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(Matthew 27:35-61; Mark 15:21-47; Luke 23:26-56; John 19:18-42) If you stop and think about it, the Christian message is utterly out of sync with what human beings would expect. That the Son of the All-Powerful and Ever-Living God would allow himself to be brutally killed, tortured for hours by some people in a backwater place in the Roman Empire, boggles the mind. That he should have allowed that out of love for human beings, from whom gratitude was not assured, is even more mind-boggling. That he even bothered … shows you what Love means. God could have redeemed us however he chose. In suffering for our sins, Jesus is teaching us, showing us graphically just how hateful, destructive, violent and malicious sin is. “For us men and our salvation,” he came down from heaven. To teach us he ca...

The Gospel for the 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, shows Jesus denouncing sin in the strongest possible terms. It’s no wonder: The world has been destroyed by sin and the Church has been shipwrecked by it — in fact, by men and women who were taught to sin as children. But Jesus also gives a giant promise of hope for our future. Fully 60% of the words in this Sunday’s Gospel passage are Jesus warning of harsh, dire consequences for sin. Jesus says, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna.” He says the same thing about your feet and your eyes. This is Semitic hyperbole; it doesn’t mean you should literally maim yourself. But it does mean that it is better to be a blind quadruple-amputee than to b...

I am compiling a “Back-to-Basics Catechesis” by focusing on Biblical Stories. Here is a reflection on the Fall of Man. A PDF of this reflection is here: THE FALL OF MAN God had made all things, and He pronounced it “very good.” And yet, something very tragic took place that would shake and alter the very foundations of what God had set forth. That event is call by various titles: Original Sin, the Sin of Adam, The Fall of Man, and so forth. The story begins in the third chapter of Genesis: Now the serpent was more cunning than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not ...

On November 5, pro-life voters will be faced with a stark choice at the ballot box. They’ll have the option to choose Democrat Kamala Harris, who promises to advance the abortion advocacy of the Biden administration and codify Roe v. Wade into federal law. Alternatively, they may opt to support Republican Donald Trump, who, while increasingly distancing himself from pro-life policy issues, continues to tout his appointment of three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who contributed to overturning Roe. Trump regularly asserts support for abortion exceptions and insists related laws are matter for the states, with no intention of moving the issue forward at the federal level. While these major party options are bleak for pro-lifers, they should know that they don’t have to vote for a pr...

[embedded content]A lot of people think that if God knows what we’re going to do ahead of time, then we have no free will. But that’s a huge mistake—and to see why, you’ll need to watch to the end of this short video. Classical theism holds that God is omniscient, meaning that he knows everything, and this means that he knows the future. This is how God lets the biblical prophets know what’s going to be happening in the future. However, the terms “foreknow” and “foreknowledge” don’t appear at all in the Old Testament, and they appear only seven times in the New Testament. With that small a number of examples to study, we have to be very careful about how we understand it and what inferences we draw from them. In Greek the verb that means “to foreknow” is proginôskô, and the noun for “forek...

animation of a grid representing a giant rogue wave In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet). The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time. Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened. For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway. At the time, the ...

Despite the multitude of Christian denominations that have sprung up over the last 500 years, there seem to have been few, if any, important divisions among Christians about the authenticity of the canon of the New Testament since the Catholic Church promulgated it at the Council of Rome more than 1,600 years ago. I. The Genesis of this Topic St. John Henry Newman, the great 19th century English churchman, scholar and convert to Catholicism, famously once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”[1] That seems like a fitting way to begin because the genesis of this essay was my hearing a Catholic convert quote the New Testament passages he references when explaining to his Protestant family and friends why he became Catholic.[2] I noticed that in the dialogue he described...

25th Sunday in Ordinary TimeBy Fr Victor Feltes What is the act of eating for? It is good for eating and drinking to be enjoyable, but they are intended for supporting life. What if people tasted but refused to consume? What if it became common and culturally accepted for people to eat and expel their meals without digestion? A normalization of bulimia would obviously be very unhealthy. It would be psychologically unhealthy — warping attitudes about food and our bodies — and also physically unhealthy, leading to malnourishment and the death of many. However, new technologies, products, and politics would rise to promote this way of life despite its harms. The divine purpose for eating and drinking is our nourishment. It is not merely for our delight but for the good of supporting life. As ...

Skip to content It would seem that we are not free in heaven. If there is not even a possibility of falling from heaven, then can we say that we are there freely or are we there against our will? To navigate this paradox, we can look to Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. In the poem, Dante’s guide, Virgil, bids farewell after leading him through hell and purgatory. His parting advice to Dante is enigmatic at best and scandalous at worst: From now on, let your pleasure be your guide;…your will is free, erect, and whole—to actagainst that will would be to err: thereforeI crown and miter you over yourself.”(Purgatorio XXVII, 131, 140-142, trans. A. Mandelbaum) To understand Virgil’s advice, we must re-examine human nature. We freely make choices; some are good for us,...

[embedded content] I want to talk about something fundamental. We’re going to discuss what God really wants—the most important thing to God. So here are 9 mysteries concerning this subject What God Really Wants The thing that God really wants from us is love, and there are several ways we know this. One of the ways is that Scripture flat-out tells us that God himself is love. In 1 John 4, we read: God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16). Love is a major theme in the Gospels. In one of the most famous verses—John 3:16—we read: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). That’s one of the key ways God manifests his love for us: he sent his Son to sav...