Category Archives: Current Issues in the Church
Current Issues in the Church
There is so much Catholic information and commentary available now that the hard part is choosing what issues are most important enough to follow. Our website limits its coverage to those current events that touch on our doctrinal and missionary purposes. Issues involving our apostolate get top priority, but other issues affecting all of our lives are also highlighted in our news reports and columns.
A knowledge of Church history will give us the tools necessary to deal with many of the alarming current issues that threaten the Faith and the Church, theologically, morally, and socially.
Brother Francis has a tremendous appreciation for the history of the Church. He liked to call Church history “the laboratory of wisdom.” Why? Because the history of the Church is the history of human salvation, and choosing the best means to save one’s soul is the highest prudence. And prudence, says St. Thomas Aquinas, is wisdom in action.
A knowledge of Church history is essential if we are to apply the wisdom of the past, and the tragic errors of the past, to current issues and events in the Church. History is the laboratory of wisdom, but the application today of the lessons learned from history is prudence.
How, for example, are we to understand what St. Pius X meant when he said that “modernism is the synthesis of all heresies,” if we are ignorant of the history of the Church’s battles against heresy? How are we to evaluate the causes of what Pope Benedict referred to a “crisis of Faith,” if we unfamiliar with any of the twenty ecumenical councils that preceded Vatican II?
Christendom is gone as a reflection of the social reign of Christ the King, but Catholicism lives on, and the spiritual warfare is ever-present. We must keep informed, rejoicing in the good, and fighting against what is evil.
Praying to the God That Ain’t
Should we be surprised if the pseudo-mystical ecumenist babblings of neo-modernists lack coherence? I’m sorry if the question was abrupt in its asking. Let’s back up… There’s this book review in NCR, “Praying to a God who is larger than religion,” which, I confess, I read. One might think the Dark Side has its allure, but there is neither proximate nor remote occasion of sin … More →
St. Joan of Arc, Papist
It seems that the prerogatives of the Holy See and its bishop would trump certain modern notions of collegiality in the sainted mind of the Maid of Orleans. From the Trial of Joan of Arc, for 2 May, we read: When it was explained to her what the Church Militant meant, and [she was] admonished to believe and hold the article Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam, etc., … More →
Sedevacantism and Schism
A recent little talk I gave on the sin of schism — part of my comments on the Chair of Unity Octave — prompted a question from one of my auditors: “Is sedevacantism schism?” I had to reply in the affirmative. In the last analysis, sedevacantists reject the jurisdiction of the Pope over the universal Church. While their schism is different than that of most … More →
Posted in Columns, Current Issues in the Church, Heresies and Errors, Theology 6 Comments
The Anglicans and the Orthodox
Anglicanorum Coetibus has created a mechanism for bringing hundreds of thousands of Anglicans worldwide into the Church, so we can say that the “Anglican Front” is indeed a very active one. But, according to Sandro Magister, this development has pricked at certain sensitivities of the Orthodox, opening up activities on that front: In Cyprus, the news that the Catholic Church is ready to incorporate groups … More →
Catholicism is Also a Manner
CATHOLICISM is not only a matter: a truth to be told; it is also a manner: a way of telling it. Manner makes meaning quite as much as matter does. To say what Christ said, but not in the way He said it, (that is to say: without enthusiasm, determination, excitement, wonder, challenge, indignation, summons and alarm) is an evasion and an apostasy. The Christian … More →
Saint Thérèse Behind Anglican Return
Contrary to what some people may think, the Dominicans don’t get all the credit! The presence of the little Carmelite’s relics in England, and prayers offered to her by the Anglicans themselves, all helped clear the way. Read the details at The Catholic Key. It should be recalled that the Little Flower is co-patroness of the missions. Certainly, she’s more a missionary in Heaven than … More →
Anglican Measure the Fruit of Dominicans at Prayer
A Dominican nun friend at the cloistered Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit, New Jersey, included me in an email bringing people’s attention to a wonderful and edifying fact. Archbishop Joseph Augustine Di Noia, O.P. (who was mysteriously present at the press conference on Tuesday), had asked the whole Dominican family to pray for a secret intention back in February of this … More →
The Faith All But Dead in Quebec
O Canada! In “Neither practising nor believing, but Catholic even so,” we learn of the tragic state of the Church in Quebec. The article summary reads: “The ‘baptized pagans’ of Quebec, the most secularized society in the Western world, have less and less knowledge of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, but attempts to remove Catholicism’s symbolic presence in public places and on the … More →
Vatican Council II: An Open Discussion, by Monsignor Brunero Gherardini
According to The Latin Mass magazine (subscribe here), Italy has just witnessed the publication of a soon-to-be blockbuster on Vatican II. Monsignor Brunero Gherardini, a renowned 85-year-old theologian of the Roman school, has descriptively entitled his work Vatican Council II: An Open Discussion. The volume is published by Casa Mariana Editrice, a publishing house connected to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and it boasts … More →
Not Everyone Happy with New USCCB Document
Just after I posted an appreciation of the recent USCCB document clarifying the Church’s teaching on her mission and the Jewish People, I checked my familiar news sources to catch up on what’s going on. Coincidentally, I discovered that “ADL president Abraham Foxman said that the bishops’ statement might be considered ‘unacceptable.’” Read the story here:ADL injects new tension in Catholic-Jewish dialogue.
U.S. Bishops Correct ‘Ambiguities’ Concerning the Church’s Mission and the Jewish People
In what Catholic World News termed “an unusual clarifying statement,” two organs of the the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops jointly released a note highlighting and correcting the doctrinal ambiguities in a 2002 document on the Church’s mission and the Jewish people. “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in Reflections on Covenant And Mission,” was released by the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine and its Committee … More →
