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God loves you as you are, but too much to leave you that way. Divine love does not leave the sinner undisturbed; it compels him to die, to rise, and to walk in “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). And true healing, the kind of healing that lasts and sanctifies, must be deeply doctrinal, sacramental, and moral. In other words, it must convert the intellect; it must flow from the life of the Church; and it must change the very rhythm and cadence of how we live and love. Anything less is spir …

The Protestant Reformation was launched when a Catholic priest named Martin Luther thought he’d discovered something in the Bible that the Church had been missing for centuries. That discovery was salvation by faith alone—that is, apart from doing good works. This core Reformation doctrine of sola fide is a major dividing line between Catholics and Protestants.Just like sola scriptura, this doctrine ends up dividing Protestants from each other just as much (and s …

The apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”Well, when I was a child, I thought you got to heaven by just being a nice person. My parents never took me to church, and the closest “Sunday school education” I received was from old Bible cartoons produced by the same animation company that made The Flintstones. I thought they …

The Catholic Church teaches what we must believe in order to be saved.After college, I traveled the country with a pro-life organization whose staff were evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. This made for interesting conversations around the trays of lasagna we ate in the evenings. (If you’ve ever had to feed thirty missionaries, you understand the utility of lasagna.)One night, we were having a slightly technical discussion about specific topics related to salvation—li …

Can you lose your salvation?Some Protestants believe in the doctrine of “Eternal Security” and would say no.Catholics take a different view.Apologist Karlo Broussard tells us Galatians 5:4 is a go-to text for Catholics when it comes to defending the belief that Christians can lose their salvation:You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.Notice that St. Paul says the Galatians were “severed from Christ” and that t …