Blog

Liturgical seasons are days and weeks set aside on the Church calendar for ongoing celebration of events in salvation history. The Church has these seasons to extend celebration of important events in the life of our Lord through time.  In General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, released after Vatican II by the Congregation for Divine Worship, the CDW said of Easter: “The fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost are celebrated in joyful exultation as one feast day, …

Sometimes skeptics have claimed that the infancy narratives found in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 contradict each other. For example, it is pointed out that Luke has Mary living in Nazareth before going to Bethlehem, whereas in Matthew they don’t go to Nazareth until later. It has also been claimed that they contain historical errors, such as Matthew’s mention of Herod’s slaughter of boys in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:16) or Luke’s mention of the enrollment that took place when Jesus was born (Luke 2:1-5). …

“When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem” (Matt. 2:1).“Wise men” is a common translation in English Bibles, but it doesn’t give us a good idea who they were.The Greek word used here is magoi—the plural of magos. These terms may be more familiar from their Latin equivalents: In St. Jerome’s Vulgate, we read that magi came from the east, and an individual member of the group would thus be a magus.Who Were the Magi?Or …