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DAY 242
CHALLENGE
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“We shouldn’t believe anything that can’t be verified by science.”
DEFENSE
Authentic science does not maintain this.
Science involves the use of a particular method (i.e., “scientific method”), the principal steps of which are:
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<li>Observing some aspect of the world</li>
<li>Formulating hypotheses to explain the observed data</li>
<li>Making predictions about further observations based on the hypotheses</li>
<li>Performing experiments to test the predictions (particularly by trying to falsify them).</li>
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This general method has proved useful for investigating many subjects, but, as we cover elsewhere (see Day 333), there are limits to what can be investigated by science.
Sometimes the reason is practical, as when an experiment cannot be performed without affecting the behavior of the phenomenon to be observed. This situation is frequently encountered in studying the behavior of subatomic particles, leading to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (according to which we cannot measure both the position and the momentum of a particle).
Other times the limit is due to a matter of principle. Science—like every other field—cannot get off the ground without using truths of logic that are fundamental to all reasoning. Yet these principles cannot be verified by the scientific method. Instead, they are assumed.
Science also presupposes other principles that it cannot demonstrate, such as the lawlike behavior of natural phenomena and the extension of those laws into the past and future. It also must assume that the data that has been observed is representative of the way things are and not just a misleading set of fluke observations. Repeating experiments to gain more data is good, but the new experiments also could involve fluke observations, so there must remain an assumption that the observed data is representative of the way things really are.
Most fundamentally, the claim that we should not accept anything that cannot be verified by science does not meet its own test. In view of the limits of science we have covered, the hypothesis proposed in the challenge does not fit the observed data. It is a bad hypothesis and therefore something that authentic science does not support. Authentic science recognizes its own limits and does not claim to be the single tool needed to prove every type of proposition.
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Nothing but Science?

The Demonic Case for Catholicism

Recently, CBS News <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/u-s-baptisms-gen-z-faith/">reported</a> on what it called “the world’s largest synchronized water baptism,” an event named Baptize America. Participants from some 650 churches nationwide gathered throughout the country for the occasion, with an estimated 30,000 people baptized in a single day. The report focused in particular on baptisms taking place in Southern California and situated the event within a broader spiritual surge among Gen Z—especially Gen Z men—who are seeking deeper meaning in Christian faith.
As someone who recently <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/baptism-now-saves-you/?searchid=10373797&amp;search_query=baptism+now+saves+you">wrote a book</a> on the subject, I found several aspects of the report worth reflecting on, especially the remarks made by Pastor Mark Francey of Oceans Church in Orange County, who was interviewed during the segment.
When asked about the inspiration behind the event, Francey explained, “[We want to] respond to the Great Commission in Matthew 28, which is to go into all the world to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them.”
To that, we Catholics can only say a hearty “Amen!” Whatever differences exist among Christians regarding baptism’s meaning and effects, the fact remains that all who baptize do so in obedience to Christ’s command. This is why the Catholic Church recognizes baptisms performed in other Christian communities as valid—provided they use the proper form and matter—even when their theology of baptism differs from ours. The essential intention to “do what Christ commanded” is enough.
But this raises an important question: what did Francey think was actually happening for those baptized on that sunny California day?
At first glance, his words seem to suggest something more than mere symbolism. When asked about the significance of water baptism, he said, “Water baptism is identifying in the death, the burial, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” This language echoes Romans 6:3-4, where St. Paul teaches,
<blockquote>We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.</blockquote>
One might take the pastor’s allusion to this text as an affirmation of baptism’s interior, transformative power, since Paul goes on to say that through baptism we are “justified” (Gk., dikaioō) from sin and set free from its slavery (Rom 6:7, 17-18).
But Francey’s choice of words is ambiguous. To “identify” with Christ’s death and resurrection could mean no more than participating in a symbolic ritual of immersion. Or it could mean that baptism effects a real, grace-filled union with Christ’s saving work. His meaning is left unclear.
The ambiguity continues when the reporter, Lisa Ling, asks, “How does baptism change people’s lives?” Francey responds, “The Holy Spirit changes people’s lives.”
True enough. As Jesus teaches in John 3:5, new birth comes “by water and Spirit.” But the pastor’s response again leaves us wondering: did he mean that the Holy Spirit works through baptism or independently of it, with baptism functioning merely as a sign?
Our Lord is far clearer than this. In John 3:5, he insists that both water and Spirit constitute the new birth. The material element is not excluded simply because the rebirth is spiritual. Christ himself frequently joins the spiritual and the material: his words are “spirit and life” (John 6:63), yet they reach us through the material sounds of human speech. Likewise, the spiritual gift of baptismal regeneration is communicated through the material element of water.
The CBS segment also highlighted the testimony of twenty-year-old Reagan Heslin, who described a conversion to Christ that began well before his baptism. He had repented of sin and started attending church long before being immersed in the Pacific Ocean. Does this prove that he was already regenerated, and that baptism only confirmed it?
Not necessarily. As I explain in my book, what some interpret as signs of regeneration may in fact be signs of what theologians call imperfect faith—faith not yet enlivened by charity. Acts 10:2-4 describes Cornelius as a man who feared God and prayed regularly before the Holy Spirit descended upon him (Acts 10:47-48).
Moreover, Christians who hold to “once saved, always saved” should be cautious about appealing to external signs as evidence of regeneration. If someone later apostatizes, many within that tradition conclude that such a person was never truly saved to begin with—meaning the supposed “signs of regeneration” were illusory. By that logic, even impressive pre-baptismal signs of conversion cannot be taken as definitive evidence of true regeneration.
Finally, this argument risks begging the question. Pre-baptismal experiences count as evidence against baptismal regeneration only if Scripture does not, in fact, teach that baptism saves. But Scripture does. Jesus affirms it in John 3:5, and Peter explicitly declares it in 1 Peter 3:21: “Baptism, which corresponds to [Noah’s ark—see vv. 18-20], now saves you.” With these biblical data in hand, we are compelled to interpret conversion experiences accordingly: as cases of imperfect faith, as preparatory graces, or as extraordinary exceptions—such as when God poured out his Spirit upon Cornelius and thereby regenerated him before Peter baptized him.
The deeper issue is this: do we interpret God’s revelation through our experiences, or our experiences through God’s revelation? The consistent Christian answer must be the latter. Experiences are important, but they must be judged in the light of revealed truth.
Interestingly, one participant in the CBS segment seemed to intuit this truth better than the pastor himself. She remarked, “I can leave all my sins in the water, and I can be made new.” Her words resonate with Paul’s teaching that baptism frees us from sin (Rom 6:6-7) and makes us new creations in Christ (2 Cor 5:17; cf. 1 Cor. 12:13).
In the end, I’m grateful that CBS chose to cover this event. That tens of thousands of Americans—many of them young men—are seeking Christ through baptism is a sign of great hope. The report also gives Catholics an opportunity to reflect anew on the sacrament Christ himself instituted as the gateway to eternal life.
Whether one views baptism as a mere symbol or as the true instrument of regeneration, the fact that so many are turning to Christ is cause for rejoicing. But as Catholics, we can affirm with confidence that the deepest meaning and fullest effect of baptism is nothing less than new life in Christ—a life that begins in the waters of regeneration and leads to eternal communion with God.

Just Admit It: Baptism Saves

<div>Jskh1993 q1: how was the skull of Jesus pierced when none of his bones were broken?</div><div>You ask a worthwhile question, given that Jesus’ head was undoubtedly wounded by his crown of thorns (John 19:2-5; Matt. 27:27-31), and yet John 19:36 conveys that none of Jesus’ bones were broken, because he is the New Covenant fulfillment of the Passover lamb (see Exodus 12).
However, one’s head can be wounded significantly without one’s skull being broken. Consider a concussion, even a severe one that knocks a person out. There is not necessarily an associated  fracture of the skull. In addition, the skin of the scalp is the thickest on the human body, meaning it can be pierced and experience great trauma without the skull/bone beneath it being fractured. The scalp has <a href="https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/834808-overview">five layers</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalp_reconstruction">with the skin being the thickest</a>.
In this light, Christ experienced great head trauma in his Passion, and it’s possible his skull may have been bruised, but definitely not broken as Scripture makes clear.
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Did the Crown of Thorns Break Jesus’ Skull?

How does the Jubilee Year and forgiveness apply to my divorce and financial situation?

How can Catholics believe Genesis is an allegory and a genealogy at the same time?

How can I better defend against the claim “Catholicism is too complex”?

The Vatican suppressed the Miles Christi order recently. What does that mean for the order and the faithful associated with them?

Could pursuit of knowledge of the faith ever be an idol?

What is the difference between the particular judgment and general judgment?

How can God forget sins forgiven in Confession if He is All-Knowing?

I’m cradle Orthodox; what is the best, concise argument against Eastern Orthodoxy? Why should I become Catholic?

I’m in OCIA, my spouse is attending a Protestant Church. Am I allowed to continue attending Protestant services with him?

I heard that God allows us to go to Hell because we would not be able to stand the beatific vision if we had mortal sin on our soul. Is this true?

How did the Lord atone for our sins?

If God is omniscient, how can He &#8220;forget&#8221; sins forgiven in Confession? Jimmy Akin explains this theological mystery and answers more questions on Genesis, Catholic complexity, and divine judgment.

Does God Really Forget Our Sins If He Is All-Knowing?

Can Non-Catholics receive ashes?

I’m in OCIA. How do I sum up the differences between a Catholic mass and a protestant service and why it’s important?

In the new calendar we removed feast days of saints. Why did that happen and did it undermine papal authority?

How can the bread turn into the body and the wine turn into the blood?

Iowa Catholic Radio. Why does the priest add a drop of water into the wine?

Are the SSPX in communion with Rome? What do you say to someone who goes to those masses?

Can you emphasize why our Catholic rituals have meaning?

Why does the eucharist have to be celebrated at every mass if it’s only required once a year?

My priest changes words during the mass. What are your thoughts on that?

&#8220;Can non-Catholics receive ashes?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the significance of rituals in the Catholic faith. Other topics include the differences between Catholic Mass and Protestant services, the removal of certain feast days from the calendar, and the meaning behind the priest adding a drop of water to the wine.
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Can Non-Catholics Receive Ashes? Mass and Ritual Meaning

In this episode, Trent shows how Protestant attempts to explain away Catholic miracles mirror atheist attempts to explain Christian miracles.
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Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
All I need is a miracle, all I need is you. True wisdom from a 1985 hit by Mike + The Mechanics. Indeed, the truth of the Christian faith is guaranteed by a miracle, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And miracles have also been used as evidences for the truth of the Catholic faith in particular. So how should Protestants respond to Catholic miracles? That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ll be talking about today here on The Counsel of Trent Podcast with me your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Hi, glad that you&#8217;re here. Before we do that, though, please hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. It will be a miracle if we hit a million subscribers by next month, but it&#8217;s actually quite possible by natural means to reach a hundred thousand subscribers next month. You can help us get there, so please hit the subscribe button.
All right, so in the Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the topic of miracles. And he says miracles were more common in biblical times because their testimonial power was needed to establish God&#8217;s different covenants. Aquinas did not deny, however, that miracles continued after the apostolic age. Aquinas even cites these later miracles as evidence for the truth of Catholicism saying, quote, &#8220;Yet it is also a fact that, even in our own time, God does not cease to work miracles through his saints for the confirmation of the faith,&#8221; end quote. This led early Protestants to ask, &#8220;How could the Catholic Church be in league with the antichrist if God had performed so many miracles through the saints?&#8221; The answer for some Protestants was that God did not perform these miracles at all. They were either pious frauds or demonic deceptions. John Calvin, for example, called them frivolous and ridiculous, so vain and false. Other Protestants became skeptical of any post-apostolic miracles, even miracles that allegedly occurred among other Protestants.
The scholar Thomas Kidd describes how a woman named Mercy Wheeler was healed at a Protestant revival service in the 1740s. She had an infirmity that prevented her from walking. Kidd says that many Protestants could not believe this miracle really happened because, as he writes, quote, &#8220;To 18th century Protestants, miracles were too closely associated with Catholicism, and anti-Catholicism served as an essential component of British Protestant identity. Opponents of the revivals attempted to associate the revivals with Catholic superstition whenever extraordinary claims surfaced,&#8221; end quote. So as a result, some Protestants adopted the same skeptical attitude atheists have long had against the miraculous foundations of the Christian faith. Now, to be fair, some Protestants are skeptical of all post-apostolic miracles, be they Catholic or Protestant. Among Protestants, there is a debate over whether miraculous gifts have continued into the present, this is called continuationism, or whether they ceased with the deaths of the apostles. This is called Cessationism.
An example of the latter view that strongly denies any post-apostolic miracle is the Calvinist author B. B. Warfield&#8217;s 1918 book, Counterfeit Miracles. Warfield dismissed Catholic miracles as being the byproduct of people he said were conditioned to believe miracles are common because of doctrines like transubstantiation. He writes the following. &#8220;The worldview of the Catholic is one all his own and is very expressly a miraculous one. He reckons with the miraculous in every act. Miracles suggest itself to him as a natural explanation of every event, and nothing seems too strange to him to be true,&#8221; end quote. For example, Warfield explains the way the healings at Lourdes as being the product of suggestion. And he says Medieval miracle stories came from, quote, &#8220;The thought of an age so little instructed in the true character of the forces of nature, and especially its deeply-seated conception of the essentially magical nature of religion and its modes of working,&#8221; end quote.
Hopefully, you should see the giant problem with a Christian saying things like this. If you replace Catholic with just Christian in these excerpts, you might think B. B. Warfield was actually the atheist Richard Dawkins. The Protestant author L. Philip Barnes notes the same thing and says, quote, &#8220;If the same considerations induced by Warfield in his dismissal of post-apostolic miracles were applied to some biblical stories, then a similar negative verdict would be required in the latter cases as the former,&#8221; end quote. You see the same parallel with atheistic arguments when comparing the evidence for Christ&#8217;s resurrection and the evidence for Marian apparitions. One common atheistic explanation for the resurrection is that the disciples hallucinated the appearances of the risen Jesus. However, the Protestant apologist Mike Licona says it would be, quote, &#8220;A mind-boggling coincidence that every one of the 12 disciples would have the same predisposition to have a hallucination.&#8221; This, he says, makes group hallucinations essentially impossible.
However, if early testimony from groups of eyewitnesses is enough to show that Jesus Christ was seen alive after his death, then why wouldn&#8217;t the same kind of evidence be good enough to show that the blessed Virgin Mary was seen alive after the end of her life in the form of Marian apparitions? Even atheists raise this point, albeit to discredit Protestant arguments for the resurrection. The atheistic biblical scholar Hector Avalos, for example, says that Marian apparitions, quote, &#8220;Form the closest parallel to the Jesus apparition stories. Marian apparitions have been reportedly witnessed simultaneously by millions of people, but most evangelical apologists do not see that as proof that Mary is alive,&#8221; end quote. The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman provides similar evidence for Marian apparitions, and he writes the following. &#8220;Protestant apologists interested in proving that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely-honed historical talents to the exalted blessed Virgin Mary,&#8221; end quote.
In my debate with Doug from Hein Creek on the resurrection, an audience member asked me about the miracle of Fatima. That was where three children claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. After they reported their encounter, a crowd of thousands of people gathered on October 13th. Many witnesses claim the sun moved in extraordinary patterns across the sky, that it changed color, and that the ground and clothes that had been soaked by rain had become bone dry in a matter of minutes. Here&#8217;s what I said about the appearances of Fatima.
I don&#8217;t believe the sun or earth changed their normal rotation, but I think it&#8217;s very possible that God caused an optical effect to occur to make it appear what normally you would not have naturally seen that they saw that. I also think that we have&#8230; And what&#8217;s interesting here is we actually have better evidence for Fatima than for even the resurrection because we have contemporary newspaper reports describing the event right the day after that it purportedly happened of contemporary accounts talking about puddles drying up and multiple witnesses describing it. So I do think there&#8217;s very strong evidence for that.
Doug:
The quote of the day here in this live stream is that we have better evidence for Fatima than the resurrection. I can&#8217;t believe Trent said that.
Trent Horn:
In some respects, yeah. Notice I said that the evidence is stronger in some respects. For example, the apostles&#8217; wrist suffering and death to proclaim Jesus rose from the dead, but the witnesses of Fatima didn&#8217;t do this. But just because the miracle of Fatima has more recent evidence does not mean the resurrection of Christ has insufficient evidence. Doug acted as if this were a concession, and it might&#8217;ve been for someone who denies Marian apparitions. In fact, Protestant apologists who have looked at the evidence for Marian apparitions don&#8217;t dismiss them as mere hallucinations. Instead, they&#8217;re convinced that the people involved saw some kind of extramental or actually existing phenomena. Mike Licona addresses the evidence for Marian apparitions that Bart Ehrman includes in his book on Jesus. And Licona says that Ehrman has not disproven Christ&#8217;s resurrection by talking about things like Marian apparitions. That&#8217;s because he hasn&#8217;t disproven the Marian apparitions.
Mike Licona puts it this way. &#8220;Ehrman merely assumes without any argument that visions of Mary are hallucinations. He states that groups had seen her. He admits that many of those experiencing the visions were educated professionals including doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, engineers, and lawyers. Even Muslims apparently saw her. And the person perceived as being Mary was even photographed.&#8221; And in his book, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, Licona admits the following. &#8220;For myself, I am not prepared to adjudicate on the matter of Marian apparitions. Because I am Protestant, I carry a theological bias against an appearance of Mary. However, I am not predisposed to reject the reality of apparitions in general.&#8221; It makes sense that Protestants would not explain Marian apparitions as being something like an improbable group hallucination, because that explanation would undercut their own arguments for Christ&#8217;s resurrection. Perhaps that&#8217;s why one popular Protestant response to Marian apparitions is that they are actually demonic impersonations of the Virgin Mary.
Licona writes, &#8220;Other supernatural forces, such as demons, could be behind some supernatural events in other religions.&#8221; This response goes all the way back to the 16th century counter reformation when authors such as Johann Marbach denounced stories of Marian apparitions as simply being encounters with the demonic. He wrote the following. &#8220;She was a false Mary whom the Jesuits conjured up with a form and the appearance of the Holy Virgin Mary. This they performed through their sorcery, and the company that they keep with the devil,&#8221; end quote. In my debate on the resurrection with the atheist Matt Dillahunty, I said we should operate on the assumption that reality is as it appears unless evidence suggests otherwise. Dillahunty refused to accept that principle. But if you do that, that would lead to all kinds of radical skepticism. But if you do accept this common sense principle, it seems clear that it at least appears Jesus rose from the dead. And if that&#8217;s true, then one is justified in believing that conclusion unless evidence suggests otherwise.
Even during Jesus&#8217;s ministry, his critics rejected this very principle by denying he was a wonder working prophet of the true God. They instead said Jesus casted out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, or it was the devil doing it. In response, Jesus told them every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided house falls. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? In other words, claiming Jesus was diabolical or demonically possessed violates basic principles of reason. Jesus&#8217;s healing of the sick and his firm commitment to serving the God of Israel means that he at least appeared to be a prophet. And in the absence of any evidence for Jesus&#8217;s demonic nature, such an explanation, on par with modern claims like that Jesus was just some technologically advanced alien, is just a weak way of explaining away the historical data instead of providing a genuine explanation for it.
So if it appears that Jesus was actually the son of God and raised the dead and rose himself, then we should accept that explanation. Merely because there&#8217;s a possibility that he was demonic, that doesn&#8217;t mean that that is a real possibility that we should entertain, especially in the absence of evidence for it. And the same thing should apply to Marian apparitions. Just because it&#8217;s possible this is a demonic impersonation doesn&#8217;t mean we should take that seriously unless there actually is evidence for it for any particular Marian apparition. And also, there&#8217;s evidence against the claim that Jesus was operating under demonic powers. Because why would an agent of the devil use miracles to motivate people to adopt a belief system that&#8217;s ordered toward rejecting the devil?
If that explanation works for justifying the miracles of Jesus, then it works for other Catholic miracles, including Marian apparitions. When it comes to approved apparitions, such as those of Fatima, we can ask why would the devil impersonate Mary in order to encourage people to belong to a church whose members promise in their baptismal vows to renounce Satan and all his empty works and all his empty show? Now, another objection would be that, if Catholic miracles prove Catholicism, then miracles performed by Protestant pastors prove Protestantism. For example, Craig Keener&#8217;s two-volume work, Miracles, describes Protestant missionaries and pastors who are claimed to have performed miracles like healing people, and in some cases, even raising the dead. Some early Protestants even said that images of Martin Luther were incombustible, they wouldn&#8217;t burn even when thrown into fires that were being stoked with Martin Luther&#8217;s books. Now, some of these stories and accounts may be apocryphal or never happened, but that&#8217;s also true of some Catholic miracle accounts, especially those that were written centuries after the events that allegedly happened.
But to say no Protestant miracle claim is authentic because Protestantism is false would be to engage in the same kind of prejudice that Protestants like B. B. Warfield practice when they say that no Catholic miracle claim could ever be authentic. And they say that, at the outset, that&#8217;s prejudicial. Does that mean miracles or mighty works, if we&#8217;re reluctant to always call these things miracles, can&#8217;t tell us anything about the agents performing them? Well, if these acts involve the suspension of the laws of nature, then at a minimum they tell us the agent&#8217;s message should be taken seriously because there is a supernatural power behind it. In some cases, this might be a malevolent power bent on deceiving people. And that could be the case with some non-Christian mighty works or miracles. But we shouldn&#8217;t rush to a demonic explanation unless evidence suggests it. God may be the power behind a miracle, but his divine act does not constitute an endorsement of everything in the miracle worker&#8217;s theology.
The Apostle John told Jesus, &#8220;Master, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him because he does not follow with us.&#8221; In response, Jesus said, &#8220;Do not forbid him, for he that is not against you is for you.&#8221; In other words, the exorcists who did not follow Jesus were ignorant of his true identity, but that did not prevent God from giving those exorcists spiritual gifts so they could do good in the world. So that means that God might perform miraculous deeds in order to confirm some aspects of Protestant theology, the ones that all Christians affirm, like the need to repent and believe in the gospel or the deity of Christ.
But what&#8217;s more difficult for Protestants to explain are miracles that involve things like the Eucharist or relics. Miracles that seem to confirm not just Christian theology but distinctly Catholic theology. So in that respect, if it appears that God is revealing that Catholic practices such as offering the mass or venerating relics have faithfully handed on what was first given to the apostles, then unless evidence suggests otherwise, we should believe that this is what has happened and is being confirmed in Catholic miracles.
The Catholic philosophers Tyler McNabb and Joseph Blotto make this point as well in the context of the events such as Fatima. They write the following. &#8220;We should expect that if a figure who represents a specific Christian tradition appears, then it would give credence to the truth of that tradition, assuming the figure does not denounce said tradition. For instance, if Martin Luther appeared with a message from God, then many would consider this to be evidence that the Protestant tradition is correct over the Roman Catholic tradition. Or if John Calvin showed up with a message from God, then this would serve as evidence that the reformed Protestant tradition is correct over other Protestant traditions, and Roman Catholicism as well. Likewise, the fact that God chose Mary to reveal his message in a Roman Catholic context, that is, a context where heavy Marian devotion is both common and seen as biblical, gives us evidence that the Roman Catholic tradition is correct,&#8221; end quote.
In conclusion, Protestants should not be dismissive of Catholic miracles, lest their approach be used to dismiss biblical miracles as well. And Catholics should not crow about the alleged lack of Protestant miracles, lest they undermine their own case also. Instead, Protestants should be open to the existence of Catholic miracles and seriously consider and discern what God is revealing through those miracles, especially miracles that occur in uniquely Catholic contexts, such as the Eucharist miraculously becoming flesh or apparitions of the blessed Virgin Mary or incorruptible saints. Hopefully, they&#8217;ll conclude that God has continued to bless his people with signs and wonders for the new covenant he has made with them through Christ&#8217;s one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Thank you so much for watching this episode and I just hope that you have a very blessed day.
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Protestantism vs. Catholic Miracles

“How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!”
This is one of those passages whose interpretation varies pretty predictably—which is to say, no one thinks that Jesus could possibly be talking about him. If anything, this is about someone else. One of the marks, perhaps, of the decadence of the modern West is that no one seems to understand his own wealth.
There are reasons for this confusion—we’ve all heard of the famous 1 percent, and it’s true that the ultra-rich are so staggeringly rich compared to the rest of us that it is difficult to conceive of any other form of wealth.
Still, it’s worth recalling a basic distinction once made to me by someone working with those in real poverty: if you’re not worried about whether or not you’re going to eat, you’re well off. That was, and remains for me, a useful reminder. Although I have known serious financial problems in my life—crippling student loans, credit card debt, etc.—I have never honestly worried about whether or not I would eat or have my basic needs met. Of course, that has less to do with my particular financial situation than with my known safety net of family and friends.
But what we make of our current economy, or the availability or lack of a safety net, isn’t really the point of the Gospel. The point is quite clear, and often re-echoed in what tradition calls the “preferential option for the poor”—material comfort can be a barrier to entering the kingdom of God.
This is not to say that we must all take vows of poverty. It’s clear in other passages, and of course in the wider tradition, that this is what the Church refers to as a counsel of “perfection.” That is, it is not required of everyone. But it is, objectively speaking, a higher form of life to reject all material possessions for the sake of the kingdom—just as it is, objectively speaking, a higher form of life to reject married life and embrace celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. This is not to say that material things, or marriage, are bad, but merely that they pose their own unique temptations as well as opportunities.
So if we can put aside the question of these more radical vocations—what tradition calls the “counsels of perfection”—it’s still worth wondering about the general principle of material life and its challenges. Perhaps we are not the 1 percent, but we are still, in the grand scheme of things in this world, pretty wealthy. What are we to do? Is there any hope at all?
The words of the Gospel, though they begin in a hard way, soften almost at once: “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.” This doesn’t, exactly, free us of all responsibility or sense of urgency, but it gives us hope that we may, whatever our material status, go through the eye of the needle.
. . . if, that is, we rely on God. If we try to do it ourselves, there is no hope.
That is why, in the end, poverty is in many cases—though not automatically—a clearer path to salvation. If you have nothing, it is easier to throw yourself on the mercy of God and recognize that you bring nothing to the table besides yourself. But if we have something—maybe it is not a lot of money, but it’s a talent, or a passion, or a bit of property, or a set of brilliant ideas—it is always tempting to convince yourself that you can bargain, so to speak, with God, that you bring something to the table that will be useful to the transcendent and eternal creator. This is and always will be an absurdity. As St. Paul says, “What do you have that you have not received?” This is not a denial of the reality and legitimacy of human work and effort and, even, merit—but it’s all relative. You can be the most brilliant, beautiful, talented, rich, philanthropic human being; you can give your entire life to others; but all becomes meaningless, from an eternal perspective, because your life cannot take away sin.
There is only one life that can do that—the life of the God-Man. And although the Catholic tradition may speak over and over about the merits of the saints, it is also insistent, at the same time, that all these merits and graces are ultimately meaningless apart from the merit and grace of the Son of God, whose unique and singular sacrifice made it possible for us to have fellowship with God.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” then, as our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount. Because to be in a state of poverty means, in effect, to be in a state of reality before God. To be poor in spirit means to see God, because to see God truly means to see ourselves truly, to understand that our entire existence is a gift, our accomplishments a work of mercy, our merits the outpouring of grace.
The history of the Church is full of dramatic examples of this realization. You have, on the one hand, saints who give up their wealth—like St. Francis of Assisi, whom we remembered last week—to better embrace Christian discipleship. But just as often, honestly maybe more so, if more quietly, you have those who give extravagantly because they realize that their wealth cannot be, ultimately, theirs, or even their children’s. Go to any great city, and you’ll see churches and institutions all over that were built by the singular devotion of a person who understood that his prosperity was not ultimately his own. Often, too, such people realized that their money is most valuable, most profitable, when used for the sake of their souls.
We can build great works here on earth, but how long can they last? As St. John Henry Newman taught us, our vocation in this life is to move out of the shadows into the truth. But we cannot do this if we are in love with shadows, or if we imagine that we ourselves can come up with the right amount of light to banish them.
Wherever, whoever we are, we must seek the mercy of God, and ask for the grace to amend our lives and follow him with a pure heart. With God all things are possible—whether that’s being happy with very little or being saved with very much.

A Glimmer of Hope for the Rich

How Evangelization Can Strengthen Your Own Faith

Do you have trouble with the Sacrament of Reconciliation? Not sure about? Don’t know quite what to say? Father Hugh Barbour gives a brief lesson on what really happens in confession, and offers tips on how to make confessing part of your life.

The Surprising Thing That Brings Jesus Joy

A student of mine recently was troubled by a challenge that a Protestant pastor posed to him and a group of teenagers. The pastor claimed that the denial of the “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/once-saved-always-saved">once saved always saved</a>” doctrine—that’s to say, the Catholic belief that it’s possible to lose your salvation, isn’t good news, it’s bad news. And he didn’t mean this in the sense that the denial of such a doctrine is incompatible with what the Bible reveals (although he’d probably make that argument as well). He simply meant that such a belief isn’t something to rejoice in and thus doesn’t make us happy, so we should reject it.
What should we make of this kind of objection?
Well, there are two approaches we can take in response. One exposes the double standard at play in the objection; the other argues that the denial of “once saves always saved” is actually “good news.”
To begin our first approach, let’s specify what Catholics mean by “it’s possible to lose your salvation.” This is simply another way of saying it’s possible to reject the gift of salvation after we’ve already received it.
Now, there’s another time it’s possible to reject the gift of salvation: before conversion, when it is initially offered. When 3,000 people asked Peter on the day of Pentecost what they must do to be saved, Peter responded, “Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). The people repented and were baptized. But they didn’t have to do that. They could have said, “To heck with that. I’m out of here.”
But notice Protestants don’t dismiss this as “bad news.” So, the question arises, “Why?” If the possibility to reject the gift of salvation before conversion isn’t bad news, how come the possibility to reject the gift of salvation after conversion is bad news?
There seems to be a double standard here. For the objection to succeed, a Protestant would have to give a principled reason why only the possibility to reject the gift of salvation after conversion is bad news—especially when it’s possible, at least according to Catholic and Orthodox belief, to get the gift back (through the Sacrament of Reconciliation). Until that’s done, the objection doesn’t hold water.
On to our second approach: the denial of “once saved always saved” is good news.
There are two senses in which we can take this. One is that the denial of such a doctrine is compatible with the “good news” in the sense of Christ’s and the apostles’ teachings in the Bible. The other is that the denial of such a doctrine entails a good thing. While both senses are true, it’s the latter sense that we have in mind here.
Consider that if it’s possible to reject the gift of salvation after our initial conversion, this implies that it’s also possible to choose to continue our commitment to living for Christ. Now, isn’t the choice to commit to a loving relationship with Christ a good thing? I think every Christian would say yes.
So, we could ask, “If it’s not bad news to say we can choose to commit to living for Christ initially at the time of conversion, why would it be bad news to say we have the possibility of making the same choice later on? What would make the commitment to continue in our relationship with Christ bad news?” Again, there would be double standard if this were so. There’s no principle that makes one bad news and the other good.
So, if a Christian believes it’s good news to have the possibility to commit to Christ at the beginning of conversion, then he must believe it’s good news to have the possibility to choose to continue in that commitment after initial conversion. But since the former necessarily entails the possibility to reject the gift of salvation at the time it’s initially offered, the latter also necessarily entails the possibility to reject the gift of salvation after initial conversion.
Given that Christians recognize the former is a good thing, it follows that the latter is a good thing (good news) as well.
I’m sure our pastor friend had good intentions in preaching to the students. He just needed to think things through a bit more to perceive the “good news” in our ongoing renewal of commitment to Christ having real value.

‘But That Sounds Like Bad News!’

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<div>Is there a patron saint of marriage or relationships?</div><div>There are several patron saints of marriage and aspects of marriage. The patron saints of marriage include:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/adelaide-saint">Saint Adelaide</a> of Burgundy (second marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangulphus">Saint Gengulphus of Burgundy</a> (difficult marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/joseph-saint">Saint Joseph</a> (married people)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/monica-saint">Saint Monica</a> (married women)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/prisca-saint">Saint Priscilla</a> (good marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/rita-of-cascia-saint">Saint Rita of Cascia</a> (difficult marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/thomas-more-blessed">Saint Thomas More</a> (difficult marriages)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/valentine-saint">Saint Valentine</a> (happy marriages)</li>
</ul>
</div>

Is There a Patron Saint of Marriage?

When I wrote an entire chapter on masturbation in my first book, Raising Chaste Catholic Men, it was a bit surreal. As I mentioned at the start of that chapter, I had never in my life envisioned that I would be writing extensively on such a subject, and I’m guessing that most folks—at least my Catholic friends and relatives—would not generally choose to read about it!
Because the topic came up in conversations with friends as they asked what I was writing that week, I heard many clever jokes and puns about this particular activity. But whereas most of the jokers were faithful Catholics, a secular friend responded to the topic of masturbation with a simple “Ick.” Even non-religious people can sense that there is something deeply wrong with this allegedly normal and healthy behavior. Sex with a partner (even sinful sex) is one thing, but the concept of having “sex” with oneself doesn’t even make sense.
Though human beings have a distorted view of sex, deep down, there is a subconscious understanding that sex is for uniting people and begetting children. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/birth-control">Contraception</a> seeks unity without babies, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-hardest-teaching-of-them-all">IVF</a> seeks babies without unity, but masturbation strips sexual activity of both of those purposes. Instead of sex as self-gift between spouses, masturbation is a solitary act of self-centeredness.
Some might argue that masturbation is simply a feel-good release, like having a good sneeze or clearing one’s nose and breathing better. But if masturbation is just another way of “scratching an itch,” then why do masturbatory acts almost always occur while fantasizing about another person? This is just more evidence that sex is made to unite persons, and masturbation perverts this meaning.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called God’s people to a new standard of holiness. From now on, they wouldn’t just be held accountable for their actions—they would also be held accountable for the content and intention of their hearts. He taught, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27-28).
This makes sense because our actions and choices spring from what we keep in our hearts, be it good or evil. If we grow evil thoughts in our hearts, they will sprout into a weed that chokes our spiritual life and keeps us away from God forever. Jesus goes on to say:
<blockquote>If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell (Matt. 5:29-30).</blockquote>
Did Jesus condemn masturbation? Some biblical scholars have proposed that Jesus refers to it in this part of the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s not hard to see why. First, Jesus says that lust is equivalent to adultery. Then he warns us about our right eye causing us to sin (e.g., lustful thoughts) and our right hand causing us to sin (e.g., lustful actions, masturbation). The qualifier “right” refers to “all we hold dear”—anything we see or touch that is an occasion of sin. But the same language also parallels similar descriptions among Jewish rabbis and, according to Anglican priest Andrew Angel, “provides good reason for reading the stumbling with the right hand in Matthew 5:30 as a reference to masturbation.”
But should we literally pluck out our eyes or cut off our hands? No. Jesus is using hyperbole, a rhetorical device that was common among rabbis of his time, to show that sin is serious and that we must always strive to avoid it. That’s why the Catechism says of masturbation, “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action&#8221; (2352).
The Church also teaches that we must have compassion for people, especially youth, whose anxieties and difficulties adjusting to puberty can affect their judgment. But with God’s grace, parents can lay the groundwork throughout childhood that will protect their little ones and preserve their joy and innocence.
Remember . . .
<ul>
<li>The Church teaches that pornography perverts the sacredness of the marital act and harms those who consume it as well as those who produce it.</li>
<li>Those who use porn and/or masturbate are conditioned to value sex not as fulfillment of marital vows to another person, but as a selfish way to use another person as a means to base sexual pleasure.</li>
<li>Jesus told us we’d be accountable not just for sinful sexual behavior, but even for sinful thoughts. That’s why we must rely on his grace in order to protect our families from sexual sin.</li>
</ul>

Why the Church Condemns Masturbation

Why Don’t Christians Observe Jewish Dietary Laws?

Featured Guests: Dr. Peter Kreeft, Karlo Broussard, Trent Horn, Dr. Michael Naughton
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcDBvekKGQ&amp;t=40s">00:40</a> What is the inspiration behind “Symbol or Substance” – Dr. Peter Kreeft 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcDBvekKGQ&amp;t=567s">09:27</a> What is the Church teaching on non-Catholics gaining salvation? – Karlo Broussard 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcDBvekKGQ&amp;t=855s">14:15</a> How can we defend the Faith while there are prominent Catholic figures who act in opposition to Church teaching? – Trent Horn 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcDBvekKGQ&amp;t=1227s">20:27</a> What is the Catholic social teaching on work? – Dr. Michael Naughton

Catholic Answers | Season 4 | Episode 12

Michael Lofton of the Reason and Theology podcast shares his experience of leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy and eventually returning. He explains why he concluded he needed to be in communion with the pope, and why every Christian should.

Fed-up Catholics Shouldn’t Turn to Orthodoxy

William Lane Craig’s Errors on the Eucharist and the Bible

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DAY 289
CHALLENGE
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“Christians can’t lose salvation. Scripture says, ‘He who believes in the Son has eternal life’ (John 3:36a), and if life is eternal, it can’t end.”
DEFENSE
This fails to understand both the biblical concept of eternal life and other things Scripture says.
A basic truth of linguistics is that you can’t define a term simply by looking at its parts; you must look at how it’s used in practice. To violate this principle is to commit the etymological fallacy (e.g., the word awful is a combination of awe and full; it originally meant something full of awe and that thus inspired reverence, but now it means something exceedingly bad).
Similarly, you can’t look at the phrase “eternal life” and define it just by looking at its parts. You must look at how it’s used in the New Testament. When you do this, it is clear that eternal life does not refer simply to unending bodily life. That is something even the damned will have after the resurrection of the dead, but it is clear the damned don’t have eternal life in the sense the New Testament is interested in (see, e.g., John 3:36b). Eternal life thus deals not just with a quantity but a quality or kind of life.
Further, while there are verses that speak of eternal life as a present possession of believers, there are also passages that speak of it as something they have not yet achieved. Thus Paul says that on the last day God “will give eternal life” to believers (Rom. 2:7) and “he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life . . . if we do not lose heart” (Gal. 6:8–9; cf. 1 Tim. 6:12, Titus 1:2, 3:7).
Thus we don’t yet have eternal life in the final sense. We may have a promise (1 John 2:25) and even a partial experience of it, but we can lose these through mortal sin (see Day 302). Thus John warns his audience: “Any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:15).
To receive eternal life on the last day, Scripture says to “keep your- selves in the love of God; wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (Jude 21).
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Eternal Life

<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-bay0Ss5UU&amp;t=32s">0:32</a> &#8211; Does the Church teach that people merit grace? &#8211; Karlo Broussard 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-bay0Ss5UU&amp;t=305s">5:05</a> &#8211; The Kalam Cosmological Argument for God &#8211; Trent Horn 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-bay0Ss5UU&amp;t=724s">12:04</a> &#8211; How do we respond to the idea of reducing the population for the environment? &#8211; Jimmy Akin 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-bay0Ss5UU&amp;t=1064s">17:44</a> &#8211; How do we respond to the Calvinist idea of predestination? &#8211; Tim Staples

Catholic Answers | Season 5 | Episode 10

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DAY 50
CHALLENGE
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“We should form our theological beliefs by Scripture alone, following the example of the Bereans, who ‘were more noble than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so’ (Acts 17:11).”
DEFENSE
This seriously misreads the passage regarding the Bereans.
The context for the Berean incident is found in Acts 17:1–10. When Paul and Silas initially visited the Macedonian city of Thessalonica, they began preaching and making converts, which led to conflict with some in the Jewish community: “And taking some wicked fellows of the rabble, they gathered a crowd, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the people” (Acts 17:5).
They then dragged Jason and some of the new Christians before the city authorities, charging them with sedition against Caesar (Acts 17:6–7). The situation was so alarming that the Thessalonian Christians hurriedly sent Paul and Silas away by night (when traveling was not safe) to the nearby city of Berea. The non-Christian Jews in Thessalonica remained so opposed to Paul that they sent men to pursue him to Berea and incite the crowds against him, forcing him to flee at once to Athens (Acts 17:13–15).
That is the background against which the statement that the Bereans were more “noble” (other translations: “open-minded”) than the Thessalonians. The contrast is not between credulous Thessalonians, who accepted whatever Paul said without evidence, and skeptical Bereans, who demanded proof from Scripture. It is between actively hostile Thessalonians and Bereans who “received the word with all eagerness” (Acts 17:11).
This is no prooftext for sola scriptura. Paul’s message did not include merely things found in the Old Testament Scriptures. It included the many new elements of the Christian faith. What the Bereans did was confirm the basic elements of his message (i.e., the fact that Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy) and then proceeded to accept all the new, unwritten teachings that were part of it (e.g., baptism, the Eucharist, the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s people without circumcision).
In short, they accepted the whole of apostolic Tradition after confirming the core elements of the Christian message with Scripture. To follow their example, we should do the same.
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</div>
</div>
</div>

Sola Scriptura and the Bereans

Cy Kellett welcomes Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin to discuss the recent surge of podcasts focused on exorcism and demonology. Jimmy shares insights into the complexities and varying opinions within the exorcist community, emphasizing the need for caution when dealing with creatures who lie.
Transcript:
Caller: There seems to be an explosion of podcasts about, like, demonology and exorcisms and stuff like that going on. And the question I have is a theme revolving around why are these entities so legalistic? Like, what in that realm? And how does that connect to our faith and is that shown anywhere? And, like, just why is that? And I can take a call off air, so appreciate everything you guys do. Thank you.
Jimmy: Okay, so I&#8217;m aware of, you know, this kind of set of podcasts and videos and things like that that are being made by exorcists or devoted to exorcism. And I have to say that there are reasons for caution in this area, because one of the things you find when you study exorcism, which I do, is that the Church&#8217;s teachings in this area are not as extensive as many people think.
And there&#8217;s actually considerable disagreement within the community of exorcists about demons and what leads to possession and how you get them out and what&#8217;s needed for that and what&#8217;s not needed for that. There are actually a bunch of different theories in the community of exorcists on these questions. I&#8217;ve been making a study of note in, okay, what are the different schools of thought and what do they claim and so forth?
I will be reporting on that in the future on Jimmy Akin&#8217;s Mysterious World. But what I can say for now is the fact that there is such disagreement and diversity among exorcists about demons and what they do, how they do and don&#8217;t work, that we need to just be very careful and not assume that what we&#8217;re hearing from any one exorcist or any one group of exorcists is the absolute truth.
What we have are a bunch of experience reports. You know, Exorcist A will have certain sets of experiences. Exorcist B will have another set of experiences and so forth. One of the problems with experience reports is in order to draw firm conclusions, you need to do statistical studies and see which experiences are typical and which are outliers. And no one&#8217;s doing those studies.
So as a result, we don&#8217;t really&#8230; the Church has not commissioned a scientific study of possession experiences and arrived at, you know, validated conclusions. It&#8217;s all anecdotal, meaning it&#8217;s just different people expressing their opinions based on their experiences. That&#8217;s one reason that we need to be careful here.
And a second reason that we need to be careful here is demons are liars who lie. They are working for the father of lies. They&#8217;ve been liars since the beginning. Consequently, if they think they can mislead Exorcist A by giving him one set of experiences and mislead Exorcist B in a different way by giving him another set of experiences, that&#8217;s what they&#8217;re going to do.
So you fundamentally can&#8217;t trust what they say. That&#8217;s another reason for caution in this area. So if you&#8217;ve been listening to a particular podcast or a group of exorcists who say demons are highly legalistic, well, I&#8217;d say that&#8217;s interesting. But A, those are only experiences that you and maybe some others have reported, but that&#8217;s not the universal experience.
And B, these guys are trying to deceive you. So don&#8217;t necessarily trust them in how legalistic they&#8217;re coming off. In fact, if demons were super legalistic, they wouldn&#8217;t have fallen in the first place. They&#8217;d still be rule-abiding angels up in heaven. They&#8217;re lawbreakers by definition.
And so the idea that they&#8217;re kind of like Mr. Mxyzptlk in Superman comics where, oh, you trick them into saying their name backwards, they got to go back to hell for 90 days, you know, that&#8217;s very unlikely to be true. We&#8217;re dealing with liars who are rule breakers. And so if they&#8217;re coming across as we&#8217;re so super legalistic, we never go where we&#8217;re not allowed and we&#8217;ll definitely get out if someone tells us to, legally, that&#8217;s very unlikely to be true.
That&#8217;s something that should be looked at with, I&#8217;m not saying rejected, but with a considerable amount of suspicion.
Chris: Cy, Jimmy, if I may, the question that Jimmy just asked. The question, yes, but the answer and the way that Jimmy gave the answer is to me like the perfect example of why Catholic Answers Live is the magnificent program that it is.
Jimmy answered what the Church teaches and why she teaches it, and he didn&#8217;t add to or, as our founder Karl Keating used to say, we don&#8217;t add or detract from what the Church teaches. We teach what she teaches and what she does not. Nothing more or less.
And especially in this world of social media and all kinds of online podcasting and personalities and things of this nature, weeding through all of those sometimes sensational opinions and clickbait, if you will, is a very difficult thing to do. This show absolutely cuts through that.
That&#8217;s why Catholic Answers Live is so trusted. All of The Apostolate Catholic.com, the books that we publish. So, my friends, you have confidence in supporting us, that you&#8217;re supporting evenhanded, thoughtful responses to questions, as the Church teaches, and always with joy and charity. That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re getting in this show. And we deliver it every day, Si, every day we&#8217;re on the air.
Cy: And what I&#8217;ve been trying to say earlier this hour, and I will repeat it now as we come to the end of the hour, is what people are paying for when they pay for this, is for us to give the show free to anyone in the world that wants it.
So our job is to produce the absolute best program we can that does all the things Chris just described with people like Jimmy Akin, and then we just give it away free. And that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re making possible. So will you help us to continue to do that?

Will Demons Follow the Rules of a Deal?

<div>His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, will be offering a Pontifical High Mass (E.F.) on Saturday, December 11, 2021, at 11:00 a.m. CST., at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin.</div>

<div>This will be his first public liturgy ever since he began rehabilitation from the COVID-19 virus four months ago.</div>

Our Lady of Guadalupe Pontifical High Mass

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent sits down with fellow Catholic Answers apologist Joe Heschmeyer to discuss some big &#8220;no-no&#8217;s&#8221; when it comes to defending the Faith.

FFAF: Stop Doing This When Defending Catholicism (with Joe Heschmeyer)

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent shares his frustrations with recent student loan forgiveness proposals and shares his own proposal for combatting student debt.

FFAF: A Student Loan Rant and Proposal

Proving The Catholic Priesthood Is Biblical (Response to Needgod.net)

<div>Why do we mourn death if it’s supposed to be the start of a new, perfect and eternal life? Shouldn’t it be celebrated?</div><div>Because death reminds us of the impact of sin and thus the painful separation, even though temporary, that death brings into human relationships.
Consider that Jesus mourns the loss of Lazarus, even though he knew that, as the omnipotent Incarnate Word, he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead shortly thereafter (John 11:32-36).
So, as is typical of Catholicism, death is a both/and, a time of mourning and yet also hope for eternal life, not an either/or.
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Why Mourn Death If Birth to Eternal Life?

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CHALLENGE
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“Perhaps it doesn’t disprove consciousness after death, but Scripture does not provide a basis for believing it, either.”
DEFENSE
There are Bible verses that demonstrate consciousness after death.
The prophet Samuel is conscious when summoned by the witch of Endor (1 Sam. 28; note the text does not challenge the idea that it is Samuel who is summoned). This is an exceptional incident since a medium is involved (Deut. 18:11–12), but it indicates the possibility of and belief in consciousness after death.
1 Peter 3:19–20 refers to Christ preaching, after death, to spirits who disobeyed in the time of Noah. They were conscious, though some have questioned whether they are human or angelic spirits.
In the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah are shown interacting with Jesus (Matt. 17:1–9). However, Elijah never died (2 Kings 2:1–12), and although Moses did die (Deut. 34:5), Jude refers to an angelic dispute over his body (Jude 9). According to early Christian writings, this was a reference to an event in The Assumption of Moses, whose end- ing is now lost. Because of ambiguity about what happened to Moses after death (was he assumed? raised from the dead?) and because of the exceptional nature of the Transfiguration, this text is of limited value.
In the account of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19–31), Je- sus describes Lazarus, the rich man, and Abraham as conscious in the intermediate state (i.e., between death and resurrection). It has been objected that this is a parable. However, Jesus’ parables are informed by real things (kings, fathers, sons, banquets, vineyards, and so on). If this is a parable, it suggests conscious individuals in the afterlife are also real.
More definitely, Paul expects to be conscious in the intermediate state when he says he “would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8; cf. Phil. 1:21–24).
The clearest passages indicating consciousness in the intermediate state are in Revelation, where the souls of the martyred are depicted praying and worshipping God (Rev. 6:9–11, 7:13–15). These are deci- sive since they are not exceptional and refer to the souls of many un- named Christians continuing to be conscious.
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Consciousness after Death Established

What the Davidic Kings Reveal About Mary

People are obsessed with identity

We have to deal with the fact that we are creatures.

Where does identity come from?

What does it mean that our identity is Eucharistic?

His Father is non-denominational and believes that the Catholic church is just a middle ground and not necessary. That he can just go directly to Christ and have a relationship with him. What advice can Father offer for him to better dialogue with his ...

So are the sacraments “the key” to a full life?

How do angels do battle?

Can I classify “relation” as a transcendental of being given how Ratzinger writes about it?

Why has Jesus been portrayed as a white man throughout time and what implications has that had on the Church over time?

&#8220;What Identity Were You Born With?&#8221; In this episode, we explore the profound connection between our identity and the Eucharist, alongside questions about the nature of identity itself and the role of sacraments in leading a fulfilling life. We also delve into how to engage in meaningful dialogue with those of different faith backgrounds and the intriguing topic of angels in spiritual warfare.
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What Identity Were You Born With? w/ Fr. Gregory Pine

Joe breaks down Ephesians 5 and some common errors people interpret from the text. He explains what authentic Catholic male-headship looks like.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer, and for many people one of the hardest biblical teachings to know what to do with is this idea of male headship. When the Bible talks with the husband as the head of his wife, what does an authentic biblical headship look like? How should we not understand these passages and how can a proper understanding of headship actually improve your marriage? I think the best place to start is with scripture itself, particularly St. Paul&#8217;s hotly disputed words from Ephesians chapter five, quote, wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior as the church is subject to Christ. So let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. So what does that mean? Well, I want to take a look at a few examples of how some people interpret or maybe misinterpret it, but first I want to go ahead and say thank you to all of you supporting me over@shamelessjoe.com.
You really do keep this show going. And you know what? This topic actually came up in a recent Patreon live stream q and a where I got the idea to do it. So just know these live streams are a great way for me to hopefully answer your questions, but also for me to find out the kind of topics you&#8217;d be interested in learning more about. And you get all of that for as little as $5 a month over@shamelessjoe.com. Okay, so let&#8217;s consider a couple of real life interpretations of male headship that are in this case, both coming from the Protestant world. The first one is a model of headship that I think is expressed well in a letter that a woman named Mary wrote to Pastor John Piper, in which she says, I know that submission is a requirement of the wife, and I&#8217;ve been working hard lately to hold my tongue and agree with my husband even when I have a different opinion. In her letter, she goes on to ask if she&#8217;s erred by going along with her husband&#8217;s decision to unwisely buy a new car even when she knew he was making a mistake. So that&#8217;s the first model of headship means something like the husband makes all the decisions. The wife&#8217;s role is just to hold her tongue or to agree with him even if she really knows he&#8217;s wrong. On the other side of the issue though, you&#8217;ve got this very different understanding of male headship from people like Kate Wallace Nunnelly of the Junior Project.
CLIP:
Women are often told that they are less than in the church, but we believe the Bible tells a different story. At the Juah project, we are all about teaching biblical equality, equipping women and resourcing the church. If you struggle understanding what the Bible really says about women or how to articulate your egalitarian beliefs, you&#8217;re in the right place.
Joe:
None only argues that male headship in the church is a myth that the Bible never says that the man is ahead of the household and that the idea of the husband is to lead. His wife is actually unbiblical. Now, she concedes that the man eats the head of the wife in the Bible, but she insists we&#8217;ve been getting that passage wrong in her view. When Paul talks about Christ being head of the church, that actually has nothing to do with leadership or authority, but with love, sacrifice, death and giving of life. So similarly, she argues that when Paul calls the man and the head of the wife, this refers only to giving himself up for her, sacrificing for her to give her a flourishing life. Now, she of course, concedes that Jesus did lead and have authority over others, but she claims that these are traits that husbands are meant to imitate as they imitate the headship of Christ.
Instead, she says the husband&#8217;s headship is a servant role, not a leadership role. So I think that&#8217;s a clear example of the second model of headship. Husbands are called the serve not lead. So which of those models is correct? Or maybe a better question is why are they both wrong? First, let&#8217;s be clear, the biblical texts really are dealing with authority and submission. You can find all kinds of modern claims. Ephesians five is being mistranslated and there is genuinely an ongoing scholarly debate about just what Paul means in calling the husband the head of the wife in terms of whether he means this to signify authority or origin or preeminence. But you know what? What&#8217;s perfectly clear is that Paul says wives are to be subject to their husband. Now, St. Peter says the same thing and the two of them use the same Greek word high tasso to describe that relationship.
Now that word comes from military usage. It originally referred to the troops under the authority of an officer, but it came to be used more broadly for anybody under the authority of anybody else, whether that&#8217;s demons being cast out in the name of Jesus by an exorcist or the subjects of the Roman Empire being under their political authorities or even us submitting to God. So we&#8217;re very clearly dealing with the themes of authority and submission. Now, having said that, hypos is a pretty broad term on its own. It doesn&#8217;t tell us just what the nature of that authority or that submission looks like. It&#8217;s used for everything from a master slave dynamic to simply respecting your elders. But fortunately Paul gives us the key to make sense of his teaching in Ephesians five because immediately like a verse before calling upon wives to submit to their husbands in verse 22, he says in verse 21, that we are to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
And you know what verb he uses there? High potassium. So as Pope St. John Paul II observes when Paul speaks of the mutual subjection of the spouse&#8217;s husband and wife, he&#8217;s giving us the framework for the words that follow on the subjection of the wife to the husband, and he&#8217;s showing us that we&#8217;re not dealing with a question of one-sided domination. So before we can make sense of male headship in the marriage, we first need to understand the Christian vision of power and leadership and service and submission as Jesus tells the apostles at the last Supper, let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader is one who serves and he points to himself as the model saying, I am among you is one who serves. So if your image of male headship is one in which the husband lords his authority over his wife, well that&#8217;s precisely the model of leadership that Jesus tells us not to follow.
On the other hand, this is what strikes me about Nelly&#8217;s argument in which she claims that the husband&#8217;s headship is a servant role, not a leadership one. From a Christian perspective, a leadership role is a service role. So men are called to be servant leaders to their wives in some way. Does that mean then that wives just shut up and go along with whatever the men decide? It does not. Submission in the biblical sense here doesn&#8217;t mean you just turn your mind off and shut up and put up go along with whatever they tell you to do. After all, we don&#8217;t do that even in our submission to God, as John Piper pointed out in his response to Mary&#8217;s letter,
CLIP:
Even in the church&#8217;s relationship to Christ, we the church let our will, our desires, our wants, be known what we think is wise, be known in prayer. That&#8217;s what prayer is in telling God what we would like him to do. And since Christ being perfect does not need our counsel at all, thank you very much. He doesn&#8217;t need our prayers to tell him how to run the world but welcomes it. How much more is it fitting for a wife to let her request be made known concerning what&#8217;s about to happen in the marriage?
Joe:
In any functioning system, whether it&#8217;s a family or a company or a political society, there are going to be those whose God has put into place to make decisions, but those in decisionmaking roles need the input of the people that they&#8217;re trying to lead. If they&#8217;re going to lead well, a good leader doesn&#8217;t make every decision personally much less on his own. One of the strangest arguments I sometimes hear against the papacy is that Peter couldn&#8217;t have been the Pope because he participates at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 instead of just unilaterally deciding everything himself. But of course, he participates in this collaborative way because that is precisely how a good servant leader behaves. So Christians in any kind of leadership role, we are warned against Lord in our authority over the people we&#8217;re called to serve In his encyclical, Casty Canobie papacy 11th warns against several different distortions of male headship and of wifely submission.
First authentic submission does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman, both in view of her dignity as a human person and in view of her most noble office&#8217;s wife and mother and companion, a woman who imagines that her job is just to shut up and nod. Well, she&#8217;s hardly living out what it is to be a good mother to her children or a true companion and wife to her husband. Second, authentic submission does not bid her, obey her husband&#8217;s every request, if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife. Think about it this way. All authentic authority, whether we&#8217;re talking about the authority of the state or your husband or parents or any authority, all authority comes from God. When we obey an authority that God has placed in our lives, we&#8217;re ultimately obeying God.
But on the other hand, if any of those human authority tells us to do something contrary to the will of God, then we should say with St. Peter that we must obey God rather than men. Never forget after all, that the St. Peter and Paul who talk so much about our spiritual need to submit to the emperor, for instance, they&#8217;re killed by the emperor for refusing to submit to laws outlawing Christianity. So our submission to any human authority is always going to be checked by ultimately our submission to God himself. If for instance, you discern God is telling you to become a Catholic and your husband tells you not to become a Catholic, well, you must obey God rather than men. But Pius is clear that this principle actually goes further. It also means that you don&#8217;t have to go along with everything your husband says if it&#8217;s for instance contrary to your dignity, simply if it&#8217;s contrary to right reason.
Male headship is not a blank check for a husband to ruin his family by acting in irrational or selfish ways, and a Christian wife is not called to abbet her husband in his selfish or sinful or ruinous behaviors. The third distortion that Pius warns against is in treating your wife like a child. Now, to be clear, the word hypo potta can be used to describe a minor child obeying their parents, but your wife isn&#8217;t a minor. I hope and Pius points out why that matters. Children typically are not allowed free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment or their ignorance of human affairs. But if you&#8217;re a husband, hopefully you&#8217;ve married a woman whose judgment and knowledge of human affairs you respect treat her like it. On the flip side, the fourth distortion that Pius warns against is what he calls that exaggerated liberty, which cares not for the good of the family in which he describes it as the head and heart of the family as being separated from each other.
Now, I&#8217;m reminded here of a 2019 New York Times piece entitled I&#8217;ve picked My Job Over My Kids, in which the lawyer Laura Balon talks about how she realizes she can&#8217;t actually have a work-life balance, and she&#8217;s resolved this by prioritizing her job, even if it means missing her kids&#8217; birthdays or family vacations or school events or simply being emotionally unavailable even when she is home. She&#8217;s gone so far as to make a book claiming that prioritizing your career like this is good for your kids. Now, Balon is divorced, but you can find plenty of women who have the same mentality who aren&#8217;t divorced yet, they should just go do whatever they find fulfilling and hopefully it&#8217;ll turn out okay for their husbands and kids. In contrast to this, Pius argues that the head and heart of the family should be in union, and if here he lays out the clearest positive vision of the biblical model of the family for if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling.
So she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. So in fact, both the husband and wife are called the lead within the family, but in these two different areas, I think that&#8217;s a beautiful image of the family. But I also think actual family life can be more complicated. Every man, every woman has their own strengths, their own weaknesses. Some men are better at leading a family than others, or maybe they&#8217;re better in one area and not in other areas. Maybe for instance, your wife is great with money and you&#8217;re not. You don&#8217;t have to ignore her gifts in the name of male headship. As Pius points out, headship and submission are these concepts that are going to necessarily play out differently and even in different degrees in the different families and cultures and eras we might consider. So that basic family model is given in the Bible, but it shouldn&#8217;t be understood in a one size fits all sort of way.
Indeed Pius warns that if the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family. So you might find a situation in which a woman is left calling the shots in her family, not because she&#8217;s usurping or undermining her husband or anything like that, but simply because he is not leading in the way that God has called him to lead. So hopefully from everything that&#8217;s been said so far, it&#8217;s clear that belief in male headship is not the same as believing that women are completely incapable or that they&#8217;re inferior to men or anything like this, and one need only to look at the holy family. After the second stage of Joseph and Mary&#8217;s marriage is complete and they come to live together from that point onward, the angelic revelations come to Joseph rather than to Mary. So God himself treats Joseph as the head of the family, but it doesn&#8217;t mean that God thinks he&#8217;s holier than Mary.
We can see even more plainly Jesus submits to both Joseph and Mary. So we should take from the three clearly that the fact that God has put one person in a role of authority doesn&#8217;t mean he thinks that they&#8217;re holier, wiser, or even more capable than those who they might be leading. On the other hand, while men and women are equal, we&#8217;re not interchangeable. As I point out in this episode here, that&#8217;s just scratching the surface of the modern errors about manhood and womanhood. So if you want, you can go check that out for some more of our modern errors on gender as well as some tools for how to combat them charitably. Either way, for Shameless Popery, I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.
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What Is Biblical Male-Headship (and what it’s not…)

“O Come, Emmanuel” and Anti-Intellectual Christianity

If Mary was born without original sin, why can’t everyone else?

Is there any strong case (theological, biblical and/or historical) for women deacons? It seems there isn’t any case, but as it gets brought up so often, what could be a strong man case for it?

Hello from the UK, Jimmy. What exactly is a Doctor of the Church, and why are their views held in higher esteem compared to any other theologian or apologist? Thanks.

What’s a good way to explain why the Novus Ordo was introduced? How would you address critics of either the Novus Ordo or the Traditional Latin Mass that both forms should be respected?

If after the resurrection we will be more like the angels, does this imply we will be genderless as well?

Recently in one livestream, someone was saying Christianity spread with Bible in one hand and bullet in other. What should be my response as a Christian?

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, we dive into one of the most debated topics in the modern Church: Why was the Novus Ordo Mass introduced after Vatican II, and how should Catholics view it alongside the Traditional Latin Mass? We explore the historical context, theological intent, and the call for reverence and unity across both forms. Whether you&#8217;re attached to the TLM or attend the Novus Ordo, this episode emphasizes mutual respect and liturgical richness.
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Why the Church Introduced the Novus Ordo & Why Have Both Forms

Daybreakers (2009) was the most expensive movie I ever watched. It was on a flight I had to rebook because I had missed the original one. It is a gem of wisdom—an apologetic for the Church&#8217;s attitude toward perversion of all kinds and a horror movie that features hope front and center.
It has at least three important Christian themes:
<ol>
<li>Sin makes us hypocrites as we despise those who go farther than us, without admitting that we are guilty of the same thing.</li>
<li>Dying to ourselves, though painful, is better than the living death that is sin.</li>
<li>Grace can be painful to experience, but ultimately, it gives the ability to live the full life we want but that we cannot live just by our own free will.</li>
</ol>
As a movie, Daybreakers is most spectacular in the beginning, opening with a montage of scenes that gradually establish the horror: a strange disease has caused almost everyone in the world to become a vampire. More horrible still, &#8220;humanity&#8221; has taken it in stride. Chrysler makes Chargers with proprietary day-driving technology. Busy vampires in crowds go to work, attend school, and do their shopping at night, and the remaining humans live either in sinister, &#8220;humane&#8221; blood-milking farms or hide in scattered rebel bands. As the blood supply dwindles, vampire hematologists race to develop an adequate blood substitute. The stakes are higher than satiation, or even survival, since blood-starved vampires become &#8220;subsiders&#8221; who feed on other vampires.
Many, including the actors and others involved in production of the movie, seem to think of it as <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostPeakOil">a fable about fossil fuels</a>—but it is so much more powerful as a story about sin, the inevitable lack of real satisfaction that it gives, and the hypocrisy it engenders. The &#8220;normal vampires&#8221; rationalize their profoundly warped existence while expressing contempt for the ones who &#8220;go too far.&#8221; For example, in one scene, a vampire cop looks at a dead subsider and spits out, &#8220;Animals!&#8221; There is a similar phenomenon in the reality we live in now, most clearly seen with regard to sexual sins, such as when men and women who justify various kinds of perversions express disgust for pedophiles. It&#8217;s a false comfort to look down on people who take your own sin uncomfortably farther.
Indeed, few modern metaphors for sin are as precise as vampirism. Vampires, for instance, cannot see their reflections, just as serious sin alienates us so much that it even separates us from ourselves, to the point of forgetting what we really are. Sin, as the great novelist Sigrid Undset says through one of her characters, is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1370150-kristin-lavransdatter">trampling on other people</a>. This antisocial character of sin is most clearly personified by a vampire, whose life depends on taking away the life of others. It is the most horrific illustration of the glutton, who lives to eat instead of eating to live. Similarly, even the most refined vampire is ultimately a being whose highest aim is satisfying his appetite. This last fact is particularly well captured in the movie&#8217;s depictions of normalcy in a regime of vampires: there&#8217;s still Starbucks; there are still crowds on the streets; high schoolers idle together outside; TVs are still on in lobbies; major news networks feature well-dressed vampire journalists interviewing politicians. Yet the yellow eyes of each person reveal the lust for blood uppermost in each mind.
Even more compelling than the psychological probing of sin is the implicit consideration of the role of grace. Its necessity is emphasized first. There are vampires who recognize the perversity of their situation and even make noble decisions from time to time. The protagonist, a scientist developing a blood substitute, loathes the fact that he has become a vampire and refuses to drink human blood. He exhibits good will, braves pressure from his vampire peers, and even shows heroism in helping and protecting the persecuted humans. Nevertheless, he cannot free himself on his own. Furthermore, it is significant that his attention in the first half of the movie is on developing  a &#8220;substitute&#8221; for human blood. It is similar to the way in which modern Western society obsesses over creating more and more ways of indulging the passions for violence and sex &#8220;without hurting anyone.&#8221; No one is prepared to dream of the possibility of curing the sickness itself.
As the movie progresses, something similar to grace emerges. In the most desperate hour, it is discovered that there is a way to reverse the transition to vampire. The transition is not made by mere self-help. Instead, it is by exposure to light and water. The scenes depicting these transformations are redolent of the Christian associations with both of these essential realities. Transformation comes with a great deal of pain—pain that is rewarded with being truly human again. Like Eustace peeling of his dragon skin in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, shedding evil hurts, but it also means becoming what we are meant to be.
Like any good movie, Daybreakers is not an allegory, but rather an example of how real art tends to &#8220;rhyme&#8221; with the deepest realities, which are supernatural. One of the &#8220;rhymes&#8221; is seen in a twist at the end of the movie. Like how the way in which grace, in some mysterious way, produces a new creature, as St. Paul says, so are these renewed humans endowed with a new ability. The tables are turned; it is now the vampires who must fear the humans, especially when they are prepared to offer their lives.
The gore in the film, rather than being gratuitous, accentuates the hidden theme: that, indeed, the wages of sin is death, even it is living death. Although one does not need to watch this movie to learn that, and though it may not be worth the price of a plane ticket, it is an example of a vigorous horror movie, invigorated by truth, that is worth watching.

Vampires and the Wages of Sin

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DAY 125
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CHALLENGE
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“How can Christians be so arrogant as to think they alone have the truth?”
DEFENSE
Nobody has a monopoly on the truth. Almost every perspective— religious and otherwise—has elements of truth in it. If it didn’t, then nobody would believe it. All human beings possess the gift of reason, and we all use it to discover aspects of the truth.
“The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [other] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” (Vatican II, Nostra Aetate 2).
Consequently, we can use the truths that we hold in common as a basis for mutual respect and dialogue: “The missionary task implies a respectful dialogue with those who do not yet accept the Gospel. Believers can profit from this dialogue by learning to appreciate better those elements of truth and grace which are found among peoples, and which are, as it were, a secret presence of God” (CCC 856; cf. CCC 39, 843).
At the same time, Christians recognize that they have been given truth in the Person of Jesus Christ, who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). This is not arrogance. One is not being arrogant by supposing that he has learned a truth. We do not say that a student of math or science or history is arrogant if his teacher has taught him a truth in one of these fields. The same is true of Christians who have been taught by Jesus.
Indeed, Christians hold that their faith is a gift from God, not something they have earned or deserved. Many of the truths God has revealed exceed the power of human reason to discover, and it is only because of God’s grace that we have come to learn them and to have the opportunity to share them with others.
TIP
Sometimes other Christians ask Catholics how they can think they uniquely possess the truth. The same principles above apply when answering this question, and they can help non-Catholic Christians understand the Catholic point of view as well as to examine their own attitude regarding the truth of Christianity in general.
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Arrogance and Truth

In this episode Trent breaks down the arguments he used to defend the pro-choice position in his recent “Devil’s Advocate Debate” and then explains why those arguments ultimately fail to support the pro-choice position.

“Devil’s Advocate Debate” Debrief

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What sparked the sexual revolution in the U.S.?

Deacon Charlie Echeverry from the Living the Call podcast joins us for a discussion of the opportunities available to better serve the Latino Catholic community. He explains how an apostolate such as ours &#8212; and maybe yours &#8212; can help bring the Church together in the US and make things less difficult for Catholic families in the future.

Latino Catholicism Is Huge. It Deserves Better Apologetics.

The One Question that Unravels Protestantism

Is masturbation a mortal sin that would at least allow you to go to purgatory?

What are the rules for non-Catholics to get to heaven?

Why does the Church normally issue communion in one kind?

I’m Catholic and married. If I feel called to be a priest, would it be morally wrong to become an Anglican priest in order to try to become a Catholic priest?

How is NFP not contraception?

I don’t think first class relics should be distributed. The body of saints should be kept together.

In the Divine Mercy it says we offer the body of Jesus. How is it we can offer the body of Jesus to God?

Can you help me better understand the Catholic teaching on justification and how it differs from the protestant understanding?

Which Catholic Doctrine Troubles You?

My friend divorced over 40 years ago and never remarried. How would one find out if the spouse is still alive? Does the Church have a process of finding them?

The Church Tribunal says I have to have witnesses of my husband’s unfaithfulness to get an annulment granted. Since there are no witnesses, am I stuck with this?

My daughter married a divorced man in the Greek Orthodox Church. Does he have to go through the Orthodox Church for the annulment?

Do marriages that don’t take place in a church need an annulment? Does the Church make it clear how serious marriage is during marriage prep?

I watched your Coming Home Interview. I just wanted to thank you and show appreciation for all you do.

My grandparents married outside of the Church but are now divorced. I worry about their salvation. How do I approach them about this?

How confidential is the annulment process?

I want to marry in the Church who is currently married and estranged from her husband so can’t file for annulment. What can the Church do to help?

I’m a convert. What’s the basis for all the grounds for annulment? Is it from the bible or from Tradition?

Do I have any interjection or right in a current annulment underway where the respondent will not respond due to being afraid or hurt? This man I question was also my husband?

Divorce, Remarriage, Annulment

Recently, I saw clips of a documentary about an online prostitute and pornographer who <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/12/11/lifestyle/onlyfans-model-lily-phillips-cries-after-sleeping-with-101-men-in-a-day/">had sex with 100 men</a> in a single day—and “plans to” up the ante to 1,000 men in a day—to promote her “brand.”
I’m grateful that most people, even non-religious ones, experienced the same disgust I felt at learning about this. But if those people sat down and really thought about what sex is for, they’d see that having sex with even just one random person is also revolting. Both acts are sexually disordered; one is just so much more obviously disordered that it becomes easier for average people to see the problem.
Debating sexual ethics is difficult, because ethical arguments often go like this: You believe in X? Well, X logically entails Y, and Y is crazy, so believing X is crazy, too.
The problem is that what used to be considered crazy is now considered normal. In the 1950s, many arguments against contraception relied on the claim that approving contracepted sex entails approving homosexual acts. That was literally crazy then, given that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-3, said homosexual conduct indicated a mental disorder. But an aggressive propaganda campaign changed this in 1973 and future editions of the DSM . . . so good luck making an argument like that against contraception today.
So we have to reach way out to the boundaries of sexual behavior to find a morally repugnant enough “Y” to prove that “casual view X” about sex is wrong.
For example, let’s say sex is like photography: all that matters is that you get consent from the person you photograph. There’s nothing weird you can take a picture of, like a tree, or even a dead body, if you have that aesthetic preference. (Consider pictures of incorruptible saints.) But if sex were like photography, then there would be nothing weird about being sexually attracted to trees (dendrophilia) or dead bodies (necrophilia). But morally sane people know that these acts are perverted, which shows that sex has an intrinsic purpose beyond mere pleasure.
Now, some people may say that our disgust with stunts like having sex with a hundred men in a day has nothing to do sexual morality; rather, it is related to someone risking her health and body. I don’t buy that, because most people who hear about this experience express moral disgust, not biological disgust.
How we feel about gross promiscuity isn’t like the anxiety we feel when we see daredevils risking their lives for a stunt. It’s also not like the queasiness we might feel while watching someone break the world record for eating hot dogs (eighty-three in ten minutes, in case you’re wondering). And if you are morally disgusted by that, you identify the sin as gluttony—too much of a good and natural thing. We don’t view it with the contempt we have for people who misuse sex, which shows that sex is not a mere biological process, like eating, but has serious moral components.
Perhaps these stunts are disordered because sex is for “expressing love,” which is still compatible with casual sex with one person. But if sex were just about expressing amorphous concepts of love and emotion, then that still doesn’t explain why bestiality is wrong, since lots of people love their pets, even <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/on-pets-as-family-members">more than other people</a>.
Nor does it explain why adult incest is wrong—and before you say birth defects are the answer, you still have to explain the wrongness of homosexual adult incest, which doesn’t cause birth defects, and the non-wrongness of pregnancy in older women, who are more likely to have children with birth defects.
As I said, sexual ethics isn’t fun to talk about, because you have to pick crazier and crazier “Ys” to explain why “principle X” is wrong. But one Y that’s easy to talk about is this: if sex only expressed love and emotion, then why does sex usually ruin friendships? This happens by turning the friends into either committed lovers (e.g., When Harry Met Sally) or estranged friends.
The reason this happens is that sex objectively communicates a kind of permanent bond that is incompatible with mere friendship.
What bonds friends are things that exist beyond them, like shared interests, hobbies, or social circles. When these external factors change, friendships often change, or go away, and that’s okay. But what bonds lovers is something intrinsic to them—the other person—and the hope is that the bond dies only when the person dies. Most people don’t expect the love of a friendship to last a lifetime, but they often desire the love that accompanies sex to last that long. So when you introduce the permanent bond, created through sex, to the temporary bond inherent in friendship, it creates an uncomfortable dissonance.
When a person has sex with 100 people in a day, the contrast between this extreme transience and the permanence of the sexual bond becomes blindingly obvious. But the same discord exists in any sexual act that takes place outside the marital bond. That’s because sex just is for the expression of marital love. We say sex is “making babies” and “making love” because sex is for expressing the kind of love that makes babies: <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19301231_casti-connubii.html">marital love</a>.
Of course, people copulate and procreate outside marriage all the time. These may be physical acts that produce children, but they are not examples of the genuine love from which children <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/i-was-astonished-to-find-this-in-the-catechism">ought to proceed</a>.
Since human beings are made in the image of God, we don’t say human beings “reproduce” like animals or photocopy machines. Instead, they procreate, or partner with God’s creative act that brings a unique human being with an immortal soul into existence. God is the one who ultimately decides if the child will be the fruit of the marital act. The Catechism says,
<blockquote>A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The “supreme gift of marriage” is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged “right to a child” would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,” and “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception” (2378).</blockquote>
To summarize, when discussing sexual ethics, we need to explain why certain sex acts are almost universally considered good, and others, even involving consenting adults, are considered universally bad. To do that, we need to answer the question What is sex for? Saying it isn’t for anything, and even saying it is for expressing love and emotion, fails to explain deep-seated views about sex that most people have.
But saying sex is for the expression of marital love explains why we can condemn gross promiscuity and the commercialization of sex through things like OnlyFans. It explains why we are repulsed by infidelity even if it is disguised as polyamory. It explains why sexual disorders involving consenting adults, or inanimate objects that don’t need consent, are still disordered. It explains why people refer to sex as “making love” and “making babies”: it’s for the kind of love that makes babies, and it is for that love even if God doesn’t bless you with a baby.
The love itself is still valuable and good for society, and so society should reverence it . . . by denouncing evils against it like fornication and outlawing the commercial enterprises that peddle this filth to the masses.

The Truth About Sex

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DAY 352
CHALLENGE
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“We don’t need the Church to infallibly settle the canon of Scripture; we have a fallible collection of infallible books. Further, the Catholic Church didn’t even attempt to define the canon for centuries.”
DEFENSE
There are several responses to this challenge.
First, if you want to claim we have certain knowledge that all the books included in the canon belong there, then you do need an infallible authority. Although some Protestants have been willing to say our knowledge of the canon is fallible (“a fallible collection of infallible books”), many find this prospect profoundly disturbing.
Second, it is particularly disturbing from a Protestant point of view because of the Protestant claim that theology should be done sola scrip- tura (Latin, “by Scripture alone”). If that is how to do theology, if you have nothing else authoritative to rely on, then the question of what belongs in Scripture takes on special urgency.
If there is the possibility that books have been included in Scripture that shouldn’t be there—and multiple books were in doubt in the early centuries (see Day 314)—then the foundations of Protestant theology are uncertain. False elements may have been introduced into data it rests upon, with potentially grave consequences. Similarly, if some inspired books were left out of the Protestant canon, important data would be missing, again with potentially grave consequences. Determining, precisely and with certainty, what belongs in Scripture is thus a critical priority for sola scriptura.
Third, we elsewhere cover various practical problems with sola scrip- tura that indicate it could not have been proposed before a certain stage in Church history (see Day 16). The urgency of knowing precisely what belongs in the canon points to another such practical difficulty. That is, nobody would have proposed sola scriptura in an age before people thought they knew the boundaries of the canon with precision, making sola scriptura again an anachronism of a later age.
Fourth, the reason the canon was able to remain undefined for centuries was precisely because the early Church did not employ sola scriptura: In addition to Scripture, it relied on apostolic Tradition and the Church’s living Magisterium. As long as these were available, the question of the canon’s precise boundaries was not critical. Tradition clarified some questions, and the Magisterium could settle new pressing questions as they arose.
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A Fallible Canon?

Christ’s Virgin Birth Isn’t a Pagan Invention

How can I expand the youth group I lead? I am a youth coordinator, how can I get kids to live what they learn out in the world?

How do we evangelize to someone who is at peace with their life in their own religion?

How do we use social media to move young people to person-to-person communication and the Eucharist?

Live from the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. Fr. Agustino Torres, CFR, joins us to talk about evangelization and Gen Z.

How to Evangelize Gen Z

Sometimes the Second Vatican Council gets a weak defense: &#8220;Well, it was just a pastoral council, so why worry about it?&#8221; Michael Lofton, from Reason and Theology, asks whether this defense is true? Is Vatican II really &#8220;just pastoral&#8221;?

Was Vatican II Merely Pastoral?

<div>What is the meaning of Ash Wednesday?</div><div>As the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday call us to remember our earthly mortality and thus repent and believe in the gospel. The ashes are a sign of penance and also a reminder that we will die a temporal death and thus should seek the kingdom of God, so that we may live with Jesus and the Church Triumphant forever in heaven.
For more on Ash Wednesday, see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/search?q=ash%20wednesday">our general resources</a> and also <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/whats-the-deal-with-ashes-on-ash-wednesday">this brief video by Karlo Broussard</a>.
</div>

What Is the Meaning of Ash Wednesday?

<div>What is the charasmatic renewel and how do i join it, is there a specific prayer i should pray? </div><div>For an overview on the Charismatic Renewal, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/the-catholic-charismatic-renewal">see our previous response</a>. To become involved in the Charismatic Renewal, contact your local diocese. Activity usually begins with participation in a “Life in the Spirit Seminar.”
</div>

What Is the Charismatic Renewal? How Do I Join?

The author of <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/meeting-the-protestant-challenge/">Meeting the Protestant Challenge</a> asks how the Catholic Church can teach that Peter is infallible when Paul rebukes Peter for not eating with the Gentiles? Doesn’t this further show that Peter had no more authority than Paul?

Paul’s Rebuke and Peter’s Infallibility

Does the Quran contradict the Gospel?

In June of 2017, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois decreed that those who die without repenting of being in same-sex relationships were to be withheld funeral rites.
Some of the more histrionic responses made it sound as though Paprocki had told churches to unceremoniously throw the bodies of LGBT people into unmarked graves. The president of Dignity USA said, “This document is mean-spirited and hurtful in the extreme,” while New Ways Ministry <a href="https://www.newwaysministry.org/2017/06/22/bishop-pastors-must-deny-funerals-to-catholics-in-same-gender-marriages">said</a> the bishop’s promise to <a href="https://www.newwaysministry.org/2017/06/24/catholics-angered-by-bishops-attempt-to-exclude-lesbian-and-gay-couples">punish</a> those who violate his directive “borders on spiritual abuse.” Fr. James Martin, on the other hand, merely chose to retweet a piece from the National Catholic Reporter with the headline “The scandal may be in not holding funerals for gay spouses, theologians say”—which implies that the real scandal is the bishop’s original directive. 
These cases involve the application of the Church’s teaching on scandal. Let’s use the context of funerals to investigate the teaching.
One reason funerals can involve scandal is because of the temptation to turn them into miniature canonization sessions. Given the grief of the deceased’s loved ones, it’s understandable that they may find comfort in talking about their loved one already being in heaven. But the primary purpose of Catholic funerals is to pray for the deceased because we do not absolutely know if they died in a state of grace. Or, if they did, we do not know how much <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/purgatory-in-jesus-teaching">purification they need</a> before they are able to enter into heaven (CCC 1030-1031). 
That’s why the General Instruction of the Roman Missal says, “At the Funeral Mass there should, as a rule, be a short homily, but <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/dont-say-a-eulogy-at-my-funeral">never a eulogy</a> of any kind” (382). The late Cincinnati archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk once put it <a href="https://catholicexchange.com/never-a-eulogy">this way</a>: “The funeral liturgy is a celebration of salvation and mercy, of grace and eternal life. It is not meant to be a commemoration (much less a canonization) of the person who has died. Extended remembering of the deceased often results in forgetting the Lord.”
Along with serving the deceased through our prayers for them, a Christian funeral can inspire those who have separated themselves from God through mortal sin to reconcile with God as soon as possible. The presence of the deceased tells them, Memento mori: remember that you will die, too! But if people see the hope of salvation being discussed in the context of someone who never repented of a grave sin like sodomy, adultery, robbery, or murder, then they may come to the erroneous conclusion that even if the Church says these behaviors are sinful, they can’t be so sinful as to risk anyone’s salvation. 
But in an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/funeral-rites-gay-spouses-public-scandal-eye-beholder">take issue</a> with the idea that funerals for couples in same-sex “marriages” would result in scandal:  
<blockquote>Wherein lies the scandal in the case under discussion? Is it in permitting a church funeral to a deceased same-sex partner that would lead others to engage in homosexual behavior, or is it in the behavior of the bishops directing priests to deny a church funeral to a deceased spouse in a same-sex marriage that would lead others to engage in discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward same-sex couples in specific, or members of the LGBT community in general?</blockquote>
Salzman and Lawler say the greater harm is the possible “scandal” that people will think the Church discriminates against people who identify as LGBT. According to them, a morally wrong behavior like sodomy “is not always morally bad if it is done with a good attitude.”  
The authors reach this startling conclusion by noting that the Catechism defines scandal as “an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil” (2284). They claim that attitudes are either always good (promoting justice) or always bad (seeking vainglory). They then say that, depending on the attitude, as well as a well-informed conscience, a wrong behavior may not be morally bad and may even be morally good. If the behavior is not morally bad, it follows that there is no grave sin and, therefore, no legitimate public scandal. 
According to the Code of Canon Law, “deceased members of the Christian faithful must be given ecclesiastical funerals according to the norm of law” (1176.1). This also includes catechumens who die before they receive the sacraments of initiation, like baptism and confirmation (1183.1). If a bishop deems it appropriate, a funeral can also be given to children who died before being baptized or even, in some cases, to a baptized non-Catholic (1183.2-3). The inclusion of catechumens and unbaptized children shows that the Church wants to provide funerals for as many believers as possible, and burying the dead itself is a corporal work of mercy (CCC 2300).  
However, canon 1184 stipulates that “unless [the deceased] gave some signs of repentance before death, the following must be deprived of ecclesiastical funerals:  
<ul>
<li> notorious apostates, heretics, and schismatics; </li>
<li> those who chose the cremation of their bodies for reasons contrary to Christian faith; and</li>
<li> other manifest sinners who cannot be granted ecclesiastical funerals without public scandal of the faithful.”</li>
</ul>
In his editorial mentioned above, New Ways Ministry member Robert Shine criticized Bishop Paprocki’s decree, saying it is discriminatory to apply canon 1184 to those in same-sex “marriages” because in one sense, we are all “manifest sinners.” He writes, 
<blockquote>It is discrimination to target LGBT people when, in a certain sense, all Catholics could be deemed “manifest sinners.” Who among us, including Bishop Paprocki, does not publicly sin at different moments? Yet, funeral rites are not denied to Catholics who pay employees an unjust wage, publicly advocate for the death penalty, or deny climate change.</blockquote>
The first response here is that the Church binds the faithful to believe only matters related to faith and morals, which excludes purely scientific hypotheses like anthropogenic climate change. But more importantly, Shine’s definition of “manifest sin” as any sin that has been “manifested” or become publicly known is laughable. Public knowledge of a sin doesn’t change its gravity. A person could be widely known for making a rude comment on social media, but he wouldn’t be a “manifest sinner.” In contrast, a person who secretly looks at pornography would be gravely sinning even if his behavior is never made manifest.  
Shine’s interpretation of a “manifest sinner” would either lead to no one being given an ecclesiastical funeral or, more likely, to a moral indifferentism that says we’re all “manifest sinners,” so we shouldn’t call anyone to repentance. The New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law provides a <a href="https://archive.org/details/newcommentaryonc0000unse">far better definition</a> when it says a person is in “manifest sin” when he is “publicly known to be living in a state of grave sin” (p. 1,412).
That means that manifest sin doesn’t occur merely because one’s impulsive bad behavior got caught in a viral video. Manifest sin, rather, involves someone both habitually living in a state of grave sin and doing so in a way that publicly announces his situation to the world. Notorious gangsters like John Gotti and Paul Castellano were denied Catholic funerals because of their persistence in manifest sin until death. A socialite who proudly cavorts with his mistress at public events or two men who publicly announce to the world that they are in a sexual relationship by contracting a same-sex “marriage” would also fit this definition.  
Even though critics like Fr. Martin deny this, it is possible to be compassionate toward those who suffer without scandalizing others and leading them into sin.<span data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:true,&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559740&quot;:276}"> 
A pastor or parish staff member faced with a request for a church funeral for a same-sex “spouse” should remember that the surviving member of such a couple will certainly be experiencing sorrowful grief. He may also be suffering from loneliness, depression, or financial hardship. Catholics should reach out to such a person, who is created in the image of God and loved by him, and strive to meet his basic human needs through empathy and acts of charity, especially to help alleviate the financial burdens and emotional toll that accompany burying a loved one.<span data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:true,&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559740&quot;:276}"> 
This person may be hurt by the denial of a Catholic funeral, but if Catholics offer compassion, this person can have a genuine encounter with Christ, who always calls us to conversion and gives us the grace to follow him in any circumstance.<span data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:true,&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559740&quot;:276}">

The Scandal of a Catholic Funeral

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DAY 328
CHALLENGE
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“The pope is a sinful man who makes mistakes. Therefore, he can’t be infallible.”
DEFENSE
The premise of this challenge is true; the conclusion is false.
The pope is a sinful man, but this does not lead to the conclusion that he can’t be infallible. Sinlessness—sometimes called impeccability—operates in a different sphere than infallibility does.
Sinlessness is a quality pertaining to the moral order: It means not making a mistake in the sphere of one’s own moral behavior. Infallibility is a quality pertaining to the doctrinal order: It deals with not making a mistake when proclaiming a doctrine.
The quality of sinlessness is not required for infallibility. One can do sinful things and yet have an accurate understanding. Solomon was supremely wise (1 Kings 4:29–34), yet he also sinned greatly (1 Kings 11:4–10). The most evil beings there are have an accurate knowledge of God: “Even the demons believe—and shudder” at the prospect of divine judgment (James 2:19).
More to the point, the very first pope—Peter—was a sinful man (see Day 19), but this did not stop him from writing two inspired letters (1 and 2 Peter). Inspiration is a greater charism than infallibility and that includes infallibility, therefore even a sinful man like Peter could teach infallibly by God’s grace.
It is also possible for a pope to make mistakes, including of a doctrinal nature—just not when he is teaching under the charism of infallibility.
Again we may look to Peter as an example. His understanding of Christian doctrine was not always perfect. Thus, when Jesus foretold future events, Peter sometimes did not understand or accept the truth of our Lord’s statements (Matt. 16:21–23, 26:31–35). However, that did not stop him from later writing the inspired, and thus infallible, letters 1 and 2 Peter.
We therefore see that a pope is capable of making mistakes both of the moral and doctrinal order and yet still exercise the charism of infallibility. God guides the pope, like every validly ordained minister, in the exercise of his ministry—just as he guided Peter. But this does not mean the pope is continuously infallible. The Church does not claim he is, and it would be attacking a straw man to inflate the doctrine of
papal infallibility beyond what the Church claims.
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Objections to Papal Infallibility

The author of Purgatory Is for Real tackles a tough philosophical question &#8212; is my soul made to last forever? If so, how do we know this? If not, what could happen that would destroy the life of my soul?

Is My Soul Immortal?

In Acts 5, when the Apostles are on trial before the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee named Gamaliel (the same Gamaliel that St. Paul studied under) provided a simple test to determine if a religion really came from God or not. So what was his test, and what does it mean for the credibility and legitimacy of Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism, and Islam?

A Pharisee’s Test for Catholics, Protestants, Mormons & Muslims

Taking our cue from his new book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/one-less-god-than-you/">One Less God Than You</a>, we ask author and apologist John DeRosa how to respond when we are told that religion is for the weak-minded! Also, Cy does some role-playing as a German atheist&#8230;

So What if Religion is for the Weak?

YOU DO NOT WANT TO MISS THIS!!! www.conferenceoftrent.com

In this video, Joe Heschmeyer responds to a caller who asks for advice defending the Sacrament of Confession in a conversation hosted by Cy Kellett.
Transcript:
Caller: My mother is Baptist. I&#8217;m Catholic. I&#8217;ve been Catholic for a few years now, but my mother is Baptist. And I&#8217;ve been going back and forth with her for a while, trying to convince her to come on board. One of the main sticking points on her end is confession. She does not understand why exactly confession through a priest specifically is necessary. My answer to her was essentially, Jesus gave the apostles the authority to forgive sins and to not forgive sins. The apostles passed down their authority through the bishops who appoint priests to act on their behalf. So, you know, the Bible tells us who has the authority to forgive sins, and that&#8217;s that. But that wasn&#8217;t quite enough of an answer for her. So I was hoping to get a little bit of help on the subject.
Joe: Yeah, I think the first thing to establish is that when we sin, we don&#8217;t just harm our relationship with God; we harm our relationship with our neighbor and with the church. The easiest way to see this is to think about it in the opposite direction. Think about what St. Paul says in regards to the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, that when one part of the body suffers, all suffer. When one part rejoices, we all rejoice. So this is verse 26.
When you are who you are meant to be by God, when you&#8217;re the great saint you&#8217;re meant to be, you can see very clearly the way other people benefit from that. So every time you stop short of being that person, you are hurting other people, even if just by the absence of not being the person you were meant to be. Even if it&#8217;s just by burying your talent, you&#8217;ve done an injustice to the person you&#8217;re meant to spend that talent on. Every time you were called to evangelize and you didn&#8217;t, someone else was harmed, even if they had no idea this was going on.
So every sin, even the most private sin, harms our neighbor and harms the body of Christ. One of the reasons for confession in general is because we need to acknowledge that we&#8217;ve hurt others, even if it&#8217;s less direct than, &#8220;Oh, I stole money from you.&#8221; Even if that way I&#8217;ve harmed others is just not being the person God made me to be, which would have been a boon to others. I&#8217;ve fallen short of that.
In James, chapter 5, verse 16, we&#8217;re told, &#8220;Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.&#8221; It then says the prayer of a righteous man is efficacious or has great power in its effects. So a second reason we&#8217;re given to go to others for confession is to have the intercession of the righteous. If you have fallen out of favor with God through your sin, then the biblical way to restore that is by going to someone who is in good standing with God.
Now, you can also and should also—do not misunderstand me here—you should also go directly to God and plead mercy from Him. But we can see from the Old Testament, places like Job, the last chapter of Job, his friends have to go to Job, who will intercede for them and make them right before God. You can also see from Lot and his family, who are saved not because of their own holiness, but because of the intercession of Abraham.
From passages like James 5 in the New Testament, we see that one of the reasons we go to other people is because we believe their prayers are very powerful. Their intercession is very powerful. This is why in 1 Timothy chapter 2, St. Paul tells us to be continually making intercessions for one another. So that&#8217;s true of just going to anybody.
So why go to a priest in particular? I think it&#8217;s important to kind of lay that foundation because we often have a very individualistic view of Christianity that is very unbiblical, but is very American. It&#8217;s just me by myself. I&#8217;m a self-made man. None of that is biblical. We are part of a body bigger than us, and we are reliant upon one another within that body. Some people have been given the ability to forgive sins. How do we know that? Because in John chapter 20, Jesus said so. He breathes on the apostles and says, &#8220;As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.&#8221;
Then He tells them, &#8220;Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.&#8221; Now, I think it&#8217;s important to tie those two ideas together. On the one hand, they have been sent. This idea of sending is very important throughout the New Testament. If you read Acts 15, you&#8217;ll see the difference between St. Paul and Barnabas, who are sent by the Church, and the Judaizers, who are not sent by the Church.
This is repeatedly referenced: the Church sends Paul. He has authority because he&#8217;s been sent both by Christ directly and by the Church. The Judaizers don&#8217;t have this authority. They didn&#8217;t get a divine apparition telling them to go preach their heresy, and they weren&#8217;t sent by the Church to do that. The ones with the authority of this sending are also the ones He is entrusting with this ability to forgive sins.
Some Protestants are going to read that and think that just means, &#8220;Oh, you have the power to proclaim the gospel, and then people will respond to that, and that will forgive their sins.&#8221; But that is a very convoluted way of nullifying John 20 because then Jesus wouldn&#8217;t have had to breathe the Holy Spirit upon them to tell them, &#8220;Keep preaching like you have been doing.&#8221; Rather, He&#8217;s giving them a spiritual authority, which we then see them exercising and their successors exercising as well.
So you should go to others because Christianity is communal and because you&#8217;ve hurt the Church. Because they can intercede for you, you should go to a priest because, unlike your other neighbors, the priest has been given this sending by the Church and has the power to forgive sins.
Caller: Okay, all right. That&#8217;s actually tied together very nicely. Good job.
Joe: Well, thank you very much.
Cy: Finally, Joe got a good grade. Congratulations, Joe. Thank you, Daniel.
Joe: If you&#8217;d like to get a book, I&#8217;m shamelessly susceptible to flattery. I will have your pick of any of the books I&#8217;ve written. If you wanted to stick around on the line, hang on, and we&#8217;ll send them to you.

Why Do I Have to Confess My Sins to a Priest?

Sacred Tradition vs Sola Scriptura & Was Jesus a Failed Prophet?

Socrates used it. Jesus used it. I use it. Asking the right questions can make all the difference. 👀

Did Jesus intend one Church or many denominations?

<div>Is my rosary still usable if the crucifix fell off?</div><div>Yes, it is still usable. A <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-rosary">rosary</a> is an aid to prayer, it is not the prayer itself. You simply need to remember the proper prayer (Apostles Creed) at that part of the rosary.
</div>

Is My Rosary Still Usable If the Crucifix Fell Off?

Get the JOE NOTES, sources for this episode, and more Shameless Popery on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/ShamelessPopery

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The Catholic Church Traces Back to Christ!

In this episode, Trent shares a portion of his talk “Faith in the Voting Booth” and discusses the nature of prudential judgments. He also answers questions on voting submitted by supporters of Catholic Answers.

“Prudential Judgments” and Voting Q+A

This episode focuses on the topic of our 2019 Catholic Answers Conference: The Early Church Was the Catholic Church

Catholic Answers | Season 5 | Episode 5

<div>During Advent, which mysteries of the rosary are to be said each day?</div><div>You are always free to pray using any mysteries of the rosary you desire. There is no obligation to do all of them, or to follow them in order, although that is what most people do. In Advent and Christmas times, it is traditional to pray the Joyful Mysteries on Sunday, replacing the Glorious Mysteries, in order to focus on the mysteries of those seasons. But this is only a custom, and privately you may pray as you please.
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Pray the Rosary as You Desire

When I was a kid, I remember watching the movie Freaky Friday. It featured Lindsay Lohan as Anna, a teenage girl with an attitude, who wakes up one morning to find herself in her mom’s body and her mom in hers. Don’t stone me for blasphemy, but I am going to use this as a parallel to the Eucharist.
We have to intellectually wrestle with the fact that Jesus took bread into his hands at the Last Supper and called it his body. He said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take this all of you, and eat it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you.” He then took the Passover wine and said something similar. “Take this, all of you, and drink of it, for this is my blood.” What did Jesus mean when he spoke these words?
I’ll tell you what he didn’t mean. Jesus did not mean that this was just a symbol. That’s what many Protestants believe, not Catholics. Also, the Catholic Church has taught that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist from the beginning.
Let me put it this way: when God tells us that bread is his body, we should believe him, even if we don’t understand how, because God himself said it was. Why should we believe that Jesus is God? Because he rose from the dead. It all comes down to the Resurrection. If Jesus is who he says he is, then it isn’t difficult to believe the miracles in the Gospels. And we know that Jesus is God because he told us he was, and he backed it up by rising from the dead.
So how does ordinary bread become the body of Christ? In order to understand this, we have to understand two terms that come from the philosopher Aristotle: a thing’s accidents versus its substance. To understand the difference between accidents and substance, I’ll return to our movie, Freaky Friday.
In the case of a daughter waking up and finding herself in her mom’s body, we see a change in that person’s substance. The core substance of Mom has changed to somebody else while maintaining in appearance everything else that was a part of mom: her eyes, her hair, her nails. Those things that are a part of her appearance make up her accidents. On the other hand, to wrap our minds around the concept of changing a thing’s accidents, let’s think of ourselves in our own bodies. If I dye my hair or break my wrist, what changes are my accidents. My core substance remains the same: I am Deacon Paul Maxey.
Now let’s apply this to the Eucharist. When Jesus said at the Last Supper that bread was his body, the accidents of the bread remained the same. In other words, the bread, a microscope would show, continued to be bread. To all scientific tests, that bread would have remained bread. But like the mother who finds herself in her daughter’s body, the core substance of what the bread is changed. It’s not just that this same change of substance occurred at the Last Supper; it continues to occur every day at Mass. That is why when we receive the Eucharist at Mass, the eucharistic minister does not say, “This is bread”; rather, holding up the Eucharist, he says, “The body of Christ.” And we respond Amen, meaning, “I believe that this is truly the body of Christ.”
Jesus completely understands that this is difficult to comprehend and even to believe, so there have been times in history when the accidents of the bread and wine at Mass have turned into the body and blood of Christ as well. One such instance is the eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, Italy, which continues to this day. To put it briefly, a long time ago, the wine at Mass turned into actual blood in the chalice. Now Lanciano is a place of pilgrimage, where we can worship God, who is truly present in the blood of Christ.
We can reflect on the words of St. Epiphanius of Salamis (374) about the Last Supper. When Jesus took bread into his hands, as it says in the Gospel, “giving thanks, he said: ‘This is really me.’” (Epiphanius, The Man Well-Anchored, 57, in William Jurgen’s The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol. 2, 1084). There is something about those words that freshens up my understanding of the Eucharist.
We can think also of the words of St. John Chrysostom (370). When Jesus says, “‘This is my body,’ be convinced of it and believe it, and look at it with eyes of the mind” (Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, 82, 4. in Jurgen’s vol. 2, 1,179). In other words, understand what’s happening even if your eyes can’t physically see the change.
If you wish that you could see Jesus as the apostles did, John Chrysostom reminds us to look at the Eucharist! “Only look! You see him! You touch him! You eat him!”
St. Ambrose of Milan (390-391) anticipated an objection: “Perhaps you may be saying: I see something else; how can you assure me that I am receiving the body of Christ?” (The Mysteries, 9, 50. in Jurgens, vol. 2, 1,333). He responds, “Let us prove that this is not what nature has shaped it to be, but what the blessing has consecrated; for the power of the blessing is greater than that of nature, because by the blessing even nature itself is changed.”
Next time we go to Mass, as the Eucharist touches our tongues, let us remember that we are receiving into our own body the living God himself!

The ‘Freaky’ Mystery of the Eucharist

Are Protestants outside of salvation?

<div>I am seeking material that supports St. Clement of Alexandria’s belief in the Eucharist not as a metaphor. His writings seem to infer he did not believe in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist.</div><div>In book I, chapter six of his <a href="http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02091.htm">Paedagogus (The Instructor of Children)</a>, St. Clement affirms that the Eucharist is both symbolic and the Real Presence, i.e., the body and blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. First, he discusses its symbolic value:
<blockquote>Elsewhere the Lord, in the Gospel according to John, brought this out by symbols, when he said: Eat my flesh, and drink my blood; John 6:34 describing distinctly by metaphor the drinkable properties of faith and the promise, by means of which the Church, like a human being consisting of many members, is refreshed and grows, is welded together and compacted of both — of faith, which is the body, and of hope, which is the soul; as also the Lord of flesh and blood.</blockquote>
Later in the same chapter, he affirms the Real Presence:
<blockquote>Eat my flesh, he says, and drink my blood (John 6:53-5). Such is the suitable food which the Lord ministers, and he offers his flesh and pours forth his blood, and nothing is wanting for the children&#8217;s growth. O, amazing mystery! We are enjoined to cast off the old and carnal corruption, as also the old nutriment, receiving in exchange another new regimen, that of Christ, receiving him if we can, to hide him within; and that, enshrining the Savior in our souls, we may correct the affections of our flesh.</blockquote>
If the Eucharist were purely a symbol, it wouldn’t be an “amazing mystery.” The Real Presence is further affirmed by St. Clement’s assertion that we hide Christ within us in receiving the Eucharist, “enshrining the Savior in our souls.” This can’t happen if the Eucharist were merely bread and wine and thus only a symbol of his body and blood.
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Did Clement Believe in the Real Presence?

<div>Why do Catholics leave Jesus crucified on the cross in Catholic churches when Jesus is risen?</div><div><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/jesus-christ">Jesus</a> is not &#8220;left on the cross&#8221; but rather his saving love is displayed.  <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-did-god-have-jesus-die-for-our-sins">Jesus died for our sins</a> out of love is the central message of a crucifix.  The centrality of this to the mission of Jesus on earth is mentioned several times in the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/new-testament">New Testament</a>:
<blockquote>For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. . . (1 Cor. 1:23)
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.&#8221; (Jn. 12:27)
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. (Jn. 3:14-16)
Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you. (Lk. 22:19-20)</blockquote>
God could have chosen any method for the redemption of humanity.  In his desire that humanity should know the depravity of sin and the depths of God&#8217;s love he chose to die on the cross.  Displaying a crucifix does not in any way deny the resurrection of Jesus.  After all, do faith communities that display only a cross want to downplay the sufferings of Jesus?  Of course not, it is just a different preference of emphasis.  In the Catholic Church the crucifix has been the traditional sign and statement of our faith in God&#8217;s love and mercy.  It reminds us that Jesus never promised his followers an easy life (Matt. 16:24) but that if we join our sufferings to his, we too we ultimately triumph as he did.
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Why Do Churches Have Crucifixes If Jesus Is Risen?

How do you respond to the claim that Baptism is a work?

Can those outside communion with the church be heard by the Saints?

In 1 Cor. 15 what would Paul mean when he mentions scriptures?

My friend said the Papacy is wrong because Jesus left evangelizing the rest of the world to Paul (Gal. 2:7), not to Peter. He says the apostles were only supposed to evangelize to the Jews (Mt. 10:5).

Is it going too far to make movies or TV shows about Jesus?

Why do the patriarchs not always observe the rights of primogeniture with their firstborns?

Ask Me Anything

<div>Can I trust the New American Bible’s commentary on Heb 13:10? It states "We have an altar" does not refer to the Eucharist but to Christ’s sacrifice. Does this mean we shouldn’t use this verse as an allusion to the Eucharist that is offered at Mass? </div><div>There is no reason to be skeptical of the commentary. This is accepted as a legitimate interpretation among Catholic scholars. Even St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted the altar as the cross in his <a href="http://dhspriory.org/thomas/SSHebrews.htm">Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews</a>. This is no surprise, since the context is all about the difference between the Jewish atoning sacrifices that took place outside the walls of Jerusalem and Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross that took place outside of Jerusalem (v.11-12).
However, this doesn’t preclude an allusion to the Eucharist. It’s possible that the author had the Eucharist in mind, especially in light of his mention of how those “who serve the tent” (Jewish priests) have no right to “eat” from the altar that is the cross. Given the Christian tradition of Jesus’ words to eat his body (Matt. 26:26) and Paul’s teaching about how our partaking of the table of the Lord (1 Cor. 10:16) parallels the Israelites partaking of their sacrificial altar, it’s not outside the realm of reason that the author has the Eucharist in mind.
But as to the apologetical value of this passage and whether it establishes the Real Presence and the real sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, some doubt its probative force. A Protestant could acknowledge that this is a reference to the Christian celebration of the Eucharist but still hold to his understanding that the celebration of the Last Supper is a symbolic partaking of the Cross. There doesn’t seem to be anything in the text that would preclude or undermine the Protestant’s purely symbolic understanding of the Eucharist. And since it falls short on this front, many think it doesn’t have strong apologetical value.
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New American Bible Commentary Falls Short

Are Christians JUST SEXUAL HYPOCRITES?!

Denying the true God isn’t atheism.

God Wants EVERYONE to Be Catholic

In this clip, Cy Kellett and Catholic apologist Trent Horn tackle a question about the perceived differences in spiritual fruit between Catholics and Protestants. Trent dives into the importance of living out one&#8217;s faith authentically, addressing the challenges and misconceptions that can arise when comparing different Christian traditions.
Transcript:
Cy: Don, why aren&#8217;t you Catholic?
Caller: Well, the first thing I would want to say is that I realize that the Catholic Church gives very good arguments for all of its dogma, and I have tried my hardest to prove that there&#8217;s any error, and I really can&#8217;t do it. But I take a step back and I analyze the fruit that I see in Catholics and Catholic priests, and I look at Protestants and I say, okay, Protestants do have some errors in the way they describe the gospel, but they have first things first. They preach and they emphasize the clear and simple gospel, and they live in that, and they walk in that, and they walk in this knowledge that they have been forgiven. And they have a great love for Jesus, a great gratefulness for Jesus, and they live lives preoccupied with Jesus that I really don&#8217;t see in any Catholics except for those Catholics who are converts from evangelicalism, or maybe they&#8217;ve been exposed to the charismatic renewal, which is a Protestant movement at heart. And so I can. I can look at it and say, you know, you make really good arguments for the Catholic faith, but I just don&#8217;t see that it actually produces any fruit in your life. Well, my Protestant brethren, they really love Jesus.
Trent: But let me. Let&#8217;s bring this back here. So your claim is that Protestants exhibit a greater love for Jesus than Catholics because&#8230; And I wasn&#8217;t clear on how you arrived at that, because they talk about Jesus more. I don&#8217;t see how you reach that conclusion.
Caller: Oh, no. I mean, I&#8217;ve been at a seminary or I&#8217;ve been at a Catholic seminary. I&#8217;ve been in a Protestant seminary. I&#8217;ve been around very devout conservative Protestants and Catholics. And there is a certain preoccupation with God and with obeying his will, a certain sensitivity to sin. You can tell in the sense of humor what kind of jokes people laugh at.
Trent: Are you talking about among Catholics?
Caller: It&#8217;s very clear, you know, when the kind of lives people live. And it&#8217;s just very clear that Protestants, you know, good evangelical ones, they really live this with faith. And Catholics, even the devout ones, it&#8217;s not really there.
Trent: Would you admit that there&#8217;s a problem that comes from, in sociology, things like sample sizes that&#8230; How would you know that this is the case? I mean, it sounds like you&#8217;re making a generalization based on your personal interactions with Protestants and Catholics, but there&#8217;s millions and millions of believers in both of these faiths. How do you know that your generalization is representative? It might be skewed.
Caller: Well, I&#8217;ve spent a lot of time watching EWTN and listening to Catholic Answers, and it&#8217;s actually very consistent among converts. They say, you know what, I first met Jesus by some evangelicals who are on fire for the Lord. And they say, praise God and thank you for my background with these evangelicals. And now I&#8217;m in the Catholic Church in the fullness of the faith, and you can see that everyone&#8217;s aware of&#8230;
But there&#8217;s that convert, you know, and I&#8217;ve been. I&#8217;ve been, you know, tempted to become Catholic at times. And I think, you know what, maybe, you know, this evangelical fire&#8230;
Trent: Well, let me. Let&#8217;s go back a little bit, Don, because I think there&#8217;s two problems with the argument. One would be a factual one. I would say that there are untold numbers of Catholics who are deeply in love with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, so much so that they go and receive him every day at daily Mass and spend as much time as they can in adoration chapels, simply adoring Jesus, just adoring and being in his presence. So would you say at least those Catholics are pretty on fire and in love with Jesus as much or more so than the evangelicals you describe?
Caller: Some of them, I have been around some who definitely do display the fruits. You know, you can see the look in their eyes. They really know the Lord.
And some of them, it&#8217;s kind of a religious thing. And you can see they really don&#8217;t. They really don&#8217;t know Him.
Trent: But there&#8217;s a lot of&#8230; But there&#8217;s a lot of Protestants that feel that that can be diagnosed that&#8230;
Way as well, just every day and remain dead in your sins.
Okay, here&#8217;s&#8230; Well, there&#8217;s&#8230; I think we could agree though, a lot of Protestants, you could find a ton of them who are the same way. They&#8217;re not authentically regenerated or converted. But here&#8217;s my second argument, that if the&#8230; Because I believe, like when it comes to evangelism, you know, there&#8217;s evangelicals that go out and evangelize. There&#8217;s a lot of Catholics that do that. We have the St. Paul Street Evangelization, for example, that go out to public areas and engage in evangelism. I admit for many Catholics that&#8217;s an area they need to improve upon. But that doesn&#8217;t show their theology is false. Because if we&#8217;re judging the truth of a church or whether we should be a part of it based on, let&#8217;s say, its missionary zeal, then we should probably be Mormons or Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses because they do the most missionary or evangelizing work, right?
I mean, I know where that argument&#8217;s coming from, but whenever I hear a Catholic say something like that, it just kind of reminds me, like, you don&#8217;t really get it. Like we&#8217;re saved by&#8230;
No, no. But help. Help me understand what I&#8217;m not getting, because a&#8230; More. You know, there&#8217;s Mormons who will evangelize and talk about their&#8230; Their love for Jesus, their love for Jesus. They believe the Son of God and they will go door to door and Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses will go door to door. So they&#8217;ll have that evangelistic spirit. But if the theology behind it is incorrect, then it doesn&#8217;t matter. We&#8217;ve got to get to the theology first, right?
Caller: Well, I&#8217;m not dismissing the importance of theology, and I would agree with you that oftentimes Protestants do fall into error in the way they describe the gospel. But I wouldn&#8217;t lump Protestants&#8230; And even your catechism does not lump Protestants in the same boat as Mormons and Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses.
Trent: No, absolutely not. Protestants are Christians, Mormons, and Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses. Absolutely, you&#8217;re correct. But the point that I&#8217;m making, the point that I&#8217;m making is that if we&#8217;re choosing what Christian denomination, what religion to belong to, what church to belong to, it just seems to make sense to me. We should say, well, which church&#8217;s teachings about God&#8217;s revelation are the most correct? That&#8217;s the&#8230;
Here&#8217;s my question for you. Shouldn&#8217;t we ask that question? And then if we find a church that has the most correct theology, the fullness of revelation, and it has other things that need to be reformed, like the need to evangelize, then we should focus on that area, not just on those who are&#8230; Who seem to be full of the Spirit and full of a love for the Lord because they could be spreading truths about Jesus that are incorrect about whether it&#8217;s Christology like Mormons, or sacramental theology like the Eucharist. Among Protestants, we should find the fullness of the faith and then encourage others to faithfully live it out and evangelize it.
Cy: Give in to that temptation, Don. If you&#8217;re tempted to become Catholic, give in because of that fullness. We&#8217;d love you to have it. And thank you very much for the call and for sharing your views, but the music&#8217;s playing, so I got to go. But we&#8217;re going to do this for another hour. So if you&#8217;re on the line, stay on the line.

I’m Not Catholic Because Protestants Love Jesus More…

St. John teaches in 1 John 5:13 that we can know that we have eternal life. Does this text support the Protestant doctrine of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/assurance-of-salvation">assurance of salvation</a>? Karlo Broussard gives the reason why the answer is no, and shows how this text actually supports the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/yes-christians-do-have-an-assurance-but-not-an-absolute-assurance-of">Catholic belief about our knowledge of our salvation</a>.
Transcript:
Contrary to Catholic belief, many Protestants teach that we can be absolutely sure we’re going to Heaven if we believe in Jesus. They quote 1 John 5:13 as a proof text where John writes, “I write this…that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Does this text teach what Protestants think? I don’t think so.
John writes in the next verse, “And this is the confidence which we have in him.” For John, the knowledge we have of our salvation is not a metaphysical certainty (no doubt whatsoever), but a confident assurance. This is the Catholic belief.
We know this is what John means because he draws a parallel between our knowledge of salvation and our knowledge that God grants our requests. Verse 15 reads, “We know [same Greek word as verse 13] that we have obtained the requests made of him.”
Now, do we have absolute certitude that God will grant our requests? Of course not! Anybody who has ever petitioned God for something knows we don’t get everything we ask for. Our knowledge that God answers our petitions is one of confidence and not metaphysical certainty.
Similarly, our knowledge that we are saved is one of confident assurance and not absolute certitude. As St. Paul writes in 1 Cor. 4:4, “I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted.” If Paul doesn’t think he can make a definitive judgment on the state of his soul, then why should we think we could do so for ours?
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Does John Teach Assurance of Salvation?

Prior to the calendar reforms of the 1970s, this fifth Sunday of Lent was known as Passion Sunday, and hence it and the remainder of Lent are called Passiontide. Even the modern calendar suggests marking this season-within-the-season through the veiling of images in the church.
Despite what one might think from the title, Passion Sunday never included, as far as I can tell, a reading of the Passion story itself—for that we have to wait until next week, hearing one version on Sunday and another on Friday. The name comes from a subtler shift in focus. While the earlier part of Lent dealt more with the personal struggle against sin exemplified by Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness, we now turn toward the events of Holy Week, when Jesus’ struggle against sin reaches cosmic heights.
So we don’t get the Passion itself in our readings today, but we get a lot of not-so-subtle foreshadowing of the Passion. Jesus speaks of the need to give our life up for love, and of his own willingness to be “lifted up from the earth” to do his Father’s will, even when his heart is troubled. Even more directly, the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus’ perfection and obedience through suffering.
“Although he was a Son,” according to Hebrews, “he learned obedience through what he suffered.”
Hebrews is an extraordinary letter—probably my favorite book in the New Testament. It’s really not a letter, but an address, a sermon, even, that gives a sophisticated picture of Christ, taking into account a wide variety of perspectives, from neo-Platonic philosophy to the Old Testament to the contemporary ritual of the Temple at Jerusalem.
How could the Son “learn obedience through” suffering? Suffering, passion, is change. In traditional ethics, the “passions” aren’t just negative feelings, but all kinds of emotions that change us—fear, affection, hatred, joy. And if you know anything about Christian theology, you will know that to speak of change in relation to God is fraught with difficulty. God is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/does-god-change-his-mind">by definition unchanging</a>. That is central to what it means for God to be God—perfectly transcendent, entirely beyond all change. And yet when Hebrews speaks of the Son, it speaks of the incarnate Son, who, even while remaining divine, has subjected himself to all of the consequences of existence in time. The Son, as a human being, is subject to change, to experience, to passion.
Thomas Aquinas writes, “Christ knew what obedience was from all eternity, but he learned obedience in practice through the severities he underwent . . . in his passion and death” (See “Commentary on Hebrews,” quoted in The Navarre Bible: Hebrews, 68.)
That seems right. It’s not that Jesus wasn’t obedient before—being the divine Son, there was never a time when he was not obedient. But for Jesus as a human being, obedience had to run its course in time.
When we think about obedience, usually we just think it means “doing what you’re told” when it comes to relationships with authority—whether it’s a child toward his parents, an employee toward his boss, a citizen toward the law and its enforcers. But these versions of obedience make obedience into something entirely external—in a certain way, arbitrary and circumstantial. This is why we’re suspicious of any obedience that presumes something more. We tend to resist anything like universal obedience—the obedience due to a monarch, for example—that rests in a person rather than in an office. With the exception of children and parents, we prefer the kind of obedience that we choose. That is, I freely choose to be part of this society, and so I agree to abide by its rules; I choose to be part of this company, and so I choose to follow its instituted leadership.
Again, those are all legitimate forms of obedience. But they point to something deeper, something that is not arbitrary and external, but that is part of the fabric of reality. When we speak of the divine Son’s obedience to his Father, we do not speak of his obedience to a law exterior to his identity; we speak, rather, of a coherent internal identity that is always ordered to another person. If the Son were “disobedient” to the Father, it’s not that he would be breaking some divine law that he previously agreed to follow; he would simply no longer be who he is.
That’s speaking of God, and the divine nature…. far, far above our highest thoughts. Human obedience is something else, because human nature is not eternal—we can change, and grow, and suffer. But I think the divine Son’s eternal obedience points us to another possible kind of obedience for us as well, and that’s the kind we see prophesied in Jeremiah 31: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts.”
God’s final goal for us is not just that we obey the divine law as an external command, but that our obedience become inextricable from our identity as human beings. Our goal is to follow the law so perfectly that we no longer have to follow the law—that we become the law, and the law becomes us. That is the perfection of humanity that Hebrews describes in Jesus. Jesus was already perfect, but human perfection is a perfection in time, and so not all perfection can simply be given from the start; authentic human perfection has to develop and learn and grow, and so it was that Jesus’ obedience through suffering was the perfection of that aspect of his humanity. Jesus didn’t just believe and obey the word of God as an external command to be followed in theory. He followed it in practice, making obedience part of history and experience, part of his identity as a human being.
What does this mean for us?
If Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to learn obedience by experience, so must we. It’s really that simple, though we often wish it were otherwise. If Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to learn obedience by experience, so must we.
Because we’re suspicious of obedience that we didn’t choose, we think that obedience to God should be somehow clear and straightforward. It should be natural and easy to follow God, and so we get annoyed when people or institutions—or even the Bible—suggest otherwise. We put on our skeptic’s cap and wait to be convinced. Certainly we’re not going to change our habits or suppress our desires or alter our tastes just for the sake of some obedience that we do not understand. But if Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had to learn obedience by experience, then so must we.
Being human, and being weak, we need to accept the frustrating, difficult-to-understand obedience before God can lead us into the deeper obedience of heaven. It would be nice if our children started out rational, listening calmly to our every instruction, saying, “Yes, Father, I understand what you say, and therefore I will refrain from running out into the street,” or “Thank you, Mommy, for your explanation about burns; I will stay away from the oven because I now know that it is the right thing to do.” Is that how it works? Of course not. We have to grab the kid who’s running into the street; we have to force him not to stick his hand into the oven; we have to put her down for a nap whether she thinks she wants one or not. Hopefully, and with lots of prayers and lots of luck, these little heathens will learn something about the nature of things. They will learn a deeper kind of obedience.
Morally, spiritually, we don’t start out any better. Jesus was, I think, the rational toddler who listened to his mommy. And if even he had to learn, from experience, what obedience felt like, dare we think that our obedience will be easy? Dare we stand around and demand to be convinced when God is trying to rescue us from the hell of our own choices?
Learning obedience is hard. It takes time, and change, and development. That is one of the reasons that our calendar hits us again, year after year, with this step-by-step walk through the life of Christ, with the opportunity to experience what he did for us in his passion, death, and resurrection. It takes time for it to sink in. And in the same way, we dare not imagine that those basic moral imperatives of the Christian life will get easier, or make more sense to us, until we submit to the hard obedience of learning them. Things like sacrificial giving, and loving those we don’t like, and treating the stranger like Christ, and always telling the truth, and treating our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit—those are hard things to believe in, much less to practice.
The only option is to do them, with patience. And if we can learn the obedience of a toddler, maybe, eventually, God can teach us the obedience of a grown-up. From there we can proceed to that transcendent obedience that is beyond submission to external rules and in the realm of true love.
We’d like a shortcut. But the only way to love is through obedience. Jesus leads the way.