Free Republic

Unearthed in the central Turkish region of Cappadocia, the unique church contains remarkable frescoesLast February, archaeologists unearthed a unique rock-carved underground church in Nevsehir, in the central Turkish region of Cappadocia. The church was decorated with never before seen frescoes depicting JesusÂ’ Ascension, the Final Judgement, Jesus feeding the multitudes, and portraits of saints and prophets. The discovery, made during excavations and cleaning operations in an underground city recently uncovered as part of an urban project in Nevsehir, is located within a castle that might date back to the fifth century. Authorities expect it will make Cappadocia an even more...

A 1,500-year-old church which was buried under debris from an earthquake for more than a millennium has reopened to the public after a painstaking restoration of some of the world’s earliest Christian art. The sixth-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua is located in the ancient Roman Forum, at the bottom of the Palatine Hill, where Roman emperors lived for centuries in sumptuous palaces.

Patricius: The True Story of St. Patrick Before all the festivities focused on shamrocks and leprechauns and good luck wishes, there was truly something to celebrate: a man willing to stand in the gap for Jesus Christ. It was an act of defiance that changed the course of a nation. Patrick lit a fire in pagan 5th century Ireland, ushering Christianity into the country. Who was this man who became the patron saint of Ireland? Ireland was a beautiful island shrouded in terrible darkness. Warlords and druids ruled the land. But across the sea in Britain, a teen-ager was poised...

He Warned Us About Islam Over 750 Years Ago… It’s Time To Listen. St. Thomas Aquinas is considered one of the most revered philosophers and theologians of any era. A 13th-century Dominican friar, his works include the “Summa Theologica” and several groundbreaking commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Over 750 years ago, he also had some prescient words about the spread of Islam, shared via Breitbart. In his work “Summa Contra Gentiles” — in which he argued for the truth of Christianity against other religions — he blasted Islam as a carnal, brutal religion which seemed to place earthly pleasures...

Unsurprisingly, then, during the 8th century, Muslims began to conceive of the world as divided between the House of Islam and a Christian 'House of War', sinister in its disbelief, obdurate in its defiance of the message of the Holy Koran. Sayings became attributed to Muhammad which cast warfare in the cause of the Muslim God as a duty of the Faithful, such as: 'I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.' ' Slaughtering Christians was cast not merely as an option for dutiful Muslims, but as a positive obligation. One veteran...

The Islamic State has managed to destroy two thousand years of Christian civilization in the Middle East in just a couple of years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted on The O’Reilly Factor last week. And he placed the blame squarely on President Obama’s cowardly, feckless, incompetent foreign policy.ISIS has been spreading across the Middle East like a plague of locusts, and as they have spread, they have targeted religious minorities, particularly Christians, for destruction. In Syria, tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have been attacked and displaced.They are the forgotten refugees.A Catholic priest who visited Kurdish Iraq last fall described...

In the days of the early church – I’m thinking specifically of the 2nd century – Christian apologists had to defend the faith against false charges, accusations, and misrepresentations. One such apologist, Athenagoras (d. 200 AD?), wrote a booklet to Roman rulers called A Plea for the Christians. This apology by Athenagoras is still quite relevant today because it discusses things we still talk about today. I’ll come back to this booklet later, but for now I want to point out what this 2nd century Christian apologist said about sexual immorality and homosexuality. Athenagoras refuted the claim or accusation that...

Historians speculate that early settler leader could have been a Catholic spy Historians have discovered four bodies and a mystery Catholic reliquary under the first English Protestant church in America.In an extraordinary turn of events, graves have been discovered under what used to be the floor of America’s first Protestant church in Jamestown, Virginia – the church where Pocahontas married the English colonist John Rolfe.The graves include the bodies of Captain William West, who was killed by Indians, Rev Robert Hunt, Jamestown’s first Anglican minister and Sir Ferdinando Wainman, the first English knight buried in America. The grave of...

Definition of Sola Scriptura Sola Scriptura: the reformed Protestant belief that the Scriptures alone are the final and only infallible authority for the Christian. This does not mean that Scriptures are the only authority (nuda or solo Scriptura), as Protestants believe in the authority of tradition, reason, experience, and emotions to varying degrees (after all, “sola scriptura” itself is an authoritative tradition in Protestantism). It does mean that Scripture trumps all other authorities (it is the norma normans sed non normata Lat. “norm that norms which is not normed”). Scripture is the norma normans sed non normata “norm that norms which is...

Last week I was writing about Magna Carta and how the Catholic Church’s role has been written out, in particular the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. But the same could also be said about much of English history from 600AD to 1600; from the very first law code written in English, which begins with a clause protecting Church property, to the intellectual flourishing of the 13th century, led by churchmen such as Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar who foresaw air travel. However, the whitewashing of English Catholic history is mainly seen in three areas: political liberty, economic...

The nineteenth century witnessed the conversions of two prominent Anglican clergymen to Roman Catholicism. Both men would ultimately become cardinals in the Roman Church, and both men would profoundly influence Roman Catholic theology. The first was John Henry Newman (1801–1890). The second was Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892). Newman is probably most well known for his involvement in the high church Oxford Movement and for his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Manning is best known for his advocacy of social justice and for his strong support of the doctrine of papal infallibility following his conversion to Rome. He...

Okay, so it isn't really Catholic thing per se, but the origin of April Fool's Day is actually found in the Church. A lot of people don't know this, so here's how the story goes. On February 24, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued the papal bull Inter Gravissimas which established the Gregorian calendar (which gets it's name from this pope) as the official calendar for the Christian world. With this pronouncement, the Julian calendar was replaced and the first day of the new year was moved to January 1. Those who continued to observe it on April 1, whether out...

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”  But how does one know such a danger exists unless one already possesses an interest in, and respect for, people who lived and thought and wrote in the past?  And in order to avoid this historical pitfall, the assumption must exist that people in the past actually have things to say to us that we need to know, an assumption that may not be as accepted as it once was.  C.S. Lewis talked about the threat of “presentism,” the idea that our current time is the most developed and that...

FacebookTwitterEmailMore Obama, like many before him, excuses Islamic State because the Christians did it first President Obama took to the floor during Thursday morning’s National Prayer Breakfast. He defended IS by saying the Christians did it first with the Crusades. So let’s actually look at how Islamic Jihad has spread across North Africa and Europe.  The image above shows the Muslim conquest battles and by comparison, the image below shows the areas where the Crusades took place.That seems a lot less than President Obama would have you believeNow what the short video that explains the difference between an aggressive Muslim expansion...

"And so we encounter another oddity of Hanukkah: Jews know the fuller history of the holiday because Christians preserved the books that the Jews themselves lost. In a further twist, Jews in the Middle Ages encountered the story of the martyred mother and her seven sons anew in Christian literature and once again placed it in the time of the Maccabees."

It has laid largely unstudied in a university library for more than 100 years. But now a 1,500-year-old papyrus has been identified as one of the world’s earliest surviving Christian charms. The ‘remarkable’ document contains some of the earliest documented references to The Last Supper and sheds new light on early Christian practices, experts say.

As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the word "crusade" in his remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked...

Pope Francis incenses the altar during Mass in the Upper Room on May 26, 2014. Credit: EWTN. Jerusalem, Israel, May 26, 2014 / 09:44 am (CNA/EWTN News).- At the conclusion of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope Francis focused his homily at Mass on the significance of the Upper Room, held to be the site of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus' apostles. “It is a great gift that the Lord has given us by bringing us together here in the Upper Room for the celebration of the Eucharist,” said Pope Francis on May 26 in Jerusalem....

. . . . For centuries, the English have been taught that the late medieval Church was superstitious, corrupt, exploitative, and alien. Above all, we were told that King Henry VIII and the people of England despised its popish flummery and primitive rites. England was fed up to the back teeth with the ignorant mumbo-jumbo magicians of the foreign Church, and up and down the country Tudor people preferred plain-speaking, rational men like Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin. Henry VIII achieved what all sane English and Welsh people had long desired ­– an excuse to break away from an anachronistic subjugation...

Pope Francis and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded words on Monday over the language spoken by Jesus two millennia ago. "Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew," Netanyahu told Francis, at a public meeting in Jerusalem in which the Israeli leader cited a strong connection between Judaism and Christianity. "Aramaic," the pope interjected. "He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew," Netanyahu shot back. Like many things in the Middle East, where the pope is on the last leg of a three-day visit, modern-day discourse about Jesus is complicated and often political. A Jew, Jesus was born in...