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Joe Heschmeyer tackles the complex legacy of Martin Luther. Was he truly evil, as some Catholics were taught? Or is the truth more nuanced? Joe delves into Luther&#8217;s writings, revealing a man passionate about Christ but also struggling with pride and arrogance.
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Transcript:
My parents were raised prior to Vatican II, and they were told in school that Martin Luther was one of the most evil human beings who ever walked the earth.
The good old days.
And I know that the pope is a big fan of Mark Luther, and the Vatican has issued stamps for Martin Luther. I mean, I hate to use the cliché about the truth of somewhere in the middle, but is all this appropriate? I mean, for someone who destroyed the unity of Christianity?
Ah, great question. Thank you.
That&#8217;s a very good question. I would say I do think it is an exaggeration to call him one of the most evil men to ever exist. I think it&#8217;s fair to say both, that he seemed to have a clear interest in following Christ and the teachings of Christ, and a clear problem with pride, with arrogance. I don&#8217;t even think one needs to be Catholic to recognize that. I think a Protestant reading the writings of Martin Luther is confronted both with a man who seems like he&#8217;s trying to follow Jesus, and a man who is very prickly about anyone disagreeing with him, and who says some very nasty things about those with whom he disagrees on basically anything, and is often quite uncharitable.
And I would even suggest that as he goes on, by all evidence, he gets worse and worse. He begins pretty supportive of the German peasants who are feeling oppressed. And then when they revolt, citing Luther as an authority, he argues that they should all be killed. I mean, he advocates everyone to kill them openly or secretly. He originally had a pretty tolerant view of the Jews, suggesting that the reason they hadn&#8217;t converted to Christianity is because of the scandals in the Catholic Church. When they don&#8217;t convert to Lutheranism, he suggests that their rabbis should be killed, their synagogues burnt down, and the Talmud destroyed. He basically wants to outlaw Judaism entirely, and also refuse them safe passage on the highway and everything else. So when you look at the career of Luther, his kind of theological trajectory, we don&#8217;t find evidence of someone growing in holiness. We find someone who seems to have a genuine and passionate desire to serve God, and then you can kind of see it get corrupted over time as he becomes more kind of embittered and disillusioned maybe with Christianity in general and the church in particular. I don&#8217;t know. I mean, different people are going to read Luther differently. He&#8217;s a little enigmatic at times, but that&#8217;s my own two cents in terms of how I read him.
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Was Martin Luther the Most Evil Man?

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The idea that Scripture is the sole rule of faith is central to the thinking of man Protestants, who see Tradition as a watering down of scriptural purity. But Catholics have good reason to reject this view. Author Casey J. Chalk explains.

Why Catholics Reject Sola Scriptura

In a recent <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/fight-the-anti-advent">article</a>, I discussed the penitential character of Advent and noted the difficulty of maintaining this while the world seems determined to make the season an anticipatory celebration of Christmas. A similar problem arises in the context of the beginning of Lent—and goes back much farther, historically.
<h2>Fat Tuesday Versus Lent</h2>
Lent is the Church’s major penitential season. The degree of rigor has varied over the centuries, but in the 1917 Code of Canon Law (CIC), every day of Lent (except Sundays) was a fast day, when we could eat only one full meal and two light meals. (On most of these days, eating meat was permitted.) Earlier in the history of the Church, the Faithful would abstain from not only meat during Lent, but also even eggs and butter.
In both the 1917 Code and the current 1982 Code, abstinence from meat is required on Fridays throughout the year (except for holy days of obligation in 1917, and solemnities in 1982). The possibility of waiving this was given to bishops’ conferences in 1966. Since then, many have indeed waived it, including the conference of the USA. (Interestingly, perpetual Friday abstinence was brought back in England and Wales in 2011.) In the current Code there, are only two fast days in the year: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Keeping in mind the older rules, Lent was historically a very serious period of penance, and the custom arose of having a celebration immediately before it started on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-ash-wednesday-unbiblical">Ash Wednesday</a>. This day, Tuesday, has variously been called Shrove Tuesday, from the old English word for Confession (shrift, with the verb shrive), or Fat Tuesday (in French, Mardi Gras). The celebration could extend to a period of time before the Tuesday, with a whole period of Carnival—literally, a “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/sanctify-your-drinking-in-pre-lent">farewell to meat</a>.” In the context of the Medieval discipline, these were the last days, until Easter, during which meat and oil could be consumed.
In some places, the fond farewell to meat could become a fond farewell to debauchery, satirized by the Dutch artist Bruegel’s 1559 painting “The Battle of Carnival and Lent.” The misbehavior of the Carnival in Venice was also notorious, giving us the tradition of carnival masks, which hid the identities of revelers and protected them, they hoped, from repercussions.

<h2>Fat Tuesday as a Catholic Tradition</h2>
These are venerable traditions of Catholic culture, certainly, but not ones we should be maintaining or reviving. In any case, things have moved on. Carnivals no longer conclude with a period of penance: The world wants to party, but not to clean up the mess afterward.
At the same time, it is not quite correct to say that the modern world has given up on penitential practices. On the contrary, as Fulton Sheen noted, often the world picks up what the Church discards. He gave the example of the decline of devotion to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/do-catholics-pray-vain-repetitions">the rosary</a> just when hippies and New Agers adopted the prayer beads of other religious traditions. Equally, at the very time when the Church’s penitential practices were being whittled down to nothing, on the basis that they were incompatible with modern life, the developed world was swept by dieting fads, and the ideal body, exposed to public view by new fashions, demanded iron self-discipline to maintain. A different kind of self-discipline is required to avoid feeling a bit of failure for not living up to these spartan standards.
Fasting and abstaining, in the past, were practices that pretty well everyone could maintain—the sick and certain others were always exempted. These practices united Catholics: something that everyone could complain about equally. The new standards of health and beauty, by contrast, are elitist by design: they are ways that the elite can remind us of their status.
There is nothing wrong with reminding ourselves of the imminent start of Lent with a bit of fun and special foods. As noted, the day before Ash Wednesday is called “Shrove Tuesday,” connecting it with the commendable practice of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-chooses-to-uses-human-intermediaries">going to confession</a> before the start of Lent. Preparation for Lent, itself a period of preparation for Easter, may sound unnecessary, but preparation for a period of penance is indeed a good idea. In the calendar of the pre-Vatican II 1962 Missal, and in the Calendar of the Ordinariates for Anglican converts, Lent is preceded by three Sundays of the season of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-septuagesima">Septuagesima</a>, “pre-Lent,” when fasting is not required but the violet of penance is adopted as the liturgical color. This puts Fat Tuesday into context as the culmination of a period of preparation for Lent, when in past centuries stocks of fats would be used up.
In the English-speaking world, Shrove Tuesday has long been marked in a culinary way by pancakes, which must be the most modest kind of party food imaginable. In my childhood in the U.K., we used to eat thin English pancakes rolled up with lemon juice and a sprinkling of sugar; these would appear even in non-Catholic schools on “Pancake Day.” Sliced bananas, ice cream, and hot chocolate sauce have, as they say on social media, now “entered the chat,” but if you are making them at home, a huge amount of the fun is tossing them, to cook them properly on both sides. You have to not worry too much about the ones that get away—they are very cheap to make—and devote yourself seriously to practicing this noble art, remembering that in this, as in so much of what makes Catholic culture fun, you are entering into the spirit of the liturgical year.
<h2>Why We Party . . . and Why We Fast</h2>
A party that goes on all year round ceases to be a party and ceases to be fun. A celebration is by definition something that rises up above the level of the ordinary. The lower the troughs, the higher the peaks can rise in comparison. The penances of Lent are essential to the joy of Easter, and the mortifications of Lent can themselves be consoled by the way one marks Fat Tuesday. Human beings are not machines, working best at an even temperature with a perfectly steady intake of calories. We are organisms designed for feast and famine, for joy and woe. As William Blake <a href="https://www.poetryverse.com/william-blake-poems/auguries-innocence">expressed</a> it,
Joy &amp; Woe are woven fine, 
A Clothing for the Soul divine: 
Under every grief &amp; pine, 
Runs a joy with silken twine.

Where Fat Tuesday Fits In

<div>Is practicing Reiki or other healing energy practices a sin?</div><div>For various reasons, as we noted in this <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-dangers-of-reiki">Catholic Answers Magazine article</a>, Reiki is bad news. Stay away from it, and encourage others to do the same. Some may engage in Reiki unwittingly. That may mitigate their culpability early on, but it won’t insulate them from potentially serious spiritual harm.
</div>

Stay Away from Reiki

In September I had the privilege of attending the 2024 Catholic Answers Conference where I heard talks by many of my favorite apologists like Joe Heschmeyer, Trent Horn, and Cy Kellett. A recurring theme across their talks was how to do proper apologetics. Specifically, they emphasized that good apologetics centers more on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/winning-the-person-not-the-argument">conversations than arguments</a>. This is because the Catholic faith is not just one of many philosophies that can be proven by debate, but the most transformative and fundamental truth we can encounter.
It is tempting, especially online, to reduce the faith to a series of talking points and proofs. Since it is now possible to speak to hundreds of new people a day about the faith, it becomes easy to use the same spiel about why this or that person should become Catholic. The apologist makes a checklist in his mind about topics to cover: baptism, the Eucharist, apostolic succession, sola scriptura, and the like. He checks this box and that box, and expects the other person to convert upon hearing the logical arguments just provided. 
But the truth is that conversion begins with the heart, not the mind. Only someone that has <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/answer-endless-objections-with-this-one-weird-trick">opened his heart to God</a> will allow himself to freely hear the truth about the faith. By treating the faith as the subject of a mere intellectual debate—and not the true transformative belief that it is—the apologist forgets the need for the assistance of grace and the Holy Spirit in apologetics. 

Not only is this type of apologetics ultimately ineffective, but it also leads to serious repercussions for the apologist. Each new non-Catholic he encounters is reduced to a subject to receive a checklist of arguments. The apologist no longer perceives him as a fellow sinner in need of God’s grace but as an adversary to intellectually conquer. Scripture is no longer the living, inspired word of God but simply a collection of prooftexts to wield against non-Catholics. The Church is no longer the bride of Christ but is simply an institution of great historical proof and significance.
Throughout my time in online apologetics, I have had to take multiple breaks to re-center myself after falling into these errors. I knew I had crossed a line once I noticed that I couldn’t interact with non-Catholics without being overcome by thoughts of how to prove the truth of the Catholic faith to them. Instead of allowing God’s grace and the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts, I felt the burden of proving everything to everyone. 
So what do we do if we find ourselves inside this same trap? We must look back to the greatest Catholic apologist: Jesus Christ. Jesus debated with others—often in Socratic fashion by asking a series of questions to his opponents. This approach served to reveal the wisdom of Christ and the truth behind his ministry, leading to the conversion of many sinners. Certainly, then, debate has its place in apologetics and conversion.
However, Christ’s ministry did not consist solely of debate. Many of his most healing and transformative interactions came not as a result of debate but of mercy, compassion, and love. This should always be at the heart of apologetics: not simply giving the “right answer” to religious questions, but giving hope and mercy in a world filled with hopelessness and condemnation. Only then can true, long-lasting conversions take place.

Don’t Reduce Faith to Arguments

Chapter 7 of the Second Book of Samuel recounts a conversation between King David and the prophet Nathan. David was settled comfortably “in a house of cedar” (v. 2) in Jerusalem, the city he conquered. Israel’s situation had been largely stabilized, the threats of its enemies contained.
But David is bothered: while he dwells in an elegant palace, “the ark of God remains in a tent.”
The tent contained the Ark of the Covenant, the tablets of Sinai. It’s hard to explain their significance to Israel. In one sense, they were Israel’s constitution. But the Ark of the Covenant was no traveling National Archives. The Sinai Covenant was more than a document. Written with the finger of God, these tablets were the basis of who Israel was—God’s people—and who Yahweh was to them.
Given their significance, David feels a disproportion between where he and they dwell. He proposes—and builds—a temple for them.
But God is never outdone by human effort (of whose inspiration he initiates through grace). Although Nathan tells David to do what the king has in mind (v. 3), he subsequently adds how God intends to match and exceed David. David might build the Lord a temple for a house, but God will make the “house of David” last forever through a Messiah from that lineage (vv. 11-16).
Man wants to build a physical house. God wants to make man himself a home in which to dwell. Man’s efforts are always so clumsy that Scripture sums them up as “he did not know what he was saying” (Luke 9:33) when Peter’s response to Jesus’ transfiguration (to which we are also called at the Last Judgment) was to propose building Sukkot tents. Or to giggle from inside a tent when the Divine Visitation offers a son in one’s old age (Gen. 18:9-15).
God would, by prevenient grace, create a human ark of the covenant, the Blessed Virgin Mary, to carry Jesus, the promised fulfillment of the Davidic house.
But if Jesus “fully reveals man to himself” (as both Vatican II and Pope St. John Paul II repeatedly insisted), God’s homebuilding did not end with Jesus as the eternal King. God aspires to do similar construction work among men through his Habitat for Divinity program.
In his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus makes clear that the physical locus of worship is less important than that man worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). It’s not that a sacred place is unimportant, but that its locus has changed.
Elsewhere, St. Paul makes that clear when he asks, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is within you?” (1 Cor 6:19). That doesn’t mean the Church is unimportant: a church is “the house of God” because he is really present there, in the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the tabernacle.
But the house in which God really desires to dwell, the tabernacle in which he prefers to be really present, is the human heart, the heart that worships him “in spirit and in truth.” That is why that human temple is sacramentally sanctified: blessed and consecrated in baptism and confirmation and fully rendered a tabernacle by the Eucharist. It is the dignity of that temple that spurs St. Paul to deplore its sacrilege.
In the Book of Revelation (ch. 21) the heavenly Jerusalem has no temple. The mediating structure of temple—of Church and sacrament—is no longer necessary in the Beatific Vision (see <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html">Lumen Gentium</a> 48), for “we shall see him as he is” and “be like him” (1 John 3:2). Revelation describes the heavenly Jerusalem as “God’s dwelling place . . . now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (21:3). What goes around comes around. David’s temple containing the Ark of the Covenant is replaced by God’s own temple, in which Jesus himself is the covenant by which man can be God’s people and he their God.
The practical consequence: building ourselves, through cooperation with God’s grace, into ever more fitting temples in which the spirit of God can dwell. The warning that we “work out our salvation in fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) should make us aware that we can fail at the task—not because God does not enable us to succeed, but because we can refuse his grace. “If God does not build the house, in vain do the builders labor” (Ps. 129:1) does not mean there’s a shortage of people working on futile human construction projects. History is littered with them, building the “new man” without God. Joining our work with his grace, however, enables us to stand up houses—temples—on rock instead of sand (Matt. 7:24-27).

Where Does God Want to Live?

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<div>We are having our marriage blessed in the Church. What all is involved? </div><div>Presuming that neither of you had a previous marriage, the validation of your marriage is a pretty straightforward process. You both need to provide your records of baptism, First Communion, and confirmation. Then you would need witnesses who can testify that neither of you had any previous marriages with surviving spouses. You would also need to provide a copy of your civil marriage. Once the priest is satisfied that you intend to enter into the Catholic understanding of marriage, you would simply exchange your vows in a brief ceremony.
</div>

How Do We Get Our Marriage Blessed?

Gary Zimak gives advice on how to calm the everyday fears of young children by praying and sharing the words of Jesus with them every day.
Transcript:
Host: Let&#8217;s go to Carissa in St. Paul, Minnesota. Carissa, you are on with Gary Zimak, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: Hi, I actually wanted to ask Gary what his thoughts were with children with worry and how to try to combat that. My five-year-old seems to have kind of the similar adult thoughts that you&#8217;re having; like she consistently thinks that mom&#8217;s gonna die when she leaves. It&#8217;s very morbid thoughts and I&#8211;and no matter what I do in trying to talk to her about Jesus, and Jesus will take care of me whether it&#8217;s here or in Heaven, she&#8217;s just not taking that information in, I guess. So just what your thoughts are on trying to explain that to her?
Gary: I can very much relate to that because I had those same thoughts about my parents dying when I was young and they were healthy. But, you know, for some reason I thought they were going to die and I struggled with that. What I would say&#8211;and having my own children who have had these same issues&#8211;I think the one thing to remember is to try to be patient and just keep reassuring them. &#8220;Jesus loves you. Your Heavenly Father loves you.&#8221; You know, &#8220;And He will only wants what&#8217;s best for you.&#8221; And to try to just maybe reiterate some of the words of Jesus about &#8220;Do not be anxious about tomorrow.&#8221;
And just over time, that, you know, the Lord&#8217;s word will bear fruit, but it&#8217;s&#8211;it really is a process, it&#8217;s a constant process. And even as an adult I still, every day, have to remind myself of these facts. But it&#8217;s a challenge, but something you want to keep continually reminding your child of&#8211;and also let your child know that YOU trust the Lord, and that you&#8217;re praying, and if they&#8217;re worried, saying, &#8220;Let&#8217;s pray together.&#8221; Sometimes I&#8217;ll do that with my kids, &#8220;Let&#8217;s say a quick prayer.&#8221; And that seems to work. Hope that helps.
Caller:That&#8217;s&#8211;yeah, that&#8217;s great, thank you.
Gary: Sure.
Host: Thank you, Carissa.

How Do I Combat Worry in Small Children?

<div>My father received absolution when he was on life support. Now, he is recovering. Are his sins forgiven?</div><div>If your father&#8217;s absolution was imparted as part of the celebration of the sacrament of confession, then his sins were forgiven and he has no need to do anything else.
The only time serious sins can be forgiven without confession is when the individual is truly unable to speak his confession. Either because he is unconscious or simply unable to speak.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states (CCC)that the anointing of the sick confers &#8220;the forgiveness of sins, if the sick person was not able to obtain it through the sacrament of Penance&#8221; (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c2a5.htm#brief">CCC 1532</a>).
I would note that the forgiveness of sins is not mentioned as &#8220;conditional.&#8221; It simply states that if the individual is unable to confess then the sacrament confers the forgiveness of sins.
Thus, if your father was unable to confess his sins, then his sins were truly forgiven via the sacrament of anointing. I would not think he has need to go to confession for any sins prior to the anointing, unless of course he would find it spiritually beneficial (see Code of Canon Law, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann959-997_en.html">canon 963</a>).
If, however, your father was able to confess but the priest simply gave him general absolution rather than hearing his confession, then he would need to go to confession.
</div>

Are My Father’s Sins Forgiven?

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Why 'Just read your Bible' doesn't work in real life.

What Did Pope Francis Change About Communion for Divorced Catholics?

Jimmy Akin clarifies the situation surrounding Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and the Vatican. Jimmy highlights Viganò&#8217;s public statements rejecting the authority of Pope Francis and accusing him of heresy and schism, actions that clearly constitute schism and trigger automatic excommunication.
Transcript:
This one comes from Ryan. I recently saw a quote showing Archbishop Viganò saying good things about the pope, but I don&#8217;t understand what did he do that irked the Vatican to the point of excommunicating him after finding him guilty of schism, excuse me, of a schism charge. Did he let his attachment to the Latin mass and his displeasure at the pope&#8217;s 2021 document on that get the better of him, or is it possible this situation is being blown out of proportion?
So the first thing I&#8217;d say is the Vatican did not excommunicate Archbishop Viganò. It ruled that he had excommunicated himself because if you commit schism, that triggers automatic excommunication. So he excommunicated himself. That&#8217;s what they ruled. I prefer not to speculate on what leads people to do things unless they tell us this is what led me to do this. And as far as I&#8217;ve seen, although he has an appreciation for the traditional Latin mass, I haven&#8217;t seen anywhere that he&#8217;s said that the restrictions that Pope Francis put on the traditional Latin mass were what led him away from the church.
And I&#8217;ve looked at his writings, and this has not been blown out of proportion. Here&#8217;s what Archbishop Viganò has said. One thing he said is, &#8220;As I stated in my communique of June 20th, I do not recognize the authority of the tribunal that claims to judge me.&#8221; That&#8217;s the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Or nor its prefect. Okay, so that&#8217;s Cardinal Fernandez. Nor of the one who appointed him. So that&#8217;s Pope Francis. So he&#8217;s just said, &#8220;I don&#8217;t recognize the authority of Pope Francis.&#8221; Now the definition of schism is a refusal of submission to the Roman pontiff. And if you say you don&#8217;t recognize his authority, you&#8217;re in schism. This is open and shut.
He went on to say, now he said it, he committed a schismatic act in that first statement I read sort of implicitly. But later on in the same document, he says, &#8220;Before my brothers in the episcopate and the entire ecclesial body, I accuse Jorge, Murillo, Pragolio of heresy and schism. And I ask that he be judged as a heretic and schismatic and removed from the throne, which he is unworthily occupied for over 11 years.&#8221; So he thinks that the Pope is a schismatic and a heretic beyond. And so, okay, it&#8217;s clear he is refusing submission to the Roman pontiff. And therefore it is very clear that Archbishop Viganò is in schism and triggered an automatic excommunication and therefore excommunicated himself.
Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this Catholic answer, be sure to like, subscribe, and check out our live streams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific. Or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or our Catholic Answers app.

Did the Vatican Excommunicate Archbishop Viganò?

<div>If the words of institution are necessary for consecration, can a mute priest properly consecrate the host?</div><div>It’s important to note that the Church encourages the use of sign language at Mass to serve the spiritual needs of the deaf community. But as to whether the form for consecrating the Eucharist (“This is my body . . . This is my blood”) must be spoken or not, the Church has no official position. We’ll have to wait and see if the Church ever makes a decision as to whether a non-spoken language is sufficient for the form of consecration.
</div>

Can a Mute Priest Consecrate the Host?

Presented with the imperative to “do something” for Lent, a familiar response is to “give something up.” In itself, this is a healthy enough instinct. Depending on your lifestyle, giving up alcohol, or even chocolate, can be a reminder of the nature of the season and a noticeable sacrifice. Alternatively, people think of giving up something bad, trying to overcome a habitual sin. This is laudable, but penance is the sacrifice of something good, not something bad. Catholics should be able to go beyond both kinds of “giving up.”
The imperatives of Lent in particular, and of the Christian life in general, are the eminent good works of prayer, penance, and almsgiving. These really are good works—works that earn us merit. These works will cancel out temporal punishment we would otherwise suffer in purgatory, and add to our glory in heaven, and we can offer them for the good of the holy souls in purgatory and for the conversion of sinners. Good works in this sense are possible only if we are in a state of grace (sanctifying grace), and they will themselves be done in and through God’s assisting grace (actual grace). When we do them, we may say with St. Paul, it is not we who do them, but God who does them through us (Phil. 2:13). They are in fact a gift of God to us—but when God gives us something, we really do possess it.
Accordingly, if we want to do something more than give up chocolate or habitual sins, the first thing we should think about is prayer. Three general principles should be borne in mind.
The first is the definition of prayer: of raising one’s mind and heart to God. This means that prayer is an action of the will, not of the intellect, the imagination, or anything else. If we are trying to pray, we are succeeding, because in trying, we will to raise our minds and hearts to God, and that is raising them to God. We can certainly use our other faculties in prayer, but they are secondary.
Connected with this is the fact that our prayers are not more successful or worthy if they are rewarded with spiritual consolations. If we feel comforted, or have a religious experience, or if our prayers have a tangible effect in ourselves or in the outside world, we should accept these things with gratitude, but prayers that are not accompanied by anything like that may be just as genuine and may be even more meritorious. God wants us to love him for himself, not for his consolations, so he won’t always give them to us.
The second principle is that the prayer of the Church is the most perfect prayer, because it is offered by Christ, the head of the Church. We unite ourselves with that perfect prayer when we take part in the “public prayer of the Church,” which is the liturgy, including the Office (the Liturgy of the Hours), and the rosary. This public prayer is continually raised to God by the whole Church, and it has a special character not possessed by private prayer.
The Church’s public prayer is perfect intrinsically—in terms of its inner nature. It is often imperfect in terms of our participation in it, and that of course goes for priests as well as laypeople. We should make whatever effort we can to make the extrinsic aspects of the Church’s prayer as perfect as possible.
The third general principle is the old adage, “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” If a particular form of prayer is difficult for you, try something else, or try participating in it in a different way.
The life of prayer can be stimulated and enriched by spiritual reading. There is a vast literature of Catholic spiritual writings, from the great spiritual masters of long ago like St. <a href="https://www.sophiainstitute.com/products/item/the-devil-in-the-castle">Teresa of Avila</a> to apologetic writers of more recent times, like <a href="https://www.sophiainstitute.com/products/item/the-greatest-commandment">Frank Sheed</a>, and there are <a href="https://www.sophiainstitute.com/products/item/treasury-of-catholic-meditations">collections</a> made from a range of writers. And then, of course, there is Sacred Scripture.
As for prayer itself, the best prayer of all is the Mass, and more frequent attendance at Mass is always to be recommended. There are also other forms of liturgical participation that may not have occurred to you, however, such as saying parts of the Office. In recent years, there has been a particular revival in interest in the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a devotion that goes back to the Middle Ages, which is well suited to the use of laypeople because it is short and easy to navigate, and it contains psalms and prayers of great beauty. There are various reprints currently available; it can be said in Latin or in translation; you can say it in whole or in part.
Moving on to penance, this is an indispensable part of the Christian life. It is simply a mistake to imagine that one can have a spiritually fruitful life without voluntarily sacrificing some material comforts and satisfactions out of a love of God. The love of God demands such sacrifices and is stimulated by them. Some kind of fasting and abstinence should be part of your life, and it is remarkable to see growing interest in how this works at a physical level. Serious penance of this kind is not impossible—all Catholics of the past did it—but for modern people in the West, some physical <a href="https://issuu.com/latinmasssociety/docs/moa_spring_2021_final/s/11734502">preparation</a> may be called for.
The same is true of another traditional mainstay of Catholic penitential practice, which is having a revival today: walking pilgrimages. I have myself walked from Ely to Walsingham (about 55 miles), and from Paris to Chartres (about 60 miles), in my forties rather than in my twenties, and I can attest that a sensible amount of preparation has the effect of spreading the pilgrim spirit over several months: you need to do a lot of walking in advance. This can and should be done not to see the sights, to get fit, to make friends, or with some vague hope of “finding oneself,” but in a spirit of prayer and penance, and with particular prayer intentions in mind. Seek first the kingdom, and many of the other things will be given to you as extras.
Finally, almsgiving should not be neglected. It is easy today to donate money to worthy causes, but the very easiness of clicking on a donate button online separates us from human contact with the person one is helping. This may be inevitable, but the contact itself is a valuable part of almsgiving, for the giver, which can too easily disappear completely.
This is more difficult than before because of the professionalization of charitable work and the takeover of many aspects of it by the state. It is not impossible, however, and there are still many opportunities for volunteering, particularly in those areas of human needs in which the modern state is less interested: the cultural, educational, and above all spiritual needs of our fellow creatures.
St. Teresa of Calcutta remarked: “The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality.” It is this poverty which Catholics have a special gift to alleviate.

Go Beyond Giving Something Up for Lent

You cannot be passionate about evangelization… and ignore Christian unity!

This Isn't Just About the Latin Mass...

On the first Sunday of Advent, in place of green, priests celebrating the Mass don vestments of violet, the color of penance, and the Gloria is not said. In this respect, Advent resembles Lent: just as we do penance as we await the liturgical celebration of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, so we do as we await his birth.
Nevertheless, Advent is a carefully calibrated penitential season. Whereas there is no gloria, there is an Alleluia.
Advent has not, historically, usually been regarded as requiring the same degree of penance as Lent. A penitential season leading up to Christmas enters the Church’s historical record in France in the year 480, with fasting three days a week from St. Martin’s Day (November 11), but as it spread to other countries, it became shorter and less severe.
All the same, it is a penitential season, and if Christmas has overtaken Easter as the primary season of gluttony, we should prepare spiritually for it with all the greater care.
It is characteristic of the Catholic spirit to make the year a patchwork of joy and penance. Every Sunday is a day of celebration; every Friday should include a taste of sorrow. The greatest feasts are or have historically been preceded by days or seasons of penitential preparation and followed by a week or longer of celebration. It makes life more interesting; it gives us something to look forward to; it gives us opportunities for celebrations we would not otherwise have. It should also stimulate us to penitential practices, which are certainly good for our health but are not the life sentence of modern calorie-counting puritanism. Gaining control of our eating and drinking—mortifying our appetites, in the traditional terminology—is good in itself, and by giving up the good things of food and drink, we offer something worthwhile to God.
Penance before and an ongoing celebration after a great feast also afford us an opportunity for an extended, deeper consideration of the mystery. In the liturgy, we hear about the events leading up to Christmas, and prophecies of it from the Old Testament. After Christmas, there is a series of episodes from the scriptures that are marked liturgically, which deepen our appreciation of the Christmas mystery. This is particularly valuable when they take us in surprising directions, as do the Holy Innocents on December 28, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-could-the-holy-innocents-be-martyrs">martyred</a> out of hatred for Christ, and St. Stephen the Protomartyr on the 26th. God’s coming as a human baby is not welcomed by everyone: it is a divisive event.
We are faced with a practical problem in the modern world, however. Christianity has left its mark on the secular calendar, but the secular world uses our seasons and feasts in a peculiar way. Lent seems to have been designated a chocolate-eating season. Even harder to ignore is the way Advent, which seems to begin now with Thanksgiving’s accidental offspring, Black Friday (even, I am ashamed to say, in the U.K.), has become an extended celebration of consumerism and self-indulgence.
Buying presents in Advent makes sense, since that is part of the preparation for Christmas. What is strange is the tendency for Christmas celebrations to take place in advance of Christmas, from office parties to fun fairs and children’s theatrical offerings. For many people, Christmas Day is at once the high point and also the end of Christmas. We may be able to extend the party spirit until the New Year, the Octave Day of Christmas, which is marked by its own major feast (variously called the Circumcision; the Holy Name of Jesus; and the feast of Mary, Mother of God). But the historic Twelve Days of Christmas takes us up to the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/epiphany-and-the-magic-road-trip">Epiphany</a>, a renewed celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation. Then again, the season of Christmas, during which we continue to sing the beautiful Marian anthem Alma Redemptoris Mater (as we should have been singing it through Advent as well), traditionally extends even further, to a final major liturgical visit to the young Holy Family: Candlemas, the feast of the Purification, on February 2. Yes, February.
In the meantime, the secular world has plunged itself into its own penitential season: “Dry January,” the season of new gym memberships and New Year’s resolutions. The Northern Hemisphere’s New Year is a terrible time to take up running before breakfast, of course, or anything else improving and arduous, and it is hardly surprising that such resolutions usually come to nothing. (Why not try such things <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/go-beyond-giving-something-up-for-lent">for Lent</a>, in the early spring, with added supernatural motivation, and see if you can keep it going afterward?)
On the one hand, the commercial imperative links buying things with celebration, and on the other hand, having done this for well over a month, by the time Christmas Day finally comes round, people need to get back to normal, and indeed to lose some of the weight they gained from anticipatory mince pies and mulled wine in December. We can go back to partying with Mardi Gras, now extended from the original Shrove (or Fat) Tuesday to practically the whole of Lent, before we all need to get thin for the beach, and so the joyless penance of dieting can be begin again at Easter.
I don’t think this has come about due to an anti-Christian conspiracy, but if it had been, it would have been a clever one: a complete inversion of the Church’s liturgical seasons.
When the world wants us to feast when we should be fasting, and fast when we should be feasting, we are at least reminded that we are not of this world. “Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy” (John 6:20).
In the practical circumstances of family life, it is difficult to embrace such a counter-cultural stance without a supportive and close-knit community, which most of us do not have. It is important, all the same, if we are to maintain Christmas as a joyful time, and not an anti-climax, at least to keep something back during Advent, in order to mark the transition from waiting and anticipating to actually celebrating. The domestic crib (nativity) scene is useful in this regard, with the empty manger waiting for the baby Jesus until Christmas, and the shepherds and wise men arriving in stages thereafter. This is also the message of the liturgical year: our waiting is turned to joy, and this message of joy is spread gradually to a wider and wider circle.
At the Purification, we are told of the prophetess Anna: “Now she, at the same hour, coming in, confessed to the Lord; and spoke of him to all that looked for the redemption of Israel” (Luke 2:38). The message of Christmas is one of crescendo, which will reach its fulfilment only when he returns in glory.

Fight the Anti-Advent

As a Catholic woman, I have been bombarded with discussions about modesty my entire life, even more so in the past few years as many young adults have returned to tradition. And while I&#8217;m pleased to see so many young women trying to dress more modestly, I’m concerned that their understanding of modesty is totally backwards.
Of course, you have the group of women online who truly believe they’re dressing modestly and proceed to flaunt their bodies on camera in crop tops, low-cut dresses, and even sheer clothing. On the other hand, you have young women posting outfits that appear to belong to a twentieth-century FLDS woman. These women go to gyms wearing tea-length athletic skirts, long-sleeved shirts, and sometimes even head coverings. Even though this preferred dressing style may feel like a genuine conviction of the heart, it still reads as attention-seeking behavior.
Let’s unpack what modesty really is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
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Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love. It encourages patience and moderation in loving relationships; it requires that the conditions for the definitive giving and commitment of man and woman to one another be fulfilled. Modesty is decency. It inspires one&#8217;s choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet. (<a href="https://www.catholiccrossreference.online/catechism/#!/search/2522" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CCC 2522</a>)
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A word I hold onto there is discreet.
St. Pope John Paul II gives us another key insight into modesty in the Theology of the Body:
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“The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine” (TOB 19:4).
</blockquote>
The body is not some embarrassing obstacle to holiness. Quite the contrary. The body reveals the person. So, modesty cannot be rooted in the idea that the body is bad and better off hidden entirely. This mentality would align more with the heretical Gnostic suspicion of the body, in which matter is treated like a problem, rather than the Catholic understanding of the body, which sees the body as inherently good.
Despite what half-naked feminists often claim, Catholic modesty is not extreme, theatrical, fearful, or frumpy for the sake of looking holy. It should be discreet. Modesty is not supposed to make the body disappear; rather, it’s meant to place the body in its proper context. The human body is good since God created it.
So, when Christian modesty starts sounding like, “The more of my body I hide, the holier I am”—something has gone wrong.
This is where the “ultra-modesty” trend starts to concern me, because for all the fabric involved, it often makes the body the main focal point, and thus is not truly modest at all. It&#8217;s still conveying, “Look at my body”—only now the message is, “Look how much of my body I’m hiding.” One woman gets attention by wearing next to nothing, while another gets attention by dressing like she is trying to win a pioneer modesty contest. The aesthetics are opposite, but the outcomes are often the same: more attention. In both cases, the body becomes the center of the conversation.
And that is precisely the problem. As stated earlier from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, true modesty is not supposed to turn your outfit into a spectacle. It is not supposed to make people stare because a) you look sexually provocative, or b), you stick out like a sore thumb. Again, modesty should be discreet and should quiet the obsession with the body, not create a new one.
The horseshoe theory applies here. The opposite fashion choices both end up being rooted in obsession with the body. Both confuse the body to be either too insignificant or too powerful, but one concludes, “My body should be on display,” whereas the other says, “My body must be hidden.” Neither comes from a healthy understanding of the body, and neither is a fully Catholic view.
Ultimately, there is a major difference between covering what ought to be covered and treating the female body itself as a near occasion of sin. Some parts of the body are private because they are especially intimate and primarily sexual in nature. The revealing of these parts belongs within the context of marriage. But this does not mean that any attractive part of a woman’s body must be kept hidden. A woman does not need to masquerade the fact that she has a female form or, on the extreme end, make it appear unattractive. Her feminine shape and beauty are simply part of God&#8217;s good creation.
Although the Church has never handed women a universal &#8220;dress-code handbook&#8221;, it has given us principles to follow: decency, discretion, charity, purity, respect for the dignity of the person, and reverence for the proper meaning of the body. Understanding what one ought to wear requires prudence; prudence requires a properly formed conscience; and a properly formed conscience requires being rooted in the Church’s teachings and the spiritual life. It is then, and only then, that we can discern how to adorn ourselves modestly with our cultural customs in mind.
Yes, I agree there is a real and much bigger problem with impurity today. I’m not denying that. Much of modern fashion is ugly, sexual, and specifically designed to denigrate women; it deserves to be criticized. But the way to combat that kind of immodesty is not through a Puritan form of dress. Instead, what we wear should help direct attention to our whole persons, not distract with how hidden or uncovered we are.
So yes, dress modestly. Please. The world could use more decency, more reverence, and more women who refuse to reduce themselves to objects. However, do not confuse “covered” with “virtuous.” Modesty is not about hiding the body; it is about honoring it.

You Can Be Covered and Still Immodest

<div>Who are the "nations" mentioned in Matthew 25?</div><div>They are all of the nations of the world, as all the peoples or nations of the world will be judged, with each person experiencing his own particular judgment as well. “Nations” is also a translation of the Latin-derived word “Gentiles,” meaning non-Jewish peoples, as in the focus of the Great Commission Jesus provides to his first apostles and by extension the Church in general in perpetuity (Matthew 28:18-20). The evangelization of Jews who have not accepted Jesus is also included in the Great Commission.
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The “Nations” in Matthew 25

Are papal supremacy and papal infallibility later inventions unknown to the early Church? In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Catholic Answers apologists respond to some of the most common Orthodox objections to Catholicism. Topics include whether the papacy is biblical, if the Filioque was an illegitimate change to the Nicene Creed, and whether mandatory clerical celibacy reflects apostolic Christianity. The discussion also examines claims that purgatory and indulgences are Western corruptions, whether doctrinal development preserves or distorts the faith, and if Rome’s actions caused the East–West Schism. Finally, the episode addresses whether Vatican I contradicts the structure and authority of the early Church. A deep and charitable exploration of the major theological divisions between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
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Objections Covered:
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<li>02:34 &#8211; Papal supremacy is unbiblical and unknown in the early Church. </li>
<li>12:00 &#8211; Papal infallibility is a late doctrinal invention. Papal authority undermines conciliar Church governance. </li>
<li>18:45 &#8211; The Filioque is both unauthorized and theologically incorrect. Rome illegitimately altered the Nicene Creed. </li>
<li>24:20 &#8211; Mandatory clerical celibacy is non-apostolic. </li>
<li>30:33 &#8211; Purgatory is a Western innovation without early consensus. </li>
<li>36:37 &#8211; Doctrinal development is corruption, not preservation. </li>
<li>42:07 &#8211; Indulgences distort repentance and were historically abused. </li>
<li>45:40 &#8211; The East–West Schism was caused by Rome’s overreach. </li>
<li>49:42 &#8211; Vatican I contradicts the structure of the early Church. </li>
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Every Orthodox Objection to Catholicism—Answered Part 1

Gary Zimak offers advice to a caller on how to help an elderly family member who believes she is too old to change her chronic worrying habits.

How to Help Someone Who Is a Chronic Worrier

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<h3>Memorial of Saint Athanasius, bishop and doctor of the Church
Lectionary: 278</h3>
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<h4>Reading 1    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/acts/9:31">ACTS 9:31-42</a></h4>
<div class="poetry">
The Church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria 
was at peace. 
She was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord, 
and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit she grew in numbers.
As Peter was passing through every region, 
he went down to the holy ones living in Lydda. 
There he found a man named Aeneas, 
who had been confined to bed for eight years, for he was paralyzed. 
Peter said to him, 
“Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.” 
He got up at once. 
And all the inhabitants of Lydda and Sharon saw him, 
and they turned to the Lord.
Now in Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha 
(which translated is Dorcas). 
She was completely occupied with good deeds and almsgiving. 
Now during those days she fell sick and died, 
so after washing her, they laid her out in a room upstairs. 
Since Lydda was near Joppa, 
the disciples, hearing that Peter was there, 
sent two men to him with the request, 
“Please come to us without delay.” 
So Peter got up and went with them. 
When he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs 
where all the widows came to him weeping 
and showing him the tunics and cloaks 
that Dorcas had made while she was with them. 
Peter sent them all out and knelt down and prayed. 
Then he turned to her body and said, “Tabitha, rise up.” 
She opened her eyes, saw Peter, and sat up. 
He gave her his hand and raised her up, 
and when he had called the holy ones and the widows, 
he presented her alive. 
This became known all over Joppa, 
and many came to believe in the Lord.
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<h4>Responsorial Psalm    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/psalms/116:12">116:12-13, 14-15, 16-17</a></h4>
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R.    (12) How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me? 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
How shall I make a return to the LORD 
for all the good he has done for me? 
The cup of salvation I will take up, 
and I will call upon the name of the LORD 
R.    How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me? 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
My vows to the LORD I will pay 
in the presence of all his people. 
Precious in the eyes of the LORD 
is the death of his faithful ones. 
R.    How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me? 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
O LORD, I am your servant; 
I am your servant, the son of your handmaid; 
you have loosed my bonds. 
To you will I offer sacrifice of thanksgiving, 
and I will call upon the name of the LORD. 
R.    How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me? 
or: 
R.    Alleluia.
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<h4>Alleluia    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/6:63">JN 6:63C, 68C</a></h4>
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R. Alleluia, alleluia. 
Your words, Lord, are Spirit and life; 
you have the words of everlasting life. 
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
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<h4>Gospel    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/6:60">JN 6:60-69</a></h4>
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Many of the disciples of Jesus who were listening said, 
“This saying is hard; who can accept it?” 
Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, 
he said to them, “Does this shock you? 
What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 
It is the Spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail. 
The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life. 
But there are some of you who do not believe.” 
Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe 
and the one who would betray him. 
And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me 
unless it is granted him by my Father.”
As a result of this, 
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life 
and no longer walked with him. 
Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” 
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? 
You have the words of eternal life. 
We have come to believe 
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
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Source: <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings">cms.usccb.org</a>
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Daily Holy Mass: Saturday, May 2, 2020

I don’t go to Mass consistently. I don’t feel forgiven from confession. Are there purgatory consequences?

How do we know Papacy in its current form is what God intended. It seems like Peter was supposed to be first among equals. Polycarp and Anicetus were equals.

I’m Not Catholic Cause I think Catholics preach a different works-based gospel.

My best friend is a bartender. What’s the best way to introduce my friend to catholic faith?

&#8220;Why aren&#8217;t you Catholic?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the reasons some individuals hesitate to embrace the faith, including concerns about purgatory and the sacrament of confession. The conversation also addresses the nature of the papacy and its divine intention, as well as misconceptions about the Catholic understanding of salvation and works.
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Why Aren’t You Catholic? Purgatory and the Papacy Explained

In previous articles (<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-god-cured-israels-heart-disease">here</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-puts-his-money-where-his-mouth-is">here</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/james-youve-gone-and-done-it-again">here</a>, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/youre-not-ungodly-anymore">here</a>), I’ve argued that the Bible supports the Catholic teaching that our interior state of holiness is a ground for our justification—what we might call “interior justification.” This stands in contrast to the view of some of the early Protestant Reformers. They believed that what makes us righteous before God is simply God declaring us righteous, rather than anything God actually does within us. This view is labeled forensic justification.
There are yet two other passages from St. Paul that support the Catholic view that I’d like to look at: Romans 12:1-2 and Romans 14:17-18.
Let’s start with Romans 12:1-2. Paul writes,
<blockquote>I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.</blockquote>
You might be wondering, “What does this text have to do with justification? Paul doesn’t say anything about it here. And how does it connect to our interior righteousness?”
Let’s start with Paul’s identification of the sacrificial offering of our bodies as spiritual worship. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches in his Commentary on Romans, sacrifice to God involves two aspects: external and internal. The external is the physical offering itself. The internal involves interior acts by which we believe, hope in, and love God. This internal aspect is primary. Aquinas appeals to Luke 17:21 for support, where Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” The assumption here is that our worship of God makes us members of Christ’s kingdom.
Next, Paul says our offering pleases God. In other words, we’re acceptable to and at peace with God on account of this act of worship.
But remember: this offering principally involves interior acts by which we believe, hope in, and love God, all of which are righteous acts. It follows, therefore, that these internal righteous acts themselves are pleasing to God.
Now, interior acts of intellect and will determine the moral quality of our souls. Since these interior acts are righteous, it follows that the moral quality is righteousness. Insofar as Paul says our spiritual worship is pleasing to God, and that worship makes us interiorly righteous, we can conclude that our interior righteousness serves as a reason why God is pleased with us.
Here is where the connection to justification comes into play. To be pleasing to God is to be at peace with God, which, for Paul, is nothing more than a state of justification. As he writes in Romans 5:1, “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Being justified and having peace with God are logically interchangeable. You can’t be justified without having peace with God, and you can’t have peace with God and not be justified.
Therefore, our justification is rooted in something that’s internal to us—namely, our minds and wills being properly ordered to God in our belief, hope, and love. This disproves the idea that our justification is not grounded in our interior holiness or righteousness.
So we might summarize our reasoning as follows:
P1: Offering our bodies as a living sacrifice is pleasing to God.
P2: That sacrificial offering involves interior righteous acts of belief, hope, and love.
C1: Therefore, our interior righteous acts of belief, hope, and love are pleasing to God.
P3: Interior righteous acts of belief, hope, and love determine the interior quality of our souls as righteous.
C2: Therefore, the interior righteous quality of our souls is pleasing to God.
P4: To be pleasing to God is to be justified.
C3: Therefore, the interior righteous quality of our souls serves as a ground for our justification.
It’s important to note that our internal acts of belief, hope, and love contribute to our justification only after initially becoming justified. In its Decree on Justification, the Council of Trent infallibly taught (in conjunction with Ephesians 2:8-9) that good works play no meritorious role prior to being initially justified.
Another important note is that the internal acts of belief, hope, and love involved in our spiritual worship are due to God’s grace. No work can contribute to our justification, regardless of whether we’re in the ongoing, present state of justification or in the final stage of justification, without God’s grace.
The other Pauline passage that I’d like to look at is Romans 14:17-18. Paul writes,
<blockquote>The kingdom of God does not mean food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit; he who thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.</blockquote>
Here, Paul echoes Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God involving an internal dimension. “Food and drink” signify the external precepts of the Mosaic Law. And Paul says the kingdom of God is not that, the implication being that God’s kingdom involves something within us.
But notice how Paul describes that interior dimension: “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” He connects being a member of God’s kingdom—a state of justification—with interior righteousness.
Paul drives this point home in verse 18 by connecting serving Christ—that’s to say, worshiping him—with being “acceptable to God.” As mentioned above, worship involves interior acts of belief, hope, and love. And for Paul, these interior acts of worship constitute our interior state of righteousness. Paul weaves together the interior state of righteousness in verse 17 with serving Christ: “he who thus serves Christ.” Serving Christ is inextricably connected with an interior state of righteousness.
Now, notice the result of this righteous service: “[He] is acceptable to God.”  As mentioned above, to be acceptable to God is to be in a state of justification. Thus, Paul teaches our justification—being acceptable to God—is rooted in an interior state of righteousness.
The irony with this Pauline theology is that Paul is the one many Protestants think champions their view of forensic justification. Yet it’s the exact opposite. Paul teaches a conception of justification identical to the Catholic view. He roots justification in the interior state of righteousness that God brings about within a believer.
So Protestants can no longer claim Paul as their champion when it comes to justification. He’s in the Catholic camp.

Sorry, Protestants: Paul Is Team Catholic

Catholics believe we will be judged based on our works. And there’s no better argument for this belief than one that appeals to Jesus’ teaching about judgment in Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and the goats.
The difference between the sheep and the goats is what they did and did not do. Performing the works of charity merits eternal life, and failure to perform works of charity leads to damnation. For a Catholic, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.
But for some Protestants, it’s not so clear. And they have reasons why they don’t agree.
Consider, for example, Protestant scholar Robert Wilkin. He <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Views-Works-Final-Judgment-Counterpoints/dp/0310490332">argues</a> that it’s “erroneous” to equate Jesus’ statement, “inherit the kingdom prepared for you,” with “entering it” or “that these people have eternal life.” He interprets Jesus as saying, “They will be rewarded with the privilege of reigning with him forever.” Protestant author Joseph Dillow takes the same line as Wilkin, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reign-Servant-Kings-Eternal-Security-ebook/dp/B007U79V1U/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1R003P3X41W6W&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ca7z02nPFWm1CdNMWP_vUN4JWkTRrkHp5f8Vnr5LDevGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.q3z343z3vb9hNof4yKuT97Ds2WKSz3JyAVkhDtOqreQ&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=The+Reign+of+the+Servant+Kings%3A+A+Study+of+Eternal+Security+and+the+Final+Destiny+of+Man&amp;qid=1725478818&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=the+reign+of+the+servant+kings+a+study+of+eternal+security+and+the+final+destiny+of+man+%2Cstripbooks%2C120&amp;sr=1-1">writing</a>, “‘To inherit the kingdom’ is a virtual synonym for rulership in the kingdom and not entrance into it.”
Since Jesus isn’t talking about entrance into the kingdom, but rather ruling in the kingdom, so it’s argued, the works that the sheep perform don’t play a causal role in their (or our) final salvation.
For our first response, let’s concede for argument’s sake that “inherit the kingdom” is equivalent to “reigning with Christ forever.” By itself, this doesn’t exclude the Catholic view that serving Christ in others is a condition for entrance into the kingdom.
Consider, for example, the contrast Jesus makes between those who “inherit the kingdom” and those who do not. Those who don’t inherit the kingdom depart from Christ “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. . . . They will go away into eternal punishment.” “Eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” both convey the nature of the individual’s experience as he departs from Christ.
But it would be ridiculous to think this somehow excludes the idea that the goats don’t ever enter the kingdom because of their failure to practice love in serving Christ in others. Jesus explicitly says, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire . . . for I was hungry and you gave me no food.” Jesus’ statements about what the damned will experience also involve exclusion from the kingdom.
Since “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” involve both what the damned will experience, being separated from Christ, and that they are excluded from the kingdom, and Jesus explicitly contrasts “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” with “inheriting the kingdom,” it’s reasonable to conclude that “inheriting the kingdom” involves not only what the saved will experience in heaven (e.g., ruling with Christ forever), but also entrance into the kingdom. And since serving Christ in others is a condition for ruling with Christ (assuming that “inheriting the kingdom” refers to ruling with Christ), it follows that serving Christ in others is also a condition of entering the kingdom.
A second response is that the word inheritance implies entering a new state that you didn’t have before. For example, if I were to say to my son, “You will inherit my money when I die,” I would mean that my son would eventually enter a state of possessing my money that he doesn’t have now, before my death. Another example is the Israelites’ inheritance of the promised land. Given that the term inheritance signifies entering a new state, we can interpret Jesus’ statement about Christians “inheriting the kingdom” to mean Christians entering the kingdom of heaven.
A third <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Gospel-Matthew-Jonathan-Pennington/dp/080103728X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3862CZWXVX21Z&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DqiaYEXWcYkkX8qPSzIFp_IcZNOky6MPu4_lAze2IEZAts1DsI0KD5cuiCu6i4zUdev2wCD-KNf7KT7xdbEP-FvlnYJGxeNjdVzOt2UiulDRGmKbezWiypKsw3QrcE5RqFruJyOmG6ijBRcN1xDW2-Nm9gM-YchAgdfhoHaGVq5hlsuEcbAdarJjlfeknQZhf0849vt7YbYwgdOlnlbGNtP0zVWfq3zTzV7KBoxwbtQ.B-ulqnL36cX-dCgBKfZog0kvhVCZWs8MO-HN2wYO0Hk&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=Heaven+and+Earth+in+the+Gospel+of+Matthew&amp;qid=1725479034&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=heaven+and+earth+in+the+gospel+of+matthew%2Cstripbooks%2C134&amp;sr=1-1">response</a> is that we have biblical grounds for thinking the phrase “inherit the kingdom” refers to receiving eternal life. First, Jesus explicitly identifies the sheep who “inherit the kingdom” as the “the righteous” who “go . . . into eternal life.” Eternal life here is not to be equated with merely a reward, such as ruling with Christ, since it’s contrasted with “eternal punishment.” Jesus is contrasting two eternal destinies: one for the righteous and the other for the unrighteous.
Moreover, as R.T. France <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Matthew-International-Commentary-Testament/dp/080282501X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JCMOJFMN08AH&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.2sxcHGe0UBaFIbxQFOD-dmxtXvQYaPjE3TD_IuJE271ATbyYitVIF0GHMFdsgAD-H30Az9ernid5pFzZ_fD331l2sn02py_tU43yJO3YO0lH7s_rtGMF08xgekhKKWAUrtmBVtpjdLg_tOf5jDoDCXmLwPih_WRB80h-qp302P0.o9Bb72TruPtCPzkfHPMT6730wIR2-MtKv3WnKkpVsX0&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=r.t.+france+The+Gospel+of+Matthew&amp;qid=1725478947&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=r.t.+france+the+gospel+of+matthew%2Cstripbooks%2C117&amp;sr=1-1">points</a> out, the phrase “eternal life” is already familiar to the reader of Matthew’s Gospel as being equated with being saved or entering the kingdom of heaven. For example, in Matthew 19:16, the rich young man asks Jesus, “What good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” Then, in verses 28-29, Jesus makes clear that the eternal life the rich young man asked about refers to the life the righteous will receive at the Final Judgment: “Truly, I say to you . . . when the Son of Man shall sit on his glorious throne . . . everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake [what the rich young man didn’t do], will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.”
Second, Matthew elsewhere in his Gospel records Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom, and it specifies that entrance into the kingdom is conditioned on whether Jesus’ followers perform loving actions. For example, in Matthew 7:21, Jesus is clear that only those who do the will of his Father will “enter the kingdom of heaven.” Doing God’s will is the essence of the theological virtue of charity.
Matthew two chapters earlier records Jesus: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20). Jesus goes on to list a variety of things that make up this righteousness:
<ul>
<li>Making amends with someone we’ve offended before we offer our sacrifice.</li>
<li>Avoiding lust.</li>
<li>Refusing to divorce or to attempt marriage after divorce.</li>
<li>Not swearing.</li>
<li>Turning the other cheek and being generous.</li>
<li>Loving enemies.</li>
</ul>
Notice that each item in the above list involves charity. And it’s this charity, manifest in deeds or the avoidance thereof, that is necessary to have the righteousness required to “enter the kingdom of heaven” and be called “sons of your Father who is in heaven” (v. 45). Therefore, charity, and the behaviors associated with it, is a necessary condition for entrance into the kingdom.
Given this context of Matthew’s Gospel concerning entrance into the kingdom and its relation to charity, as shown both in Matthew 5:20-47 and Matthew 7:21, it makes sense to think that when Jesus speaks of “inheriting the kingdom” based on charitable actions in Matthew 25, he has in mind the same teaching he gave concerning entrance into the kingdom based on charity in Matthew 5 and 7.
In sum, this Protestant counterargument fails on multiple grounds. It doesn’t jibe with Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom and its relation to charity elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel. Nor does it succeed even if we grant for argument’s sake that “inherit the kingdom” refers to ruling with Christ. As such, this comeback shouldn’t cause a Catholic to stop using Matthew 25:31-46 for biblical support of the belief that works play an essential role in entering heaven.

Protestants Reign on the Catholic Parade

Catholic Answers’ Jimmy Akin and host Cy Kellett take a nostalgic trip back to the 1970s—a time of questionable toys, bizarre TV shows, and zero safety regulations.
Transcript:
Cy: Magikarp sounds like how people say magic harp.
Jimmy: How many people actually say Magikarp these days?
Cy: I think there might have been one in the.
Jimmy: I know, I know. There&#8217;s a Magic Flute. You know, there&#8217;s an opera about that.
Cy: That&#8217;s so funny that you think of the opera and I think of the Saturday morning TV show with. With Jimmy. What was his name?
Pufnstuf
Cy: HR Pufnstuf Yeah.
Jimmy: He&#8217;s your friend. When things get tough, I All the.
Cy: Don&#8217;t do it, Jimmy. I know you know all the words to the HR Pufnstufsong. I actually am kind of tempted to have you do it, but don&#8217;t do it.
Jimmy: Okay? I&#8217;ll do whatever you want. I&#8217;m a mechanical boy, like a mechanical toy.
Cy: I was enjoying it. I was kind of getting into it.
Cy: By the way, if you&#8217;re young and you have never been exposed to HR Pufnstuf, and you don&#8217;t know why people our age are weird, because this is what we watched on Saturday morning. Sid and Marty Krofft was a CIA conspiracy against the Mile or something. I don&#8217;t know, man. It was crazy. I had forgotten about click clacks.
Jimmy: Yeah, we should explain. Just before we came back on, we were talking about wild stuff from the 70s, and Cy mentioned avocado-colored household appliances.
Cy: Yeah.
Jimmy: And I mentioned all the dangerous games that we had that were then pulled off the market. And we both, at the same time, said lawn darts, which were these. They were about a foot long, as I recall, and they had a metal core with plastic fins, and you&#8217;d throw them and aim at targets on the lawn.
Cy: They were knives for children to throw at each other. It was. That&#8217;s what it was.
Jimmy: Yeah. And I think adults played lawn darts, too. But when you get kids running around and you&#8217;re throwing pointed metal objects, you know, it&#8217;s like this is like a little game of javelins with children running around, but also click clacks.
Cy: What a click clack was. It was kind of like a bolo, but there were two plastic spheres, hard plastic, that were connected by a cord. And you&#8217;d hold the cord in the middle and you&#8217;d swing it back and forth so that the two plastic spheres would clack into each other twice with each swing. And so you&#8217;d be going, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
Cy: And a. Okay. This is a noisemaker, which is going to annoy parents, but kids love noisemakers.
Jimmy: Yeah, but the real problem is you&#8217;re gonna hit someone with those hard plastic spheres, you may hit yourself in the head. You may hit another child. You might deliberately throw it at another child to hit them. So. Well, there are some kind of dangerous toys.
Cy: I think that it&#8217;s Australians. That there&#8217;s some kind of weapon where they put two balls on the end of a string and you throw it.
Jimmy: Oh, that&#8217;s a bolo.
Cy: Oh, yeah. Okay. So of course that&#8217;s what we tried to do. Be like, hey, run down the street and I&#8217;ll try to see if I can get these around your legs. So children are knocking each other&#8217;s brains out with heavy plastic balls. The 70s was awesome. It was awesome.
Cy: After this, we&#8217;ll throw lawn darts at each other. Amazing, amazing time. But then the fun thing was then you could get in the station wagon with no seat belts and just play sports in the back of the car.
Jimmy: Just in the back of the car.
Cy: Rumble around in the back of the car while you went on a drive with no air conditioning.
Jimmy: Did that all the time. I should correct myself. It&#8217;s not bolos, but bolas that are the throwing weapon that you could use to, like, if you&#8217;re a gaucho in South America, you could, you know, catch an animal by throwing a bola at it.
Jimmy: We also had another thing that I really. Look now. We had some toys that got taken off the market that I don&#8217;t think they needed to like. There was one toy that I really liked that was. It was called a Thing Maker. And what it was was a. It was a little light bulb powered oven. Basically. They had the Easy-Bake Oven for girls, and they&#8217;d make little things that were.
Cy: Was that for girls?
Jimmy: I was not aware of that.
Cy: Well, I love Easy-Bake Oven.
Jimmy: All right, go ahead.
Jimmy: Primarily for girls, but they also had an equivalent for boys that were primarily for boys where you could take these metal trays and pour goop in them. And they had these bottles of goop and then you put that into the Thing Maker and it would heat it up and cause the goop to solidify as this kind of rubber. And you&#8217;d make these little creatures. And they had like Creeple People was one of them. And it was these little creepy looking characters that you could make.
Jimmy: And I loved playing with the Thing Maker and the Creepy Crawlers and Creeple People that I made with it. But because those little metal trays got hot, they ended up taking it off the market. And I think that was maybe a little. I mean, it&#8217;s not meant for 2-year-olds or 4-year-olds. But I think older children could play with that without it being a problem. Once you learn, you gotta have a little patience and restraint while it cools down.
Cy: Children can deal with heat. Like sometimes we under. Like for all of human history, children have been dealing with fire and heat. Like, if you&#8217;re responsible, they can deal with it.
How are they gonna learn if they don&#8217;t burn their fingers once in a while?
Jimmy: You know, there also was another that I really liked that was. This would have been late 60s or very, very early 70s. But there was a kind of plastic goop. It was thicker than the goop you&#8217;d use with the Thing Maker, which was. Had a consistency before it was baked. Kind of like glue.
Cy: And then you make a frog or something out of it.
Jimmy: You&#8217;d be all kinds of cool stuff, little monster something. But there was another kind of goop that came in a tube and this goop was thicker and more rubbery just out of the tube. And what you. And it was all kinds of different psychedelic colors. And what you do is you&#8217;d squeeze out a little bit of this goop onto the end of a straw and then you take the straw and blow into it and the goop would inflate and you would have your own custom-built goop balloon with an irregular shape and all these psychedelic swirly colors on it.
Jimmy: And then you pinch it off and you could play with your balloon. And I thought that was really cool too. But apparently the goop was toxic or something the way they made it.
Cy: Get over it.
Jimmy: Oh, sorry. Yeah. And so they ended up pulling it off the market. But I thought it was fun.
Cy: Yeah. And we. Did you, did you ever get the opportunity as a child to make a tie-dye shirt? This was also a big thing. You get a. Magically a white T-shirt turns into an actual fashion statement. Like it was a wonderful adventure making the tie-dye T-shirt.
Jimmy: I didn&#8217;t have that as a child. My parents were a little too square for that.
Cy: Oh yeah.
Jimmy: But I do actually have a tie-dye shirt now. But these are ones I bought, not ones I made. I first got a tie-dye shirt because I thought they were looking interesting. But I first got one when I was in grad school in college, at least this first one I remember.
And I had had some toe surgery for an ingrown toenail and I needed to wear Birkenstock sandals after the toe surgery. And no, there&#8217;s a method to my madness because in grad school, I was assigned as a teaching assistant. And I had, I had, you know, longish hair and I had a beard. It wasn&#8217;t as long as it is now, but I had longish hair and a beard.
And I was assigned as a teaching assistant in grad school in the philosophy department. And so I was assigned to teach Introduction to Philosophy. And I did very well at it. I had my faculty, you know, student evaluations were top of the department, and they actually gave me an award for teaching.
And I remember one day one of my fellow grad students who was also a teaching assistant, he couldn&#8217;t make it to one of his classes and asked me to sub for him. And he was not the clearest communicator. And so I went and I taught his class. And this was towards the beginning of the semester and I had, like, several students come up to me after the class eagerly saying, are you our new instructor now?
Cy: They understood you.
Jimmy: So. But one of the challenges, because I wanted as part of this course to do Intro to Philosophy, I wanted to cover philosophy of religion. And I wanted, and this was a state school, this was University of Arkansas, so this is not a religious school. And I wanted to be able to present religious content in a way that would not trip sensitivities for students that were, you know, hostile to Christianity or things like that, because, you know, young people.
And so what I did was I got out my Birkenstock sandals from my toe surgery and I bought a tie-dye T-shirt and I put on the tie-dye T-shirt. And then I go in and teach philosophy of religion. And I can talk about religion without looking like Jerry Falwell. And it worked.
Cy: Yeah, yeah. There are advantages to being a hippie. You can talk about stuff that the guy with the tie on can&#8217;t talk about.
Let&#8217;s take a break. The 70s was both better and worse than, and now I&#8217;m recalling better than people remember it. It had some. Yeah, it was a real mix. Not so good for Patty Hearst. But for the rest of us, there were click clacks.
We&#8217;ll be right back with more Jimmy Akin right after this on Catholic Answers Live.

The 70s Were Dangerous! (And Fun)

On Easter morning, two disciples of Jesus are on their way from Jerusalem back to Emmaus. They might be husband and wife, but the text doesn’t say for certain. St. Luke names only one of the two: Cleopas. If they are a married couple, they might be Jesus’ aunt and uncle. (Hegesippus, a Christian writer from the second century, references “the Lord’s uncle, Clopas.”) If Cleopas and Clopas are the same person, then we know that his wife is Mary, one of the women who was at the Crucifixion (John 19:25), and that they have children named James and Joses (Mark 15:40), who are referred to as “brothers” of Jesus (Mark 6:3). (Since Hebrew lacked a word for cousins, cousins could be referred to as “brothers,” just as Abraham and Lot are called “brothers” in Genesis 13:8 and 14:14-16, despite being uncle and nephew.)
Whatever the case, these two disciples are walking the seven miles home from Jerusalem to Emmaus, “talking and discussing together,” when another traveler joins them (Luke 24:15). Noticing their sadness, he asks what they’re discussing, and they reply:
<blockquote>Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since this happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; and they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said; but him they did not see (vv. 19-24).</blockquote>
If Cleopas and Clopas are the same person, his wife and likely walking companion was one of those “women of our company” who were the first witnesses of the empty tomb (Luke 24:10). The other traveler then replies, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (25-26).
On arriving back in Emmaus, they invite the traveler to join them. There, while “at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight” (vv. 30-31).
It’s only here that Cleopas and his companion realize two things. First, that the traveler who had joined them was Jesus (Luke explains in verse 16 that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him”). Second, that Jesus had opened up the Old Testament scriptures to them in a radically new way: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?” (v. 32). They immediately arise and make the seven-mile journey back to Jerusalem, where they tell the apostles about how Jesus “was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v. 35).
This is an important detail that we often overlook. Jesus is the key to unlocking the Old Testament scriptures: “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). But they realize who he is, and how he makes sense of Scripture, only once they recognize him “in the breaking of the bread.”
This expression is eucharistic: the “breaking of the bread” is how Luke describes the early Christian Eucharist (Acts 2:42, 46), and the way he describes this scene closely resembles the way he describes the Last Supper. Look at the careful way Luke presents this moment: Jesus “took the bread,” “blessed” it, “broke it,” and “gave it to them” (v. 30).
Why does Luke use four verbs to describe this moment? After all, presumably, he knows we know how to eat bread, and he’s not trying to reassure us that they said their prayers before eating.
It’s not a coincidence that this is just how Luke and the other Evangelists recount Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper. In Luke: “He took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me’” (22:19). In Matthew: “Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body’” (26:26). It’s those same four actions again: Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and gives. Jesus reveals himself and the scriptures are unlocked.
We see this in another, more mystical way in the book of Revelation. St. John sees a scroll “sealed with seven seals” in “the right hand of him who was seated on the throne” (5:1). A “strong angel” proclaims with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” (v. 2). When “no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth” (v. 3) is able to open the scroll, John bursts into tears. One of the heavenly elders then says to him, “Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals” (v. 5).
But what John sees next isn’t a lion; it’s a lamb. More specifically, “I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (v. 6), who then takes the scroll, while heaven breaks out into a chorus: “Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals, for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and hast made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on earth” (vv. 9-10).
There’s a tremendous irony in this passage. We expect the “strong angel” to be able to open the seals, but he can’t; no creature can. And then we expect the Son of God to be able to open it because he’s the conquering Lion of Judah. But Christ appears not in strength, but in humility: “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.” Even this image is paradoxical: the slain are not known for standing upright. It’s an image of Jesus conquering through his meekness and self-sacrifice and death.
But it’s not only an image of Christ the crucified, but of Christ as the slain lamb, recalling both the Old Testament Passover and the Lord’s Supper in which “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7). So it’s only when we know Jesus Christ in this way that everything else is unlocked. Otherwise, some scrolls remain sealed off to our understanding. We don’t get to experience our hearts burning within us.
The eucharistic Jesus is the key. The Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is that Jesus gives us himself in the Eucharist. When we receive it, we receive him in his entirety. The Eucharist isn’t just a symbol, or just Jesus’ “spiritual presence.” The Eucharist is really Jesus.

The Eucharist and the End of the World

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Did Peter believe he was the first Pope?

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Of course when a priest stands up to challenge an NFL team on is support for Pride Month he&#8217;s going to get smacked down on social media. But were Father Andre Metrejean&#8217;s comments hateful?. Karlo Broussard joins us to reason through the comments and the social media responses.
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A Priest Challenges Pride Month

Not every scandal need to be made public...

<div>Would it be appropriate for me to use the sign of the cross when I pray if I am not Catholic yet? </div><div>Certainly you may and should make the sign of the cross. It is not reserved for Catholics, and it is a powerful prayer for enlightenment and protection. If you make it while saying, &#8220;In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen,&#8221; then you are combining an act of faith in Christ&#8217;s Cross and Passion with the profession of faith in the Holy Trinity, and this will be very good for your soul. But become a Catholic as soon as you can. I will pray for you.
</div>

Should a Non-Catholic Sign Himself?

Easter Vigil Mass celebrated by Fr. Paul Check at St. John Fisher Seminary.
Exsultet
Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven, exult, let Angel ministers of God exult, let the trumpet of 
salvation sound aloud our mighty King&#8217;s triumph! Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her, 
ablaze with light from her eternal King, let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom 
and darkness. Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice, arrayed with the lightning of his glory, let 
this holy building shake with joy, filled with the mighty voices of the peoples. Therefore, dearest 
friends, standing in the awesome glory of this holy light, invoke with me, I ask you, the mercy of 
God almighty, that he, who has been pleased to number me, though unworthy, among the Levites, 
may pour into me his light unshadowed, that I may sing this candle&#8217;s perfect praises.
V. The Lord be with you. 
R. And with your spirit. 
V. Lift up your hearts. 
R. We lift them up to the Lord. 
V. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. 
R. It is right and just.
It is truly right and just, with ardent love of mind and heart and with devoted service of our voice, 
to acclaim our God invisible, the almighty Father, and Jesus Christ, our Lord, his Son, his Only 
Begotten. Who for our sake paid Adam&#8217;s debt to the eternal Father, and, pouring out his own dear 
Blood, wiped clean the record of our ancient sinfulness. These, then, are the feasts of Passover, in 
which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb, whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers. This 
is the night, when once you led our forebears, Israel&#8217;s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them 
pass dry-shod through the Red Sea. This is the night that with a pillar of fire banished the darkness 
of sin. This is the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from 
worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones. 
This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the 
underworld. Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed. O wonder of your 
humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son! 
O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that 
earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer! O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and 
hour when Christ rose from the underworld! This is the night of which it is written: The night shall 
be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness. The sanctifying power of this 
night dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners, 
drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty. On this, your night of grace, O holy 
Father, accept this candle, a solemn offering, the work of bees and of your servants’ hands, an 
evening sacrifice of praise, this gift from your most holy Church. But now we know the praises of 
this pillar, which glowing fire ignites for God&#8217;s honor, a fire into many flames divided, yet never 
dimmed by sharing of its light, for it is fed by melting wax, drawn out by mother bees to build a 
torch so precious. O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine 
to the human. Therefore, O Lord, we pray you that this candle, hallowed to the honor of your name, 
may persevere undimmed, to overcome the darkness of this night. Receive it as a pleasing fragrance, 
and let it mingle with the lights of heaven. May this flame be found still burning by the Morning 
Star: the one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son, who, coming back from death&#8217;s domain, 
has shed his peaceful light on humanity, and lives and reigns for ever and ever. R. Amen.

Easter Vigil Mass: April 11, 2020

<div>I received a gift from my brother of a lava-stone bracelet. The tag says, “Lava stone is a grounding stone that helps us connect to the energies of Mother Earth and the element of fire. It can help to dissipate anger and absorbs negative energy.” This sounds New Age to me. What should I do? If I take it apart and make jewelry with it, would that be wrong?</div><div>Although <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-new-age-movement">New Agers</a> may believe that lava stones are good for healing (chakras) and vitality, these stones do not contain any magical properties. They are lava rock deposits. If you don’t attach any mystical power to these stones, you can do what you want with them.
</div>

Jewelry with New Age Tags

There’s no shortage of biblical objections when it comes to Mary’s perpetual virginity. A common one comes from Luke 2:7, where Luke writes, “And she gave birth to her first-born son [Gk. prōtotokos] and wrapped him in swaddling cloths.”
Some Christians argue that the word “firstborn” itself necessarily implies there were other children born of Mary. If there was a firstborn, so the thinking goes, then there must have been a second-born.
Other Christians, however, distance themselves from the necessary implication of the word prōtotokos and argue that even though the word can imply either “other siblings” or “the first to open the womb,” Luke elsewhere in his Gospel gives us reason to think he intends the “other siblings” meaning.
Thus, we have two versions of this objection from Luke 2:7, the former being the less sophisticated. Let’s deal with that one first.
The main problem with this version of the argument is that it assumes that the term “firstborn” itself necessarily implies there were other siblings born of Mary. But this is patently false.
We can start with the Bible. Consider, for example, Hebrews 1:5-6: “To what angel did God ever say, ‘Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee’? Or again, ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’? And again, when he brings the first-born into the world, he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.” Does this mean that God the Father had other sons, since Jesus is referred to as the “firstborn” of God? Of course not!
Exodus 13:2 is another example: “Consecrate to me all the first-born; whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.”  Does this mean that the parents had to wait until there was a second-born to consecrate the first to the Lord? Nope!
As we see in these examples, “firstborn” doesn’t necessarily mean there were others. It also can mean “the first to open the womb.”
St. Jerome makes this argument in his The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, writing,
<blockquote>The word of God compels me to dedicate to God everything that opens the womb if it be the firstling of clean beasts: if of unclean beasts, I must redeem it, and give the value to the priest (12).</blockquote>
The Protestant biblical scholar Victor Hamilton joins ranks with Jerome, writing in Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary, “To say that Jesus is Mary’s prōtotokos is simply to say Mary had no child before she gave birth to Jesus” (14).
Since the Bible uses “firstborn” without implying a second-born, this argument from Luke’s mere use of the term “firstborn” doesn’t prove Mary was not a perpetual virgin, since Luke could be using it to signify the first to open the womb.
Well, which is it? This leads us to the more sophisticated version of the argument.
In his 2022 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6eN2WUoTk8">debate</a> with Trent Horn, Protestant apologist Steve Christie acknowledged that prōtotokos can be used either to imply other siblings or the first to open the womb. But he thinks we have reason to conclude that Luke intended the “other siblings” meaning. Here’s what he argued in the debate:
<blockquote>If Luke was communicating Jesus was Mary’s only child, he would’ve used the Greek word [monogenēs] translated “only begotten,” rather than prōtotokos, like he did elsewhere in his Gospel, such as in Luke 7:12, 8:42, and 9:38.</blockquote>
For Christie, therefore, that Luke uses prōtotokos instead of monogenēs implies that Luke intended the “other sibling” meaning versus the “first to open the womb” meaning.
The problem with this counter is that Christie shoots at the wrong target: the claim that Luke was communicating that Jesus was Mary’s only child. In other words, he’s attacking a straw man.
Recall his argument: if Luke had intended to communicate that Jesus was Mary’s only child, then he would’ve used the Greek word monogenēs, translated “only begotten.”
Notice that Christie creates an expectation for the use of monogenēs, making its absence seem to be a defeater of Mary’s perpetual virginity. But there is no need for Luke to use monogenēs if he’s not intending to communicate that Jesus was Mary’s only child. Perhaps he intended to communicate something else that wouldn’t necessitate monogenēs (only begotten). If this were the case, then Christie’s objection would have no persuasive force.
One plausible candidate for that “something else” that Luke was intending to communicate is the simple point that Jesus was the first to come through the womb of Mary. This would be true regardless of whether there were other siblings or not.
But there is another plausible candidate. As Trent correctly pointed out in the debate, the context reveals that Luke’s focus was something entirely different—namely, Jesus’ &#8220;firstborn&#8221; status as being consecrated to God. Verses 22-23 make this clear:
<blockquote>And when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”).</blockquote>
Luke explicitly quotes Exodus 13:2 within the same chapter that speaks of the law to consecrate to God the first to open the womb—i.e., the “firstborn.” Given this context, we can conclude that by “firstborn,” Luke intended the “first to open the womb” meaning.
Christie counters this by saying that Luke 2:22-23 is a different event from what occurs in Luke 2:7. Thus, we can’t interpret “firstborn” in verse 7 considering what he talks about in verses 22-23.
But who says we can’t interpret “firstborn” in verse 7 as reference to the consecration of the “firstborn” in verses 22-23? If the term is frequently used as such within the Jewish milieu, which it is, and Luke speaks of Jesus’ consecration as the first to open the womb as the culmination of the same infancy narrative that he kicks off with the use of the term, then it’s exegetically reasonable to interpret “firstborn” in verse 7 in light of the consecration in verses 22-23.
Secondly, even if we concede that Christie blocks our appeal to the consecration in verses 22-23, we still can appeal to either the possibility of the simple use of the term to signify the first to open the womb or the Jewish use of “firstborn” as a reference to the firstborn consecration, thereby creating an impasse as to which meaning Luke intends. It could refer to “other siblings,” but it could also refer either simply to the first to open the womb or the consecration of the first to open the womb. Given such ambiguity, and without further evidence to tip the scales, Christie wouldn’t be able to appeal to the “firstborn” text as a defeater of Mary’s perpetual virginity.
In sum, Luke’s use of prōtotokos in 2:7 does not, by itself, establish that Mary bore other children, since Scripture and Jewish usage regularly employ the term to signify the first to open the womb without implying subsequent births. Also, the appeal to monogenēs fails, because it assumes that Luke intended to assert Jesus’ status as Mary’s only child, when the context instead points to legal and cultic concerns surrounding firstborn consecration.
At best, then, Luke 2:7 is ambiguous, and an ambiguous text cannot overturn the historic Christian belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity.

Firstborn Jesus’ Brothers and Sisters?

When a Child Enters a Same-Sex Union

Back in my Episcopalian days in the Deep South, I remember hearing a fascinating conversation between a mother and son on their arrival at church. The son was asking his mother about why they came. She began to tell him about how they come to learn about God, but he stopped her and says, “But mom, I already like God!”
There’s no special wisdom in this statement, just honesty. If you don’t believe in the holy sacrifice of the Mass, if you don’t believe in the Sunday obligation, if you think Christianity is just having a friendly attitude toward God and other people, it makes sense that, in the long list of priorities, it should fall somewhere below cleaning the house, helping the kids do homework, playing golf, and spending time with family. When all those other things are in order, and we happen to be well rested and not too busy, maybe we can make it to church. And what’s wrong with that? I mean, we already like God.
Is it our job to make people like God? That is, I suppose, one model of ministry, represented well by Amaziah in our reading from Amos. He is a court priest. His job is to fill the king’s ears with happy religious support. His job is to keep the peace in the name of God, or the gods, or whatever convenient powers happen to be at hand. And in today’s passage, that means rebuking the true prophet, Amos. Go back to Judah where you belong, he says. Maybe they’ll appreciate your prophecy there.
But for Amos, unlike Amaziah, this isn’t about personal gain; it’s about the truth. He is, by his own testimony, not a professional: he doesn’t come from one of the prophetic dynasties or the formal groups of prophets devoted to Scripture and prayer. He is not so different, maybe, from the disciples in today’s passage from Mark, where the Lord sends them out two by two. How are they prepared for this mission? By years of training and discipline, by mastering the latest evangelistic techniques and rhetorical styles? None of the above. Their preparation consists of simply watching and listening to Jesus. Their instructions do not include a complicated playbook or set of quotas—just a reminder to keep moving and not worry too much about it if they’re not welcome. Their goal, too, isn’t just to make people like God, but to lead people from shadows into truth, from knowledge to worship.
Let’s bring this back to the present. You already like God. Good. But our job, yours and mine, is not to like God, or even just to know God, but to worship God. Worship literally means to ascribe worth to something or someone. In our beautiful marriage rite, a man says to his wife, when putting on the ring, “With this ring, I thee wed; with my body, I thee worship.” To worship God is to live in such a way as to make it clear, to ourselves, and to others, that God is the source of all worth, all value, all goodness. Worship is a whole way of life. It flows from the altar, through the church, and out into the world. Worship is putting our loves in order; it is arranging our priorities and our lives—from our heads to our wallets to our loins to our feet—in a way that shows that God is the most important thing.
For Amos and the other prophets, worship is the end game. Modern people love quoting the prophets about justice, but injustice, for the prophets, is a problem precisely because it disrupts worship, because it suggests the finality of a world without God, a world without meaning or relationship. Justice is having everything in order—which is to say it is much more than punishment or prevention. The just world is a world ordered and oriented to worship. Worship is what we are for. It is why we were made. In the philosophical way of putting it, it is our final cause: our “meaning of life.”
There is probably no better way in this world to be prophetic than to act as if worship is the most important thing in the world. Prophecy involves both action and word—the ability to name, at times, behaviors that disrupt the Church’s worship. Amaziah shows that priests are sometimes incapable of doing this themselves. Amos the prophet, however, is “a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” He’s no cleric, that is. He’s a layman. But he is able to ask the right questions, the sorts of questions that laypeople today can and do still ask. What is the most important thing? Is it God, or is it not stepping on anyone’s toes? Is it God, or is it preserving capital? Is it God, or is it making life easier for ourselves? Is it God, or is it being safe?
You don’t need an advanced degree in theology to answer those questions. In fact, sometimes theologians (and I speak as one) can make things so complicated by nuance and distinction as to lose the point. God is the most important thing. Our lives find their ultimate meaning when they are shaped and ordered around the worship of God. So, despite the Amaziahs of this world telling us to stay in our own lane and not “force our religion” on people, we have to insist, like Amos, that actually all questions about justice and morality and human politics and economics come down to worship—in other words, to what we were created for. Those demanding that we keep “religion” out of the public square are declaring that, in order to talk about the journey, we have to forbid any discussion of the destination or why we are making the journey in the first place.
Whether we are called to the modern-day royal court, or to some other more ordinary place, Jesus sends us out on his business. The question isn’t whether we have all the right skills or the perfect techniques to win the day. The question is whether we are willing to go, or to be, where we are sent, trusting in our Lord—to reveal that the purpose of all things is only found in Christ.

The Meaning of Life

Does the Bible DISPROVE that Mary was SINLESS?

How do you get from basketball to the diaconate, with a lot of suffering in between?  Here’s one way.
My journey with Christ began back in high school, with an event that looked completely ordinary and non-spiritual. I was playing basketball with some friends when I suffered a back injury for the first time. Little did I know in the moment that my life would completely change.
You see, this injury didn’t go away. Instead, I developed what my doctors thought was chronic neck and back pain, and it has plagued me ever since. Over the years, my list of symptoms grew longer and longer. I loved to play sports growing up, but because of these physical limitations, I had to rediscover who I was.
I began to focus on school by studying and reading. I saw my parents’ great love for learning about our Catholic faith, and I followed their example. Studying the Bible and other books like it, became an ordinary part of my life.
I remember thinking one day, why am I doing this? I was “wasting” so much time reading about God. When would I ever use it? In the moment, it didn’t look as though I would ever use it. But I didn’t care. In the moment, reading about God gave me a joy and a purpose I needed in order to persevere through the physical pains and limitations that I had.
Thanks be to God, about a year ago, I was finally diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Ankylosing Spondylitis. Now I understood why my body didn’t heal thirteen years ago, when I was in high school. I had an illness that requires treatment. Finally, the mystery was solved, and I had hope of a brighter future.
When I started reading the Bible, I didn’t know what God had planned for my future. All I knew was that it was worth it in the moment. Many years later, I’ve used that knowledge a lot. I taught a Bible study at the Newman Center at Southern Utah University when I was a nursing student. I’ve received two Master’s degrees from St. John’s Seminary. I’m a deacon.
St. Paul tells us in Romans 8:28 that “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” I didn’t know what God had planned for my future when my illness began. But God did.
I suffered a lot, and I have to admit that even now it&#8217;s tough to accept just how difficult life became. The pain was that bad. What made it impossible to handle was the fact that there was no hope for years, because the doctors didn’t understand why I was in pain.
Yet I&#8217;ve received a tremendous blessing through my years of illness. Through it all, I&#8217;ve had an encounter with the living God. I can say without a doubt that had it not been for my illness, I wouldn&#8217;t have developed a personal relationship with Jesus.
We hear our Protestant brothers and sisters speak about a personal relationship with Christ. That personal relationship is not only for them; it’s for Catholics, too. Because of my illness, I had to reorient my life, to reach out for something that could provide stability. That &#8220;thing&#8221; that I grabbed onto as I was drowning in despair was our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Think about the sick who encounter Jesus in the Gospels. Their illnesses and pain drove them mad. They searched with all they had for a cure. Think of the woman who spent all she had on doctors, searching for relief, to no avail (Mark 5:24-34). Then think about all the sick who in their madness searched Jesus out. Think about that “obnoxious” blind beggar who heard Jesus passing by (Luke 18:38-43). He screamed out, &#8220;Lord Jesus, have mercy on me!&#8221; The people around him told him to shut up because the way he was acting was mad. But he screamed out all the more, because he knew healing was worth it! In the eyes of the world, this beggar was acting crazy. Yet his illness freed him to call out to our Lord with all he had, even if it might humiliate him to do so.
If Jesus allows us to be afflicted with illness or some other heavy cross, we can go to our doctors, because they have treatments and cures, but we also need to cry out to him in prayer. He may heal us; after all, anything is possible for God, and healing us is easy for him. But his answer might instead be &#8220;I am <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/tracking-down-pauls-thorn-in-the-flesh">not going to heal you</a> right now&#8221; (see 2 Cor. 12:1-10). That was his answer to me for thirteen years. He may never heal us or free us from the burden. If that&#8217;s the case, we are called to cling to him all the more.
God will not abandon us—especially when we are suffering, because that is when he is closest to us. I don’t know the cross you are carrying. But I know that everybody is carrying a cross, and I know that God has good plans in mind for you. Rather than focusing on the pain, let us throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus by praying all the more fervently. Jesus is looking for us to persevere in prayer, and he promises that he will respond . . . even if he doesn’t take away our crosses (Luke 11:5-13).

When God Gives You a Cross

<div>What do you say to people who claimed to have died, but had visions of God that were contrary to Catholicism, even having visions of the "God" figure telling them things like that the Catholic Church is wrong and evil?</div><div>I would charitably respond that either they didn’t die and had a bad dream, which included erroneous details about the Catholic Church Jesus Christ founded (Matt. 16:18-19). Or they actually encountered an evil spirit, including perhaps one posing as an imposter of Christ, who misled them.
In any event, we must always subject our personal/subjective experiences to the objective historical truth about Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church he founded 2,000 years ago as his pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim. 3:15) and thus instrument of salvation (Jn. 6:67-69).
</div>

Near-Death Experiences at Odds with Catholicism

Some Protestants criticize the doctrine of purgatory by saying it’s “bad news” in contrast to the “good news” of salvation revealed in the Bible. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory is indeed good news, even providing consolation for believers. It does so in a variety of ways. 
For one thing, purgatory consoles believers who struggle with sin. We’re all too familiar with our own weaknesses. Perhaps it’s binging of Netflix, texting when someone is trying to have a conversation with you, a brief indulgence of an uncharitable thought, a failure to promptly meet the needs of your spouse or friend when able. The list goes on and on.  
It would be pretty darn hard to go through a day without falling short of Christian perfection in some way, at least for us ordinary folks. Such a task would be heroic. Heroes are rare!  
Now think about the fact that death can surprise us at any moment. Jesus says, “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matt. 24:44). Elsewhere, he says, “Remember then what you received and heard; keep that, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you” (Rev. 3:3). 
If death can come upon us so quickly, and we’re as spiritually ill adjusted as we are, it would seem there’s no hope for us entering into the glory of heaven. We might not die with our wills turned fully away from God as our life’s goal, but the guilt of venial sin and the effects of sin would impede us from entering such glory. Despair of final salvation would be inevitable—that is, if purgatory weren’t real.  
Purgatory remedies that despair and infuses joy within the soul. It allows believers who love Jesus but continue to struggle with sin in their lives to know that their shortcomings against Christian perfection are not enough to guarantee keeping them from the glory of heaven. What’s so bad about that?
Purgatory also consoles us in that it manifests God’s love for us. God loves us so much that he does everything he can to make it possible for us to be united with him, including providing us a postmortem opportunity to be freed from venial sin and any remnants of sin that impede us from entrance into heaven.  
Isn’t God’s love for us part of the gospel’s “good news”? Sure, it is! Purgatory is a doctrine that manifests such love to us. And all this applies to those we love as well. So purgatory consoles us not just with regard to our own entrance into heaven, but also with regard to our loved ones.  
Purgatory gives us the assurance that even though our loved ones die without the perfect holiness required for heaven, we know they’re not forever excluded from there. The late Marian scholar Fr. Martin Jugie puts it beautifully:  
<blockquote>They who mournfully follow the coffin, are consoled with thoughts of the mercy of God; of the expiation of venial sin and the cleansing of the wounds, left by mortal sin, after death; of extenuating circumstances which may have rendered certain sins venial for the dear deceased one. The anguished heart, torn with dread about the fate of the loved one, clings to this last hope, and there finds solace and some peace.</blockquote>
That’s good news!  
Next, the doctrine of purgatory provides consolation for a believer because it offers hope that our loved ones who die with imperfection aren’t forever excluded from heaven. But a believer might still be disheartened by the thought that if his loved one isn’t in heaven yet, then he can’t have a relationship with that person in the present moment. He would have to wait.  
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The doctrine of purgatory entails that we can assist our loved ones in purgatory by offering the Mass, prayers, indulgences, almsgiving, and other works of love for them. This is based on the Christian belief in the communion of saints, which includes the souls in purgatory.  
The holy souls are still members of the mystical body of Christ. Death did not separate them from us. As St. Paul writes, “who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall . . . [the] sword? . . . I am sure that neither death . . . nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 38-39).   
From this it follows that we are not separated from our loved ones who might be in purgatory. We are still united to them by grace. Consequently, our relationship with them can continue. We don’t have to wait until they get to heaven. That provides a believer great consolation. That’s definitely not bad news.  
Some Protestants say we’re blurring the real distinction between the visible (Christians on earth) and invisible (Christians in purgatory) dimensions of the one body of Christ. Just because there’s one body, so it’s argued, it doesn’t follow that our relationship with each dimension is the same.  
It’s true that our relationship with our loved ones in purgatory is not the same as our relationship with them here on earth. But the relationship we have with them by grace is the same. In fact, it’s even better because they’re confirmed in grace without the possibility of falling from it. From this it follows that the relationship with them is secure, on condition that we stay in grace.  
This relationship we have with them by grace is what allows us to continue expressing love toward them, even though it’s not the same kind of expressions of love as when they were on earth. We can’t hear or see them when we talk to them. We can’t give them a hug. But we can pray for them and will what’s good for them—namely, the removal of any impediments to entrance into heaven.  
The relationship might not be the same. But it is a relationship nevertheless! 
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One rationale for this is that the souls in purgatory are perfected in charity. Since charity involves not only love of God, but also love of neighbor, and love of neighbor is expressed in intercessory prayer, it seems reasonable to conclude that the souls in purgatory would express their love by interceding for us.  
That our loved ones in purgatory are praying for us is a consoling thought. Their prayer for us, and our private request for their prayers, is one way by which we keep a relationship with them.  
It’s good news to know we have friends who can’t waver in charity and are constantly praying for us. For St. James says, “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects” (James 5:16).   
The consolation we can provide the holy souls in purgatory in turn brings us consolation. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that love is “to wish good to someone,” “just as he wills good to himself.”
It follows from this definition of love that the good the souls in purgatory experience by having their impediments to heaven removed is experienced as our own good. That means that their consolation is our consolation; their source of joy is our source of joy. As the late Frank Sheed writes, “there is a special joy for the Catholic in praying for his dead, if only the feeling that there is still something he can do for people he loved upon earth.”

Keeping Up with Loved Ones in Purgatory

<div>Is it a sin to waste food?</div><div>Yes, it’s wrong to deliberately waste food.
The Church indirectly addresses this general matter by speaking of our responsibility to help provide for the needs of our neighbors, including their need for food (CCC 2447).
Sadly, a good deal of food is wasted at restaurants, as many people are casual about not consuming the food they order.
Parents can instill an awareness of global solidarity by encouraging their children to be grateful for and consume the food they receive at home. Parents can also set a good example by not purchasing more food than the family needs, striving to make sure nothing goes to waste, and also periodically contributing nonperishable foodstuffs to parish food banks or similar entities.
Unfortunately, having worked for a major grocery chain, I’m aware that certain well-meaning laws actually hurt efforts to aid the poor, because they prevent the distribution of foods after expiration dates, even though the food will be edible for several more days.
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Is It a Sin to Waste Food?

Joe dissects the argument that the Presentation at the Temple in Luke 2 is proof that Mary sinned, because she had to make a &#8220;sin offering.&#8221;
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer, and I wanted to respond to an argument. I sometimes see Protestants raise against the Sinlessness of Mary. The argument is very simple. If Mary was sinless, then why does Luke 2 22 to 24 show her offering the required sin purification sacrifice commanded in Leviticus 12 for women after childbirth? And sure enough, Luke two describes Mary offering a sacrifice in the temple according to what is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtle doves are two young pigeons. Now, Luke is quoting Leviticus 12, which in most English translations says it&#8217;s about a sin offering to be made after a woman has born a son. So it looks like a slam dunk case Mary must have sent, and you&#8217;ll find even well-respected Protestant scholars making this argument. For example, norm Geisler and Ralph McKinsey argue in their book Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, that scripture disproves Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness because she even presented an offering to the Jewish priest arising out of her sinful condition, which was required by law.
This would not have been necessary if she were sinless, but if that&#8217;s right, what sin did Mary commit that required a sin offering? Leviticus 12 is about the offering women make after giving birth to a son, but hopefully no Christian thinks that this proves it was a sin for Mary to give birth to Jesus. So what is actually going on here as we&#8217;re going to see Leviticus 12 is talking about ritual purification after childbirth. It&#8217;s not talking about moral guilt. And there&#8217;s a fascinating aspect to the passage that the early Christians realized and many people today don&#8217;t, that Mary was explicitly exempted from needing to make this sacrifice, and yet she did so anyway. But if Mary didn&#8217;t need to make the sacrifice, then why did she? Well, speaking of sacrificial offerings you don&#8217;t need to make. I want to thank everyone who does just that over@shamelessjoe.com.
It&#8217;s wonderful to not need to take sponsors and you all make that possible. I try to show my gratitude by sharing cool perks like ad free episodes that drop a day early. I&#8217;m going to have a longer version of this episode along with things called Joe Notes that have sources used in each episode with a PDF cheat sheet so you can geek out on whatever the topic is, plus weekly live streams in which I answer patron questions. So if you want to join the party, come over to shameless joe.com if you&#8217;re already there. Thank you. So the first thing to know is that what Mary is offering in the temple is what&#8217;s called a hatta In Hebrew, this is often translated as SAN offering, but it&#8217;s actually a purification offering. The Jewish scholar Rabbi Jacob Milgram pointed out decades ago translating the Hebrew here is sin offering is inaccurate on all grounds, contextually morphologically and etymologically.
That is calling it a sin offering doesn&#8217;t really capture either what the Hebrew actually says or what the context means or what the sacrifice actually is. Now I&#8217;m going to spare you the finer details of the grammatical argument except to say that he points out that the Hebrew conjunction here always means purity or purification and other scholars agree. So there has been a shift among some scholars and some Bible translations to translate this as purification offering instead. But most people, and most Bibles still know it as sin offering. But even if you don&#8217;t know Hebrew, you can see that Milgram is right, that the offering is not principally about the forgiveness of sins. It&#8217;s about being purified to go before God. Leviticus actually prescribes a different type of sacrifice called the guilt offering for the forgiveness of moral transgressions. But the hatta is offered for instances in which you become ritually impure and couldn&#8217;t enter the temple.
Now, to be sure that could be because of some sin you&#8217;d committed either intentionally or unintentionally, but it could also happen for reasons having nothing to do with sin. For instance, if a woman menstruated or if a man had a bodily discharge that rendered you ritually unclean, and you needed to offer the hit habitat, likewise, think about the way sick people like lepers were treated. They had to announce that they were unclean. But the Bible isn&#8217;t saying that they are morally sinful for being lepers. The problem is that they&#8217;re potentially contagious and they&#8217;re also richly impure. And so if you were sick and then recovered, the priest would make a huta to render you clean again. Now the same rules applied if you touched a dead body say, now if you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, this is what&#8217;s going on. The priest and Levite are worried about helping this man because he might already be dead and touching a dead body renders you impure and you can&#8217;t go into the temple.
You would need a purification offering an attack before you did so. But Jesus is clear that the priests and Levite are wrong in this instance. They shouldn&#8217;t be so worried about ritual impurity that they&#8217;re unwilling to help their neighbor. In fact, Jesus repeatedly criticizes those like the Pharisees who obsess about ritual impurity rather than about moral purity. Think about the difference like this. If you commit a mortal sin, you need to go to confession before mass. But if you go on a morning run and get all sweaty, you need to take a shower and change clothes before mass. So both of those things are in some way about going before the Lord in the right way, but it would be a mistake to conflate them or to assume that this means running and being sweaty as a sin. I can&#8217;t be too careful, but it&#8217;s not sinful.
Ancient Jews and early Christians understood this difference. As Rabbi Milgram points out, the ancient rabbinical commentators were very clear that these sacrifices are prescribed for specific physical impurities, whether that&#8217;s having given birth suffering from leprosy. In the case of a Nazarite touching a dead body and not one sage claims that the afflicted brings this sacrifice because of his sins. Indeed, this idea is vigorously denied. Milgram actually offers one example that is so clear. I&#8217;m not sure how someone would even argue against it in Exodus 29 when it&#8217;s talking about the right for the ordination of priests and for the consecration of the altar, a hatta, a purification offering is made for the altar. Now, obviously it makes no sense to say that the altar send and it needed to be forgiven. Rather the altar is being consecrated just as an individual be cleansed from all impurities before entering the temple or embarking on divine service.
Okay, so given all of that, why is Mary making a hatta in the temple 40 days after Christmas? Well, because childbirth makes you richly impure, and Leviticus 12 says that you were to make a purification offering 40 days later. This has nothing to do with sin here and everything to do with the fact that women have come in contact with blood during childbirth. That is why Leviticus 12 explicitly talks about the blood of her purifying. And again, hopefully no Christian is going to argue. This means it was sinful for Mary to give birth to Jesus or that the birth of Christ was a kind of transgression that needed a sin offering as atonement. Instead, the presentation of the temple is about exactly what Luke tells us. It&#8217;s about their purification according to the law of Moses. But there&#8217;s another dimension as well that I think is just fascinating here.
Leviticus 12 doesn&#8217;t just talk about a woman who has a son. It talks about a woman who conceives and bears a male child. On the surface, it might just sound like it&#8217;s spelling out the different stages of pregnancy like it does in Isaiah seven where it says that a virgin will conceive and bear a son. But in Isaiah seven, the verb used as hurrah, which just means conceive. But in Leviticus 12 here, the root word is actually coming from Zara, which means seed. The Hebrew here literally seems to be saying that a purification offering is needed when a woman receives seed and bears a male child. This might not seem like an important point. I mean, how else is a woman going to get pregnant? Well, there is one obvious exception, and early Christians like origin noticed remarkably quickly, I might add that Leviticus 12 literally does not apply to Mary because of the virgin birth.
Since Mary never received seed, she was free from the demands of the law, and yet she submits to the law. Anyway, that is, she knew she wasn&#8217;t bound by Leviticus 12 here, she could have just stayed home. So why doesn&#8217;t she? Well, for starters, it&#8217;s probably fair to point out that her neighbors wouldn&#8217;t have known the virginal nature of Jesus&#8217;s conception and birth. So rather than going around insisting, no, trust me, this was a virgin birth, she avoids scandalizing others by simply submitting to the law. And her son actually does something similar throughout his earthly ministry. For instance, in Matthew 17, Jesus points out that he and Peter are actually exempt from paying the temple tax yet to avoid giving scandal, causing offense, he performs a miracle and pays it for the two of them anyway. Now, this fact, Mary&#8217;s voluntary submission to the law would give rise to some beautiful reflections like this one from the venerable bead dearly beloved brothers.
Let us look more carefully at the words of the law which we have set before you, and we will see most clearly how Mary, God&#8217;s blessed mother and a perpetual virgin was along with the sun sheor most free from all objection to the law. Since the law says that a woman who had received seed and given birth was to be judged unclean, and that after a long period she, along with the offspring she had born were to be cleansed by victims offered to God. It is evident that the law does not describe as unclean that woman who without receiving man&#8217;s seed, gives birth as a virgin, nor does it so describe the son who is born to her, nor does it teach that she had to be cleansed by saving sacrificial offerings. So neither Mary nor Jesus are actually impure here. Neither one is in need of sacrificial offerings to purify them here.
And yet bead says, but as our Lord and Savior, who in his divinity was the one who gave the law when he appeared as a human being willed to be under the law so that he might redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. He&#8217;s quoting Galatians four there. So to his blessed mother, who by a singular privilege was above the law, nevertheless did not shun being made subject to the principles of the law for the sake of showing us an example of humility according to that saying of the wise man. And here he quotes, sir, act three. The greater you are, the more you should humble yourself in all things. So where is evangelicals like Geisler and McKinsey? See, and Mary&#8217;s purification a proof of her sinfulness. That argument is based on a misunderstanding of the attack and one which frankly treats Christmas as a sin that needs atoning.
The much older and better Christian reading is that Mary&#8217;s offering in the temple here points to her incredible humility and offering a purification sacrifice that strictly speaking, she didn&#8217;t need to offer. No, Luke two doesn&#8217;t show us that Mary was a sinner. But in fairness, Luke two by itself doesn&#8217;t show us that Mary wasn&#8217;t a sinner. I know many Protestants get very hung up on this Catholic teaching, understandably so, which is why you have people using Luke two as evidence that she did sin. They&#8217;re taught that Jesus was the only sinless human who ever lived. And since we&#8217;re not explicitly told in scripture that Mary never sinned or that she wasn&#8217;t immaculately conceived, therefore, it must not be true. But you may be surprised to find out that many early Christians believe that she was sinless. So if that&#8217;s not explicitly spelled out in scripture, why do so many early Christians believe she was without sin? Well, I explore one of those reasons right here. For Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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Does Luke 2 DISPROVE Mary’s Sinlessness?

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“Okay, religion is a human universal—something that’s found in all cultures. That doesn’t mean that it’s true, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Christianity is true.”
DEFENSE
Nobody would argue that because religion is a human universal, Christianity must be true. That would be excessively simplistic.
Instead, the argument is that the fact that religion is a human universal points to there being a religious dimension to the world.
The starting point for this argument is recognizing the universality of religion in human cultures. There have been no cultures without religion, either now or in the past. Even cultures that have tried to stamp out religion have not been able to do so. Further, as we observe elsewhere, children are naturally predisposed to religious belief (see Day 313). Religion is therefore a basic impulse that is rooted in human nature.
Other, similarly basic impulses tell us something about the world. The human impulses to eat and breathe point to the existence of food and oxygen. The impulses to sex and language point to the possibilities of reproduction and of communicating information in symbolic form.
Any basic impulse representing a human universal is rooted in human nature. Therefore, the religious impulse also tells us something about the world—that it has a religious or supernatural dimension.
This does not tell us much about that dimension. It does not tell us, for example, which God or gods are real or what the afterlife is like. But, in the same way, the mere impulse to eat does not tell us much about what kinds of food exist, and the mere impulse toward language does not tell us much about what kinds of information are out there.
If you want to know about the latter subjects, much more detailed studies have to be done, but the existence of the basic impulses tell us that the subjects are real.
In the same way, if you want to find out the details of the supernatural world, more detailed studies must be made and the whole enterprise of apologetics comes into play to prove or disprove particular religious claims. However, the religious impulse does point to the reality of the supernatural realm.
TIP
For more, see C.S. Lewis’s essay “The Weight of Glory.”
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Religion as a Human Universal

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“We have no evidence the saints are aware of our prayer requests. How would they even know? They are not omniscient.”
DEFENSE
We have evidence they are aware of our prayers.
You don’t have to know everything to know some things, so the saints don’t have to be omniscient to be aware of our prayer requests.
We do not know much about how the human intellect works in heaven, but the fact that heaven is a higher state than this life suggests we will have more rather than less awareness. This is also suggested because we will be made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4) and transformed to be like God by virtue of the beatific vision (1 John 3:2).
Scripture does not give many pictures of what life in heaven is like, but it shows saints and angels aware of what is happening on earth (Rev. 6:9–11, 7:13–14, 11:15–18, 16:5–6, 18:20).
The common understanding is that the saints are aware of our prayer requests through union with God. It is reasonable to suppose that, in the perfect state of heaven, people will have whatever information is relevant to them. Thus God can make a saint aware that someone is asking for his intercession.
However saints and angels are aware of our prayer requests, Scripture indicates that they are. In Revelation 5:8, the twenty-four elders, who appear to represent the leaders of the people of God in heaven, offer incense to God. We are told that the incense is “the prayers of the saints.” In Revelation 8:3–4, an angel offers incense that is mingled with “the prayers of all the saints.”
At that time, the term “saint” was commonly used to refer to liv- ing Christians (2 Cor. 1:1; Eph. 1:1; Phil. 1:1). It is natural to see these passages as depicting the inhabitants of heaven presenting the prayer requests of the saints on earth to God. This is surely part of what 8:3 means by the reference to the prayers of “all the saints.”
TIP 
If it is suggested that these passages don’t deal with prayer requests made to those in heaven, then our point is made even stronger, for the passages would show that those in heaven were aware of prayer requests that weren’t even addressed to them!
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Can the Saints Hear Us?

Cy Kellett discusses with chaplain and Norbertine priest, Fr. Hugh Barbour, and Chris Check, president of Catholic Answers, the encouraging and significant realities of the hope of Christ in the world today.

Signs of Hope

In this episode Trent shows why studies of intercessory prayer can never prove the atheist claim that &#8220;nothing fails like prayer.&#8221;
Transcription:
You often hear atheists say “nothing fails like prayer” and some even claim that scientific studies have proven that prayer doesn’t work. But in today’s episode I’m going to show why science not only hasn’t disproven the efficacy of prayer, but that it is impossible for science to do that. Here’s Hemant Mehta describing the typical kind of study on prayer that atheists often cite
CLIP:
That&#8217;s kind of like the ultimate prayer test, isn&#8217;t it? If all these people are praying for you to get better, and let&#8217;s say they&#8217;re not praying for the person next to you who has the exact same problem and you got better, wouldn&#8217;t that suggest that prayer had something to do with it? It&#8217;s kind of like this ultimate science experiment. Well, guess what? They&#8217;ve done that experiment. They&#8217;ve done controlled experiments at least as much as they could be controlled anyway, where some group of patients in a hospital are prayed for by strangers and they don&#8217;t know about it, and those same strangers do not pray for the control group and they see which group does better. Guess what? There&#8217;s no difference. Who would&#8217;ve thought? So? Look, prayer doesn&#8217;t help.
But there are three problems with these studies that make them useless when it comes to studying the efficacy of prayer. 
First, there’s the problem of an impossible control group. 
In an experiment, the control group are the subjects that don’t receive the variable under testing. When it comes to testing prayer, the control group would be a set of people who are not receiving intercessory healing prayers. But it’s impossible to isolate any group of people from prayer. 
Of course, scientists create divide a group of sick people into two groups and tell a specific set of volunteers to only pray for one of the groups of sick people. The scientists would then observe the patients the volunteers are praying for and see if they do better, the same, or worse than the so called “control” group. 
But this wouldn’t be a true control group, because there is no way to isolate them from receiving any form of intercessory prayer. What if the friends and family of the people in this group are praying for them anyways? What if a holy woman in a very rural area on the other side of the world prays for the healing of those “who have no one to pray for them”? 
I can easily see God dignifying the prayers of such a holy, unknown woman by making her the mighty cause that brought healing for people who were being used in an experiment. Participants in prayer studies often complain about the scripted prayers the researchers given them, so it makes sense God would give preference to the genuine prayers of a holy person. James 5:16 even says the prayers of a righteous person are very powerful and on the Sermon on the Mount Jesus condemned vain repetitions in prayer as if mechanical recitations forced God to act. 
In fact, God’s attitude towards human beings trying to test his willingness to answer prayer brings us to the second problem with prayer studies, the problem of an omniscient test subject 
Testing the effects of intercessory prayer isn’t the same as testing an inanimate force like gravity, because God isn’t a force that is automatically activated when enough prayers are uttered. God has a will and so he might choose to honor or not honor certain requests made through prayer. In fact, it’s been said that God always answers our prayers—it’s just that sometimes the answer is “no.” The idea of testing God’s willingness to answer prayer is even condemned in scripture when the Devil says Jesus should jump off the temple since the Bible says God will send angels to prevent his holy one from being harmed. Jesus shuts down the Devil’s temptation by declaring, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” (Luke 4:12). 
Now, science does test the reactions of people and not just forces. Psychologists and sociologists do this all the time, but their experiments must be blind or even double blind. This means the participants, and sometimes even the researchers, can’t know who is receiving the test variable otherwise their knowledge will affect the outcome of the experiment. 
So when it comes to an experiment on prayer, the person being observed can’t know people are praying for him. That’s because studies have shown that people who know they are receiving prayers tend to have worse health outcomes because they are anxious about their condition being so bad that prayer volunteers have been brought in to help them. 
However, a prayer study is, whether it admits it or not, testing God to see if God will answer prayers. But just as when humans know they are in an experiment this can alter their behavior and the experiment’s results, the same is true for God. The only prayer study that would count would be one where God doesn’t know he’s part of an experiment on his willingness to answer prayer. But that’s impossible given God’s omniscience, or his being all-knowing. Here’s an example to explain how omniscience messes up any kind of prayer study. 
Imagine we did an experiment on a celebrity to see which kinds of fan mail he responds to. If he knows he’s part of an experiment, he may alter his response to satisfy the experimenters. Or he may not participate at all because he’s indignant about his response being part of some experiment and not a genuine response to his fans. 
Now, a person testing prayer might try to get around this by saying prayer experiments have nothing to do with God. The experiments only test if the physical act of prayer we observe has any effect on healing people. I mean, you could do a study like that and Christians would agree that merely saying words into the void doesn’t do anything. Such a study would also disprove New Age fads like The Secret that make it seem like you can manifest or will reality to be a certain way.
Prayers are not magical incantations that manipulate reality. They are just requests for help. The word “prayer” comes from the Latin precarae which means to make a request. In Old English this could be a request made to anyone but over time it came to mean making a request of God even though it traditionally had a much wider usage, which is why Catholics speak of praying to Mary and the saints. 
Whether scientists admit it or not, everybody interested in prayer studies is assuming that what is being tested is whether it is more likely God will heal someone based on other people asking God to heal that person. But since God is both all-knowing and not an empirically observable part of the natural order, science cannot study what God will or won’t do. All scientists can do is make a non-scientific inference about God’s will based on extremely selective results in a prayer study. And this brings us to the third and final problem with prayer studies: The Problem of Interpretation 
Any study on intercessory prayer will yield one of three results: prayer has a negative effect on a patient’s health, prayer has no effect on their health, or prayer has a positive effect. Regardless of what outcome we observe, this can’t tell us anything about God’s existence, nature, or will. 
For example, suppose a truly blind prayer study showed that intercessory prayer results in worse health outcomes for the recipients of prayer. This has been observed in some outlying prayer studies but suppose it were consistently observed. What would we conclude? 
Is God making the patients worse to bring about a greater good? Is the devil using his powerful yet non-miraculous powers to make people sicker in order to ruin our faith in God? Is the creator of the universe evil rather than good? Does karma punish organized scientific prayers and reward genuine ones? 
Science can’t determine which of these explanations is the correct one because science is restricted to observing the natural world. Even if a prayer study found a positive correlation between intercessory prayer and healing, it wouldn’t show that God exists. I’ll admit, such an outcome would bolster my faith at first, but this outcome would be plagued by problems similar to those that accompanied a study that showed prayer caused negative effects. 
Is God the cause of this statistically anomalous healing? Is it a psychic mutant? Aliens? Is it an “evil-creator” who heals patients in order to bring about a “greater evil?” Is it an impersonal “karma field?” 
In these cases, science could only show us that intercessory prayer caused a certain kind of physical effect, but any speculations about the relationship between the cause (i.e., prayer) and the effect (i.e., healing) would belong to the realm of philosophy or religion, not science. That’s why in narrow circumstances with more data the Church can reach conclusions about miraculous healings. In these cases, the Church can use sound reasoning to determine that there is enough of a religious context like a saintly life of the intercessor, to attribute a miracle to the person’s intercession. This isn’t scientific proof, but there is no scientific proof that all our knowledge comes from scientific proof so that’s not a good objection. 
So what if scientific studies show that intercessory prayer made no difference in a patient’s health? This seems to be the result of a large study of prayer called the STEP project. Atheists might say that this proves that “nothing fails like prayer,” because if God did not exist we would expect intercessory prayer to not have any measurable effects. But this is the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. It goes like this: 
1. If A, then B. 
2. B. Therefore, A 
Why is this a fallacy? See this example: 
1. If I’m in San Francisco, then I am in California. 
2. I am in California. Therefore, I am in San Francisco. 
Of course, I could be in Los Angeles or Yosemite and still be in California without being in San Francisco. In this argument, the consequent proposition cannot be used to support the truth of the antecedent proposition. 
However, It could be used to deny the truth of the antecedent proposition (which is also called modus tollens) by saying, “I am not in California, therefore I am not in San Francisco,” but it can’t be used to prove the truth of the antecedent. When we plug in the atheist argument from prayer, we get the same problem: 
1. If God does not exist, then prayers made in scientific studies will not be answered. 
2. Prayers made in scientific studies are not answered, therefore God does not exist. 
God can still exist even if certain requests made in prayer are not answered. After all, God may have good reasons for not granting those requests, and he may be answering other prayers that are not being catalogued by scientists. Since God not an automatic force that acts in statistically predictable ways, extremely limited studies using some intercessory prayers cannot be generalized to give us conclusions about the efficacy of prayer for the billions of people who pray to God outside of the hundreds involved in a few studies. 
But that doesn’t mean we can’t know anything about how prayer affects us in our own lives. God could reveal himself to you in a subjective way that you can’t prove to others but that doesn’t disprove it for you. If you were falsely convicted of a crime based on good objective evidence, that wouldn’t justify you rejecting the subjective evidence of your own knowledge that you are innocent just because you can’t objectively share it with other people. 
And sometimes we do pray for help and God does not respond. And that sucks. But that doesn’t mean there is no God or that God doesn’t care. Sometimes when we ask for something we are asking for something that is bad for us or at least not good for us but we can’t see that. James 4:3 says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
But in other cases we aren’t asking for something selfish and God still does not grant our prayer. This is where Faith sustains us and we have to trust God who sees life from an eternal perspective we can’t comprehend. Romans 8:28 says, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” 
St. Paul asked the Lord three times to remove a thorn in his side, which could have been a physical ailment, or even a person causing Paul a lot of trouble and the Lord did not answer Paul’s request. Here’s how St. Paul puts in 2 Corinthians 12: 
Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8-10).
Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

Why Science Can NEVER Disprove Prayer

What is a Good Translation of the Bible?

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“Solomon’s temple held a metal basin or ‘sea’ used for ceremonial washings. According to Scripture, it was ten cubits across and ‘a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference’ (1 Kings 7:23; 2 Chron. 4:2). This implies that the value of π (pi) is 3, but that is incorrect. We know that π is an irrational number slightly greater than 3.14159.”
DEFENSE
Thank you, Mr. Spock. This confuses an approximation with an error.
If the sea was exactly ten cubits across then it would have a radius (r) of 5 cubits, and if it were perfectly circular then its circumference (C) would be just over 31.4159 cubits, according to the formula for the circumference of a circle, C=2πr.
How are we to account for the difference of just over 1.4 cubits be- tween the biblical and predicted values?
Some note that the Bible says the sea had a curved rim (1 Kings 7:26; 2 Chron. 4:5). Second-century mathematician Rabbi Nehemiah pro- posed the difference is because the sea’s circumference was measured around the inside of the rim while the diameter was measured from the outside of the rim (see Petr Beckmann, A History of Pi, chapter 7).
This is possible, but there is a simpler solution: We are dealing with approximations.
The cubit (the length from a man’s elbow to middle fingertip) is itself an approximation. So were most ancient measurements. If the circumference of the sea were exactly 30 cubits and its diameter thus turned out to be 9.5493 cubits, the ancient writer would have simply rounded to 10. Most likely, both the diameter and circumference are rounded, approximate values.
Then there is the problem of doing the measurement. The reference to a measuring line suggests someone measured it using a line, but did they get the line to fit the rim exactly? If they had men holding the line at points around the rim, it likely would not have fit exactly, resulting in an approximate measurement. Further, we’re assuming the sea was perfectly circular, which it may not have been.
Ultimately, since π is an irrational number, everything using it must involve an approximation. The biblical author has simply chosen a different level of approximation than the modern critic. The fact that the biblical author’s math works within the level of approximation he selects shows he is giving an honest and accurate report.
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The Bible and Pi

Leviticus 18:22 condemns same-sex activity. But who cares? After all, Leviticus condemns things like eating shrimp. So is there any legitimate reason to accept parts of Leviticus as still binding, while treating other parts as obsolete?

Why Care What Leviticus Says About Homosexuality?

Why is it necessary to follow the Church Sexual ethics? Why is the Church in my bedroom?

Why don’t protestants think birth control is immoral?

I got engaged in February and I am a parishioner of an SSPX chapel. I do not have schismatic intent and wondering if there is a canonical process for a situation like mine?

To get conversation going I play trivia with people. I ask them about the last supper, then proceed to ask about the last breakfast and last lunch. Do you think this is a good approach to evangelize?

How do we know the apostles gave their authority to their successors?

&#8220;Why is it necessary to follow the Church&#8217;s sexual ethics?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the Church&#8217;s role in personal morality, addressing concerns about authority and its relevance in private life. Other topics include the differing views on birth control among Protestants and the canonical processes for those engaged in SSPX chapels.
<a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/radioclub?email">Join the Catholic Answers Live Club Newsletter</a>
Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>

Why Follow Church Sexual Ethics? Authority and Birth Control

How do we know Papacy in its current form is what God intended. It seems like Peter was supposed to be first among equals.  Polycarp and Anicetus were equals.

&#8220;Why Aren&#8217;t You Catholic?&#8221; addresses common concerns about the Catholic faith, including the feeling of not being forgiven in confession and the potential consequences in purgatory. The discussion also touches on the nature of the papacy and its divine intention, as well as misconceptions about a works-based gospel. Additionally, practical advice is offered for introducing friends to Catholicism.
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Why Arent You Catholic? Confession, Purgatory, and Papacy

When Were the Gospels Written? (featuring Adolf von Harnack and Bart Ehrman)

If Ghosts may be souls from purgatory whom God has permitted for a particular reason to appear and interact with the living. Why don’t all ghosts ask for Masses to be said for them?

Why, in your opinion, would God allow hauntings which act as a non-interactive recording or psychic imprint, which seem to repeat over and over again in the same place, and may even be left by people who are still alive (as opposed to singularly unique...

What are the moral implications of using new technologies in the workplace, knowing that it could lead to other positions becoming obsolete and other employees being laid off? Example: Someone needs to use AI or other forms of automation to meet the re...

Does the phenomenon of dead bodies being incorruptible only happen to saints, or does it happen to non-Catholics as well?

Can you explore Catholic themes and spirituality in the Star Wars universe? The chosen one, the Force, jedi order, symbolism, sacrifice of Vader, redemption, etc. I know George Lucas is hardly Catholic, but perhaps he unwittingly drew on the things fou...

Are mine and my husband’s guardian angels friends? Is my guardian angel friends with my children’s angels? Or is my angel like a mentor to my children’s angels?

If one’s guardian angel were asked to console Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, would the angel be allowed to do it?

&#8220;Do ghosts ask for prayers?&#8221; This episode delves into the intriguing question of whether ghosts, potentially souls from purgatory, seek Masses for their peace. Additionally, we explore why God might allow hauntings that seem like repetitive imprints, the moral implications of workplace automation, and the fascinating intersection of Catholic themes in the Star Wars universe.
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Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>

Do Ghosts Ask for Prayers? – Weird Questions AMA @JimmyAkin

Tim Staples shows how Mary asking Gabriel how she could conceive a son reveals that she and Joseph had pledged perpetual virginity through their entire marriage.

Did Mary and Joseph Vow to Live Chastely in Their Marriage?

Featured Guests: Fr. Hugh Barbour, Tim Staples, Jimmy Akin, Karlo Broussard, Don Johnson
Featured Questions:
<ul>
<li>01:09 &#8211; Do we reap the rewards from good works done in the state of grace no matter how often we fall? – Tim Staples</li>
<li>05:28 &#8211; How can we deal with skeptical teenagers? – Don Johnson</li>
<li>10:43 &#8211; Why do Catholics pray to the Virgin Mary and other saints? – Karlo Broussard</li>
<li>15:18 &#8211; How do Catholics deal with anger? – Jimmy Akin</li>
<li>18:54 &#8211; Is Jesus God’s answer to Adam and Eve? – Fr. Hugh Barbour</li>
<li>20:17 &#8211; How can we explain that confession is necessary for mortal sins but not venial ones? – Time Staples</li>
<li>23:24 &#8211; Is belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist the major difference between Catholics and Protestants? – Jimmy Akin</li>
</ul>

Catholic Answers Live TV | Season 2 | Episode 1

<div>Is the Flame of Love an approved Catholic apostolate? Have the related and reported private revelations by Elizabeth Kindelmann (1913–1985) received approval as supernatural in origin from the Holy See or some other lawful Church authority?</div><div>First, Cardinal Peter Erdo of Budapest, Hungary, <a href="https://flameoflove.us/church-pronouncements/">has approved</a> the Flame of Love as <a href="https://flameoflove.us/about/church-approval-questions-and-answers/">a private association of the faithful</a>.
The apostolate is based on the private revelations that Kindelmann reportedly received from Jesus and the Blessed Mother in the form of locutions. In contrast to an apparition, a locution is a supernatural communication to a person’s ear, imagination, or directly to his intellect.
Kindelmann was a <a href="https://www.theflameoflove.org/en/spiritual-diary/biography-of-elizabeth-kindelmann">poor Hungarian widow</a> who raised six children. Her reported supernatural messages were compiled in a diary, which Cardinal Erdo has granted <a href="https://flameoflove.us/about/brief-history-and-overview/">an imprimatur</a>. An imprimatur is a Church certification that a book’s contents contain nothing contrary to faith and morals, but it does not evaluate other aspects of a book, including whether any reported private revelations in them are supernatural in origin.
Regarding reported private revelations in general, whether apparitions or locutions, they typically aren’t reviewed by the Holy See. They’re always reviewed first by the local diocesan bishop. If the revelations are judged worthy of belief by the local bishop, the faithful are free to publicly promote them and related persons.
Given their fruit, some locally approved private revelations have also received additional affirmation by the Holy See, including visits by popes on their apostolic trips around the world. Examples include the Marian apparitions of Fatima, Lourdes, and Guadalupe.
On their website, the Flame of Love apostolate does not provide any official documentation that Cardinal Erdo—or some other Church official he has deputed—has determined that Kindelmann’s reported locutions are supernatural in character.
To be clear, the Flame of Love does not formally assert on its website that the Church has determined that Kindelmann’s reported locutions are supernatural in character. The apostolate does, however, otherwise give the impression that her reported locutions have already received such Church approval. <a href="https://flameoflove.us/church-pronouncements/">For example</a>:
<blockquote>Elizabeth Kindelmann was a laywoman from Budapest, Hungary who died in 1985. She, like St. Faustina, was given a mission by God and His Mother for his Church to emphasize a special grace from God for his Church. She was always obedient to priests and bishops. Our Lady told her to gather twelve special pastors, four from within Budapest and eight from outside the city to start a Movement to spread this special Grace to the whole world. Elizabeth was instructed to keep a diary, which explains the special grace, which God calls the “grace from the Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” and “the greatest grace given to mankind since the Incarnation” (emphases added).
<a href="https://flameoflove.us/about/read-the-diary/">The urgent messages of Jesus and Mary</a> call all of us to participate in the salvation of souls (emphasis added).</blockquote>
St. Faustina’s Divine Mercy messages have received formal Church approval as being of supernatural origin (worthy of belief in that regard), first by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, and then as Pope St. John Paul II. This has not yet occurred regarding Kindelmann’s reported locutions. Consequently, although the Catholic faithful are certainly free to participate in the Flame of Love apostolate and benefit from its doctrinally sound content, I urge caution regarding attributing a supernatural character to Kindelmann’s reported locutions or any others that have not received formal Church approval.
For more information on private revelation, please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/private-revelation">our tract on the subject</a> and also our <a href="https://www.catholic.com/search?q=private%20revelation">other online resources</a>.
</div>

The Flame of Love Apostolate and Elizabeth Kindelmann’s Related and Reported Private Revelations

In this episode Trent sits down with Geoff from “a Goy for Jesus” and Steve Christie, two Protestants who critique his claim that Protestants act like atheists when they make arguments against the Catholic faith.

DIALOGUE: Do Protestants Act like Atheists?

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reflects on the recent pilgrimage in Oklahoma he and his son took part in that included walking 22 miles and worshipping at the Clear creek Monastery.

FFAF: Reflections on the “Three Hearts” Pilgrimage

Full clip: https://youtu.be/blzZm-80XVA

"I love it when people accuse us of cannibalism." -@ShamelessPopery Why? Because we know as a matter of historical fact that the early Christians were accused of cannibalism for their beliefs on the Eucharist. You can see this in an ancient document called "Octavius" by a guy named Minicius Felix who is writing against the church and accusing Christians of being cannibals. His claim is that they cover baby Jesus with grain and then eat him. So he's apparently confusing the nativity scene and the Eucharist, but you can see the real thing he's getting wro... <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls3x74JB4SE">Read more on Catholic.com</a>

"I love it when people accuse us of cannibalism." -@ShamelessPopery

<div>Is there any policy or normative from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concerning recording a baptism of homosexual couples’ children?</div><div>The USCCB&#8217;s 2006 document <a href="http://www.usccb.org/about/doctrine/publications/homosexual-inclination-guidelines-pastoral-care.cfm">Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care</a> states:
<blockquote>Baptism of children in the care of same-sex couples presents a serious pastoral concern. Nevertheless, the Church does not refuse the sacrament of baptism to these children, but there must be a well-founded hope that the children will be brought up in the Catholic religion. In those cases where baptism is permitted, pastoral ministers should exercise prudential judgment when preparing baptismal ceremonies. Also, in preparing the baptismal record, a distinction should be made between natural parents and adoptive parents (p. 21).</blockquote>
The footnote for the part regarding the distinction between natural parents and adoptive parents references the USCCB&#8217;s <a href="http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/canon-law/complementary-norms/canon-877-3-recording-the-baptism-of-adopted-children.cfm">C</a><a href="http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/canon-law/complementary-norms/canon-877-3-recording-the-baptism-of-adopted-children.cfm">omplementary Norms for the Recording of Baptisms for Adoptive Parents</a>. In these complementary norms, the USCCB requires parishes to note that the adoptive parents are the adoptive parents and not the natural parents. However, no mention of the adoption is to be included on any issued baptismal certificates.
While not officially a rule set forth by the USCCB, most dioceses change the titles of mother and father to simply &#8220;parent&#8221; when a same-sex couple has a child baptized.
</div>

What About Baptism of Same-Sex Couples’ Children?

In this episode Trent rebuts a documentary produced by the atheist Youtuber skydivephil that tries to refute the kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. Part one focuses on the philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe.

REBUTTING An Atheistic Documentary on the Kalam Argument – Part 1

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DAY 67
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CHALLENGE
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“The sacrament of confirmation is an invention of men with no biblical basis.
DEFENSE
The sacrament of confirmation is recorded in Scripture.
The laying on of hands is used in several Christian rites, including healing (Mark 6:5; Acts 28:8) and ordination for ministry (Acts 6:1–6, 13:2–3). It is also used in Christian initiation.
The book of Hebrews lists the laying on of hands among the “elementary doctrines of Christ”—basic things a convert would need instruction on—alongside repentance, faith, baptism, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment (Heb. 6:1–2).
We see it used in Christian initiation in Acts 8, where Philip the evangelist (cf. Acts 6:5, 21:8–9) converts a number of Samaritans. Al- though he baptized them (Acts 8:12), he did not have the ability to lay hands on them. Thus two apostles—Peter and John—came from Jerusalem and prayed “that they might receive the Holy Spirit; for it had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit” (8:15–17).
We see the same in Acts 19, where Paul administers Christian baptism to a group and then lays his hands upon them, which results in the Holy Spirit coming upon them (19:5–6).
The Holy Spirit is associated with and received in baptism (Matt. 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; John 1:33; Acts 2:38; 1 Cor. 12:13), but the passages above show there was also a laying on of hands for further strengthening with the Holy Spirit as part of Christian initiation.
The passages also show this laying on of hands was distinct from baptism and that not all ministers performed it. Philip the evangelist baptized but did not lay on hands, while higher-ranking ministers, such as Peter, John, and Paul, both baptized and laid on hands.
“Very early, the better to signify the gift of the Holy Spirit, an anointing with perfumed oil (chrism) was added to the laying on of hands” (CCC 1289). This rite is today known in the West as confirmation and in the East as chrismation.
Today as then, not all ministers are able to celebrate it. Bishops—the successors of the apostles—are able, as are priests under certain conditions, but other ministers are not.
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The Sacrament of Confirmation

What does the Church Say About Early Genesis?

<div>An atheist tells me that the original gospels were never found and they are based on word of mouth accounts.</div><div>First, convey to your atheist friend that original copies of Plato, Aristotle and Homer’s works don’t exist, yet no credible historian questions their historical authenticity, including whether these prominent ancient men wrote their respective works. Similarly, while we don’t have the original copies of the gospels, we do have rather early manuscripts and fragments, and many when compared to the number of other ancient written works.
In addition, St. Matthew and St. John were eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus and St. Mark and St. Luke relied on the reports of eyewitnesses.
For more on the origin and authorship of the four gospels, please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-matthew-mark-luke-and-john-really-write-the-gospels">this article from our Catholic Answers Magazine</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/where-are-the-original-scriptures">this excerpt from Father Henry Graham’s book Where We Got The Bible</a>.
In addition, explain to your atheist friend that the Catholic Church does not rely on the Bible alone, given that the Church existed for decades before all of the New Testament books were written and centuries before they were officially compiled into the New Testament canon, not to mention that members of the Church wrote the New Testament books and Church authorities determined that they were indeed inspired by the Holy Spirit and thus worthy of inclusion in the biblical canon.
There’s no doubt that the Catholic Church existed from the time of Jesus, as various historical sources, Christian and non-Christian attest. For more on the bona fides of the Catholic Church, please see our tract <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/pillar-of-fire-pillar-of-truth">Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth</a> and also my book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/what-did-jesus-do-the-biblical-roots-of-the-catholic-church/">What Did Jesus Do?: The Biblical Roots of the Catholic Church</a>.
</div>

No Original Copies of Gospels? And No Eyewitnesses to Jesus’ Life?

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The early Christians didn’t have a New Testament. They had the Church. @RuslanKD

In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent breaks down the weirdest phobias and also shares some of his own weird fears.

FFAF: The Weirdest Phobias (Including Mine)

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent explores wild theories about lost time and the lost &#8220;Tartarian empire&#8221;.

FFAF: The Tartarian and “Phantom Time” Conspiracies

Do you believe the same things about the Eucharist (or Lord&#8217;s Supper) that Jesus taught and that the Apostles and earliest Christians believed? Here are 5 ways of knowing &#8212; the true teaching is strange, sacrificial, serious, sacramental, and even SHOCKING.

The Bible on the Eucharist: Strange, Sacrificial, Serious, Sacramental, and Shocking

Are Catholics the only members of the Body of Christ?

What does Revelation mean when it says that those who overcome will be the ones to rule in the new heaven and earth with Christ?

How is it possible for Jesus to offer himself up if he offered himself up first at the last supper but did not die till the next day?

Mat. 25 talking about the sheep and the goats. How are they saved by grace if it feels like they were separated and judged based on works?

Gen.6:1-2 What are the nephilim? What interpretation does the Catholic Church take?

Why would Jesus so pure be tempted by the devil?

Who are the sheep and the goats?

Do we know what happened to the cross immediately after the crucifixion and where it is today?

It feels like the Church has moved away from numerology in the bible? Why should Catholics avoid it?

Who are the “sheep and the goats” in Matthew 25, and are we judged by works or saved by grace? In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Catholic Answers apologists unpack this key passage before addressing other challenging questions from Scripture. They explain what Revelation means about reigning with Christ, how Jesus could offer Himself at the Last Supper before the crucifixion, and what the Church teaches about the mysterious Nephilim in Genesis 6. Additional topics include why Jesus allowed Himself to be tempted, what happened to the cross after the crucifixion, and why Catholics are cautious about numerology in biblical interpretation. A thoughtful discussion on salvation, Scripture, and Catholic theology.

Who Are the Sheep and the Goats? Bible Questions

Do you want to “get away from it all”? In this episode Trent takes you on a tour to the most remote places on earth and the unusual ways people live in these locales.

The Most Remote Places on Earth

Who Wrote the Books of Moses?

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer Horn joins Cy Kellett to tackle the question of authority within the Church, specifically the role of Peter as the rock.
Transcript:
Caller: Your program has been really great in helping me grow, but I&#8217;m still not Catholic, so you guys need to do a better job, apparently.
Cy: All right, thank you for the progress report. We&#8217;ll do better.
Caller: I like history. So I look at history a lot and I don&#8217;t see the line going from Peter to the Bishop of Rome. Also, with the popes going between France and Italy and multiple popes, it seems like there&#8217;s too many problems there for me. So it&#8217;s like, okay, but
Joe: let&#8217;s start with a couple foundational pieces. Is it fair to say biblically that Jesus chooses a top-down structure of leadership for his church?
Caller: Yes, but he puts Christ as the head of the church, not the bishop in Rome.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Christ is the ultimate foundation of the church. We would not want to follow someone who thought he could replace Christ.
But in the same way that, you know, if you said, like, who is the head of your family? One answer is going to be you. One answer is going to be God the Father. Right?
But hopefully you don&#8217;t confuse in what sense you&#8217;re the head and what sense God&#8217;s the head. But like St. Paul can say, for this reason I bow the knee before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. Like, every fatherhood comes from the fatherhood of God.
Well, similarly, Peter being the rock comes from Christ being the rock. It&#8217;s not a rival rock. So you&#8217;ll find the same kind of language. And you can go back even to the Old Testament. Abraham is described as a rock, but that doesn&#8217;t replace the fact that God is the rock of Israel. It&#8217;s not an either/or in that sense.
But there is rock language used to describe Peter. In fact, his name is changed from Simon to Peter. And Peter means rock in Aramaic. It&#8217;s just very simply like, you are rock, and upon this rock I&#8217;ll build my church.
Really, before I even get to that, I just need to establish there is top-down leadership first, and second, Peter seems to have this very special authority within it.
So Christian leadership is servant leadership. Jesus tells the apostles this when they&#8217;re fighting at the Last Supper about which of them is the greatest. He gives himself as the example and says, behold, he among you is one who serves.
But then he does affirm that the 12 are called to be the servant leaders of the church that they are. He says, I have prepared 12 thrones for you. He says, as my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you. You may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.
This is what I mean by the top-down kind of monarchical leadership of the Church. It looks like a kingdom; it doesn&#8217;t look like a democracy.
The very next verse, he singles out one disciple, Simon Peter, and says, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, but that&#8217;s you all, that he might sift you all like wheat.
Then he switches from the plural to the singular and says, but I&#8217;ve prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brethren.
So all the 12 are to be servant leaders of the Church. One of the 12, Simon Peter, is to be the servant of the servants of God. This is the basic structure of the church.
And you can go back and look at the structure of the family, you can look at the structure of Adam and Eve, of the patriarchs, of the prophets, of the priests, of the kings of Israel. And the idea that there&#8217;s always one person with whom the buck stops is this recurring theme in the plan of God in salvation history.
So then the question just becomes, does that suddenly change after the time of Christ for some reason? And the answer is no.
You asked about two specific historical events. One, how do we know this authority continues on from Peter? And we know this in several different ways. You can find references to this.
For instance, when St. Ignatius talks about the Church of Rome presiding in charity in his letter to them in the year 107, you can find, in the year 96, Clement of Rome writing to resolve a controversy in Corinth, even while an apostle is alive, they&#8217;ve written to the Romans.
But maybe the clearest example is Irenaeus in about the year 180 when he talks about the necessity, he says, of the Church of Rome. He calls it the very great, the very ancient and universally known Church, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul.
And he says it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority. And then in the next paragraph, he traces one by one every bishop of Rome from the time of Peter and Paul to the time of Eleutherius in 180.
And so we don&#8217;t just know that the authority passes from Peter to the successors. We can tell you who they are by name, and we can tell you, not because of some late medieval legend or something, but from Christians in the 100s who grew up knowing people who were discipled by the apostles, like Polycarp.
So that&#8217;s the first part. Like, do we have clear historical evidence of this authority passing along through the successors in Rome? We do.
The second is, as you rightly point out, there are these controversies in the 15th century. So to make a long story medium, the Pope is elected Pope, but there are cardinals who voted for him who claim that, oh well, we didn&#8217;t feel free to elect the Pope.
And so they say that the papal election was invalid and they try to hold another election. They don&#8217;t have the authority to do this because there already is a Pope. You can have a papal conclave when the Pope is dead. You can&#8217;t just have a new papal conclave when you don&#8217;t like who the Pope is.
And so this new anti-Pope starts claiming to be the Pope, and he&#8217;s not. And then another group of cardinals gets together in Italy and Pisa and says, well, we&#8217;re going to reject both these guys and get a new Pope so that it&#8217;s all clean.
And this, of course, doesn&#8217;t solve the problem and makes it worse because now you have the real Pope in Rome, you got a fake Pope in France, and you&#8217;ve got a fake Pope in Pisa.
This was a confusing, messy situation. It embarrassed the church; it undermined the Church&#8217;s authority in a lot of ways, but it doesn&#8217;t invalidate the existence of the Papacy.
Like, you can have counterfeit money and it doesn&#8217;t mean money&#8217;s not real. You can have two different people who claim they&#8217;re married to the same woman, and it doesn&#8217;t mean she doesn&#8217;t have a husband.
Like, there might just be times where there&#8217;s a question about the validity of one marriage, you know, so should an annulment be granted? There might be times where two different people claim to have won a presidential election, but that doesn&#8217;t mean that the answer is that there&#8217;s no President.
So it was a bad moment in terms of the legacy of the Church, but there was always a Pope throughout that.
Cy: You can hear the music. So we gotta leave it there. I&#8217;m gonna send you Pope Peter, Joe&#8217;s book, if you like it. And because you&#8217;re in Peoria, Illinois, the hometown of our own Luke Bender, who runs our YouTube, we&#8217;ll send you another of Joe&#8217;s books. How about *The Eucharist is Really Jesus*?

I’m Not Catholic Cause Jesus is the Head of the Church…

In this episode Trent shares his recent work on the Counsel of Trent YouTube channel where he engages in rebuttals of videos that are critical of the Catholic faith, including Jeff Durbin’s defense of sola scriptura and Mike Winger’s criticism of the papacy.

Protestant Pastors vs. the Catholic Faith

FFAF: How to Spend Money in an Evil World

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent discusses the importance of both law enforcement and our constitutional rights. He also gives some tips on what to do if you are stopped by police or even arrested and accused of a crime.

What to do if You’re Arrested

In this episode Trent sits down with Jon Steingard, the former front man for the popular Christian pop/punk band Hawk Nelson, to discuss why he left the Faith. Together they discuss the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and Bible difficulties.

DIALOGUE: Why a Christian Pop/Punk Star Lost His Faith (with Jon Steingard)

I’ve heard that Catholics put more of their faith in the Church over Jesus. What is your response to that?

How do we know that the brothers of Jesus were actually cousins?

Are there historical sources for Jew temple virgins?

Is there anything I can say or do other than pray, to help a loved one soften their hearts on their belief that the Church is unwelcoming?

Some claim Catholics trust the Church more than Christ—but is that true? We explore this common misunderstanding along with questions on Jesus’ “brothers,” historical temple virgins, and how to reach out to loved ones who feel unwelcome in the Church.
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Do Catholics Put More Faith in the Church Than in Jesus?

In this episode Trent defends a contingency argument for the existence of God and includes sound bites from scientists like Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carroll, and Max Tegmark to make his case.
<a href="https://www.catholicanswersspeakers.com/trent-horn-speaker/">Book Trent</a> to speak at your parish or next event. 
Want more from Trent Horn? 
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<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="4" data-aria-level="1"><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/answering-atheism-how-to-make-the-case-for-god-with-logic-and-charity/">Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity</a> </li>
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How “Stuff” Leads to the Existence of God

I have many protestants tell me that they would never become Catholic because the Church teaches salvation outside the Church.

I became Protestant in 2021 and am now looking into Catholicism. How do I process my past life?

If Peter was in Rome then why did Paul write the letter to the Romans?

Do Christian who are hostile to the Catholic Church still have invincible ignorance?

&#8220;Can salvation happen outside the Church?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the Catholic understanding of salvation, addressing concerns from Protestants about Church teachings. Other topics include navigating a past as a Protestant while exploring Catholicism and the reasoning behind Paul&#8217;s letter to the Romans despite Peter&#8217;s presence in the city.
<a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/radioclub?email">Join the Catholic Answers Live Club Newsletter</a>
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Can Salvation Happen Outside the Church? Peter and Paul

<div>Why does the Catholic Church prohibit the faithful from eating meat on Ash Wednesday and Lenten Fridays, while permitting the consumption of fish? And how could the Church—for many years—require the faithful to abstain from meat on all Fridays throughout the year under pain of mortal sin, and yet more recently restrict its rule to only Lenten Fridays? And how can what was a mortal sin for many years suddenly become not a mortal sin?</div><div>
Dietary disciplines are by nature changeable, as Jesus lifts Old Covenant dietary norms in the New Covenant era (Acts 10). So too have the leaders of his Church in the New Covenant, as we have observed with changes to Lenten Friday norms over the years. Further, the sin in violating these norms is disobedience to God, not simply eating certain types of food, as if their consumption were intrinsically bad.
In Europe, “meat” has historically referred to the flesh of warm-blooded land animals: e.g., beef, lamb, poultry, and pork. These were considered luxury or celebratory foods, so giving them up was a real sacrifice. In contrast, fish was typically considered a “poor man’s food,” and thus not associated with festivity.
In addition, some think the practice to abstain from meat—and yet permit fish—on Ash Wednesday and Lenten Fridays dates only to the 1500s, or perhaps later medieval times. However, it was well&#8211;established in the 400s:
For example, the historian Socrates (Hist. Eccl., V, 22) tells of the practice in the fifth century:
Some abstain from every sort of creature that has life, while others of all the living creatures eat of fish only. Others eat birds as well as fish, because, according to the Mosaic account of the Creation, they too sprang from the water; others abstain from fruit covered with a hard shell and from eggs. Some eat dry bread only, others not even that; others again when they have fasted to the ninth hour (three o’clock) partake of various kinds of food.
More recently, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) decreed in 1966 and reaffirmed in 1991,
12. Wherefore, we ask, urgently and prayerfully, that we, as people of God, make of the entire Lenten Season a period of special penitential observance. Following the instructions of the Holy See, we declare that the obligation both to fast and to abstain from meat, an obligation observed under a more strict formality by our fathers in the faith, still binds on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. No Catholic Christian will lightly excuse himself from so hallowed an obligation on the Wednesday which solemnly opens the Lenten season and on that Friday called &#8220;Good&#8221; because on that day Christ suffered in the flesh and died for our sins. . . .
13. In keeping with the letter and spirit of Pope Paul&#8217;s Constitution Paenitemini, we preserved for our dioceses the tradition of abstinence from meat on each of the Fridays of Lent, confident that no Catholic Christian will lightly hold himself excused from this penitential practice (emphasis added).
<h3>The Problem Is Disobedience, Not Because Eating Meat Is Inherently Evil</h3>
Some non-Catholics scoff that the Church could decree that eating meat on certain days is a mortal sin. God created meat and gave it to us to eat (Gen. 9:3-4), so how could eating it be gravely wrong!? Of course, the answer to their question is contained in the very act of their asking it: most of the time the Church is fine with the Catholic faithful eating meat, especially on feast days, including Christmas and Easter.
In contrast, because of the penitential nature of certain days, such as Ash Wednesday—as well as Fridays throughout the year because they recall weekly our Lord’s suffering and death—the Church binds the faithful to aid their growth in holiness. So the problem of eating meat on such days is disobedience to the divinely ordained authority of Christ’s Church, which has the God-given power to bind and loose on disciplinary matters (see Matt. 16:18-19; 18:15-18). In addition, it’s important to remember that committing a mortal sin has three components: 1) grave matter, 2) full knowledge, and 3) complete consent (CCC 1857-1859).
Also, because they are changeable disciplines, as distinguished from unchangeable dogmas, the Church is free to bind and loose differently at different periods in Church history, e.g., not requiring abstinence from meat on Fridays outside of Lent beginning in Advent 1966, yet reminding the faithful that Friday retains its penitential character:
24. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat (emphasis added).
We also see God himself making changes over salvation history on what he has bound and loosed for his people. For example, in the Old Covenant, the Lord prohibits the Israelites from eating certain foods because of their association with their pagan neighbors, and thus as a means to safeguard his people from dangerous spiritual fraternization (Lev. 11:1-47; Deut. 14:3-21; see Deut. 7:3-4). However, in the New Covenant, as a sign that God’s people are now to “make disciples of all nations,” i.e., “all Gentiles” (Matt. 28:18-20, emphasis added), Jesus relaxes the Jewish disciplines regarding unclean foods associated with those same Gentiles (Mark 7:14-19; Acts 10:9-16).
So the sin was—and is—willfully disobeying God’s directives that he first communicated through human authorities he established for his people on earth in the Old Covenant, particularly Moses, and which he now binds or looses in heaven regarding the New Covenant Church’s discipline on earth, not because consuming certain food was or is necessarily immoral.
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Why Do Catholics Abstain from Meat on Ash Wednesday, But Allow the Consumption of Fish?

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