A Catholic priest consecrating Holy Communion. Photo by Josh Applegate via Unsplash. Many Americans take polls seriously, and many Catholic Americans are discouraged by Pew Research Center’s survey about a so-called majority of Catholics who don't believe that Jesus Christ is really present in the Holy Eucharist. However, [...]
When couples, by means of recourse to contraception, separate these two meanings that God the Creator has inscribed in the being of man and woman and in the dynamism of their sexual communion, they act as ‘arbiters’ of the Divine plan and they ‘manipulate’ and degrade human sexuality - and [...]
Nowhere else on earth except on a skinny white plastic stick can two vertical lines create such immense joy. What’s represented by those two lines—the culmination of marital love and unity—is the fulfillment of long-held hopes and dreams. Indeed, they often evoke tears of happiness and maybe even a little [...]
The short answer is no, remarriage after annulment is morally okay. The Catholic Church does not acknowledge divorce. In the Catholic mindset, marriage is not merely contractual, but sacramental. It is a permanent spiritual union formed by God, and it makes no more sense to speak of a couple becoming [...]
Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) is Pope Paul VI’s famed 1968 encyclical on contraception and reproductive ethics. Written in light of a study commissioned by the Vatican on modern reproductive issues, its timing coincided with the sudden prevalence of contraception and concerns about overpopulation in society at large. Pope Paul [...]
"Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God. . . . God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being." (Catechism [...]
The Beauty of Catholic Marriage Is remarrying after divorce a sin? To answer this question from a Catholic viewpoint, we must first understand what marriage is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines marriage as “the matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a [...]
Some baptized Catholics who support abortion use a distorted understanding of Church teaching on the “primacy” of conscience to support their views. They also frequently misrepresent theological principles regarding Catholic sexual ethics. One of the most common abuses involves probabilism, which simply means that if a definitive judgment has not [...]
The Modern Misunderstanding of Conscience A fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the human conscience lies at the root of many of the problems in the Catholic Church today. Very few Catholics even know what that role actually is. When pressed, many will say, “If my conscience tells me that [...]
Almost everyone knows that the Catholic Church opposes abortion. However, few are aware of the long and rich history of the Church’s reverence and respect for human life, and fewer still can explain exactly why the Church cannot change her teachings on abortion. This article will address a number of [...]
