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Daily Prayer and Scripture Spend at least ten minutes each day reading the Bible. Focus on passages that highlight God’s covenant love (e.g., Hosea, John’s Gospel). Pray with these texts and ask the Holy Spirit to make his love real in your heart. Sacramental Life Regular confession and frequent reception of the Eucharist are powerful reminders that God’s love is tangible, forgiving, and sustaining. In the sacraments, we encounter God’s merciful embrace. Eucharistic Ador …

When people ask me why they need to go to see a priest in confession instead of going “directly to God,” I remind them that they already believe that you can’t “go directly to God” when it comes to another sacrament: baptism.Protestants believe that someone else (ideally, a Church minister) has to baptize you—you can’t baptize yourself. Protestants who believe that baptism saves us from sin consequently believe that we need the involvement of a minister …

The Catholic Church teaches us what actions are gravely sinful and must be avoided so we do not forsake our salvation.Once, I was talking with a poised young Protestant woman who was adept at citing the Bible. The topic of James 2 and its insistence that a man is not justified by “faith alone” came up, to which she quickly responded,“Of course, we are saved by faith alone. But true faith is never alone. Saving faith in Christ is always accompanied by good works. The works aren …

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 …