

Familiaris Consortio, issued Nov. 22, 1981, has been called a plan of action, a road map and strategy for the Christian family; it is also a forerunner to Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”). This quick read (three hours, give or take) is not only our personal favorite from the saint; it’s a bracing vision that explodes with insights and strategies for the challenges every Christian family faces today.

This is a great blessing, and it is the gift that you offer to the rest of us. However, you still have much growing and learning to do; much success and failure, joy and suffering lie ahead for you—and learning as well. To be learned is to seek truth that is given to us by God. My prayer as your archbishop is that you will be open to learning and growing in your knowledge, and especially open to hearing and trying to understand points of view different from your own, even points of view with which you strongly disagree. I wish that is what those of you who walked out of the speech by a pro-life activist recently would have done. This action put on full display one of the blind spots of youth due to young people’s lack of extended life experience: gullibility. Let me explain. While every generation has valued science and contributed to its advancement, your generation, more than any other in the past, looks to science as a guide for navigating oneself through life. Let’s then look at what science has to say about abortion.

According to the authoritative teaching of the Second Vatican Council, Catholics must not pigeon-hole human beings by race, ethnicity, chromosomal identity or object of sexual attraction. Catholics who take the texts of Vatican II seriously refuse to truckle to, and in fact resist, those cultural aggressors who think of human beings as mere twitching bundles of morally-equal desires, the fulfillment of which exhausts the meaning of “human rights.” Catholics who take the Council seriously work to give legal effect to Vatican II’s teaching that “abortion, euthanasia… [and] mutilation” (think of 13-year-old girls getting double mastectomies in the name of “trans” rights) “poison civilization,” “debase the perpetrators” as well as the victims, and “militate against the honor of the Creator.”

The Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing new regulations for U.S. health-care law in close consultation with a coalition of activist groups intent on imposing an abortion, end-of-life and sexual-health agenda without religious-freedom exceptions. The new rule in development has the potential for adverse effects on Catholic employers, but could prove devastating to Catholic health-care providers, including Catholic hospitals that care for one in six hospital patients in the United States.

“Ye shall be as gods,” said the serpent. Whitaker Chambers called it the second oldest religion in the world. It has always proved popular. In his time, it took the form of communism. But the tempter is not so stupid as to appear in the same guise always; even human beings eventually get the idea that certain “moral mushrooms” will kill them, and they may even remember it for a few generations. In the meantime, the tempter must peddle something else, must appear as someone else. No trouble there. Mushrooms and mountebanks are always ready to hand.

According to one Cambridge academic, permissive attitudes about sex, marriage, drugs, and religion are “luxury beliefs; more status symbols for cultural elites than blueprints for the way they live. Rob Henderson first floated the idea of “luxury beliefs” in an essay in the New York Post, later at Quillette, and most recently in a podcast. He argues that beliefs that tend to be disastrous for poor and middle-class communities have become the modern equivalent of buying expensive clothes or hiring servants. It’s a way of showing off your wealth and signaling your status to fellow members of the upper class.

Do our Catholic bishops really mean it when they say that abortion is a very grave sin? Or are they simply paying lip service to a Catholic moral doctrine? Now, I don’t think any bishop is taking bribes from the likes of NARAL, Planned Parenthood, or the ACLU. A bishop, no matter how poor he may be in other ways, is above that. But I’m far from certain that bishops are above taking “bribes” of respect and friendship offered by society’s social and economic leaders, many of whom – probably most – are largely indifferent as to the sinfulness of abortion. What these high-ranking people are really serious about is economic activity: the buying and selling of goods and services. (“The chief business of the American people is business,” as Calvin Coolidge once said.) As long as abortion doesn’t interfere with these activities, why should they care?

Scruton had a reverence for modesty, restraint, and humility in politics. He loathed what he called “the utopian fallacy;” the notion that humanity is perfectible if we just get rid of the obstacles . . . and the people who create them. He had an equal aversion to “the planning fallacy,” the idea that we can fix every problem with the right plan . . . and the coercive muscle to carry it out. In contrast, he treasured love, friendship, learning, home, family, nature, and nation. In other words, life on a human scale.

What is the result of mortal sin? Here is another term that is provocative, disturbing, and shocking. It is so unsettling and eternally divisive that sensitive adults should again beware. Again, don’t worry about the children. (They expect God’s justice because they’re innocent. Adults count on God’s mercy because we’re not.) Eternal damnation.

She is the bride of Christ: chosen from all as she stands before her Lord and Savior.… When Jesus Christ asks her, “what have you done in your short life to merit the kingdom of heaven of my Father?” She will answer, “I have seen the son of Man and I believe in Him: I have eaten His Sacred Body and drunk His Precious Blood.” This is the proof, the true witness she can give.

One idiom is showing up more often lately, as people claim that the gene therapy device speciously known as The Vaccine is “the hill they will die on,” especially as mandates close in on people’s livelihoods and children’s safety.

What’s over now is what you might call the Napoleonic Phase of the Culture War: the two armies in smart uniforms lining up and trading grapeshot like gentlemen. That phase is over, and we’ve lost. The radical Left has finished its “long march through the institutions.” They now control every major center of power—be it political, military, economic, social, and cultural.

The Breastplate of Saint Patrick contains a curious prayer invoking God’s power “against every knowledge that blinds the soul of man.” Sometimes it’s called the knowledge that “corrupts,” “binds,” or “defiles.” Whatever the translation, the point remains the same and runs contrary to our culture’s way of thinking. We live by the silly, simplistic notion that “Knowledge is power.” We can’t imagine a bad kind of knowledge. Saint Patrick knew better. He knew our need to be defended against that kind of “knowledge” that not only fails to help but in fact threatens us. It is a knowledge that promises sight but delivers blindness.

The developing news story has only deepened local mistrust of county school administrators. And some Catholic experts believe it will encourage more parents to embrace their rights and responsibilities as the primary educators of their children, a fundamental teaching addressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2223). The Catechism states that parents have “the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule.” The Catechism upholds the right of parents “to choose a school for them that corresponds to their own convictions” (2229).

Treating school parents as domestic terrorists while ignoring this? "The banquet this year was much like those in past years, with one major difference: the presence of heavy security. There were uniformed police officers with bulletproof vests in evidence everywhere. For Texas Right to Life is an organization under fire, part of a nationwide movement under fire, suffering harassment and maltreatment that I predict will only get worse in the coming months and years."

Each book in The Tuttle Twins series comes with discussion questions at the end, helping parents to talk with their children about the important ideas in the book—ideas such as individual rights, the proper role of government, and what it means to be free. There are also free activity workbooks to accompany the books.

Schnurr knows any attempt to close parishes will be met with fierce resistance from the “Not my parish!” folks. Yet he is trying to manage the decline smartly. Too many bishops around the world are punting on this issue, pushing off the difficult decisions to their successors. Eventually dioceses will collapse under the weight of too many parishes and not enough parishioners. But managing the decline is only one aspect of the path forward. We also have to ask what kind of Church we want to emerge after this decline. Will it be a Church that stubbornly and irrationally clings to the post-Vatican II status quo? Pope Francis often speaks against rigidity and living in the past, but none are more rigid and stuck in the past than the Church officials who want every year to be 1976 again.