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Part Two:  Channels of Grace Baptism Table of Contents     Baptism was already prefigured in the Old Testament. Some of the ancient rites or events that anticipated Christian Baptism were circumcision (Colossians 2:11), the march of the Israelites through the Red Sea (I Corinthians 10:2), and across the Jordan (Joshua 3:14). What the church considers a formal prophecy of baptism was the oracle of Ezekiel regarding the New Israel. I shall pour clean water over you and you will be cleansed. I shall cleanse you of all defilement and all your idols. I shall give you a new heart and put...

Two weeks ago I mentioned in my sermon that God grows Christians by feeding them his Word. One way he does this is by providing the church with teachers and preachers. This means that if we are going to grow we need to be sitting at the feet of reliable carriers of God's truth. This, however, begs the question: how can we identify a reliable carrier of God's truth? The Bible makes it clear that there are many unreliable carriers of so-called truth. Satan masquerades as an angel of light seeking to deceive. So we need a lot of biblical...

Featured Term (selected at random): INEFFABLE That which is inexpressible. Only God is ultimately ineffable because only he cannot be fully comprehended by the finite mind. Since knowledge determines expression, the divine ineffability is a result of the divine incomprehensibility. In the words of St. Augustine, "More true than our speech about God is our thinking of Him, and more true than our thinking is His Being" (De Trinitate, VII, 4, 7). All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Father Vincent Lampert (right), from St. Francis and Clare Parish in Indianapolis, Ind., lectures at Foellinger Auditorium on Monday. Fr. Lampert discussed his experiences as one of 12 officially trained exorcist priests in the United States. Joanna Mirowska The Daily Illini With Halloween around the corner and Hollywood releasing horror movies such as "Paranormal Activity" and "Saw VI," one cannot help but feel chills running down his or her spine. St. John's Catholic Newman Center had the timing right when it invited exorcist Father Vince Lampert to speak about his experiences Monday night at Foellinger Auditorium. Lampert, the head priest...

Saints Simon and Jude                      SAINTS SIMON AND JUDE, APOSTLES From a commentary on the gospel of John by Saint Cyril of Alexandria, bishopAs the Father sent me, so I am sending you    Our Lord Jesus Christ has appointed certain men to be guides and teachers of the world and stewards of his divine mysteries. Now he bids them to shine out like lamps and to cast out their light not only over the land of the Jews but over every country under the sun and over people scattered in all directions and settled in distant lands.   That man...

Part Two:  Channels of Grace The Sacraments Table of Contents     The closing article of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in life everlasting,” is also the opening door to the seven sacraments instituted by Jesus Christ. As we have seen, the eternal life that awaits those who believe in Christ is the supernatural life which He came into the world to restore to a fallen human race. That is why the Savior was so blunt in His explanation to Nicodemus about the need for being “born again”. I tell you most solemnly, unless a man is born through water and the...

Featured Term (selected at random):INHERENCE Dependence on another being for its existence. Accidents naturally inhere in the substances they modify. By divine power, in the Holy Eucharist the accidents of bread and wine exist without inhering in their substance, which has been changed through transubstantiation into the substance of Christ's body and blood. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Hello and welcome to another edition of the White Horse Inn as we are thinking through what is means to be Christians in a post-Christian culture. You know, every time a debate comes up on homosexual marriage or on war, a whole host of topics; on one hand conservatives sometimes invoke the theocratic promises, commands, and threats of the old covenant as if they could just be lifted from the context of Israel's covenant with God and apply to any modern country. While liberals and secularists simply dismiss these Old Testament passages as morally offensive "texts of terror." But there...

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development collection is next month. CCHD might as well stand for Catholic Cash Helping Democrats. Thirty to 50% of the collection goes to community organizing and helped elect politicians like Lorretta Sanchez and Barack Obama. Please urge Catholics to BOYCOTT THE COLLECTION. Spread this YouTube video far and wide!

October 26 October 26David TwellmanFormer United Methodist

I have been involved with Internet discussions and apologetics for a very long time, at least in Internet terms. I remember debating a man from the Netherlands via email about Catholic theology in 1992, before I was even officially received into the Catholic Church. Considering “Internet years” are somewhat like dog years, I figure that’s 119 years of online debates and discussions (and it even feels like more sometimes). Over that time I have developed some rules of engagement for Internet apostolate that might be helpful for others. 1) Always remember the superiority of the real world over the virtual...

Featured Term (selected at random):CANONICAL PENANCE The specified penance, corresponding to the nature and gravity of the sin, prescribed by confessors in the sacrament of penance. These penances were listed in penitential books. Celtic in origin, the earliest canonical lists are ascribed to St. Patrick and date from the fifth century. In time the practice spread throughout Europe. The best known penitential book is that ascribed to Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (602-90). All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

THE MOST illuminating aspect of last weekend’s Knock “apparition� was what wasn’t seen. A so-called clairvoyant had predicted that at 3pm on Sunday the Virgin Mary would make an appearance. The crowd gathered. The clock ticked down. And, sure enough, at 3pm . . . she didn’t turn up.Instead, a few minutes after that, some of those present say they saw the sun either spin, or shoot out rays, or that they did indeed see the Virgin Mary.A Mayo News reporter wrote: “Standing beside some people from the parish of Knock, we witnessed something that we had never seen before. Whatever...

Traditional Holy Mass Propers † Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost † † Feast of Christ the King † The Blessing of Christ by Fernando Gallego, 1492 Missa Dignus est Agnus qui occísus est, accípere virtútem, et divinitátem et sapiéntiam, et fortitúdinen, et honórem ( "The Lamb that was slain is worthy to receive the power and divinity and wisdom and strength and honor" ) 25 October 2009 Anno Dómini "....our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers,against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places...." "Nothing...

Crusader friar of Habsburg Austria London barrister and historian James Bogle discusses here the life and times of a great Catholic: Blessed Mark of Aviano (Marco d’Aviano in the original Italian), who deserves to be much better known in the English-speaking world.    On 27 April 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified Rev Fr Mark of Aviano OFMCap (1631-99). The ceremony occurred without any world-wide protest from Muslims, and certainly nothing of the sort that accompanied the considerably more innocuous recent commentary of Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg.Mark of Aviano was a Capuchin friar, born Carlo Domenico, in Aviano in...

The Jewel of Celibacy by Dr. Jeff Mirus, October 23, 2009 Phil Lawler is undoubtedly correct that the rule of celibacy will not be relaxed for Catholics of the Roman Rite when married Anglican priests begin to appear under a new Catholic ordinariate. He may also be correct that Eastern Rite churches will gradually permit more of their married clergy to serve in the West as we become accustomed to married clergy through a growing familiarity with our Anglo-Catholic brethren. (See The Anglicans and the Eastern Churches.) But the official policies of the Roman Rite and the Eastern Rite churches...

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 23, 2009 (Zenit.org).- When priests are given the choice between marriage and celibacy, the tendency is to choose celibacy, at least according to the experience of the bishop of Cairo of the Chaldeans.Bishop Youssef Ibrahim Sarraf said this today in response to a question concerning married priests at a press conference to present the final message of the synod on Africa. The question was asked in light of the announcement this week that Benedict XVI will publish an apostolic constitution that will allow groups of Anglicans seeking communion with the Church to do so through personal ordinariates....

 Does the Church teach two Gospels?  Daniel Gregg Also posted at Torahtimes.org          When the preacher says Christ died for our sin, what does it make you think?  Does it make you think that he paid the penalty for sin so that the repentant might be forgiven?   Or does it make you think one only needs to believe to be perfectly righteous in God's sight, and then one is saved on the basis of God's vision of righteousness?     Believe it or not, the Church teaches two gospels.  One is a gospel of repentance and pardon, by which a man may be...

Full title: John Calvin: Antidote to the Sixth Session of the Council of Trenton the Doctrine of Justification (1547) Justification would be easily explained, did not the false opinions by which the minds of men are preoccupied, spread darkness over the clear light. The principal cause of obscurity, however, is, that we are with the greatest difficulty induced to leave the glory of righteousness entire to God alone. For we always desire to be somewhat, and such is our folly, we even think we are. As this pride was innate in man from the first, so it opened a door...

  Unam Sanctam is the sort of document that gives our Protestant brothers and sisters a real jolt, primarily because it looks at first blush as though it teaches that Catholics cannot have Protestant brothers and sisters. Written by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, this papal bull concludes with a shocking dogmatic definition:   We declare, say, define and pronounce, that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.   The average modern reader concludes that these words mean: "We know exactly where the Church both is and is...

Index of Prohibited Books 1050. Why is there an index prohibiting books by the leading writers of the day? The Catholic Church exists to sanctify men. She must give them all that is necessary for their salvation, and safeguard them from all that could hinder it. Any Church which has no prohibition of dangerous books would not be doing its duty. Meantime if a leading writer publishes stuff which can lead souls to hell, then the Catholic Church forbids her children to be led by him. What sort of Church would she be if she remained indifferent while the...

The Left, champions of strict separation of church and state, have come out in support of an American theocracy. How can this be? Could this possibly be the same political machine that ritualistically goes from town to town scanning courthouses for explicit references to God, or even worse, the Ten Commandments? Or the establishment telling little Susie she cannot pray at school? Or the organization forbidding the reading of scripture, even on a purely non-sectarian, academic basis? Surely we can't be talking about the same ideologues. But there is no mistake. The Left supports theocracy, as long as it is...

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 12.   “ Life Everlasting” Table of Contents     The closing article of the Apostles’ Creed is also the opening door to our spiritual life. In fact, in one sense everlasting life is the spiritual life. As understood in the Sacred Scriptures, eternal life begins at baptism (Romans 6:4). It is a new life, initiated by union with the death of Christ, which is symbolized and effected by baptism (Romans 6:4). It is death according to the flesh (Romans 8:12), but it is a resurrection from the life of sin (Romans 6:13). It is therefore a life...

"Why do we have to go to Mass?" is one of the most frequently asked questions that students address to their religion teachers, and recently I received an email from a former student asking for an article that he could share with his friends that answers that very question. There is obviously a scriptural basis for going to Mass, but there is also a basis in human reason. The human person is the subject of a host of duties. It is the virtue of justice that dictates how he ought to respond to those duties. Firstly, he has a duty...

Reality tells us there are only two religions in the world. There is the religion of human achievement, the religion of works, the religion of the flesh, the religion that says you can be good enough, holy enough, religious enough, spiritual enough. And there is the one other option, the religion of divine accomplishment, the religion of faith, grace, mercy and not of the flesh but of the Spirit and they do not mix. The scribes and the Pharisees were the architects of and the purveyors of and the exemplars of a religion of human achievement. Their salvation and acceptance...

[T]radition and [t]radition By Dr. Jeff Mirus | October 23, 2009 11:18 AM Yes, I know you’re tired of hearing about it, but one of our most faithful supporters, and a man whose opinion I deeply respect, has posted two highly critical comments in Sound Off in response to my In Depth Analysis from September 23rd, On Waffling, Tradition, and the Magisterium. Both posts challenge not just this particular article but more generally the manner in which I have always portrayed the conflict between Traditionalists and the Church.The posted criticisms assert three points: First, that my use of the term...

Featured Term (selected at random):NEPOTISM Preferment in ecclesiastical practice based on blood or family relationship rather than merit. Applied especially to the conferral of Church offices. Historically nepotism plagued the Church for centuries, was practiced by some of the popes, many bishops, and was one of the factors that led to the legislation of celibacy in the Western Church and to the Protestant Reformation. The most important legislation against nepotism was the bull Romanum decet Pontificem in 1692, of Pope Innocent XII. (Etym. Latin nepos, nephew.) All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, ©...

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 11.   “ The Resurrection of the Body” Table of Contents     We not only believe that the human soul is immortal, but that the human body is destined to rise immortal from the grave. Unlike our souls, which as spiritual substances are naturally immortal, our bodies are mortal by nature. They were not created subject to death, according to God’s original plan for mankind. But the sin of our first parents deprived them and their descendants of the gift of bodily immortality. All of us must die because we are all sinners.One of the great benefits...

Donna Steichen is a longtime investigative journalist who has written numerous articles in various Catholic publications. She is also the author of Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism (Ignatius Press, 1991), and editor of Prodigal Daughters: Catholic Women Come Home to the Church (Ignatius Press, 1999). Her most recent book, Chosen: How Christ Sent Twenty-three Surprised Converts to Replant His Vineyard (Ignatius, 2009), contains the inspiring and often surprising stories of men and women who were not drawn to the Church by sound evangelization programs, beautiful buildings and liturgies, or saintly witnesses among the clergy, but were...

by Emanuel A. Winston, Middle East Analyst & Commentator thelastcrusade.orgIn Tanach (the Jewish Bible), it speaks about the Nations of the North assembling and descending upon Israel in a conquest of savage killing. In the Prophecy the attacking Nations from the North succeed in occupying, first the lowlands along the sea and then they begin to ascend the foothills toward Jerusalem. They succeed with much carnage, raping, killing until the earth heaves; the skies turn black wherein a man cannot see to the end of his arm. This phenomenon speaks of volcanic ash so dense that nothing can be...

Featured Term (selected at random):EXTRAORDINARY MAGISTERIUM The Church's teaching office exercised in a solemn way, as in formal declarations of the Pope or of ecumenical councils of bishops approved by the Pope. When the extraordinary magisterium takes the form of papal definitions or conciliar decisions binding on the consciences of all the faithful in matters of faith and morals, it is infallible. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: – Revelation 22:18 I've seen some incredibly stupid and misguided initiatives by "conservatives" in my day, but this one takes the cake. Because the Bible has been rewritten to conform with the agenda of "liberals," a self-described "conservative" is spearheading an effort to rewrite it to his liking. If you think I'm joking, read on...

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 10.   “ The Forgiveness of Sins” Table of Contents     It is deeply significant that the Apostles’ Creed affirms our belief in the forgiveness of sins immediately after professing our faith in the holy Catholic Church. These two mysteries belong together. On Easter Sunday, Jesus told the two saddened disciples on the way to Emmaus: “You see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that in His name repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem”...

Featured Term (selected at random): LEGATE A LATERE A papal legate deputed by the Holy See for important missions of a temporary character. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 9.   “ The Holy Catholic Church: the Communion of Saints” Table of Contents     Having professed our faith in the Holy Spirit, we continue by professing to believe in the Holy Catholic Church, of which the Holy Spirit is the soul or source of her corporate life. In one sense, the Church began with the origins of the human race. God wants to save people not only as individuals but as members of society. Consequently the Church corresponds on the level of grace to our social existence on the level of nature.The foreshadowing of the Church...

Broken Keys by Ian Wolfe — October 21, 2009 And when [Jesus] had said this, he breathed on [the disciples] and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” John 20:23 The church has given to her ordained ministers through the gift of the Holy Spirit the power and authority to exercise the apostolic ministry to bind and loose sin.1 Traditionally Luther’s Small Catechism included a section on the Office of the Keys, although not written by Luther himself.2 I note...

It is my pleasure to be able to write on a subject where we as Catholics share so much common ground with our Reformed brothers, and even with most Evangelicals. In fact, it is no small thing that we agree upon foundational truths contra mundum in a time when even many Christians deny them.This article intends to show that, though Protestants agree with the Catholic Church on the basic truths about Scripture and its authority, the Reformed view of Scripture errs in three respects: in its assumption about the canon of Scripture, in its view of the authority of Scripture,...

Featured Term (selected at random):POPE Title of the visible head of the Catholic Church. He is called Pope (Greek pappas, a child's word for father) because his authority is supreme and because it is to be exercised in a paternal way, after the example of Christ. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

I was talking with a friend the other day. He’s a fellow convert who (as is common with us) was wondering why on earth Catholics who don’t believe much of what the Church teaches stay . He was greatly puzzled about the tendency of many life-long Catholics to remain quite proudly Catholic despite the fact that much of what the Church insists we must believe is something they flatly reject in favor or whatever the latest Oprahism is on the tube. Equally puzzling, both during this pontificate and the last one, is the common tendency of many Catholics–usually cradle Catholics–to...

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 8.   “ I Believe in the Holy Spirit” Table of Contents     The best way to understand what we mean by our profession of faith in the Holy Spirit is to compare it with our faith in the Son of God. In God there is intellect and will, corresponding to thinking and loving in human beings. Scripture identifies the mind of God with the Word of God, as St. John tells us: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). “So, just as the Word...

Coalition of Reason An advertisement that promotes atheism will run in a dozen subway stations in Manhattan for a month starting next Monday. Atheism is coming to the subway — or at least subway ads promoting it are. Starting next Monday, a coalition of local groups will run a monthlong advertising campaign in a dozen Manhattan subway stations with the slogan “A Million New Yorkers Are Good Without God. Are You?” The posters also advertise the Web site BigAppleCoR.org, which provides a listing of local groups affiliated with the Coalition of Reason, the umbrella organization that coordinated the campaign.

What is your first response when you hear someone refer to the mother of Jesus Christ as the “Co-redemptrix�? Extreme? Excessive pietism, even if well-intended? Heresy? Only Jesus is the Redeemer. If not directly heresy, then extremely dangerous? At least anti-ecumenical? At best confusing?Witness of the Saints Now let’s look at some people who have in fact called the Virgin Mary the Co-redemptrix: John Paul II (on six different occasions); Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta; St. Padre Pio, stigmatic wonder worker of the 20th century; Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary; St. Francis Cabrini, the first American citizen to be canonized;...

Featured Term (selected at random):FEELING A conscious state or experience. More particularly in scholastic philosophy an experience of the external or internal senses, namely of sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste, and bodily, or somatic, sensation. Feeling is often simply equated with emotion, but emotion can also be spiritual, whereas feeling is, properly speaking, in the material order. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

My friends have often heard me say, “The more I read my Bible the less dispensational I become.”This statement comes from someone who was spiritually nurtured in churches with dispensational theology, who graduated from a Christian university steeped in dispensational theology, who received his first graduate degree from a dispensational seminary, and who—for twelve years—preached sermons that reflected dispensational theology. For the first sixteen years of my Christian life, I rarely questioned the fundamental distinctions of dispensational theology. What are those distinctions? In his discussion of what he called the “sine qua non of dispensationalism,”Ryrie asserted:“A dispensationalist keeps Israel and...

Church members from Utah and abroad gathered on Friday to hear some Book of Mormon stories their teachers have never told them. The lessons centered around Mesoamerica, including Mexico and Guatemala, as the most likely setting for Book of Mormon peoples and events at the 7th annual Book of Mormon Lands Conference at the Red Lion Hotel in Salt Lake City. The conference drew 280 attendees — the conference’s biggest crowd ever — as a result of key speakers such as Dr. John L. Lund, Joseph Allen and Jerry L. Ainsworth, said Stephen L. Carr, senior vice president of the...

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 7.   “ From Thence He Shall Come to Judge the Living and the Dead” Table of Contents     There is only one final judge of the human race. It is God by whom the world was first created and to whom we are destined in eternity to return. What may be less obvious is that this same Almighty God became man in the person of Christ. Consequently, Jesus Christ has the divine right to judge all mankind. Immediately we distinguish between the Lord judging us individually at the moment of death, and judging us as the...

Since its inception in 1830, the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) has denied any continuous historical connection with Christianity. Mormonism's founder Joseph Smith, claimed that in 1820 God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in the woods near his home in Palmyra, New York. Jesus said that for the proceeding 1700 years (give or take a century — Mormonism can't say exactly) the world had been living in the darkness of a total apostasy from the gospel. This was the answer to a question young Smith had been pondering. "My object in going to...

Featured Term (selected at random):LITANY OF THE SACRED HEART Invocations of Jesus Christ under the title of the Sacred Heart, authorized for recitation in the universal Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1899. After the customary petitions to the Persons of the Holy Trinity, the litany contains thirty-three invocations of the Heart of Jesus. Each invocation reflects an aspect of God's love symbolized by the physical Heart of Christ, the Son of God who became man and died out of love for sinful mankind. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life....

Traditional Holy Mass Propers † Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost † † Feast of Blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint Luke, Martyr † Missa Mihi autem nimis honoráti sunt amici tui, Deus ( "....To me thy friends, O God, are made exceedingly honorable...." ) 18 October 2009 Anno Dómini "....Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not...." "Nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us.I could attend Mass forever, and not be tired.It is not a mere form of words; it is a great action.The greatest action that can...

Part One:  The Apostles’ Creed 6.   “ He Ascended into Heaven, and is Seated at the Right Hand of God, The Father Almighty” Table of Contents     Jesus Christ arose from the dead and remained upon earth in visible form for forty days. On the fortieth day, He ascended into heaven. As described by St. Luke, Jesus had just finished telling His disciples they would receive the power of the Holy Spirit: When He had said these things, while they looked on, He was raised up. And a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they were beholding Him...