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A Different Kind of Christmas StoryAt their feet spread the great Egyptian desert, a shadowy ocean of sand rolling southward into Africa. The woman, a pale redhead with dark rings of sorrow under her eyes, had otherwise the look of ease and city life about her. Her child seemed even more incongruous: a scrawny, big-eyed boy, five, perhaps, six years old, with an ominous, unending cough; a dark, mixed-race runt with a head of kinky yet unmistakably Celtic red hair. Most Roman women would have exp …

Myth: Christians borrowed Christmas and Easter from pagansEvery spring just before Easter, major news organizations run stories “debunking” one of the central tenets of the Christian faith—Jesus’ resurrection. Some take the form of an interview with a supposed biblical expert who puts forth reasons to doubt the Gospels’ veracity concerning the Resurrection; others breathlessly report some archaeological “discovery” that supposedly disproves the Resurrection, such as an ossuary that contains Jes …

If the Council of Trent didn’t add the deuterocanon to the Bible, as its deliberations show, why do Protestant bibles exclude these books? Before 1599, nearly all Protestant bibles included the deuterocanonical books; between the years 1526 to 1631, Protestant bibles with the deuterocanon were the rule and not the exception. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the tide began to turn toward smaller bibles for Protestants. By 1831, the books of the deuterocanon, along with …

Having a proper understanding of joy is imperative to becoming a saint. Joy is the arousal of some sense of good. When we malign and obscure good, we malign and obscure joy. St. Gregory the Great tells us, for example, that (a false) joy may result from another’s misfortune (CCC 2539). The unrighteous presence of envy, in this case, corrupts true joy. There’s a better means of obtaining the joy that comes from the Spirit, and a study of the life of St. Philip Neri reveals this. Aft …

Fr. William G. Most (1914-1997) will not end up numbered among first-rank apologists, but his book Catholic Apologetics Today (now out of print) came to my attention just when I could profit from it. It appeared as I was putting together the newspaper columns that, when collected and revised, became my first book. Every Fundamentalist I have dealt with—or so it has seemed—has faulted the Catholic Church for teaching, supposedly, that we are saved through good works. We earn our salvati …