What Makes a Baptism Catholic?
Q1: What makes a Catholic baptism Catholic? I’m a lay Roman Catholic who just started working as a hospital chaplain, which means I may be called upon to administer emergency baptisms in some cases....
View ArticleDiscovering an Impediment Right Before the Wedding
Q: My sister has an upcoming marriage in our Catholic Church in the USA. She is divorced for about 8 years now from her civil marriage. She did not tell her priest she was civilly married because she...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Mass Invalid? (Part II)
Q: At Mass, one visiting priest, consistently and with full intention, refuses to elevate the Eucharist at the consecration, rather he offers it to the congregation. He says this is in line with the...
View ArticleWhy Can’t an Ex-Catholic Marry Validly Outside the Church?
Q: Over ten years ago, there were two weddings of ex-Catholic friends outside the Church that I decided to attend, because I considered their membership in other Christian denominations to be a formal...
View ArticleOur Priest Cancelled Our Wedding, So Who Else Can Validly Marry Us?
Q: My fiancé and I have been engaged for about a year, and long ago we had planned to marry on April 25. As you can probably imagine, our parish priest cancelled the wedding entirely, citing a...
View ArticleInvalid Baptisms and Unaccountable Clergy
Q1: We’re from Michigan, and the invalid baptism of Father Matthew Hood in the Detroit Archdiocese is all over the Catholic news … lots of people are now wondering if their children were invalidly...
View ArticleEcclesia Supplet: Making Invalid Sacraments Valid
Q: You mentioned in “Invalid Baptisms and Unaccountable Clergy” that when Father Hood [of the Archdiocese of Detroit, Michigan] discovered that his own baptism was invalid and he was not a priest,...
View ArticleDoes an Excommunicated Priest Administer Valid Sacraments? (Part II)
(Part I of this article was posted on April 28, 2022, and can be read here.) We have been discussing a scenario described to us by John, who wanted to know if his confirmation was administered...
View ArticleOverdoing the Anointing of the Sick
Q: I attended Sunday Mass while on vacation … the priest preached about the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick. Here are some of the statements he made. “We all need to receive this sacrament.”...
View ArticleConfession, and General Absolution (Repost)
This piece has been reposted repeatedly over the years during the Christmas season–because incredibly, the illegal abuse of General Absolution by some parish clergy is still happening! Thus it makes...
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