In the game of basketball there is an exciting defensive tactic called the full-court press. With relentless determination to get ball control and score, all five men on a side will chase over the entire court to harass their assigned opponent in hopes of stripping him of the ball, to dribble downcourt, drive the lane, and jam home two points. The fact is that a good defense is a good offense. The full-court press produces....

...Unlike the Catholic Press. At least lately. Generally, it doesn’t know what to defend and so rarely, if ever, goes on the offensive. Much of it has simply limped off the world-court of ideas. And what’s not on the sidelines already, is being beaten to the basket as badly as a sumo wrestler by Michael Jordan.

The oral tradition has its importance­–theoretically, maybe superiority–but there is no doubt among the popes about the need of a relentless Catholic Press. Pope St. Pius X said:

“In vain will you build churches, give missions, found schools...all your work, all your efforts, will be destroyed if you are not able to wield the offensive and defensive weapon of a loyal and sincere Catholic Press....I would make any sacrifice, even to pawning my ring, pectoral cross, and cassock, in order to support a Catholic paper...”

Pius XII pronounced: “The Catholic Press should stand as a seer and prophet....Anything you do for the Catholic Press I will consider done for me personally.” At the end of the last century, Pope Leo XIII insisted: “The godless press has destroyed Christian society. A good press must be pitted against it. Good papers must be founded and circulated, and in them lies must be energetically defeated and truth defended....”

The benefit of hindsight proves prophetic the hard wisdom of Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari vos (1832):

“With this is blended the liberty of the press–the most fatal liberty...for which there never can be sufficient horror, and which certain men dare so loudly and earnestly to demand and extend everywhere. We shudder, venerable brethren, when we consider the monstrous doctrines, or rather prodigies of error with which we are overwhelmed;....Yet there are, alas, men so carried away with impudence as not to hesitate to maintain stubbornly that the deluge of error flowing hence is quite sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book printed to defend truth and religion amid this mass of iniquity. It is doubtless a crime,...to commit with premeditation a great and certain evil, in the hope that perhaps some good will result; and what man of sense will ever dare say that it is lawful to scatter poisons, to sell them publicly, to hawk them about,...under the pretext that there exists some remedy which has at times snatched from death those who used them?”

Archbishop Lefebvre echoes Pope Gregory in a "Conference on Liberalism," the first in a series of ­conferences we intend to publish (for the first time in English).

Thanks to the lie-peddling free-speechers and the cooperation of the false democratizers within the Mystical Body itself, today’s challenge indeed that “the Press must meet the Press.” Charles Coulombe’s historical piece tells us how the Church rose to the occasion in "Catholic Journalism: The Real Free Press."

In the book review of My Life with Thomas Aquinas, we learn from Mrs. Carol Robinson how and why the Catholic Press fell from grace. The publishing field has been declining for centuries since editors and writers necessarily flounder if they don’t have contact with Catholic truth. With the suppression of the authority of Catholic truth, the entire burden of truth has shifted to feeling while our intellects hang useless, though crushed, says Gary Potter in"Observations & Reflections," by an “information overload” of pseudo-knowledge.

Free-speechers deny the absolute authority of Catholic truth over the intellect. But, the intellect is meant to seek out and conform with this truth. Thus, the denial of Catholic truth is a denial of the intellect’s proper end. That’s a denial of reality. That’s intellect-escape....

Which brings us to Virtual Reality (VR). What is good and bad about this new medium skyrocketing in availability and popularity? Joseph Dunmore’s "Said Jesting Pilate" answers with a profound thesis. VR is a dream-machine system that uses a technological package of artificial sensory stimulation to present an interactive “false reality” of your choice. Imagine the abuses. What has been the effect on the young (and aging) 
video generation who in this electronic age have been denied the necessity of experiencing really real things? Teacher James S. Taylor tells us in "The Child and Reality" and proposes boldly practical solutions for families recognizing the spiritual damage wrought by unreal living.

In "Epiphany in an Angelicized Age," Dr. Michael Berton philosophizes on the deeper motivation behind Virtual Reality and the growing “techno-anxiety” about possible repercussions of emerging technological innovations on man and society. Is there a “God complex” among the innovators? Are we courting disaster?

If you think all the tech-talk has nothing to do with the Catholic Faith, you’re wrong.

Instaurare Omnia in Christo,

Fr. Kenneth Novak