Questions actually put to the faith — by sceptics, by students, and by Catholics themselves. Each is stated at full strength before it is answered, and points back to the tract where the doctrine is treated in full.
Whether God can be known by reason, whether he has spoken, and what it means to hold something on faith rather than on evidence.
Where the doctrine of creation and the findings of the natural sciences actually meet, and where they are answering different questions.
Where Catholic teaching comes from, how it is transmitted, and what is happening when it appears to change.
The apparent reversals are real cases that need answering. The distinction the tradition draws is between a doctrine unfolding what it always contained and a doctrine being contradicted — and it is a distinction with teeth.
Read the answerIn 2018, the Catechism began calling the death penalty 'inadmissible.' Whether that's a legitimate development of doctrine or a genuine reversal is one of the sharpest live disputes in Catholic moral theology today.
Read the answerThe person of Christ, the historical evidence for him, and how one death two thousand years ago bears on anyone now.
Authority, infallibility, and the visible institution measured against the claims made for it.
What the sacraments do, why matter is involved at all, and the difference between a sign and a cause.
Predestination, merit, and the long argument about how divine causality and human liberty occupy the same act.
Conscience, intention, and hard cases — where the tradition draws its distinctions and why they are not evasions.
What prayer is for, how the interior life is ordered, and what separates Christian contemplation from practices that resemble it.
Death, judgement, and how eternal loss can be reconciled with an infinitely merciful God.
Von Balthasar's famous question split Catholic theology between those who see it as a legitimate hope and those who see it as a dangerous softening of a hard truth Scripture and tradition insist on.
Read the answerReports of tunnels of light and encounters with deceased relatives are often taken as vindicating an afterlife in general. Whether they vindicate the specifically Catholic account of death and judgment is a much narrower question.
Read the answer