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<div>At the Transfiguration, the apostles seemed to know that the persons conversing with Jesus were Moses and Elijah. How?</div><div>The Gospels do not explain how the disciples were able to recognize Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration, so any answer is a guess.
Possible ways the disciples were able to recognize <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/moses">Moses</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/elias">Elijah</a>:
<ul>
<li>Jesus referred to them by name in his conversation with them, and the disciples overheard it.</li>
<li>The disciples overheard the conversation, and the context informed them with whom Jesus was speaking.</li>
<li>They had something unique about their appearance that made them readily recognizable (Exodus 34:29; 2 Kings 1:8).</li>
<li>There was some sort of heavenly announcement that wasn&#8217;t recorded in the Gospels.</li>
<li>Jesus explained to the disciples who they were.</li>
<li>They were divinely inspired to recognize them, similar to God&#8217;s revelation to Peter that Jesus is the messiah.</li>
</ul>
</div>

How Did the Disciples Recognize Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration?

Tim Staples takes a detailed walk through Scripture and Catechism to explain the Church as the Body of Christ, what that means, why she has a hierarchy of members, how she distributes grace through the Sacraments, whether whether an unbaptized person can be a member, invincible ignorance, and the difference between the Church triumphant and the Church suffering.

What Exactly is ‘The Church?’

Walter M. Miller’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz has long been a favorite of mine. In this I’m not alone: this epic story, of a post-apocalyptic world in which the Catholic Church rebuilds civilization only to watch it descend into barbarism again, has captivated millions of readers since its publication in 1959.
One passage late in the book (mild spoiler) burnished itself in my mind. A nuclear attack has destroyed a major city and left thousands of survivors poisoned by radiation. The government sets up “Mercy Camps” to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/three-questions-for-euthanasia-fans">euthanize</a> the suffering. A priest gives a ride to a young mother headed to one of the camps, intending to have her baby put out of its misery.
The priest tries to talk her out of it, but every argument he makes is deflected by the kind of sophistry and emotional appeals we would recognize in today’s culture wars. Finally, in desperation, he turns to her and says,
<blockquote>“I&#8217;m not asking you. As a priest of Christ I am commanding you by the authority of Almighty God not to lay hands on your child, not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy. I do not advise you, I adjure and command you in the name of Christ the King. Is that clear?”</blockquote>
For an instant, he expects the woman to laugh. When the Church, he thinks to himself, “occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker.”
But the woman doesn’t laugh. Finally, she is moved, at least for the moment, not to commit the evil she had planned. It turns out that she needed, as Miller narrates, “the voice of authority now, more than she needed persuasion.”
I thought of this scene yesterday when <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-wants-make-ivf-treatments-paid-government-insurance-compani-rcna168804">former president Donald Trump announced</a>, unprovoked and apropos of nothing, that if elected to a second term he would see to it that in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures are fully funded (either by insurance or government) for all who want them.
Let’s leave aside that empty campaign promises run rampant in election years, and so this could be all bluster; let’s ignore for now that this plan is a gross affront both to Catholic teaching (and thus the beliefs of Trump’s Catholic running mate) and the conventional principles of the conservatives whom Trump claims to represent. What makes me mindful of that Canticle passage is the general absence of that fictional priest’s courageous moral authority when it comes to our world and IVF.
Yes, the magisterium has laid out the Church’s <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html">teaching</a> on assisted reproductive technologies, and Pope Francis has repeatedly reaffirmed it. But on the subject of IVF there remains a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/03/22/1239879602/despite-church-prohibitions-catholics-still-choose-ivf-to-have-children#:~:text=A%20Pew%20Research%20survey%20in,vitro%20fertilization%20is%20morally%20wrong.">massive gulf</a> between the Church’s moral doctrine and the views and practices of everyday Catholics. As with contraception (somewhat less so with abortion), the Church says one thing but most of the people believe and do another.
In this context, we can understand why Trump might think he has little reason to fear Catholic backlash against this new campaign promise.
I have <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-hardest-teaching-of-them-all">written before</a> about how the Church’s teaching on IVF may be the single toughest moral claim it makes. The real-life cases in which it is used are so gut-wrenching, and the human lives it produces bring so much joy, that for many people it seems impervious to bloodless theological or philosophical criticism.
The Church needs to persuade these people, certainly. Our bishops, the pastors and catechists who teach under them, and lay apostolates like Catholic Answers work to make Church teachings—especially the hard teachings—reasonable and accessible so that people in the pews may understand them and assent to them fully. This important effort continues.
But, as with the woman in the story who, despite the priest’s best efforts to change her mind with reason, can’t understand or accept why she should not take her sick child to a Mercy Camp, there are many Catholics who won’t be persuaded on IVF. And it seems to me that, for such people, our pastors need to re-discover their voice of authority.
Anecdotally, today the opposite is more common. Do you know couples whose parish priest gave them “permission” to undergo IVF, or who told them just to follow their consciences? I do. So perhaps our pastors need a stronger dose of conviction before they can start speaking with authority. The chain between the Church’s official teachings and the seminaries, universities, and academies through which that conviction is supposed to be transmitted to clergy and lay leaders needs to be strengthened for a start.
Like the priest in the book, those who invoke the Church’s supreme authority in our world should expect derisive laughter, too. The Lord spoke with authority, and they spat on him. But authority grows with use; the more our leaders are heard from, the more they will be heeded. And so I still look hopefully to a future time when politicians refrain from policies that offend Catholics because Catholics observe all the teachings of the Faith—even if it’s sometimes not by persuasion but simply by a command in the name of Christ the King.

Time to Be Stronger on IVF

All four Gospels refer to a woman named Mary Magdalene. She is one of the witnesses of Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, and she is often named first in lists of women.
All this makes it clear that she was prominent in the early Christian community and was well-known by the authors of the Gospels. But who was she? What do we know about her? And how has her image changed over time?
The first thing to note is her name: Mary Magdalene. Magdalene is not a last name. They didn’t have last names in first-century Jewish society, so what does this term mean?
It helps if you look at the Greek behind it. In Matthew, Mark, and John, she is referred to as Maria hê Magdalênê or Mariam hê Magdalênê. These would be literally translated as “Mary the Magdalene”—so a Magdalene is a kind of person.
The specific kind of person a Magdalene represents is someone from the fishing village of Magdala, which was a mostly Gentile town of about 40,000 people on the western side of the Sea of Galilee.
So Mary was from Magdala in Galilee. She is thus being referred to by a naming convention whereby you give the person’s name and place of origin—as in “Jesus of Nazareth” (Acts 10:38) or “Jesus the Nazarene” (Matt. 26:71).
This place designation is not the most common way that women were referred to in first-century Palestinian Jewish culture. Men were often referred to using a patronym—that is, their father’s name—as in “Simon son of Jonah” (Matt. 16:17) or “Simon son of John” (John 1:42). Women were normally named based on their relatives. However, when an Israelite woman got married, she left the house of her father and became a member of her husband’s household. Consequently, women were commonly referred to in different ways:
<ul>
<li>An unmarried woman would be referred to using her father’s name—e.g., “Anna the daughter of Phanuel” (Luke 2:36).</li>
<li>A married woman would be referred to using her husband’s name—e.g., “Joanna the wife of Chuza” (Luke 8:3).</li>
<li>A woman who was a mother might be referred to using the name of her son or sons—e.g., “Mary the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14), “Mary the mother of James and Joseph” (Matt. 27:56). This would happen especially if the woman was a widow and no longer had a husband.</li>
<li>And if a woman didn’t have a living father, husband, or son, she might be referred to by the name of her siblings—e.g., though the Gospels never do this, you could refer to “Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus.”</li>
</ul>
But none of these things happens for Mary Magdalene. Instead of specifying which Mary we’re talking about by referring to her relatives, she gets a place designation.
This suggests that she didn’t have any relatives who were well known in the early Christian community, so they defaulted back to a place name.
Most likely, she had no father, husband, or sons—and she certainly didn’t have any who were well known.
The identifying thing that stuck out in the minds of the first Christian communities was that she was a Galilean from Magdala, so that’s how they referred to her.
Luke tells us two interesting things about Mary Magdalene. At one point, he says,
<blockquote>Soon afterward [Jesus] went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means (8:1-3).</blockquote>
This tells us that “seven demons had gone out” of Mary, so she was a former demoniac, and given the context, it was likely Jesus who cast the demons out of her, something that is explicitly stated in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-fake-resurrection-in-marks-gospel">the longer ending</a> of Mark (Mark 16:9).
She is also grouped among the women who provided for Jesus and the Twelve “out of their means.” This suggests that Mary was a woman of means. She had money—i.e., disposable income that she could use to support Jesus and his mission.
All four Gospels indicate that Mary was a key witness to the events of the climax of Jesus’ ministry.
She had come with his traveling party to his final Passover in Jerusalem (Matt. 27:55, Mark 15:41), and there she witnessed the Crucifixion (Matt. 27:56, Mark 15:40, John 19:25).
She also witnessed his burial (Matt. 27:61, Mark 16:47) and his resurrection (Matt. 28:1, Mark 16:1, John 20:1), after which she returned and told the Twelve (Luke 24:10, John 20:18).
Luke mentions that the women had prepared spices with which to anoint Jesus’ body on Good Friday, after the Crucifixion (Luke 23:56), and then they brought the spices to the tomb on Easter Monday (24:1). Mark adds the detail that they had bought the spices (Mark 16:1), which would again suggest that Mary Magdalene had financial resources.
But when they arrived at the tomb, they discovered it empty, and angels appeared to them and announced that Jesus has been raised.
John records a touching story of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene (John 20:11-18). He doesn’t mention other women being with her, so it is possible she was alone.
When she realizes that she is seeing Jesus, she is overjoyed, but he gives her a warning. Some translations render it, “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/touch-me-not">Do not touch me</a>, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” This translation is confusing since—before the Ascension happens—Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds (John 20:27).
Better translations would be “Do not hold me” (RSV), “Stop holding on to me” (NAB:RE), and “Do not cling to me” (ESV). The idea is that Mary shouldn’t become overly attached to Jesus now that he’s back, because he’s going to be ascending to the Father, and she will not always be able to be with him.
We’ve covered the passages in the New Testament that explicitly name Mary Magdalene, but some Christians have wondered if she may be mentioned in other passages—either with the name Mary or without it.
For example, it has been speculated that she may be the sinful woman (likely a prostitute) who weeps on Jesus’ feet, wipes them with her hair, and anoints his feet (Luke 7:36-50).
The answer is that she almost certainly is not this woman. Not only does Luke not name her, but he also relates this story at the end of chapter 7 of his Gospel. The very next thing he says is the passage quoted above, where Mary Magdalene is introduced.
It is scarcely likely that Luke would omit the woman’s identity at the end of chapter 7 and then immediately introduce her by name at the beginning of chapter 8. We thus have no basis for besmirching Mary Magdalene’s reputation by accusing her of being a prostitute.
Many have identified Mary Magdalene with Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, including Pope Gregory I (590-604). However, this also is a mistake.
One reason is that Mary Magdalene is identified as “the Magdalene” in all four Gospels, whereas the two Gospels that refer to the sister of Martha and Lazarus (i.e., Luke and John) identify her with respect to her siblings. This means that the latter Mary had prominent siblings who were known in the Christian community, whereas Mary Magdalene did not.
Further, Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus isn’t from Magdala. She isn’t even from Galilee. John tells us, “A certain man was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha” (John 11:1).
Bethany is just outside Jerusalem in Judea, so Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were Judeans rather than Galileans, and Mary of Bethany would have had no need to follow Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem for the final Passover, because she lived right there!
The idea that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were the same person was common for a long time in the Western church (not the Eastern churches), and this left a mark on the Western liturgical calendar.
Mary Magdalene has long had a memorial on July 22, whereas Martha has one on July 29. But now that the confusion between Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany has been cleared up, the Congregation for Divine Worship <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20210126_decreto-santi_en.html">ordered in 2021</a> that the July 29 memorial be listed as that of “Martha, Mary, and Lazarus”—giving the other two Bethany siblings their due on the calendar.

Who Is Mary Magdalene?

As Catholics, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-im-catholic-sola-scriptura-isnt-workable-part-i">we sometimes point</a> to the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/on-the-different-kinds-of-protestants">doctrinal chaos</a> within Protestantism as evidence for the need for an infallible Church. As fallible humans, we tend to err, even when trying our hardest. And so it’s unsurprising that the various denominations of Protestantism come to wildly <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/one-question-protestants-cant-answer">different conclusions</a> on doctrine, including questions like “Does God love everyone?” “What must I do to be saved?” and so forth. But some Protestants will respond to this objection by pointing out that, for members of a supposedly-unified body, Catholics sure do spend a lot of time fighting amongst themselves.
This objection is nothing new. Back in 1850, <a href="https://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume1/lecture10.html">St. John Henry Newman pointed out</a> that “it is a well-known point in controversy, to say that the Catholic Church has not any real unity more than Protestantism,” and to claim that “the greatest alienation, rivalry, and difference of opinion exist among the members of the Catholic priesthood.” And as Newman points out, this objection is half-true and half-false.
The true half is that there are opinionated and strong-willed Catholics. After all, Newman said, “the children of the Church are not of a different nature from the Protestants around them,” and left to himself, “each Catholic likes and would maintain his own opinion and his private judgment just as much as a Protestant.” Nor is this a bad thing, of itself. Your intellect is a gift from God, after all. As Newman put it:
<blockquote>The intellect of man is active and independent: he forms opinions about everything; he feels no deference for another&#8217;s opinion, except in proportion as he thinks that that other is more likely than he to be right; and he never absolutely sacrifices his own opinion, except when he is sure that that other knows for certain. He is sure that God knows; therefore, if he is a Catholic, he sacrifices his opinion to the Word of God, speaking through His Church.</blockquote>
But the situation isn’t all good. Due to original sin, “each mind naturally is self-willed, self-dependent, self-satisfied; and except so far as grace has subdued it, its first impulse is to rebel.” And so, on all of those issues upon which the Church hasn’t spoken infallibly, “there ever has been, and ever will be, a vast exercise and a realized product, partly praiseworthy, partly barely lawful, of private judgment within the Catholic Church.”
So there are areas within Catholicism that are left to private judgment, and over which Catholics can and will disagree. This always has been, and always will be, the case. But there are also areas upon which the Church has <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enchiridion-Symbolorum-Compendium-Definitions-Declarations/dp/0898707463">spoken definitively</a>, and this is where we see how the equation to Protestantism is a false one. There’s no binding creed within Protestantism, no infallibly settled doctrines upon which all Protestants must agree. There are good and bad Catholics: those who accept or reject the Church’s dogmatic teaching. But there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” Protestants in this sense, since there’s no set of dogmatic teaching. The objection makes it sound as if it were “difficult or impossible to ascertain what it was that the Roman Communion taught,” when we know the opposite to be true.
Finally, Newman points out that the remarkable thing isn’t that Catholics often disagree. We should expect as much from a Church spanning the globe, two millennia, and untold numbers of ethnicities and nationalities. Of course we have a lot of disagreements. The remarkable thing is that we have a coherent creed to which all faithful Catholics assent, no matter their culture or background or natural inclinations.

“But Catholics Are as Divided as Protestants!”

In this Clip, Cy Kellett, Edgar Lujano, and Emily Torres respond to Senator Cruz&#8217;s bizarre endorsement of AI generated criticism against Catholic Answers.
Transcript:
Edgar Lujuno: Ted Cruz said, read every word of this. It&#8217;s the best and most comprehensive explanation of what we&#8217;re fighting.
Cy Kellett: I don&#8217;t think he read every word of it.
Edgar Lujuno: I don&#8217;t think he did. It&#8217;s the whole political thing about Zionism and opposing Zionism versus being forced on Zionism. And there&#8217;s a lot of equating church teaching to being like a streamline towards anti Jewish or anti Zionist. And he actually name drops Catholic. She name drops Catholic answers in this article. So track one, the Sola Scriptura assault. I&#8217;m not going to read the whole thing, but the first mention of Catholic Answers says the online assault on Sola Scriptura has been running for years through Catholic answers, YouTube debates, conversion testimonies and TikTok content to targeting young evangelical men specifically, the argument is always the same. Your reliance on personal Bible reading is epistemologic.
Cy Kellett: Yeah, there you go.
Edgar Lujuno: Epistemologically naive, historically ignorant, and intellectually embarrassing. You need the church. The church says the covenants with Israel are fulfilled, superseded in Christ.
Cy Kellett: So, you know, I actually, when I read that, I think that there are mistakes in it, but it&#8217;s not entirely wrong. It&#8217;s not true that we are specifically targeting evangelical men. That&#8217;s not the case. Evangelical men are finding us on their own. We&#8217;re not advertising to evangelical men. We&#8217;re not going to their house. Our guys debate Protestants. Our guys debate. But that&#8217;s because, I mean, that&#8217;s where the division in the church is between Protestants and Catholics. It&#8217;s not targeting anyone. So that&#8217;s silly. But the fact is we don&#8217;t believe in sola scriptura. Sola scriptura is non biblical. Sola scriptura is not true. So we challenge it. So I don&#8217;t think we should apologize for that. And it&#8217;s also the part where she says the argument is always the same. That&#8217;s also not true. If you&#8217;ve ever listened to this show, every apologist comes at it in a different way. And if you ask them on Tuesday, they&#8217;ll come up with a different way to come. I mean, they&#8217;re trying to have conversations with real human beings.
Edgar Lujuno: And then when Protestants come up with a different way to interpret what sola scriptura means, they always come back and say, actually, this is why this interpretation fails. So, yeah, you&#8217;re absolutely right.
Cy Kellett: What&#8217;s interesting, read Carlo Buccard&#8217;s books Meeting the Protestant Challenge and Meeting the Protestant Response, where he is extremely solicitous. Solicitous of Protestant people. He is not at all trying to Own anyone? He explains the Catholic position. He listens to the Protestant response, and he explains the Catholic response to that response. I think it&#8217;s very responsible and reasonable. I think. Maybe. I&#8217;ll be honest. Insurrectionist. Barbee doesn&#8217;t like the debate because you can&#8217;t win a debate on sola scriptura. Sola scriptura is non biblical and wrong. You cannot win that. Give us enough time, we&#8217;ll win that debate.
Edgar Lujuno: The second mention of us in this is in the headline Vector 6, the Trad Catholic online pipeline. And it says, beneath the major figures runs a sprawling ecosystem of Catholic, Orthodox, Catholic, Catholic, and Orthodox content creators.
Cy Kellett: That is a big. Now we&#8217;re lumping Catholic and Orthodox. Okay, sorry about that. So you mean there&#8217;s a conspiracy of all the Christians in the world except for Protestants? Is that what you&#8217;re. Come on. That&#8217;s an incredibly huge lump. Apostolic churches is what the churches that are still faithful to the liturgical teachings of Jesus Christ. Okay, yeah. Okay. Lump us in with them. Good.
Edgar Lujuno: So the Catholic and Orthodox content creators who have been running the theological attack for years. Catholic answers, YouTube debaters, debates, conversion testimony, videos this ecosystem specifically targets. It&#8217;s like a. It&#8217;s like a repeat. You know what this sounds like?
Cy Kellett: It sounds like chat GPT, right?
Edgar Lujuno: It sounds like chatgpt. And guess what? Even the format of this thing, along with all the different capitals or the. The. The size of the font and the dashes, all of it looks like it was generated by ChatGPT.
Emily Dinneny: So the ironic part about this is that I&#8217;m pretty sure from what I read in the X threads, she is not an evangelical. Oh, she&#8217;s not. She&#8217;s. She&#8217;s Jewish. Oh. And so she&#8217;s. She&#8217;s. She&#8217;s describing this attack that. That Catholics are making against evangelicals. But she&#8217;s not an evangelical herself. She&#8217;s not even Protestant. Interesting. Oh. So she&#8217;s just assessing the lay of the land as kind of an outsider to this whole debate. She is, sort of. Because she&#8217;s gonna say that evangelicals are more in line with Israel and support Israel as a nation because of their dispensationalist theology that they tend towards. And Catholics are pulling them away from that. And Catholics don&#8217;t believe, as she mentions here, that the Catholic Church will teach that, you know, the covenant, that New Covenant is all of those that believe, that have faith. It&#8217;s not just the biological descendants of Israel or Jacob, she calls it. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s replacement theology is what she&#8217;s saying.
Cy Kellett: I mean, I&#8217;m not an anti Israel guy, but I might respond to her. Christians have been in that part of the world for thousands of years. Evangelical Christians have not. I mean, Orthodox Christians have, Catholics have. Evangelical Christians have not. So maybe you should learn the story, and I was going to say of your fellow Christians, but she&#8217;s not a Christian. She&#8217;s Jewish. But I mean, maybe Ted Cruz should find out what has happened. And look what, look what happened to Christian populations in Iran or Christian populations. I mean, remember a few years ago, blowing up churches on Easter in Egypt? I&#8217;m not saying that the Israeli state is somehow worse than these other manifestations, but learn the history of Christians in that part of the world and then tell me you&#8217;re just in favor of everything that goes on as far as what Israel does. You can&#8217;t be. You have to be critical of at least some of it.
Edgar Lujuno: Yep, I completely agree. So her second tract, she gets into replacement theology mainstreaming. So she connects that to eventually the people who are running the operation and says people like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens who are all calling themselves or for a replacement theology or, you know, to that effect and, and calling Christian Zionism a brain virus. And it&#8217;s like, I never thought Catholic Answers would be affiliated with all those.
Caller: Yeah. With it. With them. It&#8217;s especially like. Yeah, especially. That&#8217;s a case of lumping. Yeah.
Cy Kellett: Like you&#8217;re basically just not listening to what people, the differences, what people say. Just lump them all in together.
Edgar Lujuno: Yeah. So I just, when, when you start throwing all these things lumped in together, it&#8217;s just like, all right, so the argument to me is really, really starting to fall apart because if you look at those three individuals and you try to lump us in with them, there&#8217;s a really big disconnect. There&#8217;s no real association with any of them there with Catholic Answers. In fact, I know some of them have called out Catholic Answers.
Cy Kellett: At least there is a good amount of Catholic anti Semitism out there. We don&#8217;t want to pretend like there&#8217;s not.
Edgar Lujuno: Yep. And I mean, we&#8217;ve addressed it on the show.
Caller: We try to.
Edgar Lujuno: Yeah, we&#8217;ve had plenty of shows. And then you. Usually it&#8217;s the followers of some of these individuals who come and come after us. It&#8217;s like, all right.
Cy Kellett: Oh, yeah, yeah, we&#8217;re. We&#8217;re babies for them. Like, we&#8217;re just, we have no courage. We have no guts. We won&#8217;t stand up for. To these Jews, I guess, that run the world or something. I. I don&#8217;t know. But, yeah, Okay. I mean, I don&#8217;t. Ted Cruz probably doesn&#8217;t even know who we are, so I don&#8217;t think he&#8217;s picking on us.
Caller: I don&#8217;t think he even read it.
Cy Kellett: I mean, well, maybe that&#8217;s the case, but I think we&#8217;re not. I think we&#8217;re not political. I mean, everybody&#8217;s political. There&#8217;s no such place as neutral for a human being. Nobody has a neutral. So I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;re political in a million different ways. But, I mean, we could probably fight with each other for a long time over Israel in here and how to talk about Israel, how to think about, like. We don&#8217;t have a Catholic answers view of modern Israel. We don&#8217;t have that, do we? Did I miss a meeting? No. We try to bring people to Jesus Christ into his one true church. Come on in. It&#8217;s great.
Caller: That&#8217;s the point.
Cy Kellett: Jesus is beautiful. Can I ask you a question? I&#8217;m going to start with you, Emily, on this one. Do you think. See, because we don&#8217;t try to fight with evangelicals, we try to be bold in proclaiming the truth. Do you think that as we make all these evangelical. Because we have tons of evangelical friends and supporters and callers and all that the fact that we are not their enemy. Do you think that there are some people that want to stoke that enmity? Because if you&#8217;re not protesting against the Catholic Church, you can&#8217;t be Protestant anymore. They got to keep the protest going because once you realize, oh, my goodness, the Catholics are not a bunch of statue worshiping weirdos who are pagans. I mean, most of them aren&#8217;t. Most of them aren&#8217;t.
Caller: You are.
Cy Kellett: I mean, come on. But you know, I think once the truth gets out about Catholicism, you got to really work hard to keep the protest going because there&#8217;s just not that much to protest. We believe in Jesus Christ just like you believe in Jesus Christ. He&#8217;s the Lord, he&#8217;s the Savior. And I would even go so far as to say, he is the King. I know. Oh, that&#8217;s a dangerous thing to say. But the truth is, when we say Christ is the king, that&#8217;s a good thing. The little baby born in the manger, the one who laid down his life for others, this is the King. We&#8217;re not saying he wants to trample on everybody. We&#8217;re saying this is good news.
Edgar Lujuno: My ancestors were saying, long live Christ the King. When? Exactly? And the persecution back in the 20s under the Mexican government, they were trying to stamp out Catholicism.
Cy Kellett: But I know that people say, well these anti Semites are using Christ the King as a phrase to be mean to Jews. I don&#8217;t argue with that. I&#8217;m sure that that&#8217;s going on. That has probably always gone on. But that does not mean I can stop saying Christ is king because Christ is king.
Edgar Lujuno: I&#8217;m sure Emily, you can attest to this. But working with high schoolers, any phrasing can be used as trying to be like a smack in the face. And so you&#8217;ve been in the classroom long enough that where you know that even if you see something that just non threatening a teenager who&#8217;s clever enough will find a way to make that an insult.
Caller: You look nice today. Say that to somebody. There&#8217;s certain people who&#8217;ll be like, oh what? This is the first time I&#8217;ve ever looked nice. I didn&#8217;t look nice yesterday, I didn&#8217;t look nice today. I look nice.
Edgar Lujuno: See, Johnny&#8217;s laughing because he understands like yeah, yeah. I don&#8217;t, I don&#8217;t know. The whole trying to lump us in with this major group of people that just because you oppose us on this or it&#8217;s not even we even oppose them. It&#8217;s just a complete misunderstanding of what Catholic answers is. We&#8217;re not, we are not the enemy of Ted Cruz. Senator Cruz, we are not your enemy. We are Catholics just trying to live our faith and explain what we&#8217;re trying to.
Caller: We are barely even aware of what you&#8217;re doing. We&#8217;re in California, not Texas. We&#8217;re ruining your career. But we certainly aren&#8217;t against you.
Edgar Lujuno: So Senator Cruz, if you&#8217;re watching this, which you&#8217;re probably not, I Recommend going to catholic.com. we have a lot of great resources that help clarify what the Catholic Church actually teaches.
Caller: And we love our evangelical brothers. Absolutely.
Cy Kellett: We love them. We love being on the pro life lines with them. We love, you know, speaking up for basic morality and for the person of Jesus Christ the other. But you&#8217;re wrong about Sola scriptura. You&#8217;re wrong about sola fide. That&#8217;s not the Christian faith. That&#8217;s not an adequate expression of the Christian faith.
Edgar Lujuno: I&#8217;ve got an idea. Maybe this will be a little too petty, but maybe we can send a couple of the Carlos books.
Caller: That&#8217;s so petty. Yes, I hear what you&#8217;re doing.
Edgar Lujuno: Send him a couple of books. Send him the Meeting the Protestant Challenge and Meeting the Protestant Response to his office and you know, hopefully and just a warm note saying, hey, we love you, we&#8217;re praying for you.
Caller: And what do you think Emily, Is that passive aggressive or is that. It&#8217;s not meant to be passive aggressive, though. It&#8217;s not. He&#8217;s gonna be. He&#8217;s gonna be confused because he didn&#8217;t even read this entire 20 page letter that this chatgpt or woman wrote. So he&#8217;s gonna be like, why am I getting these books? Is Ted Cruz a Protestant? I mean, I would assume. I don&#8217;t know. He&#8217;s an evangelical, I think everything. Oh, his father was an evangelical preacher, right? I don&#8217;t know. Do you think it&#8217;s a bad idea to send him a book? I mean, why not send him evangelicalized to anybody?
Edgar Lujuno: Yeah, just send it to him as a. As a way of hope, maybe. Engaging. Maybe. That&#8217;d be a great conversation between Trent Horn and Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz Calls Out Catholic Answers as a Problem…

Jimmy Akin explains why we often use &#8220;sleep&#8221; as a euphemism to talk about death, and uses the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, along with Revelation, to argue that we will not be literally unconscious in the time between death and the Second Coming.
Transcript:
Host: The following question comes to us via Facebook Live, Emily Rose typed this in:
&#8220;I was wondering how you answer Christian denominations who believe that humans still fall into a sleep-like state when they die until judgement happens at the end of time, instead of each person immediately going to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory upon death.&#8221;
Jimmy: Okay, first of all, I noticed that Emily Rose used the word &#8220;still,&#8221; and that could suggest that at one time they did, but that they no longer do. Maybe, for example, during the Old Testament times. And actually, I don&#8217;t have any evidence that that happened in the Old Testament times. There are passages, both in the Old and the New Testament, that talk about the dead being asleep, but really that&#8217;s a euphemism. It&#8217;s like today, even, you know, though a Catholic believes you do go immediately to the personal judgement, the ending up in Heaven or Hell or temporarily in Purgatory, a Catholic might still tell a child, &#8220;Well, Grandma fell asleep.&#8221; That&#8217;s a euphemism. It&#8217;s a way of softening an unpleasant reality by speaking of it using a more pleasant term.
And the reason that that sleep metaphor gets used for death in all different kinds of cultures is obviously because dead people look like they&#8217;re asleep. You know, they don&#8217;t stand up, they don&#8217;t walk around, they tend to lay there, they tend to have their eyes closed, if they don&#8217;t have their eyes closed, people tend to close their eyes so they look more like they&#8217;re asleep because it&#8217;s less disturbing; and so there&#8217;s an obvious basis, just in human nature, for the sleep/death euphemism. And that&#8217;s what we encounter in Scripture. So knowing that there&#8217;s this euphemism that&#8217;s in use in all different kinds of languages and all different kinds of cultures over the planet would form part of my answer to people who think that the dead enter a sleep-like state, like, let&#8217;s say, until the final judgement.
But I wouldn&#8217;t stop there. I&#8217;d also go to various passages; like in Luke&#8217;s Gospel, you have the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and that depicts Abraham, Lazarus, and the rich man, all three, as conscious in the state between death and resurrection, what&#8217;s called the intermediate state. Now someone could say, &#8220;Well, but that&#8217;s just a parable.&#8221; Maybe it is. It&#8217;s the only parable of Jesus where you have somebody who&#8217;s named: Lazarus. None of his other parables have that. And coincidentally, this parable involves the suggestion of Lazarus coming back from the dead. And we actually know there was a Lazarus who did come back from the dead, and that raises the question of &#8220;Just how much of a parable is this?&#8221;
But even if it&#8217;s purely a parable, even if it&#8217;s symbolic, Jesus still populated His parables with real things. So He&#8217;s got&#8211;in other parables, for example, he has fathers and sons and wine presses and crops and weeds and kings; and all of these things really exist, so he&#8217;s drawing on actual occurrences to craft his parables. And if that&#8217;s the case, when he tells us a parable about the afterlife, that depicts people conscious in the afterlife, we could infer he&#8217;s drawing on real life there too.
But we don&#8217;t have to stop there, because if you go to the book of Revelation, that shows us what&#8217;s happening in Heaven before the Second Coming, we see all kinds of people in Heaven who are conscious, including people who are coming up out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes, and now they&#8217;re praising God; we see the Saints in Heaven, worshiping God; we have the souls under the altar who have been martyred, crying out for justice from God, they&#8217;re obviously conscious; so we just have a lot of evidence from multiple sources indicating that we don&#8217;t enter a sleep-like state, that we are conscious between death and resurrection, and those are some of the considerations I&#8217;d point out.
Host: Thank you, Emily Rose.

Referring to Death as Sleep

Not long ago, I received a wedding invitation from a relative. As with many of today’s “baptized pagans”—people who were initiated into the Church but never lived intentionally as an adult Catholic—he&#8217;s planning a secular ceremony. Because he was baptized a Catholic, though, he is still subject to Church law regarding “canonical form” for marriage.
The requirement of canonical form means that, when a baptized Catholic says “I do” in a rite that falls outside of what the Church prescribes (and without getting a dispensation), in fact he does not. The marriage doesn’t take. Two lifelong Protestants can get married in a Protestant ceremony and have a sacramental union, but a baptized Catholic who later became a Protestant cannot. And non-Catholics can contract a valid natural marriage (when one or both parties is unbaptized) by making vows in any number of settings. A baptized Catholic marrying an unbaptized person can’t (see canons <a href="https://canonlaw.ninja/?nums=1117">1117</a>, <a href="https://canonlaw.ninja/?nums=1086">1086</a>, etc.).
This can be tough to take, even for someone (like me) who would be considered a hard-liner on <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-marriage-sex/">Catholic teaching about marriage.</a> Many believing Catholics and regular Mass-goers don’t know about the requirement of canonical form. How much less would someone who hasn’t been inside a church since infancy? And why should someone who doesn’t even believe that Catholicism is true even care? And yet the Church exercises its power to deprive such persons of a valid marriage.
It’s a purely juridical power. There is no necessary reason why such a person couldn’t marry outside canonical form. There is no concession to reality (like a previously contracted valid marriage) that the Church is forced to make. It’s just a matter of law; a law that could be different.
In fact, not very long ago, the law was different. Canon 1117 used to allow for “a formal act of defection” from the Church that would dispense a person from canonical form. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apl_20091026_codex-iuris-canonici.html">did away with that provision</a> and changed the text of several relevant canons. I can see the practical arguments for that change. You never want to encourage formal apostasy, of course. Requiring canonical form also discourages secret marriages that can become practical headaches. And, as Benedict himself pointed out, invalidity due to defect of form makes it easier for tribunals to annul marriages of people who later wish to return to the Church and remarry “following the failure of a preceding marriage.”
On the other hand, though, keeping material apostates on the books doesn’t seem to be of much benefit for them, or the Church, if they’re just technical Catholics who don’t actually believe or practice the Faith. Furthermore, denying such people the sacramental graces of marriage (if they’re both baptized) or the bond of a natural marriage (if the other person isn’t) seems contrary to concern for their souls and their families. And the ease with which such unions can later be annulled, pace B16, could be considered a bug, not a feature!
But my biggest problem is pastoral. Do we think that such people will be more likely to return to the Church upon learning that Rome has stretched out its arm to deny them marriage, or less? What would you think of a religion—with which you don’t identify in any way—that claims to be able to neutralize your marriage on a legal pretext? Would you be attracted or repulsed?
In my relative’s case, I suspect that it would be an obstacle, not an aid, to re-evangelization. It wouldn’t come across as one of those hard truths that nonetheless compel by their power. It would just seem mean.
Catholicism isn’t a club that you join and un-join. I get it. Baptism is an indelible mark on the soul, not a mailing list you unsubscribe from by checking a box on a screen. At the same time, I think we have to recognize that many people have been initiated into the Faith but never assented to it by an adult act of the will. Their souls are Catholic forever, but their hearts and minds are something else. We have to reckon with that, too.
At a time when Catholic leaders are talking about all kinds of ways to accompany and extend mercy to those on the “peripheries,” some of these ways quite dubious, it seems fitting to consider easing the legal requirements of canonical form so as not to deny valid marriage to those who are capable of it. That would be an act of mercy wholly within the Church’s power that legitimately accompanies people where they are—and does not strain doctrine or morals to do so. And from there, we may hope that the graces and goods of marriage will make them more responsive to our prayers and pleas for their return to the Faith.

No Marriage For You!

<div>Is my medal still a miraculous medal if the prayer has been omitted from the side of the medal with the image of Our Lady?</div><div>Sounds like an accidental defect in the manufacturing process. At this point, we advise you to replace it with a correctly made Miraculous Medal and have that new one blessed. As to your defective medal, if it’s been blessed, you can just bury it in the ground per usual norms for blessed objects.
</div>

Defective Miraculous Medal?

<div>Why does the Catholic Church not require newlyweds to take NFP classes?</div><div>Most dioceses in the United States do require some kind of &#8220;Pre-Cana Classes&#8221; prior to marriage. Those classes almost always include sessions on Natural Family Planning.
</div>

Does the Church Require NFP Classes for Newlyweds?

We have data showing how American attitudes on the Bible have shifted over the past forty years. First, <a href="https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2014/12/gallop-poll-21-say-bible-is-ancient.html">here’s a graphic</a> from atheist John Loftus’s blog, posted back in 2014. It shows three choices from a Gallup poll regarding what someone thinks the Bible is and compares the results from the poll in 1984, 2004, and 2014. Here are the choices:
<ol>
<li>The Bible is the ACTUAL word of God and should be taken literally, word for word.</li>
<li>The Bible is the INSPIRED word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word.</li>
<li>The Bible is an ancient book of FABLES, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.</li>
</ol>
None of these is a great option, but if I had to pick one, I’d go with option two.
Option three denies or at least downplays the Bible’s divine inspiration, but option one denies the Bible’s human composition. It suggests that the Bible is only a record of God’s words spoken to human secretaries. But that’s not what the church teaches, as can be seen in this excerpt from the Second Vatican Council:
<blockquote>In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which he wanted (Dei Verbum 11).</blockquote>
The Bible is the word of God, but its human authors didn’t just blindly transcribe God’s voice. If they did, how do we explain Paul’s lack of knowledge in 1 Corinthians 1:16, where he says, “I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.”
The human authors were true authors, which means God allowed their personalities and worldview to be present in the words they wrote. This means that in their writings, we see a worldview that is less advanced—not just scientifically, but also theologically. That’s why Dei Verbum notes that the books of the Old Testament “also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, nevertheless show[ing] us true divine pedagogy.”
Pope Benedict XVI recognized that the Bible is not just a sterile collection of God’s explicit commands and descriptions. It is a story of human redemption told over centuries. He wrote the following in his 2010 apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini: “It must be remembered first and foremost that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance. God chose a people and patiently worked to guide and educate them” (42).
For example, since the ancient Israelites were often tempted to worship false, pagan gods, the true God did not explicitly reveal to them that he is a trinity. Doing so early in Israel’s history might have confused them and led to false worship of a triad of separate divine beings instead of true knowledge of the Trinity. Instead, God first taught that he is the God to be worshiped above all other gods, without explicitly saying those gods are false. Later, he revealed that he is the only uncreated Creator, and then, later still, he revealed his triune nature.
So, just because the biblical text says something, that doesn’t mean God is saying that exact same thing to us today. That’s why the Second Vatican Council taught that “since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”
The key phrase in this passage is “asserted by the inspired authors.”
The fact that something is said in Scripture does not mean it should be taken in an uncompromising literal way—like when the Psalmist says we take refuge under God’s wings (91:4). The Bible is the inerrant word of God, but it comes to us through human words in a variety of genres. There is history, but there are also poetry and other non-literal ways of expressing truth, like when the Bible describes God the Father having physical body parts like a strong right arm.
Consequently, an overly literal approach to Scripture produces many more difficulties for atheists to marshal as evidence that the Bible isn’t divinely inspired. For example, some alleged “Bible contradictions” related to genealogies arise only when one falsely assumes genealogies were exact records and not approximations that often skipped generations. As a result, the biblical fundamentalist may create a contorted explanation for the difficulty, whereas the atheist sees a difficulty that doesn’t actually exist.
So let’s go back to this Gallup poll and notice the change over thirty years.
Loftus takes this to mean that Christian fundamentalists are losing. In one sense, they are, but in another sense, they are just, as my friend Randal Rauser says, <a href="https://randalrauser.com/2014/12/fundamentalists-arent-losing-the-battle-theyre-merely-changing-sides/">switching sides</a>. Biblical fundamentalists who have an overly literal approach to Scripture have become “fundamentalists” or “new atheists” who reject the Bible based on an overly literal reading of it. The percentage of those who see the Bible as the literal but not the actual word of God has remained constant and even increased in recent years. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx">When Gallup asked this same question in 2022</a>, here were the results:
<ol>
<li>The Bible is the ACTUAL word of God and should be taken literally, word for word (20%).</li>
<li>The Bible is the INSPIRED word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word (49%).</li>
<li>The Bible is an ancient book of FABLES, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man (29%).</li>
</ol>
Once again, the middle ground position picked up points. As for the other two options, more people are ditching one extreme view of the Bible—it’s all God and has no truly human elements—in favor of another extreme view: the Bible is all human and has no truly divine elements.
In many cases, this “side-switching” happens because a person pits what the Bible says against what the facts of science, history, and ethical reasoning say. He thinks only one can be right, and so if the Bible is right, then science, history, and philosophical approaches to ethics must be wrong. But if this person accepts modern views of science, history, and ethics, then the Bible has to be wrong. He doesn’t step back and say that maybe it isn’t the Bible that’s wrong, but his overly literal reading of it.

When the Protestant Switches Sides

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Is Ash Wednesday / Lent ONLY FOR CATHOLICS?

<div>If people who biologically can't have children or are too old to do so can still get married, why can't homosexuals?</div><div><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/sacrament-of-marriage">Marriage</a> is the relationship in which a man and a woman become one in a lifetime commitment. That is why their becoming conjugally—and complementarily—one is called “the marital act.” In contrast, the absence of complementarity in a same-sex couple is self-evident, beginning with their futile attempts at conjugal communion (CCC 2357-59). In short, with a same-sex couple, the two necessarily cannot become one, and therefore their sexual expressions are necessarily not <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/bringing-sanity-to-sex-part-2">love-giving (unitive), let alone life-giving (procreative)</a>. Nor would they make fit adoptive parents, even though they can certainly love children as a relative or family friend. But a sterile married couple would make fit parents, given that the wife can complementarily fulfill the role of mother and her husband the role of father.
Divine revelation affirms what we can discern by reason from the natural moral law. God made us <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/how-are-we-the-image-and-likeness-of-god">in his image and likeness</a>, male and female (Gen. 1:27-28). And those whom God calls to marriage become one flesh for life (Gen. 2:23-24), and God normally blesses them with children and draws them closer to each other in him, enabling those who can’t conceive to become good adoptive parents. Jesus reaffirms that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/where-in-the-bible-does-it-say-that-marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman">marriage is between a man and a woman</a>, and that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-permanence-of-matrimony">it is a lifetime commitment</a> (Matt. 19:1-12). Note that Jesus relaxed the Jewish disciplines regarding unclean foods (Mark 7:14-19) yet <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-bible-on-homosexual-behavior">never relaxed the Jewish teachings</a> against same-sex relations, let alone redefined marriage. Those morally impermissible practices were simply never on the table.
Homosexual relations have no hope of making the two participants one, let alone being a renewal of covenant love in an ongoing way (see Gen. 2:23-24). These acts are incapable for one to make a conjugal self-gift of himself or herself.
In comparison, when a wife becomes <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-sterility-an-argument-for-same-sex-marriage">infertile because of age</a>—or either spouse is infertile for reasons beyond their control during the wife’s normal childbearing years—the marital act is still a beautiful expression that renews and deepens the marital love of husband and wife. So we see that the love-giving aspect nourishes marital life even when a couple is sterile. Consequently, onanism and other forms of marital masturbation <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/married-mutual-masturbation-isnt-ok">are sinful</a>—a sin against the sixth commandment—because they prevent the total and mutual self-gift of husband and wife that conjugal love is designed to be and renew, including when a husband and wife are sterile (see CCC 2366-70; 1854-64).
</div>

Why Not Same-Sex ‘Marriage’?

Recently, Bradley Onishi wrote <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/21/life-conception-christian-theology-00147804">a piece</a> for Politico entitled “Why Christians—and Republicans—Should Reconsider the Premise that ‘Life Begins at Conception.’”
The beginning of the piece correctly notes how some Protestant denominations were hesitant to say abortion is sinful. In 1971, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention allowed for abortion in the case of rape. He then says,
<blockquote>It’s not Protestants, but Catholics in the United States who, as a religious community, have opposed abortion forcefully going back to the nineteenth century, and it is in Catholicism that we find the view that life begins at conception. Starting with an 1869 document called Apostolicae Sedis, Pope Pius IX declared the penalty of excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy.</blockquote>
Now, the Church has not defined when life begins, because that is a scientific question. But it has consistently taught that abortion is immoral. The Catechism says, “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable” (2271).
However, Onishi’s argument goes downhill when he tries to undercut the consistent tradition in Catholicism of opposition to abortion. He writes, “There were also forceful and influential voices that argued fetuses did not become persons until they were ‘ensouled.’”
Onishi is correct that some theologians of the past considered abortion of an “unformed” fetus to be less serious than of a “formed” fetus, but they still considered it sinful to kill the fetus through abortion. Tertullian said in the third century, “Whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth, that is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed” (Apology). Tertullian believed that “the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does” (Treatise on the Soul).
Some theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas believed that an unborn child receives a rational soul several weeks after he is conceived. But they probably believed that because they relied on the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s mistaken view of human development. Aristotle thought that unborn children progressed through vegetable and animal stages of life before their bodies were “animated” with a rational soul and became human beings later in pregnancy. Moral theologian William May says,
<blockquote>Aquinas relied on the inadequate biological knowledge of his day, that in human generation the male seed was alone the active element; he concluded that the body first formed by maternal blood by this seed was only vegetative in nature. . . . But note that for St. Thomas the bodies generated were not human in nature. . . . St. Thomas, were he alive today and cognizant of the biological evidence known today, would not hesitate in concluding that the body that comes to be when fertilization is completed is indubitably a human body and hence that its organizing and vivifying principle can only be a human soul, an intellectual or spiritual soul (Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life Huntington, 164–165).</blockquote>
Onishi also claims, “There are Irish ‘saints’ who performed abortions in circumstances of rape and fornication.” A common example offered in this vein is Ireland’s Brigid of Kildare, who allegedly performed “miraculous abortions” that dissolved pregnancies caused by rape. But we know that the Church condemned abortion during this time period, and historians have shown that these accounts come from <a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/38293/did-irish-saints-perform-abortions-dont-believe-it-scholars-say">unreliable folklore</a> written centuries after the saints lived. Even Maeve Callan, an example of a historian who downplays the medieval Church’s attitude toward abortion, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22606751/">admits</a>, “The sixth-century Penitential of Finnian, the seventh-century Irish Canons, and the eighth-century Old Irish Penitential include abortion among the sins to be repented.”
Throughout Church history, punishments were sometimes lighter for abortions earlier in pregnancy, but punishments for many sins have changed throughout history. That doesn’t mean that the Church’s teaching on those acts being evil changed. In the early Church, penances for sins like adultery could last for years, but now penances are reduced to encourage people to confess their sins in the first place. For example, in 1591, Pope Gregory XIV rescinded his predecessor’s rule that only the pope could lift excommunications for abortion and allowed bishops the authority to do this. In 1869, Pope Pius IX erased all distinctions between “formed” and “unformed” unborn children in canon law and made the punishments for abortion the same regardless of when during pregnancy the abortion occurs.
The question of whether abortion is wrong has nothing to do with the question of whether the unborn have souls. There is no way to empirically prove that a newborn infant—or anyone, for that matter—has an immortal soul. As a result, this argument proves too much and would justify killing humans at any stage of life. It would be more responsible to believe that biological human beings have a right to life, and that is why abortion, infanticide, and other forms of homicide are wrong.
That’s why <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19741118_declaration-abortion_en.html">in 1974 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith</a> said that a human life is still present in the womb, and this fact justifies prohibiting abortion. It also says that if we are unsure about the status of an embryo, then we should not risk killing a person whose existence in the womb is at least “probable” (just as we would not shoot a figure in the woods that was “probably” a hiker and not a bear).
Finally, contra Onishi, Christians shouldn’t give up on the belief that life begins at conception because the question of when the life of an individual biological human being begins has been settled.
The standard medical text Human Embryology and Teratology states, “Although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed” (8). Leading pro-choice philosophers agree that human fetuses are human beings.
In Planned Parenthood v. Rounds (2008), the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found that requiring abortionists to say that the fetus is a “living, separate, whole human being” does not force an abortionist to espouse an unconstitutional religious viewpoint. The Court ruled that this statement is a biological fact that even physicians affiliated with Planned Parenthood accept.
David Boonin, author of A Defense of Abortion, writes, “Perhaps the most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand and every human fetus on the other is this: All are living members of the same species, Homo sapiens. A human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development” (20).
After reviewing several medical and embryology textbooks, I have yet to find a single one that denies that a human embryo or fetus is a human organism. Since, by definition, a human fetus is a stage of development in the life of a human organism, I doubt I ever will find such a claim in a serious textbook.
Therefore, when it comes to scientific questions about when life begins, we should listen to the scientific consensus, and when it comes to moral questions, we should listen to the teaching of the Church. Any advice an editorial in Politico might give on these matters should be judged in accord with what the real authorities say on these issues.

Time to Give Up on Abortion?

Karlo Broussard explains why the eternal consequence of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-hell">Hell</a> is properly understood as a necessary effect flowing from the nature of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/sin">mortal sin</a>, rather than as a vengeful punishment imposed by an angry God.

How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?

I have had atheists admit to me that they reject Christianity because they prefer the idea of permanent extinction to the possibility of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/you-cant-have-an-all-good-god-without-hell">eternal hell</a>. Personally, I like it when people are upfront about what is driving their decision-making, and I don’t think this admission means they are acting irrationally, either.
This preference for extinction is relevant to a popular apologetic issue—namely, that many people embrace Christianity because (only because) <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-fantasy-comfort-scared">it is comforting</a>. But can’t the notion of permanent extinction be comforting also? Especially given the difficulties of this life and the prospect of death’s “sweet relief”?
Besides, Christianity is not all rainbows and unicorns, is it? After all, it seems clear (as the Church says) that Scripture teaches the possibility of hell and that Christianity demands significant moral reform in our everyday lives—reforms that many in modern society take issue with, particularly <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/sex-is-kind-of-a-big-deal">along sexual lines</a>. So, this whole “people just believe this or that because it is comforting” business seems, at best, a wash. I know people who choose atheism for comfort, perhaps for the moral laxity it provides in this life or the prospect of not having anything to account for in the next, or both. And I know people who choose Christianity for comfort, for the prospect of eternal bliss and reunion with loved ones lost. My advice? We should all drop this silly line of attack; not only can it be launched from either direction, but it fails to adjudicate the large issue. You know, the one about truth.
Why think naturalism entails permanent extinction, anyway? When I was a naturalist, that certainly seemed like the best, but certainly not the only possible or even most probable outcome, and I still think that assessment is right. What haunted me as a naturalist wasn’t so much going extinct, but the opposite.
With naturalism (the philosophical form of atheism, which is to say everything is just atoms and the laws we use to combine them, essentially), and especially if certain naturalistic accounts of the human person are correct (that we are nothing but a combination of physical bits), there is quite a range of possibilities, it seems to me, with virtually none of them hopeful or pleasant. Consider, for example, Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return, where everything repeats itself in an infinite loop. For many, running this life over and over might not seem particularly appealing (even for those who had, overall, better experiences than others), but maybe “everything” doesn’t include just this life, but an incredibly large, if not infinite number, of lives. And perhaps a great many lives are extremely awful, physically or mentally or both—perhaps far more atrocious than the worst actualized life in this universe. Seems likely, assuming there are more ways for things to go wrong than right or well. Either way, there is no end or escaping this cycle. It just goes on and on . . . like Groundhog Day, only with no possibility of control. Everything is determined; there is no outcome we can ultimately influence.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GncQtURdcE4&amp;w=600&amp;h=337]
Sounds like hell. Only, somehow, worse.
What’s more, there is little to no reason to think an outcome along the lines of Eternal Return is any less probable than permanent extinction—that is, if God does not exist. No plausible naturalistic theory should automatically cause us to think these options are unevenly likely. In fact, they seem perfectly equal possibilities, given the core naturalistic commitments—that there is no perfect being at the bottom of everything, there are only natural entities and natural causes, etc.
I think that if naturalism is true, it’s less likely that everything after death goes blank, and more likely that Nietzsche was right. After all, the idea of recurrence was countenanced by not just Nietzsche, but other thinkers, including many ancient ones. It seems, given a certain naturalistic starting point, to make a fair bit of sense.
From Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo: “The doctrine of the ‘Eternal Recurrence’—that is to say, of the absolute and eternal repetition of all things in periodical cycles—this doctrine of Zarathustra&#8217;s might, it is true, have been taught before. In any case, the Stoics, who derived nearly all their fundamental ideas from Heraclitus, show traces of it.”
Alternatively, one could entertain what many naturalists currently find fashionable to entertain—that we are all entrapped in, or the product of, some massive simulation or “virtual world,” designed by who knows what and who knows why.
We don’t need to think too hard about this scenario—again, a scenario seen as not improbable by many naturalists (many argue it is probabilistically most likely, if not inevitable)—to begin conceiving of any number of quite dreadful outcomes. Perhaps this inevitably finite, morally fallible designer—or worse, a committee of designers—might, for the sake of entertainment or profit, be curious to see how entities like us begin to react in spontaneously enacted hellish scenarios. If this virtual world business is true in any sense, then we are already massively, systematically deceived—itself a sort of living hell. We might not have to wait until death to discover that naturalism includes its own rather haunting equivalent of Inferno. We may, plausibly, already be in it.
Of course, I don’t think any of these naturalistic scenarios are true because I don’t think naturalism, in any conceivable form, is true. The theist, with his wholly different worldview commitments, need not fret over these outlandish ideas. Nevertheless, I wish to impress the point that no naturalist should take comfort in the idea of permanent extinction upon death, relying upon any sort of “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/invincible-ignorance-is-not-a-ticket-to-heaven">get out of hell free</a>” card—just get through this life, and that’s the end of it. Godlessness does not let us off so easy.