A common question among Catholics is whether they are permitted to attend invalid marriages (that is, weddings which result in an invalid marriage). Despite the prevalence of the question, there has been little formal explanation by Church authority. The following then is merely one canonist’s view on the topic. The
The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men’s minds that they become difficult of access, but even when access is obtained will again meet, and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind
Collapsing the “Two Books” Newton’s theological investigations, marked by his pursuit of textual “simplicity” and his anti-Trinitarian convictions, revealed a man deeply invested in reconciling faith with reason. His approach to Scripture, which sought to uncover the “good sense” behind divine revelation, was emblematic of a broader intellectual shift in
The details of their analyses vary, but a number of commentators have recently come to the same conclusion: Catholic theology finds itself in a profoundly challenging moment. In his 2021 essay, “The Crisis in Catholic Theology,” Grant Kaplan reflects from his position at a large Catholic university on the “gravitational pull
Augustine’s Confessions lends itself to a rich variety of readings and understandings. There is a lot that can be said about it, a sensus plenum of meanings. I want to propose one way to read the text that sheds light on what Augustine is learning over the course of his conversions
A Story About Ambiguity It was a mistake, says Hans Urs von Balthasar, to think of saints as heroes. Those kinds of stories (Balthasar means Western heroic epics) were, in some sense, the kind available to the early church and to the medieval church, at least in terms of Hellenistic
Just about everything Newman wrote on any topic over a long career of writing is controversial in some way, or another, and engenders strong responses, whether of outrage or acclaim, frustration or elation, the emotion of being hard-done by or quiet vindication. The experience of reading Newman—either The Idea of