2025 | Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History

Roman Stoic Philosopher Seneca on Aging, Death, and Suicide

09/17/2025 Bruce Strom 5

Seneca reminds us: “There is indeed a limit fixed to us,” “but none of us knows how near he is to this limit. Therefore, let us so order our minds as if we had come to the very end. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s account every day.” “Let us begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.” What is important is “not how long you live, but how nobly you live. And often living nobly means that you cannot live long.” […]

Did Rome Fall, or Evolve to Barbarian Kingdoms? Sack of Rome, and Attila the Hun’s Invasions

Did Rome Fall, or Evolve Into the Barbarian Kingdoms? Sacks of Rome, and Attila the Hun’s Invasions

09/15/2025 Bruce Strom 1

Peter Brown contends: “The Roman Empire was not violently breached by barbarian “invasions.” Rather, between AD 200 and 400, the frontier itself changed. From being a defensive region, which kept Romans and barbarians apart, it had become, instead, an extensive middle ground, in which roman and barbarian societies were drawn together. And after AD 400, it was the barbarians and no longer the Romans who became the dominant partners in the middle ground.” Indeed, after AD 400 barbarian tribes served in the army of the Huns, and barbarians from most of the tribes, including the Huns, served in the Roman armies. […]

Roman Stoic Philosopher Seneca on Aging, Retirement, and Death

Roman Stoic Philosopher Seneca on Old Age and Retirement

09/07/2025 Bruce Strom 4

Seneca faces old age and death as only a Stoic could. “Old age is a time of life that is weary rather than crushed.” Nevertheless, I am thankful, “for age has not damaged my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution. Only my vices” “have reached senility; my mind is strong,” “it is alert,” “it declares that old age is when it blooms.” “My mind bids me to consider how much this peace of mind and moderation of character I owe to wisdom and how much to my time of life; it bids me to distinguish carefully what I cannot do and what I do not want to do.” “There is only one chain that binds us to life, and that is the love of life.” […]

Classical Christian Psychologist Paul Tournier on Old Age, Death, and Faith

08/26/2025 Bruce Strom 2

Tournier reminds us that we may experience many successes, but as we grow older, “success retreats, and escapes us, it is limited, unfulfilled.” “When one comes to the end, a man’s life is nothing much.” “Professional life is over, and it finishes unfinished. This is a prefiguration of death, in which the whole of life will finish it, too, being unfinished. That is the dramatic contradiction of death.” Quoting Robert Mehl: “An end, but not a fulfilment, that is the face of death.” […]

Classical Christian Psychologist Paul Tournier on Old Age and Retirement

08/20/2025 Bruce Strom 4

Paul Tournier notes: “Freud defined psychological health under the double heading of aptitude for love and for work.” But Paul Tournier cautions that “the superficial relationships of working life and of sexual attraction must lead to a deeper personal commitment. And I believe that no commitment can be truly personal unless it takes on a transcendent dimension and become love, in the biblical meaning of the word.”
Paul Tournier is grateful: “As an intellectual, I am specially privileged. It is true that the better educated people are, the more chance they have to enjoy their retirement. First, intellectual work” is not physically taxing. “Second, the capacity for intellectual work is retained longer than physical ability. It can even increase in old age as long as disease does not affect the mental faculties. But most of all, the more one exercises one’s mind, the more pleasure it gives to exercise it. The more one learns, the more one wants to learn, and the easier study becomes.” […]

Summary of Papacies Between Trent and Vatican II. How Did These Popes Prepare the Way for Vatican II?

08/08/2025 Bruce Strom 0

How did the Catholic Church survive the French Revolution, the conquests of Napoleon, and the Revolutions of 1848? Was the Second Vatican Council a continuation of Vatican I? Was Pope Leo XIII, who issued Rerum Novarum, the social justice encyclical that sympathized with the working man, a conservative or a […]

Pope Benedict XV and Pope Pius XI: Confronting World War I and World War II, and Fascism

07/27/2025 Bruce Strom 1

Mussolini signaled in a speech that he was open to negotiating the Roman question. Mussolini was not a practicing Catholic and was famously a serial philanderer. Like Napoleon before him, Mussolini realized that it was in his political interest to settle this issue and regularize the status of the Vatican City.
O’Malley writes: “The most momentous aspect of the Lateran Agreements was the establishment of the Vatican City as a fully independent and sovereign state, with its own postal service, police force, full diplomatic corps, and so forth. The Italian state agreed never to interfere in the free functioning of Vatican City and ensured full and safe access to it by anyone the papacy wanted to receive. The papacy agreed never to try directly or indirectly to reestablish the Papal States, and it relinquished in perpetuity all claim to the city of Rome.”
The Vatican was paid a generous indemnity for the loss of this territory, and the state would pay an annual stipend for the upkeep of historical monuments. In addition to the 103 acres in Vatican City, the pope could also use several churches and castles traditionally at the church’s disposal. […]

Pope Pius X, Promoting Piety, Rejecting Modernism

07/27/2025 Bruce Strom 0

After the long and momentous papacy of Pope Leo XIII, the cardinals sought a candidate who would be a pastoral pope. They chose Guiseppe Sarto, who had spent his entire priestly life as a pastor, last serving as patriarch of Venice. He was from a family of modest means, and for nine years he served as a priest in a country parish. His formal education was meager, he studied at a seminary in Padua.
Our author John O’Malley explains: “Pope Pius X had never set foot outside Italy. He saw things in terms of black and white. While still Patriarch of Venice, he wrote to a friend: ‘When we speak of the Vicar of Christ, we must not quibble. We must obey. We must not evaluate his judgments or criticize his directions lest we do injury to Jesus Christ himself. Society is sick. The one hope, the one remedy, is the pope.’ The words ring like an Ultramontanist manifesto.” […]

Pope Leo XIII: Catholic Social Justice and Rerum Novarum, Confronting the Modern World

07/27/2025 Bruce Strom 1

O’Malley writes: “Rerum Novarum is a long encyclical. It reaffirms previous papal condemnations of socialism and communism. But its tone throughout is serene, and free from rant.” “While it proclaimed private property as a natural right, it insisted it had its limits. If private property was a right, so was the right of the worker to a just wage and to humane working conditions. Most remarkably, the encyclical endorsed the right of workers to organize in order to obtain and secure their rights.”
Pope Leo XXIII was labeled the Social Pope and the Pope of Workers since he endorsed the necessity of paying workers a living wage that enables the worker to feed, clothe, and house his family with dignity. Rerum Novarum encouraged the formulation of social justice doctrine, leading to the Catholic concept of the preferential option for the poor. Subsequent popes endorsed the theology of this encyclical: Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius VI issued Octagesima Adveniens, and Pope John Paul II issued Centesimus Annus on the fortieth, eightieth, and hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. In addition, Pope John XXIII issued Mater Et Magistra on social justice. […]

Pope Pius IX, 1848 Revolutions and First Vatican Council

07/11/2025 Bruce Strom 1

Why did Pope Pius IX call the council? John O’Malley notes: “Some people speculated he wanted it solemnly to confirm the Syllabus of Errors. He may have wanted it as a show of Catholic strength worldwide against the church’s enemies, especially in Italy.”
O’Malley continues: “Despite the broad agenda that was anticipated, the council dealt with only two items. The first was the relationship between revealed truth and the powers of human reason.” The council affirmed both the distinction and compatibility between them. With that resolved, the council planned to discuss “church-state relations and the role of the bishops, but with the encouragement of Pius it bypassed them and moved directly to consider” “papal primacy and papal infallibility.”
Papal primacy was not new; the Catholic Church had held this view for fifteen hundred years. But the pope and many bishops felt that the church needed to definitively state that the pope had full authority, not only over matters of faith and morals, but also over discipline and governance for the church worldwide, for both clergy and laity. […]