On a recent book review TV interview program called Q/A, Ross Douthat, author of To Change the Church, was asked about his own beliefs. He responded quite frankly that he was a Catholic. When asked why, Douthat replied that, as far as he could see, a divine intervention did take place in this world around [...]

It was a shocking photo. There was Jesuit James Martin with his arm around Professor Robert George of Princeton, both of them grinning ear to ear. Professor George published the photo on his Twitter feed and it appeared this beacon of orthodoxy had given his imprimatur to the heterodoxy of James Martin, who has quite [...]

Most Protestants and even some Catholics (arguably, 20 percent, maybe more) deny the predominately Catholic teaching that Jesus Christ is really present in the Eucharist. And many of those who accept the teaching betray little dis-ease receiving the sacrament in a manner that would have been unthinkable in a generation when the confessional lines were [...]

Though I have written several articles about Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL), I am repeatedly struck anew, as time goes on, by its inexorably destructive implications. Despite AL’s generally good summary of Catholic teaching on marriage and the family, its moral subjectivism ultimately undermines not only the truths affirmed in the document, [...]

“For God, For Country, and for Yale.” This phrase is etched into the stone arches that dot the landscape of Yale University. Yale, though founded by the Puritans for the purpose of missionary training, Christian education, and familiarity with the humanities and Biblical languages, has fallen far away from its original mission. This is nothing [...]

At first glance, the Solemnity of Corpus Christi seems primarily an internal church feast. However, once upon a time (especially when societies were more religiously homogenous) that internal faith found external expression in public processions with the Eucharist. In some places (e.g., Poland), public expression was never lost; in others, like the United States, it [...]

The doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery that has been the subject of debate, controversy, and misunderstanding for two millennia. Part of the difficulty is that although traces of the Trinity run throughout the warp and woof of Scripture, God’s holy Word contains nothing explicit about it. But perhaps our larger problem is that [...]

Editor’s note: The following document is a pastoral letter issued May 13 by the bishops of Kazakhstan on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Praised be Our Lord Jesus Christ! Dear brothers and sisters in Christ! The current year is marked by the memorable event of the 50th anniversary of [...]

The German bishops’ conference is hardly alone in exploiting, for “pastoral” reasons, the implications of Amoris Laetitia’s (AL) betrayal of objective moral truth. At the same time, the larger context of its recent decisions to admit select Lutherans, and select divorced and “remarried” Catholics, to Holy Communion seems to point also to a source of [...]

Pentecost celebrates the birth of the Church with the coming of the Holy Spirit in fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to his disciples. Yet, few doctrines of the Church are as misunderstood as that of the Holy Spirit. I suspect this is partly due to the fuzzy image connoted by a name that conjures up notions [...]

Should Catholics evangelize Muslims? Currently there doesn’t seem to be much effort in that direction. For example, a recent Pew survey shows that 23 percent of Muslims in America no longer identify with that faith, and, of those, only 9 percent convert to a different faith. The other 91 percent effectively become secular. By the [...]

About a year before being received into the Catholic Church in 2004, the biggest obstacle to conversion for me, a Protestant, who had moved in evangelical and evangelical-charismatic circles, was not the Church’s Marian doctrines, but the political and economic positions of many of the bishops, who seemed to be, except for their stances on [...]

Pontificates are hard things to peg. When they begin, we can never be sure how they are going to turn out. In 1978, a Polish cardinal who had been an active participant at the Second Vatican Council was elected the 263rd Successor of Saint Peter. He was following an Italian (Albino Luciani) who had died just [...]

“The Marxist ideology is wrong,” said Pope Francis in December 2013, amid early public accusations of him having Communist ideas. “But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.” One of them, possibly, if not apparently, is one of Francis’s closest advisers, German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, [...]

Protestantism comes from Germany, its original spark with Martin Luther, and its earliest excesses with the Anabaptist rule over Münster; the latter crushed finally by the prince-bishop’s army, the former however enjoyed enduring success. From Germany, Reformation ideas spread to other European countries, and from there into the whole world, creating new epicenters of Protestant [...]

Washington D.C. is no stranger to making history. This past Saturday was no exception. You would not have found throngs of people marching with angry placards, but hundreds of Catholics on their knees. They were not assembled at the National Mall, but at the Basilica Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. They were not participating in [...]

“Hell is the place God created for the angels who rebelled against him. We say ‘place,’ but since angels are spirits the word ‘place’ is metaphorical. Hell is a condition but also a society of those who are separated from God. Having rejected God and having lost his angelic privileges to God’s company, the devil [...]

In the early 1950s, children watched a puppet show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie broadcast from Chicago all the way to the Eastern seaboard through the innovative marvel of television. It was more of a children’s show for adults, for how else could the sophisticated puns make sense, or what child could understand how Ollie the [...]

The brouhaha that erupted last month over the latest Scalfari interview with Pope Francis concerned whether the Holy Father really believes in the existence of hell. The Vatican press office was quick to deny Scalfari’s claim. Yet the controversy overshadowed only briefly a more contentious and longstanding debate in theological circles over eternal punishment. Since Pope [...]

“The deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake on Christ who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.”   ∼ Verbum Dei, #2, cited in Placuit Deo I, 1. Several weeks ago, Clifford Staples called my attention to a recent document from the Congregation for the [...]