Thirty years ago this month, I attended World Youth Day (WYD) in Denver, CO with Pope John Paul II. It took place days before my 15th birthday. Some estimates believe one million people showed up to the events at the old Mile High Stadium (see above photo) and the final Mass at Cherry Creek Reservoir (see below photo.) My own mother was one of the chaperones for WYD '93 and my little brother (12 years old at the time) was one of thousands treated by Denver General Paramedics for dehydration at the final reservoir Mass. This was a special event for my family since Denver is where we were born [...]

Really, the better title of this blog should be "The Roman Canon is the Oldest Eucharistic Prayer and those of the Eastern Liturgies."  What is excluded from this?  Obviously, the Novus Ordo's Eucharistic Prayer II, III and IV are all very new man-made prayers. They are not of Apostolic Origin.  But for some reason, that isn't so "obvious" to most Catholic educators today. One of the strangest modern-myths pushed in my mainstream-seminary years ago (and probably still today) was that "Eucharistic Prayer II is older than Eucharistic Prayer I."  (That sounds as silly as saying, "The New Mass is older than the Old Mass.")  As most of you know, what [...]

As many of you know, the three parts of sacrifice as found in both the Old Testament and New Testament is 1) The offering and 2) The slaying and 3) the consummation of the victim. Regarding the second of those three, most of the Catholic world is unaware that the dual-consecration of the body and the blood entails the slaying. St. Gregory Nazianzus wrote, "The priest sunders with unbloody cut the body and blood of the Lord, using his voice as a sword." Keep in mind that St. Gregory was the Archbishop of Constantinople in the 4th century. That means he is very early and very Eastern in Church history, [...]

Photo credit above:  Dr. Peter Kwasniewski. A new CARA study quoting Gallup polls has recently published statistics on current American Catholicism as seen above. We have all known for awhile that there were more ex-Catholics than Catholics in the USA, but the spread is enormous in the above numbers that just came out in 2022. In one graphic from CARA (above chart) see especially that there's almost 113 million US Catholics baptized but only about 53 million of them even attempt to attend yearly Mass at Christmas and Easter. Another study (above) came out a few years ago showing the striking comparisons between the faith-based practices of Catholics who currently go to [...]