Category: Catholicism

The Cause of My Joy

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Today I also wanted to share post from a blog I link to often, Neal Obstat. All of his articles are great, but this one is particularly wonderful. In it he shares a poem he wrote for his wife on their wedding anniversary. Here’s the first verse:

Deathless Love
My love for you, my Bride, is deathless
for death would mean that we must part,
but even waters our love cannot quench,
nor the grave cleave our God-knit heart.
…

Beautiful, right? If you’d like to read the rest of his poem (and why wouldn’t you?!), click on the image below:

The Cause of My Joy

Story Time!

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While I was in Washington DC for the March For Life last year, I was invited to a party. Honestly, this English accent of mine gets me in everywhere… 🙂

Anyway, each guest was asked to come prepared with a relatively unknown Saint story to share with the everyone else. Clearly this party was organized by my kind of Catholic nerd! Naturally, I told the story of this blog’s patron, St. Drogo.

However, I also came prepared with another story, not about a Saint, but about a Saint’s brother. Since it was recently the ordination anniversary of my former Pastor, Fr. Robert, I thought it would be appropriate to share that story today.

Jerome

Many of you might have heard of St Jerome. He was a great biblical scholar of the Early Church and he was the one who produced the Vulgate, the official translation into Latin of the original Biblical texts. This story is about Jerome’s younger brother Paulinian, sometimes known as Paulinanus.

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Restless Popery

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Yesterday on Facebook, Joe from Shameless Popery shared that he had intended to write a post on the supposed Pagan origins of Easter, but that our mutual friend, Steve, had referred him to Easter: The Pagan Conspiracy, a post I wrote on the same subject last year.

Joe had initially said he wasn’t going to write his own defense. Fortunately for us, rather than depriving the world of another of Joe’s excellent articles, he did write his own post on the subject, building off my original entry:

Shameless Popery

Before 300: Pre-Constantinian Christianity

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It is often asserted that the Catholic Church was founded by the Constantine, who was Emperor of the Roman Empire from AD 306-337. A couple of weeks ago, a lady named Monica made such an assertion and in earlier post I pointed out some of the problems with such a theory.

However, today I would like to do something a little different… In this post I would like to set forth the positive historical case for the existence of the Catholic Faith in the generations prior to Constantine. I will show how twenty-one different Catholic doctrines were taught long before Constantine rose to power:

  1. The Church is Catholic
  2. The Church has a three-fold structure of leadership
  3. There is unity through episcopal authority and schism is evil
  4. Sacred Tradition is authoritative
  5. Worship is liturgical
  6. There is Apostolic Succession
  7. Peter has Primacy
  8. The Eucharist is a Sacrifice
  9. Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist
  10. The Eucharist is taken to the sick
  11. Infants are to be baptized
  12. Baptism actually washes away sin
  13. Priests forgive sins
  14. Works are involved in salvation
  15. Prayers are said for the dead
  16. There is purgation after death
  17. Relics are venerated and Saints are celebrated
  18. Mary is the New Eve
  19. Mary was a perpetual virgin
  20. Mary is the Mother of God
  21. Prayers are made and songs are sung to Mary

I will demonstrate these early Christian belief by looking at primary sources alone and restricting myself to writings produced prior to AD 300.

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