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AQUINAS "Our church does not use musical instruments, as harps and psalteries, to praise God withal, that she may not seem to Judaize." (Thomas Aquinas, Bingham's Antiquities, Vol. 3, page 137) AUGUSTINE "musical instruments were not used. The pipe, tabret, and harp here associate so intimately with the sensual heathen cults, as well as with the wild revelries and shameless performances of the degenerate theater and circus, it is easy to understand the prejudices against their use in the worship." (Augustine 354 A.D., describing the singing at Alexandria under Athanasius) CHRYSOSTOM "David formerly sang songs, also today we sing hymns....

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, by Abbé Augustin Barruél The years 1796 to 1798 saw the publication of two important presentations of evidence concerning an international conspiracy, then only decades old, which had devastated France and was threatening the entire civilized world. That conspiracy had coalesced into a continuing organizational structure with the founding of the Order of the Illuminati by Adam Weishaupt on May 1, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. The conspirators in the Order came from the top levels of society, and their ultimate goal was the destruction of all existing religious and political institutions, all forms...

Lent is a special time of prayer, penance, sacrifice and good works in preparation of the celebration of Easter. In the desire to renew the liturgical practices of the Church, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican Council II stated, "The two elements which are especially characteristic of Lent — the recalling of baptism or the preparation for it, and penance — should be given greater emphasis in the liturgy and in liturgical catechesis. It is by means of them that the Church prepares the faithful for the celebration of Easter, while they hear God's word more frequently...

THE HISTORY OF LENT by Abbot Gueranger O.S.B. The forty days' fast, which we call Lent,[1] is the Church's preparation for Easter, and was instituted at the very commencement of Christianity. Our blessed Lord Himself sanctioned it by fasting forty days and forty nights in the desert; and though He would not impose it on the world by an express commandment (which, in that case, could not have been open to the power of dispensation), yet He showed plainly enough, by His own example, that fasting, which God had so frequently ordered in the old Law, was to be...

Has anyone noticed the almost complete disappearance of Protestants from our nation? "What!" I can hear my readers exclaim, "Storck has really gone off his rocker this time. Why, just down the street there's an Assembly of God church and two or three Baptist churches and the Methodists and so on. My cousin just left the Catholic Church to become a Protestant and my niece just married one. Moreover, evangelical Protestants have many media outlets of their own and they have great influence in the Bush Administration. They're everywhere." All this, of course, is true. Except that for some...

It's still a jolt for some people to realize this, but the Bible did not fall down out of the sky, leather-bound and gold-monogrammed with the words of Christ in red, in 95 AD.  Rather the canon of Christian Scripture slowly developed over a period of about 1500 years.  That does not mean, of course, that Scripture was being written for 1500 years after the life of Christ.  Rather, it means that it took the Church some fifteen centuries to formally and definitively state which books out of the great mass of early Christian and pseudo-Christian books constituted the Bible....

So here I am facing another Minnesota winter, looking to expand my mind. Naturally I turn to "The Winter & Spring 2006 Community Education Catalog" of the Eden Prairie, Minnesota public schools, where I see the very first course offering is Da Vinci Code Historical Seminar Did you find the historical events in the 2003 fictional best-seller interesting but too fantastic to believe? Actually, most of the background items cited in the book were tied to events purportedly recorded in history. I struggled with "purportedly recorded" for a while, but decided to move on. As the rest of the description...

It is clear from the New Testament (Mk 1:29-31; Mt 8:14-15; Lk 4:38-39; 1 Tim 3:2, 12; Tit 1:6) that at least the Apostle Peter had been married, and that bishops, presbyters and deacons of the Primitive Church were often family men. It is also clear from epigraphy, the testimony of the Fathers, synodal legislation, papal decretals and other sources that in the following centuries, a married clergy, in greater or lesser numbers was a normal feature of the life of the Church. Even married popes are known to us.1 And yet, paradoxically, one has to desist, when faced with...

Some past scholars and popular opinion have held that the Byzantine Greco-Slav Schism (causing the emergence of the present Eastern Orthodox communion) was consummated in the days of the Patriarch Photius of Constantinople (858-886 A.D.). Yet others have thought that the schism between Rome and Byzantium was complete when the Queen City on the Bosphorus saw Roman Cardinals and the Patriarch Michael Cerularius engage in mutual excommunications in 1054 A.D. Actually, it was at the end of the 13th century that the Byzantine Greek church (constituted by the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) together with its offshoot Slav...

I will address the topic of Christianity and Islam by limiting myself to a brief presentation of historical facts, without entering into the specifics of religious and theological dialogue. This seems useful to me, because the celebration of the fifth centenary of the birth of Pius V was a bit muted, especially in academic circles. The victor at Lepanto in 1571, this pope who had the courage and the energy to construct an alliance of almost all the Christian kingdoms against the Ottoman empire – which was advancing to threaten Europe and had already established dominion over the Balkans –...

Central to the early Christian community was an ethic which, on the one hand, condemned violence and bloodshed and, on the other, vigorously upheld the sanctity of life. Such an ethic had, and still has, manifold ramifications. In the case of the early Christians, it led them not only to shun the violent “pastimes” of the Roman arena, but also to eschew participation in the militarism of the Roman state. Of great import with regard to our contemporary scene, this ethic led the early Church to articulate a clear position concerning the treatment of the unborn. In the following paper,...

On the same day when the Vatican made public Benedict XVI’s message for the World Day of Peace next January 1, cardinal secretary of state Angelo Sodano sponsored a meeting at the Pontifical Lateran University — the grand chancellor of which is the pope’s vicar, cardinal Camillo Ruini. The meeting focused on a topic crucial for the Church’s geopolitics: “Christianity and Islam, Yesterday and Today.” In his message, Benedict XVI pointed to “nihilism” and “religious fanaticism” as the two deep sources of Islamist terrorism. But the analysis at the December 13 meeting at the Lateran concentrated above all on the...

One day in a spring, an elderly man walked alone on a stone road lined by young willows in Xuzhou in East China's Jiangsu Province. At the end of the road was a museum that few people have heard of. A Chinese theology professor says the first Christmas is depicted in the stone relief from the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220). In the picture above a woman and a man are sitting around what looks like a manger, with allegedly "the three wise men" approaching from the left side, holding gifts, "the shepherd" following them, and "the assassins" queued...

On New Year's Day, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson received a gift of mythic proportions. Amid great fanfare, a mammoth cheese was delivered to the White House by the itinerant Baptist preacher John Leland. It measured more than four feet in diameter, thirteen feet in circumference, and seventeen inches in height; once cured, it weighed 1,235 pounds.The colossal cheese was made by the staunchly Republican, Baptist citizens of Cheshire, a small farming community in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. The religious dissenters created the cheese to commemorate Jefferson's long-standing devotion to religious liberty and to celebrate his recent electoral victory...

Christian faith in reason and in progress was the foundation on which Western success was achieved. When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and Islamic nations were "backward" by comparison with 15th-century Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many civilizations had pursued alchemy,...

The residents of early New England were strongly influenced by the traditions of Calvinism and the routine of the established Congregational church, honoring hard work and stern independence, which were interpreted as self-sufficiency. They were proud of observing Thanksgiving as the most important day of the year and self-righteous in refusing to observe Christmas day, which they considered an emblem of the Roman Catholic Church. The Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists also followed the teachings of John Calvin and chose not to celebrate Christmas. It was a day when farmers slaughtered hogs and farm wives dipped their candles. "It was remembered,"...

According to conventional wisdom, Christmas had its origin in a pagan winter solstice festival, which the church co-opted to promote the new religion. In doing so, many of the old pagan customs crept into the Christian celebration. But this view is apparently a historical myth—like the stories of a church council debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or that medieval folks believed the earth is flat—often repeated, even in classrooms, but not true. William J. Tighe, a history professor at Muhlenberg College, gives a different account in his article "Calculating Christmas," published in the...

THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION (Part 2) BY KARL ADAM Translated by Cecily Hastings CANTERBURY BOOKS SHEED AND WARD INC. 840 BROADWAY NEW YORK 3 NIHIL OBSTAT: MICHAEL P. NOONAN, S.M., CENSOR DEPUTATUS IMPRIMATUR: + RICHARD J. CUSHING, ARCHBISHOP OF BOSTON BOSTON, MARCH 22, 1951 This book is a large part of "One and Holy," a translation of "Una Sancta in katholischer Sicht," published by Patmos-Verlag, Dusseldorf.CONTENTS WEAKNESS IN THE CHURCH Rome Germany LUTHER The Final Break The Mystery of Luther The Doctrine of Justification Christendom Divided The New Rule of Faith Salvation by Faith Alone Priesthood and Sacraments The...

THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION (Part 1) BY KARL ADAM Translated by Cecily Hastings CANTERBURY BOOKSSHEED AND WARD INC. 840 BROADWAY NEW YORK 3 NIHIL OBSTAT: MICHAEL P. NOONAN, S.M., CENSOR DEPUTATUS IMPRIMATUR: + RICHARD J. CUSHING, ARCHBISHOP OF BOSTON BOSTON, MARCH 22, 1951 This book is a large part of "One and Holy," a translation of "Una Sancta in katholischer Sicht," published by Patmos-Verlag, Dusseldorf. CONTENTS WEAKNESS IN THE CHURCH Rome Germany LUTHER The Final Break The Mystery of Luther The Doctrine of Justification Christendom Divided The New Rule of Faith Salvation by Faith Alone Priesthood and Sacraments The...

Five weeks ago we started our study on the History of the Reformation. We started with Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg and then worked our way backward from that wonderfully, historic event. Now my purpose in doing that was to show that Luther’s action was not really the beginning of the Reformation but was rather the culmination of a whole series of reforms and protests, reforms and protests that had begun much earlier. That is why I wanted to show the connection between Luther and Huss and then between Huss and Wycliffe....