Today’s question: Why couldn’t God just forgive humanity? Why did he need to send Jesus?

Question: Why couldn’t God just forgive humanity? Why did he need to send Jesus?

Answer: Mere forgiveness would have done absolutely nothing to redeem mankind from perpetual slavery to Satan, sin and death. Much more was required before forgiveness would be practical and effective.

Satan had no power over the sinless and divine man, Jesus Christ. So Jesus was the only one with the ability to overcome Satan, sin and death, for us.

Once that was successfully accomplished, forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God quickly became the number one priority of the Christian (Catholic) Church.

In fact, the first thing Jesus did, after he rose again from the dead, was to give the Apostles the power to forgive sins, in his name:

John 20:19-23  Now when it was late the same day, the first of the week, and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered together, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst and said to them: Peace be to you. And when he had said this, he shewed them his hands and his side. The disciples therefore were glad, when they saw the Lord. He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them: and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. 

Send us your question. Receive a Catholic answer.

Go To Bob Stanley’s “The Catholic Treasure Chest”

S U B S C R I B E
Click here to receive every new post in your daily email.
Free to you. Cancel any time.

Scandal: First Lady Jill Biden promoted ‘birth control pills’ and condoms to Kenya’s youth, while wearing a rosary around her neck.

(LifeSiteNews) — First Lady of the United States Jill Biden encouraged young Kenyans to continue spreading propaganda about contraception and “safe sex” at their churches and schools, all while wearing a Rosary around her neck.

As part of her five-day trip to Namibia and Kenya last week, Biden participated in multiple events pertaining to the “empowerment of women and youth.”

Full story

How the Blessed Hope of Eternal Life in Our Lord, Jesus Christ is Faithfully Expressed Through Our Enthusiastic, Grace-Empowered Participation In the Work, Worship, Sacraments and Devotions of the Holy Catholic Church

SUITABLE for FRAMING!

Download this article for Free on a single,
illustrated 8.5X11 page – PDF

The Blessed Hope of Eternal Life
in Our Lord, Jesus Christ
is Faithfully Expressed Through Our
Enthusiastic, Grace-Empowered Participation
In the Work, Worship, Sacraments and Devotions
of the Holy Catholic Church

By God’s Awesome Power and Justice,
Mankind Has Already Been Rescued from Perpetual Slavery
to Satan, Sin and Death.

Through Membership in The Holy Catholic Church,
We Inherit the Sacred Deposit of the Faith
and Hope to Obtain Everlasting Life.

Matthew 16:18 (The words of Jesus Christ)
And I say to thee: That thou art Peter;
and upon this rock I will build my Church,
and the gates of hell (which is the power of death)
shall not prevail against it.

Personally Founded by Jesus Christ,
for the purpose of our salvation,
The Holy Catholic Church Is Entrusted by God
with the Mission of Freely Dispensing,
to Every Nation and To Each Successive Generation,
the Fruits of Christ’s Absolute Triumph
Over the World, the Flesh and the Devil.

Matthew 28:19 – Go therefore, teach ye all nations:
baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…

Through the Sacrament of Baptism,
All Past Sins Are Washed Away;
Our Soul Receives An Indelible “Mark of Faith”
and Is Infused With Sanctifying Grace.
We Become: Members of the Holy Catholic Church,
Adopted Children of God, Living Temples of the Holy Spirit,
Immortal Citizens of Heaven and Co-Heirs with Jesus Christ.

From the Catechism: 838
“The Church knows that she is joined in many ways
to the baptized, who are honored by the name of Christian,
but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety…”
Those “who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized
are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion
with the Catholic Church…”

From the Catechism: 2030 – It is in the Church,
in communion with all the baptized,
that the Christian fulfills his vocation…
(Vocation: A person’s authentic life’s work and divine calling;
not necessarily restricted to the priesthood,
deaconate and/or religious orders)

Through regular prayer and study,
along with a lifetime of full, faithful, grace-empowered
participation in the work, worship, sacraments and devotions
of the Holy Catholic Church,
we personally encounter the one, true God;
coming to know him in Spirit and in Truth.

To know God is to love him,
rightly regarding him with awe, wonder,
reverence, faith, hope, joy, gratitude, serenity,
selflessness and a profound, heart-felt respect.

1st John 5:3-5 – For this is the charity (love) of God:
THAT WE KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS.
And his commandments are not burdensome.

For whoever is born of God OVERCOMES the world.
And this is the victory which overcame the world: OUR FAITH.

As faithful, enthusiastic members of the Holy Catholic Church,
Offering God Our Very Best, for His Greater Glory,
We Hope to Obtain Eternal Life; Not By Our Merits,
But According To His Inestimable Love,
Powerful Graces and Tender Mercies.

Author: Doug Lawrence – Courtesy of Bob Stanley’s “The Catholic Treasure Chest” and AskMeAboutGod.Org – Both sites are hosted by Doug Lawrence at http://www.askmeaboutgod.org

Download this article for Free on a single,
illustrated 8.5X11 page – PDF

Every-10-year religious study of USA shows some surprising numbers

The Catholic Church has the most adherents in 37 states.

At 61 million adherents in more than 19,000 churches, Catholics are close to 19% of the U.S. population – the largest religious body in the country – according to the U.S. Religion Census (USRC), an every-10-years study carried out by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.

Read more at Aleteia

Significant historical observation

Lenten reflection: Do I pray only for others, or also, for myself? What does that mean?

Some believe that praying for oneself demonstrates humility.

Others see in it only selfish pride.

Suggested meditation:
Ask God to “take stock” of your prayer life
and see what he tells you about it.

You have 40 days.

No answer? Pray for another 40 days.

Excellent video: The Biblical Roots of Ash Wednesday.

Click here to watch the video

Maybe old “devout Catholic” Joe Biden just stopped off to pray?

The UK Sun reported:

PRESIDENT Joe Biden has once again stumbled while boarding Air Force One as he was leaving Poland on Wednesday.

The latest blunder from the 80-year-old US president was caught on video as he headed back home from his overseas trip.

Biden fell forward about halfway up the stairs to the plane as he boarded Air Force One at Warsaw Chopin Airport.

The US president was seen waving at the crowd before entering the plane’s cabin.

Full story and video

Fatima visionary wrote that the “final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about marriage and the family.”

Sister Lucia with Pope Saint John Paul II

Cardinal Caffarra:

“There is a book in Holy Scripture, the last, the Apocalypse, which describes the final confrontation between the two kingdoms. In this book, the attraction of Christ takes the form of triumph over enemy powers commanded by Satan. It is a triumph which comes after lengthy combat. The first fruits of the victory are the martyrs,” he said.

Caffarra said that legalized abortion comes from the “culture of the lie” where the “crime” of murdering a human being is seen as a “good.”

Abortion is a “sacrilegious act,” he said, adding that it is the “profoundest negation of the truth of man.”.

“The reason why man should not shed the blood of man is that man is the image of God. Through man, God dwells in His creation. This creation is the temple of the Lord, because man inhabits it. To violate the intangibility of the human person is a sacrilegious act against the Sanctity of God. It is the Satanic attempt to generate an ‘anti-creation.’ By ennobling the killing of humans, Satan has laid the foundations for his ‘creation’: to remove from creation the image of God, to obscure his presence therein,” he said.

The Cardinal said Homosexual “marriage” also comes from the “culture of the lie” since it “denies entirely the truth of marriage” as it comes from the “mind of God the Creator.”

Full article

Asbury Revival is about to “flame out”.

The revival at the Christian school, which has fewer than 1,700 students and is located about a half-hour outside Lexington, drew national and international attention, attracting groups of students from at least 22 colleges and universities to its campus, and even gaining the support of former vice president Mike Pence, who tweeted his support of the movement.

But the crowds became too much, the university said.

“Students have not only had to juggle various campus commitments … but also the throngs of people who have entered the dimensions of their space,” Kevin J. Brown, the university’s president, said in a statement. “For some, this has created a sense of being unsettled and even alienation from their campus community.”

Public worshiping will continue in the afternoons through Wednesday.

Full story

Unfortunately, many people today think yoga and Reiki are something that is compatible with Christian doctrine. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“In advising against being carried away by artificial practices such as Transcendental Meditation I am but repeating the age-old message of the Church… The way of the Fathers requires firm faith and long patience, whereas our contemporaries want to seize every spiritual gift, including even direct contemplation of the Absolute God, by force and speedily, and will often draw a parallel between prayer in the Name of Jesus and yoga or Transcendental Meditation and the like. I must stress the danger of such errors…

“He is deluded who endeavours to divest himself mentally of all that is transitory and relative in order to cross some invisible threshold, to realize his eternal origin, his identity with the Source of all that exists, in order to return and merge with him, the nameless transpersonal Absolute. Such exercises have enabled many to rise to supra-rational contemplation of being, to experience a certain mystical trepidation, to know the state of silence of mind, when mind goes beyond the boundaries of time and space. In such like states man may feel the peacefulness of being withdrawn from the continually changing phenomena of the visible world, may even have a certain experience of eternity. But the God of Truth, the Living God, is not in all this.

“It is man’s own beauty, created in the image of God, that is contemplated and seen as divinity, whereas he himself still continues within the confines of his creatureliness. This is a vastly important concern. The tragedy of the matter lies in the fact that man sees a mirage which, in his longing for eternal life, he mistakes for a genuine oasis. This impersonal form of ascetics leads finally to an assertion of the divine principle in the very nature of man. Man is then drawn to the idea of self-deification, the cause of the original Fall. The man who is blinded by the imaginary majesty of what he contemplates has in fact set his foot on the path to self-destruction. He has discarded the revelation of a personal God… The movement into the depths of his own being is nothing else but attraction towards the non-being from which we were called by the will of the Creator.” (His Life is Mine, 115-116)

Former Hindu guru Rabi Maharaj, “No part of Yoga can be separated from the philosophy behind it.”

Full story

Some “funny” things happened when Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, tried to rebuild the Jerusalem temple.

Still not rebuilt

Signs of trouble immediately appeared: after the first day, the workers awoke to find the soil they had removed had shifted back into place. Undaunted, they resumed work when “of a sudden a violent gale blew, and storms, tempests and whirlwinds scattered everything far and wide,” according to the account of the ecclesiastical historian Theodoret.

Then calamity struck: an earthquake rocked the site, followed by fireballs that burst out of the unfinished foundations for the temple, burning some men, and sending the rest in flight. Some rushed into the church that had been built by Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, only to have its doors shut in front of them by “an unseen and invisible power,” according to one account.

Some accounts of the disaster read like a retelling of the plagues visited upon Egypt: the fountains by the old temple stopped working, a famine broke out, and two imperial officials who had desecrated some sacred vessels met with grisly deaths. One was eaten alive with worms. The other “burst asunder in the midst.”

All this culminated with the appearance of the cross—either in the sky or sprinkled like stars on the garments of the workers, according to early Church accounts.

Read more from Stephen Beale at Catholic Exchange

Today’s question: Is it wrong to say that the entire Bible is NOT infallible?

Question: Is it wrong to say that the entire Bible is NOT infallible?

Answer: Yes. It is wrong, mainly because the entire Bible is the Holy Spirit inspired, written Word of God.

God neither lies, nor does he make errors.

That said, various Bible editions and translations do contain certain errors, but that is man’s doing. Not God’s. Even so, such errors tend to be relatively benign and transparent – at least, to those who are somewhat familiar with the work.

The following excerpt from the applicable, official Catholic Church document explains the bulk of what we know to be true, regarding the Sacred Scriptures:

DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION
ON DIVINE REVELATION
DEI VERBUM
SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED
BY HIS HOLINESS
POPE PAUL VI
ON NOVEMBER 18, 1965

CHAPTER III
SACRED SCRIPTURE, ITS DIVINE INSPIRATION AND INTERPRETATION

11. Those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Sacred Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For holy mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles (see John 20:31; 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19-20, 3:15-16), holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.(1) In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him (2) they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, (3) they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. (4)

Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings (5) for the sake of salvation. Therefore “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Greek text).

12. However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, (6) the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.

To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. (7) For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. (8)

But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, (9) no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith. It is the task of exegetes to work according to these rules toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture, so that through preparatory study the judgment of the Church may mature. For all of what has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God. (10)

13. In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remains intact, the marvelous “condescension” of eternal wisdom is clearly shown, “that we may learn the gentle kindness of God, which words cannot express, and how far He has gone in adapting His language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature.” (11) For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.

Read the Complete Vatican Document Here

Editor’s note: The Official Bible of the Holy Catholic Church is the Vulgate, translated into Latin from the original languages, using still existing, source documents, by St. Jerome, in the 4th Century. Vatican II has muddied the waters a bit, but this is still an essential truth, since The Council of Trent declared the original Latin Vulgate as authentic:

Moreover, the same sacred and holy Synod,
considering that no small utility may accrue to the Church of God,
if it be made known which out of all the Latin editions,
now in circulation, of the sacred books, is to be held as authentic,
ordains and declares, that the said old and vulgate edition,
which, by the lengthened usage of so many ages,
has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures,
disputations, sermons, and expositions, held as authentic;
and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it
under any pretext whatever.

Of course, a huge number of newer translations are now available, in various languages. Quality and accuracy may vary widely, so choose wisely.

My personal favorite is the English, Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible, which was translated directly from the Vulgate, which faithfully “reads” and “flows” much like the original and still remains thoroughly Catholic.

The D-R Bible has also undergone a number of revisions, over the centuries, so “your mileage may vary”.

Send us your question. Receive a Catholic answer.

Go To Bob Stanley’s “The Catholic Treasure Chest”

Click here to automatically receive all new posts in your email
Not arriving? Check your SPAM file.

For Lent: An excellent treatise on sin, shame, repentance and forgiveness.

…let’s think about the contemporary world, both secular and within the Church among the Freemasonic-modernist-communist-sodomite infiltrators. Shame is viewed not as the gift from God that it is, but as a scandal to be eliminated, a character fault to be purged, and a “hate crime” when recommended to others.

“Um, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Shut up! Who are you to judge?”

Read more from Ann Barnhardt

Alligators not happy about Archbishop’s Lenten ruling

Alligator meat is permissible to eat on Fridays of Lent, the archbishop of New Orleans assured a conscientious parishioner, and his approval has been backed by the national bishops’ conference.

“Concerning the question if alligator is acceptable to eat during the Lenten season…yes, the alligator is considered in the fish family,” Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond wrote in a letter provided by the  New Orleans archdiocese.

Link

The business model of producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable

“It works as long as [products are] made in China and sold in China, but the business model of producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable,” Hideo Tanimoto, president of Kyocera, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Not only have wages gone up, but obviously, with all that’s happening between the United States and China, it’s difficult to export from China to some regions.”

Kyocera is building its first factory in Japan in almost 20 years.

Full story

Priest thinks the faithful are too stupid to understand transubstantiation

Just because you can’t SPELL the word doesn’t mean you’re not smart enough to understand it!

Full article

The place at the table Catholics were promised in Biden’s Democratic Party is a lie, based on the party’s quasi-Marxist attitude toward the Catholic Church in the West.

It has now gone from the cognitive dissonance of requiring Catholic politicians to vote for abortion, euthanasia, same-sex “marriage,” and gender transition of children, to the outright government persecution of Catholics who don’t go along with this.

Read more from Shane Schaetzel

Article explains where Ash Wednesday ashes come from

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Or, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”

On Ash Wednesday, millions of Catholics throughout the English-speaking world will hear one of these two blessings as a priest applies ashes to their forehead in the Sign of the Cross.

But where exactly do the black or gray powdery ashes come from?

Read more

Protect yourself. Assisted suicide is only one component of the culture-of-death tool chest that is used to prematurely end lives.

Read the article