Burying Benedict

by Matthew Schmitz

Though Benedict is still living, Francis is trying to bury him. Continue Reading »

22 May 2017 0

Creeping Infallibility

by Jessica M. Murdoch

Any sort of “creeping infallibility” that would attach the same level of authority to every papal utterance or document must be avoided. To fail to draw appropriate distinctions—whether between binding and non-binding documents of the ordinary magisterium, or between the development and the evolution of doctrine—is to dim the light of the Petrine ministry and impoverish the faithful. Continue Reading »

27 Sep 2016 0

New Norms for Marriage Nullity

by Kurt Martens

I recently attended a conference in Rome, “La riforma operata dal m.p. ‘Mitis Iudex,’”sponsored by the Consociatio Internationalis Studio Iuris Canonici Promovendo—the international association of canon lawyers of which I am a board member—which dealt with the fiercely relevant topic of . . . . Continue Reading »

4 Dec 2015 0

The Neglected God

by Timothy George

Some years ago Nils A. Dahl wrote that God may be the “neglected factor in New Testament theology.” Destructive biblical criticism, exemplified for years in the work of the so-called Jesus Seminar, eviscerates the gospel narratives of all theological power and leaves us, at best, with a Jesus made in our own image—political agitator, cynic sage, new age guru, etc. The words of weeping Mary in John 20:13 are appropriate: “They have taken my Lord away, . . . and I don’t know where they have put him.” But the Jesus of the Gospels cannot be confined to the straitjacket of such pseudo-scholarly speculation. He bursts through those Scriptures today just as he rose bodily from the grave that first Easter morning. Continue Reading »

1 Jun 2015 0

Knowing the Trinity

by George Weigel

Richard of St. Victor, a 12th-century Scottish theologian, is not exactly a household name in 21^st-century Christian circles. Truth to tell, I only know of him because of a curious conversation I once had with my friend, the late Richard John Neuhaus, who, as only he could, told me of a friendly discussion he’d had with Rabbi David Novak one summer about the Scotsman’s Trinitarian theology, which tried to establish by reason that God must be triune. (We talked about a lot of strange and wondrous things, up there on the cottage deck in the Ottawa Valley.) Continue Reading »

27 Aug 2014 0