The very first heresy that threatened the Church had to do with race. This was known as “Judaizing.” The baptized Christian who had been born a Jew and observed all the commandments of the Law of Moses (besides others of the rabbis) sought to impose also the Law of Moses onto Gentile converts to the…
At the Pentecost Octave, the Church celebrates an end and a beginning. It is the close of the Paschal cycle, which celebrates the close of the Old Covenant. This is the beginning of the Time after Pentecost, celebrating the birth of the Church under the New Covenant not of the letter, but of the Spirit…
On Thursday, May 22 of this year, the faithful entered the season of “Little Advent,” the Lord’s own novena given to the apostles: Ascensiontide. Just as in winter Advent, the Church waits in joyful and fearful expectation for the Lord’s coming in the flesh, the Little Advent of Ascensiontide awaits a mysterious and unknown power…
“Naïve and immature people have a great passion to ‘serve humanity,’ but they cannot bear to serve a human being standing right in front of them.” This adage was given to me by a wise man who pithily summed up the pervasive folly of our age, and indeed several centuries of modernity. The bloodshed wrought…
For readers of One Peter Five, the crisis in the Church is no secret, but an open wound fifty years old and more. And after the summer of shame and the continuing saga of Viganò, speculation was raised at the onset of January 2020 as to what could possibly go still worse in the Church.…
The French Revolution and its daughter movements defined the social question of the 19th century, which, as I have noted elsewhere, the Magisterium from Pius VI to Pius XII answered with authority and clarity. But, as Pope Benedict observed in his famous “hermeneutic of continuity” address in 2005, it was the legacy of the American…
As the COVID-19, Chinese communist, Wuhan coronavirus pandemic (pick your modifier) crisis continues, faithful Catholics from all sides have divided on the issue. The spectrum of opinions ranges from those faithful Catholics taking the virus very seriously and advocating for great caution to those other faithful Catholics dismissing the whole thing as an overblown and…
A man is bound to his neighbor in two ways: justice and charity. Justice is concerned with giving what is right to whom it is owed (S.T. II-II q57 a1). Charity is the action whereby a man wills the good of another for the sake of God. St. Thomas says the charity we give to…
The present crisis contains within it a lesson about the spiritual crisis afflicting the Church over the past few generations. The social distancing, which, it is hoped, will avert disaster, is in fact the same thing the Church has practiced for centuries in the spiritual order, and particularly in the period of Modernism — with…
During the Great Fast of Lent, the faithful are enjoined to do penance. The three great works of penance are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.[1] In this article, we will define the penance of almsgiving in the form of a brief catechism. What are alms? Alms are “every spiritual or corporal work of mercy” [2]. Prümmer…
In a recent article, I discussed how a new understanding of revelation was brought about at Vatican II, and, as Benedict observed, “a moral theology based entirely on the Bible was demanded” [1]. This article generated some controversy, even an accusation of heresy, which I will attempt to address here. Specifically, I said that “the crucial aspect…
