Not Called to Communion: Outline of Chapter 1

I’ve been looking at Joseph Ratzinger’s 1990 work “Called to Communion,” a work whose title, at least, has become a kind of rallying cry for a self-annointed group of supposedly (and formerly) “Reformed” believers who became Catholic. In this work, Ratzinger, a Cardinal and head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” at …

Not Called to Communion: “The Church”-1

I want to take a minute here and talk about my hopes to continue to look at “Called to Communion.” After Ratzinger outlines his rules for “the base memory of the church” as his standard to judge both what the text says and what is “historically and objectively accurate” – as opposed to “a patient …

Earliest churches in Rome (1)

The right way to understand history is to start from the beginning. What was it like to be a Christian in the earliest church in Rome? We have a marvellous picture of this earliest church, provided by the New Testament scholar Peter Lampe, author of the work “From Paul to Valentinus: Christians in Rome in …