It is a whimsical fact that a huge number of anti-Catholics spend enormous quantities of energy trying to prove that Catholics “worship Mary.” Even in an age of mass communication, this goofy 19th-century Know Nothing charge is still leveled by people who really ought to know better. And, of course,
I’m sitting here in an airport during one of those countless little bubbles in time where nothing big is going on. I’m between flights, having just arrived in Detroit from Seattle and (soon) heading out for Pellston, MI. So I’m taking this time to write a bit—and reflect on the
If you ask most people what will resolve the tension between the races, the sexes or the economic classes, nine times out of ten people will say, “Equality and Toleration.” Why? “Well, because we live in a democracy and each person is as good as any other. Toleration is fundamental
An Evangelical friend wrote me in the course of an Internet conversation about Catholic piety toward the saints and said, “If some church had set up a statue to John the Baptist, and was sacrificing doves to it, then smashing that idol to rubble would be an act of honor
Jesus, at the moment of the Triumphal Entry, appears to be about to win the Game of Worldly Success. The Prophet rides into the Big City to thunderous applause. “From Humble Manger to National Religious Leader” scream the headlines in the Palm Sunday edition of the Jerusalem Herald. The Galilean
The most obvious thing to say about what is called the “Olivet Discourse” or “Little Apocalypse” in Luke 21 is that it is not easy. This needs to be said since many people imagine this passage (and ones like it in Matthew 24 and Mark 13) is, for opposite and
The final Marian dogma—the Assumption—was promulgated in 1950. But like all doctrinal developments throughout the history of the Church, it is rooted in apostolic teaching and reflected in Scripture. Pope Pius XII defined the dogma this way: “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course
A lot of people confuse the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. The Virgin Birth refers to the birth of Jesus Christ. The Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Mary, not Jesus. It is the dogma defined by the Catholic Church in 1854 that: “The most Blessed Virgin Mary
The dogma that Mary is perpetually a virgin (defined at the Second Council of Constantinople in the sixth century) finds its origin, like all Catholic dogma, in the teaching of the apostles. To see it in Scripture, we must, of course, get past both hyper-sexualized contemporary culture (which can scarcely
Why does the Church bother having dogmas about Mary anyway? Why not just stick to talking about Jesus? To find out way, consider Nestorius. He was a fifth-century bishop and theologian who disliked the way common folk talked about Jesus and his mother because it played havoc with a theory
As we saw last time, the biblical authors and the Fathers of the Church see in Mary a figure who is a fulfillment of prophecy, just as Jesus is. However, the way in which she fulfills prophecy is of a different character from Jesus, precisely because she is a creature
As we saw last time, the problem with the claim that Catholic devotion to Mary is “pagan” is that there is simply no evidence for it. When we look at the early Christian Church, we find that it is as convinced that devotion to Mary is perfectly in accord with
The basic problem that faces those approaching Mary from outside the Catholic tradition is the seeming disproportion between what Scripture tells us about Mary and the enormous amount of space she appears to occupy in the life of the Church. Part of that appearance of disproportion is due to Catholic
Cradle and convert Catholics encounter the Blessed Virgin Mary in profoundly different ways. A cradle Catholic growing up in a parish and a family with a healthy Marian spirituality grows up, from the immemorial Always of childhood, surrounded by her as Mother, as Heavenly Intercessor, as Glorious Virgin, as the
As a born and bred Western Washingtonian, I was raised to respect the environment. My entire education, especially in this part of the country, was ordered to toward making me acutely aware of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. If you dump some toxic junk out of your boat somewhere upstream
If you examine an icon, you will notice that the figure in it will often be breaking out of the frame. Sometimes the hands, sometimes the halo, sometimes both are outside the border framing the image. That’s no accident. It’s part of what iconography is trying to get us to
I was about sixteen years old when I saw my first death. It was a murder: a particularly obscene act of cold-blooded murder that involved somebody I felt I knew a little bit. His name was John F. Kennedy, and I watched him die on a March evening in 1975
It would seem that James Fagan, a defense attorney and Massachusetts lawmaker is a monster embodying all the most horrifying qualities of a legal shark. A couple of weeks ago, he was being vilified in the press for what appeared to be utterly evil sentiments spoken on the floor of
More than once since becoming Catholic, I have had conversations with people who have been burned by fellow Christians and declared in their anger, “I was a fool to believe in these people. I am determined not to get fooled again.” Not a few people, acting on this resolve, have
Rod Dreher has posted an account of his conversion from the Catholic Church to Orthodoxy that consists, sadly, of non-reasons for converting, non-reasons that are, I fear, simply setups for further heartache in the future, not to mention unpersuasive. For instance, I don’t believe that the personal charisma—or lack thereof–of a
As we discussed last time, both liturgy and drama are stylized representations of reality that mediate to us an encounter with the human and the divine. That’s because Man is a priest. He must live out his priestly role, since he was made by God to do it and continues
You enter a ritual space and take your seat in the midst of a large audience. At the front (or perhaps in the middle) of the hall you are in (often it is a vast and airy hall) is a ritual space that is marked off from the space you
My son Peter has been bitten by the acting bug. He got cast as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and has been relishing the chance to show off as a total goofball before an audience of his peers. He’s pretty good too! So good that he’s been called back for auditions
When it comes to the death penalty, the Church teaches: 2267 Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against
The Christian faith is rife with difficulties. Save your life to lose it? Be born again? The Father is greater than I but I and the Father are one? This bread is my flesh? “What on earth is he talking about?” said everybody from Nicodemus to the mob in Jerusalem
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