| May 18th, 2008 The term used for lay ministers of the eucharist is not "exceptional" but "extraordinary." "Ordinary" is the Church's term for someone who is ordained. For example, a bishop is often called an "ordinary" because he ... |
| May 18th, 2008 Transubstantiation is a teaching of the Church that developed from the 10th the 13th century as a way of explaining how the bread and wine that we receive at Mass are no longer bread and ... |
| May 18th, 2008 All things being equal, the Church would prefer that Catholics marry Catholics. Shared religious beliefs and practices are important factors in establishing a closer union with another person. Catholics also see marriage between Catholics as ... |
| May 18th, 2008 How strictly must we obey laws that don't seem to make sense and impede the way we want to live our lives? Does a Christian need to follow the law literally, as an expression of God's will over temporal matters through human legislators? Jesus and Paul provide some example here. Both seem to have been "law-abiding citizens" in most respects. Jesus made exceptions which involved common sense (the disciples picking and eating grain because they were hungry on ... |
| May 18th, 2008 As many Catholics do, I have some serious disagreements with the Catholic church's teachings. I joke that "I'm a bad Catholic but obviously still identify as a Catholic. How can I reconcile issues over things like abortion, acceptance of other religions, gays/females as priests. The first big conflict in the Church was over whether to admit Gentiles to baptism, without binding them to practice all the laws of Moses, and whether Jewish Christians could then associate with them as ... |
| May 18th, 2008 Your question comes at a time when many people are asking about the appropriateness of tatoos. Parents, especially, are facing the increasing number of adolescents who want to have this form of "body art" ... |
| May 18th, 2008 The first thing to note is that the Bible isn't a source of science or history as we know it, but of religious truth. As John Paul II once observed, "the Bible does not show ... |
| May 18th, 2008 The Catholic theologian Gerald O'Collins, S.J., has called the writings of the prophet Isaiah "the fifth gospel." By this he means that so many of the themes of the gospels, enfleshed in their portrayal of ... |
| May 18th, 2008 I mean, we follow Jesus, but he didn't even write it; his friends did. If it was written so many years after his death by failing memories, why do we live by it? (What about the missing years?) Why do we base our beliefs on a man who 1) is like the rest of us and just wants peace, 2) was written about by other people who only told their version of the story, 3) wasn't important enough to be followed during the missing years? These are great questions and I hope I can do them justice. The four gospels are important to us because they provide us with the first testimonies of faith. They share the story of Jesus ... |
| May 18th, 2008 Thank you for your question. You ask: "What was the nature of Adam and Eve's perfection? And is this the perfection we are trying to journey towards?"The book of Genesis relates that "God created ... |
