This week's David Hahn Show opens with a story from Fr James Martin's ministry Outreach, which published an article by Alex Capecelatro recounting two meetings he and his partner had with Pope Leo, presenting themselves on both occasions as a "married couple." The first came in October and the second on 29 July at the Canticle of Peace in Castel Gandolfo, and on both occasions Capecelatro reports being greeted warmly by the Holy Father. Hahn argues that the pope's courtesy is being repurposed as something it was never meant to be, a pattern he traces back to Martin's own May headline, "Vatican listens to LGBTQ people: A major step forward," which framed the inclusion of testimony from two gay men in a Vatican synod report as institutional progress. Against that model, Hahn points to Courage International, the Catholic apostolate for those experiencing same-sex attraction, whose Five Goals of chastity, prayer and dedication, fellowship, support and good example, along with its sister apostolate EnCourage, aim to combine welcome with fidelity to Church teaching rather than treat the two as in tension.
From the Vatican, Hahn turns to Capitol Hill, where Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on Instagram that she is freezing her eggs, accompanying the news with footage of herself injecting the drugs used in oocyte retrieval. Ocasio-Cortez, 36 and set to turn 37 within months, was recently named a potential 2028 presidential contender by Vice President JD Vance, and Hahn situates her decision within a broader shift in when American women become mothers, citing CDC data showing the average age of a first-time mother rose from 26.6 in 2016 to 27.5 in 2023, with first births to women over 35 up 25 per cent over the same period as first births to teenagers fell by 26 per cent. Hahn draws on the document Dignitas Personae, which sets out three goods a treatment for infertility must respect, namely the right to life from conception, the unity of marriage and procreation within conjugal love, to argue that egg freezing and the IVF it anticipates fail all three, and that a culture willing to put fertility on ice risks treating children as something to be scheduled rather than welcomed.
Hahn then revisits a story that broke a few weeks earlier: a viral clip in which podcaster Jennifer Welch mocked homeschooling parents, which prompted Angela Watson, an associate research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, to respond in The Hill that critics of homeschooling rarely engage with the data. Watson notes that homeschooling is no longer a fringe choice, with a US Census Bureau survey putting the figure at 6 per cent of American K-12 students, or roughly 3 million children, for the 2023-2024 school year, and a University of Minnesota study of 732 homeschoolers across 140 colleges finding no significant difference in first-year performance once SAT scores and GPAs were matched against conventionally schooled peers. Hahn adds his own account of being homeschooled alongside his five siblings before three years of Catholic high school, and cites the Catechism's teaching at paragraph 2221 that the role of parents in education "is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute," arguing that every school, homeschool included, transmits some account of reality and that the real question is which account is true.
The episode closes in Liechtenstein, where Hereditary Prince Alois, who governs as regent for his father Prince Hans-Adam II, has already pledged to veto a citizen initiative to legalise abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, provide state-covered abortion information and insurance, even before organisers had gathered the signatures needed to force a referendum. It is not the first time: voters rejected a similar 12-week proposal in 2011 after Alois warned he would block it, and in a principality of roughly 40,000 people, his constitutional veto power remains real. Hahn draws a parallel with Monaco, where Prince Albert II refused last year to sign legislation legalising abortion up to 12 weeks despite a 19-2 vote in the National Council, invoking the principality's Catholic identity, and closes the segment with the line from Sirach that "the government of the earth is in the hands of the Lord, and over it he will raise up the right man for the time."
Running beneath all four stories is the same argument dressed in different clothes: that warmth, choice, data and popular will are each being treated as self-justifying, when none of them settle the prior question of what is actually true or good. A pope's kindness does not amount to doctrinal endorsement, a woman's right to choose when to have children does not suspend the biological clock she is choosing against, a mother's right to teach her own children does not depend on a stereotype about who homeschools or why, and a majority vote does not make the taking of an unborn life any less grave. Hahn's throughline is that welcome, freedom, evidence and democracy are all real goods, but none of them can substitute for the harder work of asking whether what is being welcomed, chosen, taught or voted on is actually good.
