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The Dominican Rosary

Full Question

        What kind of rosary has only one bead between the crucifix and decades?        

Answer

That would be the Dominican rosary. Dominicans do not begin the rosary with the Apostles Creed and the Our Father, three Hail Marys, and the Glory Be for the pope's intentions. They begin it in the way one prays the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They start with the first part of the Hail Mary, followed by "O God, come to my assistance. Lord make to help me." Then they recite the doxology and an alleluia, except during Lent. They then begin the first decade in the usual manner.

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Was Peter Ever In Rome?

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There Is No "Where" for God 

Full Question

        Where did God exist before he created heaven and earth?        

Answer

You ask a deep and important question. However, using the word “where” implies that God in his divine essence is like us human beings—that is, with a bodily, three-dimensional nature. And that’s not true, although it’s human understandably that we initially ask questions in terms of our human experience.

Although we fully acknowledge the Incarnation, in which God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, fully God and fully divine (CCC 456ff.; John 1:1-3, 14), we nevertheless hold that, in his divine essence, God is pure, uncreated Spirit. Which means he surely exists but not in a place, which implies materiality, i.e., a three-dimensional reality,

If God had materiality as part of his divine nature, he would be like us—a body-soul composite, i.e., a composite of spirit and matter. But that would mean he couldn’t be God, because everything composed requires a cause for its composition, i.e., its creation.

But God is necessarily uncreated, the Uncaused Cause, or he wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—God. So while God existed before he created anything, he didn’t exist anywhere, because time and space, which are constitutive of creation, didn’t exist.  

As the eminent lay Catholic apologist Frank Sheed says of God, “Because he lacks the limitation of having parts, he is free from the consequent limitation of occupying space. Space cannot contain him. He transcends space, and the things of space, and indeed all created things. He lives his life in utter and absolute independence of them” (Theology and Sanity, 2nd Edition, 1978, p. 31).

So before creating the heavens and the earth, God existed in a perfect exchange of eternal love—Father, Son and Holy Spirit (see CCC 232ff; 249ff.)—“beyond” the limiting confines of created time and space. Thus even using the word existed, a term related to time, is a misnomer. How God existed exceeds human comprehension. But along with King Solomon, we can certainly proclaim, “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27).

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How Exactly Did Jesus Take On a Body?

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The Truth About Biblical Authority

Even if someone does not accept the inspiration of Scripture, he can know through the use of reason alone that the New Testament contains accurate historical information about the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And one piece of history he will find there is that Jesus established a “Church” that would have the authority to speak for him whenever there was a matter of dispute among the people of God. That Church—also a matter of historical fact—was and is the Catholic Church.

Perhaps the plainest example of Our Lord’s teaching on the establishment of an authoritative and infallible authority on earth, namely, the Church, can be found in Matthew 18:15-18. Here, in part of the Gospel reading we heard this past Sunday, Jesus gives definitive instruction as to how matters of dispute would be settled among the people of God for all time:

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the Church; and if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.  

Jesus guarantees that the Church’s definitive decisions would be backed up by the authority of heaven itself. So radical is this authority that he would also say of his Church, “If they receive you they receive me; if they reject you, they reject me” (Matt. 10:40; Cf. Luke 10:16; 1 Tim. 3:15; Eph. 3:10; 4:11-15, etc.). This does not mean just some kind of authority, but an infallible authority, i.e. the authority of Christ himself.

The blessings of this infallible Church are manifold. But one very important reason for its establishment concerns the nature of faith itself. Without an infallible spokesman for Christ, the follower of Christ cannot have faith in the sense that God wills for him, because without that infallible spokesman he is forced to trust in some man’s private and fallible interpretation of the word of God rather than the word of God itself. Whether he places his faith in his own interpretation or in another fallible person’s really doesn’t matter. He is trusting in a fallible source, rather than in that of God’s spokesman who speaks infallibly.

In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, St. Paul explains this principle succinctly:

And we thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God.

Notice that Paul did not say he was giving the Thessalonians (and us) his fallible opinion of what he thought Jesus said. He gave them the word of God. Paul—and the Catholic Church, I should add—never asks the faithful to place what the Church in its tradition calls “divine faith” in anything other than the infallible teachings of God’s authority on earth, whether that be Paul himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, or the infallible teaching authority of the Magisterium of the Church (cf. CCC 2089). To place “divine faith” in anything else would be to accept “as doctrines the precepts of men.” Jesus did not have nice things to say about that! (See Mark 7:6-8.)

The Protestant idea that Jesus did not give us an infallible Church—that, instead, we are to get our Bibles out and argue verses and then start our own churches if we cannot agree—as has been the practice of Protestantism for 500 years with no end in sign, or indeed possible. It is also completely alien to the New Testament, which condemns the practice of private interpretation of Scripture:

First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God (2 Pet. 1:20-21).

Our Protestant friends will claim that this text does not condemn private interpretation at all. It is, they will say, only speaking of the inspiration and authority of Scripture— that the text of Scripture itself is not a matter of “private interpretation.” It has nothing to do with the man interpreting Scripture.

But this is manifestly false. The next verse (2 Peter 2:1) informs us that Peter was concerned with more than just the actual text of Scripture. He warned of “false teachers” who would teach “heresies,” not just false teachers who would write apocryphal works and claim them to be Scripture:

But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies.

In 2:10 he describes these false teachers as “despising authority,” and then, in 3:16, he tells us they “twist the scriptures to their own destruction.” The context of Peter’s letter leaves no room to doubt that our first pope was condemning the private interpretation of Scripture, the foundation of the Protestant movement.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, in paragraph 89, that the dogmas of the Faith are crucial for our spiritual lives, and our spiritual lives must be upright so that we will be open to receive the dogmas:

There is an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas. Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith.

And the Catechism also tells us—in paragraph 2051—just how far the infallible teaching authority of the Church extends:

The infallibility of the Magisterium … extends to all the elements of doctrine, including moral doctrine, without which the saving truths of the faith cannot be preserved, expounded, or observed.

Why does this great gift extend to all of these matters absolutely crucial for our salvation? Paul  says it beautifully and succinctly in Ephesians 4:14: “so that we may no longer be children, tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine.”

Too many Catholics take for granted the great gift of the Magisterium, of the bishops in union with the bishop of Rome, which has safeguarded the truth of the Faith for 2,000 years. In fact, there is no human way to explain the reality of the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5) that we have experienced in the Church for these two millennia apart from this supernatural gift of God’s grace that we call the Magisterium.

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Anti-Catholics like to paint Church teachings in a way that makes them seem vain, backward, or superstitious, all in the hope of drawing people out of the Faith and into sects or unbelief. Catholic apologists fight back with facts and sound arguments.

But there’s another area where the Church’s enemies tell their own false story of Catholicism: its history.

Whether it’s from the media, in classrooms, or out of the mouths of pastors and politicians, we’ve all heard a version of Catholic history filled with unrelenting violence, ignorance, worldliness, and bigotry. It’s enough to make many believers question whether the Church truly was founded by Christ!

This kind of attack requires no less of a response from those who know the truth. In The Real Story of Catholic History, Steve Weidenkopf gives it to you.

Weidenkopf (The Glory of the Crusades) collects over fifty of the most common and dangerous lies about Catholic history and, drawing on his experience as a historian and apologist, shows how to answer them simply and powerfully. Whether it’s claims about Catholicism’s supposedly pagan origins, old myths about Galileo or the Inquisition that never seem to go away, or more modern misconceptions that anti-Catholics cynically exploit, The Real Story provides the desperately needed corrective.

Packed with research and diligent in pursuit of the truth, while never whitewashing or explaining away the Church’s past faults when they’re found, The Real Story of Catholic History is an essential resource for every Catholic’s bookshelf.

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Dealing with Offspring in Invalid Marriages

Full Question

        I am taking my grown children and their spouses on vacation. Some are not married to those with whom they want to share a room. Should I allow this?        

Answer

If I understand you correctly, your children are in legal marriages, but some of those marriages are not recognized to be valid by the Church. You may also mean some of your children are not married but will be bringing a partner of the opposite sex. Generally speaking, the Church requires that we must recognize an essential difference between valid and invalid marriages (CCC 2353). Valid marriages are a social good and a gift from God. Invalid marriages constitute grave matter and the possibility of public scandal. Moreover, the Church requires that the faithful should avoid direct cooperation in the sins of others (CCC 1868).

In matters where a legal marriage is not recognized by the Church to be valid, the Church does not give specifics of how to avoid direct cooperation in the sins of the partners. In any case, the Church trusts the faithful to use their best prudential judgment in handling the issues that arise within extended families in a way that upholds the Church's teaching on the sanctity of a valid marriage. In this particular circumstance, one solution might be to pay for your children's other travel expenses but not their hotel expenses. If you need assistance in how to implement this with your family or to find other acceptable solutions, make an appointment with your pastor, confessor, or spiritual director.

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Jesus and Jewish Law

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From Cold War to Culture War

The United States faced an implacable foe in the Cold War but overcame it. Catholics likewise face an implacable foe in the Culture War, indeed a related one: it is increasingly known as Cultural Marxism, and its aims include the promotion of abortion, euthanasia, and radical sexual license, and the elimination of religious liberty. What can we learn from the tactics of our Cold War foe so that we may also overcome our Culture War foe?

In May of 2008, the California Supreme Court created a right to same-sex “marriage” in the Golden State. Pro-family forces struck back, successfully passing a ballot measure—Proposition 8—restoring the traditional definition of marriage. Rather than accepting the will of the people, anti-family forces engaged in a massive campaign defaming anyone connected to Prop 8. They quickly got the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8 and restore the California Supreme Court’s imposition of same-sex marriage.

This tactic was reminiscent of the old Soviet doctrine called Brezhnevism. Named for Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, it held that once a country becomes Communist, it must stay Communist at all costs. It was because of this doctrine that JFK reacted so firmly to the Berlin Wall crisis. As Kennedy memorably put it, “We cannot negotiate with people who say, 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.'”

Translated to today’s culture wars, this mentality says, “All ‘progress’ towards cultural liberalism is permanent and non-negotiable, even if it only happened a week ago and contradicts thousands of years of prior cultural reality. But everything you believe has to change.”

That is exactly the mentality we face in fighting against the Cultural Marxists (or, less dramatically, the cultural left) and their anti-life agenda.

Another example: the Supreme Court ruled in 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick that there is no right to homosexual sodomy in the U.S. Constitution. The legal academy exploded with indignation. In 2003, the Court overturned its own ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.

Think about that. Pro-lifers have been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade for forty-five years without success, but gay activists overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in a mere seventeen years. (Indeed, the court’s rationale for not overturning precedent in Roe is completely contradicted by its hasty decision to overturn Bowers.) This despite 100 years of abortion prohibitions prior to Roe, and a similar cultural precedent for anti-sodomy laws for all of American history prior to Lawrence. But, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” Pro-family activists got out ahead of the same-sex “marriage” juggernaut by a good twenty years, getting President Clinton to sign the federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and passing referendums protecting the traditional definition of marriage in almost every state in the country.

All for naught. The Supreme Court struck down the federal DOMA in 2013 and, in one fell swoop, imposed same-sex marriage on the entire nation in 2015. Again, all while pro-lifers have failed for almost half a century to overturn Roe, and in spite of the complete absence of precedent for same-sex marriage for all of American, and indeed human, history.

“What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”

We saw this Brezhnevism at work when the current administration rescinded the Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague” letter telling public schools that, if they wanted federal funding, they must allow boys (who claim to identify as female) to shower with girls. President Trump did not even hold a position on the issue, and only rescinded the order because he considered it a state matter. But activists reacted with outrage.

Forcing schools to let boys shower with girls had never before been considered a matter for federal human-rights enforcement. But, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”

We saw this again when the administration said it was set to roll back Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. The idea that the government must force employers to pay for contraception did not exist until a few years ago, and the mandate was decreed by an administrative agency rather than democratically passed through Congress. But the cultural left already has the lawsuits ready to go. Once it achieves a victory, it becomes the inalterable status quo.

“What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.”

Or take the most recent controversy on this front: rescinding transgenderism in the military. Permitting transgendered soldiers was a policy that President Obama only executed during his last year in office. Nevertheless it must now be treated as a sacred right that cannot be taken away, and to oppose it makes you a hate criminal. Because “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”

We have faced similar things here in Connecticut. No one expects that recent state laws creating special rights for the transgendered and banning so-called “conversion therapy” for same-sex-attracted minors will be repealed. But activists have vowed to repeal the religious liberty exemptions we have secured over the years. And even though we have repeatedly quashed attempts to legalize assisted suicide, such legislation comes up every year. If it ever becomes law, it will be treated as another irreversible benchmark of progress.

But when we make even modest attempts to pass laws consonant with Catholic moral teaching—whether a Religious Freedom Restoration Act or a bathroom privacy bill or some tiny little restriction on abortion—the thing cannot stand and must be shouted down or overturned right away. "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."

The Brezhnevism of the cultural left is not only evil because it makes and enforces laws contrary to the moral law, but also because it hurts civil society by fostering cynicism. So many Christian voters today think that working within the system is pointless because the whole thing is rigged anyway.

But there is a way to fight back in the Culture War, and it’s the same as it was in the Cold War: we need a Grenada.

Grenada is an island in the Caribbean that fell under the control of a Communist government in the early 1980s. Under President Reagan, the U.S. invaded Grenada and removed the Communists from power. Though a small victory, it had a tremendous psychological effect in the final decade of the Cold War.

For the first time ever, it was the U.S. telling the U.S.S.R., “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” The mere fact that a Communist victory could be reversed allowed people to see the possibility that the two parties in the game could also be reversed. In less than a decade the Soviet empire was no more.

We Catholics, indeed all Christians and everyone else in the pro-life and pro-family movement, need to hunt for every cultural Grenada we can find. The ban on partial-birth abortion was one. The Hobby Lobby victory against the contraceptive mandate was another. The models for victory are out there.

So let’s not be cynical or despondent. If we chip away bit by bit at the cultural left’s hegemony, if we show that Brezhnevism can be reversed, we can light a fire in people’s hearts that can topple an empire.

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Did God Tell Joseph Smith to Establish the Mormon Church?

Full Question

        Did God and Jesus appear to Joseph Smith? If you don't believe this, can you tell me why? Beside the fact that it would topple the Catholic Church.        

Answer

Mormonism and its various historical claims simply don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. In that regard, see this Catholic Answers Magazine article and also this one.

As the aforementioned articles demonstrate, Joseph Smith preached doctrines contrary to what the real church of Jesus Christ—i.e., the Catholic Church—taught for almost 2,000 years. Consequently, he had to develop his doctrine of the “Great Apostasy,” which contradicts Christ’s proclamation that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church (Matt. 16:18-19). I’ve heard Mormons more than once say, “It’s either us or the Catholics” as to which is the real Church. Well, charitably stated, they are at least half right on that one.

Many Mormons are good, family-oriented people. But their religion is not worthy of belief. For further information on Mormonism, simply use “Mormonism” as a search term in our general search engine at the top of the homepage at Catholic.com.

You can help bring the fullness of Catholic Truth to the world!

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Can We Call God "She"?

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What Is Detraction?

Full Question

        What is detraction? What are some basic principles to help me examine my conscience with respect to this sin?        

Answer

The Baltimore Catechism (Q 1311) defines detraction as "revealing the sins of another without necessity."

So the basic questions we need to ask ourselves when a situation arises where we might reveal someone else's sins:

What is my motivation for sharing this information?  

Am I trying to make myself look better or someone else look worse?

What good, if any, will come out of sharing this information?

Am I taking pleasure in sharing this information?

If the "shoe was on the other foot," would I feel someone would be justified in sharing this about me or someone I love?

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All About the Society of St. Pius X

Full Question

        Can you tell me some more about the SSPX?        

Answer

Here is a helpful article on the SSPX from Catholic Answers Magazine, and here is a response to a previous question we received on the SSPX. And here also is a good overview on the SSPX from our friends at EWTN. To learn even more about the SSPX, use “SSPX” as a search term on our homepage search function.

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Does the Church Need More "Pious Silence"?

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Is It a Sin to Disregard Climate Change?

Full Question

        Is it sinful to disregard climate change knowing it is causing loss of human life?        

Answer

Without entering into the debate about scientific evidence for and against a “climate change" crisis, we can safely say that we’re all called to be good stewards of God’s creation—which means not abusing the Earth, including not frivolously using resources like heat and air conditioning.

For more on this issue, please see Ronald Rychlak’s analysis in Catholic Answers Magazine, and also Jimmy Akin’s analysis of Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.

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Is Freemasonry a Religion?  

Full Question

        Why does the Catholic Church look at Freemasonry as a religion when it most definitely is not?        

Answer

Actually, in contrast to an Elks Club, a Moose Lodge, or a Rotary Club, Freemasonry is indeed a religion, and that’s a key reason why the Church forbids Catholics from becoming Masons. For more on this issue, see one of our previous answers.

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Can People Who Died by Suicide Be Buried in a Catholic Cemetery?