Several main-stream media outlets are running a story with headlines like “Pope says condoms acceptable ‘in certain cases’.”   One does not even need to read the quotation in context to know that this is false.  The reason one can know this is because the pope does not have the authority to do such a [...]

The title of this post refers to Pope St. Gregory the Great’s famous pun, made upon meeting children from England in the slave market at Rome– “not Angles, but Angels.”1 This encounter, according to the church historian Bede, prompted the Pope to initiate an Apostolic Mission to Britain, for to convert the Anglo-Saxons. St. Gregory [...]

The Catholic Church has stood, since its inception, firmly against the use of any artificial methods of contraception. In fact, it is the only Christian institution that, as a whole, has held this teaching consistently for all of Christian history.

Catholics, following St. Augustine, differentiate between coveting a neighbor’s wife and between coveting a neighbor’s goods. Protestants follow Judaism and Origen in combining both types of covetousness into the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covet.” Now the species of a sin is defined by its object (Summa 2a.72.1) just as an action takes its species [...]