Honestly, the TLM isn't going to go anywhere at this point. If it were supressable, it would have already been suppressed by now. But here we are 55-60 years later, and it's still around and there has never been less interest in suppressing it.

https://twitter.com/FrTotleben92742/status/1978120982150709734

And after 4 years of TC, we can say that document has not had its intended effect (getting trads to prefer the new liturgy), but has only increased interest in it and sympathy for those who attend it.

I just got through the Apoatolic Exhortation, and I thought it was mostly excellent. A few thoughts: I know I complain that papal documents are too long, but I thought that the two lengthy chapters on the poor on scripture, tradition, and the life of the church (chs 2 and 3) were excellent and not wasted words at all.

Maoism. Since they are the ones who uniquely see that the arc of history is inexorably bending in a certain way, this makes them the revolutionary vanguard and spokesmen for what "the people" want -- or what they would want if they knew what was really good for them.

https://twitter.com/Catholicizm1/status/1972794075788259480

Therefore we cannot "turn back the clock." Geist is at work in the way that History is progressing, and they are the ones who can uniquely interpret it. They are sincerely convinced that only by "getting with the times" as they understand it can the Church reach people of today.

Some people on here are deeply confused about the theology of grace. Just to clarify: you need to be efficaciously moved by God's prevenient actual grace *first* in order to perform any act in the order of salvation at all ... ... and this grace is completely a free and undeserved and unmerited gift from God, which he gives completely gratuitously, and not even on account of how he foresees you will "use" or "cooperate" with that grace.

The question is whether the death penalty is necessary for proportionate retribution, which is the primary aim of punishment. Proportionate punishment is not, in fact, against human dignity, but quite the opposite: the ability to be punished flows from human dignity.

https://twitter.com/ModernBoethius/status/1966571141121655193

Being "punishable" is proper to human beings precisely as human beings, because it is our human dignity, as made in the image and likeness of God (i.e, having intellect and free choice) that (1) gives us agency and makes us morally responsible for our choices . . .

DBH is to smart to not be mendacious here when he pulls out this shopworn and oft-refuted old chestnut. All you have to do is literally read to the end of the very question that DBH cites to see why he thinks that it was the Word that became incarnate.

https://twitter.com/mzw_13/status/1961833682068509042

I mean, for goodness' sake this is not hard:

aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.III.…

In today's gospel, Jesus answer to the question, "Will only a few be saved?" is to tell the disciples to focus about working out their own salvation in fear and trembling, rather than vainly speculating on questions that you don't know enough to answer. Because if you neglect the task of working out your own salvation and waste your time speculating, then others are going to enter the kingdom and you will be shut out of it.

Pointing out that the Church does not require us to believe (or disbelieve) in evolution and then concluding that we are "free" to believe in it or disbelieve in it is to completely misunderstand what doctrine is and its relation to truth. Catholic doctrine is one way of coming to know the truth about some aspects of reality; so is modern science. "God is one nature subsisting in three persons" is true in exactly the same sense as "Human beings evolved from lower primates."

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.