Introducing: The Second Collection

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | May 16, 2025 | In Reviews

Although I enjoy writing, one aspect of the craft that I find troublesome—probably because I am not very good at it—is settling on titles for my work. Sometimes I might rip off a short essay in less than an hour, and then spend another hour stewing over the few words to put in the headline. But every now and then the process works the other way: I think of a title that I feel sure would capture my reader’s attention, and only then begin to think about what I could write under that title.

So it is with The Second Collection. The phrase itself is familiar to practicing Catholics, who hear it regularly in the announcements at Sunday Mass. (“The second collection this week will be for…”) In fact the routine occurrence of second collections has always irritated me. Passing the baskets twice becomes a distraction at Mass, particularly when it occurs one week after another, a needless excess of fundraising.

But speaking of excesses, I could hardly write an entire book on the subject. So how could I make use of that title? Ah, a collection of essays could certainly be entitled The Second Collection! And to be honest I have thought for many years about producing such a collection. Sad to say, I have dithered too long, and in the mean time I have produced three of these eBooks: Misinterpreting Catholicism, on how the mass media distort public understanding of the faith; Witness of Suffering, on the final days of Pope St. John Paul II; and (with my colleague Jeff Mirus) A Church of Hope a collection of pieces on the Covid epidemic and the enormous costs of the lockdown. However, the first of those efforts was really a collection of news stories, and the last was a joint project. So perhaps it is still accurate to say that this is the second collection of my own essays. In any case it is the first eBook with that title.

The essays in this collection originally appeared on the CatholicCulture.org site over a period of several years, touch on a variety of different topics. To help readers browse (since that, I think, is the purpose of a collection), I have sorted them into several rough categories, as follows:

• The very first essay here is—appropriately enough, I think—on the subject of second collections. In it I tell a story about an archdiocesan synod in Boston in the 1980s. But the lessons that I learned from that experience in the 1980s helped to shape my concerns about the “Synod on Synodality” in the 2020s. The process of a synod can easily degenerate into a discussion about how to have discussions—or worse. The first section of this eBook explores the dangers of synodality: first, the unfortunate tendency to encourage verbosity; second—and more ominous—to encourage questioning of Catholic doctrine.
• Many of my most popular essays, as measured by readers’ responses, have been devoted to political themes. At times I find those responses unsettling, since my main interests are no longer political (as they once were). But the application of Catholic social teaching to contemporary problems remains important, as is the distinction between the authority of the teaching magisterium and the personal opinions of prelates and even pontiffs. These are explored in Section II of this collection.
• One particular area in which the application of Catholic social teaching should be vitally important, and is invoked only rarely—and then often inaccurately or improperly—is the tradition of teaching on the just conduct of war. Pope Francis stated, on numerous occasions, that war always represents a failure of policy and a loss for the nations involved. No reasonable person should argue the point; war is a terrible thing. But what if the war is fought for a just cause—that is, to redress a wrong that is even more terrible? Theologians have wrestled with that question for centuries, producing a remarkably sophisticated and useful set of moral standards. The just-war tradition has been a particular interest of mine for many years, dating back to my involvement with the US bishops’ “peace pastoral” in 1983. Section III is devoted to this topic, and my efforts to apply just-war teaching to current conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza. I hope and pray that this section will soon be outdated. Unfortunately, I doubt that it will be. In any event, maybe readers who stumble across these essays sometime in the distant future might be interested in historical case studies.
• And speaking of conflicts, the pontificate of Pope Francis—which came to an end just as I finished collating these essays—saw a dramatic escalation of conflicts within the Catholic Church. Section IV is devoted to some of those conflicts, including those that involve Catholic moral teaching, the scandals within the hierarchy, and—perhaps most painful of all—the sacred liturgy.
• My editorial work at Catholic World News has given me some special insights on—and opinions about—the internal workings of the Vatican. In Section V, then, I give voice to those opinions on subjects such as the continuing chaos of Vatican finances, the failures of Vatican diplomacy (particularly regarding China), the seeming inability of Curial bureaucrats to hear the concerns of the faithful (particularly on clerical abuses of various kinds), the persistent Roman temptation to identify with the political Left, and inability of the Holy See to rein in centrifugal forces (particularly German).
• The final section of this collection is a potpourri, difficult to categorize. It includes my musings on a variety of subjects, ranging from the mundane and even silly to (I hope) the profound and even inspiring. The ambitious reader, or one looking for relaxation and amusement, might choose to start, at the end of the book—thus in a way replicating the pattern by which The Second Collection took shape.