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As St. John says, “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal” just as “there is sin which is mortal” (1 John 5:16-17). So what sin is mortal and what is not?  A mortal sin is one that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible. Unrepented, it brings eternal death” (CCC 1874). That’s what makes it “mortal,” or deadly: it cuts us off from God forever, unless it is “redeemed by repenta …

As we should expect, Mother Teresa’s idea of holiness was simple and direct. For her, sanctity begins with humility and ends with surrender to God’s will.  “You know, I’m only a little pencil in the hand of God, a God who is about to write a love letter to the world,” she was fond of saying.cii Mother understood that the path to holiness lies in following St. John the Baptist’s advice: “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). She lear …

Let’s lay down some groundwork by considering why we act as we do. Unlike irrational animals driven by instinct, we have the power to determine what goods we will seek and how we will go about obtaining them. We are masters of our own actions. Those goods we seek are goals or ends, the things we hope to achieve by our actions. “Although the end be the last in the order of execution, yet it is first in the order of the agent’s intention. And it is in this way that it is a cause …

Poverty and unjust working conditions are real problems, and sometimes their root lies in an unjust and dysfunctional economic system—socialism being the example par excellence. But usually, societal injustices are the result of deeper moral evils like greed, envy, indifference, and selfishness. Simply reordering society so people aren’t poor can’t eliminate these vices (and doesn’t solve poverty, either). That’s the error of liberation theology which, as we’ …

Everett Ferguson, a Protestant elder, biblical scholar, and Church historian, has written what’s perhaps the definitive work on the subject, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Ferguson spends hundreds of pages carefully combing through the evidence to expose the first five hundred years’ worth of Christians thought about baptism.His findings are neatly summarized on page 854: Although in developing the doctrine of baptism differe …