Category: Catholic Corner
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Are Atheists Vincibly Ignorant? (2021 Version)
In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition: Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn…
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Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır
"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb) Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude. When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail. It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged…
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An Ecclesiological Contretemps: Edward Feser versus Rod Dreher
Start here with Dreher. Feser's response to Dreher. Dreher's reply (scroll down). Feser again. …………………………… Addendum 5/31. Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, comments (minor edits added by BV): With regard to the exchange between Edward Feser and Rod Dreher on the latter’s rationale for leaving Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which I too have been closely following,…
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On the Role of Concupiscence in the Decline of the Catholic Church
Substack latest.
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Sacramental Efficacy Despite the Corruption of the Church?
Here: Therefore, the serious believer is thrown back upon his or her own inner resources. Thankfully, the Sacraments are still efficacious despite the corruption of the Church . . . . Suppose I go to what used to be called Confession, but is now foolishly called Reconciliation. The priest, I have reason to believe, is…
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Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions
The review is a well written and very fair summary of von Hildebrand's book. (I read portions of the latter in graduate school days but I do not currently have it in my library.) Here is the review's main critical passage together with my remarks. [Von] Hildebrand’s arguments for the objectivity of value therefore seem…
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Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis
Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and obedient faith and trust. On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an…
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Somebody Else’s Faith
Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959: He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.
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Bernanos on Prayer
Georges Bernanos has the protagonist of his The Diary of a Country Priest (Image Books, 1954, pp. 81-82, tr. P. Morris, orig. publ. 1937) write the following into his journal: The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare…
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The Stove Dilemma and the Lewis Trilemma
This from R. J. Stove, the son of atheist and neo-positivist David Stove: When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well…
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Maximilian Kolbe
Today is the feast of Maximilian Kolbe. Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings…
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Continence: Notes for a Sermon I will Never Give
The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker. Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit. Remind people of the importance of…
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Cognitive Dissonance on Good Friday
It was Good Friday. I was 11 or 12 years old, possibly 13. I was with the boy next door, also raised Catholic. He wanted to play. It was around two in the afternoon. Christ had been on the cross for two hours according to the account we had been taught. I recall to this…
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Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl
My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in which we read: What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which…