The following is a guest post written by Devin Rose. Devin is a 32-year-old software engineer and lay apologist who blogs at St. Joseph’s Vanguard. He and his wife, Katie, live in Austin with their four children. After years as a devout atheist, I converted to Evangelical Protestantism in February of 2000 and was baptized […]
In the third part of the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas asks the question whether it is proper to Christ to be the Head of the Church and answers in the affirmative. Protestants often claim that the Catholic Church has set the pope as the head of the Church instead of Christ. But St. Thomas […]
Dr. Ligon Duncan is an adjunct professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and also the senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson. At this year’s “Together for the Gospel” conference, held April 10-12 in Louisville, Kentucky, he gave a talk titled “Did the Fathers Know the Gospel?” Here I examine […]
One way to help reconcile Protestants and Catholics to full communion is to consider together the writings of the early Church Fathers, because in the Fathers Protestants and Catholics share a common history and a common patrimony. One of the most fundamental points of disagreement between Protestants and the Catholic Church concerns the relationship between […]
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 […]
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.
The Second Vatican Council taught that non-Catholic Christians were to be recognized as “brothers” in light of their valid baptisms “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Some traditionalist Catholics look askance at this teaching, but it is worth noting that Saint Augustine also recognized that non-Catholic […]
In our contemporary culture, church-shopping has become entirely normal and even expected. Not only when moving to a new location, but if persons have some falling out with a pastor or other individual or family in their church, or even if their church-experience starts seeming dull or dry, they visit and try out other churches, […]
The following is an excerpt of an article I wrote for the Italian newspaper, Ilsussidiario. These categories of person flow out of an Incarnational ecclesiology. We see this duality in the life of our Lord. He is both the manifestation of God’s faithfulness to humanity and humanity’s faithfulness to God. Jesus Christ is God’s answer […]
The Catholic Church teaches that nature is ordered by God. The heavens are superior to the earth, and angels are superior to men.1 Even within the angelic order, not all are equal; for there are angels and arch-angels, cherubim and seraphim.2 Men naturally arrange (order) themselves into hierarchies as the ancients knew well and accepted […]
