Today marks the 50th anniversary of ‘Lumen Gentium‘, the Vatican II constitution on the Church. With this brief post I present its highlights, while encouraging you to read the document in its entirety. The First Vatican Council was preparing to give a definition of the Church but was forced to an abrupt end in 1870…
Unresolved feelings of guilt can have terribly damaging effects: self-hatred, anxiety, despair, even suicide. This holds true not only for individuals but for whole societies. The French writer Pascal Bruckner writes of Europe’s guilty conscience: “Brooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism), Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations…
The disorder introduced into our human nature by Adam’s fall from grace reveals itself especially through seven dominant vices known in the Catholic tradition as the capital sins. These are: pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. We call them “capital” sins (from the Latin caput, “head”) because they are the sources or fountainheads…
No, I’m not referring to myself in the title, though I would bristle at the accusation of heresy, or even theological imprecision. The forthcoming (November/December 2014) edition of The Catholic Response magazine features this cool-headed commentary by its founder and editor, Father Peter Stravinskas, on the 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family. Because it generates more…
During a recent dinner conversation, a Jewish friend asked me, with sincere politeness, if I agreed with the Church’s attempts to “impose its morality” on a pluralistic society when it comes to abortion and other hot-button issues. She, like other American secularists, — I say “other” because, although my friend is Jewish, the Reform denomination…
Saint Jerome famously said, “Ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” Equally memorable to me was the retort of a friend—a priest of high academic credentials—when I mentioned the tendency among Catholic biblical scholars to dismiss as “proof-texting” the use of Scripture in support of doctrine. I told him of the seminary instructor who…
One of the chief arguments for the traditional Christian practice of celebrating the Eucharist ad orientem — the priest and people together facing the same direction, toward the liturgical “east” of the apse — is that the Mass is a sacrifice offered up to God.1 To be specific, the Eucharist is at once a sacrifice of praise…
There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece novel, Brideshead Revisited, that I often recall, to my amusement. Father Mowbray is giving instructions in the Catholic faith to a lapsed Protestant named Rex Mottram. Mister Mottram isn’t really sincere in his conversion (in fact he’s completely disinterested in spiritual matters), but he very much wants to…
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