Questions Answered – September 2019

Love in Context of Abusive Relationships Question: Am I wrong and sinning if I do not like family members who mistreat me? Answer: This question actually has two prongs to it. The one has to do with the relationship of volitional to … [Read more...]

Perfect Love Casts Out All Fear

Lessons from the First Pope

Saint Peter is perhaps the most fascinating, lovable, and relatable apostle. The insight which Scripture provides portrays this very fact, for the Gospels depict an amusing yet awe-inspiring image of a humble and sincere, bold and fearful … [Read more...]

Love’s Oblation

William L. Stidger told about a young lad he had baptized as a baby. The boy grew up, and when World War II began, he joined the Navy. One night his ship came into Boston, and the lad visited his former pastor and friend. During their visit … [Read more...]

Our Lord and His Love

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16) In this world where almost everything is relative, we can know at least one absolute truth: Every human being alive in this world wants and needs to be … [Read more...]

On the World’s Most Beautiful Sermon

I. A sermon is an essay or a treatise that is spoken. Classical sermons of Newman, or some of the great French preachers, could last for hours. Great Protestant divines were known for long and powerfully delivered sermons. We live in a … [Read more...]

The Metaphysics of Christian Love

Introduction This essay will largely confine itself to the thought of two Christian writers on the nature of love: Josef Pieper and Josef Ratzinger. The latter, being the younger of the two, is immensely indebted to the ideas of the … [Read more...]

Summer Reading for June 2016

David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy Jr. Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae. Grand Rapids, MI: … [Read more...]

At That First Fish Fry: A Message for Ordinary Time

So we now pass from the great liturgical seasons of Lent and Easter to “ordinary time.” Since mid-February, the Church has traveled the spiritual desert of Lent, has reveled in the joyous celebration of Easter, and has witnessed the final cu … [Read more...]

Ideas for Pastoral Ministry from the Philosophy of Love of Dietrich Von Hildebrand

My Encounter with the Philosophy of Love of Dietrich Von Hildebrand In the year 1958, I was a young atheist philosophy major about to give up on finding truth or love—as I couldn’t find either truth or love at the non-religious uni … [Read more...]

The “Inhumanity” of the Homosexual Lifestyle

To love as a person is freely to wish goodness for someone ... Love always wants to affirm, and to better, one’s friend. Through the power of free choice, true love makes the friend, not the self, the beneficiary. Can there be a more … [Read more...]

God and Caesar

In the Catholic view, the religious sphere is based on the virtue of faith. This faith is a gift of God ... In contrast, according to this Catholic view, the civil sphere is based on experience illumined by faith. That is to say, it is … [Read more...]

Mysterium Fidei: The Year and the Encyclical

Both Benedict and Francis must see the need to stress the basic theological virtue of trusting in God for a reason at this point in time. November brings the Year of Faith to an end.  And what a year it was.  The Year of Faith was i … [Read more...]

Freedom in Our Souls

We cannot exercise freedom from inordinate attachments unless we have accepted the purifications which are necessary to be freed from our self-centered instincts. St. Augustine This is salvation: to live in the consolation of the Holy … [Read more...]

“Humanae Vitae” and Sacred Scripture: A Missed Opportunity

While prophetic in many ways, the most controversial encyclical of the twentieth century might have been better received had a stronger biblical argument been made in its favor. This July 2013 we commemorate the 45th anniversary of Pope … [Read more...]

Why Do We Believe?

The dynamics of Catholic faith-building are thus severely attacked today by many in the sciences who quite glibly point out that the evidence of science trumps the evidence of religion. The Year of Faith is a most appropriate time to … [Read more...]