Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Last year, immediately preceding this Solemnity, Taylor posted “Mary Without Sin (Scripture and Tradition),” and on the Feast I posted “Mary’s Immaculate Conception, in which I included podcasts of Prof. Lawrence Feingold’s lecture and Q&A on this dogma. Those two posts provide evidence for the Catholic dogma, [...]

There are some ancient Christian doctrines that only the Catholic Church has retained. One such doctrine is her teaching on contraception, which was the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers, and which all Christians shared for nineteen centuries until the Lambeth Conference of 1930. At that conference the Anglican Church decided to permit the use [...]

Leonardo De Chirico Leonardo De Chirico is a Protestant lecturer in theology at IFED (Istituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione) in Padova, Italy. He edits the theological journal Studi di teologia. He also worked in Italy for twelve years as a Reformed Baptist church planter. Over the past few months Leonardo has posted a series [...]

When I first began to take interest in theology, and in Reformed theology in particular, during college, I learned the story of how the Catholic Church closed herself off to serious study of the Holy Bible at the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The act in question is the Council’s enshrining the Vulgate, Jerome’s Latin translation [...]

Yesterday (May 24) was the feast day of St. Vincent of Lérins, a soldier who became a monk at the monastery in Lérins, and wrote his famous Commonitory in AD 434, three years after the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus, and seventeen years before the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. Because Protestants generally accept both those [...]

My eldest son is an altar boy. His job sometimes seems mostly symbolic, but there are times when I can tell that his work for the Church is important. In an Eastern parish, we have a clear delineation separating the altar from the rest of the church building. This stock photo from my church website [...]

The principle of lex orandi, lex credendi (which can be translated as “the law of praying is the law of believing”) has an immediate appeal to almost all Christians. It is easy to see that how we relate to God in prayer is a mirror-like reflection of our beliefs, and we sense intuitively that our [...]

We ain’t gonna lie. Many of us on Called to Communion were drawn to the Catholic Church after we had reassessed the “salvation issue” through the lens of the “New Perspective on Paul.” Three years ago, a few friends of mine (including Sean Patrick of Called to Communion) were lamenting that there wasn’t a book [...]

One of the seven Old Testament books rejected by Martin Luther and subsequent Protestants was the book of Ecclesiasticus, alternatively known by its “Old Latin” title Sirach. The other books rejected by Protestantism are Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, Baruch, and 1 & 2 Maccabees. Ecclesiasticus/Sirach is found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (three copies to be [...]

On a recent feast in honor of the Mother of God, (I think it was the commemoration of her Dormition), my priest made a great point about Tradition as it is compared to Protestantism. Many times we as Catholics and Orthodox try to explain how it is that our honor which is given to the [...]