Ihave suspected for over ten years now that I have Asperger syndrome, but I have never sought a diagnosis that would tell me for sure; and this reluctance has caused a few diagnosis apologists I know to try to argue me into it. They will run down all the rational arguments and bring to the conversation the mighty weight of a whole list of benefits that come with a diagnosis. But what said diagnosis apologists never once seem (to... Read more
Except that it is. Purgatory is in the Bible more times than the notion that something must be in the Bible; sola scriptura is in the Bible precisely zero times. Thus one way of answering the objection is to say: “If you can show me where the Bible says it must be in the Bible, I’ll show you Purgatory.” But Purgatory is in the Bible, in 2 Maccabees 2:46: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray... Read more
Recently a meme made its way around Facebook; and on the left side, it depicted a member of the U.S. military; and on the right, a Mexican attempting to scale a wall. The meme told us that the soldier deserves free health care and the Mexican does not. He’s breaking a law, don’t you know? What disturbed me most—perhaps it ought not have–was, the reason I came across this meme in the first place was because a well-known Catholic... Read more
Solomon—or whoever the author of Proverbs—announces a list. “These six things doth the Lord hate!” he begins. But at once he must correct himself. “Yea, seven,” he decides, “are an abomination to him.” In rhetoric, we call what has just happened metanoia. It is when you make a statement, and then instantly correct some part of it. St. Paul uses it in 1 Cor. 7:10: “And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord.” And in... Read more
And interlocutors have the duty to avoid logical fallacies like straw men; I know Church teaching and have not denied it. The USCCB has a good overview of Catholic social teaching on this topic. It cites three “basic principles,” and here are the first two: People have the right to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their families. A country has the right to regulate its borders and to control immigration. So let’s look at some... Read more
Leviticus 18:22 is a permanent moral law that has not been abrogated by the New Covenant. “Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination.” But you have no right to cite that verse if you’re going to ignore the equally permanent moral law of Leviticus 19:34. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers... Read more
The pope said: “In order to demonstrate our love for the Pope, it is necessary to obey him. Therefore, when we love the Pope, there are no discussions regarding what he orders or demands, or up to what point obedience must go, and in what things he is to be obeyed. “When we love the Pope, we do not say that he has not spoken clearly enough, almost as if he were forced to repeat to the ear of... Read more
One self-appointed Catholic sage writes: “Once they”–they here meaning the so-called Catholic Left–“get started down the SJW trail, they just keep going.” That’s a novel concept: Social justice as a sort of gateway drug to more and more extreme forms of dissent. Certainly that is not how the Church understands it. The acronym “SJW” is meant to be a pejorative, and I used to bristle at it. But when I read the above dictum from The Sage, I wondered... Read more
There are two senses in which one may speak of “God’s will.” One may speak of God’s perfect will—that is, what God specifically ordains. For example, the fact that the pope has supreme teaching authority in the Church is God’s perfect will. But one may also speak of God’s permissive will—that is, what God does not ordain but permits. The fact that some people would resist the pope’s teaching authority and there would be Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome is... Read more
Richard A. Spinello, author of this article at Crisis!!!, goes as far as to claim that the pope emeritus’s recent letter was an “implicit rebuke” of Amoris Laetitia. Odd, then, that the Vatican gave the green light to B16. How very careless of Frank, to miss his subtext this way. But Spinello sees all, even though “Benedict is quite discrete, of course, and never mentions Amoris Laetitia.” It all has the tone of wishful thinking on Spinello’s part. Here’s... Read more
To Give a Defense
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