Today is the feast day of our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas. She holds particular significance to the Catholic Church in America, as her appearance to St. Juan Diego on Tepeyac hill in Mexico was the first Marian apparition in the New World. She is dearly beloved by Mexican Catholics, and wherever there is a Mexican…
At this point in Catholic history, the Catholic Church needs strength. This can be done in many ways, such as strengthening the clergy and laity. We also need to bring in converts. We do have one more resource at our disposal: the ex-Catholic. There is no shortage of ex-Catholics on our planet. People are leaving…
When I woke up on August 2 to a tweet that Pope Francis had made changes to paragraph 2267 of the Catechism, I knew that I was in for an exhausting phase in my post-conversion life. Without even reading the text in full, or examining the letter to the bishops, or comparing the new wording…
In his recent interventions, Pope Francis had repeatedly referred to a “paradigm shift” with regard to the Church’s attitude toward native cultures in different countries. It seems that he has in mind a return to rooted indigenous cultures and religions. One of his reference points for this approach is the Kabbalah, a Jewish occultist and…
A new, open letter to the pope is making the rounds on the Internet, and it has gathered over 2,600 signatures so far. “Most Holy Father,” it begins, “Many of us have tried to contact you, on many occasions and for several years, and we have never received the slightest acknowledgement of our letters or…
Image: The miracles of St. Francis Xavier (see full image here), by Peter Paul Rubens Two good friends, fellow parishioners, are having coffee and donuts after High Mass one Sunday. Maximilian: I really enjoyed Father’s homily today. His explanation of the parable of the mustard seed and the yeast in the dough hit the nail on the…
Last week I wrote an article criticizing the Protestant character of some “New Evangelization” programs. I gave a few brief suggestions for true Catholic evangelization, and a number of people contacted me subsequently requesting more practical suggestions. In terms of one-on-one evangelization, I’ve written a book on the subject; here I’d like to share a…
It’s no secret that the Catholic Church in the Western world has experienced a tremendous drop in practicing members over the past 50 years. More troubling—and not unrelated—is the fact that the desire to gain more members via evangelization has declined even more tremendously. In the 60’s and 70’s, evangelization was ridiculed in many parts…
Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from the recently-published book The Old Evangelization by 1P5 author Eric Sammons, published by Catholic Answers Press. One day, back when I was a diocesan director of evangelization, I was meeting with a pastor and some of his staff about launching evangelization efforts in their parish. The pastor had a sincere…
Azerbaijan is a country in the South Caucasus, bordered by Russia and Georgia to the north and by Iran to the south. While never a Catholic country (it has an overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim majority), there was until the mid-1920s a thriving Catholic population of some 2,500, served by several priests, most of them living in…
Pope Francis’ most recent comments attempting to separate Islamic religious beliefs from Islamic violence are deeply misleading. They are not just slightly or partially incorrect, but dangerously wrong. They stand in direct contradiction to the Church and her saints’ long history of experience and understanding of the Islamic world. In the context of yet another airplane interview — this…
