Archives for 2014

Thanks from the Phillipines

Thank you very much for your much appreciated help to is priests in the busy parishes! More power to your Media Apostolate! Msgr. Felicito C Sison Archdiocese of San Fernando Pampanga Philippines … [Read more...]

Homilies for January 2015

Homilies for Sunday Liturgies and Holy Days, January 2015

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God—January 1, 2015 Entrusting Our Lives and This New Year to Mary Purpose: On this eighth day of the birth of the Savior, let us renew our baptismal covenant with Jesus Christ, in his Church, through the i … [Read more...]

Why Do Priests Need Philosophy?

When he (Aquinas) was not sitting, reading a book, he walked round and round the cloister, and walked fast and even furiously, a very characteristic action of men who fight their battles in the mind. (G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.) … [Read more...]

A Holy Priesthood for a Holy People

A groaning in the heart, of one seeking and waiting for God, is appropriate for Advent. A thirsting in the heart for his living water, in this world of dryness, is proper. In this waiting for the holy season of The Incarnation, however, a … [Read more...]

Sacrifice, Substitution, and Suffering

Sacrifice is troublesome for us fallen humans. It is not only the inconvenience or effort that troubles us so much, because we are sometimes willing to be inconvenienced or troubled for good reason; that is, a reason that serves our own … [Read more...]

Parables of the Generous One

Our faith-conviction that God is the primordial Source and Resource for all creation and human life inspires our gratitude for all as gift, and our boundless hope that the best is yet to come. The abundance of God is the ultimate Source and … [Read more...]

The “Rhetoric” of Relativism

Exposing the Logical Contradiction

Relativism: (1) the wholesale philosophical rejection of the existence of any objective, absolute, or universal truths whatsoever (specifically referred to as cognitive/epistemological relativism or radical skepticism); or (2) the … [Read more...]

Winter Reading for December 2014

31 Days to Becoming a Better Religious Educator. Jared Dees (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press: 2013) 164 pages; $9.95. (Reviewed by Brandon Harvey) The Power of Four: Keys to the Hidden Treasures of the Gospels. Eduardo P. … [Read more...]

Why God Becomes Human

The Advent and Christmas seasons are upon us. Like the reality itself, we Christians have to look more deeply to see the mystery beneath the glitter and the commotion. God has now descended into his creation to take up his rightful place as … [Read more...]

Guadalupe and God’s Word

A Biblical-Theological Interpretation of Her Apparition

When Miguel Sánchez published Imagen de la Virgen María in 1648, he did more than document the first apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the New World. Scholars agree that his account became a lens through which clergy and faithful i … [Read more...]

The Holy Spirit and the Contemporary Reform of the Catholic Church

Status Quaestionis Ecclesia semper reformanda est (The Church is always to be reformed). This phrase originated in the Nadere Reformatiae of the Dutch Reform during the 1600s, and first appeared in the 1674 work, Beschouwinge van Zion … [Read more...]

A Silence about Mary

Mary is very central to the Gospel’s infancy narratives, but after Cana she almost disappears: we see her in the “Who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters?” passage, at the foot of the cross, and as being present at the Pentecost eve … [Read more...]

The Nativity of Christ

Its Historic Reality

In those days, Caesar Augustus published a decree ordering a census of the whole world. This first took place when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. Everyone went to register, each to his own town. And so Joseph went from his own town of … [Read more...]

Apokatastasis: On the Salvation of a Punk Rock Princess

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” are the famous opening words sung by the godmother of punk rock, Patti Smith, on her debut album, Horses. On Wednesday, April 11, 2013, the same Patti Smith—a self-proclaimed “non-Catholic who l … [Read more...]