Jesus Christ: “given unto us” (Isa 9.6): This “true Man” has been the subject of the most sublime contemplation, worship, and love imaginable for over two thousand years. Even agnostics marvel over his Person and teachings. And His enemies, of whatever variety, obsess over Him to this very day. For in that crib, the Church… Read More Jesus Christ, Light of the World
When Magicians work their tricks, people applaud, are charmed, and wonder aloud how they ever did that. But with the Lord Jesus Christ it was very different. His saving deeds elicited fear, which is the sign of a real miracle occuring in the midst of sane men and women, as witness the Gospel history: “A… Read More Jesus of Nazareth vs the Magicians and Empiricists
The Easter cards we see in ordinary stores give no hint of the shock of the disciples at seeing the empty tomb and beholding the risen Christ. And certainly not of the terrible trauma and ignominy which Our Lord had just gone through: the betrayal, the arrest, the torture and brutal execution of the Son… Read More Christ’s Victory Over Death and Postmodern Despair
“Today the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which—almost without being aware of it—so many human beings today have yielded.” —- Gabriel Marcel Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan… Read More Thomas Merton on Creation: The Rain is Not for Sale
“May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. — St. Paul, Galatians 6:14. “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent,… Read More Kerygma. Finding Our Way Home Again.
“The word “God” exists. Thus we return to the beginning, to the simple fact that in the universe of words with which we build our world and without which even the so-called facts do not exist for us, the word “God”, too, occurs. Even for the atheists, even for those who say: God is dead,… Read More Karl Rahner* on the Word “God”
“The natural man does not understand the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” — 1 Corinthians 2:14 Tim Staples, a Catholic writer, says, “…from a philosophical perspective, the soul is pure spirit and is the form of… Read More The Natural Man Does Not Understand
4 hrs 34 mins. Unlike so many today, Archbishop Fulton Sheen was biblically-centered. He explicitly rejected Modernistic reinterpretations of Sacred Scripture(1). Here for 4 1/2 continuous hours Bishop Sheen expounds with great erudition on Christ’s Passion and death and beyond, What God has done for us…This is an incomparable Sheen gift for Holy Week —and… Read More Fulton J Sheen. Holy Week. Sign of Contradiction: Good Friday and Beyond
Alas, it’s been a tough winter here in New England where I live. A couple of weeks ago, while shoveling some of our winter snow, I slipped on hidden ice and took an impressive fall. I immediately knew my right shoulder was likely broken. For about ten minutes I was alone on my back on… Read More A Last Things Podcast
And replies. By What Authority Does C.S. Lewis Pontificate? By Thomas Storck | New Oxford Review. Thomas Storck is a Contributing Editor of the New Oxford Review. The great Anglican apologist and scholar C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) championed a concept he called “mere Christianity.” Although the term itself seems to have been coined by the Puritan… Read More Is There Such a Thing as “Mere Christianity”?
Malcolm Muggeridge. “The coming of Jesus into the world is the most stupendous event in human history. . . . As it is, belonging to a civilization which began with the birth of Jesus some two thousand years ago, and reaching the conclusion—to me inescapable—that whatever is truly admirable in the achievements of the succeeding… Read More Fiat Lux. Into History Comes the Light
The value of sufferings in Christ By Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D. O Jesus Crucified, teach me the science of the Cross. 1. The Passion of Jesus teaches us in a concrete way that in the Christian life we must be able to accept suffering for the love of God. This is a… Read More Personal knowledge of the Cross
Fr. Joel S. Panzer, The Catholic Answer and EWTN, 1996 When did the Catholic Church condemn slavery? According to some notable figures, the Church did not finally condemn slavery until recently. Judge John T. Noonan stated that it was not until 1890 that the Church condemned the institution of slavery, lagging behind laws enacted to… Read More The Popes and Slavery: Setting the Record Straight
St. Paul. Phillipians 1: “I want you to know, brethren, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, 13 so that it has become known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ; 14 and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord… Read More Prison Amidst Rivalry and Good Will
And the Deep Truths in Fritz Eichenberg’s ‘The Lord’s Supper‘. The other side of the Eucharist is friendship. It often happens that week after week, year after year, Christians sit and kneel next to practical strangers in church on Sundays. They leave Mass as they entered, nodding and saying hello to people they do not… Read More Strangers in the Pews
The Gospel according to St John, read by Sir David Suchet. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God; 3 all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. 4 In him was life,[a]… Read More Beginning Again. In the beginning.
“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his… Read More If We Say
Christs love and service to all, to native born and to foreigners whom we encounter. The Order of Saint John, more commonly called the Order of Malta, lived by its credo, “Our Lords, the Sick and the Poor.” The members of the Order make a promise upon investiture to serve, to the best of their… Read More “Our lords the sick and the poor.”
“The laity . . . are given this special vocation: to make the Church present and fruitful in those places and circumstances where it is only through them that she can become the salt of the earth” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 33; emphasis added). Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem Second Vatican Council… Read More Laity and Evangelization
G. K. Chesterton: “In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon… Read More Man could do no more… Pilate “washed his hands of the world”
The Catholic Principle of Subsidiarity is a “principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as “the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks… Read More As Government Diverts Billions to War Americans Face Trying Times & Hunger
“The FBI memo cited the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, including a list of organizations the SPLC brands “radical traditional Catholic hate groups.” As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux… Read More The DOJ and Catholics
“The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same… Read More Saints of Flesh and Blood
Penitential Practices for Today’s Catholics was originally published as a resource for the Jubilee Year 2000. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This resource is presented as a pastoral tool for cultivating the penitential practices in one’s daily life. While its focus is limited to a discussion of the Church’s penitential practices, it serves to promote these… Read More Penitential Practices for Catholics
A stoneis not an individual.You can make little onesout of big ones. A treeis an individual.It comesfrom a germ.“Only Godcan make a tree,”says the poet. A horseis an individual.The horse is notan individualthe way the treeis an individual.It has animal life. Man is an individualand has animal lifelike the horse.Man has also reason.which the horse… Read More On Personalism. Peter Maurin.
James M. Patterson, April 2020First Things Magazine C-Span: The important lecture of Thomas Reeves on America’s Bishop (including an the account of his many sufferings and persecutions). Watch it here. Fulton J. Sheen is defined in popular imagination by the persona he adopted on Life Is Worth Living, his Emmy-winning television program. During each episode, the… Read More Taking Sheen Seriously
Venerable Fulton J. Sheen: the Meaning of the Cross of Jesus Christ. By Way of The Cross He leads us through both light and darkness. “Your care for me is greater than all the care I can take of myself… If You wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless You. And if You… Read More The Meaning of the Cross
Our Lord Jesus Christ gives up(1) on none. Nobody. God help us from ever holding on to any Pharisee within. Brennan Manning writes of brokenness, “My life is a witness to vulgar grace — a grace that amazes as it offends. A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same… Read More Vulgar Grace
The Figures Behind the Evangelists. By Frederick W. Marks.The New Oxford Review.Dec. 2021. One of the most powerful arguments for the reliability of the Gospels is the fact that two of them were written by eyewitnesses: Matthew and John. There is another fact, however, that is equally important. The other two evangelists, Mark and Luke,… Read More The Gospels of Peter & Mary
Regis Martin.Crisis Magazine. What would you call someone who lives off the substance of a faith he no longer believes in, a faith every detail of which he despises, including the Church founded by Christ to give it expression; one who makes, by the way, a very good living teaching theology at a Catholic University… Read More Hijackers of the Word
Their lives amazingly intersected. And he prayed in her convent’s chapel. Hear the story. —- Divine Mercy and the Lonely
“Let no soul fear to draw near to Me, even though its sins be as scarlet. My Mercy is so great that no mind, be it of man or of angel, will be able to fathom it throughout all eternity. (…) Mankind will not have peace until it turns to the fount of My Mercy.… Read More The Divine Mercy and Loneliness
Catholic Critique 