Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 1:
There are currently 6,863 Questions & Answers about the Catholic Church and her teachings in the five books listed on this site.
Vol 1 : 1,588 questions and answers on Catholicism and Protestantism that arose over the 5 years to 1938 from a "Question and Answer" radio program from the Catholic Station 2SM on Sunday evening at 7-8pm.
Vol 2 : 1,422 questions and answers over 7 years since Vol 1 which reflect "our own experience of the needs of today with its denial of the supernatural, its driftage from religion, its adoption of a purely secular basis of life, and its widespread repudiation of those Christian standards of morality which, if not always observed in practice, have at least not hitherto been seriously challenged and denied." (Author's foreword)
Vol 3 : a further 1,354 questions and answers. The three volumes to date "contain but a classified selection of typical questions and answers chosen from a vast mass of material accumulated during twelve years of radio work and public lectures in which non-Catholics were encouraged to express their difficulties in accepting Catholicism."
Vol 4 : 1,650 questions and answers on Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Paganism and Communism from the radio information session over the 13 years from 1941 to 1954.
Vol 5 : 839 questions and answers from the years 1962 to 1968 prompted in great part by the decisions of the Second Vatican Council.
While the fundamentals of Catholic doctrine have not changed, there has been change in aspects of the Church's life e.g. the Index was abolished, we can eat meat on Friday and, more importantly, we had Vatican II.
Reading the justification for a rule or practice now abolished, one can still appreciate the wisdom of the rule even though for some other reason the authorities have now chosen to abandoned it. For example, how many people understand the danger to their spiritual life in reading "atheistic" literature or pornography? Protection was the point of the Index. How aware are we now of the "occasions of sin"?
Another interesting aspect of these questions is that they form a record of sorts of what was important to thinking men in decades gone by. For example, browse the questions on
and you get a vivid sense of the "hot issues" of the day. The consistency of the Church's teaching, the faithfulness to the Gospel message through all controversies is consoling. It is a help to faith in our troubled times. "This too will pass".
It is interesting to browse some of today's issues in the Search function:
Enjoy browsing.
"The hardest thing to find in the world today is an argument. Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these things are born of enthusiasms without the pain of labour. Thinking, on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work a man can do - that is perhaps why so few indulge in it."
- Mgsr Fulton Sheen in Preface to Vol 3 (1942)