Catholic Church

By Chilton Williamson, Jr., Crisis Magazine - Parish priests in our day and age are naturally concerned to know what music and musical styles are popular, preferred, tolerated, or positively disliked by their parishioners. Church membership and attendance at Mass continue to decline as a result of spiritual luke-warmess, liberalizing influences, secularization, social influence, and now the engulfing scandal of sexual predation involving a shameful number of the clergy, and priests are properly keen to stanch the flow and win back as many of their fallen-away parishioners as they possibly can.

By Rachel Lu, National Catholic Register - St. Peter was a fisherman. Fishing nets and tilapia were his daily reality. Born without distinction in a backwater of the Roman Empire, he presumably would have lived and died in total obscurity, had not Our Lord called him to a higher ministry. The green hills of Galilee might have been his entire world… St. Paul was not a fisherman. He was a man of education and status, who was quite possibly being groomed for an authoritative office or distinguished profession. Some speculate that he may have been a relative of Herod the Great.

By Jennifer Hartline, The Stream - And suddenly there it was. “…by the forgiveness of their sins.” It jumped off the page: salvation comes by the forgiveness of sins… There is a great need for the Church to return to this simple, core truth, and to sweep away everything else that obscures it… There is no salvation apart from the forgiveness of sin. That means we must first confess that we have sinned. We must first recognize that we have transgressed against God’s holy law, and against God Himself.

By Fr. Bill Peckman, ChurchPop - The first culprit is that we forgot the transcendent… Check that…we actively excoriated it from our identity. This happened in several ways… First, we tamed God. We made Him into our image. We turned him into a kindly and ineffectual therapist whose chief job is to enable our every behavior and pat us on the back for rebelling against Him.