Years ago, a friend’s brother was at Reed College in Oregon. It’s one of those schools where the students seem to major in protesting more than in actual studying. After several months of watching silly demonstrations about every conceivable PC cause, the guy decided to create one of his own,
Roughly a century ago a modernist scholar complained that Jesus came to proclaim the kingdom of God, but instead all we got was a lousy Church. He’s probably not the only person to have felt a bit disappointed, nor the only one to form the conviction that the Church is
The refugees returning to the Promised Land after seventy years of captivity in Babylon had a problem. He was a killjoy named Haggai and he was chewing them out for rebuilding their houses. Or…well… that’s not exactly the case. His complaint wasn’t so much that they were building their houses
Our Father is not, according to Jesus, merely our Father. He is our Father “who art in Heaven”. What does that mean? Getting at the answer to that, in our present culture, is harder than you’d think, not least because Heaven, says C.S. Lewis, is an acquired taste. There are
In Luke’s gospel, the “Our Father”, like so much else in Jesus’ teaching, is occasioned by a request from his disciples: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1). This should get our attention, because it is typical of Jesus’ method of revelation that, instead of
A lot of people seem to think that the Church functions according to the principle “That which is not forbidden is compulsory.” So many folk seem to be under the impression that there is a black and white magisterial answer to everything and that “You’re with us or agin us”
One of the sweetest things about being a Dad is getting to enjoy again all those things I’d forgotten I loved in the years since becoming a grown up. With all the hubbub between being five years old and now–what with taking Iowa tests, discovering girls, discovering rejection by girls,
It seems, said my friend, that the Church contradicts itself. On the one hand, Catholic teaching declares revelation complete with the close of the apostolic era. Yet consider the canonization of, say, Joan of Arc. It appears a Catholic must believe one of the following: 1. Revelation continues. It was
Not long ago, a nice lady wrote me saying We are both Protestants but are searching out Catholicism, just to give you a quick back ground. There is not much out there for us on practical implications of these different Church Seasons. So my question is this: how do we
You gotta love the mainstream media. They re-define chutzpah. In an amazing triple play, the media have given us Nancy Grace, the Don Imus imbroglio, and now NBC’s “coverage” of the horror at Virginia Tech. Boy, is Edward R. Murrow dead. In her TV news persona, Grace plays a snarling
My friend Ludwig was puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said, “what is meant by those who say grace is imparted through sacraments. It seems to me to involve an intolerably narrow view of grace. As a Protestant, I’ve always understood grace to mean unmerited favor, plain and simple. Why are
I love local patriots. I love Willa Cather because in My Antonia, she makes it clear that she is trying to do for Nebraska what Vergil did for Rome: sing the glories of her home. Anybody who loves the home–especially their home–is alright by me. And anybody who truly loves their home appreciates
One of the big differences between Catholic teaching and a great deal of the sort of dilute Protestantism that floats around in our culture is the Church’s teaching on temptation and failure after we become Christians. Not a few Protestants have been troubled over the years by the fact that
Last week, we talked about the revolutionary idea at the heart of Catholic anthropology: the truth that sin, while normal, is never natural since sin is what destroys, not constitutes nature. This does not mean that “sin is unreal”. It means that man as created and, more importantly, man as
In late July, Mel Gibson publicly imploded in a drunken, profanity-laced rant against Jews. Much ink was spilt over the question of whether we are truly ourselves when we are smashed. I think the real question is whether we are truly ourselves when we are sinful. As a good child
“Investigators Seek Reason for School Shootings” say the headlines. Was it because of poverty? Were the killers incited to murder by the taunts of their peers? Was it access to guns? Was it their parents? Their school? Their physiology? What, as the phrase goes, drove them to it? We want rational answers,
I am gratified that the long-awaited motu proprio from Pope Benedict, urging a wider celebration of the Tridentine Rite, is out. I’m happy for those, including my son, who love to worship in that way. More power to ‘em. Some of the loveliest Catholics I know are devotees of the
It has to be one of the strangest things in the world: So many Christians who love Jesus with all their hearts recoil in fear at the mention of His mother’s name, while many who do love her find themselves tongue-tied when asked to explain why. Most of the issues people have
Many supposed “theological differences” between Catholics and Evangelicals are, I think, founded in semantics rather than in substantial disagreement. For example, when I was an Evangelical one of the periodic arguments I ran across against Catholic moral theology was that the concept of mortal and venial sin is unbiblical. Sin
June 22 is the Feast of one of our greatest saints: Thomas More. St. Thomas More (1478-1535) was one of the most gifted men of his day. He entered Oxford at about age 15, was a brilliant scholar, writer, and lawyer (thereby showing that lawyers can get to heaven) was fluent in
Many of my readers may remember the World Council of Churches. They are an organization whose basic function is to periodically issue leftist tracts disguised as theological reflection. With the catastrophe of the American elections, they are reflecting all over themselves as reported in a Reuters article that is characteristically
Last week, we discussed the common complaint that CCC 841 is wrong when it teaches that “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the
The Church teaches (CCC 841) that “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” These
When I was five, The Wizard of Oz was the outermost limit of terror. The flying monkeys, in their fakey makeup and phoney suits, gliding in on barely concealed wires to snatch Dorothy out of the haunted wood were the stuff of nightmares for me. I had no ability to distinguish between
“There is a primitive society—I don’t know which one exactly—whose members were shocked to learn that we embalm our dead, place them in boxes, and then bury them in the ground. Do you know what they do? They eat them. To them, it’s ethical and moral and honorable to devour
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