True freedom is being free to love, serve, worship, and be the people God made us to be without the constraints of sin holding us back.
Reason and free will separate us from animals and are how we are made in the image and likeness of God.
Having faith requires us to put our trust in another. Faith is an essential part of being human.
There are many different ways of coming to know things. Employing all the ways available to us to have knowledge of truth helps to ensure that our view of reality is accurate and not distorted.
The Church is a community of disciples. All disciples are called to evangelize.
The Church teaches that salvation is possible for those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church.
Good things are those things that help lead human nature to its true purpose.
We can trace every social sin back to a failure to follow one of the Ten Commandments, for each one contains within it many moral principles of social life.
Temperance is the virtue that resists the inordinate attachment to goods that lead to greed.
Learning was revived in Western Europe and accelerated around 1100 when the first universities were founded.
Enlightenment thought, spearheaded by renowned thinkers and philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Voltaire, and Rousseau led to a perceived conflict between religion and science, faith and reason, which are in truth allies. This conflict eventually opened the door to modern relativism.
Today there are both many challenges facing the Church and many reasons for hope.
In the West, the civilizing influence of the growing monasteries formed villages around them, and many Catholic bishops emerged as the only real leaders in what was left of the former Empire.
