Fr. Philip Scott probably has a special appreciation for God’s word to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” His mother was warned by doctors that she should have her tubes tied to prevent death in a future
The “scandal” of the gospel used to be a badge of honor for Catholics. It was “scandalous” that God should become man, die on the cross, and grant us life through death. All of these affronts to the world’s wisdom were summarized by St. Paul: For since, in the wisdom
Recently, the Mainstream Media (MSM) got itself all in a tizzy about “the Vatican” supposedly issuing “seven new deadly sins”. As one particularly egregious headline put it “Recycle or go to hell, warns Vatican”. Given this view of the Faith, discussions in the press then break down into inane prattle
I’ve always loved this funny little tune from Chaucer’s day: Sumer is icumen in,Lhude sing, cuccu!Groweth sed and bloweth medAnd springth the wude nu.Sing, cuccu!Awe bleteth after lomb,Lhouth after calve cuBulloc sterteth, bucke ferteth.Murie sing, cuccu!Cuccu, cuccu,Wel singes thu, cuccu.Ne swik thu naver nu! This joyful, ebullient tune, doubtless sung
Oh my stars and garters! It turns out that, not only did the Church say a perfectly valid Mass from the time of the Reformation till now, but on top of that, the Pope is still Catholic! That was the astonished discovery of the delightfully ignorant Mainstream Media when, in a shocking
We Catholics often toss terminology around with the assumption that we all, of course, understand it and agree on its meaning. It is only when somebody (often it seems to be our children) asks “What do you mean by that?” that we find we don’t really know what we mean.
Some of my non-Catholic friends find prayer to the saints ooky. They ask me, “Since when is talking to a bunch of dead guys Christian?” Since biblical times. Consider Moses. He had been a dead guy for several centuries when Christ began his ministry, yet he was intensely interested in
Culturally deprived and TV-less laggard that I am, I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD lately—for the very first time. First impressions: Joss Whedon can write rings around everybody else. Second impression: Dickens lives! By that I mean, Whedon seems to have hit on Dickens’ formula: Create a character you
Confirmation has sometimes been called a sacrament in search of a theology. That’s because many Catholics wonder, “What exactly are we doing this for?” and celebrate it (if at all) mostly because, well, the Church says to do it and it seems like a nice rite of passage for teens
Naaman, the great Syrian general, had a little problem. He was a leper. His Israelite slave girl gave him news that a prophet of Israel, a great man named Elisha, might be able to help him out of his predicament. So, being a great man himself, he went to the
Most of us don’t wake up in the morning thinking of ourselves as The Fulfillment of Prophecy. Still and all, we are. Oh, not because we are any great shakes ourselves, of course. Left to our own devices apart from grace we’d only be the fulfillment of somebody’s worst nightmare.
A common question bedeviling the whole discussion of Baptism is the issue of what the Church means by the “necessity of baptism”. Extremes can be found on both sides. Some Catholics will insist that all that “necessity of baptism” jazz went out with Vatican II and nobody really believes that
It seems to be a basic rule of the universe that whenever something is simple, the devil tries to complexificate it and whenever something is complex, the devil is always insisting that it should be simple. So it is only in keeping with this pattern that something as simple as
Ponce De Leon trooped around the New World looking for the legendary Fountain of Youth. If he’d been as good a Catholic as he was a soldier and explorer, he’d have known that the Fountain of Youth was right there in his local parish back in Spain. The power unleashed
Previously, we noted that the Incarnation is not simply an isolated anomaly, but the establishment of an eternal principle: namely, that God reveals himself to us sacramentally, first in the body of Jesus Christ and, till he comes again, through the sacraments of Holy Church Christ established. We looked at
Evangelicals, like all orthodox Christians, vigorously affirm the doctrine of the Incarnation—the faith of all Christians that God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became man. Evangelicals, like Catholics, believe this doctrine with
The Church teaches that there are two kinds of gifts given us by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and Confirmation. The first kind, which we have been surveying over the past few weeks, are called the sanctifying gifts. These are so to speak, the gifts you get to keep. That
The last—and greatest—of the sanctifying gifts is Wisdom. Wisdom can mean different things to different people. The Greeks often thought of wisdom in speculative and abstract terms. They loved logic puzzles and riddles like “Can you step in the same river twice?” or “Can God make a rock so big
One of the curious paradoxes of our time is summed up in the saying, “Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.” So often, atheists and fundamentalists don’t disagree about things so much as they disagree about whether the things they agree on are good or bad. Atheists and fundamentalists agree, for
After Vietnam, the West in general and America in particular went through the great MASHification of culture, in which military and masculine virtues were despised and denigrated for a decade or two. Soldiers were routinely painted as baby-killing psychos, or as brain-dead gung ho types ready to order their troops
Proverbs 15:22 tells us, “Without counsel plans go wrong, but with many advisers they succeed.” One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit given in Confirmation is the gift of Counsel. That’s a gift that can work in a couple of different ways and it is one of which the
God did the Jews a huge favor early on in their history: He made them losers. Not losers in the sense of being the sort of nebbish who lives in his Mom’s basement, but losers in the sense that, when it came to coming out on top in the whole
The second of the sanctifying gifts of the Holy Spirit given in Confirmation is the gift of piety. Like all the sanctifying gifts, this is a gift you get to keep (as distinct from charisms, which are the gifts you are given in order to give them away to somebody
God gives us the gifts we need, not the gifts we necessarily want. Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof famously complains, “If wealth is a curse, O Lord, then smite me!” But his old friend, in his love for Tevye, leaves him poor—and Tevye. On the other hand, in Confirmation,
We seem so often to be incurable legalists when it comes to the things of God. Some people talk as though Baptism doesn’t really stick unless you are confirmed too. Others wonder whether, since Baptism does “stick”, Confirmation is really necessary—as though the goal is to achieve a sort Minimum
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