And Fulton J Sheen on the meaning of Palm Sunday. “If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow: and if they be red as crimson, they shall be white as wool” (Isaias 1:18). Homily of Benedict XVI, Palm Sunday, 2006. To understand what occurred on Palm Sunday and to… Read More “The Cross Is the Tree of Life” – Benedict XVI
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
“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.
First, the Problem. The famous Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson writes, surely accurately, in his Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, “… at the very place where the Summa of Alexander and the Commentary of St. Bonaventure undertake to show that the existence of God is evident, St. Thomas devotes an article to proving that it… Read More Gilson, Saint Thomas and The Self-Attesting God
“Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem, or did the gospel writers “invent” the story to fit prophecy? Did a Roman census ever force people to travel back to their ancestral towns? And what about Herod’s massacre of the innocents – pure theology, or plausible history? Tom Wright and Mike Bird respond here to challenges raised… Read More N.T. Wright Replies to Historian Tom Holland Regarding N.T. Nativity Accounts
One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father of us all” — Eph. 4: 4-6 Every ecclesial community brings its tradition(s) to bear in the exegesis and understanding of Scripture. Even independent Protestant Fundamentalist pastors and larger Protestant denominations(1) employ their traditions [i.e., their received community understanding of texts] as a… Read More Catholicism, Tradition and Protestantism
“The need of reflecting on the interior life of the Savior is particularly great in the present period of general confusion, when individuals and entire peoples misunderstand the ultimate end of human life and forget the profound difference between perishable, material goods and immutable, spiritual goods. Material goods divide us in the measure that we… Read More Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: What Christ Must Be for Us
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
Fr. Chad Ripperger writes, “The juridical concept of the deposit [of Faith] requires that it is not the property of the guardian. In other words, it is not the person who receives it that has ownership of it, but of the consigner who is handing it over to him to keep it in a safe… Read More The Binding Force of Tradition
… 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
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
This young woman gets what many theologians have long forgotten or forsaken. May God give her -and all of us- perseverance unto the end. Romans 5:6-11: with a powerful and encouraging word for each of us. Through the blood of Jesus we receive grace to be conformed to the righteousness of God! The life of… Read More Saved From Wrath. Rachel Shares Romans 5:6-11.
The coming of the “Son of Perdition, the Man. of Sin” In 1954 the famous Thomist, Josef Pieper wrote: “Once, and as soon as, world dominion in the full sense has become possible, the Antichrist has become possible. To this corresponds the other coordinate fact that the Christian gospel must have reached the totality of… Read More Thomist Josef Pieper on the Pseudo-Order and World Dominion of the AntiChrist.
How Israel and Palestine Became Enemies According to Scripture *|* What’s next for Syria’s Christians After Assad’s Fall? (Opinion) “The complex and tumultuous history behind one of the world’s most enduring conflicts… How some Protestant-Evangelical [and some Catholics] see the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exploring the key events, ideologies, and interests that have driven… Read More All Eyes on the Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
Reginald Garrigou Lagrange and St. Alphonsus Ligouri. The New Oxford Review has been interested in this important subject recently and so I thought the following might assist those likewise interested and / or baffled by it all. See also other essays by following links regarding predestination, grace, free will, etc at this website. 1. Catholic… Read More Harmony and Differences on Predestination in Catholic Theology
+ 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
Updated. Fox News: “Pentagon denies secret UFO retrieval program after whistleblower bombshell“. In any case, whatever it all turns out to be, whether altogether mundane or something else, we know that one day Christians can expect “wicked deceptions” to descend upon the earth, originating from “principalities and powers … the rulers of the world of… Read More Rumors of “Aliens”. Deep State(s) Psy-Ops? ‘Signs and Lying Wonders’?
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”
The need to be in a state of grace to receive Communion (CCC 1385) Leila Miller: … Christ said marriage is a one flesh union. So anytime you’re ripping that living flesh apart, something is dying. I mean, something pretty serious is being lost. Trent Horn: Yeah, because we think about divorce, it’s always so… Read More Trent Horn on the Evil of Divorce and the Way to Healing.
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.
“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.
Recent discoveries are making Jewish, secular and agnostic scholars reconsider a century’s worth of skepticism towards the New Testament accounts of Jesus. (Pinned Dec. 18, 2022) By Robert Hutchinson, via The Blaze.com. The entrance to the Mary of Nazareth International Center in central Nazareth doesn’t look like much. It’s just a simple doorway off narrow… Read More New Discoveries About Jesus of Nazareth
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
“A little error in the beginning becomes a great error in the end”— St. Thomas Aquinas. Against Polygenism.By: Dr. Kevin Mark, Kolbe CenterApril 22, 20230 “Would that We had not learned by experience how many ‘false apostles’ the present age has spawned! These are ‘deceitful workmen who transform themselves into apostles of Christ.’ Unless we… Read More Error In the Beginning. Great Error…
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
Peter Kwasniewski, PhD To a degree not yet as widely recognized as it should be, Pope Francis – Jorge Bergoglio, S.J. – is showing himself to be an admirable disciple of his Jesuit forerunner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955), the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, who exercised an enormous influence on the young… Read More Teilhard de Chardin: Model of Ambiguity for a Future Pope
John Chrysostom (347 – 407 AD)Doctor of the Church. [Homily Two on the Gospel of St. Matthew by St. John Chrysostom] “But tell me, who of you that stand here, if he were required, could repeat one Psalm, or any other portion of the divine Scriptures? There is not one. And it is not this… Read More St. John Chrysostom: The Word of God for the Wounded
Note: SH. Today it is States alone which consider the punishment of [political and ever-evolving moral] “sins” to be their exclusive prerogative. And these States employ the shocking punishments most liberally day after day. Countless millions have died. But there exists One who is far above and infinitely mightier than creaturely states (Exo. 3:14-17) Who… Read More God is a “Man of War”. The Problem of Violence in Scripture
I admire much that Jordan Peterson has done and said. Very much. But I cannot accept his thought entirely regarding the question of Meaning in our lives and times, which he and others have publicly discussed, and which many admire. To the contrary, it is Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8),… Read More Jordan Peterson on Meaning
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
New Ways Ministry and the Synodal Process. National Catholic Register. “As the Church embarks on a two-year synodal process, the confusing optics of the recent New Ways Ministry controversy have only deepened a sense of unease regarding the Synod on Synodality and its impact.” Read more But is it not a long way from there… Read More “Confusing Optics”
Trent Horn is an apologist for Catholic Answers Along other lines, Trent Horn on Unnatural Egg-sploitation And Those Who Applaud it.
Divino Afflante Spiritu Pope Pius XII – 1943 “Let all the sons of the Church bear in mind that the efforts of resolute laborers in the vineyard of the Lord should be judged not only with equity and justice, but also with the greatest charity; all moreover should abhor that intemperate zeal which imagines that… Read More On Sacred Scripture. Pius XII. 1943.
Credo Of The People Of God.Pope Paul VI – 1968. “Complete and Explicit …We believe…” With this solemn liturgy we end the celebration of the nineteenth centenary of the martyrdom of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and thus close the Year of Faith. We dedicated it to the commemoration of the holy apostles in… Read More The Credo Of The People of God. Pope Paul VI.
A brief comparison of liturgy from the 2nd century and liturgy today “While there exist many different liturgical rites within the Catholic Church, each with their own unique traditions, the basic structure of the Mass across all these rites is the same as it it was in the 2nd century. When compared side-by-side, surprisingly little… Read More 155 A.D. The Mass According to Saint Justin Martyr
Catholic Critique 