By Robert Royal
St. Augustine famously wrote of having come late to the Beauty that is God: tam antiqua, tam nova ("So ancient, so new"). It's a brilliant and profound way of expressing the truth that the deepest Good is not in the past or in the future, but by its very eternity transcends time. It's like a heart-rending piece of music that, even the very the first time you hear it, is both fresh beyond all expectation and, in the same moment, an evocation of a place that you feel you have known and longed for your whole past life, the one true home of the human heart.
By contrast, what we're most often immersed in is a false, politicized version of old and new. A limited politics is, of course, a necessary and good thing. But when politics takes on a religious importance, a defining reality for our lives, it's a dangerous and partial substitute for the real thing. What's "conservative" then becomes merely a return to some idealized past; the "progressive" turns into a drive for some future utopia, whatever the cost (which is usually large in terms of human casualties). Compared with that deeper, truer music of Creation, the substitutes – if they come to possess us – are like an organ grinder's tune geared to make the monkeys dance.
That's good neither for our souls nor our public lives. And it's always the main task of our lives to take care of temporal matters with our eyes fixed on the eternal. Which is what we strive to do, day in and day out, here at The Catholic Thing.
So today I have to ask you to join us in supporting work that seeks some larger, more Catholic way. We only come to you twice a year asking for your support. And as part of this mid-year funding campaign, we have some remarkable new/old things to report.
First, we're re-launching today the website of the Faith & Reason Institute (www.frinstitute.org), the parent institution of The Catholic Thing, in a new format that will make it easy to keep up with our writers, fellows, and varied activities. I think the staff did a wonderful job and produced a format that's both attractive and accessible. Please take a look.
You'll see not only worthwhile written material by myself and others at TCT, but also an archive of the Posses; our video series on martyrs and persecution "Faith under Siege"; our TCT courses (my new course on Pope Leo's complicated relationship to his Augustinian heritage starts next week); our annual Summer Seminar on the Free Society, which this year features a dialogue between Western and Eastern Catholics about the public square; and several other new initiatives that we'll be rolling out shortly.
We're only able to bring you all this thanks to the generosity and fidelity of people like yourself who care about Catholic truth, and are willing to support us in this mission of keeping Faith and Reason present, together, not only among ourselves but in the whole world. As St. John Paul II wrote at the beginning of his encyclical Fides et ratio:
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know Himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
Much is at stake in this dual approach to knowing God.
I'd like to call your attention to one new feature in particular that we're launching. Many people these days are confused about what the Church teaches and why. And while columns on this page often address those questions as they crop up in the news and public debates, and our courses look at broader subjects, we decided that lots of readers would benefit from a simple, but more systematic approach.
And what better way to do that than by going through the Catechism of the Catholic Church? And not on your own, but with the guidance of my Posse colleague and friend Fr. Gerald Murray. So, you'll shortly be receiving the first installment via email and an...
