Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 26

Since folks found Eons to be entertaining and informative

…here’s another one for your Saturday amusement: Just to be clear, birds once had teeth because evolution is real and only Fundamentalists, Catholic and Protestant, insist otherwise. Protestants at least have the excuse of ignorance of the Magisterium. Catholic Fundies have nothing. A few years back, Benedict XVI had a conference on Creation and Evolution […]

“Many will come in my Name saying, ‘I am he.'”

So the other day, our President decided to scold America’s Jews for “disloyalty” if they voted Democrat. This ancient anti-semitic trope, typical for a man who declares Nazis “very fine people” was, of course, laughed off by his cult even as they affirmed it.  “He supports Israel!” they said.  “It is impossible for him to […]

Pope Francis Gives Some of Peter’s Relics to Patriarch Bartholomew

So this happened about two months ago on the Feast of Peter and Paul: Patriarch Bartholomew had sent a delegation led by Archbishop Job of Telmessos to the Vatican for the feast day celebrations. After the solemn Mass, Pope Francis and Archbishop Job went down to St. Peter’s tomb under the high altar to pray. […]

An Actual Real Professional Catholic Ethicist Writes to Reassure Me

He writes: Thank you so much for your recent post about the moral principle of cooperation. As a practicing bioethicist in Catholic Health Care it’s comforting to know there are bloggers with such mass appeal who are able to provide such important clarification about what the Church actually teaches.  This principle is so important in […]

Silence: The Shield Against Suspicious Man

This is another typically fine piece from Where Peter Is: a website dedicated to the radical proposition that the Pope is neither a heretic nor a monster: In my last article, I tried to illustrate how the nuanced concept of silence appears throughout Francis’ corpus of theological thought. One question remains yet unanswered, however: why […]

The reader from Friday writes back

They say: Thank you for getting back to me with this reply. Although I appreciate all of it, two things in it stand out in particular: While the ChurchMilitant crowd does call out sin in the hierarchy, it fundamentally has a false view that the problem can be fixed by replacing everyone without conservative views […]

Saturdays are a Good Day for Game of Thrones/XMen Characters

to entertain us with Hillaire Belloc Cautionary Tales:

A reader puzzles over criticism of the Pope/hierarchy

They write: I want to start by saying the I appreciate your writings, especially on poverty. I was coming to the conclusion that American churches alignment with Ayn Randian economics was related to “faith alone”/antinomian theology, which claims that the Christian life ought to require no sacrifice, and you expressed these thoughts very well in […]

Since today is the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady…

I thought I would post an Oldie But a Goodie as an offering to her: The final Marian dogma—the Assumption—was promulgated in 1950. But like all doctrinal developments throughout the history of the Church, it is rooted in apostolic teaching and reflected in Scripture. Pope Pius XII defined the dogma this way: “The Immaculate Mother […]

In case you missed them….

… you can go here and listen to my Catholic and Enjoying Live! interviews with Destiny Herndon-de la Rosa of New Wave Feminists and Mike Lewis of Where Peter Is.  The latter is getting a bunch of hate from the guy who runs Canon212, so that’s a hopeful sign.