Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
(Here is, for your perusal, Saint Thomas’ teaching on charity – or divine-like love, ‘willing the good’ – is the principle of merit, rather than, as Kant would later say, the difficulty or greatness of the task. Here, Thomas is adumbrating Saint Therese’s ‘little way’, that small things done with great love, are greater in[…]
Now He is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to Him all of them are alive. (Lk. 20:38) As we approach the end of the liturgical year, the Sacred Liturgy invites us to ponder the four last things: death, judgment, Heaven and hell. These are realities that help us to live[…]
A priest I knew many years ago opposed to the move from Latin to English in the prayers and readings at Mass. “For,” he said, “if the people heard the creed in their own language, they might discover that they didn’t believe it.” An instance of what he meant may be found in today’s Gospel,[…]
(I may write more on the recent headline, which comes not as a surprise, that most ‘Catholics’ – and one must use that term widely nowadays – reject the Church’s teaching on ‘cohabitation’, companionate marriage or, in more technical terms, fornicatio simplex. For now, ponder these words from the great Saint Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica,[…]
A writer must at times take back, or at least re-form, opinions once vaguely and lightly and perhaps too hastily held. Even the great Augustine and Newman wrote their retractions. All part of that humility of Christian growth, one may hope. I finally watched, well, skimmed through, the ‘ritual’ held in the presence of the[…]
(At the request of the author, we are re-posting this reflection by Leeda Crawford from September 2010, sage advice for parents with children in the public system, especially that goes by the appellation ‘Catholic’. I, for one, consider the system inherently compromised, worse now ten years on, by forces not only secular, but outright inimical[…]
The memorial of Saint Charles Borromeo (1538-1584) commemorates one of the great pillars – along with Saint Robert Bellarmine, Philip Neri and countless others – of what is unfortunately known as the ‘Counter Reformation’, which is really nothing other than the Catholic Church’s vigorous response – lately grown complacent, complaisant and enervated in the luxury[…]
For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save what the lost. (Lk. 19:10) ⧾ The conversion of Zacchaeus may be said to be a consequence of our Lord’s preaching. Last Sunday we heard the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee and given the sequence in the narrative, it is[…]
Somebody has sent me a book on Companionate Marriage; so called because the people involved are not married and will very rapidly cease to be companions. I have no intention of discussing here that somewhat crude colonial project. I will merely say that it is here accompanied with sub-titles and other statements about the rising[…]
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats, 1919 After a six-week campaign, marked with nastiness and recriminations,[…]
