Month: June 2015

Remember Lot’s Wife.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • June 29, 2015 • Exegesis; In the News; LGBT Issues; Moral Theology

 

It is not mar­riage, what five peo­ple forced upon us all on Fri­day, and can not be mar­riage any more than a square can be round or a hexa­gon rec­tan­gu­lar. What five peo­ple — a major­i­ty by one — forced upon us all on Fri­day was a game of make-believe, a lie. Words mean things, and mar­riage is not just a social arrange­ment entered into by any two peo­ple who may choose. Mar­riage is onto­log­i­cal, root­ed in God’s design of the human per­son for uni­ty and pro­cre­ation. Man was not designed to fit with man, nor woman with woman; and we may not design our own real­i­ty.

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Laudato Si is a hard teaching. And we must accept it.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • June 25, 2015 • Church Social Teaching

 

Encycli­cals take time to read. They take still longer to digest and under­stand, and longer still for them to even begin to change our habits of thought and pat­terns of behav­ior. That is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when, as encycli­cals should, it hits us where we live. How many of us can say they’ve under­stood and mod­eled their moral life after Rerum Novarum? Can you? That was writ­ten in 1891. A hun­dred years lat­er, Pope St. John Paul II still had to adjure us on its teach­ing when he wrote Cen­tis­simus Annus. We’re thick. This peo­ple is a stiff-necked peo­ple.

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Why I am never leaving the Catholic Church.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • June 4, 2015 • Apologetics

 

I wish I could say oth­er­wise, but I must tell the truth about this. The Catholic Church does not promise that every­thing will be easy. It promis­es, instead, a Cross. Fr. George Schom­mer, who preached the clos­ing homi­ly for my RCIA class the year I became Catholic, said it: “You will be test­ed.” And yet, I have nev­er once been tempt­ed to go and leave. I have nev­er once said, “You know what, I was hap­pi­er when I was a Pres­by­ter­ian, let me go back there.” As though I was hap­py then because I was a Pres­by­ter­ian, or as though the Chris­t­ian life is about our hap­pi­ness, or our feel­ings.

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