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In honour of the Easter Triduum, we will not be publishing an article this week. Rather, we have included two meditations from our dear friend Fr John Rizzo and his memoir. The first, on the presence of Christ in a priest for Holy Thursday was published yesterday. The second is on the hour of death for Good Friday. These two meditations offer some inspiration for our prayers at the start of the Easter season.
In honour of the Easter Triduum, we will not be publishing an article this week. Rather, we have included two meditations from our dear friend Fr John Rizzo and his memoir. The first, is on the presence of Christ in a priest for Holy Thursday and the second on the hour of death for Good Friday. These two meditations offer some inspiration for our prayers at the start of the Easter season.
The Christian life is a life of grace. But that life of grace in the 1st century AD was still yet to be manifest to the first followers of Christ. They knew they had to be like Him- but what would that look like when they had no examples to follow? The Church had to navigate between two extremes- of re-creating an alternative system of laws to the Jewish system that it had abandoned; and the other extreme of just leaving it up to personal whim and inspiration. The Apostolic Church had to resist both the Judaisers and the Gnostics, for both wanted to pull Christianity in two different directions, either of which would have destroyed the early Church.
To teach anything is to teach with authority. And any teacher who does not teach with authority is not teaching you anything at all. Such was the idea as paraphrased by G.K. Chesterton. This is what we desire from the Church: to teach with conviction the truths that have been handed down from God Almighty for the salvation of souls. This kind of authority is born from the conviction that souls are in jeopardy and that they must be saved. This is the context from which Fr Pius instructs on how to pray and to act in this period of the Church’s history.
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Now that Pope Francis’s health seems to be improving, I am more confident in publishing this particular article. It can feel unbecoming to write about what happens after someone dies, before that someone is dead. It feels a bit like trying to get a quick peak at the will before the person has breathed his last. Yet the wheels of the Church, though they grind slowly, they do grind. The ancient and solemn custom of electing a new pope will begin the moment the Pope has breathed his last. This article however is not about that.
Lent is almost upon us. And so, in order to avoid the stampede towards the choice of an unsatisfactory Lenten penance, we offer for your reflection a practical spiritual primer as how to go about choosing the thing you will renounce this Lent. At the heart of every Christian sacrifice is a joy that must be not be concealed. Let your mortifications be merry and your carnivals solemn.
Australia Day is upon us. And as has become our custom, an argument brews about what date this day should be celebrated. At the heart of the debate is a profound misunderstanding of our nation’s and its day. A profound misunderstanding that originated in our failure to understand what a Christian nation is and that ours is a Christian nation. In the following Special Article, we examine a better way of understanding our National Day and its date.
Fr Pius Noonan
To teach anything is to teach with authority. And any teacher who does not teach with authority is not teaching you anything at all. Such was the idea as paraphrased by G.K. Chesterton. This is what we desire from the Church: to teach with conviction the truths that have been handed down from God Almighty for the salvation of souls. This kind of authority is born from the conviction that souls are in jeopardy and that they must be saved. This is the context from which Fr Pius instructs on how to pray and to act in this period of the Church’s history.
In this excellent article, Fr Pius explores the true nature of our sin. And the true nature of the conversion of heart required to restore us to justice. Oftentimes, because of the secularism of the culture and the natural tendency of the human heart to be an idolator, we like to treat our sins as minor inconveniences or trifling peccadillos. We absolve ourselves with the mere wave of the hand, but we do so without the weight of the Cross. Fr Pius exhorts us to take this moment of Grace seriously that is presented to us in Lent.
There is a common misconception amongst modern churchmen, that the image of the Church with an outstretched hand requires that the hand be empty. Nothing could be further from the truth. When the Church goes out to meet the world, she carries with her the fullness of truth. Not a list of proposals or thoughtful suggestions. But in order for the world to come to the truth, the Church must overcome the errors the world has accepted. In this article, Fr Pius explores the true nature of pastoral charity: that charity and silence in the face of error are eternal enemies.
Much of what ails the Church is that she has lost sight of where she is going. If we are not convinced that there are dangers- mortal and eternal dangers- present in our Christian lives, then we are more likely to be careless bout taking a wrong turn and less than vigilant in trying to turn back to the rite path. Sin is a less serious reality when we believe there is no real penalty for it. In this article, Fr Pius examines the reality of hell and our need to embrace the Lord’s teaching and the Church’s Tradition surrounding this doctrine for the benefit of our souls.
Father Matthew Solomon
The Christian life is a life of grace. But that life of grace in the 1st century AD was still yet to be manifest to the first followers of Christ. They knew they had to be like Him- but what would that look like when they had no examples to follow? The Church had to navigate between two extremes- of re-creating an alternative system of laws to the Jewish system that it had abandoned; and the other extreme of just leaving it up to personal whim and inspiration. The Apostolic Church had to resist both the Judaisers and the Gnostics, for both wanted to pull Christianity in two different directions, either of which would have destroyed the early Church.
In this month’s article, we answer the last of our three original questions: how did the Church come to distinguish Her scriptures form other non-canonical Christian writings? Thus far, we have seen that the absence of express instructions from the Lord regarding Sacred Scripture, although seemingly a limit, is actually part of the Church’s intellectual and moral formation. The Church must receive what She is to hand on. And like all good mothers- she must exercise the virtues that she requires Her children to practice. Tradition demands that both the intellect be enlightened and the will quickened.
In this month’s lesson, we try and figure out whether those who wrote the New Testament understood that they were adding to the Scriptures. For not only did the Lord Jesus not directly instruct his disciples to write down his words and deeds; there are also no instructions as to who should do it. The question of who should write the New Testament is a question about authority. Did those authors know what they were doing? And did they have some understanding of the authority with which they were doing it? If we are to find our way back to the beginning- we must know what the beginning looked like.
As Catholics, when we think of Sacred Scripture, we tend to take its existence as a given. We never ask ourselves why the first Christians wrote down their experiences and why it would occur to them to do so. After all, we still had the Jewish Scriptures which the Lord Himself referenced on many occasions. Why was there a need for a New Testament when the old one seemed to be perfectly acceptable? In this article, we examine the tradition that made the writing of a New Testament perfectly obvious to the first Christians.
Father Peter Joseph
St. John Henry Newman, canonised in 2019, remains one of the most admired and studied intellectual thinkers of the 19th Century. His major work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, remains one of the most influential works in recent history. In this essay we explore why that is, and why you should read.
Father Paschal Corby
In Parts I and II of this essay, I outlined an approach to John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis splendor from the perspective of the eschatological orientation of morality. From his presentation of a deeply Christological morality, the saintly Pope offers an enlightened and robust morality that is oriented towards eternal beatitude.
It is only after having established this Christological/eschatological orientation of morality that John Paul then confronts certain neuralgic points within the moral theology of its time – points which do not seem to have disappeared of which have reemerged in the contemporary context. In this final part of the essay, I will consider how the eschatological focus of Veritatis splendor provides a hermeneutical key for interpreting such polemics, especially its response to questions of conscience, the immanentizing of moral theology and the so-called ‘teleological’ moralities.)
In Part I of this essay, I considered the eschatological orientation of morality as contained within John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis splendor. Following the Pope’s own outline, I drew on the encounter between Christ and the rich young man, and the latter’s question to the Lord, “Teacher, what good must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16). Now, in Part II, I will explore the necessity of this encounter for awakening the human subject to their moral agency, in orientating their lives toward their end in Christ.
This is the first article in a three-part series dealing with St John Paul II’s encyclical: Veritatis splendor. This encyclical was published in 1993 and is one of the most comprehensive teachings in the Church against the tyranny of moral relativism. One of the principal ideas of the encyclical was the knowability of moral truth and its connection to our relationship with Almighty God. Fr Paschal in this article explores the intrinsic connection between moral truth and eternal life.
The virtue of hope, before it is a virtue is a passion. A passion that is guided by the intellect, but is only raised to the level of virtue by grace. As Christians, we are called to cultivate the virtue of hope in deepening our relationship with the Lord.