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They do. You are outside the Church. I am within it. I am of purely English origin, and was instructed and received into the Church by an Irish Priest, and found myself more than welcome among the children of the Catholic Church. Nor was I expected to become a militant Irish sympathizer from any national point of view. I retain …
That was not necessary that we might know their contents. We have true copies. Also that would not have bettered things. Christ did not base His religion upon the reading of Scripture. He established the infallible Catholic Church to teach in His Name. That Church He has miraculously preserved.
Not all do so. Many employers do not give a fair return for work done, and I have shown that the Catholic Church protests against such injustice. But the remedy is not to sweep the whole existing order away. Let us correct these abuses. In reality the world is suffering precisely because it refuses to live according to Catholic …
Mary did not need Baptism in so far as that Sacrament was instituted for the destruction of original sin. She received that Sacrament in order to participate in its other effects, and chiefly in order to receive the Christian character which that Sacrament impresses upon the soul.
The verse means that no man can avoid death and free his soul from the necessity of being separated from the body.
The opinion of the one doing the work is of more value than that of the onlooker. The Church knows that these temporal things are necessary. Anyway these properties have been honestly and laboriously acquired by charitably minded citizens, are held in their name, and are not actually theirs only, because they have freely resigne…
Socialism is a very broad term which men interpret in many different ways. Communistic socialism is, of course, condemned by the Catholic Church. Mitigated forms of socialism, which aim at social reform, but which ignore religion and rely upon purely materialistic methods, are also condemned. In these and similar senses of the w…
The law is not prompted by lack of respect for the non-Catholic party or for the guests. It is prompted by respect for religious rites and for the worship of God. The non-Catholic has no more right to intimate Catholic religious practices than an unnaturalized citizen to all the civic rights of true subjects. The non-Catholic pa…
The religious man knows that he cannot face life unaided, but that is not to his detriment. We do not ridicule a child at school who cannot face the problem of mathematics without the help of a master. If God needed help He would be imperfect. But man is not God. He is very conscious of limitation, and if he wishes to behave as …
I do. I say that such a doctrine is a monstrous fable. History shows that human beings, whether Catholics, Protestants, Mahometans or Pagans, have been guilty of great cruelties to one another. Even ecclesiastics, if you wish, through their own fault and not through any teaching of their Church, have been guilty of excessive cru…
It is. All who have the Catholic faith believe in prayer for the dead. It is not a doctrine for the laity only. And I sincerely hope that friends will pray for me and have Masses offered on my behalf when God has taken me from this world. I shall need them. Nothing defiled will enter heaven, and if at death one’s soul is not abs…
Only when they completely forget their Christian faith, for Christ Himself appointed this means of forgiveness.
Brutal cruelty and ill treatment afford lawful grounds for separation, as also does adultery if it has not been condoned. But this separation does not break the bond of marriage. Death alone can do that, and neither is free to marry again whilst the other is still living. For grave reasons a Catholic can obtain ecclesiastical pe…
I do not think you know of many. In any case, if some Priest did so offend, that would not justify anyone in giving up his religion. We have a duty to offer public worship to God. The faults of the clergy could not be a reason, they could at best be an excuse for another’s neglect of duty. It is a foolish argument to say, “The P…
It is a place of suffering awaiting men after death, if they fail to depart this life in the grace and friendship of God. Information concerning its locality has not been revealed in terms of longitude and latitude, even could such terms avail. God has revealed that there is a hell, but not where it is. And the latter informatio…
The majority of the people in the countries you mention happen to be Catholics, But that does not mean that the Catholic Church as a Church has political control. Meantime the Church does not want political control her*, and would absolutely refuse on principle to accept it, were it offered,
It means Holy Spirit. “Ghost” is Anglo-Saxon for spirit, “spiritus” in Latin meaning a breath. Thus the word spirit is associated with human breathing as a kind of intangible impulse. Christ used the term to bring home to us that the Third Person of the Holy Trinity is the impulse of love invisible and intangible between Father …
We cannot make such a comparison. The rich man who provides for the offering of Masses for the repose of his soul has a better chance of diminishing his purgatory than the rich man who makes no such provision.
Yes. We are taught to be humble. And Christian humility orders a man to be unassuming and gentle. But it does not forbid a man to worship God as befits God. In fact, the more humble a man is, the more he magnifies and glorifies God, and depreciates self. The Catholic Church says, “God certainly deserves the best we can give Him.…
A belief in a God, a sense of sin, and imagination building upon ordinary human ideas would be enough to give rise to a mythology on the subject. Yet we can even admit lingering vestiges of the knowledge of our creation by God, and of God’s primitive promise to put enmities between the woman and Satan. But no mythology has produ…
Since it is God who has been offended, God has the right to lay down the conditions of forgiveness. You cannot insist that God must forgive you on your own conditions. And Christ certainly did not give His Priests power to forgive sin knowing that no one would have to seek forgiveness from Priests at all
Priests pray every day for the souls in purgatory without payment of money, and without any discrimination between the rich and the poor. When someone asks for a special intercessory Mass, offering the customary stipend, the Priest will comply with the request. But this is in addition to his personal prayers for the dead.
No. Who in this world could persuade thousands of good women to forego theatres, dances, and worldly amusements, and to take a strict vow of perfect chastity in the sight of God, merely that they might be at the service of Priests who offer them no remuneration, and who strangely enough bind themselves by similarly strict vows u…
Your belief is right, though many Protestants are rapidly giving up that belief. For the grounds you allege for your belief scarcely provide a sufficiently rational foundation. You may feel that it is inspired, but nothing can be proved from feelings, and in any case there are others who do not feel that it is inspired. Again, w…
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