Ancient Truths in New Light

Picture of Father Matthew Solomon

Fr Matthew Solomon is a priest incardinated in the diocese of Rome and currently resides in Sydney Australia, where he is collaborating with the Oriens Institute. APer completing his studies on Rome, Fr Solomon was ordained in 2001 by Pope St. Paul II at St. Peter’s Basilica.

He has worked on Rome as a curate in several parishes and was university chaplain to the Sacred Heart University in Rome for a number of years. He is the author of the Solomon Doctrine, which is his exposition of the ills of Western Civilisation and how the Catholic Church can begin to remedy these issues by plumbing the depths of Her Tradition.

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.
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.
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 nations 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.
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.
St. Peter's Basilica
Sacred (Apostolic) Tradition is one of the pillars of Catholic Doctrine. But from where did the idea for tradition come? Does sacred tradition have an origin? Can it be argued that Sacred Tradition has a tradition? In this series we begin to examine the origins of the Apostolic Tradition that lie deep in the Church’s history in order to shed light on the direction we need to go today.