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<div>Some years ago on YouTube there was something called the "blasphemy challenge." What is this?
People were challenged to submit videos in which they recorded themselves blaspheming or denying the existence of the Holy Spirit.</div><div>The so-called “Blasphemy Challenge” is a misguided attempt by some unbelievers to commit the unforgivable sin—i.e., blaspheming the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12:32) People were encouraged to submit videos in which they recorded themselves blaspheming or denying the existence of the Holy Spirit. Obviously, this is a foolish endeavor.
Some Protestant Christians, who anticipated being raptured to heaven and wanted to have their pets cared for in their absence, cooperated with nonbelievers in taking up this challenge so as to ensure ongoing temporal care for their canines and/or other pets. Such actions are obviously contrary to Christ’s teaching and ironically place the good of mere animals over human beings, i.e., those who are made in the image and likeness of God (see Genesis 1:26-27). In addition, the rapture is not biblical, as can be read about <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-rapture">here</a> and <a href="http://www.cuf.org/2005/02/now-you-see-em-now-you-dont-dispensing-with-the-rapture/">here</a>,
Finally, the unforgivable sin cannot be committed by a mere utterance, we are happy to report, thanks to God’s great mercy. The only real unforgivable sin is final impenitence (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a8.htm">CCC 1864</a>).
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The Blasphemy Challenge

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God is infinite.

A caller asks Fr. Hugh Barbour if indigenous dances are allowed <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-liturgical-dancing-permitted-at-mass">during Mass</a>. His answer: it depends.
Transcript:
Caller: I&#8217;d just like to know if indigenous dancers are allowed during the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/sacrifice-of-the-mass">Mass</a>.
Fr. Hugh: With the question of indigenous dances, we all know the difference between something which fits in a particular culture and makes sense and something which is kind of like a corny school pageant approach where, you know, it&#8217;s not something people do every day. It&#8217;s not a part of their normal religious practice, but suddenly, in order to do something nice for the liturgy, they do some kind of dance.
You know, I would say to start with good taste. And, you know, if it&#8217;s not something you normally do, then it&#8217;s not an authentic expression of your religious practice, either. And there&#8217;s a lot of fake liturgy out there where, you know, even though people are not doing indigenous dances, ever, they stir them up and arrange them for the liturgy.
And the liturgy is made up of signs which correspond to our human religious experience. If you&#8217;re living in the Congo, for example, and you have a church-approved liturgy which involves also the congregation processing, swaying back and forth, and playing instruments, and whatnot as part of the liturgy, but that is the normal way in which they celebrate anything, then that&#8217;s something very, very different. And, when you witness that you can tell the difference between a self-conscious &#8220;Aren&#8217;t we great? Aren&#8217;t we inclusive? Aren&#8217;t we just lovely?&#8221; cultural experience and the serious, focused, God-oriented liturgy of the church.
And I think there&#8217;s a consideration. There&#8217;s room for cultural accommodation. But people react when they begin to feel like it&#8217;s fake. And I&#8217;m not going to say where you draw the line or what&#8217;s fake and what&#8217;s not.
And of course, the thing is, at any given Mass, a lot of people could go away edified even from the corniest, tackiest display of self-conscious religiosity. They can still like it. And they may be edified because God is the Lord of all, and He can move hearts any way He wants.
So, I&#8217;m not saying that that&#8217;s a complete loss, but the church does not foster a liturgy which is a fabrication which is planned, which is calculated. She fosters a liturgy which is according to her liturgical law, her books, her traditions, her music, and each and every place. So I would just say it&#8217;s not so much an easy answer, but rather you have to look at it in each particular context.
Host: Tony, I&#8217;m interested because here in the U.S., we have lots of Catholic parishes or Catholic missions and chapels on Indian lands. And, you know, I&#8217;ve never—I&#8217;ve been to many masses on Indian lands, but I&#8217;ve never seen indigenous dancing. But I would imagine—you&#8217;re calling from Idaho, that might be the case there. Is that what you were talking about?
Caller: No, Aztec, Mexican Aztec dancing.
Host: Oh, Aztec dancing.
Fr. Hugh: But where?
Caller: My local church.
Fr. Hugh: Yeah. And are any of those people Aztecs? That&#8217;s my question.
Caller: Well, I mean, I guess the Mexican community&#8230;
Fr. Hugh: The distant, distant ancestors. But, I just, my thing is to just look at it and say, is this something that they naturally would do or is it something that would be suggested to them as a political-cultural statement? Because Mexican Catholic culture has a long liturgical tradition and very beautiful music that&#8217;s been there for hundreds of years. And so I&#8217;m a little suspicious when these things are introduced. Not that they have to be wrong, but just that we should apply these things with certain caution because the church&#8217;s liturgy is not simply a class project.

Are Indigenous Dances Allowed during Mass?

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Karlo Broussard carefully walks step-by-step through 1 Corinthians 3:11-13, which he calls &#8220;the key classic text&#8221; for the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.

Scriptural Proofs of Purgatory

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Should Christians avoid AI / ChatGPT?

Do Catholics believe Saints answer prayers?

I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed; 
he shall bruise your head, 
and you shall bruise his heel.
So God spoke to the serpent after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Our reading did not include the whole story, but I’m sure you know it: God told Adam and Eve that they could eat from any tree in the Garden but one. The serpent deceived them, and they ate of the tree.
Genesis tells us the true story of our origins—the origin of humanity in God’s creation and the origin of the world’s long struggle with sin and death. Something went very wrong, and yet God, from the beginning, has a plan to fix it. Let’s consider those two things, then. First, what went wrong? And second, what is God doing about it?
Probably a lot of us were taught as children that the basic problem was disobedience. God gave a command—do not eat from the tree—and Adam and Eve disobeyed. That is true. But to put it in this way, as a story of law and disobedience, makes it sound arbitrary. God makes law, and our duty is to follow it. We are not allowed to ask why. If this the way of things, many of us may naturally wonder if Adam and Eve were right after all. We resent the idea of arbitrary rule. We don’t want to live in a world where things are the way they are simply “because I said so.”
Perhaps some of us do. But in order to trust any kind of “because I said so” law, we have to trust the lawgiver. We have to trust that the person in authority is not just powerful, but good. And there we have a better hint at what is going on with Adam and Eve in the garden. Adam and Eve had been put in a place of overflowing goodness and life and joy. They were literally in paradise. They were in perfect fellowship with God. They lacked nothing. They ate from the tree of life. They were in a place without hurt, without evil, without hunger, without pain. When they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, then, it was not a choice designed to correct some problem, to escape from a difficulty or improve their lot. The fruit itself was not evil; it was not somehow unclean. It was, as created by God, good. But in choosing this one good, they preferred it to the other goods they had been given. In particular, they placed this lesser good above the greatest good—they chose a piece of fruit over fellowship with God.
So the problem wasn’t evil, per se, or at least not evil as we normally think of it. It was disordered good. It’s not that Eve, when she ate the fruit, stopped loving God—there wasn’t a flip switched between love and hate, as if it’s just one or the other—but she removed that love from its proper position. This is a good description of much of our sin as well. It’s definitely possible to do something intrinsically evil. But a lot of the time, it’s not that we’re doing evil directly; it’s that the good we do is not ordered in its proper place. We love some things way more than we should, and we love other things much less than we should. This is ultimately less a problem of disobedience than it is of disordered desire, disordered affection.
So Adam and Eve disobeyed. But their disobedience wasn’t just the disobedience of an arbitrary command. It was the rejection of trust; it was the choice of a lesser good over a higher good.
We may still wonder why it was that God chose this particular way—why God gave this particular prohibition. The divine will is ultimately inscrutable, but I find myself moved by C.S. Lewis’s answer from his novel Perelandra, where a new Adam and Eve on Venus face exactly the same kind of seemingly arbitrary command. They live in a world of floating islands, and their one law is that they cannot sleep overnight on the fixed land. The figure of Satan, a man from earth, pesters the woman repeatedly about the arbitrary absurdity of this command. There is no reason for it, he insists. It’s all relative. People on his world stay on fixed land all the time. Surely God—that is, Maleldil—did not really intend her to follow such a strange law. Surely its real intention was to test her freedom and reveal her own strength. After all, Maleldil wants his children to think for themselves.
To this the character responds: “I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?” (101).
From the disobedience of our first parents, we lost the joy of obedience. We lost the joy of loving God for his own sake and not only for the many benefits we receive at his hand. It is this loss of true joy—and its cheap substitute in other kinds of love, other kinds of joys—that persists in humanity. It has become part of our human identity, our social and cultural DNA.
How can we restore fellowship and harmony? How can we recover obedience not as duty and burden, but as joy? How can we receive the gifts of God and eat for fellowship rather than death? We’ve seen the problem, and now we can ask: what is God doing about it?
Even in Genesis, God declares that this fall from grace will not last forever.
I will put enmity between you and the woman, 
and between your seed and her seed; 
he shall bruise your head, 
and you shall bruise his heel.
This passage is often called the proto-evangelium, the original or primitive gospel, because it contains in a hidden way the whole story of Christ. The seed of the woman is Jesus, the incarnate Son. Mary’s son, the new Eve’s son, is hurt—he dies the death of a sinner. But from this death he emerges with a mere bruise, a mark of the conflict that did not ultimately overcome him. By contrast, the devil receives a mortal blow: his power and his deception are caught up in the greater purposes of God. When Mary gives her “fiat,” her yes, at the Annunciation, she steps into that original human calling of fellowship and joy.
The good news of God’s plan is not yet fully known in Genesis, but we know it now in Jesus Christ. He enacted both God’s justice and man’s responsibility, submitting himself to the yoke of mortal obedience. He submitted himself to all the pain of our disordered love so that he might put our loves in order.
This is the story of our fall and our redemption. We, like Adam and Eve, face a choice—many choices, in fact—about whether or not to obey the word of God. But what Jesus has shown us, in his selfless love for us, is that this word is not arbitrary or selfish; it is trustworthy. God is trustworthy. When God asks us to love him above all else, when he asks us to do things that seem arbitrary or hard to grasp, he does this always and only for our good. We know this now more fully than Adam and Eve did.
“So we do not lose hope,” as St. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “for this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
It’s probably worth saying that, for Paul, this was no question of idealistic principle. He knew suffering, both from his own personal struggles and in his own eventual trial and execution. He wrote in an era when life often was, compared to our current age, short, brutal, and full of misery. But this “momentary affliction,” for Paul, can reveal joy because it teaches us to love what really matters.
Whom do we love? What do we love? To what authority do we give our obedience? The question is not whether to love, whether to obey, or whether to eat—the alternative is not, as we might think, perfect freedom, but perfect nonexistence. Human beings love, obey, and eat—even if they love and obey only themselves and eat only to their destruction. But there is a better love, a more perfect food, and a worthier obedience, in whose perfect will all human stories find their meaning.

Genesis Is True

Is asking saints for prayers divination?

<div>Was St. John Chrysostom a Greek Orthodox priest or a Catholic one?</div><div>St. John Chrysostom lived in the fourth century, the Catholic and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/eastern-orthodoxy">Orthodox Churches</a> did not split into two separate churches until the eleventh century. He was simply a priest of the Church in Antioch of the one universal Church. Toward the end of his life (c. 398), he became the bishop of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/constantinople">Constantinople</a>, which would eventually split with the Western Church, but that would not be until six centuries later.
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John Chrysostom: Catholic or Orthodox?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says “Of all the divine attributes, only God&#8217;s omnipotence is named in the Creed: to confess this power has great bearing on our lives. We believe that his might is universal, for God who created everything also rules everything and can do everything” (268).
Yet how can God be omnipotent when the Bible says he was defeated by iron chariots? This is a common atheist meme and was even the title of a now-defunct atheist wiki called “Iron Chariots.” The claim references Judges 1:19: “And the Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.”
This part of the book of Judges describes the Israelites attempting to drive the remaining Canaanites out of the promised land. You should know that later in the book the tribe of Judah was able to drive out the Canaanites and their iron chariots. Judges 4:15 describes how God “routed” the Canaanite commander, Sisera, and his 900 iron chariots.
Judges 1:19 isn’t saying God failed to drive out the Canaanites in the plain. The pronoun “he” in this verse refers to the nearest proper noun, or the tribe of Judah. It was Judah who took possession of the hill country but failed to secure the plains. The Lord was “with Judah,” but that doesn’t mean Judah accomplished all their goals. Genesis 39:21 says the Lord was with Joseph while he remained falsely imprisoned for two years because a person who promised to free him forgot to do this (Gen. 40:23)
This only meant God did not abandon Judah during their failure to capture the valley, which was due in part to a lack of faith. According to James Jordan’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Judges-Theological-Commentary-James-Jordan/dp/1579102492">commentary on Judges</a>:
<blockquote>Chariots could not function in the hills, so Judah did not have to fight them there. Where the iron chariots could function, however, Judah did not succeed . . . as Judges 4 and 5 will show, God is fully capable of dealing with iron chariots. Thus, the problem was not the iron chariots. The problem was faith, or rather the lack of it. (13)</blockquote>
Ultimately, the book of Judges reveals that God keeps his promises to us even when we break our promises to him. That’s why in the next chapter in Judges, after the defeat of other tribes is described, God says “you have not obeyed my command. What is this you have done? So now I say, I will not drive them out before you; but they shall become adversaries to you”. (Judges 2:2-3).
God never abandons us, but he also lets us suffer the consequences of abandoning him, so let us pray to always remain faithful to him no matter how many “iron chariots” we face in our own lives.

Iron Chariots vs. Almighty God

<div>Besides Deuteronomy 18, are there other biblical references warning against tarot-card reading or fortune telling?</div><div>As you indicate, Deuteronomy 18:10-15 is a fundamental passage that condemns both divination and magic/sorcery (CCC 2115-17). There are number of other passages in which divination and/or magic are condemned directly or indirectly, the latter being when things go badly for a practitioner of magic, Elymas (Acts 13:4-12). For more Scripture passages, see these two articles from the Catholic Encyclopedia on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/divination">“Divination”</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/witchcraft">“Witchcraft.”</a> For a general treatment of tarot cards, see also <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-enduring-allure-of-tarot">our related article</a>.
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Where Does the Bible Forbid Divination?

<div>When did God as 'Father' become common? Jesus called him Father, but was that common?</div><div>Referring to God as “Father” took place in Old Testament times, but it was rather unusual prior to the coming of Jesus, who regularly referred to his heavenly Father, e.g., John 1:14, 18.
In the Old Testament, God is referred to as the father of the nation of Israel several times, (Deut. 32:6, Is. 63:16, Mal. 1:6). He is also referred to the father of certain people more than a dozen times, (e.g., 2 Sam. 7:14, Ps. 89:26). And at other times, the imagery of “fatherhood” is present even though the word Father is not used, (Ex. 4:22-23, Mal. 3:17).
In coming to redeem the world (see John 3:16-17), Jesus invites us into an intimate relationship with his heavenly Father in which we can call him “Abba” or “Daddy,” (e.g., Mark 14:36, Rom. 8:15, Gal. 4:6).
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When Did God as ‘Father’ Become Common?

<div>Have you heard of Antonious Aquina? He recently wrote an article titled "Francis, the Pope of Perversity."</div><div>Antonius Aquinas is the pen name of a person who neither accepts the valid election of Pope Francis nor accepts Vatican II as a legitimate ecumenical council. In addition, it is one thing to criticize Pope Francis in a constructive way, as a number of faithful churchmen have. But Antonius does not. In short, there are better resources on the Internet, including authentically Catholic ones like Catholic.com. And please pray for Antonius Aquinas, Pope Francis, and the Church in general.
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Critic Not Worth Your Time

Karlo Broussard tackles a fascinating question: Could Marian apparitions be the devil masquerading as Mary? Karlo delves into the possibility of demonic deception, emphasizing the importance of discernment and the Church&#8217;s role in evaluating alleged apparitions. He highlights the criteria used to distinguish genuine apparitions from potential deceptions.
Transcript:
If the devil can appear, Karlo, as an angel of light, could these Marian apparitions be the devil appearing as Mary?
Yeah, great question. And the answer is, yes, it&#8217;s possible. It could be the devil appearing as Mary. That&#8217;s a possibility. But then the question becomes, is it the case that these Marian apparitions approved by the Church is perhaps a manifestation of the devil in visible form? And the answer would be no. So it is possible that the devil can visibly manifest himself in the image of Our Lady or any other image. And this is why, Si, that whatever apparition is experienced, whether for me personally or whether it&#8217;s going on, right, in a public setting or something, those events need to be submitted to and subject to the discernment and the investigation of the ordinary of the bishop. So he can employ his team of experts to assess that situation and that alleged apparition to see if it is, in fact, Our Lady or if it is the devil or a demon manifesting himself in the form of Our Lady. And so for us as laypeople, Cy, we&#8217;re going to defer and look to the judgment of the Church, given the Church&#8217;s competency in assessing these situations. And of course, that, of course, just raises the question, well, you know, what sort of criterion might they look to in order to discern this? Well, one criterion would be, you know, what sort of teaching, perhaps, is directly associated with the alleged apparition?
So, for example, take the Immaculate Conception, you know, that was defined as dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854, and then you have the apparition of Our Lady under the title of the Immaculate Conception at Nords. Well, if that were the devil, I don&#8217;t think the devil would be manifesting himself to confirm for people the truth of the Immaculate Conception. Like, why would he want to affirm Our Lady as the Immaculate Conception? He would want to try and lead us away from that. So if he were to present himself in the apparitional form, he would be shooting himself in the foot, right? So that confirmation, that apparition in a direct association with the teaching of the Immaculate Conception, is a good reason for those with competent authority at the time to conclude that this is legit, you know, this is Our Lady manifesting herself and not the devil. And so these are the sorts of questions that the bishop and his team would be asking to try and discern whether these alleged apparitions are in fact apparitions. But David&#8217;s question, Cy, highlights the very reason why there should be careful examination and assessment of alleged apparitions. And we as the laity need to always be subject to and properly disposed to give deference to Holy Mother Church&#8217;s judgment on these issues.
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Can the Devil Portray Himself as Mary?

Created in God’s image in the beginning, our faces have been re-imaged into Christ’s by nothing other than his love. For when we survey human history or the day’s headlines, we see how mean and desiccated and envious our species is. Even close to our hearts we find innumerable jealousies, petty fears, and secret plans for revenge. So much of ourselves is scared and self-centered, unwilling to let love get too close.
The Christian account of how this came to be is found <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/in-the-beginning/?searchid=9525288&amp;search_query=in+the+beginning">back in Genesis</a>, when the first couple turned away from God’s invitation to intimacy with him. In so rebelling, Adam and Eve fated all their progeny to a doomed course. It is as if one of your ancestors had gambled away a magnificent sum of cash, which could have been your inheritance if he had not acted so foolishly so many years ago. But instead of abandoning us to ourselves, God decided to recreate the human race by starting over with a new Adam and a new Eve.
<blockquote>Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned— for up to the time of the law, sin was in the world, though sin is not accounted when there is no law. But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come. But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one person Jesus Christ overflow for the many.
—Romans 5:12-15</blockquote>
So each of us belongs to two Adams, the first representing our disobedience and disdain for the good, and reminding us of our lost spiritual inheritance, and the second directing us toward charity and mercy and all that Christ embodies. In him, we have been recapitulated—given a new head (Eph. 1:10)—and can now share in the Son’s perfect love of the Father and his for us.
As there are a first and second Adam, so too with Eve. Our blessed mother Mary, the second Eve, remedies the first Eve’s selfishness by her love and humble obedience.
<blockquote>He became man by the virgin, in order that the disobedience which proceeded from the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her that the Spirit of the Lord would come upon her, and . . . the Holy Thing begotten of her is the Son of God.
—St. Justin Martyr
When I remember the disobedience of Eve, I weep. But when I view the fruit of Mary, I am again renewed. Deathless by descent, invisible through beauty, before the ages light of light; of God the Father was thou begotten; being Word and Son of God, thou didst take on flesh from Mary virgin, in order that thou might renew afresh Adam fashioned by thy holy hand.
—St. Gregory the Wonderworker
Death came through Eve, but life has come through Mary.
—St. Jerome</blockquote>
The name Eva (in Latin) is renewed into Ave, the greeting of Gabriel to Mary (Luke 1:28). Where the first Eve was deceived by a fallen angel, the second was enlightened by one of God’s most trusted messengers. And where the first brought about death through disobedience beneath the tree in Eden, the second led to life being given upon the tree of Calvary. That is why the early Church Fathers saw in Genesis 3:15, in the aftermath of the Fall, the Protoevangelium or “first gospel.” There the Lord forewarns Satan, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.”
The second person of the Trinity takes our human nature to himself through the “yes” of Mary, the second Eve. Her fiat—“let it be done”—is the watershed moment in all human history (Luke 1:38). Having been preserved from the dissolution and division that are the result of original sin—for the Father had preserved her from conception for this single moment—she is able to offer the Son of God humanity in its fullness.
<blockquote>Once something has been bound, it cannot be loosed except by undoing the knot in reverse order. . . . And so the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience. What Eve bound through her unbelief, Mary loosed by her faith.
—St. Irenaeus</blockquote>
Good prayer comes from good theology. We can never separate spirituality from study, devotion from dogma, just as we can never divide defending the Faith from loving our neighbor. From Irenaeus’s millennia-old Mariology comes a most beautiful novena: to Mary, Undoer of Knots. This devotion arose in Germany around 1700, prompted by a painting depicting Mary untying the knots of a cord and returning the rope back to earth smooth and renewed to her children.
<blockquote>Dearest holy mother, most holy Mary,
you undo the knots that suffocate your children. 
Extend your merciful hands to me.
I entrust to you today this knot [mention your request here] 
and all the negative consequences that it provokes in my life. 
I give you this knot that torments me and makes me unhappy 
and so impedes me from uniting myself to you and your Son Jesus, my Savior. 
I run to you, Mary, Undoer of Knots, because I trust you 
and I know that you never despise a sinning child who comes to ask you for help.
I believe that you can undo this knot because Jesus grants you everything. 
I believe that you want to undo this knot because you are my mother. 
I believe that you will do this because you love me with eternal love. 
Thank you, dear mother.
—Opening Prayer of the Novena to Mary, Undoer of Knots</blockquote>
Just as God began the new era in Christ with a woman, it is a pious practice for each of his children to begin their day with this same woman, our mother Mary. Since she is the one who gave the Son of God his body and all its senses, it is also fitting to consecrate all of ourselves to her.
<blockquote>My queen and my mother, I offer myself entirely to you this day. 
Pray that I have the grace to consecrate to you 
the use of my eyes, ears, mouth, heart, words and thoughts, and my entire being. 
You hold me as your child, form me also into a more faithful friend of your son Jesus. 
This alone will make me a fit and fruitful friend 
in your loving hands and in his service, 
bringing the greatest possible salvation for me and for other souls, 
and glory to God our Father.</blockquote>

Mary Will Undo Your Knots

One of the tenets of Reformed theology is the belief in total depravity, or the idea that man is wholly defiled and incapable of doing good before being regenerated, or born again, in Christ.
According to the most prominent author of Reformed theology, John Calvin, “the will is so utterly vitiated and corrupted in every part as to produce nothing but evil” (Institutes 2.2.26), and “man is so enslaved by the yoke of sin that he cannot of his own nature aim at the good, either in wish or in actual pursuit (2.3.5).
Thus, Calvin teaches that it is impossible for man to do any good before he is regenerated in Christ. And if he is regenerated, it is in no part attributed to any of his own actions. It is solely the work of God.
This means if God does not choose to regenerate us, we are incapable of ever doing good and thus ever being saved. All we can do is sin, and we cannot turn away from evil in any capacity.
If we have no say in our salvation, then, how could we have any say in our damnation? We wouldn’t. In fact, according to Calvin, all of the evil deeds we commit are simply the result of our depraved nature. We do not have the ability to do otherwise.
But if this were the case, how could God justly punish us for something that we had to do? Would a judge punish somebody with a life sentence for a crime he was forced to commit, with no possibility of doing otherwise? That seems pretty unfair.
A Calvinist might push back and say Catholics agree that God determines who receives the grace of final perseverance and who does not. Although this is true, it is also true that all people are given sufficient grace to be saved if they are willing to cooperate with it. Thus, in the Catholic world, each person is given a real chance at salvation; God can truly be said to desire the salvation of all, since he gives everyone the opportunity to be saved.
Additionally, the Catholic Church teaches that human nature is not fully depraved or corrupted. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “human nature has not been totally corrupted,” but is simply “wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin” (405). As a result, humans can perform acts of natural good throughout their life even if they have never been regenerated in Christ, since human nature is not fully corrupted or inclined to evil. This aligns with our everyday experience.
For example, a firefighter might be an atheist, but he could still have the virtue of courage and risk his life to save others. A mother might not be a believer, but she could still practice love and selflessness with her children. Even though it is certainly more difficult to do this without having efficacious grace from the sacraments, it is still possible.
The teachings of Calvin are clearly misaligned with ordinary human experience. Even though non-believers may not be saints, they are certainly not people who “produce nothing but evil,” as Calvin suggests.
Not even Scripture describes individuals in this way. For example, in 2 Chronicles 19, King Jehoshaphat is described as doing evil and thus meriting the wrath of God, but also having some good in him:
<blockquote>Jehu the son of Hanani the seer went out to meet him, and said to King Jehoshaphat, “Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the Lord? Because of this, wrath has gone out against you from the Lord. Nevertheless some good is found in you, for you destroyed the Asherahs out of the land, and have set your heart to seek God.”</blockquote>
In addition to this, God invites all to seek after him and thus do good: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:22). If it were impossible for everyone to turn to him, why is he inviting us to? Again, this would be asking the impossible. It would not be fair.
It would also be unfair for Christ to judge the saved from the damned by their charitable works, since the damned have no possible way of ever having done good works. It would be like a parent requesting of his child, “If you grow five feet overnight, I will reward you. But if you don’t, I’ll punish you.” One might respond to the parent that he’s being completely unfair and unreasonable. How could you punish a child for failing at an impossible task?
And yet this is how God the Father is under the Calvinist framework. He demands an impossible task of most of the world, since wide is the path to destruction and narrow is the path to life. Most people would be eternally punished for something they had no control over. How could God be infinitely just and loving then?
It is clear he couldn’t—which is why the Calvinist view of total depravity is . . . well, totally wrong, and inconsistent.

Total Depravity Is Totally Wrong

We live life with language, with signs. Even a baby, who doesn’t speak English or Spanish or Latin, knows how to say things, and figures out pretty quickly how to say more—a cry, a cuddle, a coo. We speak with gestures and forms of dress, with emojis and text shorthand, with eye rolls and notes folded up and passed up the aisle when the teacher isn’t looking. We say things with songs and sounds, with sculptures, paintings, screenplays, cameras.
Even in our own interior way, we communicate. My body sends me, or rather I send myself, signs of pain, of delight, of confusion or fear. My mind—what for St. Augustine is the clearest sign of the Holy Trinity—is a kind of constant communication with itself: memory, understanding, will.
Language, signs, is wrapped up in the mystery of creation. So, too, it’s wrapped up in the mystery of sin, for every one of those signs can be misunderstood, distorted, ignored, and corrupted—whether with the tragic translation error leading to violence or the tragic interior communication gaps of mental illness. And so it’s no wonder that some key moments in the human story focus on this collapse.
The Tower of Babel—that great story from Genesis 11—is very much in the background of Pentecost. We don’t read it this morning, though it was read at last night’s vigil. The scene in Acts comes across as a kind of reversal of Babel. Human arrogance led to division and confusion; the Holy Spirit brings peace and understanding.
The Holy Spirit also brings . . . well, the Church as we know it. From one perspective, the Church was already Catholic in the upper room on Holy Thursday; some of the Fathers even speak of the Church going all the way back in the history of Israel and the Patriarchs. But whether the Church was born on Pentecost or simply transformed on Pentecost, it’s interesting that the main sign of this transformation, this new life, was the sudden miraculous translatability of the apostolic witness.
I use that term intentionally, because every translation is, I think, a kind of miracle, a kind of transcendence. I think the Jewish people of the first century understood this; their Bible, the Septuagint, was a Greek translation of ancient Hebrew texts. The legendary origin story of the Septuagint, where seventy translators independently produced the exact same Greek text, is meant to show not so much how special the Greek Septuagint is, but how special God’s Word is. God’s Word is alive. Muslims revere the Quran, but the Quran is the Quran only in Arabic; translations may be useful in academic contexts, but Islam does not consider them scripture. But Jews and Christians have been using translations from the beginning. And Pentecost is in one sense the ultimate validation of that tradition.
What does Jesus mean when he says that the Spirit will guide us “into all truth”? The passages for today take pains to show that the Spirit is not some independent agent, but the Spirit of the Father and the Son. So whatever “all truth” means, it cannot mean something contrary to the existing testimony of scripture and apostolic tradition.
The Catholic Church understands, thanks in large part to St. John Henry Newman, that doctrine does develop—not that the Church changes its teaching, but that it gains deeper insight into the deposit of faith over time, especially when it comes to the implications of that deposit and how it might be applied in any given age. Yet I’m not sure if that’s the main takeaway from Pentecost. For Pentecost isn’t about new knowledge—as if St. Peter stands up and declares that the Holy Spirit has taught him something new. Rather, Pentecost is about translation.
But that’s not quite right, either, at least the way that we often think of translation. In the age of Google Translate—and any number of other apps and tools out there—we think of translation as a technical achievement. So obviously it can be mechanized, perfected. But Christians are perhaps better equipped than most to understand the problem of this: we have, after all, been translating our holy scriptures for more than two thousand years. And somehow we continue doing so. Seminarians still learn Greek and Latin and Hebrew. Why bother? Why not just improve the older translations? The answer is that we know that language is not that easy. Language and human culture and society go hand in hand. How we speak, so we think, or vice versa, or both.
But if a language like Greek or Hebrew is hard to translate, how do you translate a new language like Christianity? For isn’t the Church a kind of language? It’s not just a social club; it’s a sacramental body. It’s not just a source of information; it is the information. It’s not just an abstraction; it’s a particular group of people. It is, in short, our grammar and vocabulary for approaching life. Because, in baptism, we have a new identity, a new life in Christ, we also have a new way of understanding and structuring reality.
Like any language, Christianity can never be fully understood from the outside. You can’t ever make sense of French until you speak French. You certainly can’t make any sense of Hungarian until you’ve lived in Hungary and eaten a lot of Hungarian food. Yes, you can watch a movie in Mandarin with English subtitles. But in a certain way, the movie you’re watching is not the movie that was made. It is something else. All translators know this—perhaps translators of higher art forms most of all. Can you translate a film into a poem? Can you translate a poem into a painting? Can you translate a symphony into a paragraph?
Or can you translate the experience of a group of friends who got to know the incarnate Son of God, watched him die, then met him raised to life and saw him ascend to heaven? Can you translate all that into a message, an invitation?
On Pentecost, the answer is yes. But it’s not yes in the sense that we can run it all through Google Translate, and that’s the end of it. It’s yes in the sense that the experience of Jesus has been translated—transformed by the Holy Spirit—into this language, this structure of life that we call Church. And so the miracle we see on Pentecost isn’t simply tongues, if by that we mean a supernaturally efficient translation of information. It’s that our mission to the world—our mission to preach the gospel to all creatures—isn’t something we have to bring about by force of will or brilliance of strategy. It is achieved by the Spirit working through us. He is the translator, the missionary; he is the fire.
I’m reminded of that famous motto chosen by St. John Henry Newman, “Heart speaks to heart.” It comes from St. Francis de Sales. And I think the way that both Francis and Newman use it is to remember that conversion comes to the whole person, not just to the head. Peter’s sermon on Pentecost is not a magic formula for converting souls; it’s not that he all of a sudden got the right information to share. No, he spoke from the heart, and the Spirit moved. This is always the pattern.
You see, if Church is a kind of language, it’s not always going to make sense from the outside. I say this from experience, both as a convert and as someone with Protestant family. Personally, I was something of an expert on Catholicism for many years, but my knowledge was like someone who has read a lot of French textbooks but never actually tried to speak French. Similarly, my non-Catholic family members can respect Catholicism, and they can try to understand certain parts of its idiom, but often I realize that they do not really understand it at all. And often this is how the conversation goes in the public square. We simply speak our own language.
This reality can be hard. We can get discouraged and wonder if anything we say or do will ever make any difference or even be understood. But Pentecost is a day of hope in just this way: it is God’s promise that, if our hearts are inflamed with his love, that fire can and will spread. It is translatable. Not by us: by the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Ghost, and fill the hearts of thy faithful people: and kindle in them the fire of thy love.