Mercy for me, but not for thee
“At times one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them—in this case the...
Author: David Wanat
Sincerely-held errors
I’ve been encountering a lot more conspiracy theories—though not by choice—on social media lately. The tendency always seems to be based on observing the facts of a case and giving a dubious interpretation of those facts. Sure, there might be...
The New Theology of Dissent
Anti-Francis Catholics frequently identify themselves as “orthodox” or as strict adherents to Church teaching. While doing so, they must reconcile those claims with the fact that they have chosen to reject the official teachings of the current pope as heretical...
An Easter People, Even without the Sacraments
The other day I was told about one of my former RCIA candidates who was received into the Church a few years ago. He and his wife have a baby, and they had hoped to have their child baptized on...
On Critics of the Church’s Precautionary Measures
Over the last 2,000 years, we have faced many different plagues and crises. The Church has responded to them in various ways, based on the needs of the people and the knowledge of science at the time. As our knowledge...
Since when did “conscience” become a dirty word?
The other morning, I saw a post by a well-known§ opponent of abortion on Facebook saying we shouldn’t vote according to conscience, but according to “conviction.” This post was aimed at encouraging people to vote for her preferred candidate rather...
Respecting Continuity in Church Teaching
There are, unfortunately, Catholics who think that defending Pope Francis involves tearing down his predecessors. Throughout his pontificate, they have portrayed almost everything Pope Francis has done as “finally correcting” the bad practices of his predecessors and ignoring the good...
Confusion in the Church is not caused by the pope
Throughout the history of Christianity there have always been people who read Scripture, Patristics, Magisterial documents and other things and used the conclusions they drew to argue that the Church—whether through the teachings of Pope or Council—had gone wrong and,...
The False Authority of Personal Interpretation
Certain Catholics who oppose the decisions and teachings of Pope Francis (or other recent popes) proudly announce their “orthodoxy” by citing certain Scripture and Church documents—the latter frequently from the time of St. Pius X—in order to argue that the...
How Anti-Catholics are like Anti-Francis Catholics
[EDIT 1/21/20] A reader on pointed out that I botched my syllogism. He was correct. I must have made the error by changing the word order during editing and automatically changing antecedent/consequent to match without seeing if that changed the...
Hijacking Legitimate Authority
As I continue to work my way through the dreary Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, I notice a good deal of what I call hijacking legitimate authority. By this I mean that he claimed his interpretation of Scripture was the true meaning...
Bizarro World Catholicism
As the antics of some Catholics continue, I am reminded of the DC Comics Bizarro World. The basic concept here is whatever is seen as right, true, and good on Earth is seen as wrong, false, and bad in Bizarro World....
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