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Pope Francis accepts a book from Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich during an audience at the Vatican June 11, 2021. (CNS photo/Vatican Media) Raised in a Fundamentalist Protestant home and Bible chapel, I held to more than a few incorrect (and even wildly false) notions about the Catholic Church. Most of these involved Mary and the papacy. Catholics worship Mary! Catholics believe Mary is the fourth Person of the Trinity! Catholics worship the pope! We believed, based in part on the magisterial writings of Presbyterian theologian Lorraine Boettner (1901-1990), the equally magisterial comics of Jack Chick (1924-2016), and the rightly interpreted King James translation of the Bible, that the Catholic Church was a massive and mysterious pseudo-Christian organization built on the false teachings ...

‘The FDA never had the authority to approve these hazardous drugs and remove important safeguards…’ A federal judge in Texas issued a much anticipated ruling Friday that, if it holds up in court, could take the abortion drug mifepristone off pharmacy shelves due to safety concerns and in doing so, prevent over half of the abortions that take place in the country. U.S. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s preliminary ruling found that the Federal Drug  Administration (FDA) did not follow proper testing and safety protocols when it approved the abortion drug in 2000. The judge allowed the FDA seven days to appeal his decision, which means the drug will still be available for the time being. Almost immediately after Kacmaryk issued his decision, a judge in Washington state issued a ruling that the ...

Happy Easter! Today is the most important day in the Church year because it is the most important day in history. Today, human history received its final and definitive direction. Good will be victorious. Evil and its consequence — death — will be defeated. There’s no more question about that. The only question is: which side are you on? This day is an acid test of faith: Do you believe that a real human being, who was also really God, really rose in his human flesh this day from a grave? And do you believe that, one day, you will be called to do the same? Or is it just a nice story, a sentimental tradition, a wish projection? And that once you’re dead, at worst you’re dead, at best, who knows? If the former, happy to wish a fellow Christian “Christus resurrexit!” If the latter, then why a...

People are pictured during a procession on the Via Dolorosa, “The Way of Sorrow,” the path believed to be taken by Jesus to his crucifixion, in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017. CNS photo/Debbie Hill Jesus suffered and died 2,000 years ago, but Catholics today can still attend a reenactment of his funeral and burial — in the Holy Land. “The funeral procession of Jesus Christ is a unique liturgical procession that only takes place at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Good Friday,” Dominican Father Jordan Schmidt told Our Sunday Visitor. “It is perhaps the most dramatic liturgical event that I have ever witnessed.” The ancient custom of reenacting Christ’s funeral dates back to the 13th century, when the Franciscans first arrived in the Holy Land, according to the Terra Sancta Mus...

“There’s no part of man more like a dog than brazen Belly, crying to be remembered…” Homer, The Odyssey As the Lenten season or what is also called the Great Fast comes to its culmination, I wonder whether my fasting has yielded the hoped-for fruits. Here I reflect simply from a natural or philosophical perspective on disciplining my bodily appetites. A central feature of Aristotle’s view of human nature is that the bodily (or ‘sense’) appetite can be formed by repeated good actions. While this appetite will always remain beyond the full control of reason and will, nevertheless it can be rendered increasingly amenable to the direction of our rational powers. The cardinal virtue of temperance, for instance, consists in a habitual disposition of the sense appetite to move in accord with righ...

During the Lenten season, an austere time of the desert, we keep our eyes fixed on Christ crucified. The focus is not on the “no” of penance, but the “yes” of love that comes from sacrifice. Jesus models this for us and even invites us into it, especially from his throne of the Cross. He invites us to enter into his kingdom through forgiveness, humility, trust and love. As he speaks to us from this vantage point over all of human history, looking out into the abyss of our sin and suffering, he calls us through his Seven Last Words to participate in his own sacrifice. Through our response, we are pulled out of our misery to reign with Christ, dying to ourselves in order share in the glory of his resurrection.   Christ’s Seven Last Words constitute one on the greatest Lenten medita...

In November 1949 Chien-Shiung Wu and her graduate student, Irving Shaknov, descended to a laboratory below Columbia University’s Pupin Hall. They needed antimatter for a new experiment, so they made their own, using a machine called a cyclotron. The machine’s multiton magnet was so gigantic that, according to university folklore, a decade earlier administrators had to blast a hole in an exterior wall and recruit the football team to maneuver the block of iron into the building. The magnetic field produced by a cyclotron accelerates particles to dizzying speeds. In the lab, Wu and Shaknov used it to bombard a sheet of copper with deuterons, generating an unstable isotope, Cu 64, as a source of positrons—the antimatter. When a positron and an electron collide, they annihilate eac...

In a Nutshell Catholics in the 19th century were supposed to avoid eating for long periods and to abstain from certain food the vast majority of days during Lent. In previous centuries, the total number of fasting and abstinence days per year in the Church once topped 100. The Church has always recommended fasting and abstinence as penance for sin and armor against temptation. Some say the Church has lost something as fasting and abstinence have waned. One author recommends training your body through diet changes to make fasting less torturous while still an act of penance. Has It Been a Tough Lent? Consider how Catholics around seven generations ago lived it. For many in the 19th century, Lent meant no meat, eggs, butter, cheese or milk, for 40 days. Nearly every day during Lent also was ...

COMMENTARY: Whatever your reason for wanting to become Catholic, run with it. It’s your road sign pointing you in the right direction. “What do I do till RCIA starts?” someone asked me and some other people who’d entered the Church as adults. She’d grown up in an unreligious home and didn’t have much idea how religious institutions worked, especially one with as many rules as the Catholic Church.  After a long time of reflection, in January she’d decided to become a Catholic and started going to Mass, and then found that the instruction in her new parish didn’t start till the fall. She couldn’t enter the Church for a year and a couple months. She seemed to feel that a long time to fill out. I told her to go on as she started.  This advice may help people like her, but also people...

8 Great Reflections on the Passion Palm Sunday (Year A)By Fr. Victor Feltes Today’s Gospel is long, but this reading is rich. So here, briefly, are eight great reflections on the Passion. At the Last Supper, Jesus told his apostles, “One of you will betray me.” They each replied, “Surely it is not I, Lord?” except for Judas Iscariot, who said, “Surely it is not I, Rabbi?” (Rabbi means teacher.) There is a big difference between Jesus just being a teacher and being your Lord. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus lovingly willed to save us but his humanity understandably dreaded the tortures his self-sacrifice could entail. He prayed: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will.” In this, Jesus shows us that we are allowed to pray for any ...

I wasn’t the first to make the connection, but once I noticed it, it was everywhere. You walk past a poster for a new movie and think, Why is every action hero named Jack, John, James, or, occasionally, Jason? I turned to my friends and colleagues, asking desperately if they had also noticed this trend, as I made my case by listing off well-known characters: John Wick, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, John McClane, James Bond, Jack Bauer, and double hitter John James Rambo. Advertisement I worried I might have fallen victim to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Now that I had become aware of it, was each glimpse of a John Wick ad reaffirming my unsubstantiated theory? The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. As a data researcher, I had to get to the bottom of it. Wha...