Category: 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.