Tag: featured

Know your Rites

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The other week I resumed a former “hobby” of mine.  When I was living back in London I would often go and visit Eastern Rite Catholic churches…

What’s Rite?

A “Rite” in this context generally refers to a group within the wider Catholic Church which is associated with a particular liturgical tradition.  The main Rite with which most people will be familiar is the “Latin Rite”.  This is what is followed in most Catholic churches in Western Europe and the United States.  However, what most people don’t know is that there are six other Rites in the Catholic Church. The Catechism in paragraph #1203 lists these other Rites as Byzantine, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Maronite and Chaldean. The majority of married Catholic priests (yes, you heard me right) will be found in these Eastern Rite Catholic churches where the discipline of celibacy is not exercised in the same way.

I love visiting Eastern Rite churches – I get to explore an unfamiliar liturgy, but unlike when I visit Protestant churches, I also am able to receive communion because the churches which I visit are in full communion with the Bishop of Rome.  So far, I have participated in Maronite and Byzantine (Melkite & Ukrainian) liturgies.

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TEA: How to read the Bible like a Catholic (St. Ignatius)

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Bible Rosary

During Lent, I gave two talks at St. Ignatius Catholic parish in Los Angeles. Here is the first talk I gave on reading Sacred Scripture:

“How to read the Bible like a Catholic” (Download)

Q&A (Download)

 

— Questions —

• What does Jesus mean when he says that, to be his disciple, we must “hate mother and father”?

• What is apologetics?

• What kind of Bible would you recommend?

• If I want to read a book of the Bible, where should I start?

• Why do some people leave the Catholic Faith?

Qur’an Cover-to-Cover: Day 10 (“The Angels”)

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angel

Today in Atlanta, my friend’s son was baptized and entered into the Body of Christ! However, there’s no rest for the wicked, so here I am writing up today’s text from Qur’an, Surah 35:

Surah 35 – “The Angels” (Fatir)
The chapter begins with a typical set of assertions relating to Allah’s soveignty and the denial of the existence of any other God. 

Some interesting things are said about Satan and evil doers. One phrase I really liked was “[Satan] only invites his party to be among the companions of the Blaze”. This is why Satan’s parties are the worst! Ayah 8 affirms that “Allah sends astray whom He wills”, once again suggesting that Muslims believe in double-predestination.

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Blessed are the Gifts

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A couple of days ago on Facebook, my friend Rachel referred to the “seven gifts of the Spirit”. These are the gifts mentioned in the Prophet Isaiah:

And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the spirit of counsel [right judgement] and might [fortitude],
    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord [piety]…

– Isaiah 11:2-3

I commented briefly on Rachel’s Facebook posting, saying that St. Augustine associated these seven gifts with Christ’s beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10). In today’s post I wanted to explain in a little more detail what St. Augustine taught about the relationship between these gifts and the beatitudes…

Sermon on the Mount Copenhagen Church Alter Painting
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St. Thomas Aquinas: Pro-Choice?

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A friend of mine recently referred to the book “Good Church, Bad Church” by Tom Kane, a former Catholic priest. I read the synopsis on Amazon and read the extract on the author’s website.  In the extract, a couple came to Kane while he was still a Catholic priest and he counseled them to have an abortion, calling upon St. Thomas Aquinas as justification:

“The great Catholic theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose theological reasoning is the foundation of Catholic morality, said that a fetus does not contain a soul until several months because there is not enough development yet to hold a soul, so the fetus, Thomas says, is not a person,” I said. “Yet the Vatican and the Vaticans of Protestantism would sacrifice an endless number of lives for a miniscule embryo that resembles an amoeba.”

“But the fetus has life,” he said.

“Yes, but what kind of life? Plant life? Animal life?” I said. “A fetus has a very primitive form of life—not yet a human life.”

AquinasInTheLouvre

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