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"He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature" (Heb. 1:3). Jesus is both God manifest and God in substance. Just as the rays of the sun give light, warmth, life, and growth to the earth, so Jesus Christ is the glorious light of God shining into the hearts of men and women. As "the radiance of God's glory," Jesus expresses God to us. No one can see God in HIs full glory; no one ever will. The radiance of that glory that reaches us from God appears in the Person of Jesus Christ. Just...

“. . . Made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). Christ was fully God and fully man. In his Systematic Theology theologian Charles Hodge wrote, “The Scriptures teach that Christ had a complete human nature. That is, He had a true body and a rational soul. By a true body is meant a material body which in everything essential was like the bodies of ordinary men. . . . It is no less plain that Christ had a rational soul. He thought, reasoned, and felt.” Hodge’s assessment is correct, for Christ was given all the essential attributes of humanity....

Franciscan Media Image: Statue of Saint Ambrose | Luigi Scorzini | photo by G.dallorto Saint Ambrose Saint of the Day for December 7 (337 – April 4, 397)  Saint Ambrose’s Story One of Ambrose’s biographers observed that at the Last Judgment, people would still be divided between those who admired Ambrose and those who heartily disliked him. He emerges as the man of action who cut a furrow through the lives of his contemporaries. Even royal personages were numbered among those who were to suffer crushing divine punishments for standing in Ambrose’s way.When the Empress Justina attempted to wrest...

A group of feminist theologians have come together to produce a draft of A Woman's Bible, meant to counter traditional male interpretations of women characters in the Bible. AFP reported that the theologians, both from Protestant and Roman Catholic denominations across several countries, have put forth texts that challenge presentations of female Bible characters as weak and subordinate to the men around them. "Feminist values and reading the Bible are not incompatible," said Lauriane Savoy, one of the Geneva theology professors behind A Women's Bible, which was published in French. Along with colleague Elisabeth Parmentier, Savoy says that many people...

"In these last days [God] has spoken to us in His Son . . . through whom also He made the world" (Heb. 1:2). Christ is the agent through whom God created the world. John 1:3 testifies, "All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being." Jesus has the ability to create something out of nothing (cf. Rom. 4:17), and that sets Him apart from mere creatures. Only God can create like that; we can't. If you could create, you'd live in a different house, drive a different car,...

“Taking the form of a bond-servant” (Philippians 2:7). Christ submitted Himself to the Father’s will. When Christ emptied Himself, He not only gave up His privileges but also became a servant. First, He was a servant by nature. Paul used the Greek word morphe (“form”) again to indicate that Christ’s servanthood was not merely external but His essence. It was not like a cloak that could be put on and taken off. Christ was truly a servant. The only other New Testament use of morphe is in Mark 16:12. There Jesus appears in a resurrection morphe—a form fully expressing the...

A Shocking Loss of Faith: Reflecting on the Closing of So Many Churches Msgr. Charles Pope • December 6, 2018 • Lincoln Congregational Temple in Shaw, credit: NCinDC, FlickrAs I walk or drive through my Capitol Hill neighborhood here in Washington, D.C., I pass by more than twenty churches (all of them Protestant) that have been closed in the past decade. Many of them are grand and prominent buildings. (Click here to see four of them.) Most of the them have been converted to condominiums, likely due to historic preservation norms that seek to retain the exterior appearance of...

Francis Mercy Hits the Familia Christi Hard Francis Mercy Hits the Familia Christi Hard The Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei under Cardinal Ladaria published a December 1 decree, imposing Roman Auxiliary Bishop Daniele Libanori as the new superior of the Familia Christi, an Italian Old Rite community consisting of 15 young priests and seminarians. The group was founded in 2016 by the excellent former Ferrara Archbishop Luigi Negri. It is loved by the faithful but hated by Negri’s successor, Archbishop Gian Carlo Perego, a modernist Bergoglio bishop who promotes mass-immigration and modernism. According to press reports, Archbishop Perego mainly hates the...

Well, it’s time for a good Christmas rant. This requires a rant, because every year, we see the same ignorant silliness. (Sorry, but it’s just true.) Supposedly, Christmas is secretly pagan, secretly syncretist, secretly a co-opting of pagan stuff and ignorantly claiming it to be Christian. But the truth about these things is so available that it’s literally staring out at you even from Wikipedia. Well, if you are one of the people who says this stuff, I’ve got a lot of problems with you people. Let the airing of grievances begin. (And it’s not even Festivus yet!)

Franciscan Media Image: Patron of Sailors | photo by Lawrence OP | flickr Saint Nicholas Saint of the Day for December 6 (March 15, 270 – December 6, 343)  Saint Nicholas’ Story The absence of the “hard facts” of history is not necessarily an obstacle to the popularity of saints, as the devotion to Saint Nicholas shows. Both the Eastern and Western Churches honor him, and it is claimed that after the Blessed Virgin, he is the saint most pictured by Christian artists. And yet historically, we can pinpoint only the fact that Nicholas was the fourth-century bishop of...

Is it possible to receive an unbaptized person into the Orthodox Church without baptizing him? What would it mean to do such a thing? You might not expect a book about the Second Vatican Council to elicit such questions from Orthodox sacramental theology but Fr. Peter Heers’s 2015 doctoral thesis, published with the title The Ecclesiological Renovation of Vatican II (ERV2), does just that. The book examines the theology and practice of baptism in the Latin West as it was articulated at the Second Vatican Council (V2), tracing its development from the time of St. Augustine, and contrasts this narrative,...

Do You Want to Have a Good Christmas? Then Listen Carefully to this Advent Message: “You Need a Savior!” Msgr. Charles Pope • December 5, 2018 • One of the goals of Advent (in many ways a penitential season) is to meditate on our need for a savior. In daily Mass and in the Liturgy of the Hours, we read lengthy passages from Isaiah and the other prophets, who speak boldly and bluntly about the people’s sin. Some of the passages are even a bit humorous. Here are a few: Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the LORD...

Bible teachers making predictions for when the End Times will arrive, which prove to not be true, has led to damages to the credibility of evangelicals, a Christian author and theologian has said.Kenneth R. Samples, the senior research scholar of philosophical and theological apologetics at Reasons to Believe, tackled on Tuesday several questions people have when it comes to End Times prophecy.The questions and comments were framed in responses to his 2013 book Christian Endgame: Careful Thinking about the End Times, which warned about excessive speculation regarding the timing of Jesus Christ's return to earth.One person wrote: “I am convicted...

"In these last days [God] has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things" (Heb. 1:2). Since Jesus is the Son of God, He is the heir of all that God possesses. When Christ first came to earth He became poor for our sakes, that we, through His poverty, might be made rich (2 Cor. 8:9). He had nothing for Himself—He had "nowhere to lay His head" (Luke 9:58). Even His clothes were taken from Him when He died, and He was buried in a tomb that belonged to someone else. It is beyond our...

“[Christ] emptied Himself” (Philippians 2:7). Christ renounced His divine privileges. Although Christ never surrendered His deity, He did empty Himself in certain ways. One such way was to give up His heavenly glory. That’s why in John 17:5 Jesus prays, “Glorify Thou Me together with Thyself, Father, with the glory which I ever had with Thee before the world was.” Christ gave up the glory of a face-to-face relationship with God for the muck of this earth. He gave up the adoring presence of angels for the spittle of men. Christ also emptied Himself of His independent authority. He completely...

"God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son" (Heb. 1:1-2). Jesus not only brought but in fact was God’s full and final revelation. A Samaritan woman declared, "I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us" (John 4:25). The expectation of that day, even among the Samaritans, was that Messiah would unfold the full and final revelation of God. The Holy Spirit, through the writer...

“Although He existed in the form of God, [Christ] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself” (Philippians 2:6-7). Christ emptied Himself without ever surrendering His deity. Note the contrast in Philippians 2 between verses 6 and 7: Christ didn’t think equality something to be grasped but instead emptied Himself. Paul used the contrasting connective “but” to show that being equal with God didn’t lead Christ to fill Himself up but instead to empty Himself. The Greek verb translated “emptied” (kenoo) is where we get the theological term kenosis—the doctrine of Christ’s self-emptying as...

Franciscan Media Image: Relics of St. Sabbas the Sanctified in the Catholicon (main church) of the Eastern Orthodox Mar Saba monastery in Palestine | photo by adriatikus Saint Sabas Saint of the Day for December 5 (439 – December 5, 532)  Saint Sabas’ Story Born in Cappadocia, Sabas is one of the most highly regarded patriarchs among the monks of Palestine, and is considered one of the founders of Eastern monasticism.After an unhappy childhood in which he was abused and ran away several times, Sabas finally sought refuge in a monastery. While family members tried to persuade him to...

Hi everyone! It's Wednesday night Bible study!For this week's Why the New Testament was Written video, we're talking about why Paul wrote the second letter to Timothy. I consider it to be the saddest book of the New Testament, as Paul's farewell letter to the church and to the world in general. This is part 15 of the series (should be three more to go...next week is II Peter, then Jude, then finally Revelation).Why Paul Wrote II TimothyVideo clocks in at 9:29.

Is It as Good to Pray the Breviary from Electronic Devices as It Is from Traditional Books? Msgr. Charles Pope • December 4, 2018 • It is hard to overestimate the convenience of praying the Liturgy of the Hours from an online breviary. Not only are they convenient but they also help to lessen the complexities that often go with setting up the traditional book. For example, Do the psalms come from the day or the Common?Do we use the Common of Pastors or that of the Doctors of the Church?Do the Advent weekday prayers and antiphons outrank the...