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December 1, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- I am a parish priest, a pastor of a typical suburban American parish who tries, as kindly and patiently as I can, to help people who often have not been well-formed in their Catholic faith to understand what the Church teaches and why. My repeated experience is that people are grateful when a priest explains to them the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as most adult Catholics today readily admit that they generally have not been well catechized. Like many of my brother priests, I have been concerned by the two...

The History of AdventFr. William Saunders The liturgical season of Advent marks the time of spiritual preparation by the faithful before Christmas. Advent begins on the Sunday closest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (November 30). It spans four Sundays and four weeks of preparation, although the last week of Advent is usually truncated because of when Christmas falls.The celebration of Advent has evolved in the spiritual life of the Church. The historical origins of Advent are hard to determine with great precision. In its earliest form, beginning in France, Advent was a period of preparation for the...

Preparing Our Hearts and Minds for AdventConstance T. Hull This Sunday the Church begins her new liturgical year with the season of Advent. In the hustle and bustle of the secular Christmas season, it is an often-overlooked season. It is a time when the Church calls us as our Mother to enter into the silence and hope of waiting. Many of us live in cultures of instant gratification, so Advent is rich in spiritual truths. Christmas trees, elves, lights, and holiday decorations seem to show up in stores earlier and earlier. The day after Halloween gave way to Christmas. Here...

Advent: The Real Meaning of Christmas LightsMarcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D. As fall moves onward towards winter we have places to go, things to do, people to meet. Yet as we go about our business, we notice the days are getting shorter. Sweaters come out of storage, we close the windows, and turn on the heat.Advent is a season where we stop and remember that the light of this world is waning in more ways than one. That the world as we know it is passing away.The world “secular” comes from the Latin word for this present world with its priorities–getting a...

"God . . . has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Heb. 1:1-3). Christ is superior to everyone and everything. The book of Hebrews was addressed to an audience composed of Jewish Christians, Jewish non-Christians who were intellectually convinced about Jesus but...

“Although [Christ] existed in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Christ is the perfect example of humility. In his book Miracles, English scholar C.S. Lewis used this analogy to describe the incarnation of Christ: One may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing...

I haven’t written in this space for some time, but now that the election is over some additional interventions seem necessary to capture what’s happening in Roman Catholicism’s remarkable period of controversy. My Sunday column talked a bit about the way in which varying interpretations of “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on the family, have produced variations in official Catholic teaching on marriage from diocese to diocese, region to region – a “submerged schism,” to borrow a phrase from the Vatican-watcher Andrea Gagliarducci, which thanks to the astringent words of certain bishops is no longer even that submerged.One reading of...

UPDATE 1 Dec:This we now read at Religion Confidencial: Religión Confidencial publicó el martes una noticia que ponía en boca de monseñor Pio Vito Pinto, decano de la Rota Romana, la afirmación de que los cuatro cardenales que han escrito al Papa “podrían perder el cardenalato”. La frase, tomada de una entrevista realizada por RC en la que monseñor Vito respondía en italiano, no es correcta. Revisada la grabación, se ha comprobado que lo que afirma es que el Papa Francisco no es un Papa de otros tiempos, en los que sí se tomaron ese tipo de medidas, y...

News reports are featuring famous athletes, actors, and pop-stars being asked about abortion and gay-marriage. Often, they criticize Christians: "Doesn't the Bible say 'judge not'; who are you to tell people what they can, and cannot do?" Unfortunately, misrepresentation of this Scripture is common among the media and other groups who often misquote Jesus' words from Matthew 7:1, "Judge not, that you be not judged." Ironically, few reference another scripture that also deals with judging, John 7:24. Here Jesus encourages His followers to "judge with righteous judgment." At first, these two scriptures may seem contradictory, but when we look at...

Lately I came across an interesting bit of theologizing. The author (who shall remain nameless) spoke of his love for Psalm 139 (“one of my absolute favorite psalms”). In it he said that “right smack dab in the middle of this Psalm, King David calls for God to slay his enemies and declares that he has nothing but hatred for them”. He refers, of course, to verse 21: “Do not I hate them that who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe them that rise up against You? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my...

Do You Want to Have a Good Christmas? Then Listen Carefully to this Advent Message: “You Need a Savior!” Msgr. Charles Pope • November 30, 2016 • One of the goals of Advent (in many ways a penitential season) is to meditate on our need for a savior. In daily Mass and in the Liturgy of the Hours, we read lengthy passages from Isaiah and the other prophets, who speak boldly and bluntly about the people’s sin. Some of the passages are even a bit humorous. Here are a few: Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the LORD...

Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.( 2 John 9)The Apostle John’s ministry is a ministry of restoration. There were (and are) many whose faith in Jesus, understanding of God, prayer life, interpretation of scripture, ministry and ethics, have been corrupted and distorted by false christian teachers who have redefined what it means to know God. This is still the case today, and the need for John’s epistles is yet vital to the church. To John, the Lord’s...

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s governing body, the Holy Synod, has formally rejected the Pan-Orthodox Council and its conclusions, it emerged from an announcement in Sofia on November 29. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church declined to attend the council, held in Crete in June, after its call for the Pan-Orthodox Council to be postponed was not heeded. It was among four autocephalous Orthodox churches that refused to attend, along with the Patriarchate of Antioch, the Georgian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. The event in Crete was “neither Great, nor Pan, nor Pan-Orthodox,” the Holy Synod said in its November 29...

Pope Francis greets Stephen Hawking (CNS photo/L'Osservatore Romano) The Pontiff addressed the meeting held by Pontifical Academy of Sciences Pope addressed experts, including Prof Stephen Hawking, at a session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (November 25-29) convened to discuss the impact of scientific knowledge and technology on people and the planet.The Pope told them that humanity does not own God’s gift of creation and has no right to pillage it“We are not custodians of a museum and its masterpieces that we have to dust off every morning, but rather collaborators in the conservation and development of the existence and biodiversity...

The week of November 14 to 21st, 2016 will be remembered as the one in which open war was finally declared between the two long-contending factions in the Catholic Church. And while this has caused a lot of wailing and lamenting, the truth is I have never been so happy and contented to be a traditional Catholic than I am under this pontificate of madness. Everything I thought about the modern, post-conciliar Church is being demonstrated to be true every day.Four senior cardinals revealed to the Catholic world the fact that Pope Francis has refused — in essence — to...

All of the tweets are posted in the article at the link. Almost two weeks ago I reported on the bizarre social media behavior of Antonio Spadaro, the Pope's "mouthpiece" and editor of the influential Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica. He had used Twitter in various ways to attack the "four cardinals" who had submitted the "dubia" to Pope Francis. This included using screenshots of the movie trilogy Lord of the Rings to equate the Pope's opponents with grotesque fictional villains. Spadaro appeared to be conflicted about the appropriateness of his actions. He alternated between acting like a man with something to...

For more than three years a Bergoglian mafia of handpicked soldiers in clerical garb and miters has been conducting the Capo di Tutti Capi’s relentless campaign to rub out the bimillenial teaching and discipline of the Church respecting divorced and “remarried” persons living in what even John Paul II’s often nebulous Catechism calls “a situation of permanent and public adultery.” The hit list includes the teaching of both of the Capo’s two immediate predecessors that “under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual...

I mean, I do like Pope Francis. I’ve defended Pope Francis. I want to believe—I really want to believe—that footnote 351 of Amoris Laetitia can (and should) be read consistently with Familiaris Consortio 84. I have argued as much multiple times on this wery blog.Footnote 351 of Amoris Laetitia says that “in some cases” couples who are in an irregular marital union but unable to separate for the sake of children can “receive the help of the sacraments.” The main text (par. 305) refers to such a couple as being in “an objective situation of sin,” even if “not subjectively...

The Bridegroom Comes! A Reflection on the Great Wedding Feast That Advent Announces Msgr. Charles Pope • November 29, 2016 • The coming of Christ at Christmas was as an infant and thus we don’t usually think of wedding imagery. Yet since the first coming of Christ has certainly already been fulfilled, we now focus more on His second coming, of which the first coming is a sacramental reminder.Thus, in Advent, our longing and excitement are also directed to His glorious second coming. Mother Church, the New Jerusalem, our Mother, looks for her groom Jesus to come again all...

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us…(I John 1:1-2)The Final of the three simple, theological propositions set forth by the apostle John, in his restorative ministry to those whose faith had been distorted due to the gnostics is this; …Jesus Christ has come (and remains)...