We we all take that express escalator straight to heaven? "Catholic" means "universal" but "Catholicism" does not mean "Universalism". Universalism is the false doctrine that everybody will be saved. This is a sentimental belief held by people who are so cushioned from the realities of life that they don't know anybody who deserves hell [...]
Is Mercy Marshmallow Mushy? My article for Aleteia this week considers the matter of mercy. Too often mercy is no more than soft sentimentality. It's like marshmallows: soft, fluffy, sweet and lacking in nutrition. “The mushy bits” were the soft, sweet, sentimental parts of the story. Those were the bits for the girls [...]
It was Mother Teresa who said, I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is 'Abortion', because it is a war against the child... A direct killing of the innocent child, 'Murder' by the mother herself... And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people [...]
Did you help by donating to the campaign I ran last Fall to help build our new church? Thanks to you we have now had the ground breaking ceremony and the earth movers have begun their work. Joseph Pronechen has written a great article about the new church at National Catholic Register here. Today they are [...]
From what we know so far a "disgruntled employee" Bryce Williams walks up and shoots dead twenty four year old Alison Parker and twenty seven year old Adam Ward. This continues a stream of mindless violence in our society that seems to be surging. Social engineers will say, "People respond like this because they're poor. They [...]
Working in the Bible Belt we Catholics often come across Protestants who are being led to the Catholic Church. However, their path seems to be littered with land mines. There seem to be so many obstacles and one of the things which a Catholic finds curious is how the enquiring Protestant usually doesn't have a sense [...]
I wrote a hastily and ill informed blog post about Archbishop Cupich yesterday in the midst of my travels back from Arizona. I took the post down and stopped to do what I should have done first, and that is to read not just the headlines but the article, and not just the article, but the original [...]
In many of the discussions about women's ordination in the Catholic Church the question is linked to the idea of married priests. Catholic progressives almost invariably link the two issues. "Priests should be allowed to marry and women should be ordained as priests." It's understandable that people with a shallow grasp of their faith would link [...]
Women Priests? My latest article for CRUX is posted here. It discusses the new wave of Catholic feminists and their response to the "closed door" on women's ordination. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis recognized the “many women who share pastoral responsibilities with priests, helping guide people, families, and groups, and offering new contributions to theological [...]
DL and Joseph Pearce at Oxborough Hall Catholic Herald in the UK asked for an article about my recent pilgrimage to England with Joseph Pearce. My 10 years as a Catholic layman in England was somewhat of an exile in the wilderness. It was therefore with mixed emotions that I accepted biographer Joseph Pearce’s [...]