Back in 2014, Cardinal Walter Kasper gave a lecture across two days, February 20 and 21, for an extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals in Rome on the topic of marriage and the family. He spoke at the invitation of Pope Francis....
Looking over the websites of Newman Guide-approved Catholic liberal arts colleges that a younger friend of mine was weighing going to a few years back, I noticed a pattern. While this pattern was stronger at some colleges than at others,...
As I shared last week, Sacred Heart University hosted a panel discussion entitled, “Francis: Is a Schism on the Horizon?” The discussion was organized and moderated by the Canadian academic and writer Michael W. Higgins and was hosted by Sacred...
For as long as we Christians have been doing theology, that is, seeking to understand our faith, we have been asking questions about salvation. How are we saved? From what do we need to be saved? Who will be saved?...
The sixth and final chapter of Dei Verbum is about how the Bible is actually used and its fundamental importance in the Church. The chapter begins by saying that listening to the Bible at Mass stands on par with receiving...
There is a picture by the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich called “The Mother of the World.” First executed in 1924 and then painted again in 1937, the image shows a haloed woman enthroned on some sort of mountaintop, wearing a...
In my last essay, I took aim at Pelagianism, a heresy from Late Antiquity, which Pope Francis has frequently targeted in its perceived modern forms in his teaching. In this essay I will discuss Gnosticism, the other major heresy whose...
In the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, a monk and theologian known to history as Pelagius advanced a novel understanding of the relationship between free will and grace. Pelagius, who hailed from somewhere in the British Isles and...
Aristotle opened Metaphysics with a simple statement: “All men by nature desire to know.” 2,500 years later, the question we face today–in a culture where we are continuously bombarded with information–is whether this desire can be tempered and directed toward...
I will take one more instance. A man is converted to the Catholic Church from his admiration of its religious system, and his disgust with Protestantism. That admiration remains; but, after a time, he leaves his new faith, perhaps returns...
As the endless stream of “doctrinal declarations,” “corrections,” and “clarifications” continues to cause confusion and scandal for the Faithful, I feel it is imperative to cast our minds back to the pontificate of Pope St Paul VI, who, like Pope...
You often find the charge among critics of Pope Francis that his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, is opposed to Pope John Paul’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor. The differences between the two are exaggerated in order to set these two documents of...
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