“While experiencing these days the painful situation of our divisions, we Christians can and must look to the future with hope,” Pope Benedict XVI told a packed basilica of St Paul’s outside-the-walls Wednesday evening, “because Christ’s victory means to overcome everything that keeps us from sharing the fullness of life with Him and with others.” [...]
Most gracious God, on this day of the March for Life, may your servants who marched side by side be rewarded with the strength of perseverance, with the deepest hope in your goodness, and with a renewed desire for unity with the separated brothers and sisters with whom they marched.
In his work Called to Communion (Ignatius: 1991. German title: Zur Gemeinschaft gerufen), then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: Anyone who becomes acquainted with [the Church] as she lives out her life sees immediately that the ancient Church never consisted in a static juxtaposition of local Churches. Catholicity, concretely realized in many forms, belongs to her essence from the [...]
Each year, Called to Communion takes note of the “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.” It is an occasion prompted by the World Council of Churches, an occasion to which the Catholic Church gives full-throated support.1 Since Called to Communion is a Catholic website devoted to God’s call to communion, made to all Reformed and [...]
Stories of conversion from the Reformed faith to the Catholic Church abound. When I was Reformed, and was contemplating the claims of the Catholic Church, I read many conversion stories. I searched them and I probed them, looking for that nugget by which I could understand why the particular story’s author had gone off the [...]
Has the Catholic Church changed her doctrine concerning “no salvation outside the Church?” Dr. David VanDrunen recently penned a brief historical survey of what he sees as Catholicism’s “change” from soteriological exclusivisity to inclusivity. VanDrunen is a Westminster Seminary California professor and minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). His article appeared in the OPC’s periodical [...]
I. The Reformed Position: The claim in the Westminster Confession of Faith that all controversies of religion ultimately are to be determined by the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture contradicts the testimony of the Church Fathers, who repeatedly teach the necessity of judging such controversies by way of the Church and Sacred Scripture. The [...]
If the Catholic view of the efficacy of grace is correct, why are “bad Catholics” so prevalent (and so bad)? As I considered conversion from the Reformed faith, this was a question to which I returned regularly. But since being received into full communion with the Catholic Church, and viewing things from a Catholic frame, [...]
Just a few months before I was certain I needed to enter the Catholic Church, I wrote the following post on a blog I had been using to write out my thoughts about discerning the Church. I re-post it here, with some edits that seem appropriate now that I am Catholic, to reach Called to [...]
As a Reformed Christian, my lips pursed at the very idea of 7th graders beginning “seminary.” Only the Catholics could come up with such a bizarre scheme, I thought. It made as much sense to me as gifted monks spending all of their earthly days milling about in silence. I didn’t get it. But two [...]
