The Catholic Thing

Faith & Reason Institute
Faith & Reason Institute
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The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.

  1. 3h ago

    Remembering Ratzinger at Rimini

    By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza Pope Leo XIV is traveling to Rimini today for the annual cultural festival organized by Communion and Liberation (CL). Few use its formal name, the "Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples." It's simply "Rimini." It might be the only thing many know about the Italian coastal town, which draws major figures from the worlds of religion, the arts, and even Italian politics for its summer gathering. Some 80,000 participants attend, with three-quarters of a million more following online. Communion and Liberation inaugurated the Rimini meeting in 1980, and already in 1982 St. John Paul the Great visited. Pope Leo will be the second pope to visit and what he says about culture, art, and beauty will be noted carefully. Just this week at his general audience, the Holy Father spoke of music and the worship of God. This year's Rimini theme is taken from the final line of Dante's Inferno: "The Love which moves the Sun and the other stars." It's perfect for Rimini, where devout Catholics speak in a language that they hope will engage even nonbelievers. Thus the "love" of this year's theme is explained as "the dynamic principle of the cosmos, the energy that holds everything together and drives it toward fulfillment." That sounds a bit like "The Force" in Star Wars, but that's the CL way. They are clearly intended to offer an opening to the Holy Father and his recent teachings on artificial intelligence. "We live fragmented within digital bubbles that isolate rather than connect us," CL's introduction continues. "In a world where algorithms decide what we see and whom we meet, rediscovering love as a force that moves and transforms becomes a radical challenge. It means recognizing that reality is not static chaos, but carries within itself a direction, a dynamism that pushes us beyond ourselves." That there is a dynamic that takes us beyond ourselves was articulated at Rimini in two memorable addresses that were not given by a pope, but a future one: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 1990 and 2002. How does that love dynamic manifest itself? In beauty and sanctity, which is what Ratzinger said the Church offers the world as her ultimate testimony. Ratzinger was close to the CL movement and its founder, Msgr. Luigi Giussani, so much so that he preached at Giussani's funeral Mass just months before his own election as pope in 2005: Father Giussani had grown up in a house – as he himself said – poor in bread, but rich in music. . . .And so, from the beginning he was touched, indeed wounded, by the desire for beauty; he was not satisfied with just any beauty, a banal beauty: he sought Beauty itself, infinite Beauty; thus he found Christ, in Christ the true beauty, the path of life, the true joy. Ratzinger was thus applying to Giussanni a longstanding claim of his, articulated most famously at Rimini in 2002: I have often already stated my conviction that the true apologia of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth, against any denial, is on the one hand the saints and on the other the beauty that faith has generated. Earlier in the same address, Ratzinger recalled "an unforgettable experience for me was the Bach concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Munich after Karl Richter's untimely death." "I was seated next to the Evangelical Bishop Hanselmann," he said. "When the last note triumphantly faded away, we spontaneously looked at each other, and just as spontaneously said, 'Whoever has listened to this knows that faith is true.'" Ratzinger too grew up rich in music; he described his hometown as belonging to the "Mozart region of Bavaria." In the truly magisterial lecture that he gave at Rimini in 1990, Ratzinger addressed the question of authentic reform in the Church. Some twenty-five years after Vatican II, he explored what true and false reform meant. What needed to change so that what doesn't change – the Gospels, the deposit of the faith, the tradition of holiness – can be discovered a...

  2. 1d ago

    Beauty: A True Human Need

    By Joseph R. Wood As I write, on the day celebrated by some Orthodox as the feast of the Transfiguration on the Julian calendar, I've had several experiences of beauty just this morning. The sunrise through the West Virginia trees, the sunlight streaming into an Orthodox monastery church and illuminating the rising incense smoke around the icons, the chant, the memory of the faces of those I love, on and on. While I drove across the country this summer, I imagined, or at least hoped, that I was more aware of and attentive to the beauty surrounding me than I had been on similar voyages earlier in my life. This may have stemmed from my grandly calling the trip a "pilgrimage," and trying to travel accordingly. The Transfiguration may be the most beautiful moment in recorded history. Peter, James, and John were mortal sinners chosen to witness the fullness of beauty: Christ as God alongside two great prophets. The pleasure that God the Father spoke of at that moment is the pleasure of the source of all beauty. But for all that, beauty remains a mystery to me. I've always thought that I don't "do beauty" well. It's a confusing subject. "There's no accounting for taste," we're told, suggesting that beauty "is in the eye of the beholder." These clichés surely carry some truth. But just dismissing beauty as an entirely subjective matter is inadequate to explain it, or to explain the need we feel to share it with others. Some writers have identified "real beauty" with human faces or bodies, or particular examples of art and architecture. I think these efforts are as confused as I am. But they too are looking for the "what is" of real beauty. One great help towards sorting out the confusion is a book by the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, Beauty (also published under the title, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction). Scruton rejects the notion that beauty is simply a subjective experience, though subjectivity is very much involved. Taking an explicitly incarnational view of the body, he claims that "human beauty belongs to our embodiment, and art that 'objectifies' the body, removing it from the realm of moral relations, can never capture the true beauty of the human form." Beauty is inextricably linked to goodness, and so to moral matters. The book is an example of one of my favorite "genres," works by philosophers and theologians who no longer need to write competitively or academically. These writers are on the far side of much thought, scholarship, or prayer – or possibly all three. The books are brief and simple, presenting settled conclusions. They tend towards wisdom (Pope Benedict XVI's short trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth is another example). Scruton finds some understanding in the classical notion of beauty, along with truth and goodness, as a Platonic reality that transcends time and space. But it is more than that, just as it is more than whatever I happen to say it is. There's an objective reality to which the person responds subjectively in some way: The experience of beauty is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment as much as right action. Scruton does not say what I would add (though he is not irreligious). But I think his short book points to beauty (and truth and goodness) not just as absolutes in themselves, but as a right relationship with God, the absolute. We are rational and relational creatures, and beauty reflects ou...

  3. 2d ago

    Star Gazing

    By Stephen P. White But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight – Thursday, August 20 at 8 PM Eastern – to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing debates about synodality and liturgy, liberal nuns who challenge Church teaching, and other current issues in the Church and the world. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel. Now for today's columns... I remember a moonless summer night at a campsite in North Dakota, almost forty years ago now, when the stars were so innumerable and bright, it was difficult to pick out the familiar constellations. The night was so black that I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, but the stars hung so thick and low I thought I could reach out and pluck them from the firmament like bunches of grapes. Billions of stars. It was, in an older and truer sense of an abused and overused word, awesome. My late father loved astronomy. He knew a great many constellations and most of the names of the brightest stars. I remember on dark nights at home in the Midwest, he would point them out. Straight above us there were Vega, Altair, and Deneb. They make up the Summer Triangle. There was Cassiopeia. And the Corona Borealis. Over there, in the South, was Scorpio with the great red giant, Antares. As autumn comes on, Scorpio will sink below the horizon, and Orion will rise; the great hunter chasing a quarry he will never catch. He taught me that our eyes see color best in the center of our focus, but light sensitivity is slightly better just beyond the edge of the center of sight. The dim star you might not see if you gazed at it directly might be just visible if you looked just to one side or the other. That's how he taught me to find the Andromeda Galaxy – the most distant object visible with the naked eye. I have only seen it once. But I have seen it. Dad eventually got a telescope – a quality amateur instrument with a mirror eight or nine inches in diameter – and he would bring it out on clear nights to look at the nebula in Orion's belt, or to see the rings and moons of Saturn, or to gaze at the crescent of Venus following the sinking sun. The telescope was really overkill for inspecting the craters of the moon; binoculars were best for that. We used to talk about the most amazing night skies we had ever seen. There was that night in North Dakota – never seen anything like it or since – where we could see the Milky Way clear overhead, the aurora to the north, and lightning crawling over thunderheads, like luminescent cauliflowers, to the south. Over the years I realized that those nights with Dad, staring up at all those pinpoints of ancient light and wandering planets, were a kind of theodicy. Dad was a family doctor. He spent his days around people who were sick and suffering. He helped many of them get well and even thrive, but he also knew that everything he did was ultimately a stall. He fought a losing battle against mortality every day. We all do, of course; he just saw that more clearly than most of us. Dad's fascination with the stars wasn't merely therapeutic – though it was that, I suppose – it was closer to contemplation in gratitude. It was an exercise in wonder. See what unfathomable glory the Lord has made? What greater remedy to the problem of suffering, the problem of human frailty, than to gaze with wonder upon God's own handiwork? Wonder is not, strictly speaking, a virtue. But it does inoculate the soul against cynicism. Wonder begets humility and gratitude – which are virtues – both of which go a long way to transforming the suffering of this life from something one hopes to avoid or at least endure into something that opens into redemption. And I find that looking up is a remarkably effective way to inculcate a sense of wonder....

  4. 3d ago

    Restless and at Home in America

    By Robert Royal We recently reached the 250th anniversary (a quarter-millennium) of the dominant nation and culture of our time – and of one of the greatest countries in world history. Yet just a few weeks later, you'd hardly know it. And only a month ago, everyone was talking – even here – about a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, a 3000-year-old foundation stone of our civilization. That, too, passed quickly and is unlikely to become a classic. The Church keeps better time – witness the recent Feast of the Assumption. But we need much greater attention to what's important, deep, steady, and (relatively) lasting even in our passing world. Now and then, we get it, for instance, Patrick J. Deneen's new book American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls. Many know Deneen as the author of Why Liberalism Failed and one of the brighter lights at Notre Dame. But he has had a long interest in the Odyssey and its connections to the American experience. And he deliberately timed the book to come out at this moment. At first sight, connecting modern America to Bronze-Age Greece may seem a stretch. But in this brief, lively, and approachable treatment, Deneen ably uncovers several valuable truths. To begin with, as the book's subtitle indicates, Deneen sees a deep divide particularly in American souls, and one that has existed from the beginning. The Pilgrims, he notes, crossed the wide Atlantic on their "errand into the wilderness," but also in search of a true home. They were not just explorers, like Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci (who gave America its name), but also somewhat similar to Odysseus in seeking their proper place. At the same time – and here's the divided soul – in a sense they were explorers, leaving home in search of a better life, "a city on a hill." Deneen traces this paradox through American culture. We are, more than most nations, a people who are both restless and seeking rest – but a rest that lies over the horizon. Augustinian echoes are obvious here, in that all human beings are seekers, of course, often not knowing that the only real rest is in God. But in America that perennial search also has had this-worldly personal and social dimensions. As an Italian friend of America wrote decades ago, we're the only people on earth whose very Constitution confesses to seeking a "more perfect union," mere perfection being not enough for us. Deneen explores this ambivalence in the American soul via several landmarks in American popular culture. In The Wizard of Oz, for instance, especially the film version, Dorothy yearns for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." And she gets it in Oz where – like Ulysses – she encounters strange beasts and multiple adventures. But it's precisely those experiences that help her to realize "there's no place like home," even a plain farm in Kansas. In a later chapter, Deneen notes a similar division in the film It's a Wonderful Life. The young George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) wanted to see the world, do great things, escape the "limits" of small-town life. But forced to take over the family business, he never has the chance. Yet – as the heartfelt Christmas conclusion makes clear – he did achieve great things, even had adventures of a sort, by not leaving and therefore living the heroic life of "ordinary people." Several of Deneen's comparisons are surprising. The Laura Ingalls Wilder series "Little House on the Prairie," set in Mankato, Minnesota, may seem as distant from the Odyssey as a story can be. But Deneen traces exactly what must have been the attitude of many settlers who journeyed into the wide-open American West, an odyssey and errand into the wilderness to be sure, but also a search and a discovery of a new home. These readings can at times also be a little strained. Field of Dreams, a great film about the quintessential American sport – baseball – displays elements of voyaging and nostalgia, to be sure. But it takes no little forcing to fit it into the overal...

  5. 4d ago

    Selling Radical 'Synodality' as 'Social Prophecy' If synodality is "not a programme needing to be implemented" why does the Synod Secretariat's website present it as a programme needing to be implemented? In 2028 the Synod Secretariat will host an Eccle

    By Fr. Gerald E. Murray The recent annual Assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious received a video message from Pope Leo XIV, in which he said: All Christians are called to be builders of Christ's communion, formed in a synodal Church in which everyone cooperates in the same mission according to their own charism and ministry. In a special way, those in religious life are called to become experts in synodality due to the opportunities afforded by community life to practice it, as well as the very way that your congregations are organized. What, though, is "a synodal Church" in which women religious are "called to become experts in synodality"? An answer to this question was given by Sister Nathalie Becquart, XMCJ Undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, who addressed the Assembly in person: Synodality is not a programme to be implemented, not a project with a 2028 deadline, not one more meeting. It is about our deep identity as Church, rooted in the mystery of the Trinity. It is not about being another Church but about being the Church in a different way. . .to move from one culture to another: from a culture of clericalism, hierarchicalism and institutional self-sufficiency to a culture of listening, co-responsibility, discernment and genuine exchange. She went on to describe synodality as a "social prophecy" and a "grammar of peace." She also said, "What I have learned in these years accompanying the synodal process of the Universal Church is this: the Holy Spirit is not waiting for us to be ready. The Spirit is already at work." Sister Becquart's comments are opaquely revelatory: synodality is presented as a necessary innovation, a different culture, a much-needed reform effort to reclaim the Church's true identity and vitality. Synodality means the birth of a new style of "being Church," but it is not "another Church" at odds with the pre-synodal Church. Incoherent reassurances such as these are a smokescreen hiding what is obvious: the synodal project is an attempt to remake the Catholic Church into a new entity akin to various Protestant churches. A close look at Sister Becquart's remarks reveals them to be an exercise in sloganeering. Slogans are useful in advertising. Synodality is a new, unknown product on the market. Wary customers need to be convinced to buy into it. But a number of questions arise: The Holy Spirit is always at work within God's Church. How does Sister Becquart know that He is now at work calling us to embrace the emergence of a synodal "Church in a different way"? Sister Becquart's remarks are confirmation that synodality is a largely meaningless word that is used by those in charge of the synodal process to promote a set of ideas that are shockingly revolutionary in nature – and thus in need of semantic camouflage. The people in charge of the Synod have created a semantic shield for their project. They attempt to hide the plain truth that they want to create a new Church with a new doctrine in which the hierarchy will share governing authority with lay people and in which heterodox impositions will be characterized as the community's discernment of where the Holy Spirit is leading the Church. They present themselves as reformers, not revolutionaries. They simply want to do away with an outdated clericalist and "hierarchicalist" culture, lingering from a lamentable past, that diverted the Church from her true synodal nature which will now be restored by the common effort of all the faithful, guided by the Holy Spirit (and the Synod Secretariat) to throw off that outdated culture. The synodality steamroller is a danger to the Church. It needs to be seen for what it is, and stopped before it wreaks any more havoc upon the Church.

  6. 5d ago

    'I Want to Believe'

    By Randall Smith I sometimes hear people say something like this: "I want to believe, but I just can't," or "I would like to believe, but I just don't." I don't wish to be critical of such people. I assume their reserve about "faith" comes out of a good-willed desire to be honest about themselves – like someone admitting, "I wish I were a calm, temperate person, but I'm just not." So, although I respect the goodwill, I still would wish to ask this person: "What do you think faith is?" "What do you think having faith is like?" I fear sometimes that people think "having faith" is the same as "being certain," or that "having faith" is a feeling you get when you're sure of something. What if it's not? What if it's something else? What if it's like love – not quite a feeling as much as a way of living? Before we could explore the question of faith, we would need to get clear on something else. People don't just "have faith"; they have faith in something. In God. In God's love for us. That God's love for us is expressed and embodied in Christ. So, we wouldn't just ask about faith – that's much too vague. We would start by asking what this person believes or doesn't believe in. So, for example, we might ask: Does it seem reasonable to you that the entire universe, with all its beauty and order, and especially with human beings capable of knowing, loving, and sacrificing for each other, came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing? It is hypothetically possible, but is that what you believe? Some people do. Do you? Are you convinced that life – all life – and all existence is essentially meaningless? Because if you're not convinced of that, then it is possible that life is meaningful. And in fact, don't you live your life that way? Haven't you shown by the way you live your life – caring for people, trying to do good things rather than selfish things, appreciating beauty, and trying to understand the things around you more profoundly – that you do believe in something? If we look at the way you actually live, wouldn't we have to conclude that you actually believe that living this way is meaningful, not meaningless? You act as though selfless care for others is meaningful, as though acting with love and care for others is good. You don't have any scientific proof that this sort of life is intrinsically meaningful and good. But you live as though it were. That's a kind of faith. So what if I said to the person who claims they wish they had faith but just can't: "But wait, you actually do have faith; you just haven't realized it or reflected on it." That presupposition you bring to the way you look at the world and the way you live your life when you assume that courage and kindness and generosity and care are better than cowardice and cruelty and arrogance and selfishness – that is part and parcel of what Christians call "faith." There's no scientific proof that this life is better. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to suppose that being selfish makes more sense than being selfless. Do you sometimes say to yourself: "I must be crazy to live this way, giving myself selflessly to others rather than just getting everything I can for myself?" So, what keeps you coming back to selflessness and care and generosity? Is it something you've noticed in your experience? Is it something you just sense is true? That sense you have that something you can't touch or measure or prove scientifically is in fact true – true with the kind of truth you would be willing to bet your whole life on, even though sometimes you're not entirely certain about it – this is what Christians call "faith." There's no need to get caught up in the word. Call it what you like. But just so you know: you have faith. You just haven't examined it. So, for example, if you realized that you do believe that life is intrinsically meaningful – not only your life, but the life of all creatures – then you might start asking other questions, such as: How could that be? How coul...

  7. 6d ago

    Religious Life is the Higher Calling

    By David G Bonagura, Jr. A wave of egalitarianism, swelling for over two centuries, has broken over every corner of the West, including the Church. In its backwash, among other aspects of Catholic life, the approach to vocations in the Church has slowed. Older Catholics would have heard in their youth that a vocation to the priesthood or to religious life is the "higher calling" compared to the Church's other vocational sacrament, holy matrimony. For younger Catholics, this label and this comparison have seemingly been swept out to sea. It's not that the Church has given up promoting religious vocations – far from it. In the United States, we have National Vocations Awareness Week each November and Good Shepherd Sunday after Easter as designated annual occasions for this effort, to say nothing of others less prominent. And during these periods, I have heard fine homilies and read good pieces on the beauty of priesthood and religious life. Alongside this constructive work, I have often heard, sometimes even in the same sentence of a petition read at Mass, the promotion of vocations to the diaconate and to marriage. These are legitimate and holy vocations within the Church. Each has produced wonderful saints who have lived their respective callings with heroic fervor. But are these vocations all equally worthy to be prayed for within the same sentence? Let's be honest: the priestly and religious vocations are, in a certain sense, in competition with marriage, which is the normal form of life for adults within the Church – and, again to be frank, one that does not require hours of discernment. Humans are biologically attracted to marriage. The religious vocation asks prospective men and women to sacrifice their natural desires on behalf of something that cannot be seen, touched, or heard. That's a tough sell in itself. When this sell is pitched as one vocational option as good as the other, the abysmally low number of seminarians and religious novices vis-à-vis the Catholic population will come as no surprise. How, then, do we "sell" priestly and religious vocations? What if that "something" we cannot see, touch, or hear is the ultimate Good, the Cause of our existence, and our Destination when we die? What if that "something" is both the source and the fulfillment of happiness? What if that "something" has created me and designated me for Him for all eternity? Here we return to that phrase washed out to sea: the priestly and religious vocations are indeed a higher calling because its primary object is the highest thing – God. To represent God directly as the priest does, to espouse God directly as the religious does, these things fulfill their life's mission as immediately united with God. The primary object of marriage is service of one's spouse. God, as the object of the service, is then the secondary object of marriage. It should hardly be controversial, then, to call the priestly or religious vocation "higher." Since God is the highest Good, the be-all and end-all of existence, the first discernment question a young person should ask himself is not "What am I called to?" but "Am I called to serve God directly as His priest or as His spouse?" What greater thing is there in this life than to anticipate eternal life in one's being? Whether through the offering of the Mass or the full consecration of the self to God, the priest and religious manifest God's saving power in the very structure of their lives. Could there be any other call more noble, more joyous, and more exciting? From this initial question, many others follow. Some pertain to the individual Catholic discerning what exactly God has planned for him; others arise in protest to a hierarchical ranking of vocations. The two lines of questioning are not exclusive. First, those not called to the priesthood or religious life are not "inferior" – meaning "bad" or "inadequate" – Catholics. They simply have a different calling. Should someone be upset about this fact, he...

  8. Aug 15

    The Assumption: A Feast of Doctrinal Development

    By Michael Pakaluk Why debate what the development of doctrine looked like in distant eras of Church history when we have three instances in front of us, two of which were seen and commented upon by that great Saint of Development, John Henry Newman? By "right in front of us," I mean the extended present of the Church's self-consciousness, which reaches back to Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility in 1870, and Pius XII's definition of the Assumption in 1950. These are three examples of the Church developing its doctrine. That is why today's Feast may be viewed not simply as teaching a truth, that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven, but also as exemplifying a truth about what development amounts to. More than examples, they are paradigms, that is, examples which serve as standards. We hear a lot from some clerics about "paradigm shifts" in the Church's teaching. These men are using "paradigm" in Thomas Kuhn's sense of a conceptual framework. When one such paradigm is replaced by another, Kuhn said, there is no continuity between the older and the newer frameworks. What Newton meant by "force," for instance, is not the same as what Einstein meant by "force," although the words are the same. But the older and original meaning of a paradigm is an example that serves as a standard, such as when (perhaps) you learned amo, amas, amat as a paradigm of first conjugation verbs in Latin. "You want to construe laudamus?" The teacher says, "Look to your paradigm." These paradigms of development point to sameness, not difference, in the Church's teaching. They teach that the crucial move in development is not "we used to believe this, but now we believe this," but rather, "we see that we have believed this all along." To develop, in the first instance, is to define explicitly and sharply what was held implicitly and, to some extent, inchoately. It is to make uniform what was left in rough form, and it is to make binding on all what formerly was held in the manner of a loose "consensus." In the second instance, it is to become clear that one doctrine, not yet defined, has belonged to the same family as others, already defined. In a letter to J.D. Dalgairns on January 22, 1855, Newman says that he has received a copy of Pope Pius IX's Bull on the Immaculate Conception. He quotes the key words in Latin (here in translation), underlining some: "We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful." He says that the words seem to leave open precisely how she was so preserved: he does not think the definition endorses Scotus's view that the work of the Redemption was applied to Mary retroactively. And then he adds, "It is remarkable that the Bull does not define the doctrine, but defines that it is revealed, and therefore of faith." That is to say, all that the pope does is transfer a truth from "believed" to "needing to be believed." In various places he says that he finds, when he reflects upon the matter, that he has always believed this truth: "it really does seem to me bound up in the doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve," he writes in his Letter to Pusey. Newman's problem becomes, then, to explain why Anglican Christians of goodwill do not, likewise, already hold it. He finds two reasons. The first is that they confuse active and passive conception: the doctrine is not that Anne conceived Mary in a way that would not have passed on Original Sin (active immaculate conception, a heresy), but rather that Original Sin would have been passed on to Mary, except for a singular ...

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