“God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. — Frederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 109. The Forerunners: 2015: For the Neo-modernist or Progressivist Catholic today, the traditional understanding… Read More Progressivist Theology. What it is.
St. Antoninus writes: In the Event of the Most Grave Confusion(s): “The people are not oblidged to know…” And St. Thomas Aquinas on whether one must avoid (ipso facto or otherwise) excommunicated persons before sentence has been passed Principles St. Antoninus, commenting on the Great Western Schism. (1054 A.D.) “The question was much discussed and much… Read More In the Most Grave Confusion(s): “The People Are Not Oblidged to Know…”
“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun.”— Joseph Pearce Note: I do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to have been perfect. Which pope in history was? Even Pius XII allowed the infamous Teilhard de Chardin to remain a priest in the… Read More Benedict XVI by Joseph Pearce
And a response It Ain’t Broke, But Let’s Fix It Anyhow June 2004, NOR We picked up a Catholic magazine, and on the cover was one big headline, and it was a striking one: “Was Vatican II a Mistake?” In the background to the headline were a litany of post-Vatican II disasters: “practicing homosexuals in… Read More The New Oxford Review Exchange on Whether Vatican II Was Necessary
Biblical Interpretation in Crisis. On the Question of the Foundations: and Approaches of Exegesis Today by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 1988 (later Pope Benedict XVI) In Wladimir Solowjew’s History of the Antichrist, the eschatological enemy of the Redeemer recommended himself to believers, among other things, by the fact that he had earned his doctorate in theology… Read More Biblical Interpretation in Crisis — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 1988
In a biography of G.K. Chesterton published in 1943, Maisie Ward tells of this remarkable trait of the great convert and Catholic apologist: “(He) liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After…[a particular period of]… Read More G. K. Chesterton and The Eternal Thank You
Extra Ecclesiam nulla Salus Dear Dr… Thank you very much for the revised version of your article on the theological understanding of the efficacy of the “baptisms” of desire and blood* for salvation [absent water baptism]—in certain circumstances. As you’ll see by the enclosed letter which I wrote to a friend, I am on the… Read More On Fr. Leonard Feeney
Recent events among some significant numbers of so-called “Progressive” Catholics, gleefully talking about the “devolution” of Church authority in our time, especially since Francis, has reminded me several times of something I was told by an Oblate priest while I was making a personal retreat in the late 1980’s. It was at the Oblate Fathers… Read More No More Traditional Priesthood, a Goal for ‘Progressives’?
… and the New Pseudo Praxis. Perhaps the most critical and classical difference between all forms of Protestantism and Catholicism lay in their respective understandings of the relationship between faith and good works. For Catholics, God’s saving work in Jesus Christ – the fruit of unmerited grace – issues in a changed heart and a… Read More Loving Theology More Than God
The objective of the modernist has always been to force ‘God’ into a relative obscurity in order to make more room for the autonomy of man. In order to do so it is necessary for the modernist to utterly reject the traditional understanding of the Incarnation, whereby God consummated His love and revelation of Himself… Read More The “Specious Pretext”. Modernism.
“The living magisterium makes extensive use of documents of the past, but it does so while judging and interpreting, gladly finding in them its present thought, but likewise, when needful, distinguishing its present thought from what is traditional only in appearance. “It is revealed truth always living in the mind of the Church, or, if it is preferred, the… Read More Tradition and the Living Magisterium.
Josef Pieper, the renowned Thomist, in his 1953 study, The Silence of St. Thomas (St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Indiana) reminds theologians and students of St. Thomas Aquinas that while Pope Pius XI in his 1923 Encyclical Studiorum Ducem insisted that the Angelic Doctor is to be esteemed by all Schools of Theology, he also reminded all… Read More St. Thomas Aquinas and the “Life-blood of Catholic Theology”
Larry Chapp seems to express a kind of anxiety or apprehension in this video discussion about the obvious problem of the traditional magisterium as he comes “out of the closet” and reveals himself to be, of all things, an eschatological “universalist” wherein, in the end, we can all hope that Scripture and Tradition will be… Read More A Note on Dr. Larry Chapp — at the edge of Hell. Nothing to lose.
+ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect. Declaration:+Dominus Iesus, August 6, 2000. + On the Unicity and SalvificUniversality Of Jesus Christ and The Church. INTRODUCTION: 1. The Lord Jesus, before ascending into heaven, commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world and to baptize all nations: “Go into… Read More On the Unicity and Universality Of Jesus Christ
NCRegister: “A blessing is not compatible with a state of sin: One cannot bless that which breaks, consumes, destroys. To which sacrament, therefore, is the blessing of an irregular couple ordered? It is not true that blessing promotes and justifies nothing, because it implicitly promotes “disordered acts” and a pseudo union… “In the text of Fiducia… Read More ‘Non-Liturgical’ Blessings Do Not Exist
Or how to squeeze Union Theological Seminary into two Millennia of unambiguous Catholic teaching. Raymond Brown’s Wayward Turn in Biblical Theory by Msgr. George A. Kelly Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA, January / February Note: Raymond E. Brown was professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City, where he taught for 29 years. He was… Read More Raymond E. Brown’s Mischievous Tactic: the “Scientifically Controlled Evidence”
“THIS IS A question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side. For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us? The picture of a fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it.… Read More What are we to make of Jesus Christ? by C.S. Lewis.
Updated. A couple of years ago our son asked me if I watched Michael Voris’ YouTube channel. I replied along the lines of, “Sometimes. Not very often. He’s been around for a long time; I know his thinking well enough. It can lead to wrong impressions, to schism or outright skepticism.” It can also minimize… Read More Michael Davies on Our Priests and Our Tribulation
At the dawn of the 20th century Pope Pius X warned against the teachings of the theological Modernists who were already infiltrating the Church: “… in their books you find some things which might well be expressed by a Catholic, but on the next page you find other things which might have been dictated by… Read More On the Doctrine of the Neo-Modernists
Fundamentalist Protestant incomprehension of the Catholic doctrine regarding Mary as the Mother of God is largely and essentially an incomprehension of the Incarnation itself, whereby the Word, who is God, was made flesh (John 1:1; 14). It is rooted in a failure to contemplate, with the Catholic Church, the stupendous implications of this wondrous mystery.… Read More Our Blessed Mother, Mary, in the Order of Grace
Ireland, February 1st, Feast of Saint Brigid, 2021. Catholicarena.com. 21st Century Ireland is desperately grasping for an identity. It sometimes defines itself against British identity, yet it has found itself increasingly becoming a subculture of Britain both financially and culturally. Some often cast it as being distinct from American culture, yet many Irish children are… Read More No, St. Brigid of Kildare Was Not a Pagan Feminist Abortionist
Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register wrote, “The former cardinal-archbishop of Milan [Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini], a favorite of those pushing for heterodox reforms in the Church, had envisioned a permanent synodal Church in which the idea of collegial governance introduced at the Second Vatican Council could be better realized. The Jesuit biblical… Read More Martini’s Endless Dream
Counterrevolution? In sickness or in health, for richer or poorer… “Tradwives, a newly coined term for traditional wives, is a subculture of housewives who believe in clear gender roles, the importance of homemaking and a patriarchal marriage, according to many women who self-identify as tradwives. Tradwives are women who honor femininity, care for their husbands,… Read More Tradwives’ push back against critics who say their viral homemaking lifestyle is ‘alarming’
By Dave Carlin.The Catholic Thing. Decades ago, American conservatives used to say that liberalism was “creeping socialism.” It wasn’t true at the time – although it may well be true of today’s liberalism, a very different and far more leftist kind of animal than the liberalism of the old days. From the late 1940s until… Read More Improving the Church
Updated. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, To Change The Church: Pope Francis And The Future of Catholicism … is an urgent, compelling work of popular religious journalism. Douthat reads the signs of these anxious times with acute clarity and far-seeing vision. This book is must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of… Read More Revisiting the 2018 Dreher / Douthat Interview: the Great Gamble of Francis.
Then, The Jesuits: What Went Wrong? But first: Franciscan University Presents. Panelists Dr. Regis Martin, Dr. Scott Hahn, and special guest Fr. Gerald E. Murray, a diocesan priest in the Archdiocese of New York, and Co-Author of the new book “Calming the Storm: Navigating the Crises Facing the Catholic Church and Society“, as they discuss… Read More Facing Crises in the Church and Society | Fr. Gerald E. Murray
“Only the God of Jesus Christ is the living God [Jn. 14:16]. As has also been stated in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (no. 3), the first God mentioned above—the God of the philosophers—is the fruit of human thought, of human speculation, and capable of saying something valid about God . In… Read More John Paul II on the Only Name Under Heaven
A Synod “filled with the usual modern technocratic, therapeutic linguistics of faux egalitarian tyranny”. Will the Church still be a “listening” Church in ten years or will the “Spirit” go mute once the Germans have given the final definitive word on the Spirit’s intentions? Larry ChappCatholic World Report April 22, 2022 I am not opposed… Read More The quintessentially modern approach to “synodality” is empty and artificial
Rocco Buttiglione is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Pius V University in Rome, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. “… we reach the heart of the question which interests us. To appreciate its full scope, let us take G. W. F. Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of History’ as a point of… Read More John Paul II, Poland, and the Hegelian Menace
First Things. Despite his humble origins as a baker’s son from Trastevere, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, longtime curial head of the Holy Office (“successor to the Inquisition,” in journalese) and scourge of the nouvelle théologie of the 1950s, was a formidable figure in pre-conciliar Catholicism. Ottaviani’s approach to theology was neatly summarized in the Latin motto of his… Read More George Weigel on The Last Laugh of Alfredo Ottaviani
Prescinding from any questions regarding the wisdom of calling the Council in the time and manner it did, regarding the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, and its Decrees on Ecumenism, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2007 clarified confusions, showing again that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from dogmatic errors through the… Read More Dogmatics Clarified, 2007: Second Vatican Council doctrine of the Church
A Personal Account. July 3, 2021 Brother Lawrence Mary, Tert. M.I.C.M. Have you ever paused on the edge of a life-changing decision, one in which you contemplated an irreversible choice that would separate you forever from everything that you know and love? Maybe you traveled to a new country, knowing you would never return. Or… Read More Standing on the Edge
Cardinal Gerhard Mueller (Former CDF Prefect) on the New TLM Restrictions: Unity is not sterile uniformity. “The clear intent is to condemn the Extraordinary Form to extinction in the long run.”
To the Outskirts of Existence “At the end of 2013, I wrote to Pope Francis suggesting we have a conversation about the fundamental questions facing Christians in the modern world. It was a naïve proposal, but it never reached him. John WatersJul 12, 2021, Ireland The main element and purpose of this article is actually… Read More John Waters on Pope Francis
The who, what, where, when, and why of the Council by Michael J. Miller. Catholic World Report The famous black-and-white photograph of the Second Vatican Council in session, taken from a high balcony at the back of Saint Peter’s Basilica, shows more than 2,000 Council Fathers standing at their places in slanted stalls that line… Read More A Review of Roberto de Mattei’s “The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story”
Michael Davies on Father Feeney As regards the question of “No salvation outside the Church,” I can assure Mr. [Atila Sinke] Guimarães that I am aware of the fact that this is the teaching of the Church and was not invented by Father Feeney. I have been studying the dogma since 1979 after I read… Read More Traditional Catholic Author Michael Davies on Fr. Leonard Feeney
“…no man ought to sever himself from the unity of the Church before the time of the final separation of the just and unjust, merely because of the admixture of evil men in the Church“ —Saint Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists, Bk. IV, The Complete Works of Saint Augustine. Ch.12.19, (1407)
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