Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”—Genesis 3:1. In Part 1 of Did God Really Say (Found on the Update section of my site this week) I told my own conversion story, explaining how God initially moved me from a progressive view of Biblical scholarship to a traditional Catholic view. This set the ground for my later conversions on both the moral life and even the liturgical life as a priest. I specifically credited a Hahn tape set on Providentissimus Deus [...]

Or how I became a "Catholic Fundamentalist." In 2024, I gave a talk at a women's conference at a traditional Catholic parish called My Two Conversions.  I explained how in high school, I was a pretty liberal Catholic who worked at The Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen in the afternoons.  Perhaps in the evening, I might be found at a downtown Denver coffee-shop writing letters against the death penalty for Amnesty International. But, at 16 years old, I had a big conversion and I came to believe that Christ was truly present in the Blessed Sacrament.  Then, another 16 years later (several years after ordination, in fact) I became a traditional [...]

One can always detect the preferred heresy of the age by what is removed from the Bible.  So, before we look at the USCCB’s Bible translations, let’s look at two examples of what heretics over the last 500 years have removed from their own versions of the Bible. 1) The Protestant rebels removed Maccabees because of Purgatory.   Maccabees is like the Braveheart of the Old Testament.  It's one of the most exciting books of the Bible, so no one should have removed it.  But the 16th century heretics like Martin Luther removed 1 and 2 Maccabees because it showed Purgatory and the necessity of sacrifice for the dead.  Here's [...]