The Pew Research Center just released its latest study on “America’s Changing Religious Landscape.” The subtitle tells the story: “Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.” For our purposes, I want to focus on the Catholic numbers. Anyone who has been paying attention, either to these studies or…
This is the third installment of a multi-part series. You may find each part here: Part I – Part II – Part III A Book of Hours was the essential guide to devotion for a literate Catholic layman of the late Middle Ages, from the late 14th century to the early 16th. Its content was essentially liturgical, but selected with…
Flashy billboards, provocative dress and apparel, Hollywood fashions spread far and wide, suggestive innuendos, off-color jokes, indecent movies, and the ever-present danger of the Internet, seducing souls into visit the numerous and poisonous websites—all of these and a plethora of other alluring and seductive temptations can trap even the best of us into falling into the…
Infinite is the one great mystery of Christian faith. The more men ponder over its parts the more bewildering it appears, for the mystery of the Triune God is continually upholding its hidden power. How grandly impressive is Catholic worship! What an awful holocaust is its sacrifice! Far surpassing the power of human concept is the…
In his great work, The World’s First Love, Archbishop Fulton Sheen tells us how the Church’s doctrine of Mary, the Mother of God, is always correcting the errors of the time. With the decree of the Immaculate Conception, the Church condemned the modern notion that all men are created equal. When Pius XII defined ex cathedra…
In my recent post, “What About the Rest of Bishop Finn’s Story”, I discussed the ideological and political dimensions of last week’s resignation of Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. The motivation for the public relations campaign against Bishop Finn was clearly stated by former diocesan chancellor Jude Huntz when he…
The following editorial by Father Peter Stravinskas, Ph.D., S.T.D., appears in the current (May/June) issue of The Catholic Response magazine. It is posted here with Father’s permission. When the Extraordinary Synod on the Family was announced and when it concluded, I promised our readers ongoing reflections on the Church’s understanding of marriage and the family, particularly…
(Editor’s note: this is Part III of a three-part essay. You can read Part I here and Part II here.) Part III According to George Cardinal Pell, the build up to the Second Vatican Council “was an enormously exciting time, a time of great intellectual ferment. We were caught up in this great movement of reform,…
Amid all of the coverage of Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation on Tuesday was a very telling quote from the former chancellor of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. Jude Huntz, who was chancellor under Finn from 2011 until August 2014, when he left to become the Director of the Office for Peace and Justice in…
Here is an idea I’d like to propose to my brother priests. Make the Sacrament of Confession as accessible as possible. For me, I knew it was difficult (if not impossible), to sit over in Church in the Confessional all day. Parish life is quite a bit more demanding than the days of St. John…
Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On the evolutionary basis…
