I'm finishing up a novena to St. Ann in my hometown (the parish has been doing it for 106 years!). I have been preaching on Mary, and I have to recommend Aidan Nichols, "There Is No Rose" as a short but deep Mariology.

amazon.com/There-No-Rose-… Aidan Nichols has a gift for finding the truly decisive points of an issue and explaining them lucidly. So, Nichols book is short, nut surprisibgly deep for its length.

Mary doesn't mediate in the sense that we go to her instead of going to Jesus directly, the way we deal with a front-office secretary to have access to the big boss. Rather, Mary is like someone who makes an introduction to a friend -- she in no way gets in between us and Jesus. And there is no reason to suppose that this type of mediation is unbiblical, or that the Bible somehow teaches us that these kinds of mediators don't exist when it comes to Jesus.

So, someone on here was asking me about what Bañez says about whether God's antecedent will to save all is in him formally (and analogically) or merely eminently (and metaphorically). I can't find the tweet, so I am responding here. Banez' argues for and against both sides of the question, but comes down on the latter side of the question. God wills all be saved is his will of expression, not his will of good pleasure. God wills all be saved means that God enjoins on us the precept to will that all be saved.

No, the point of the magisterium is *not* to eliminate personal interpretation, because, obviously, you cannot eliminate personal interpretation. If you read a text, you have to determine it's meaning. The whole problem here is the use of the word "interpret."

https://twitter.com/ReasonTheology/status/1944560397341872508

When the Church says that it is for the magisterium to interpret the Word of God as this is contained in the desposit of faith, she means something very specific:

If you recall Grillo's remarks about Bl. Carlo Acutis, Grillo actually does think that the two forms of the Roman rite really do embody two different theologies of the Eucharist.

https://twitter.com/CatholicSat/status/1943738878243840155

For him the two rites are two different leges orandi precisely because they are two different leges credendi, and that's why you can't have two different leges orandi.

As long as you are not abstract and professoral, and you put lots of unction into your homilies, people actually like intellectually sophisticated homiles. The homilies that I have gotten *by far* the most positive feedback for have been the most intellectually challenging ones. One year I preached the masses at a high school summer camp, and for various reasons, I took up the theme of "what is faith" -- so over a week I preached on the virtue of faith, the act of faith, why faith is reasonable, faith and reason, and faith and doubt.

I'll say this: if the problem is that people don't affiliate with their territorial parish, then I don't think the right solution is to emphasize their responsibility to affiliate with their territorial parish. I think that the more effective solution, as well as the solution that is better for overall pastoral care is for pastors to ask why people don't want to affiliate with their parish, and how can they create the kind of parish culture that people want to affiliate with.

Some quick vocation discernment tips:

https://twitter.com/lukei4655/status/1921651755336581457

1. When it comes do discerning a vocation, some people think that God is this sphinx, and your vocation is some sort of riddle that you need to figure out, with dire consequences if you get it wrong.

I just found out that one of our regulars here at the monastery is going in for a deportation hearing this afternoon together with her husband. Super sad. Is the administration going to deport actual bad people like they said? Or are they just going to keep doing this nonsense?

If you encounter a doctrinal or theological claim and your first question is "Do I have to believe this?" or "What level of authority does this have?" Then you are wrong. What you should be asking is, "Is this true?" and "What grounds do I have for thinking it true?" That might be because it was infallibly defined by the Church to be divinely revealed, or because a pope authoritatively but non-definitively taught it, or because someone offered a good argument for it, or because it is commonly held by reliable people, or perhaps something else

The Pillar has a pretty good article on indulgences. But I do have to quibble with their explanation of "detachment from all sin, even venial."

pillarcatholic.com/p/indulge-us-o… This particular phrase has an interesting history, but if you look into how it got formulated, what it really means is that you are sorry for all the sins that you have committed, even venial ones.

This shows you the kind of books that this guy reads and how he reads books. If you read a lot of business, or self-help, or personal improvement books for information, then yes, an AI model does render this kind of reading obsolete.

https://twitter.com/daviefogarty/status/1893528367607226624

But a part of reading significant texts is that the ideas in them cannot be reduced to information and its application. So, in reading a significant text you learn to enter into a dialogical relationship with the text.

Sometimes you see a debate about the so-called "two ends" of the sexual act, the unitive and the procreative, and which one takes priority. Let me suggest that this question is poorly put. An action cannot have two (really distinct) ends, therefore the sexual act does not have two (really distinct) ends. The sexual act has only one end, and when we say that it has a unitive and procreative end, we are not naming two really different ends of the sexual act.

Once you strip away the rhetoric, Francis' position in his immigration letter is, "Governments have the right to regulate immigration and enforce immigration laws, but the only morally legitimate enforcement action is to deport serious criminals who are in the country illegally." He also seems to suggest that human dignity and the universality of the command to love our neighbor imply that the government has equal obligations towards the well-being of non-citizens who are in the country without authorization as it does towards its own citizens.

Some people claim that conservative Catholics treat Francis differently than JP2/Benedict, allegedly because Francis disagrees with them, while JP2/Benedict agreed with them. I don't think this is true. I think they show the same attitude, but under changed circumstances. The response of supporters of Francis' recent letter illustrate one reason why. You will notice that there is very little exposition of Francis' arguments (such as they are) or an explanation or defense of Francis' position with arguments.

Many people are avoid the real issues with Vance's position on immigration, because addressing it seriously raises hard and uncomfortable questions, especially for those who take Catholic social teaching seriously, and don't reduce it to slogans or weaponize it for their politics The animating cause of Vance's politics--the through line of it all from "Hillbilly Elegy" onwards--is the threat that the economic decline and social-cultural disintegration of the working class, especially in the Rust Belt and Appalachia, poses to social solidarity.

There are three obvious errors with this proposal.

https://twitter.com/pjfahey/status/1886108736818708588

First, from the fact that to theologize is not to catechize, it does not follow that you do not need to know theology in order to catechize.

Before this error creeps up too often, when "Gaudium et Spes" and "Veritatis Splendor" say that "deportatio" is illegal, they are not referring to repatriation. According to the dictionary (and its references to Roman Law), "deportatio" is displacing people from their native land So, in condemning "deportatio," the Magisterium is thinking of things like the displacement of the Jews, or various displacements that occurred in Europe right after World War II, or things like ethnic cleansing.