"God is so mighty that after creating man free, He rules and directs him according to His good pleasure, without prejudicing man's liberty in any way."—Divine Intimacy, Day #240 on "Divine Omnipotence." I recently came across the above quote again in Divine Intimacy (DI) but I had never noticed that it may be one of the best short explanations of man's freedom and the world's suffering in light of God's sovereignty.  All of world history and modern man's doubts about God seem to be answered in that stunning quote.  Here's why I think that quote from Fr. Gabriel of DI is so profound: The issue of theodicy is the question [...]

Keep in mind as you read this blog post that the new Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) released in 1992 is not infallible.  There are significant errors in the CCC, including the constant flip-flopping of the death penalty as I discussed in yesterday's video.  In fact, Pope John Paul II never claimed it was infallible upon its release.  He simply said it was a "sure norm."  But he still released a highly-defective catechism. On the other hand, Pope Clement XIII said that the 16th century Roman Catechism of Trent (RCT) contains "that teaching which is the common doctrine of the Church, from which all danger of doctrinal error is absent." [...]

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 [...]