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Hospitals today really encourage people to have living wills. Is it permissible for patients to choose to have water and food withheld in case of very severe illness? I think this is suicide.
Do you think that saints can help us out? Can you be sure that they are there and that sometimes they talk to you?
A non-Catholic friend asked me how the Scriptures at Mass are selected. Who started this and when was the present system adopted?
Vatican II’s 1963 “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” called for a wider selection of biblical texts to be used at Mass. The current Lectionary (book of those readings) was prepared by an international committee of experts and went into use in 1970.
In the Gospel of John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved ” is at the foot of the cross (19:26) and is entrusted with caring for the mother of Jesus (19:27). Who is this disciple and what makes him more loved than anyone else?
For centuries, most Christians have thought it was the Apostle John, but biblical scholars have more recently questioned this. The “Beloved Disciple, ” who appears only in the Gospel of John, is introduced in 13:23 with later references in 18:15–16; 19:26–27; 20:2–4, 8; and 21:7, 20, 23–24.
How could God take my precious son at age 43 and yet allow rotten people who have stopped believing in God to keep on living? My son was a great Catholic and spent eight years in Catholic schools.
When I became a Catholic at the age of 20, I loved the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Now, more than 40 years later, my behavior is morally acceptable, but I am tortured interiorly by inappropriate thoughts, lacking focus and concentration. While polite and kind outwardly, I get irked or offended by others’ behavior. I am impatient, judging inwardly in my mind.
Our Bible study group is reading the prophet Hosea. Someone asked, “Why did God choose Israel to be the chosen people? “
