Not afraid to call a spade a spade, and deeply grounded in the Scriptures and the fathers of the Church, the scrappy and erudite Cardinal Giacomo Biffi has done it again. When his last book was published, we wrote Cardinal Biffi’s Bombshell. With his recent publication of Pecore e Pastori (Sheep and Shepherds), the good Cardinal has proven that there is more shock and awe left in his arsenal, and he’s delivered the ordinance right on target.
Perhaps the oldest devotion to Our Lady in Europe is the devotion to Our Lady of the Pillar. In Spain, Pilar is a popular girl’s name, as is Mercedes for Our Lady of Mercy. (In fact, General Franco named one of his daughters Pilar, just as one of the Carmelite Martyrs written of in this [...]
When the Apostles divided the earth and drew lots for their portions, Spain fell to Saint James the Greater. The seeds he sowed grew well, and the roots of the Faith in Spain go deep. Upon his return to Jerusalem in AD 42, Herod Agrippa I had him beheaded. His body was taken back to [...]
This is a very interesting article, not only because it authenticates Antonio Gramsci’s conversion, but because it highlights his strategy for Communizing all Europe. In order to do that, Gramsci insisted that the Church, the new order’s main enemy, would have to be infiltrated and destroyed from within.
Madrid, Dec 2, 2008 / 08:11 pm [...]
We received news yesterday on the death of Brother Dominic Maria, O.S.C.O. Brother was an early member of Saint Benedict Center and a convert of Father Feeney’s from Protestantism. He was a Harvard student and the scion of the famous Morgan family (J.P. was a grand-uncle). Our own Brother Francis (Dr. Fakhri Maluf) was his [...]
An offense is measured, not by the one who gives it, but by the one who receives it. While it certainly would be wrong for anyone to strike a neighbor, it would be a much greater wrong to strike the Pope, the President, or some other prominent individual.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they offended God. [...]
I had heard of Stevenson’s defense of Father Damien many years ago, but only recently came across the actual letter that he wrote to the Rev. Dr. Hyde, the Blessed’s unworthy calumniator. Pope John Paul II beatified Father Damien de Veuster in 1995. His feast day, May 10, is a state holiday in Hawaii. [...]
To all our readers: Happy Thanksgiving! And lest you think that heathens and heretics dining on maize and turkey is the historical “first Thanksgiving” in America, we present a myth-shattering article by Adam Miller, who truly tells the story of “The First Thanksgiving.” (Hint: It was Catholic!)
Today is also the feast of the Miraculous Medal. [...]
Of all the words, exclamations, and clichés that grew out of anti-catholic bigotry, it is the word “dunce” that is the most ridiculous misnomer. It is derived from the name of one of the greatest scholastic thinkers of the Middles Ages, Duns Scotus, a Franciscan theologian, philosopher, and logician. He taught at Oxford [...]
Everyone knows that Protestants do not venerate saints. Nevertheless, sometimes they canonize their own by naming places after some local denizen that they feel deserves the title. At least five cities in the U.S.A. testify to the rather strange anomaly: St. Paul, Texas, is named after W.H. Paul; St. James, Missouri, is named after Thomas [...]
Brian Kelly has written on this site about Our Lady of America and her apparitions to the holy religious in Ohio, Sister Mary Ephrem (Mildred Neuzil). These apparitions are approved by the Church, as the recent canonical study of the case by Archbishop Burke testifies. While there are many supposed apparitions which claim our attention, [...]
This page contains some links to articles about Hans Urs von Balthasar, the theologian perhaps most known for undermining the Church’s doctrine on hell. The links are further down.
Novel and dangerous Christology. Von Balthasar’s novelties also extended into the realm of Christology. His “Mission Christology” explains the person of Christ in terms of our Lord’s mission from the Father. In an effort to be objective (contra some modern trends in Chrisology), von Balthasar uses modern philosophical language to explain that Christ’s personhood is identical to his mission . In other conscious subjects, personhood has to be achieved by their being given a mission, but in Christ, his Mission is his Person — they are identical — therefore he did not need to “given” personhood as we do. Further, in Christ, we all have the hope of achieving personhood.
The problem with this view is that it defines personhood in terms of “mission,” a philosophical novelty. Rather than being a “rational hypostasis,” a person is a conscious subject which has been put in act (given personhood) from outside. Besides being a strange philosophical psychology, this is dangerous inasmuch as it identifies Christ’s Person with his mission. This would make his mission a necessary, and not a free act. Further, it would make creation necessary and not merely a free act, for the mission presupposes creation. The Logos is a “person” in eternity, yet he had no mission in eternity.
Von Balthasar’s considerations on Holy Saturday, of Christ’s descent into Hell, are perhaps the most problematic. While he presents his theories in erudite, long verbosity, the theologian concludes that Christ on the Cross experienced the abandonment of the damned. Further, his descent into hell was passive, not an active descent into hell (thus, the Creed’s active, “he descended into hell, got it wrong !). Christ experienced the torment of hell and was somehow severed from divine knowledge, a blasphemous notion destructive of faith in the Incarnation and in the Trinity.
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[...] above-mentioned Rome trip, began to embrace modernist theology. He became enamored of the likes of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and other theological miscreants, to the scandal and protest of many in the [...]
[...] above-mentioned Rome trip, began to embrace modernist theology. He became enamored of the likes of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and other theological miscreants, to the scandal and protest of many in the [...]
[...] One of the leading figures in the “New Theology” was the German ex-Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar. A brief couple of paragraphs concerning this theologian, with links to critiques on other sites, in now on our site. [...]