catholicsphere

Maggie Gallagher writes in her column this week about Pope Benedict’s answer to What is this thing called love?

I knew Pope Benedict was a brilliant intellect, a German academic theologian of some note. But nobody told me the man has the soul of a poet. This pope writes of our longing for the “apparently irresistible promise of happiness” glimpsed in the love “between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.”

A much needed message for a world that needs to learn true love, and the Source of love…

Scroll through the newspaper. Oh, another dead child in New York City, killed by her mother’s boyfriend. A middle-aged mother, hearing her husband is about to divorce her, fails at suicide but succeeds in suffocating her three young children. America’s 34th richest man serves divorce papers unexpectedly on his (fourth) wife, apparently to avoid an imminent hike in the prenupped price of divorce. A 41-year-old child protective services worker is arrested for raping his two adolescent daughters “at least 100 times,” according to the New York Post. He remorsefully tells police “he couldn’t help it. He would fight the urges for a while and it just became a thing.”