Matthias Scheeben on grace

Matthias Scheeben on grace

This is the fifth article in a five part series: What grace is The teaching of the Council of Trent: Decree on Justification The Protestant errors regarding grace and justification The controversies between the Jesuits and Dominicans in the 16th century and...

Apologetics and evangelisation

Apologetics and evangelisation

One of the exciting developments within the Church during the past fifteen years is an explosion of new apologetics. I want to share with you the meaning of apologetics and a little about how it functions or can function today particularly in our work of...

Three great apologists

Three great apologists

Fr Holden’s survey of great apologists originally formed part of his lecture, Apologetics and Evangelisation but is published here separately. The original survey also included C.S. Lewis, Frank Sheed, Peter Kreeft, and Karl Keating. These four...

A patristic and pastoral trilogy

A patristic and pastoral trilogy

From the vast patristic literary corpus, three works stand out as classic texts on the priesthood: Gregory of Nazianzus’ Second Oration, otherwise known as the De fuga; John Chrysostom’s De sacerdotio; and Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis. These three works are...

The genius of the Roman Rite and the identity of the priest

The genius of the Roman Rite and the identity of the priest

In recent years, the notion of the genius of the Roman Rite has seen resurgence. That the Oratorian, Fr Michael Lang, and the Jesuit, Fr Keith Pecklers, have both published books called The Genius of the Roman Rite testifies to the usefulness of this turn of phrase....

The hermeneutics of inquisition

The hermeneutics of inquisition

The title of this presentation has already created some surprise, so I have to clarify from the start that, in actual fact, it will not deal with the Roman Inquisition as a historical institution, but rather with the right method of [theological] inquisition; that is,...

The priest as sinner in the thought of St Augustine

The priest as sinner in the thought of St Augustine

If the Donatist Controversy is treated nowadays at all in seminaries and divinity schools, it is probably mentioned only briefly, perhaps in a survey course on Church History, perhaps in a course on sacramental theology. What most students take away from this...