This afternoon, I gave a talk to the returning teachers at Christ the King on the virtue of study. I made four basic points:
1) Reason is good, and ordered towards God, since all truth is of the Holy Spirit.
2) Therefore, studiousness is a virtue that we ought to practice.
3) This is particularly true of Catholic school teachers, given their unique calling.
4) Studiousness must be rooted in prayer, and should help us to pray better.
Here’s the text of the full talk:
Today is the Feast of the Assumption, in which we Catholics celebrate that the Virgin Mary, at the conclusion of her earthly life, was taken up into Heaven, body and soul. For Protestants and even many Catholics, it’s a hard doctrine to swallow. Here are five reasons that I believe in it (besides the fact that the Church infallibly teaches it).
St. Thérèse was only 24 years old when she died in 1897, but she quickly became one of the most famous Saints in the world. Pope St. John Paul II declared her a “Doctor of the Church” for her spiritual writings. So what can we learn from this St. Thérèse, the “Little Flower?” That’s the theme of this talk that I gave at Christ the King on July 26th. I look first at the way her holiness was tied to the holiness of her family (and the importance of living married life well) and then her distinctive teachings on prayer, especially her famous “Little Way,” that Pope Pius XI described as a sure path of salvation.
St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, a parish priest in a small town in France, became world famous and, after his death, was declared the patron saint of parish priests around the world. Pope John XXIII marked the 100th anniversary of his death with an encyclical on the priesthood, and Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed the Year for Priests in 2009 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Vianney’s death. So what did this extraordinary parish priest have to say to laypeople about how to pray? Listen to this talk to find out!
St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the Apostle John, wrote a series of letters somewhere about c. 107-110, en route to his martyrdom in Rome. These letters are richly Catholic, so much so that the Reformer John Calvin was convinced that they couldn’t be authentic. So how do we know that they are?
Most of us aren’t called to be priests or monks or nuns, yet so many spiritual authors assume that their readers live in convents, monasteries, or rectories. So what about the spiritual life of everyone else? Here are three takes on holiness in daily life (from St. Francis de Sales, Blessed John Henry Newman, and… Continue reading Holiness in Daily Life: St. Francis de Sales, Blessed John Henry Newman, and St. Josemaría Escrivá
Tonight (July 7th), from 6-7 pm Central, I’m going to be on Catholic Answers Live talking about Protestantism and the early Church. The conversation was sparked by a post I wrote a while back called 6 Early Christian Controversies That Protestantism Can’t Explain. In it, I talk about the desire of many Protestants to return to… Continue reading TONIGHT, Catholic Answers Live: Protestantism & Early Church History
Continuing the series on “the Saints and prayer,” I spoke yesterday on prayer and the Eastern Church Fathers. I wanted them as a change of pace for two reasons: I find that Catholics in the West are much more familiar with Western Church Fathers like Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Leo, than they are with Eastern… Continue reading The Eastern Church Fathers on Prayer
If you want to learn how to pray, where better to turn than to Jesus Christ Himself? Here’s what we can learn from watching Him pray, and from listening to Him teach us how to pray.
When Catholics talk about praying to Mary, a classic Protestant objection is “but I can go directly to Jesus!” To that, I’d say, “True, you could go to Jesus alone… but if you pray to Mary, you and the Virgin Mary can go directly to Jesus!” The “why not just go directly to Jesus” objection points to one of the real differences between Catholics and Protestants on this question: we Catholics believe that some people’s prayers are more efficacious than others.
