Happy 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea! Perhaps this day, when the bishops assembled May 20, 325 AD, is the most important of all in the history of Christianity. Throughout this council, the bishops under the direction of a secular ruler, the Emperor Constantine, laid the groundwork for what would later become the Trinity….
Category: Roman “Catholicism”
The cult Opus Dei and its sappy founder
There’s a docuseries on Max exposing the Roman “Catholic” cult named Opus Dei (Latin for “work of God”) titled How I Left the Opus Dei. The subjects were women from poor families, recruited when they were young. Opus Dei housed them in a fancy estate (all under the auspices of Christian poverty, of course), and…
Habent papam
They have a pope, another papa … again. He calls himself Leo. That’s an interesting name for an American pope, but the choice shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the last pope named Leo complained about “Americanism” to Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore. Granted, Leo was critical of the ideals of the Age of…
Leaving the commune (aka seminary)
This month it’s been 14 years since I left the Roman commune known as seminary. You could say I lost my faith in Rome during my final semester, the spring of 2011, having been in Roman communes for a total of four years. Those final two years were in Rome itself. I returned stateside and…
The next pope? Wait, I’m not supposed to care
Who will be the next pope? A good Catholic would avoid asking such a question. In the recent past, if he had heard someone observe a drastic difference between Francis and Pius XII, the last pre-Vatican II pope, he would have performed mental gymnastics to say, “Despite the difference between those two men, the papal…