St. Augustine’s Press

The Bible teaching on the end times have long been a source of sometimes morbid fascination for Christians. And now, at the turn of another millennium, we are seeing renewed bouts of predictions fever. Amid the frenzy, how can we take end-times teachings seriously and understand them clearly?

Both an explanation and a spiritual guide to the season of Lent, from Ash Wednesday through Holy Week, including the Seven Last Words of Christ, Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday.

One of the gravest and most divisive issues confronting the Catholic Church in recent decades – a major factor in an ongoing institutionalized rupture between Rome and at least half a million traditionalist Catholics – is the question of whether Vatican II’s Declaration Dignitatis Humanae can be reconciled with traditional Church doctrine on religious liberty.

The spirituality and immortality of the soul might seem to be an essential Christian doctrine, but in fact many early Christian writers held that the soul is material and that immortality is a gift. As Ernest Fortin’s study of Claudianus Mamertus (d. 475), a priest of Vienne in Gaul, and his De Statu Animae, On the State of the Soul (ca. 470) shows, St. Augustine did not settle the question. De Statu Animae is the only explicitly philosophical work in the West that we possess between Augustine (354–430) and Boethius. It responds to a defense of the corporeality of the soul by Bishop Faustus of Reii, modern Riez. Like many early Christian writers, Faustus held that God alone is spirit, so that the human soul is material, immortality is a gift, and Platonic dialogues or neo-Platonic textbooks of philosophy are the product of unhealthy curiosity.

There have been serious complaints since Vatican II that many Catholics do not know the basic teaching of the Church on the essentials of the faith, such as the Ten Commandments, the Seven Sacraments, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the twelve articles of the Creed. That was one of the main reasons for the production of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was mandated by Blessed John Paul II and published in the 1990s.

Juxtaposing “ecumenism” and “jihad,” two words that many would consider strange and at odds with one another, Peter Kreeft argues that we need to change our current categories and alignments. We need to realize that we are at war and that the sides have changed radically. Documenting the spiritual and moral decay that has taken hold of modern society, Kreeft issues a wake-up call to all God-fearing Christians, Jews, and Muslims to unite together in a “religious war” against the common enemy of godless secular humanism, materialism, and immorality.

This volume consists of the addresses delivered to the 22nd Annual Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars held in Chicago in September 1999. Each chapter includes a discussion of one of the major themes related to the contemporary question of marriage and the common good expounded by a competent senior scholar, followed by a response on the same subject by a younger scholar. The end result is an in-depth treatment of several of the major issues that concern marriage and the family today.

Charles Journet, the great Swiss theologian and cardinal of the Church, first wrote this work on the Mass over forty years ago; yet his ever-ancient-ever-new insights into the sacrificial nature of the Mass are most needed today, when this aspect of the sacrament is so often misunderstood or neglected.