by Randall Grasso The Most Important Thing in Life What is the most important thing in life?  The most important thing in life is to get to Heaven. Why is getting to Heaven the most important thing in life?  Getting to Heaven is the most important thing in life because it the purpose for which God made us. God desires all men to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.  1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pt. 3:9. God made us to love Him and serve Him in this life and to be happy with Him forever in the next. After death we enter eternity where we will forever [...]

N.B:  I will be on silent retreat for a week.  Because I usually upload blogs, podcasts and videos a week ahead of time, my production schedule will normalize mid-January.  I hope to re-start myself (by God's grace) and also re-start my education series like VLX and the Sunday Sermon Series in a couple weeks.  I'm sorry for my absence on that, but one reason for the delay is that we had a medical emergency.  By your prayers, everything is good on that front, now.  Please pray for me on retreat. In Victories of the Martyrs as conglomerated by St. Alphonsus Liguori, we read about St. Philip, the bishop of Heraclea: [...]

Most liberal Catholics will happily admit that the Catholic hierarchy began to openly espouse a new data set of doctrinal points in the 1960s.  (Many traditional Catholics—including myself—would ironically agree with this.)  But there's a group of Catholics between the liberals and the traditionalists that will say something like, "No, no.  Vatican II did not teach a new dogma.  Vatican II simply taught us how to transmit the constant dogmas of the Catholic Church in a manner that is now packaged in a new way to accommodate the sensitivities of modern man."  Fair enough.  This is the teaching of many neo-con Catholics and it's essentially what I espoused in seminary [...]

One of the most common questions I get is: "Which Dogmas are Infallible in the Catholic Church?" In 2013, the website Tradicat was able to conglomerate from the late Dr. Ludwig Ott's book, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma about 238 dogmas that are either De Fide (defined by the Catholic Church as infallible) or Sent. Certa (infallible by corollary.) I improved Tradicat's numbering system a bit below, but Dr. Ott and Dr. Daniel Stramara did the hard work on this long ago. More recently, Fr. Paul Kramer and Dr. Edmund Mazza have revealed that despite being a modernist, and despite hiding the Third Secret of Fatima, Pope Benedict XVI has denied none [...]

Top Left:  An icon of St. Maximus the Confessor, a 7th century Greek monk loyal to Rome.  Top Right:  An "icon" of Fr. Hans Urs Von Balthasar SJ, a Jesuit of the 20th century. Ecumenical for the first thousand years of Christianity was an adjective to describe dogmatic meetings of orthodox bishops who cared about accurately defining the Catholic Faith.  New Advent has a good definition: "Ecumenical Councils are those to which the bishops, and others entitled to vote, are convoked from the whole world (oikoumene) under the presidency of the pope or his legates, and the decrees of which, having received papal confirmation, bind all Christians."  All 21 ecumenical [...]