By Michael Cook Brother, have you been saved? That's a question we associate with soapbox preachers. But  the question of salvation has not gone out of style. Only the answer has. Only last month, for example, two leading bioethicists published a book on salvation. Julian Savulescu, of Oxford University, and Ingmar Persson, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, have written a pas...

Recently I was in Mass with my wife when a lady in front of us began talking to someone beside her during the Offertory. It may have been important to her but I always find this exceedingly distracting and annoying. Is there anything that can be done about it? Let me begin by considering the importance of silence, not only in Mass, but in general. Modern life tends to be noisy. People...

If the government passes a law requiring priests to inform the police or to testify in court about any serious matters they hear in confession, what will happen? Will priests comply? This issue has suddenly leapt into the public arena with respect to the sexual abuse issue, so it is important to be acquainted with some facts. First, the requirement that priests never divulge to anyone...

Hope springs eternal in the priestly breast - A research study on procedural justice for Priests – Diocesan and Religious. Reviewed by Fr Anthony Paganoni CS This book is an attempt to unravel the subtle, even if hushed-up, consequences of the delirium surrounding the often-reported appalling behavior of clergy, both diocesan and religious, whether or not that behavior has been correctly...

On Monday November 12, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the formation of a royal commission into “institutional responses to instances and allegations of child sexual abuse”. The media spotlight has been on child abuse claims in the Catholic Church. But the Prime Minister is wise enough to realise that sex abuse is so widespread that it is not just a problem in one denom...

By Mike Aquilina For believing Christians the re-evangelisation of Europe looks like a tough job. How long did the first evangelisation take? It is not a tough job. It is an impossible job. If you look at the odds against Christianity in the first, second, and third centuries, there was really no chance the Church would survive. Rome had brute power. It controlled everything – the ...

  Have you heard the joke that begins: “An Anglo-Catholic theologian, a delusional geneticist, and Death walk into a bar…” No? Well, that’s because the joke doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have to, when we have scientists who actually believe that temporal immortality is not only possible but desirable. For Catholics, November is traditionally a month to remember the dead, and to po...

Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers I was born in Barbados and immigrated to the United States when I was two and a half years old. My wife Colleen and I have been married for 18 years and we have four beautiful children: Claire (14), Angela (12), and Benjamin and Sophia (9). Having kids has brought me closer to God by allowing me to exercise patience and heroic virtue. I am the Presiden...

The rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany during the early 1930s began the darkest period in Jewish history. Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, implemented a policy known as "the final solution" to exterminate European Jews during World War II. On November 9 and 10, 1938 an act of destruction that swept across Germany, annexed Austria, Poland and areas of the Sudetenland in Cz...

If faith, as I was taught, is the acceptance of a truth on the authority of God revealing it, why does Christ speak of faith that can move mountains? This is not the same as accepting a truth. Is there another kind of faith? Yes, there is. While we customarily define faith in the way you did at the beginning of your question, there is another meaning of the word, which is equally biblica...