Theology

BY SUSAN TASSONE  Purgatory — a masterpiece of God’s mercy It’s no small wonder that coming up with a lesson plan on purgatory can be challenging....

A continuing series on ways to instill a robust Catholic identity in those we teach BY JOE PAPROCKI In our exploration of Catholic identity in this...

By Joe Paprocki Overcoming the tendency toward a “beige Catholicism” One of my favorite ideas to borrow from Bishop Robert Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles,...

By Joe Paprocki How Catholics rely on sacramentality to transcend words What is your native tongue? If you’re Catholic, your true “native tongue” is a language...

By Virginia M. Kimball Pray, fast, confess, receive the Eucharist, and be devoted to the Immaculate Heart ​One hundred years ago, in 1917, three years...

Jesus taught us the words of the Our Father and wanted us to remember them. He knew that if we kept the words he taught us in our hearts, we would always know how to pray. There are other words that we know by heart because they are important to our Catholic faith.

The end of the school year is filled with reviews of what you've learned in each subject. This game is a fun way to review what you know about the Catholic Church.

Two anniversaries of importance to the Catholic Church were marked on October 11, 2012. On that date, the Church celebrated both the fiftieth anniversary of the opening session of the Second Vatican Council and the twentieth anniversary of the publication, in French, of the original, provisional edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. To celebrate this anniversary, this article will provide a brief introduction to the Catechism (henceforth CCC), including its history, an overview of the CCC, and finally, suggestions on how it can be used most effectively within ministry.

This Year of Faith is an invitation, not a command. It is not a time to complain that the Divine should take a more active role in the world, but that we should “make God credible in this world” (Fisichella). It’s more than being nice or doing one’s duty. It’s going to demand sacrifice, courage, and an enormous amount of energy—but probably not more than the original disciples needed in order to follow the Great Commission. They may have been the first to witness like their hair was on fire.

That does not mean we need to live in a world of religious animosity. Part of our catechetical task is to put our lessons on the Catholic faith into a real-world context. A major part of the context is the simple fact that our neighbors may not believe what we believe or understand the world the way we do.