257 articles from the existing collection.
A state law opposed to the law of God is not rightly the thing of Caesar, and in so far as it is thus opposed to the law of God, it is to be ignored. Obedience must be rendered to God rather than to the State.
That is untrue. For over three centuries Protestantism could not inspire the thought of foreign missions. The Catholic Church was missionary from the very beginning and has ever retained that characteristic. In any case where are the English and American Protestant missions in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Russia, etc.? Do not…
I could not support extortion, but I can honestly say that only a person absolutely ignorant of things Catholic could imagine that money is extorted from the poor for Masses
All men are equal in so far as each is a human soul before God, and must meet the same judge. And God will not be more lenient with the Pope than He will be with the simple layman. But all men are not equal in other ways. Christ certainly gave the Apostles a higher office than simple Christians possess, and they and their succes…
The state holds the marriage to be valid in state law. And all Catholics hold the marriage to be civilly legal. But the state says nothing whatever about God’s view of the matter, and the Catholic Church declares the marriage null and void before God, and therefore in conscience. Even after that declaration, if the parties do no…
If I could not, that would but prove something wrong with my own ideas on the subject. For it is certain that God is loving, just, and merciful; and He has revealed that there is a hell. So the ideas cannot be repugnant. However God’s love, justice, and mercy demand that there be a hell. His love demands a hell, for the more He …
No. Some Catholic individuals have lost their own spirituality through political ambition, but this does not affect the Church. Christ promised that His Church would never go wrong, not that individuals in the Church would never go wrong. You cannot argue from bad fish in a net to the rottenness of the net. A very good net can h…
If there be a conflict between the two interests, I put Church first. God comes before Caesar. The Church, as the Kingdom of God, is more important than any earthly kingdom. No country has rights against God. And in our own case, if there be a question of soul and body, the soul is the more important, and the body must give way …
The Church has always consistently used what power she has in the cause of the worker. With the very rise of the present industrialism Pope Leo XIII. insisted on the rights of labor in a series of almost revolutionary Encyclicals. He insisted that in justice the workers must receive wages that not only provide moderate comforts …
Jesus said, “They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill.” Matt. IX., 12. And the same God whom we Christians worship gave most minute health laws to the Jews, laws which Jesus never declared to be false and useless.
Why should you worry about a thing which does not affect you? Let Catholics, who do go to Confession, do the worrying. They find it full of compensating consolations. Your only worry should be your ignoring of the words of Christ as recorded in St. John XX., 21-23.
No. Catholics have been urged over and over again by their Church to do their utmost towards the rehabilitation of the world. They do believe in God and in God’s providence. They believe that all the miseries of this world have been permitted by God, or they would not exist. But they are due to man’s own political and economic m…
Nor do I. But the race is not over until the soul has definitely left the body, and no one knows with absolute certainty just when it does leave the body. If the soul has gone when the Sacrament of Extreme Unction is administered, the Sacrament cannot avail. But if the soul still be there, it certainly can avail unto salvation.
England has progressed materially, but no argument can be deduced from that. God gives temporal benefits to good and bad alike. Spiritual blessings are the real blessings. England is rapidly drifting to irreligion altogether, and the Book you say she has opened to her people is being torn to shreds and ridiculed by Englishmen in…
Pope Pius IX. was in just possession of the Papal States, and he was just in taking all ordinary precautions to preserve what lawfully belonged to the Church.
The Catholic Church agrees with St. Augustine in this matter, and declares that all who possess superfluities, that is, goods which are over and above that which is necessary for the upkeep of their state in life, are obliged under pain of sin to share their superfluities with their less fortunate fellow men. The hundreds of orp…
Civil law and divine law are not always in harmony. Politicians at times exceed their powers and make laws, which are contrary to those of God. Thus they have legislated concerning matrimony with no reference to the will of Christ who raised the marriage contract to the dignity of a Sacrament.
No. God’s creative activity terminates in good only. But the soul cannot normally be infused into a child of Adam without its contracting the privation of the original gratuitous gifts it was destined to receive had Adam not fallen. I say normally because God did anticipate the merits of Christ in one case, preventing the soul o…
The Kingdom of God as established by Christ is at once a visible Church in this world, and an invisible spiritual Kingdom of grace within the soul. External adherence to the visible Kingdom demands also that Christ reign by grace within the soul. But this interior grace does not dispense a man from accepting the will of Christ o…
That could not justify birth-control by contraceptive methods. The choice to-day is between Christ and the modern pagan philosophy. If modern godless civilization is right, and this life is all, then let us measure everything by utility and pleasure. If Christ is right, and the beatitudes, directed against worldly wisdom, are th…
Pope Pius IX. was in just possession of the Papal States, and he was just in taking all ordinary precautions to preserve what lawfully belonged to the Church.
There is a big difference between imagining a future life and conceiving it. I cannot imagine or picture the future life any more than you can. The only images we could form would be derived from this life, and they would fit this life, not the next. Not without reason does God say, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hat…
False translations of the Bible are on the Index. Catholics may read the safe translation provided for them, a translation which may be secured at any Catholic bookshop.
I suppose we are all slaves of life in some sense. The workers fears loss of employment; the employer, too, fears the loss of his business and the fruits of his anxious investments. We all fear to be deprived of food and the necessities of life, and God intends us to work to live. But in so far as injustice enters into the prese…
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