Fr. Altman Was Correct: You Can’t Be a Catholic and a Democrat
During the stolen US election last year, a bishop put on Twitter: "The right wing tells us bishops that we’re in the back pocket of the Democratic Party; the left wing tells us that we’re in the back pocket of the Republican Party. I’m just trying to stay centered on Jesus Christ and His Church." This is a very misleading tweet, first of all because the democratic party has been giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the US bishops many years back including $91,000,000 from democrats to the USCCB in 2016. It's also misleading because of a reason found in a reply on Twitter: "Your Eminence, you have [...]
The “Greater Good” is Not a Catholic Moral System
Eugenics, the notion that the strong can kill the weak, is built on the philosophy that population reduction may have to be done for the greater good of society. It's built on the part of Darwinian evolution called natural selection and survival of the fittest. Under this philosophy, the Nazi Holocaust was simply a moral attempt to cleanse their own society of weaker Jews "for the greater good" of society, as they Nazis might say. Why then do so many on the left today say that we have to make decisions on COVID "for the greater good"? Now, in their defense, libs do not want another holocaust. And proportionate decisions [...]
Men’s Groups: A Suggestion
Who is more chatty, men or women? You probably can guess my answer at face-value. But when you throw a single variable in there, and change it just a little bit, for example: “Who is more open about problems with new friends?” I believe the answer is: men. You see, if you started a women’s Bible Study, you would be lucky if you could get fellow women to open up about, say, internet temptations within three months of that Bible study getting together. But if you started a men’s Bible Study, the men would be open about internet problems that very first night. I mean it: That very first night [...]
The Marriage of Faith and Reason
The collect in the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) for St. Albert the Great today reads: O God, Who made blessed Albert, Your Bishop and Doctor, eminent in the submission of human wisdom to divine faith, grant us, we beseech You, so to follow the path of his teaching that we may enjoy perfect light in heaven. This is such a beautiful prayer because it captures what a genius St. Albert was in matters of both human wisdom (called humána sapiéntia in the TLM collect today, now called "science") as well as matters of divine faith (called divínæ fídei in the TLM today, also called Divine Revelation.) As you know in 2021, [...]
How Hard Is It To Avoid Heresy?
Consider a putatively-conservative Roman Catholic archbishop who invites his priests to pray with Lutherans in a Lutheran community building. This really happened. But because this bishop is "pro-life," he is considered "conservative" by most of his laity. Thus, most mainstream Catholics will pretty quickly forgive a bishop inviting their own Catholic priests to a Lutheran prayer service. That is, if they even think there's anything to forgive in that. I think the attitude among most of the laity today is basically: Well, I make mistakes in my vocation, so I can't judge my superiors who make mistakes in their vocations. Fair enough. There's some humility in that attitude. But there's [...]
St. Vincent of Lerins on how to Navigate a Church Crisis
Many Catholics think that "Catholic" means "universal," and they are correct, but they make the mistake of thinking this is universal not through history but just today in this current Church crisis. We look to the great saint and doctor of the Church of the 5th century, St. Vincent of Lerins, for how to navigate a Church crisis when many bishops believe and teach different things. St. Vincent of Lerins was one of the very, very few bishops who fought against the global 5th century heresy of Arianism believed by 99% of the bishops of his day. We will see below in his writings why "Catholic" does not mean [...]
Thoughts on “The Restrainer”
And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of His mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and [...]
No Feasting Without Fasting
by Andromeda “I say to you: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.” Luke 13:3 The novel idea which claimed, and still claims, that modern man is exempt from the precepts of the Gospel, ‘because times have changed,’ entered into, and firmly established itself in the Catholic ethos during the post conciliar period of the Church. We were, it was proclaimed, to enter into a new Springtime, throwing off the dark and dowdy ways of thinking and being, and by so inaugurating a new human fraternity which would bring about a heaven right here on earth. It followed as a natural consequence of this happy hypothesis, [...]
The Great Ones Part 3 of 3
by Guest Writer “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’” - Luke 23:34 I’ll admit that I’ve long harbored an idea, albeit subconsciously, that only God could forgive heroically. What I mean is that only an infinite God of infinite magnanimity towards the most treacherous of His creatures could speak words of forgiveness while wasting away on the cross. For the rest of us finite humans, there has to be a limit. It’s the same mentality that St. Peter had when he thought he hit it out of the park with his question of forgiving a brother who sins against him seven times. In [...]
The Great Ones Part 2 of 3
Above top left is my friend, Msgr. Philip J. Reilly, a priest of the diocese of Brooklyn who has saved tens of thousands of babies from abortion. Above top right is a man who he helped convert, Dr. Bernard Nathanson MD who killed 75,000 babies before being baptized a Catholic. The good news of the blog post will eventually get to these two men. But first, I want to admit that I was going to write a blog post on these two men. The top left (second set of pictures) is Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. Wikipedia says of him that he was "known as the Angel of Death (German: Todesengel), [...]