"None of this is relevant to membership of the Church – and therefore, it has nothing to do with Francis' legitimacy." Image: Wiki Commons Public Domain This essay is written in response to Mr Michael Lofton's comments on a debate hosted by Mr Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas on 20 September 2022. (We have …
Continue reading Does Michael Lofton understand the arguments made in the debate on Francis?
Image: Nestorius, who St Robert Bellarmine, St Celestine, St Nicholas and Cardinal Billot say lost his power to depose and excommunicate when he began preaching heresy. Wiki Commons. This is the first part of an essay by Mr John Lane, edited and expanded by S.D. Wright. It concerns the nature of law, offices and jurisdiction, …
Continue reading The Loss of Ecclesiastical Offices: Is Holy Church Unprotected?
This three-part series is about how laymen can go about learning the sacred science of theology, in accordance with its proper methodology and structure. I have freely gathered together notes, ideas and reading lists from various sources, particularly the Bellarmine Forums.[1] Up until this point, we have been going through the stages in the order …
In Sapientiae Christianae, Pope Leo XIII taught that it is a duty for laymen to study and spread the Catholic faith. He wrote: "In order to safeguard this virtue of faith in its integrity, we declare it to be very profitable and consistent with the requirements of the time, that each one, according to the measure …
"The proximate matter of Baptism is the use of the water [...] in such a way that in the common estimation of men an ablution has been performed." Prümmer, Handbook of Moral Theology 1956, 552.3 (NB: we earn commissions through these Amazon Links) Defects of matter (and related issues) and necessary actions This article is about …
Continue reading Is it valid? The proximate matter of Baptism
This essay consists of two parts: Part I - Review of Baronius Press's edition of the Roman Catechism Part II - The Roman Catechism itself Historical background The authority of the Roman Catechism Clergy and theologians on the Catechism Comparison with the modern catechism The Roman Catechism and the crisis in the Church The nature …
Chapter III of Vacant's work is long, and so the WM Review is publishing it in two parts. This first part addresses the express teaching of the ordinary magisterium, and the second will consider its implicit and tacit teaching acts. This part also describes the ways in which the Church makes use of natural sciences …
We are pleased to present another section from this study by J.M.A. Vacant, in which he addresses the concept and the authority of the ordinary and universal magisterium. We previously published Chapter VI of this work, on the Pope's personal exercise of this magisterium. Fr Vacant was a professor of the Major Seminary of Nancy, …
In this part we will examine the second condition of membership, that of public profession of the true faith. In part one of this series, we saw that the Catholic Church could be defined as: “The society of men who, by their profession of the same faith, and by their partaking of the same sacraments, make up, …
Continue reading Membership of the Church: Part III – Public Profession of the True Faith
"Where do we go to learn the Catholic Faith? How do we make sense of the modern ecclesial landscape?" This article was originally published at LifeSiteNews (source). Reprinted with permission. All pictures have been added. Cover photo source In a time of rampant confusion about basic Catholic doctrine – to say nothing of more complicated …
Continue reading Theology Manuals – Why are they so important in the post-conciliar crisis?