In place of the usual “guess the pope” feature that typically runs on Saturdays, we are sharing the words of the last three popes in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States: Yesterday...
This throwaway culture has marked us. And it marks the young and the old. It has a strong influence on one of the dramas of today’s European culture. In Italy, the average age is 47 years old. In Spain, I...
“Divinely instituted, the Church has the promises of the assistance of Christ until the end of time. The breaking of its unity by an act of grievous disobedience on your part would cause incalculable damage and would destroy the future...
“In the young man, whom Matthew’s Gospel does not name, we can recognize every person who, consciously or not, approaches Christ the Redeemer of man and questions him about morality. For the young man, the question is not so much...
“However, the Apostle, cannot risk compromises on such decisive ground. The Gospel is only one and that is what he proclaimed; there can be no other. Beware! Paul does not say that the true Gospel is his because it was...
“Finally, I would like to speak of one last feature, not to be overlooked, of the spirituality of World Youth Days, namely joy. Where does it come from? How is it to be explained? Certainly, there are many factors at...
“This consideration too clarifies the great error of those others as well who boldly venture to explain and interpret the words of God by their own judgment, misusing their reason and holding the opinion that these words are like a...
“It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together...
“The Sovereign Pontiff alone enjoys the right to recognize and establish any practice touching the worship of God, to introduce and approve new rites, as also to modify those he judges to require modification. Bishops, for their part, have the...
“But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper”, but loveless....
“For the rest, in this as in other points of Christian doctrine, “the proximate and universal norm of truth” is for all the living Magisterium of the Church, which Christ established “also to illustrate and explain those matters which are...
“Today, if we listen to the Spirit, we will not be concerned with conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left. When those become our criteria, then the Church has forgotten the Spirit. The Paraclete impels us to unity,...
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