Jenna Marie Cooper Q: Since the Church teaches that God is a forgiving God, how could he banish a person to Hell? It is very difficult for me to believe that God would make that an eternal habitat for anyone. A: According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Hell’s principal punishment consists of eternal…
Questions of Faith There is an enormous gap between the public perception of sainthood and the reality of it. The vast majority of people believe that saints are born rather than made, titanic figures of myth and legend that we devote art to and tell stories about, nearly like Hercules or Prometheus, except that their…
Spend any time around Protestant denominations as a Catholic and you’re likely to be asked: “What’s the deal with Mary?” Or depending on who you’re chatting with, you might be more aggressively accused of “worshipping” Mary. Our initial reaction might be something along the lines of laughing it off, insisting that of course we don’t…
A common line of thought these days among critics of religion, and Christianity in particular, is that God must be a major narcissist, creating a world full of people, animals and more, to sing his praises from now through to eternity. Commandments from throughout the Bible to love and worship God, a ‘jealous’ God, have…
The Church has a long history of celebrating martyrs – those who died “in a supreme act of love, witnessing to their faithfulness to Christ, to the Gospel and to the Church” (Pope Benedict XVI, apostolic letter to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints). That logic is somewhat incomprehensible today, though. A certain amount…
It is taken for granted these days by those of every political and religious persuasion that love is a very good thing, and rightly so. This is so taken for granted that it’s one of those things that has become invisible, a truth that goes without saying. We usually learn about ‘love’ by osmosis, rather…
It’s widely held today that faith, or spirituality as it’s more commonly put these days, is a private matter. Rightly perceived as an important element of the inner lives of individuals, our culture’s view of the topic is this: faith or spirituality is an expression of the individual’s relationship with God, the universe or some…
Too many of us have too limited a conception of conversion. We often think of it as something for other people, maybe especially for people who adhere to other faiths than Catholicism. This is certainly an element of conversion, and possibly the form we’ve read the most about. After all, history is full of peoples…
Plenty of secular accounts pertaining to morality co-exist in the world today – some hold that objective moral values are real; others that moral actions can be reduced down to evolutionary behaviour; and many that morals don’t exist at all but have been created to allow for a functioning society. In opposition to some of…
It’s common in this day and age to hear the Old Testament decried as mad, bad and barbaric. Many atheists say that it’s an instruction manual for how to be a bad person, rather than how to be a good one. Others say that God seems to have undergone a major personality shift between the…
Colm Fitzpatrick