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Memento mori--remember death--this is how the medieval monks exhort us. Our life, given in birth and taken by death, is radically marked by finitude, which can be a source of great fear and anguish. Our finitude, however, does not in itself need to be something negative. It confronts us with the question of our life's meaning and spurs us on to treasure our days. Our contingency, as evidenced in our birth and death, reminds us that we have not made ourselves and that there is nothing necessary about the marvelous fact that we exist. Particularly from a Judeo-Christian perspective, embracing our finitude will mean gratefully accepting life as a completely gratuitous gift and living one's days informed by a sense of this gratitude.
Foreword by Cardinal George Pell. Walter Cardinal Kasper created an international media stir when he proposed allowing divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments after a penitential period. But is this something the Church can even authorize? As the Church enters into the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on Marriage and the Family, this book takes up the Kasper Proposal and sorts the helpful from the problematic. Never separating pastoral concerns from doctrinal considerations, the authors engage Cardinal Kasperಙs ideas with respect, but also at times with some profound disagreement. How can we heal the wounds of a broken culture? How do we best support families, give...
Catholic moral theology faces a radical challenge in this age of moral upheaval. No longer must it simply respond to specific questions about particular matter, nor elaborate some method for the formulation of norms. The challenge now is instead no less than comprehending the mystery of human action in its proper dynamism. Livio Melina here guides the reader on a path that seeks to recover the integrality of moral experience and its place in Christian existence. This path aims at rediscovering in moral action an epiphany of love and attempts to help us recognize a profound synergy between human and divine action.
In response to Benedict XVI's first encyclical, the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies and Marriage and Family reflects, together with the Holy Father, on love. From the very beginning, the fundamental work of the Institute has been pursuing a deeper understanding of God's plan for marriage and family. In these twenty-five years various generations of students and professors, following the legacy of John Paul II, have been able to discover and communicate the beauty of the vocation for which all men have been created: the call to love. Twenty-six professors from the Institute's various sessions express what in their understanding are the main themes of the document, approaching the topics raised by the Holy Father with different theological and philosophical perspectives; by so doing they have highlighted the significance and fecundity of the lines of thought suggested by the Pope. This book is offered as a path towards a fuller understanding of the profundity and richness of the love with which God fills us and wants us to communicate in our turn.
2021 was the fifth anniversary of Amoris Lætitia, and according to pope Francis, it should have been a year of reflection on the exhortation, an opportunity to focus more closely on the content of the document. In response to this appeal, Dispelling the Fog presents five essays analysing the issue of the so-called “divorced-remarried” and their access to the Eucharist in connection with the exhortation. Vojtěch Šimek focuses on the crucial Chapter 8 of Amoris Lætitia and its possible interpretations. Peter Dvořák examines and refutes the claim that the teaching of the exhortation is Thomistic. Lukáš Novák argues that even after Amoris Lætitia, there is no sustainable argument t...
Introduction to Sacramental Theology presents a complete overview of sacramental theology from the viewpoint of the body. This viewpoint is supported, in the first place, by Revelation, for which the sacraments are the place where we enter into contact with the body of the risen Jesus. It is a viewpoint, secondly, which is firmly rooted in our concrete human bodily experience, thus allowing for a strong connection between faith and life, creation and redemption. From this point of view, the treatise on the sacraments occupies a strategic role. For the sacraments appear, not as the last of a series of topics (after dealing with Creation, Christ, the Church), but as the original place in which...
Essays by distinguished bishops and theologians that not only introduce readers to the theological depth found in Amoris Laetitia, but consider the full document, including its reception in the multicultural and diverse environment that characterizes the church in the United States and the full range of challenges and issues related to marriage and family life.
This well-researched book explains why the Catholic Church continues to teach marital indissolubility and addresses the numerous contemporary challenges to that teaching. It surveys the patristic witness to marital indissolubility, along with Orthodox and Protestant views, as well as historical-critical biblical exegesis on the contested biblical passages. It also surveys the Catholic tradition from the Trent through Benedict XVI, and it examines a Catholic argument that the Catholic Church's teaching can and should change. Then it explores Amoris Laetitia, the papal exhortation from Pope Francis on marriage, and the various major responses to it, with the issue of marital indissolubility at...
This book gathers fourteen Catholic scholars to present, examine, and explain the often misunderstood process of "deification". The fifteen chapters show what "becoming God" meant for the early Church, for St. Thomas Aquinas and the greatest Dominicans, and for St. Francis and the early Franciscans. This book explains how this understanding of salvation played out during the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent. It explores the thought of the French School of Spirituality, various Thomists, John Henry Newman, John Paul II, and the Vatican Councils, and it shows where such thinking can be found today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. No other book has gathered such an array of scholars or provided such a deep study into how humanity's divinized life in Christ has received many rich and various perspectives over the past two thousand years. This book seeks to bring readers into the central mystery of Christianity by allowing the Church's greatest thinkers and texts to speak for themselves, demonstrating how becoming Christ-like and the Body of Christ on earth, is the only ultimate purpose of the Christian faith.