The tragedy of the story is that humans used their intellectual and physical powers to stop babies from happening so much so that their bodies followed suit. When Julian conceives against the stark backdrop of a childless landscape, there is no doubt that there is a human child’s life at stake, and her companions risk everything to protect mother and baby.

The joining of a man and a woman in marriage invites us to take up our cross and follow him to Calvary. This cross does not only consist of learning to love one another in the face of unspoken expectations, rough edges, and a failure of communication; it involves the uncertainty and the risk of fertility.

While it is impossible to know with medical certainty the identity of the bones discovered in the first-century tomb, they were found next to a scratched inscription from the third century that proclaims, Petros Eni- Peter is here.

If Mary was the Mother of God, how could God not have preserved his own mother from the pain of sin?

While Catholic theologians did not deny the internal, invisible, spiritual bonds uniting the Church, they stressed that which was being denied: the governing and teaching authority of the pope and the bishops, participation in the sacraments, and the external profession of the same Christian faith taught by the Catholic Church.