222 articles from the existing collection.
Not in the sense you probably intend. We are now progressing towards our final destination. There we shall have attained it. The one exception is in the case of a soul that goes to Purgatory, where it undergoes a progressive purification fitting it for the Vision of God. This cannot strictly be called educational, but it is a sp…
Christ never intended this world to be Heaven. He said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” The Church is His Kingdom on earth, but it is not a Kingdom of earth. And I esteem this Kingdom of Christ above all else. This does not forbid me to dress respectably. It does forbid me to rejoice in so far as humanity is in despair and sh…
No human being can say. Christ Himself refused to give any definite information on the subject. “Of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.” Mk. XIII., 32. The uncertainty is deliberate, so that men will be encouraged to live good lives in constant expectation of the possible e…
Hell is the eternal lot of misery awaiting those who die in a state of grave sin and at enmity with God. Before the general resurrection, the soul alone experiences this misery; after the resurrection, the body will be re-united with that soul and will share in the misery, being tormented by created elements even as the person f…
I do not. Due punishment for not doing as Christ commands is justice, not cruelty. Parents know that it is not cruelty to inflict reasonable and deserved punishment upon children who are rebellious. And God has more right to your obedience than any parents to the obedience of their children. It is a blameworthy weakness in paren…
Of course. It is as lawful and wise a tribunal as that for the censorship of films. And although the Holy See condemned brutal excesses, the Spanish Inquisition was as necessary for both Church and state in Spain as the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Police Department for the preservation of law and order in Chicago. There…
Christ can be said to have failed only if He did not succeed in accomplishing His purpose. But His purpose was to give men the means of salvation, should they will to make use of such means. All who sincerely wish to be saved can be saved. Meantime, even God cannot endow a man with freewill who has to do the right thing in spite…
The Catholic Church’s teaching on baptism is rooted in the words of Jesus Christ, who declared the necessity of being “born again” through water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of God ( John 3:5 ). This teaching forms the bedrock of the Church’s understanding of baptism as a sacrament that imparts supernatural grace. Baptism…
Yes. Christ, of course, accepting the Old Law prior to fulfilling and perfecting it by His new revelation, observed Saturday. But He Himself prepared the way for the change of day. He defended His disciples when the Jews accused them of not observing the Sabbath strictly in the traditional sense. Matt. XII., 1-8. He rebukes a to…
It does not. It refers to the resurrection of the body. If the individual soul ceases to exist, there could be no resurrection of the same personality. The material body could be recalled, but another soul would have to be created. This would mean two successive personalities, of which the second would not be the first. Deny the…
This is not a condemnation of Christian traditions, but of doctrines held by those to whom St. Peter wrote, and handed on to them by human tradition from their fathers. These were the traditions Our Lord condemned in Matt. XV., 3.
We do not know how far they understand the gravity of sin. As for the act of contrition, you are leaving out the greatest factor of all—God’s grace. In a flash God can enlighten the mind and move the will to a purely interior act of contrition of which the onlookers know nothing. And God alone knows how many are thus saved.
I am quite prepared to maintain that.
Grace is given directly in answer to prayer, but many very necessary graces are normally to be obtained only through the Sacraments instituted by Christ.
You must have been reading Stevenson’s Suicide Club, and then eaten cucumbers and gone to bed with the fond hope that you would not have a nightmare after all! There is a Carmelite Convent in your suburb at Dulwich Hill, but it is not a Death Order. It is an Order devoted wholly to the life which alone really counts—that of God’…
It follows that meat is not evil in itself, and that the Church does not forbid meat on Fridays because she thinks that meat will defile men. That should be evident from the fact that the Church permits meat on other days, as she could not do if she believed meat to be evil. Therefore it must be a question of the day, and not of…
It would be the greatest possible injustice to regard her as a goddess. It is just to honor her even as God has honored her, which we Catholics do. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords, and His mother certainly possesses queenly dignity, holding the highest place in Heaven next to her Divine Son. But that does not, and canno…
It is quite lawful to inflict pain as a punishment, or no school-master could punish a rebellious child. I am grateful now for many a punishment inflicted upon me by my parents in my childhood. In principle, the infliction of pain is lawful. The question rather concerns the degree of pain to be inflicted. Excessive pain is undou…
Some Protestants believe that. Many do not. Good Protestants can be saved, but if they are good they are Protestants in good faith who have the will to do God’s will, and are not Catholics merely because they do not realize their obligation to join the true Church.
It has not made havoc of Christianity. It is making havoc of Protestantism. But Protestantism is not really Christianity. The Catholic Church alone is the true representative of Christianity, and she is not affected by rationalism. The Bible is as authentic as ever, and humanitarianism has not affected the fires of hell, even as…
That does not deny the distinction between body and soul in man. If God breathed a living soul into man’s body, then man’s body is a distinct thing, and man is rightly said to possess both a body and a soul. To say that a man is a living soul is but to use a figure of speech, alluding to the complete thing by the name of its pri…
No, for God is a spirit, a purely spiritual substance, and does not breathe. The expression is only a human way of putting things. The soul is a spirit, and is called the breath of God merely because caused or created by God in its spiritual or breath-like nature.
Because Our Lord did not add those words to the prayer as He taught it There is nothing wrong with the words in themselves. In fact, they are very beautiful. But they are not Sacred Scripture. Some early Catholic copyists wrote those words in a margin; later copyists mistakenly transcribed them into the text; and the Protestant …
The word spirit can have a very wide meaning. It is derived from the Latin word spiritus, meaning a breath. Then because the soul of man is as invisible to bodily eyes as a breath, and also because its presence is manifested by the breathing of a living body, the word spirit acquired a transferred sense, becoming a substitute fo…
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