God be praised, friends; it is the Passover of the Lord!
The Passover of Israel celebrates each year the deliverance of the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt, and the Passover of the Church celebrates each year the deliverance of all mankind from the slavery of death and the annihilation of the grave which are the wages of sin.
Read MoreConsider the many people about whom we just read in the Passion narrative:
Simon the leper, the unclean man into whose home the Divine Physician came to share a meal, an outcast sought out by the Lord.
The unnamed woman whom the Lord Jesus says will be praised until the Last Day for her extraordinary act of love in using a luxurious perfumed oil to honor him, a gesture of devotion that he himself regarded as a preparation for his coming death.
Read MoreWhat we now call the Fifth Sunday of Lent was for many centuries called Passion Sunday, and then in 1960 this day in the calendar was renamed the First Sunday of the Passion while next week was called the Second Sunday of the Passion. But that change lasted only nine years, and in 1969 the liturgical calendar began to call today the Fifth Sunday of Lent while calling next week’s observance Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord.
Read MoreDo not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:1-2)
Read Morewe have arrived at the very strange pass of needing first to find full, visible communion of faith among those who are already Catholics, including not a few bishops and even some cardinals. And where shall we look for such unity? We must look to the Lord Jesus.
Read MoreNo doctrinal development can ever yield a teaching of the Church that contradicts anything known by divine Revelation and contained in the Deposit of Faith.
Read MoreIn the Catholic intellectual tradition, to think theologically is an exercise of reason reflecting on the data of divine Revelation for the purpose of understanding what is already believed by grace through faith.
Read MoreAn acorn never grows into a Bassett Hound or a Ford Explorer; it always becomes an oak tree.
Read MoreBut such a claim to prophetic witness is self-serving flattery, and those who do not believe what the Catholic Church teaches to be revealed by God should admit to themselves and to everyone else that they are no longer Catholics and then move on to something else in their lives. Such candor would be far more conducive to the struggle for authentic reformation in the Church than the living lie and cognitive dissonance of rejecting what the Church believes and teaches while remaining a teacher in the Church.
Read MoreInstitutional decline, even when well managed, is not reformation. Authentic reformation in the Church - when it is christocentric, scriptural, liturgical and sacramental, and ecclesial - may not quickly result in statistical growth, but it does lead souls to understand the vision of Jospeh Ratzinger and find with full conviction that which was always at the Church’s center: “faith in the Triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.”
Read MoreEcclesia semper reformanda and purificanda. The Church is always in need of being reformed and purified, because all the baptized - starting with me - are always in need of constant conversion from sin and a deeper conformity to Christ crucified and Risen. But what does this process look like?
Read MoreHow do we help in the work of constant reformation in the Church? By following the Lord Jesus in the Way of the Cross, by believing everything God has revealed for our salvation in the Gospel, and by being transformed by grace through faith from children of wrath into children of God.
Read MoreTo believe in the Gospel is to accept the reality of divine revelation, meaning that we acknowledge the Gospel is not the product of human wisdom, experience, or investigation but the result of God’s own self-disclosure to the human race. And it is precisely that topic which is considered in Dei Verbum, a document which I believe will still stand in a thousand years as one of the most important instruments of Christian teaching ever offered by the Church.
Read MoreFor those who accept the call of the Lord Jesus to “Repent and believe in the Gospel” the first question must be, What is the Gospel? So here’s a working definition of the Gospel: everything that God has revealed for the salvation of the human race.
Read MoreThe Lord Jesus began his public ministry with a clarion call to conversion, and he linked repentance together with saving faith in the Gospel because there is no way to have one without the other.
Read More“I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.”
Read MoreMy personal story stands as the point of departure for the essays ahead on the shape of A New Catholic Reformation, and here at the beginning I stipulate that what follows will be partial and incomplete and unsatisfactory. But I hope that the thoughts to come will be of some use to others in finding a path forward to holiness of life by the obedience of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and fidelity to his Gospel lived in full, visible communion with the Church which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
Read MoreYes, the Church is holy because she is the spotless Bride of Christ, vivified and sanctified by God the Holy Spirit. But she is also an assembly of human persons, each of whom is a sinner in need of redemption
Read MoreA New Catholic Reformation is a free newsletter about the constant need of the Church to be reformed and purified through obedience of faith to the Gospel of Jesus Christ
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