Catholics believe in the infallibility of the Church and of the pope. This serves as both a teacher of, and an important check to, our personal interpretations of Scripture. If I understand a passage of Scripture to be teaching X, and X is a conclusion contrary to the teachings of the Church, I can be… Continue reading The Protestant Fallacy That Threatens to Undermine Christianity
Tag: Church
Reason #10 to Reject the Reformation: The Grand Finale
Today, we arrive at the last of St. Edmund Campion’s Ten Reasons to reject the Reformation, and it’s a doozy. It turns out, he spent many of the prior nine reasons crescendoing towards this last one, and the result is epic: a sort of cosmic vision of the Catholic Church and the Reformation, with (in… Continue reading Reason #10 to Reject the Reformation: The Grand Finale
Pope Victor and the Second-Century Papacy
Pope St. Victor I In October, I wrote about a fascinating conflict in the first-century church of Corinth. When a dispute broke out within their church, they wrote to Rome. Pope Clement wrote back, issued some orders, and resolved the dispute. Under any circumstances, this would be interesting, because it shows the way that papal… Continue reading Pope Victor and the Second-Century Papacy
Reason #5 to Reject the Reformation: The Church Fathers
Church Fathers, a miniature from Svyatoslav’s Miscellany (1076) The relationship between Protestantism and the Church Fathers is complicated, and necessarily so. On the one hand, the Early Church Fathers are an invaluable source for any Christian, whether they know it or not. They’re the ones who passed on the faith, even at the cost of… Continue reading Reason #5 to Reject the Reformation: The Church Fathers
Reason #3 to Reject the Reformation: the Visible Church
Catedral de Santa María de Burgos, Burgos, Spain One of the biggest issues separating Catholics and Protestants is on the nature of the Church: did Christ establish a visible Church, containing both the saved and some number of the damned? Or did He establish an invisible Church that’s just the collection of all the saved? That’s… Continue reading Reason #3 to Reject the Reformation: the Visible Church
Reason #2 to Reject the Reformation: Scriptural Interpretation
Yesterday, I began a multi-part series looking at St. Edmund Campion’s Ten Reasons against the Reformation. The first reason, addressed yesterday, was the canon of Scripture: the Reformers took books out of the Bible (and not even the same books as one another), and end up leaving no coherent authority upon which to have a… Continue reading Reason #2 to Reject the Reformation: Scriptural Interpretation
Pope Francis Shows His Cards
I. The Crises in the Synod Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, one of the leading opponents of Cardinal Kasper’s proposals The Extraordinary Synod on the Family, which began on October 5, ended yesterday. The Synod was, to put it mildly, a bumpy ride. A group of bishops, lead by the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, vocally pushed… Continue reading Pope Francis Shows His Cards
Celebrating Lepanto in the Age of ISIS
Paolo Veronese, The Battle of Lepanto (1572) On Sunday, I stumbled upon a group of Venetian nationalists commemorating the Battle of Lepanto, which occurred 443 years ago today, October 7, 1571. I spoke to one of the men, who explained that they wanted to remind people of the battle (and of Venice’s contributions to the… Continue reading Celebrating Lepanto in the Age of ISIS
How Your Online Tone Could Send You to Hell
The before-and-after photos used by Rorate Caeli.After the Soviet Union had Nikolai Yezhov executed,his image was carefully purged from official photographs. A few weeks ago, Msgr. Charles Pope wrote a blog post on his blog (which is on the Archdiocese of Washington’s website). It quickly disappeared, leading the traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli to decry “the… Continue reading How Your Online Tone Could Send You to Hell
Can All Christians Agree to a “Mere Christianity”?
Martin Luther, illustration from Die Gartenlaube (1883) Martin Luther and many of the original Protestant Reformers believed that “the all-clear Scriptures of God” were so clear that “if many things still remain abstruse to many, this does not arise from obscurity in the Scriptures, but from their own blindness or want of understanding, who do not… Continue reading Can All Christians Agree to a “Mere Christianity”?