Author name: Molly Hostetler

We search the Scriptures all the time. Google or DuckDuckGo is here to help. We can just send a search engine off to find whatever we want in the Bible. Every conceivable translation is in our pockets, along with millions and millions of words of commentaries to help us understand—or misunderstand—what we’re reading.

The sacraments were part of God’s plan from the very beginning—how much do you know about them? Find out in this quiz from The Bible and the Sacraments.

Today’s readings remind us of the centrality of charity in the Christian life.

Here at the beginning of our Lenten journey, Holy Mother Church pulls no punches.

The rejection by many, including priests and bishops, of the Church’s teaching that the use of contraception is gravely immoral, prepared the way for the rejection of other teachings that go against the sexual revolution.

While we mustn’t ignore the importance of the individual, the truth is that reducing society to a collection of unattached individuals would be like trying to reduce nature to a collection of unattached atoms. It doesn’t get us very far. Sure, we’d have gold and nitrogen and even diamonds (which are just well-organized carbon). But we wouldn’t have water or sugars or proteins, all of which are essential to life, and all of which are molecules—combinations of atoms. Even oxygen gas is a mash-up of two oxygen atoms, not individual particles floating in space.

The Lord entrusted to his Church the Deposit of Faith, which is the body of his teachings to be handed down to each generation in all its purity, uncorrupted by any modifications or omissions. The determination of what teachings are essential as opposed to what are not is fraught with danger.

The essential problem we face in the Western world is the loss of reality. We have entered into a nihilistic view of the world in which nothing is what it is, where there is no such thing as “what something is.” According to this view, something only becomes what it is when we determine it. It is called the “plasticity of reality.” Everything is subject to man’s reshaping or designating of value.