Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was one of the great scholars and statesmen of Victorian England. Like most of his countrymen in those days (and now), he was not Catholic. But in October 1840, writing in The Edinburgh Review on a recent book on the history of the Popes, he had
Jesus uses two terms in Scripture that are important to Catholic/protestant debates, and to a lesser extent Catholic/Eastern Orthodox debates. Those terms are “binding” and “loosing.” In this post, we’ll focus on the generic meaning of “binding and loosing” that both Catholics and Eastern Orthodox agree on, in contradistinction to
Many protestant denominations, and some Eastern Orthodox (EO) churches, permit divorce and remarriage (though EO recognize marriage as a sacrament, and allow remarriage in a more limited set of circumstances). They no doubt believed divorce to be a tragedy, but one that is allowed in a limited set of circumstances.
What is Purgatory, and is it taught in the Bible? Let’s talk about it, and yes. This introductory article will provide a very quick overview of Purgatory, with details left for future installments in this mini-series, “Purgatory in the Bible.” The goal of this first post is to present a
In this installment of Where is the True Church?, we will cover St. Augustine’s Of True Religion, authored sometime between AD 389 and 391. First, St. Augustine establishes as a basic fact that true religion must be precisely that: true. It cannot be merely a matter of opinion. Therefore, he
It is widely believed that the most explicit Messianic prophecy of Jesus in the Old Testament is found in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, which we provide below for reference (Isa. 53): 1 Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been
Throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, one is overwhelmed by the ubiquitous references to the Catholic Church. This is one of the many reasons protestant and other non-Catholic readers who read the Church Fathers end up Catholic. After all, if the one true Church established by Christ was, and
Few conversion stories had as big of an effect on my own conversion as that of Dr. David Anders. Before becoming Catholic, he was a Calvinist theologian and historian who had set out to defend the reformation and disprove Catholicism. But after years of studying the sources, Anders himself ended
Roadmap Our Roadmap is as follows: Introduction Now that I am Catholic, I recognize many steps along my journey that, at the time, I didn’t realize were leading me to the Catholic Church. One of those steps was in my early college years (perhaps between the ages of 18-20) when
