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When a French intellectual looked in the mirror in 1600, he saw a Frenchman and a Christian where he would have liked to have seen a Greek pagan.  Since the Church was still powerful, few intellectuals were as mad as Giordano Bruno, who was justly burned at the stake in 1600, for his neopagan notions.  Instead, the intellectuals became sly and ironic.  From Montaigne on, intellectuals began subjecting Catholic France to imaginary visitors from Latin America, Persia, and China, all of whom expressed astonishment at the silly religion, false reverence to the king, and loyalty to the great nation.  

And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?

At this point in the argument, I want to make it plain that I am not trying to write even a brief history of political universalism.  My basic intent is to show some of the more important influences—influences, I wish to emphasize, that I do not necessarily criticize much less condemn.  So far, I have briefly mentioned the Stoic ideal of world-citizenship, which was transformed into a more restrained celebration of the Imperium Romanum as an ideal of human community rooted in justice.  The disintegration of the Empire, rather than discrediting the imperial ideal, invested it with spiritual significance. I...

Poor Robert de Niro is still the pale-faced  teenage punk Bobby Milk, too dumb and too lazy to finish high school or find a job anywhere but in the make-believe world of  Hollwyood movies.

Christians ought to be deeply suspicious of both nationalism and globalism, which developed in the course of the 18th century and which were both advocated by the bloody-handed leaders of the French Revolution who killed each other over whether the Revolution represented the revival of the French nation or the dawning of the brotherhood of man.  In the end, the nationalists won, and while Napoleon pretended to be liberating the captive nations of the Holy Roman Empire, he was really only replacing Austria with France, Hapsburgs with Bonapartes.  Stalin and Trotsky played out the same homicidal farce in their struggle...

Here’s a pretty-how-de-do!   Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend and leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, wonders if someone like Donald Trump–so wealthy, so unashamed of his wealth–could possibly be Christian.  He has also attacked Mike Pence for his concentration on sexual issues.   Like many people who read the headlines, I wondered what religion could inform the mind of a man who attacks one politician for being rich and another for being moralistic, when he pretends to have married another man.  (I forget which he pretends to be the wife and which the husband.) He can’t be a...

Many libertarians and classical liberals regard St. Thomas Aquinas as one of the enemies of liberty, of economic liberty in particular.  According to these critics (and to some self-described Thomists, Thomas is supposed to have devised an abstract and systematic theory of an ideal state, which would have the power to regulate the marketplace by establishing a quasi-Marxian “just price” for all goods and by prohibiting all interest on investments.  This opinion of Thomas’s economic views is substantially wrong, both in the details and in its overall point of view.  Although Thomas was far from being a classical liberal, his...