God Is Known By His Works

"Concerning the question: What is God? not one of the masters who have ever been has succeeded in giving an explanation, for it is beyond all thought and intelligence. And yet someone who zealously and diligently seeks for some kind of knowledge of God will attain it, although in a very remote way... This is how some virtuous pagan masters sought him in former times, especially the wise man, Aristotle. He examined the course of nature..., sought passionately and thus found. From nature he deduced that that there must necessarily be a unique monarch, lord over all creatures, and this is what we call God...God's being is such a spiritual substance that mortal eye is unable to contemplate it as it is, but it can be seen in its works. As Saint Paul says: creatures are a mirror reflecting God (Rom 1:20). Let us stop here for a moment...: look above and around you, how immense and lofty is the heaven in its swift course, with what nobility has its Lord adorned it with its seven planets and how decorative it is by reason of its innumerable host of stars! When the sun shines gaily in a cloudless sky during the summer, what fruit, what good things it brings to the earth! How beautifully green are the meadows, how smiling the flowers, how the sweet song of little birds resounds in forest and field, and all the animals that went into hiding during the hard winter now hasten happily outside. How both young and old among men express their joy with the joy that brings such happiness to them. O loving God, if you are so worthy of being loved in your creatures, how beautiful and worthy of being loved you must be in yourself!"

-Blessed Henry Suso, Dominican Life, ch. 50

Ask A Father

Q: St. Justin Martyr, why can’t non-Catholics receive Communion at Mass?

A: “No one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, This do in remembrance of Me, this is My body; and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, This is My blood; and gave it to them alone.”

-First Apology, Chapter 66

On this same theme, see this post.

Christ Is Risen!

"For Christ, death-however burdened and agonizing and essential-is only a passageway to fulfillment. 'Did not the Christ have to suffer these things before entering in to his glory?' he asks the disciples on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24:26). The Resurrection is the blossoming of the seed he has always borne within him. He who rejects it, rejects everything in Jesus' life and consciousness that is linked with it. What then remains, is not worth faith."

-Romano Guardini, The Lord

Easter Vigil Homily Of Pope Benedict XVI

Read the Holy Father's beautiful homily on the sacrament of Baptism, which by virtue of Our Lord's glorious Resurrection brings the sinner from death to life!

The Biblical View Of Covenant

“In the Bible, what we call ‘covenant’ is not a symmetrical relationship between two partners who make a contractual agreement involving reciprocal obligations and penalties: this idea of a partnership among equals cannot be reconciled with the biblical concept of God. According to the latter, man is in no position to create a relationship with God, let alone give him anything and receive something in return; it is quite out of the question that man should bind God to obligations in return for undertakings on his own part. If there is to be a relationship between God and man, it can only come about through God’s free ordinance, in which his sovereignty remains intact. The relationship is therefore completely asymmetrical, because God, for the creature, is and remains the ‘wholly other.’ The ‘covenant’ is not a two-sided contract but a gift, a creative act of God’s love. This last statement, it is true, goes beyond the philological issue. Although the covenant is patterned on Hittite and Assyrian contracts between states, in which the lord imposes his law on his vassal, God’s covenant with Israel is far more: here God, the King, receives nothing from man; but in giving him his law, he gives him the path of life.”

-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Many Religions—One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World

1 Peter 2:24

The New York Times' Sorry Excuse For Journalism

Fr. Thomas Brundage, JCL, the presiding judge in the Fr. Murphy case, sets the record straight and provides more evidence that the New York Times is intent on attacking the Holy Father (and thus the entire Catholic Church) and isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Ask A Father

Q: St Hilary, what advice would you give to someone who wishes to study theology?

A: “Enter these truths by believing, press forward, persevere. And though I may know that you will not arrive at an end, yet I will congratulate you in your progress. For, though he who pursues the infinite with reverence will never finally reach the end, yet he will always progress by pressing onward. But do not intrude yourself into the divine secret, do not, presuming to comprehend the sum total of intelligence, plunge yourself into the mystery of the unending nativity; rather, understand that these things are incomprehensible.”

-De Trinitate, II, 10, ii (PL, 10, coll. 58-59)

Support Pope Benedict!

Fr. Dwight Longenecker has some great insights on the current sex abuse scandals here and here.

Also be sure to check out John Allen's article (from the National Catholic Reporter, of all places) discrediting the New York Times' attack on the Holy Father.

Here is also an article by Sean Murphy, a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman, responding to Christopher Hitchen's vitriol.

Lastly, pray for the Pope! Pray that the anti-Catholic pharaoh's will unharden their hearts and start doing some real journalism.

Rahner On The Canon

“Now the Synagogue, unlike the Church, does not have the authority to testify infallibly to the inspiration of the Scriptures. Even prior to the death of Christ, there existed no authoritative teaching office in the Old Testament, in the sense of a permanent institution formally endowed with inerrancy. There were individual prophets, but no infallible Church, for the eschatological event, the final and irreversible salvation act of God, had not yet occurred. It was possible for the Synagogue to apostatize from God, to turn a ‘No’ to him and to his ‘Anointed’ into its own official ‘truth’, thus bringing about its own end as a divine institution. Not that the Old Testament period was altogether without knowledge of inspired and canonical sacred books. There were writings which were recognized as inspired, and, more decisively, these ideas about the meaning and extension of canonicity were recognized and ratified for themselves by Jesus, the apostles, and the Church. If, in the pre-Christian era, there appeared prophets commissioned by God to deliver his message and call men to faith, then there is no reason why there should not have existed a knowledge—ultimately grounded in the prophetic charism itself—of the inspiration of Holy Scripture and of its essential relation to the Jewish religious community (its canonicity). Such knowledge was in fact present. But it must be remembered that neither the extent nor the certainty of the Canon was, or even could be, definitively established in pre-Christian times. Sacred books were written after the time when prophets existed no longer: the sacred writer need not have been a prophet himself; certainly the writers of much of the late wisdom literature would hardly have claimed to a prophetic commission which bears witness to itself without needing any support or certification from the Synagogue or other external authority. Yet the Synagogue, as distinct from the prophets who appeared in it from time to time, was not, as a religious institution, empowered to give definitive testimony to the inspiration and canonicity of sacred books. If this is so, a final definition of the Canon was impossible before the time of the Church. An inchoative knowledge of inspiration and a start on the formation of a Canon was there possible, because (and to the extent that) prophetic charism was there to support it. But no more than that. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Church, even in the case of the Old Testament, herself completed the formation of the Canon and did not simply take over the Jewish canon as final and definitive…The rejection by Protestants of the inspiration and canonicity of the deutero-canonical books, on the grounds that they were not recognized by the Synagogue, contradicts the fact that all the writings of the Old Testament (even apart from the reasons we have just mentioned) are directed towards Christ and the New Testament, and are a part of salvation history only because of this direction, and can be recognized as such only by virtue of it. This is not to say that no Old Testament book could be recognized as canonical until after Christ; even earlier, to the extent that they were grasped as essentially prophetic, incomplete, and open to some future revelation, the Old Testament books were already recognized as ‘pre-Christian’—indeed this is the only sense in which they could have been understood as the work of God. If this reference to the future belongs to the essence of the Old Testament, we may ask whether this essence is preserved and respected if an historical gap is introduced between the canonical Old Testament history and Christ of such dimensions as to constitute a real hiatus between that history and its fulfillment in Christ. If such a break is inadmissible, then we must ask: after the ‘cessation’ of prophecy, where are we to locate the influence of God by which post-exilic history continued to be true salvation history ordered toward Christ? Against Marcionism and similar tendencies in the early Church, the Church has declared the Old Testament to be truly her own prehistory, and hence a part of her own as yet hidden life (the ‘Church since Adam and Abel,’ etc.); this prehistory cannot have come to a close long before the appearance of the Church, or have been reduced for a long interval to a merely human religious evolution.”

-Karl Rahner, Inspiration in the Bible