Blog of the Archdiocese of Washington
In the readings for daily Mass the past few days we have been reviewing the faith journey of St. Paul who describes his personal history and also his authority in the second chapter of the Letter to the Galatians. The story is interesting for three reasons. It can help correct notions that some have of Paul’s rapid assent …
Continue reading “What St. Paul Can Teach Us About Respect for Church Authority”
We live in a time when science is exulted. But the problem with science is that it is only able to deal with the material and the measurable. Hence to exalt science to the exclusion of other ways of knowing is to take the partial and declare it to be the whole. Yet it is …
In the Gospel for today about the rich man and Lazarus the Lord gives us some important teachings on judgment and on hell. Now it is a fact that we live in times where many consider the teaching on Hell to be untenable. Many struggle to understand how a God described as loving, merciful and …
Continue reading “The Hell There Is – A Meditation on the Gospel for the 26th Sunday of the Year”
Msgr. Pope did a great job introducing us to the pastoral letter on the New Evangelization and we will continue to write about it as it becomes a way of life for Catholics in the archdiocese. One dimension of the New Evangelization is engaging people in conversation and not missing an opportunity to propose that …
There has been a tendency in the Church in recent decades to divide out the teachings of the Church into separate and often “competing” realms. On the one hand there are said to be the basic moral teachings that include our duty to worship God, tell the truth, obey biblical sexual norms and the like. …
In today’s Gospel Jesus defines four Demands of discipleship. We can look at them one by one. 1. The CONTEXT of the discipleship. The text says that large crowds were following Jesus and so he turned to address them. Just about any time you find a mention of a large crowd fasten your seat belts …
Permit me a few thoughts on the issue of tolerance. This post is not intended as a systematic treatise on tolerance. Rather just some thoughts on a frequently misunderstood concept that some have called the only “virtue” left in our neo-pagan society. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines Tolerance and toleration: Toleration — from the …
Back when I was in Seminary in the 1980s there was a “Revisionist Creed” that floated around. We never used it in any way in the Seminary and most of us thought of it as a joke that some one had ginned up. But it reflected the relativism of those times which most of us …
Continue reading “On the Mend: The Church in the Early 21st Century”