By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment Edward Feser & Joseph Bessette Ignatius Press, 2017 500 pages $21.20 Paperback Sometime in the mid-1990s in Colombia, Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos lured a 6-year-old boy into an isolated spot and sodomized and murdered him. There were bite marks and other evidence…
(Part II of a two-part series. Read Part I here.) In the first part of this essay I attempted to cut through some of the confusion that frequently surrounds discussions of the various modes of exercise of the magisterium, particularly with reference to the term ‘ordinary magisterium’, which can mean two different things in two different…
Image: screenshot of live stream, Ordinary Public Consistory, June 28, 2017. Earlier this week, we received, from a member of the clergy in Rome, the text of a homily from Cardinal Raymond Burke on the occasion of the feast of Saint Cecelia and the Ordinary Public Consistory in November of 2010, during which ten new cardinals…
Editor’s note: As we continue our exploration of the Church’s magisterium in light of some more recently troubling papal documents, we are pleased to introduce this work from Dr. des. John P. Joy. Joy wrote his doctoral dissertation in dogmatic theology “On the Ordinary and Extraordinary Magisterium from Joseph Kleutgen to the Second Vatican Council”…
Earlier this week, papal biographer and Crux contributing editor Austen Ivereigh fired off a bravado-laden tweet about Amoris Laetitia (AL) and the corresponding dubia: Naturally, the pope won’t answer the so-called dubia; they seek to overthrow the fruit of the HS in two synods & a major papal document. — Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) June 20,…
In 1862, the French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” The quote was paraphrased –somewhat more famously, perhaps — in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, as “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Over the course of…
What does “Catholic” really mean? In order to answer that question, to the benefit of Catholic and non-Catholic alike, I’d like to examine the core distinguishing elements of catholicity. I hope to reveal the inner logic of the word, which is the unity of the people of God in all eras, in every place, in…
It has arguably been the most high-profile Catholic news item in the United States for years. The Little Sisters of the Poor became the poster children in the fight over over religious freedom in America during the Obama administration and the roll out of the so-called Affordable Care Act. The administration’s refusal to allow conscience…
One sunny autumn day, as I was taking a walk throughout my neighborhood, I spotted a man whom I had never met before, and who I knew did not live in the neighborhood. After briefly talking, he reached into his pocket and handed me something. It was a dollar bill with a picture of Benjamin…
As a result of H. Reed Armstrong’s recent article on the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac on the thinking of the contemporary Church, I found myself perusing an analysis of von Balthasar’s “Delirious Hope that All be Saved” by Dr. Christopher Malloy, professor of theology at the University of Dallas. In…
(Image: From left to right, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar) Editor’s note: The author of this essay is, according to his own words, “not a certified academic, let alone theologian. These thoughts are simply the opinion of a Catholic artist who, having studied the deprivations of ‘Modern art,’ is concerned about the…
