Corpus Christi Blog

Welcome to the first Sunday of Lent and the first issue in our Lenten reflection series. The purpose of Lent is to set aside an intense, focused period of time to foster repentance from sin and conversion of heart (metanoia), as reflected in external acts of penance. During the 40 days of Lent, sinners encounter God’s merciful judgment, choose life over death through their conversion, and experience spiritual resurrection in preparation for Easter joy. To help us facilitate repentance and conversion, the topic for this year’s Lenten series is the Seven Deadly Sins according to St. Thomas Aquinas and how to conquer them, with references to The Seven Deadly Sins: A Thomistic Guide to Vanquishing Vice and Sin, by Kevin Vost, Psy.D.

Later this week, we will celebrate Ash Wednesday and begin our Lenten journey, leading to the most important holiday of our Christian faith – Easter. Lent is a sacred season of the liturgical year, lasting forty days, from Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday (excluding Sundays), designed to prepare the faithful for the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection at Easter. Its purpose is to foster interior conversion, intensify our prayer lives, and encourage our practice of penance, primarily through fasting and almsgiving. During Lent, we imitate Christ’s forty days of fasting in the desert.

I listen to The Patrick Madrid Show on Relevant Radio several times a week. Every so often, a person calls in with questions about Freemasonry and its compatibility, or incompatibility, rather, with the Catholic Church. Because it continues to come up, it has been on my mind for a while to research and provide some catechesis on Freemasonry.

Have you ever opened a Protestant Bible and wondered why it only has 66 books instead of the 73 you find in your Catholic Bible? These seven books — 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, Baruch, Tobit, and Judith — are woven into the standard canon of the Old Testament in the Catholic Bible, while in the Protestant Bible they are separated out and viewed as historically valuable and spiritually edifying, but not divinely inspired Scripture. To get to the root of the differences, you have to take a trip through Church history, beginning with the earliest Christians and progressing through the Protestant Reformation. Let’s look at the Catholic defense of these seven books as divinely inspired Scripture and a fuller revelation of God’s wisdom.