Faith through history

Saint Augustine: The Christian Philosopher

Augustine was born at Thagaste in North Africa. He was one of the key figures in the transition from classical antiquity to the middle Ages. He lived nearly eighty years of the social transformation, political upheavals, and military disasters that are often referred to as the ‘decline of the Roman Empire.’ Augustine was a Manichaean […]

Neo-Platonism and the Reality

Fr Joseph Pallattil “Absolute has its centre everywhere but its boundary nowhere.” This is the famous maxim of Neo-Platonism. Neo- Platonism is a stream of philosophy rooted in platonic philosophy, but extending beyond it in many respects. Its objective was to use Plato’s thought as an intellectual basis for a rational and human life. Neo- […]

STOIC EXERCISES FOR INNER PEACE

Fr Joseph Pallattil A calm mind is a blessing in a chaotic world. Unfortunately a lot of people have chosen to achieve this by using and abusing pills and other substances which can lead to addiction. If you want to achieve inner peace in a healthy and non-medicated way stoicism has some valuable methods to […]

John Calvin (1509-64)

John Calvin continued the Reformation in Switzerland begun by Zwingli, now centred in Geneva, and is the real founder of the Reformed Tradition (Calvinism), and the one who made Protestantism a world power. He was born in 1509 at Noyon in France and was intended for an ecclesiastical career. He received benefices and tonsure at […]

Menno Simons

Alongside the mainline Protestant movements in Europe, there emerged several groups which wanted even more radical reform of the Church which went far beyond what was envisaged by the mainline Protestant Churches. These movements are generally called “Radical Reformation,” “Left-Wing of the Reformation” “Non-Conformists” etc. It developed into three major groups: (1) radical revolutionaries, fanatics […]

Huldrych Zwingli (1485-1531)

Huldrych Zwingli (also Huldreich or Ulrich) was a Swiss Reformer and Humanist, who laid the foundation for the Reformer Tradition of Protestantism. Together with Luther, he was one of the two leading protagonists of the early Protestant movement which had independent roots although the insights often paralleled. He denied all dependence on Luther and said: […]

Pope Leo X (1513-1521)

Pope Leo X was at the helm of affairs in the Church at the outbreak of the Reformation and in some sense became the saviour of the Reformation by neglecting for two years to proceed vigorously against Luther because of his entanglement in the European politics of the time. In his electoral oath Leo had […]

The Indulgence Controversy

Without the Indulgence Controverosy, there could perhaps be no Reformation as we know it today. An indulgence is remission of the temporal punishment of sins, granted by the Church and effective before God. Indulgences had become an integral part of the penitential practices of the Church in the Middle Ages but the practice of indulgences […]

Pope: ‘Synodality is inseparable from ecumenism’

Vatican, Catholic leaders from Europe discuss sexual abuse in the Church