Spirit & Life Blog

Why are so many Catholics afraid to uphold the Church’s moral doctrine? Based in the Word of God and codified by the Magisterium, the truths therein are essential to living in true freedom, and are offered to all. The Church isn’t, as even many Catholics seem to assume, just some social agency with rituals. “The…

The message of Fatima is, in its basic nucleus, a call to conversion and repentance, as in the Gospel. This call was uttered at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it was addressed particularly to this present century . . . . The call to repentance is a motherly one, and at the same time…

Sometimes a name really is revealing. The United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, is one organization whose name says a great deal about its true concern. It was, well, born during the overpopulation panic codified in the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” in the late 1960s, but before the widespread abuses of population…

Contemporary culture is in a deep crisis regarding holy matrimony. Both the truth about the family and families themselves are being ripped apart by violent forces. Proponents of the Culture of Death know well the importance and centrality of the natural family; otherwise, why exhaust so much time, effort, and resources attacking it? This doesn’t…

Last Friday the Ordinary Synod on the Family concluded and released its document, or Relazione Finale. The document, currently available only in Italian, is causing some concerns. Sadly, we will have to wait until the document is translated into English to better understand its content. With such an important document, I question the decision to…

Then the Lord God formed man out of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7) As a Catholic priest of nearly twenty-one years and president of an international pro-life organization, I am very concerned with the results of two recent…

Tradition teaches that Saint Francis of Assisi set up the first Nativity scene in order to inspire and encourage a greater appreciation of the wonders of the first Christmas. The year was 1223, and Francis created the scene in a cave outside Greccio, Italy featuring a wax figure of the infant Jesus and a man…