Bad as things are, and bad as they’re going to get, there are at least three great writers out there who are Catholic, reasonable, good writers, and not afraid to speak the truth.  Today people emailed me links to three of the best articles I’ve read in a long time.

The first, by Anthony Esolen, in Crisis Magazine is one of the most stirring pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time.  A clarion call for our bishops (and all of us) to begin to Witness – which is to say to be willing to be martyred – for the Faith.  You should read the whole article, but the best part might just be this near the end, where Esolen simply tells the Canadian bishops exactly what they should say to the government that is trying to crush them …
Go ahead then—we dare you to keep bluffing. We dare you now to forbid us to teach the whole doctrine. We dare you to order us to bless fornication, divorce, abortion, contraception, onanism, unchastity, and all your miserable brew of temporary and local excitation to spice your perduring and spreading ennui. … You have nothing to offer. You are holding a pair of threes. We have everything to offer. We proclaim the holiness of the human body.
The second, by Fr. George Rutler, is a manly and intelligent examination of anger, an emotion we are told to smother, as it fits not so well in to the land of eunuchs (“Sterility City” as it were).  The money quote …
Anger as a deadly sin is like an oil spill instead of oil for energy. When anger is used rightly it becomes strength.
And finally, the inimitable Fr. Barron uses VP  Candidate Ryan to elucidate Church teaching on a variety of things.  As usual, Fr. Barron is charitable, reasonable and balanced.  For example …
Solidarity without subsidiarity can easily devolve into a kind of totalitarianism whereby “justice” is achieved either through outright manipulation and intimidation or through more subtle forms of social engineering. But subsidiarity without solidarity can result in a society marked by rampant individualism, a Gordon Gekko “greed is good” mentality, and an Ayn Rand/Nietzschean “objectivism” that positively celebrates the powerful person’s dominance of the weak.  Catholic social theory involves the subtle balancing of these two great principles so as to avoid these two characteristic pitfalls.