Sheavings

Suppose I rushed up to you, all excited, and said, “The most incredible thing has happened! Sit down, because you are going to be astounded! I know some of this is going to be hard to believe, but you’ve got to understand, I’m not making this up! I saw it

Seventy years ago Franklin Roosevelt offered his vision of the Four Freedoms, including the Freedom from Fear. Roosevelt addressed what was then a largely Christian nation. These days, our rapidly de-Christianizing nation is discovering that a Culture of Death is also a Culture of Fear. From massacres in high schools,

In a mathematically perfect world, conversation between Catholics and Evangelicals would be conducted on the level of pure theology and many misunderstandings would instantly be clarified: Evangelical:[Stirs sugar into teacup] Tell me, Friend Catholic, what your understanding is of the place of Mary in the economy of salvation? It would appear

A culture of death is a culture of fear and ours is a culture of death.  Fear is a sort of background radiation, a certain slant of light coming through red, lowering clouds and casting a strange pall over what used to be called “normal life”. The signs of it

There is a curious and creepy fact I have noticed. It runs through things like Heinrich Himmler’s secret address given in October 1943 to SS troops carrying out the mass murder of Jews: I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly. It should be discussed amongst

The Creed balances many difficult ideas and paradoxes (as that God is one and three, that the immortal Son became mortal man, that life issues from death, and a thousand other mysteries). But the very first bit of balancing the Creed does is to propose three different titles by which

According to Catholic teaching, one of our principal functions as laypeople in the Church is participation in the secular world and renewing the face of the earth. However, many lay members of the Church remain perplexed by Catholic social teaching and how to view the American political scene in relation

Defining the word “Faith” seems to be one of the most baffling things in the world for most of us. Every day you’ll hear people say stuff like “You just gotta have faith…” and then not finish the sentence. They will assure us in a time of crisis “Just believe.

One of the difficulties in the increasingly successful rapprochement between the Catholic Church and our separated brethren is that secular culture often muddies and confuses the growing goodwill between these two groups of Christians. To understand how such muddying happens, we need to understand what secular culture has done to

Ask your average Catholic about evangelization and you get a mumble and a shrug. Evangelization? That’s what Evangelicals do, isn’t it? It’s not that Catholics think it’s bad (though some are, in fact, actively hostile to it since it smacks to them of “imposing our values” on others). Rather, it

If you asked most people, “What would Jesus say about somebody who says one thing and does another?” they would reply: “Jesus called such people ‘hypocrites” and denounced them.” This is true as far as it goes. But as is nearly always the case with our Lord, this was not

There’s a reason Jesus gave his first sign at the Marriage Feast at Cana. His teaching is, in fact, suffused with nuptial imagery. He calls himself the Bridegroom. He tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding banquet. And where did he get this sort of thinking

Before I became Catholic, I was taught in my old Evangelical group that, of course, the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist was so much hocus pocus and that the whole notion of the Host and the Cup actually being the Body and Blood of Christ was a lot of superstitious

One of the curious paradoxes and points of connection between the American tradition and the Catholic Tradition is that our country was founded, in large measure, by the people known as the Puritans, who were not much on things like Mass and what they called “popery”. Indeed, they came to

The two elements of the Eucharist are bread and wine—simple gifts laden with enormous symbolic significance reaching right back to the roots, not only of Israel’s revelation, but to our own most elementary animal needs and our own deepest human desires. They speak to so many things at once: to

Jesus taught His disciples on the Emmaus Road that the Old Testament was actually about Him. As Augustine said, the New Covenant is hidden in the Old Covenant and the Old Covenant is only fully revealed in the New. That’s what the Catechism of the Catholic Church is getting at when it

The Catechism tells us that the Mass is called the Mass “because the liturgy in which the mystery of salvation is accomplished concludes with the sending forth (missio) of the faithful, so that they may fulfill God’s will in their daily lives.” We English speakers may not quite get the

St. Paul tells us, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). But American piety tends to have a strong isolationist streak. And

Scripture often looks both backward and forward. That’s because Scripture is simultaneously traditional and prophetic. So, for instance, the entire idea of the Messiah is one which constantly calls us to remember the past as well as look forward to the fact that the Lord is doing something new. The

Everybody loves a good mystery. Teasing out a riddle, figuring out how all the pieces go together: it’s one of the great pleasures of life. We love being tantalized and confronted with question marks that lead suggestively away into shadows and half-darkness where things don’t quite add up. To be

When I first became a believer, it was in the context of a small non-denominational group of Evangelical charismatics who lived on my dorm floor. I knew from nothing about Christianity when I became a believer, having never attended Church when I was growing up. My total information pool about

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is an idea that has fallen into disfavor in modernity, for various reasons. In Protestant circles, of course, the notion that the Mass could be a sacrifice is often seen as a repudiation or usurpation of the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, as though

Luke puts bookends on his gospel. There is both a prologue and an afterword to his gospel that are meant to refer us to the source and summit of our worship: Jesus Christ fully present in the Eucharist. The front bookend is the story of the Nativity, where Luke bothers

Yesterday, we looked at the fact that the book of Revelation reflects the shape of the Mass. We noted that that it begins with a penitential rite, moves on to the Liturgy of the Word and is filled with thanksgiving. The final thing to note is that it climaxes in

Revelation was regarded as a dicey book in the early centuries of the Church. People then, as now, didn’t quite know what to make of it. Many shared the sentiments of a much later Christian named Martin Luther, who said, “A revelation ought to reveal.” Amidst all the battles, beasts,