This Ad Rem is a “teaser.” It’s a section of the talk I will give in a couple of days at the Saint Benedict Center Conference. (If you are not coming, feel free to pre-order the CD’s and DVD’s of … Continue reading
Category: Theology
A Brief Primer on the Virtue of Justice
Justice, in its most foundational meaning, is “rendering to the other what is his due.” When the “other” is a fellow man or the State, there are three specific parts of justice that pertain: commutative justice, distributive justice, and legal … Continue reading
Lessons to Learn from Clerical Scandals
It is not my custom to write about the latest scandal. There are good reasons for this. The world is fallen and scandals abound, even in the best of times. To dwell on them risks losing sight of the good … Continue reading
Some Thoughts on Our Lady’s Assumption
Although we do not celebrate Our Lady’s dormition or death as a liturgical feast day with a Mass, the Catholic Church has, from the earliest times, celebrated her glorious Assumption into Heaven, body and soul, on August 15. As of … Continue reading
Righteousness: Merely ‘Reckoned’ in Us Or Actually Divinizing Us in Grace?
Karlo Broussard addresses this question in a Catholic Answers piece. It is quite good. He points out that when scripture uses the word “reckon” in regard to our justification by God’s grace that it can only mean that God affirms … Continue reading
Modernism as a Thought Crime
Plato said that God is thought thinking thought. As Father Leonard Feeney wrote, this is about as close as a philosopher can get to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity with his unaided intellect, and it is a loose approximation … Continue reading
Science vs. God
Modern man derives much of his sense of himself as master of all he surveys from science and technology in general, but nothing feeds his notion of being the master of life itself more than the new birth technologies. They … Continue reading
Gregory of Nyssa on the Holy Eucharist
Catholic Exchange, Stephen Beale: If the truth of the Eucharist has ever seemed strange to you, that’s because it should. St. Paul said, “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews indeed a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles foolishness.” The Eucharist … Continue reading
Joseph Ratzinger on the Priesthood and on the Resurrection
In the latter part of 2006, after the April 2005 installation of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, I had occasion to tell a professor friend of mine confidentially that I have always had difficulties reading with understanding the varied … Continue reading
To God’s Image and Likeness
The internal counsels of the Blessed Trinity when He deigned to create man have been mercifully revealed to us in the book of Genesis: “Let us make man to our image and likeness” (1:26). The passage, frequently cited, is not … Continue reading
Saint John Eudes and the Middle Age Controversy Over the Immaculate Conception
I am reading Part One (of three parts) of The Wondrous Childhood of the Most Holy Mother of God by Saint John Eudes. It is a masterpiece of filial devotion to the Mother of God, reflecting on her holy childhood, … Continue reading
Protestantism and the Filioque, a Good Argument
Currently reading and enjoying H J A Sire’s Phoenix from the Ashes, I came upon a passage that presented an argument worth spreading far and wide. It involves the doctrinal incongruity within Protestantism resulting from the so-called “Reformers’” acceptance of … Continue reading
To Honour and be Honoured
Our culture is one that enshrines the dishonorable. In the place of statesmen, we honor stooges and scoundrels; in the place of religious and philosophical truth, moral goodness, and genuine artistic beauty, we exalt overpaid athletes, morally bankrupt Hollywood celebrities, … Continue reading
Testimony of Three Second Century Fathers on Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist
Tom Nash, Catholic Answers: In a recent article that has received a lot of attention online, Protestant apologist Brian Culliton argues that a close reading of the early Church Fathers illustrates they didn’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The … Continue reading
He Descended into Hell
We have entered into the drama of Holy Week. As the events of these days are each momentous, there is too little time, especially during the Triduum, to confront each of them as they are presented to us by Holy … Continue reading
