June 2015 - To Give a Defense

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.

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.

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.