If you have a group of Catholics over for a dinner party, and they’ve stayed a bit too late but you don’t want to be rude by pointedly winding the alarm clock in front of them, one thing that always works to clear the room is to bring up in conversation the efficacy of prayer and people’s individual prayer lives. We all believe that people should pray and we may even believe that everyone does pray. And probably no one would deny that the question of opening channels of communication to God is “a very important thing”. But nothing makes people start looking at their watches faster than bringing up prayer in conversation.

For those of you who have stayed with me to the end to the end of the last paragraph, let me try to tantalize you with this. For a full 35 years, I didn’t think that I could pray. This changed a few years ago. [More]

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?

CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

One of the many unfortunate aspects of “cafeteria Catholicism” in our country today is that the Church’s social teaching has become virtually synonymous with liberal, quasi- or outright-heterodox forms of our faith. This should not be. The social doctrine of the Church is part and parcel of the deposit of faith, and those of us who embrace the truth of Catholicism must stop ourselves from assigning guilt by association with regard to social doctrine merely because its loudest proponents are very picky in the cafeteria line.