Considering a title for this essay, I rather facetiously suggested to my friend, Father Edward Tomlinson, who assisted me with many of the facts for the piece, that I should call it either “Newman’s bums” or “Sacred bottoms.” Father Tomlinson, a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, as am I, is the … Read more
“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” —Matthew 6:22 I’m content, at the age of about twenty-five (the exact number escapes me), to stay exactly where I am. I’ve moved precisely once since my undergraduate days. Nothing’s more futile than … Read more
On November 4, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued an Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, in response to “groups of Anglicans” who had petitioned “repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately,” which created for them a new ecclesiastical structure: the Personal Ordinariates. The stated purpose of these was “to … Read more
This past October marked the 498th year since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. It also marked the eleventh year since I walked out of Trinity Lutheran Church in Traverse City and began the long road towards Catholicism. Anyone who has talked to me for more than five … Read more
What God knows is not necessarily what God wills. Each pope is guaranteed the protection of the Holy Spirit from fallible definitions of faith and morals, but to suppose that each pope is there because God wants him there, including the unworthy successors of Peter, comes close to the unforgivable blasphemy against the Third Person … Read more