Todd Aglialoro, writing for Catholic Answers: With their shocking publication of new norms for permitting divorced and remarried Catholics to return to the reception of Holy Communion (based on their reading of Amoris Laetitia – ed.), the bishops of Malta have shown how great errors can grow from tiny seeds. And: Remember, divorced and remarried Catholics […]
Over the next few weeks, the second reading at Sunday Mass will be taken from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians). This week, we read the first few verses of chapter one: Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the […]
Ever wonder why some Eastern Christians celebrate Christmas on January 6, the date the Western Church chose for the Epiphany? And how did the West settle on December 25 as the date for Christmas? Andrew McGowan, Dean of Yale Divinity School, sheds much light on these questions: “Around 200 CE, Tertullian of Carthage reported the […]
Bishop Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire ministries, has offered up yet another great movie review. This one’s on director Martin Scorsese’s Silence, long in the making, which adapts Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name. It deals with (spolier alert) the apostasy of certain Jesuit missionaries in […]
Matthew and Luke are the only two Gospel writers who include an infancy narrative in their biographies of Jesus. According to the most widely accepted theory about how the Gospels were composed, Matthew and Luke wrote independently of one another. That is, Matthew did not have a copy of Luke’s Gospel on his desk when […]
During the Christmas and Easter seasons in particular, many skeptics appear in the media who insist that these celebrations are meaningless, because Jesus never actually existed. How can we respond? It’s important to understand that people who doubt the birth and existence of Jesus of Nazareth are extremely few. Their claims are, quite frankly, not […]
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this: “(W)hen the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Saviour’s first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming. By celebrating (John the Baptist’s) birth […]
Matthew Leonard, Executive Director of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology: In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the native people of Mexico City suffered conquest first by the Aztecs and then by the Spanish conquistadores. It was the custom of the Aztecs to harvest the conquered people as victims for human sacrifice, offered to […]
In this Sunday’s Gospel reading (Matt 11:2-11), John the Baptist, who by this time has been imprisoned by Herod, sends messengers to ask Jesus if he is the promised Messiah. Have you ever wondered why John did that? Have you ever wondered why Jesus doesn’t simply answer, “Yes”? Read on! Indeed, Jesus’ reply to the […]
On this Second Sunday of Advent, we encounter the figure of John the Baptist in the Gospel reading (Matthew 3:1-12): John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” It was of him that the prophet Isaiah had spoken when he said: A […]