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Tim Staples explains the Church&#8217;s doctrine on predestination, with emphasis on how a member of the Body of Christ can lose their salvation only by rejecting, with their own free will, the sufficient grace that God gives them.

Can Members of the Body of Christ Go to Hell?

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent explores the problem of &#8220;normalcy bias&#8221; in life-threatening situations.
Transcript:
TRENT:
We all have biases, but sometimes our biases can get us killed. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to talk about today here on the Council of Trent. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, but Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. That is the essence of free for All Friday. And if you go back through Council of Trent, we&#8217;ve done, my goodness, we&#8217;ve done at least over 300 free for all Fridays. I&#8217;m sure as someone, if they had a lot of time on their hands, could see what kind of moods I was in, what kind of hobbies or issues were peaking my interest at various times over the past eight years. I remember when free for All Friday started, I was really on disaster fix for a while. I was talking about disasters here. There I still have a book on disasters that I would love to write at some point, so maybe we will work on that. 
But today I want to talk about a thing called normalcy bias and how it manifests in disasters. And the catalyst for the discussion is a disaster that took place recently took place last month. It took place on New Year&#8217;s Day actually in Switzerland. So this was in a town, a ski town called Kranz, Montana, the region of Aice in Switzerland. January 1st, 1:26 AM local time at this bar, there&#8217;s a bar called LA Constellation, and you&#8217;ve got over a hundred people in there. They&#8217;re still celebrating New Year&#8217;s, they&#8217;re partying and they start passing out the sparklers. They&#8217;re really aggressive. Sparklers shooting sparks up, and there&#8217;s a waitress coming out with champagne and there&#8217;s bottle toppers with the sparkler going off and the band is still playing. You can see all this because there&#8217;s people who are recording it on their cell phones. The sparklers go and then they catch light the ceiling because the ceiling is covered in black acoustic foam, which is incredibly dangerous because acoustic foam is highly, highly flammable. 
The fire spreads quickly, and when it does burn, it emits a extremely toxic gas within the smoke that can debilitate people very quickly. But what&#8217;s interesting about the disaster is you see the fire start spreading at first, though it spread slowly, just the flames start licking around at the foam and going, and people just stand there and they watch this and they&#8217;re filming it with their cell phone for a while for at least like 30 seconds. And here&#8217;s the thing, it doesn&#8217;t take long. It doesn&#8217;t take long, 60 seconds or 90 seconds, sometimes even in 60 seconds, a room can be engulfed in flames, especially if it has the right material that is not flame retardant, and suddenly you&#8217;re trapped and you can&#8217;t believe what&#8217;s happened to you. But why is it that people, they&#8217;re just standing there and they&#8217;re looking at this. I was reading an article about it online saying that most people have never even seen a structural fire, right? 
You go back in history, lots of people were familiar with fires because we didn&#8217;t have modern safety apparatuses to prevent fires. We have ground fault interrupting circuits, GFCI, that&#8217;s the one where you plug in your blender, your Vitamix into the kitchen, and there&#8217;s too much power going into the outlet, and suddenly all the power turns off from the outlet and you&#8217;re like, Hey, what&#8217;s going on? You got to press the red button to click it back on again. That&#8217;s to prevent surge overloads. We have all kinds of things, smoke detectors. Now, office buildings, commercial buildings have usually have sprinkler systems in them, so we have a lot of things that are able to prevent fires. Usually. I have several friends who are firefighters, and usually when they go out for fires, it&#8217;s for buildings that are under construction or abandoned buildings. Those are the only things where you have structural fires today. 
Usually not people&#8217;s homes or office buildings or places where they work. So the thing is, we&#8217;re not used to them, whereas back in the day, a hundred years ago, you would have fires were a regular occurrence, so people were naturally afraid of them. In fact, they&#8217;re afraid so much that you know the phrase, you can&#8217;t shout fire in a crowded building as a limit to free speech. That&#8217;s not actually what was said. A Supreme Court case where they said, you can&#8217;t falsely shout fire in a crowded building because there were disasters happened a hundred years ago. There was, I think it was called the Italian Hall Disaster, where somebody just yelled, fire in this hall, and everybody panicked and ran out. There was no fire. Some people think that these were union strike busters who were trying to start a disturbance, and so people were celebrating. 
They were dancing and someone yelled, fire falsely, and everyone rushes for the exits. They get trampled on the stairs, the exit doors swing in instead of out. I believe that was one of the details that might be incorrect actually, but the fact of the matter is there were not enough exits. People were trampled, and a lot of people died as a result. There was no fire, but people were so scared of one, they were rushing out of the building. But nowadays, if you say that, people are like, huh? What? People could see fire? You could see here in Kranz, Montana, just back in January of this year, people are watching, they&#8217;re seeing a fire spreading on the ceiling, and they&#8217;re like, whoa, crazy. And what do they got to do? They got to pull out their phone and record it. Everything has to be recorded nowadays, and they&#8217;re just recording this as it&#8217;s happening. 
And I have watched, so in Twin, I&#8217;ve watched the National Fire Safety Board do demonstrations where they set similar conditions, start a fire on a roof, and you watch it and at first, oh, it seems it&#8217;s going slowly. Then all of a sudden the smoke is filled half the room, then all the room is 60 seconds or the fire flashes over and just immediately explodes out. It goes from a small fire to a big fire in an instant. And that&#8217;s something that also witnesses believe may have happened in this fire, and people are caught off guard. And so what ended up happening is that in this Kranz Montana fire, recently, 116 people were injured, 83 with severe burns and 40 people died in this fire. They&#8217;re in this resort. You think normally you get people out, but you also underestimate in a crowded room how slow it takes to get people out if people leave at the last second. 
Or people will usually, in a disaster situation like a fire, especially when people have to leave a room quickly, they will go towards the exit, the entrance, they&#8217;ll go to the entrance, they came in. So even if there are sufficient exits for everybody to get out, most people will naturally default to the entrance where they came in. If it&#8217;s the main entrance, there&#8217;s going to be a bottleneck, and then you&#8217;re not going to be able to get people out. That&#8217;s why when I go to event venues, when I go anywhere, even I go to the movies, I always look around and try to pinpoint at least two additional exits where one of my closest exits and have them and commit them to memory. That way I can quickly get out. It reminded me of the station nightclub fire in Rhode Island as February 20th, 2003, a hundred people died. 
230 people are injured. People are going to see a band called Great White playing at this nightclub. It was overpacked. People couldn&#8217;t find exits. They&#8217;re all rushing towards the main exit, which was narrow. But the same thing happens. You have sparklers going off on stage illegally. They were not supposed to be there, ignites acoustic foam, and the musicians are still playing, and they look up and they see the fire and they&#8217;re like, oh, man, that&#8217;s not good. People are looking and they see the fire start to spread and they don&#8217;t do anything. They just watch it. Then the fire alarm starts to go off. There&#8217;s no sprinklers. And because there was a grandfather rule, because the building was so old, it wasn&#8217;t required to have sprinklers. I think that rule has been changed since then. If anything, the older buildings are the ones that need to be retrofitted with sprinklers, and it&#8217;s a heartbreaking video. 
Don&#8217;t watch it. If you go watch it, it&#8217;s very sad that the people are still filming as they&#8217;re leaving and you see people trying to get out and the bottleneck forms and they get stuck in there. And then the smoke just starts to fill it up after 30 seconds and people are screaming, the flames are shooting out, and you don&#8217;t understand just how fast it can spread. But the problem is also that people operate under a condition called normalcy bias. This is also called analysis paralysis, ostrich effect. First responders call it negative panic. So when you think of a panic, people are screaming, running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Instead, negative panic is when you don&#8217;t run around and you act like an ostrich with their head in the sand. You don&#8217;t want to do anything. You just stand there and you can&#8217;t function. 
You can&#8217;t operate because your senses are overwhelmed. At the time, Amanda Ripley has written a really great book called The Unthinkable, who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, and she studied several different disasters to see, well, who are the ones who make it out of a disaster, whether it&#8217;s like a plane crash or a ship sinking a fire, who makes it out and who doesn&#8217;t? And what do they have in common? And so she says that when there is a disaster, people tend to operate. There are three phases of their response, denial, deliberation, and decisive moment. So denial is the first one, and 80% of people freeze up in a disaster or they don&#8217;t function. They don&#8217;t operate, not maybe for a long time, but in the first instant, they just can&#8217;t process what is happening. So they undergo a kind of denial and they will check with other sources to make sure, is this really a disaster? 
Is this really that bad? And they&#8217;ll ask you, are you leaving? Are you going to leave? 70% of the people, of the survivors of nine 11 who got out of the World Trade Center had asked other people if they were going to leave first before they decided to leave. They checked with other people to see what the situation was. And the problem is that the reason we call it normalcy bias is that our brains are prone to operate thinking that each day will be normal, like the last one, sun rises, suns today will be relatively like yesterday. Our minds are not primed to operate with the assumption that things could be radically different tomorrow than they are today. We like to keep a schedule and a routine, if you will. And so when things dramatically interrupt it like a disaster, our brain can take a long time to try to process the new information. 
It takes about eight to 10 seconds for the brain to process radically new information. And if you don&#8217;t have the ability to process it during that time, you tend to freeze up. Evolutionary psychologists believe one reason that most people will freeze up in a disaster. There&#8217;s fight, flight and freeze. And so people won&#8217;t just won&#8217;t know what to do. I was watching a documentary about the Estonia. This was a, it wasn&#8217;t the Estonia. No, the Zebu Ferry. This was a ferry in the North Sea, one of those car ferries where you drive your car on and it drives off, and they forgot to close the front door so they couldn&#8217;t see it from the bridge. And the ship leaves, and then water gets in when they&#8217;re out in rough seas and on a ferry, it&#8217;s very unstable because of the cars and the open area when water gets in. 
And so it capsized really quickly. But even as it was starting to capsize, one survivor talks about how he was running out and he saw his parents, and I think his sister just kind of staring off and he&#8217;s like, come on, let&#8217;s go, let&#8217;s go. And they just stood there and they were just staring off into the distance. They couldn&#8217;t even move. Their brains just could not process the idea that the ship they were on is sinking. It just wasn&#8217;t even in their minds. And now with all this dramatic new information, the ship is at a 45 degree angle. Water&#8217;s coming in, they can&#8217;t function because they hadn&#8217;t countenance that something like this could happen to them. That&#8217;s why many years ago when I went on the Catholic Answers Cruise, I was there by myself. But during the night, I practiced a drill. I had my clothes laid out with a life jacket, and I got up in the middle of the night, put on my clothes in the darkness, put on my headlamp. 
I brought a headlamp, had a life jacket, clothes headlamp, turned it on, and I was able to do that in about 10 seconds, and then I could make it out the door. I have a headlamp on and go on my way. Yeah, I know that&#8217;s really nerdy. Yeah, I know, but hey, at least I&#8217;m the one who&#8217;s going to be, I&#8217;ll make it to the lifeboat people. It reminds me of Dwight shrewd on the office when Michael drives the car into the lake and the car sewing of water, and Dwight says, do not panic. I have repaired for this. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;ll probably doing. Do not panic people. I prepared for this. But the Titanic, when the Titanic was sinking, normalcy bias caused a lot of people to die. They weren&#8217;t willing to get into lifeboats. They froze because they just had no thought in their head that this ship could actually sink. 
It was unsinkable. How could they have that? How could that possibly happen? And so they weren&#8217;t able to operate in that way, and people didn&#8217;t get into lifeboats. A lot of lifeboats in the Titanic were lowered half full because people felt more secure on this big ship, even though it&#8217;s sinking than on a little tiny boat. But it doesn&#8217;t have to be gigantic disasters either. It can be small events that can feel like disasters for us. So one example the researchers give are car crashes. Now, car crashes are a fairly normal thing. We drive a lot. And usually each year you will see, maybe you won&#8217;t see the crash itself, but you&#8217;ll see the aftermath of a car crash on the side of the road and you&#8217;ll say, oh, oh, that&#8217;s pretty bad. But the problem is, while we see a lot of car crashes, we&#8217;re not usually personally involved in car crashes. 
That&#8217;s a rare thing to happen to people. And so when we do get in a car crash, especially a serious one, it&#8217;s a totally brand new experience for people. And so you&#8217;ll have a disassociative moment, not be able to process what&#8217;s going on, and you&#8217;ll have this kind of normalcy bias will creep in thinking, oh wow, this can&#8217;t really be happening. Of denial. Then deliberation and then decisive moment. Like, what am I going to do in big disasters or smaller disasters in our lives? Did I say this before? I&#8217;ll have to check, but I can&#8217;t remember. I had to start and stop this episode. Evolutionary psychologists believe that normalcy bias could be the result of an instinct to protect prey from predators. That why would you freeze up in a life-threatening situation? Well, thousands of years ago, one of the biggest life-threatening situations we faced as animals and any animal faces is getting eaten by another animal, right? 
And if you&#8217;re scared, not sure what to do. Research has shown that prey is sometimes less likely to be eaten by a predator if they freeze up and they don&#8217;t move, right? Remember the Jurassic Park rule at the T-Rex, Ian freeze. Allen&#8217;s telling him not to move because the T-Rex s him and he moves anyway, try to draw him away. And so that could be the case. This is just an evolutionary relic, a relic of our evolutionary past where animals were more likely to survive in situations where they could get eaten, freeze and don&#8217;t move, and the predator goes and ignores them. That&#8217;s just one proposed solution. Evolutionary psychology, a lot of it&#8217;s kind of flimflam because you&#8217;re just proposing these theories that can&#8217;t really be tested. So it&#8217;s interesting in that respect, but otherwise, the normalcy bias is there. So be aware of it. 
And if you go out, just try to think yourself, okay, what would I do if the worst happened? You&#8217;re in a new place. Wherever you are, count the exits to the seats on a plane. As long as you prime that in your head, it will at least give you a fighting chance to get out of a bad situation because you&#8217;ve thought about it, you thought about it in your head, it&#8217;s going to be totally brand new to your brain. So the book, if you&#8217;re interested, is called Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley. So I would definitely recommend that, and maybe I&#8217;ll do a full free for all on that book here in the future, so as it&#8217;s the unthinkable, who survives when disaster strikes and why. But thank you guys so much and hope you have a very blessed day.

FFAF: How “Normalcy Bias” Can Kill You

What is dispensationalism?

Are we currently in the End Times?

What are the signs that will precede the return of Jesus?

Did Jesus get end-of-the-world prophecies wrong?

Will Jesus really return—like “a thief in the night”?

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“Are we currently in the End Times?” This episode explores the signs of Jesus’ return, delving into questions like what dispensationalism is and whether Jesus got end-of-the-world prophecies wrong. Join us as we navigate these important topics and more in this thought-provoking discussion.
[Encore episode, original air date July 25, 2025]
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Are We Currently in the End Times? Signs of Jesus’ Return

A follow up to his video, &#8220;Why Liberal Catholicism Is Dying,&#8221; Joe examines the results to a follow up study on priests in America, which results show some good, some bad and some ugly.
Transcript:
Joe:
They interviewed more than a thousand priests. It doesn&#8217;t appear they got anyone saying that they were extremely liberal. There is this sea change of orthodoxy coupled with compassion, but that&#8217;s the good news. Let&#8217;s talk about the bad news. The bad news is young priests are burning out. Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to briefly share the good, the bad, and the ugly about the future of the priesthood in the Catholic church in America. And I&#8217;m going to be looking at the 2025 report by the Catholic Project. If you&#8217;re not familiar, this is a group out of CUA Catholic University of America where they did a massive study looking at Catholic priests in 2022, did a large survey of several or a few thousand priests and then they were able to get follow up more in depth survey results in 2025 with 1,164 of those original priests.
So this let them go a little deeper. You may remember I did an episode earlier looking at young priests at a very broad level showing younger and newly ordained priests are way more politically conservative and way more theologically, orthodox and older priests. But here they went a little more in depth. So let&#8217;s us get a better view of what that concretely means because terms like orthodox and conservative could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. And so we now have I think a fuller, more nuanced picture. So I want to do something of a follow-up episode and then I&#8217;ll link to the original episode at the end of this one just exploring the good, the bad and the ugly because I think there&#8217;s some really good signs, but I think we would be lying if there weren&#8217;t some things that are also alarming about the picture facing young priests.
And I think the silver lining from that is there are things you and I can concretely do. So with that said, let&#8217;s start with the good. There is this sea change of orthodoxy coupled with compassion. I don&#8217;t mean to say that compassion is new. I mean to say that the kind of theological orthodoxy we have is not some cold pharisaic rigors, but rather we see something like a bleeding heart Catholic orthodoxy, which is great. It&#8217;s exactly what we would want from our priests. These study authors talk about, as I alluded to this massive generational shift and we see it both in political and in theological views. I&#8217;m much less interested in the political, much more interested in the theological, but these are both too big not to mention. So in both the 2022 and the 2025 study, we see again these huge shifts. So priests who were ordained before 19 75, 60 1% considered themselves either very or somewhat politically liberal.
Only 15 or fewer than 15% consider themselves politically conservative. Now if you compare that to those ordained since 2010, those who consider themselves somewhat or very conservative went from 15% to 51%. And meanwhile, the number of people considering themselves politically liberal has dropped to about 11% of priests ordained in the last 15 years. So there is this massive shift, and in fact even there that 11% is only priests who consider themselves somewhat liberal in that cohort, remember they interviewed more than a thousand priests. It doesn&#8217;t appear they got anyone saying that they were extremely liberal or very liberal. Maybe they did. There&#8217;s no number for the dark blue in that figure. So it looks like the radical left wing kind of priest is simply a thing of the past, and I&#8217;ve mentioned that before, but I&#8217;m much more interested in the theological trajectory because like it or not, there is a clear connection between the self-described politically liberal and the theologically progressive or less orthodox, more heterodox or heretical priests.
I don&#8217;t know a better way to put that, but we see this also has a massive generational bent to it as well. Among priests ordained before 1975, more than 70% describe themselves as theologically progressive. These days priests ordained in 2010 or later only 8%. And I wish there was a chart for this because I think the more you press someone on whether they&#8217;re extremely progressive, et cetera, you just see this total collapse that the radical, let&#8217;s question everything. Theology that you sometimes would get from left-wing priests, sometimes they&#8217;ll still get from older kind of baby boomer priests. It doesn&#8217;t draw anyone to the priesthood, and we can say that pretty definitively. Now by contrast, the young priests, over 70% of them consider themselves conservative or orthodox theologically or else very conservative slash orthodox. Only about 20% of them even consider themselves kind of theologically middle of the road.
Now, again, this leaves a lot of questions about what that actually means, but I think we can take a closer look at a few things. Number one, it doesn&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re just blindly supporting whatever the Trump administration says because remember, you&#8217;ve got a lot of people who consider themselves conservative priests and that might be sounding alarm bells for people saying, well, what about all the bad stuff? What about sometimes inhumane crackdowns with ice and everything else? And it&#8217;s worth at least pointing out that it doesn&#8217;t appear that these priests are just blindly partisan. They are putting Phil of Jesus Christ first, at least in terms of their own self-reporting. Two thirds of priests who identified as very conservative still said they were at least somewhat concerned about the Trump administration&#8217;s policies among priests who identified themselves as conservative young priests who identified themselves, oh no, sorry, that&#8217;s all priests who identified themselves as conservative.
83% still said that they were concerned about Trump administration policies. So don&#8217;t hear conservative to just mean these are MAGA priests who will just co-sign whatever the administration does. It&#8217;s clear that they&#8217;re obviously going to be more conservative on some prudential issues, but it doesn&#8217;t seem like they&#8217;re doing this just blindly. In terms of the theological shift and what all this means, pastorally, Luke Kain, who has a good analysis of this in the pillar points out that the priestly priorities are really notable here. Only 11% of the priests ordained before 1980 said access to the traditional Latin mass should be a priority compared with 20% of those ordained between 1980 and 1999. So you see it basically doubles from about 10% to about 20% and then basically doubles again to almost 40% because 39% of those ordained in the 21st century think access to the traditional Latin mass should be a priority.
They&#8217;re also these younger priests more likely to focus on eucharistic devotion as a priority and less likely to focus on things like climate change, immigration, LGBT issues, poverty, racism, and social justice. There is one particular chart that I think drives all of this home. It&#8217;s figure 12 in the 2025 report, and it might be too small for you to see on the video, but if you pull up the report, you can see each of these issues and they just ask priests which things they can consider a priority. And I&#8217;m going to get more into that in a second, but I want to compare two issues, L-G-B-T-Q community versus access to traditional Latin mass. Now look, I think there&#8217;s a perfectly orthodox way of saying yes, people who are same sex attracted need to be ministered to, et cetera, and so just because someone says it&#8217;s priority or it doesn&#8217;t tell you what they think ought to happen, nevertheless, this is going to be a notable shift because among the oldest generation, those ordained before 19 80, 60 6% of them considered the L-G-B-T-Q community a priority, whereas the TLM community only 11%, so it&#8217;s a six to one variation, they&#8217;re six times more likely to regard the L-G-B-T-Q outreach as a pastoral priority and not Latin mass.
In contrast, among the priests ordained in the last 25 years, that six to one ratio has disappeared. They&#8217;re actually slightly more likely to treat the TLM as a pastoral priority 39 to 37%. So it&#8217;s about a one-to-one ratio now instead of a six to one ratio. Again, it&#8217;s a massive change. And so if you&#8217;re wondering what&#8217;s the future of the liturgy going to look like, well imagine when those people become bishops because in many of these cases, these priests are too young to be seriously considered its bishops, but this is the future of the diocese in America that this is what a lot of pastoral governance is going to look like a generation or two from now. So you can see on all sorts of issues, they&#8217;re less concerned about climate change, less concerned about immigration, less concerned about L-G-B-T-Q. They&#8217;re slightly less concerned about poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity, although still pretty concerned about it.
They&#8217;re more concerned about eucharistic devotion, more concerned about access to the TLM. They&#8217;re less concerned about racism and social justice, although still pretty concerned about social justice and they&#8217;re not particularly concerned about ality. So that&#8217;s kind of a data dump, but it should give us a little bit more of a sense of what does it mean when we hear that these young priests are theologically and politically conservative and orthodox. There is a cudgel that you might hear, which is, oh, well these guys, they hate the pope. They&#8217;re dissenting from the Pope and they dislike Pope Leo and et cetera, et cetera. And in the numbers, we just don&#8217;t see that as true overall, 86% of priests said that they had either quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in Pope Leo the 14th. Now, granted, this is over the summer. This is in kind of his papal honeymoon period, but that&#8217;s still massive.
And another 13% said they had some confidence. Only 1% of priests said they had very little confidence. That&#8217;s really good. That&#8217;s a really good sign. Additionally, most believed that relationships between the Vatican and the US would improve under polio. 28% said it would improve significantly. 51% said it would improve somewhat, only 3% thought it would get worse. Only 17% thought it would save the same. So four out of five of priests are just like, yeah, could and good for the church in the us. I want to go back now to that issue about priorities in the American church. Across the board. Priest think that we need to focus on young adult ministry, family formation, marriage prep, evangelization. These aren&#8217;t politically hot button, these aren&#8217;t controversial. These aren&#8217;t cross-generational or political in any way. So people don&#8217;t talk about this, but those are big things and those are things that priests are rightly focused on.
These are followed pretty closely by concerns for poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, as well as pro-life issues. Then following that, you have immigration, Hispanic slash Spanish language ministry, social justice, then eucharistic devotion, then racism, then artificial intelligence, which I thought was actually pretty fascinating to see it score as high as it did, followed by climate change slash ecology, ality, L-G-B-T-Q, and then finally access to the traditional Latin mass. But again, on that final one, remember there&#8217;s an enormous generational divide. So I think that the access to the TLM is going to rise in the ranks of priority as you get a lot of these younger priests becoming older. I think it&#8217;s also maybe helpful to hear the kind of things that priests are grappling with. Those are a bunch of different really big issues, really important issues that people want a good Christian witness on, and they often want a good Christian witness on from the priest.
And so just bear that in mind. Whatever your particular issue is that your pastor or your bishop may be trying to be a good witness and a good steward, a good advocate for a bunch of other really important issues as well. So maybe cut &#8217;em a little slack. Now, in the 2025 report, there is one part I didn&#8217;t love, which is they compared which things these different priests saw as a priority and which things they actually had a ministry for. And so only 6% of priests actually had an L-G-B-T-Q Ministry. Okay? I get what they&#8217;re doing there. But with an evangelization for instance, they&#8217;re less likely to have evangelization ministries than they&#8217;re to have pro-life ministries. There&#8217;s something worth exploring there like where we put in our actual time, money, and energies. But I have some caveats with it, and I have caveats because of Pope and John Paul ii, who I&#8217;m recording this on Wednesday, it&#8217;s his thief day.
He warns that we&#8217;re not saved by a magic formula. We&#8217;re saved by a person, Jesus, who says, I&#8217;m with you, and therefore we don&#8217;t need to go out and invent a new program. Rather, the program as it is, is simply the gospel and it&#8217;s living tradition. It&#8217;s ultimately centered in Christ himself. And this is a program which doesn&#8217;t shift with times and cultures. You don&#8217;t have a generational divide for who Jesus applies to. Okay, that&#8217;s a lot, but that&#8217;s the good news. Let&#8217;s talk about the bad news. The bad news is young priests are burning out at a remarkably high rate. This is something that I think we need to take very seriously. Now to measure this, they ask priests to agree or disagree with the following statements. It happens more and more often than I talk about my ministry in a negative way during my ministry work.
I often feel emotionally drained and I usually feel worn out and weary after my ministry work. So you can measure for yourself whether those are good or bad kind of questions to ask. But those are the questions they&#8217;re asking. And what they find is that diocesan priests are more likely than priests and religious orders to be burnt out. 7% of diocesan priests report having high burnout using this kind of method compared to only 2% of priests in religious orders in terms of having at least some burnout, 44% of death and priests report being at least somewhat burnt out compared to 31% of those in religious orders. That&#8217;s already going to be our first indication that this is at least largely about the amount of work we&#8217;re putting on the shoulders of our priests. And we also see a big generational gap. So in response to the prompt, I&#8217;m expected to do too many things that go beyond my calling as a priest.
Older priests, only 13% said yes to that among those who ordained 2000 or later 45%. That&#8217;s huge, and that&#8217;s worth exploring. So it raises this question, well, is this an issue of too much being put on the shoulders of younger priests or are they just expecting not to do things that the older priests knew they were going to have to do? One of the priests interviewed in the report talks about how he&#8217;s extensively helping with vocations, youth camps, local charities, that he works 60 to 70 hours. He doesn&#8217;t really, he will often go weeks with no real day off, and he puts an average of 20,000 miles on his car per year. Those are things I think we should be watching out for because this is one of those things that can come back and bite us in a big way. As the report says, one explanation is that priests are just being asked to do more and that a lot of young priests, one indication of this is a lot of young priests are serving in multiple parishes significantly.
There wasn&#8217;t an actual relationship that they could measure between the number of parishes a priest was serving in and burnout, which at least anecdotally I would say makes sense for this reason that at least in the diocese, archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas, the diocese, I know the best, the large parishes are way more taxing. There&#8217;s a lot more things going on every night of the week. And then you go out into rural Kansas and you might have two or three parishes that are kind of in a general geographic region. So you might be in the car more than you would in the suburb, but your number of people you&#8217;re ministering to is a lot fewer. It&#8217;s a much more manageable workload. You might actually be bored rather than overwhelmed. In any case, I think this is something we need to take very seriously, that priests are burning out, and we don&#8217;t want to tax young priests to such an extent that they end up wanting to leave ministry.
Something like 3% of the priests they surveyed had considered leaving ministry. That&#8217;s relatively low, but it&#8217;s still too high, and that number could go up in a heartbeat because someone just has a really horrible month or two. So I would just say for the laypeople watching this, try to find ways of making your priest&#8217;s life a little easier, particularly if this is a priest who has a lot on his plate, so that&#8217;s the good and the bad. Let&#8217;s get to the ugliness, which is the ugliness of loneliness. And this is an epidemic I would suggest nationwide, but priests are not immune from it. And also if they&#8217;re overworked and they&#8217;re living alone, they might be particularly susceptible to this. So the questions that they asked was actually based on, I believe, A-U-C-L-A study on loneliness. The questions are, how often do you feel that you lack companionship?
How often do you feel left out, and how often do you feel isolated from others? And you score each of those from one to three from not very often to a lot. And so if you have a score of six or higher cumulatively, so if you do 1, 1, 1, only be three, you do 3, 3, 3, that&#8217;d be nine, that&#8217;d be the most lonely you could be. So a six or above, they rank you as lonely. In terms of loneliness, 27% of the older generation of priests considered themselves lonely, then they may not have used that word, but in terms of how they answered the questions, that skyrockets to 45%. So these two things, the burnout and the loneliness, I think we need to tackle together and say, these are good priests with the heart for Jesus Christ, who are striving to live out orthodoxy in a compassionate way, and we should do more to make their lives a little easier.
So it may be as simple as if you are on good, friendly relations with a priest, let them come over and just have a meal or test some time away. Sometimes that&#8217;s extra work. Know your priest well enough. Are they an introvert, an extrovert? How do they like to unwind? But if there are ways of making their life a little easier, you can bond with them, connect with them. You can help with both the burnout and the loneliness. And please, as a final bit of advice, pray for priests because they are targets spiritually. They&#8217;re susceptible to all of the temptations and everything else, everyone else&#8217;s, and we need them for the future of the church. Now, as I mentioned, I recently did a video exploring the 2022, so if you want to hear more about the political and theological shifts, you can check that out over here. I hope you enjoy that much deeper dive. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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New Priests Are MORE ORTHODOX Than Ever, but there’s a catch…

In this episode Trent responds to a recent article from Fr. Thomas Reese called “Religious conservatives have lost LGBTQ rights battle. It’s time to surrender.” Trent shows why this is a bad option and gives us cause for hope (along with a healthy dose of pop culture references along the way).

No Fr. Reese, the Church Will Never Surrender

I admit that many popular expressions peeve me, whether it’s “I could care less” for “I couldn’t care less,” or “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too” instead of the clearer “eat your cake and have it, too.” But there’s one idiom in particular that gets my goat: “It’s not the end of the world!” After all, consider what we mean by it: as <a href="https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/not-be-the-end-of-the-world">Collins Dictionary</a> explains, “if you say that something bad is not the end of the world, you are trying to stop yourself or someone else being so upset by it, by suggesting that it is not the worst thing that could happen.” 
Theologically, this is a catastrophe. The early Christians looked forward to the end of the world and the return of Jesus, and even longed for it. The second-to-last verse in the Bible, after all, says, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). St. Paul could speak of the early Christians as “awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). And we claim to share this desire. Each Sunday at Mass, we say in the Nicene Creed that we “look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” 
But do we really? Or do we think of it more as the idiom suggests, as “the worst thing that could happen”? 
Partly, it may be because of how we get there. The Catechism points out that “before Christ&#8217;s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers” (675). Jesus says that in this trial, “many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because wickedness is multiplied, most men’s love will grow cold” (Matt. 24:12-14). He describes it as a period of “great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now”—so difficult that “if those days had not been shortened, no human being would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened” (vv. 21-22).  It&#8217;s perfectly rational to pray “that you may have strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of man” (Luke 21:36). 
But for many of us, it’s what follows that most alarms us: the prospect of the world ending, and of standing before Jesus to be judged. It’s this fear that I want to address, because I suspect it reveals something about our choices. If everything we’re living for is here below, the prospect of the world’s end (or even our own death) must be troubling, since it’s the loss of everything we have. But as Jesus has explained, it doesn’t have to be this way (Matt. 6:19-21): 
<blockquote>Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.</blockquote>
Likewise, the moment in which we’re judged—whether at our individual judgment at the moment of our death (Heb. 9:27) or the Final Judgment at Christ’s return (Matt. 25:31-46)—is going to be the best or the worst moment of our entire lives. 
So perhaps we dread the return of Jesus because we’re not ready, either individually or in terms of the whole human race. That latter fact seems to be one reason that the Lord hasn’t returned already. When the early Christians grew impatient that the Lord hadn’t already come back in their lifetimes, St. Peter responded by suggesting that there may be millennia more to wait, in order to give humanity more time for repentance (2 Pet. 3:8-9): 
<blockquote>But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. </blockquote>
So how can we go from being a “not the end of the world” people to a “come, Lord Jesus!” people? Comparing his return to a thief coming in the night, Jesus tells us both “watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” and that “therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matt. 24:42, 44). Being watchful for the Lord is an important element of getting ready for the Lord, so that his return is good news. 
The <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html">Church’s liturgical year</a> aims to help us here. After all, the liturgical cycle exists to unfold “the whole mystery of Christ, from the incarnation and birth until the ascension, the day of Pentecost, and the expectation of blessed hope and of the coming of the Lord.” In this time of Advent particularly, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html">we’re reminded</a> that “it is not possible coherently to celebrate the birth of him ‘who saves his people from their sins’ without some effort to overcome sin in one&#8217;s own life, while waiting vigilantly for him who will return at the end of time.” In other words, we can’t separate our watchfulness in Advent, as we yearn for Christmas and the Lord’s return, from our readiness in Advent, our spiritual preparation for his arrival. 
Even the name “advent” (which means “coming”) encourages us in a twofold attitude of “waiting-memory of the first, humble coming of the Lord in our mortal flesh” as well as “waiting-supplication for his final, glorious coming as Lord of History and universal Judge.” We know that Jesus came into the world quite unexpectedly in his first coming, with a faithful few watching and waiting. We know that he intends to do so again. And so we should strive to be among those wise virgins who awaited the Bridegroom with lighted lamps (see Matt. 25:1-12). 
But it’s not enough simply to get ourselves ready. As Catholic Christians, we want to help others to know the gospel, and to prepare for the coming of Christ, and to be incorporated into the kingdom of God. Eschatology—the study of the end of the world—is closely connected to evangelization. Remember, that’s why St. Peter said Jesus hadn’t returned yet. And so, in the words of the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651207_ad-gentes_en.html">Second Vatican Council</a>, “missionary activity tends toward eschatological fullness.” Or in Jesus’ own words, “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).<span data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335551550&quot;:1,&quot;335551620&quot;:1,&quot;335559685&quot;:0,&quot;335559737&quot;:0,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559739&quot;:0,&quot;335559740&quot;:259}"> 
So perhaps this Advent is a good time to ask yourself (or better yet, God): am I watchful and hopeful to meet Jesus, or does the idea fill me with dread? And how can I better prepare my own heart, and my neighbor, for the coming of Christ at Christmas, at the hour of our deaths, and at the end of time?

The End of the World…Do You Feel Fine?

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“Our calendars are mistaken. Jesus wasn’t born in 1 B.C. but around 7–6 B.C.”
DEFENSE
The year of the calendar is not a matter of faith.
The Anno Domini (Latin, “Year of the Lord”) system of reckoning was created in A.D. 525 by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis “the Short” or “the Humble”). It later came into international use. Made centuries after Christ, this calculation is in no way essential to the Faith. The Church does not teach Christ was born in any particular year, and it is universally recognized that Dionysius’s calculations are probably slightly off (Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 3: The Infancy Narratives, 61–62).
The estimate that Christ was born in 7–6 B.C. is based on the view that Herod the Great died in 4 B.C. Matthew records that, attempting to kill Jesus, Herod slaughtered the male infants two years old and under in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:16). This suggests that Jesus’ birth took place two or more years before Herod’s death, leading many to pro- pose a date of 7 or 6 B.C.
The view that Herod died in 4 B.C. has been popular for some time, but recent studies indicate that this view is probably wrong and that the traditional date of Herod’s death, 1 B.C., is correct. This would put the birth of Jesus in the 3–2 B.C. time frame, which is when the Church Fathers say it was. A large majority of early Christian sources place Jesus’ birth at this time (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed, 291).
Confirmation is found in the Gospel of Luke. It records that John the Baptist began his ministry in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, or A.D. 29 (Luke 3:1). Shortly afterward, Jesus began his own ministry and Luke reports that he was about thirty years old at the time (Luke 3:23). Deducting thirty years from A.D. 29, and taking into account the fact that there is no “Year 0” (instead, there is a jump from 1 B.C. to A.D. 1), that would indicate Jesus was born around 3–2 B.C, when the Church Fathers say he was. Thus Dionysius Exiguus was probably only a year off.
TIP
On the problems with dating of Herod’s death to 4 B.C., see Finegan’s book as well as Andrew E. Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul.
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The Year Jesus Was Born

Protestantism’s Most Unhistorical Doctrine

Do you have resources available in Spanish? Is CIR a supplement or replacement for other 12 step programs?

I’m in recovery and just want to encourage others. I went to Mass, gym and meetings everyday.

What resources do you have that we can use? My wife and I think my son has a drinking problem?

The last 7 years of my marriage I discovered my husband had a sex addiction. I eventually filed for divorce. What is known about this kind of addiction and its correlation to abuse?

I’m recovering but being exposed to new age theology through recovery programs. How do we address this?

I’m on methadone and having a hard time quitting. I’m having a hard time convincing myself this is a sin.&nbsp;

If you suspect your child has a drinking problem, you&#8217;re not alone. We share Catholic resources, signs to look for, and how parents can respond with both love and accountability—while staying rooted in faith.
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What Can I Do If My Child Struggles with Alcohol Addiction?

In this special anniversary show, Trent reflects on his favorite and least favorite moments as an apologist, what the future holds for debates, and most importantly: his favorite Power Ranger? Anything goes in this special Q+A episode of the Counsel of Trent!
Want more from Trent Horn?
<ul>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/made-this-way-how-to-prepare-kids-to-face-todays-tough-moral-issues/">Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues</a></li>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/why-were-catholic-our-reasons-for-faith-hope-and-love/">Why We&#8217;re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, And Love</a></li>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/persuasive-pro-life-how-to-talk-about-our-cultures-toughest-issue/">Persuasive Pro-Life: How to Talk About Our Culture’s Toughest Issue</a></li>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/answering-atheism-how-to-make-the-case-for-god-with-logic-and-charity/">Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity</a></li>
</ul>

100th Episode “Anything Goes” Q+A!

I had a friendly chat with William Lane Craig

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reveals why you&#8217;re old box TV in the garage is worth more than it looks.

FFAF: Why Your Old TV is a Hidden Treasure

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reveals how some of the modern things we use every day are actually hundreds or even thousands of years old.

FFAF: I just want to talk about Cobra Kai

Trent is back from Australia with an update on how the coronavirus affected his travel. He then weighs in on the debate over whether churches should close in order to curb the spread of this pandemic.
<a href="https://www.catholicanswersspeakers.com/trent-horn-speaker/">Book Trent</a> to speak at your parish or next event. 
Want more from Trent Horn? 
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<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1"><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/made-this-way-how-to-prepare-kids-to-face-todays-tough-moral-issues/">Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues</a> </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1"><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/why-were-catholic-our-reasons-for-faith-hope-and-love/">Why We&#8217;re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, And Love</a> </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="1"><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/persuasive-pro-life-how-to-talk-about-our-cultures-toughest-issue/">Persuasive Pro-Life: How to Talk About Our Culture’s Toughest Issue</a> </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="4" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="4" data-aria-level="1"><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/answering-atheism-how-to-make-the-case-for-god-with-logic-and-charity/">Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity</a> </li>
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Coronavirus and Church Closures

In this episode Trent joins Matt at the Pints with Jack podcast to discuss the moral arguments of C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, and David Baggett.

What is the Best Moral Argument for God’s Existence?

The Gospel and the Gospels

I scrolled through my Facebook feed, one post after another. Photos of friends, pictures of coffee, quotes from famous people. Advertisements.
I stopped. There it was again! 
The same ad that I had seen over and over for the past few months. I hardly ever paid attention to the ads on Facebook, except this one. This one. I didn’t even notice the product being advertised, but that didn’t really matter; it was the tagline that got wedged in my brain so firmly that it replayed like a chant in my mind without my even really looking at the ad:
“What if, for 30 days, you just believed?”
Since my husband Pat had first begun his research into philosophy of religion, his reading list had transformed, book by book, into a study of Christianity. Simultaneously, this ad began showing up in my social media feed. So, while my husband was becoming more Christian-like by way of his studies, I was slowly being introduced to Christianity by way of my boredom-induced web browsing. The funny thing is that, as far as I’m aware, that advertisement had nothing to do with Christianity, and yet that is how I thought of it, how it kept niggling at me as I sat on the sidelines, watching Pat immerse himself in Christianity and become a better husband and father as he did.
I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something to all this Christian stuff. Could it—as wild and wacky as it sounded—actually be true? And even if it wasn’t true, were there enough potential benefits to living a Christian life, including becoming a better, happier person, that would make the absurdity of organized religion worth it?
What if, for 30 days, you just believed?
I didn’t even know what belief actually entailed. Did I need to “accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior”? What did that even mean? Could I just read a Bible? Should I pray? What kind of prayers? Did I need to give up my Sunday mornings, get out of comfy pajamas, and actually go to a church?
No, I decided. No, no, no. I couldn’t do that, not any of it. And so, as I had many times before, I scrolled right by the ad and left it at that.
And yet…
What if, what if, what if?
Meanwhile, Pat thrust himself deeper into Christianity, wrestling with his biggest hangups to a faith in Jesus. Miraculously, Jesus prevailed. Pat set aside his atheism and accepted Christ as Truth. He was eager for me to join him in this newfound belief, but through his years of internet marketing and his experience being my husband, he knew there would be no pressuring me into Christianity. He needed to finesse me a little, present the message in just the right way, and that meant he needed to address my concerns and my disbelief with dispassionate interest.
“You know,” he said to me in passing, “I got a book on Kindle you might like. It’s called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.”
“Oh?” I said politely.
“It’s about an investigative journalist, an atheist, whose wife converts to Christianity, and he goes on to research Jesus from an historical perspective—he interviews all these experts, including anthropologists and historians and psychologists. Anyways, if you want to take a look, you can read it on your phone.”
And then he walked away.
He didn’t force me to talk about the book. He didn’t make me say I’d read it. He didn’t hand me a copy. But he did put the ball in my court—which was the smartest thing he could’ve done. I had, after all, become a “no” person. Had he forced me to make a judgment call right then and there about that book, I would’ve balked, and the impenetrable walls of Jericho constructed around my heart would have only grown stronger. Instead, he used two evangelization techniques that we ought to pay attention to.
One: often a person can be more persuasive when he can get someone to see that he isn’t being pushy, but rather that he’s allowing the space and genuine freedom for that person to make his own assessment of the Christian faith.
And two: know a person well enough that you can come to a discussion of Christianity from positions he is already interested or invested in.
His brief synopsis of the book did intrigue me. Coming from a family of journalists, being a lover of history and anthropology, and having a spouse who had seemingly left me in my non-belief? It all worked together to make me want to open the book. Pat hadn’t mentioned how the story ended. Did the writer get his wife to de-convert? Or did they coexist without treading on each other’s beliefs? Or did he discover that his wife was in the same spot as me—with the tiniest smidgen of hope, exhausted by cynical non-belief—yearning for truth?
What if, for thirty days, you just believed? 
That week, the advertisement showed up one final time in my Facebook news feed. This time, I gave the idea some serious thought, playing around with a kind of thirty-day faith challenge. That would be long enough to give a real attempt at trying on Christianity. If I got to the end of the month and realized I still didn’t believe, then, sure, I might have to eat a little crow, but I would also be in the position to have my atheism strengthened. If I gave this religion an honest try and found it wanting, then I could be even more confident that atheism was true and settle back in, as much as I might not want, into my closed world of nos. If I went through the thirty days and believed in Christ, well . . . future Christine could worry about that improbability when the time came. Besides, that last option was a bit too frightening to wrap my head around.

What If, for 30 Days, You Just Believed?

The Catholic Church’s celebration of and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/praying-to-the-saints">prayer to the saints</a> is an evergreen topic of apologetics. I find myself addressing it in a variety of contexts when I teach theology to high school and undergrad students. The upshot of continually returning to this same well of living water is that it forces apologists to <a href="https://youtu.be/Zm4RwawV4Lo?si=NIvIcPq1jnVO3NZV">get more creative</a> in our presentations. It also forces us to reflect more deeply on the Christo-centrism of these apparent “churchy” elements of Catholicism, contra those Christians who disregard the importance of the “capital C’ Church.
Here’s one line of argument for <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/the-saints-pray-for-you-how-the-christians-in-heaven-help-us-here-on-earth/">the intercession of the saints</a> that I find accessible and at least digestible by Catholic and non-Catholic Christians alike.
No Bible-believing Christian denies that St. Paul, on numerous occasions, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/where-does-the-bible-say-the-church-is-the-body-of-christ">refers to the Church</a> as the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27; Col 1:18, 24; and Eph 1:22-23). Let us grant for the sake of argument that “Church” could mean something as watered-down as “any person who believes in Jesus.” This definition at least allows for the possibility of including most saints of Catholic history. Even a staunch anti-Catholic would still have to accept the Apostles as saints and part of “the Church” so defined. Great! We now have actual people that we can all agree are part of the Church and therefore, according to St. Paul, make up the “body of Christ.”
Next, every Christian agrees that Jesus is no longer dead, but alive. This is kind of an important part of calling oneself a Christian! St. Paul hinges one’s entire faith in Jesus on belief in his Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:14.
Now, I am no medical expert, but I am fairly confident that a man’s head must remain attached to his body for him to stay alive. Better still, it must not only be attached but united to his body. A head can still be attached to a dead person, but to describe the head as united implies there is still a wholeness to the living person. The body and the head are still working together.
Now consider the man, Jesus. We believe that Jesus is alive. If he is alive, his head must be united to his body. If his body is the Church, then the Church must always be united to Jesus. That Church must, at the very least, include those faithful Christians of the Bible we call saints. Those saints, because they are part of a living body that is united to its head, must also be alive just as the head is. Those living saints must also include people like Peter, Paul and, yes, Mary! 
All this is to say that when the Church holds up models like the saints, prays with them, and acknowledges their power to intercede for us, it is simply recognizing the unity the saints share as a body with the head, Jesus Christ. The Church, in praising the saints, is actually praising Christ’s body. This is not only acceptable for a Christian, but necessarily follows from his faith in a living Jesus. 
The need to explain and defend “basic” doctrines like the Church or the communion of saints is not new. But when we preach the Gospel, we need to adjust our approach when we recognize the specific focus that will resonate with our audience. The modern world is starved for relationship—union with another real, living person. So let’s use this opportunity to show how the communion of saints lives right now in real relationship with Jesus—so closely united that they are the body to his head.

Living Jesus, Living Saints

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“The pope’s title “Vicar of the Son of God” in Latin is Vicarius Filii Dei. When you add up the Roman numerals in this title, you get 666. Therefore, the pope is the Antichrist mentioned in Revelation 13.”
DEFENSE
Vicarius Filii Dei is not one of the pope’s titles, and this method of calculation is unreliable.
Some have referred to the pope as “vicar of the Son of God,” but this is not one of his official titles. These are listed in the Annuario Pontifi- cio (“Pontifical Yearbook”), published annually by the Vatican press. They are:
Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God.
The closest title is “Vicar of Jesus Christ” (Latin, Vicarius Iesu Chris- ti), but this does not add up to 666.
Some claim that the phrase Vicarius Filii Dei is printed on the papal ti- ara (a special kind of crown worn by past popes). These reports are false. None of the tiaras had this phrase, and popes today do not use tiaras.
One might argue the pope can still be described as the vicar of the Son of God, even if it isn’t one of his titles, but this produces an unreliable methodology. All kinds of people and things can be described in ways that add up to 666. The children’s TV character Barney may be a cute purple dinosaur, but that doesn’t mean he’s the Antichrist (CVte pVr- pLe DInosaVr = C+V+V+L+D+I+V = 100+5+5+50+500+1+5 = 666).
Ironically, this argument is often made by Seventh-day Adventists, whose founding prophetess was Ellen Gould White (ELLen GoV- LD VVhIte = 50+50+5+50+500+5+5+1 = 666).
Finally, while you can get 666 by taking each Roman numeral as an individual digit, out of its immediate context (VICarIVs fILII DeI = V+I+C+I+V+I+L+I+I+D+I = 5+1+100+1+5+1+50+1+1+500+1 = 666), Roman numerals need to be read in context. Placing a smaller number to the left of a larger one results in it being subtracted, not added. Thus “IV” means 4, not 6. In the same way, “IC” and “IL” mean 99 and 49, not 101 and 51. Read this way, Vicarius Filii Dei is 660, not 666.
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666 and the Pope

<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

My father received last rites and went to confession. The priest said that if he were to die, he wouldn’t have to go to purgatory. Is this true?

What did it mean when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary?

What are legitimate reasons to not have kids?

What’s the Church’s official teaching on the Nephilim?

Do you have to believe in all doctrines of the Catholic Church in order to be appointed a priest or bishop?

1 Corinthians 4:6 says to “not go beyond what is written.” Is this evidence for sola scriptura?

&#8220;Can you avoid purgatory after last rites?&#8221; This episode explores the nuances of last rites and their implications for purgatory, alongside intriguing questions about the meaning of the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, the Church&#8217;s teachings on the Nephilim, and the reasons for not having children. Tune in for a thoughtful examination of these important topics.
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Can You Avoid Purgatory After Last Rites? Nephilim and Mary

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<li>15:15 &#8211; How to React to the Sex Abuse Scandal – Trent Horn</li>
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Catholic Answers | Season 4 | Episode 10

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DAY 123
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CHALLENGE
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If Matthew’s exceptive clauses on divorce don’t mean you can get remarried (see Day 122), what do they mean?
DEFENSE
There are a number of possibilities.
In Matthew 5:32, Jesus states: “Every one who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Social conditions in the ancient world pressured divorced women to remarry, so to divorce a woman was, in effect, to make her an adulteress—unless she already was one. Matthew may mean that a husband could divorce an adulterous wife without being guilty of forcing her into adultery, for she had already chosen that path.
Adultery thus might be a valid ground for divorce, but it would not permit remarriage. Note that Jesus says that anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery, without making any exceptions (cf. Day 82). This was the classical understanding of the exceptive clauses found in the writings of the Church Fathers.
Another theory points out that the word used in Greek for “unchastity” (porneia) and “adultery” (moicheia) are different, suggesting that “unchastity” should be taken as a reference to something other than adultery, such as sex with someone else before a marriage had been consummated. If infidelity were discovered before consummation, a person might be able to divorce and remarry, because marriage only becomes indissoluble when it is consummated (CCC 2382).
On either of the above theories, Matthew may have included the exceptive clauses to bring out this aspect of Jesus’ teaching because he previously mentioned that Joseph had planned to divorce Mary when, prior to their living together, she was discovered to be with child. Yet he calls Joseph “a just man” (Matt. 1:19). How could he be just if divorce was always wrong? Thus Matthew may have included the exceptive clauses to make it clear how Joseph’s intent could be reasonable for a just man to divorce.
Another theory, which has been argued in recent years, is that the word porneia here refers to incestuous marriages that were practiced by Gentiles but forbidden by the Jewish Law. Matthew may have wished to make it clear for his Jewish readers that such Gentile marriages were not valid. For a defense of this view, see John P. Meier, The Vision of Matthew, 248–57.
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The Meaning of the Exceptive Clauses

In this episode, Trent breaks down the problem with bestselling books about Heaven.
Transcription:
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It&#8217;s ironic that good books about how to get to heaven don&#8217;t make the New York Times bestsellers list, but erroneous books about heaven do make that list. The Protestant blogger, Tim Chaley call these heaven tourism books and there&#8217;s been a lot of them in recent years. Books like 90 Minutes in Heaven to Heaven and Back and Heaven is for Real and other books might be called Hell Tourism Books such as 23 Minutes in Hell, which could have also been about any layover you&#8217;ve had at Newark Airport. And in today&#8217;s episode we&#8217;re going to talk about what&#8217;s wrong with heaven tourism books. But before we do that, if you like these episodes, please be sure to hit the button and subscribe in order to get all of our great content. So the main problem with these books is that they devalue heaven. They take away heaven&#8217;s majesty and replace it with a human idea that we speculate about instead of treating heaven as a divine gift that we humbly receive and hopefully wait.
For example, Don Piper describes heaven as having something like pearly gates and says of the streets, it was like a city with paved streets. To my amazement, they had been constructed of literal gold. If you imagine a street paved with gold bricks, that&#8217;s as close as I can come to describing what lay inside the gate. But when the Bible uses this kind of imagery, it doesn&#8217;t seem as literal as just gates made of pearls and streets made of literal gold. Revelation 21, 21 says of the new Jerusalem in heaven, the 12 gates were 12 pearls. Each of the gates made of a single pearl and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent. As glass notice, the gates aren&#8217;t made of pearls. They just are a pearl, and the gold is like transparent glass, which is not like the gold that we know in this world.
This shows that while the Apostle John was given special knowledge about heaven, he wasn&#8217;t writing heaven tourism. Instead, he was writing a unique genre of literature about what God revealed to him that has multiple layers of interpretation. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m skeptical of heaven tourism books that collapse this mystical imagery into mundane pedestrian descriptions of heaven. The Bible does use earthly imagery like wedding feasts or golden cities to describe heaven, but the catechism says this mystery of blessed communion with God and all who are in Christ is beyond all understanding and description. According to Pope St. John Paul ii, the heaven or happiness in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. And that&#8217;s how you can tell which visions of heaven are more authentic. When you read heaven tourism books, they usually focus on details like seeing dead loved ones or heaven being clouds and harps and golden streets or things that Jesus tells us Instead of the glory of worshiping God, face-to-face.
Compare heaven tourism books to the descriptions of heaven from the saints. People like St. Faustina who said the following, I saw how all creatures give ceaseless praise and glory to God. I saw how is happiness in God which spreads to all creatures making them happy. St. John Bosco said of his vision of heaven, all was blue is the calmest sea. Though what I saw was not water and he heard music most sweet he said of people singing salvation, honor and glory to Almighty God and Father. And of course there&#8217;s St. Paul who said in two Corinthians chapter 12 that he was taken up in some way to heaven. But that quote, he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. And while descriptions of heaven from the saints after the giving, the deposit of faith can be helpful. We have to take everything in balance because none of those private revelations constitute public revelation about heaven that we must accept, but they can help us meditate on the joy of heaven not being what is there, but who is there simply God and his infinite majesty that never ceases to bring us joy and happiness.
Heaven will not be boring because just as there are an infinite number of numbers, there is an infinite degree of happiness we can have in heaven with God. Every day will be better than the previous day, just as every number can be greater than the previous number. Moreover, boredom is an evolutionary bug in our fallen world, it&#8217;s not a part of God&#8217;s ultimate design for us. Human beings that suffered boredom were more likely to seek out better living conditions and thus survive longer in our history. Boredom is like fear and jealousy. They&#8217;re imperfect feelings that help us survive in this fallen world, but they&#8217;re not going to be needed in heaven. We&#8217;ll be perfectly happy and free from those feelings in the next life. So my concern is that heaven tourism books treat heaven more as a cool place for this kind of objection to fester that it&#8217;s not going to be cool enough to make us happy.
Remember, it&#8217;s not about what is there but who is there that matters. And I do have another concern that involves how this genre of literature can exploit children. In 2010, Kevin Malarkey published the book, the Boy Who Came Back from Heaven and it was also adapted into a film about how his six-year-old son Alex, claimed to have visions of heaven during a near death experience that took place after a car accident. In Alex&#8217;s vision, heaven also has a hole that leads to hell and Alex saw the devil a being with three heads, moldy teeth and fire for hair. The book was a bestseller and Alex&#8217;s father, Kevin, got full rights to the royalties. Tragically, Alex remained paralyzed after the accident and he and his mother claimed that his father, who is divorced from his mother, didn&#8217;t give them money from the book sales. What&#8217;s most heartbreaking though is that Alex says he made the story up and that his father embellished what little he did.
Describe. In a 2015 blog post, Alex wrote the following, please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations, I have to keep this short. I did not die. I did not go to heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention when I made the claims that I did. I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies and continue to, they should read the Bible, which is enough. In other interviews, Alex revealed that his first encounter with an angel or what he thought was an angel was waking up in the hospital where it was dark and he was groggy and saw his father talk to someone he thought was an angel but was actually a nurse. Now, I commend Alex for coming forward and what happened to him was understandable. A 6-year-old child whose injuries were described as being an internal decapitation is going to have a hard time processing everything that happened to him.
So I do not blame him for the events that transpired, not at all. However, I do blame his father, Kevin malarkey for using the tragedy to exploit his son for money and sell us a bunch of well malarkey. With all due respect, that&#8217;s a bunch of malarkey. But even when the people involved sincerely believe the account of going to heaven or seeing heaven, very young children have a tenuous grasp on earthly realities, let alone heavenly realities. You can see this in the book, heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo, which was also adapted into a film. It tells the story of BPO&#8217;s 4-year-old son, Colton, who said that he experienced heaven during an emergency surgery after having acute appendicitis. Colton talks about how he saw his mother and father during the surgery as well as other people. Colton allegedly could not have known about like an unborn sister miscarried by his mother or a great grandfather who had died 30 years before Colton was even born.
Many of the book&#8217;s, descriptions of Heaven mirror common misconceptions that are shown to children in coloring books and cartoons, things like Colton saying that he saw Jesus riding a rainbow colored horse. I don&#8217;t blame Colton for thinking this because even many adults have misconceptions about heaven. For example, Colton says that the people in heaven have wings and they have halos on their heads. Alex malarkey gave the same detail when he was six years old saying that there were pure white angels with fantastic wings in heaven, but the Bible never describes either angels or human beings as having wings in heaven. The practice of describing angels this way began in the fourth century to distinguish angels from humans and frescoes and to show how angels traverse God&#8217;s creation. The idea that human beings in heaven have wings probably comes from the common error that human beings become angels when they die.
In fact, some representations of angels only show their face and wings to symbolize that angels don&#8217;t have physical bodies. Angels only appear to have bodies when they interact with human beings and they don&#8217;t have wings when they do that. People even mistake angels for humans, which would be hard to do if they had wings as can be seen in Hebrews 13, two, which says, do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. For thereby, some have entertained angels, unawares heaven. Tourism stories also can cause alarm when we invest too much authority into the person telling these tales. For example, Colton said that he learned while he was in heaven that there&#8217;s going to be a war and it&#8217;s going to destroy this world. Jesus and the angels and the good people are going to fight against Satan and the monsters and the bad people.
I saw it. Colton also said this war would happen soon because he saw his own father fighting in it. These kinds of stories take our focus off of heaven and onto the seer or the visionary or the returning visitor, and it contempt us to want to just follow these lurid details he tells. It&#8217;s kind of the reverse. My concern in the previous episode I did called, it&#8217;s not always demons where excessive curiosity about hell and demons can lead us away from pursuing holiness and into an unhealthy fixation on knowledge about the dark part of the afterlife that God never meant us to have. So let&#8217;s pull all this together. Hell is real, heaven is real, and God may allow some people to have visions of these realities without necessarily taking them there. And those visions may be given in accord to the person&#8217;s understanding and not meant for the rest of us to take it literally, especially if the vision is given to a small child. The most popular depictions of heaven on the New York Times bestseller list are probably the last place you should go to get information about heaven. The Bible and the catechism of the Catholic church are a great place to start. The latter of which says the following heaven simply is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme definitive happiness. For more about heaven, I recommend Peter Cree&#8217;s book, heaven the Heart&#8217;s Deepest Longing. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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The Problem with “Heaven Tourism” Books

In this episode, Trent examines one of the most controversial stories in the Old Testament to expose the biggest mistake Bible critics make.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq8-lg1_60E">When Atheists Misread the Bible </a>
<a href="https://shop.catholic.com/hard-sayings-a-catholic-approach-to-answering-bible-difficulties-softcover/">Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach To Answering Bible Difficulties</a>
Transcription
Trent:
When you listen to critics on the internet, there&#8217;s a similar bad argument. Many of them parrot. How could anyone support the Bible when it has such awful things in it? Some of these critics even want to ban the Bible using obscenity laws that are meant to protect children.
CLIP:
It talks about adultery, talks about beastiality, talks about cannibalism. One doesn&#8217;t have to turn very far in the Bible to find something that is just egregious, and I&#8217;m not sure why we teach those lessons to our children.
Trent:
These kinds of arguments can catch average Christians off guard when they only remember the more pleasant stories they might&#8217;ve heard in Sunday school. So in today&#8217;s episode, we&#8217;re going to show how to answer this argument and use one particularly gruesome story from the Old Testament as a case study in doing so. But before we do that, there are two rules you need to remember. Rule number one, don&#8217;t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel to help it grow and so that you don&#8217;t miss our great content. And also check out our premium community that makes all of this possible@trentornpodcast.com. And rule number two, when reading the Bible, remember that just because the Bible records something that doesn&#8217;t mean God recommends it. Contrary to some popular opinions, the Bible is not an instruction book that God directly dictated to human authors. The Bible is a collection of writings from different authors who record events in salvation history across different literary genres.
It&#8217;s true the Bible records evil deeds like the rape of Dina or Kane&#8217;s murder of Abel, but it does not condone these acts. This should be a common sense principle, but you&#8217;d be surprised at how many critics simply list Bible passages that sound evil and then make the incorrect inference that the Bible itself is evil. While ignoring the context of these passages, Pope ended the 16th address these kinds of passages in his post sonna apostolic exhortation verb domini. He wrote The following, God&#8217;s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly in successive stages. And despite human resistance, God chose a people and patiently work to guide and educate them. Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times and thus describes facts and customs such as cheating and trickery and acts of violence and massacre without explicitly denouncing the immorality of such things.
My colleague, Jimmy Aiken likes to say God was working with blunt instruments when it came to the people of Israel who lived in an historical context very different from our own, but God was able to use even their primitive cultural intuitions as part of his plan of salvation that he established from before the creation of the world. The catechism says this to God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy, when therefore he establishes his eternal plan of predestination. He includes in it each person&#8217;s free response to his grace. The catechism then references Acts 4 27 through 20 eight&#8217;s descriptions of Herod and Pils freely chosen evil deeds as part of this predestine plan and says, for the sake of accomplishing his plan of salvation, God permitted the acts that flowed from their blindness. In other words, as the saying goes, God can write straight with crooked lines, and even the leaders that God selected to guide his chosen people were not perfect like anyone.
This is especially evident in the book of Judges, which recounts how Israel constantly fell into idolatry and as a result was punished through foreign domination. But God had mercy on Israel and sent a series of judges to deliver his people from their oppressors. While some of these judges were good and noble people, others were of equality that apostate Israel deserved. And one of those judges is the subject of our case study on how to read evil Bible stories and his name was Jha. In judges chapter 11, the leaders of a region of Israel called Gilead asked Jha to drive out the Ammonites who were oppressing them. Jha accepted their offer, and after a peaceful approach failed, he prepared to go to war. Jha didn&#8217;t know if he could defeat the Ammonites, so he made the following vow to God, if you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me when I return victorious from the Ammonites shall be the Lords and I will offer him up for a burnt offering.
To the ancient audience that heard this story, this is the equivalent of watching a modern horror movie and a character says, let&#8217;s split up. You brace yourself because you know something bad is about to happen. The story continues. Then Jha came to his home at mitzvah and behold, his daughter came out to meet him with Timbrels and with dances. She was his only child besides her, he had neither son nor daughter. And when he saw her, he tore his clothes and said, alas, my daughter, you have brought me very low and you have become the cause of great trouble to me for I have opened my mouth to the Lord and I cannot take back my vow. Some exs say that Jeha did not actually burn his daughter alive, but offered her up as a consecrated virgin. But this seems to contradict verse 39, which says, Jeha did with her according to his vow, which he had made, and his vow only mentions burnt offerings, not consecrated virginity.
But what does this episode prove? Remember, just because the Bible records his story, it doesn&#8217;t mean God recommends the actions in it. The biblical text does not praise Jha for what he did, and it does not say that God helped Jha because of the vow Jha made as opposed to just helping him deliver Israel because God loves his people. This is just another example of how the Book of Judges is more a description of what not to do than it is a model for how believers should behave. Now, some critics say that this story is evidence that the Bible possesses moral failings including a heinous acceptance of human sacrifice. Scripture scholar Tom Stark says that Jep says actions only makes sense of the Israelites thought that God would accept a human sacrifice. According to Stark, no repudiation of the sacrifice is found here, nor does Yahweh intervene to spare the life of JHAs daughter, Bible critic. Mark Ze agrees saying The lack of divine intervention stands in striking contrast to the Abraham and Isaac story. And here is one atheist YouTuber&#8217;s cartoonish. Take on the story.
CLIP:
I&#8217;m home. Daddy, daddy. Oh no. I told you his daughter would be the first thing to come out of his house. Stupid deal, Lord. Yeah. Now one of us has to go down and stop the sacrifice like when Abraham was about to kill his only child. Shall I go now? Lord, really? Lord, as soon as you&#8217;re ready, just give the word and we&#8217;re there.
Trent:
But God had already told the Israelites in Deuteronomy 1231 that sacrificing sons and daughters as burnt offerings was abominable. This lesson was taught as far back as the story of Abraham and eventually became part of Israel&#8217;s national identity. God did not have to intervene to tell Jeha not to do this just as God doesn&#8217;t intervene to stop every other grave sin in scripture or in our own lives. Unlike in the case of Isaac, God never commanded Jeha to offer anyone up as a sacrifice. So no special intervention was necessary. God&#8217;s word was enough for him. And so as God often does in scripture and life in general, God allowed the consequences of jetta&#8217;s bad decisions and sins to be his own punishment. Even if that involved Jha harming someone he cared about, keep in mind that Jha wasn&#8217;t planning to sacrifice his child to God since he had only one daughter and he was devastated to the thought of sacrificing her.
So who or what was Jha planning to sacrifice? Now, it could have been an animal since the Hebrew word Asher in judges 1131 can be translated as whatever. Instead of whoever, therefore Jha could have said, whatever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, I will sacrifice indeed. When many people return home, their dogs are the first to greet them. And the book of Tobit describes Israelites having canine companions. But it&#8217;s also plausible that Jha planned to sacrifice one of his slaves to Yahweh in exchange for a military victory. Jha may have believed that Yahweh would accept a human sacrifice, not because Yahweh revealed that to the Israelites, but because other nations sacrificed human beings to their deities and military victories sometimes followed these barbaric rituals. According to the Bible knowledge commentary, though Jha made his rash fo, he probably knew something about the prohibitions of the mosaic law against human sacrifice.
Yet his half pagan background combined with a general lawless spirit dominating the period of the judges could readily account for his fulfilling this vow. So instead of Jha being able to bless his family through the sin of murder, by offering a human sacrifice to Yahweh that would allow him to become a powerful leader in Israel, JHAs attempted murder and illicit human sacrifice brings the curse of murder upon his own family. However, other critics make the argument that judges 1129 says that the spirit of the Lord came upon Jha. Doesn&#8217;t that mean that God wanted Jha to sacrifice his daughter? No. The spirit of the Lord did come upon Jha, but that does not mean that God endorsed everything Jha did after that point. For example, the spirit of the Lord came upon Samson in Judges 1514, but not long after that, S Samson visited a prostitute according to Old Testament scholar Christopher Wright.
One thing that is said quite often about these judges is that the spirit of the Lord, Yahweh would come upon them. When this happened, it was a signal for action empowered by the spirit of the Lord, they could exercise charismatic leadership and do valiant exploits that were recited around the campfires of Israel for generations to come. Wright then lists seven instances where this phrase is used and each describes a person being strengthened for war, including jeha. The passages do not describe the person being protected from sin in general. For example, Wright says, the superhuman power given to Samson clearly exposes all two human weaknesses. A similar analysis can be applied to Jha, whose skill in combat did not aid him in fighting spiritual temptations. And finally, the critic could object that Jha was praised. In Hebrews chapter 11, alongside of the heroes of the Jewish faith, and so God did condone his human sacrifice.
Hebrews 1132 through 33 says, the following for time would fail me to tell of Gideon Barack s Samson Jeha of David and Samuel and the prophets who through faith conquered kingdoms and forced justice received promises stop the mouths of lions. But the list of heroes in this chapter only describes people who were able to do mighty deeds because of their faith in God. Hebrews 11 does not say that these people were without serious flaws. Rahab was a prostitute. Gideon practiced idolatry. S Samson had a weakness for women, and David committed adultery and murder. JHAs vow only shows that he was a sinful human being who God used for the benefit of Israel, not that God willed or desired, that ppta engage in human sacrifice. Ultimately, the author of the book of Judges did not think his audience was so inept that he needed to write in big block letters.
What these people did was bad. Instead, the final verse in Judges hauntingly, indicts, Israel&#8217;s decrepit condition. In those days, there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. Once again, judges is not an instruction book on how we should live our lives. It is a warning about what happens when God&#8217;s authority is rejected. Pope Pi 11 said this, as should be expected in historical and didactic books, the Old Testament books reflect in many particulars, the imperfection, the weakness, and sinfulness of man. If you like to learn more about how to address tough Bible passages like this one, see my previous episode on Atheist misreading the Bible. Also check out my book, hard Sayings, A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. And Dr. Matthew Ram&#8217;s book, dark Passages of the Bible, engaging Scripture with Benedict the 16th and St. Thomas Aquinas. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

The Biggest Mistake Bible Critics Make

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In this episode, Trent pulls back the curtain on the drama surrounding Humanae Vitae and examines myths surrounding a commission dissenters hoped would change Church teaching.

The Myth about Pope Paul VI’s “Birth Control Commission”

What does it mean for a pope to be infallible? Didn’t Peter err in Antioch? In this episode, Trent concludes his discussion with Steve Ray on the papacy.

Understanding the Papacy, Part 2 (with Steve Ray)

In this episode Trent honestly breaks down every book he&#8217;s written from &#8220;the worst&#8221; to &#8220;the GOAT&#8221; and everything in between.
<a href="https://shop.catholic.com/why-were-catholic-our-reasons-for-faith-hope-and-love-case-of-20-books/"> Get a case of Why We&#8217;re Catholic</a>
Transcription:
In today’s episode I’m going to honestly rank every book I’ve ever written with the classic tier ranking of s-tier being the superior, A-tier, being great, b tier good, c-tier, okay with some flaws, d-tier meaning a lot of flaws, and f-tier being the worst.
And especially when it comes to the not-so-great books I’ll recommend some better ones in their place along with just other good books on general on the topics I’ve addressed.
So, let’s get started in order of my book’s publication:
Number 1, 2013’s Answering Atheism.
F-tier. It’s the worst book on the whole list. It’s not a bad book. It’s just my first book so I made a lot of style and structure mistakes as a new author. I’m also placing this as F-tier because I’ve done a lot of work on the philosophy of religion since I published that book 12 years ago and I’ve changed my mind on things like the kalam cosmological argument and the moral argument, as can be seen in my debates dialogues and podcast episodes.
Eventually I want to write a whole new book on atheism, but until then, if you want a really good book on atheism get Ed Feser’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God, Josh Rasmussen’s How Reason leads to God, Brian Davies book on Philosophy of Religion, and One Less God than You, by John DeRosa which is published by Catholic Answers Press.
Number 2, 2014’s Persuasive Pro-life.
D tier. A lot of the writing drags and the layout is confusing because my editor wanted me to address different types of people rather than different kinds of pro-choice arguments. But I’m really glad I wrote it because I’m grateful I could share my decade of experience in pro-life apologetics with people who are passionate about defending the unborn.
And in 2022 I totally reworked the book Bionic man style.
I made 2nd edition shorter while adding new content, so now the book is exactly what I want it to be and I love whenever I can give it away for free at pro-life conferences to equip people to help end abortion. So the 2nd edition goes in the A-tier category.
And if you want other really great books on defending the pro-life worldview get Chris Kaczor’s Ethics of Abortion and Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis’s book Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.
Number 3, 2016’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties.
B tier. There are lots of Bible Difficulty encyclopedias, but they’re all written by Protestants and sometimes their theology comes through like when they answer the “Hard Saying” of Jesus saying “Eat my flesh” by saying Jesus was being metaphorical.
I’m glad I spent a year and a half to write a book to help Catholics better engage difficulties in scripture but I’ve learned a lot since writing this book ten years ago so maybe in a 2nd edition I can bring it up to A-tier status. Until then, I recommend the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which wasn’t completely available when I wrote Hard Sayings, as a solid tool in your biblical apologetics toolbox.
Number 4, 2017’s: Why We’re Catholic.
Not just S-Tier but GOAT. My favorite book I’ve ever written because God was so gracious in using this book to help so many people. It’s sold over 500,000 copies and I’ve heard so many people tell me that after reading it they immediately signed up for OCIA and have seen other people mention it a lot online.
The main reason I wrote this book was because there wasn’t a single book you could give anyone to explain why they should be Catholic. The closest we had was Rome Sweet Home by Scott Hahn which is an awesome book but speaks more to educated Protestants since Hahn was a Protestant minister. 
I wanted something you could give to atheists, non-Christians, and fallen-away Catholics of all stripes so I worked really hard to make the book accessible to people. In fact, I read each chapter aloud to my wife to make sure it was easily digestible and it’s the most common book I send people when I see someone online saying, “I’m thinking about becoming Catholic.”
Check out the link below if you want to buy a case of them at a bulk discount to keep in your car, home, and office and give out to anyone you meet.
Number 5, also published in 2017: The Case for Catholicism
S-tier. I’m so happy  got the chance to write a thick, mid-level apologetic for Catholicism. It’s not basic level like Why We’re Catholic but it’s not super academic and off-putting. Instead, it’s ideal for someone with a college education and is the most common book I’ve written that’s helped pastors become Catholic. Often when I hear someone is thinking of becoming Catholic I’ll send this book along with Why We’re Catholic in case the person is inclined to go deeper in their investigation. Given space limitations the book doesn’t cover the fundamentals of the faith so, in the future, I would love to write a companion book at the same level of rigor called The Case for Christianity.
I may also do a second edition of this book or a follow up book that addresses Protestant apologetics that came out after the book was published like Walls and Collins books Roman but not Catholic and Gavin Ortlund’s What It Means to be Protestant, but for now The Case for Catholicism still stands on its own quite well.
But if your investigating Catholicism I recommend not stopping at this book. I’d recommend Thomas Joseph White’s Book The Light of Christ if you’d like a theological introduction to Catholicism that is focused on explaining what Catholicism teaches more than making arguments for the truth of Catholicism.
Number 6, 2018’s: What the Saints Never Said
C tier. It’s a fun little book and I guess after writing some heavy books in the previous years I wanted to do something light so I wrote this book on fake saint quotes. It was really fun to research but at the end of the day while it’s interesting for trivia it’s not central to my mission of evangelizing and encouraging people to be Catholic, so I’m going to put it lower on the tier list. I have toyed with the idea of writing a book called What the Saints Never Did and ruining everyone’s favorite saint traditions, but there’s no need to spend time on that when the harvest is plentiful to share the Gospel and the laborers are few.
Number 7, Also published in 2018, Made this Way co-authored with Leila Miller
B tier. Leila and I have known each other for almost twenty years. She is a Catholic mother, grandmother, online advocate for the Faith and a real spitfire. So, we had great synergy when writing this book because she would give me raw passionate dough of Catholic motherly advice on teaching kids of all ages why Catholic moral teaching makes and I would pepper the dough with footnotes, my own experience debating non-Catholics on these issues, and mold it all into a frame work to help everything flow together.
It&#8217;s a good book but my only critique of it is that it has a limited audience. It is written for parents to explain moral issues to children but we found that teens and young adults also found the book really helpful for themselves, so it makes me want to write a book that is just a defense of Catholic morality in general written at the level of Why We’re Catholic.
Number 8, 2019’s Counterfeit Christs: Finding the Real Jesus Among the Impostors
I’m putting this in C-tier. In this book I presented apologetics focused on the person of Christ where I show how atheistic Jewish, Muslim, modern, and some Protestant depictions of Jesus Christ are in error.
In reminds me of an apologetic charcuterie board where you can pick and choose little bites of knowledge that most interest you, but the book kind of bums me out because many of the topics could have been expanded into entire books so each topic will always feel insufficiently addressed. However, it’s a solid introduction to how people distort the person of Christ and I love the book’s cover.
In the future I’d like to contribute my own defense of the Christ’s divine status, especially his resurrection from the dead, but in a way a lot of apologists haven’t attempted before. Stat tuned for that. In the meantime if you want really solid defenses of Christ’s resurrection, I recommend Justin bass’s the Bed Rock of Christianity and Andrew Loke’s Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach.
Number 9, 2020’s Can a Catholic be a Socialist, co-authored with Catherine Pakaluk
B-tier. Economics and history are hobbies of mine, so it was really fun to work with Catholic economist and CUA professor Catherine Pakaluk to engage Catholic defenses of socialism that were all the rage at the end of the 2010’s. I especially enjoyed unearthing the gruesome details of the Soviet and Chinese socialist regimes that many people have never heard about, like how Chinese socialism led to the world’s worst famine killing tens of millions of people with survivors being reduced to propping up their dead relatives in bed and pretending they were alive to collect rations from the government.
My only concern about the book is that it’s a bit short and there are many other arguments we could have addressed, like the late 19th century arguments about the relationship between capital, labor and profit that still persist to this day as well as other modern arguments for democratic socialism expressed by people like Richard Wolff. Hopefully in a few years we can release a second edition that addresses those arguments and incorporates responses to critics we’ve already published.
Number 10, 2022’s: Devil’s Advocate: Facing My Inner Anti-Catholic
D-tier. I think the pandemic had us all thrown off our game but I think I was off my game in the aftermath. I’m just not a fan of this book. The biggest thing I don’t like is the cover because usually when you put the author himself on the cover, or even just pictures of people, it doesn’t age well. I get what our production team was going for here with me seeing an evil version of myself in a mirror, but I just don’t like it.
This was also my first and probably last experiment in writing a dialogue book. Basically, I wanted to write a dialogue with my inner skeptic so that I could have a format to address what I consider to be the toughest objections to Catholicism. But really, the toughest objections probably need the most rigorous answers and you need traditional chapters and footnotes to do that. It’s interesting to read, but it feels like a tchotchke, or a neat trinket, more than a substantive contribution to apologetic discourse.
It was a still a fun enterprise and I think there are solid apologetics in this book I don’t cover in other books, but it’s still on the bottom rung of the books I’ve written. If you want to read really good Catholic dialogue books, I recommend the Peter Kreeft books that inspired me to write Devils Advocate especially the Unaborted Socrates and Between Heaven and hell.
Number 11: 2023’s When Protestants Argue Like Atheists
C-tier. I think I started to get into my more experimental phase of book writing at this point which can be really good or really not so good.
I’m at least glad it isn’t just another apologetic book on a topic that has been done to death. The point of the book is that many of the arguments Protestants make against Catholicism also undermine Christianity as a whole, like saying Catholic sacred tradition relies on unreliable oral testimony, even though our knowledge of the Old Testament and even the Gospels also comes from oral testimony. 
I wanted to help Protestants avoid these arguments that undermine our shared Christian faith, but for many people the book’s title comes across as an attack on the character of Protestants, which wasn’t my intention. Also, it might have been too narrow of a thesis for a book length treatment, but I’m still grateful for at least putting the thesis out there for other Catholics to build on and include in their discussions with Protestants.
All in all, it’s started me on a path in future book projects to get back to basics.
Number 12, 2024’s: Confusion in the Kingdom: How ‘Progressive’ Catholicism Is Bringing Harm and Scandal to the Church
B-tier. It’s really weird to see how the winds of discourse can shift so quickly but even into the early 2020’s it felt like liberal and progressive Catholicism was getting a lot of air time and was a big topic of discussion among Catholics. It felt like you couldn’t go a few months without Fr. James Martin making a kerfuffle online. But now I barely hear from many of these persons and groups so that’s kind of taken the wind out of the book’s sails.
But I’m still keeping it in B-tier because it is a very rigorous reply to the common ways liberal Catholics cause confusion in the Church, like when they say it’s discriminatory to fire teachers in so-called same-sex marriages when Protestants are allowed to work in Catholic schools or when they say to be truly pro-life you have to be pro-gun control and pro-immigration.
Originally, I called the book Answering Liberal Catholicism: Responding to Confusion in the Kingdom but the title was changed in production and the cover, while very artistic, doesn’t really communicate what the book is about. And while you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, people still do that which may have diminished the impact. But it could also have been that the book would have been more effective if I had written the book back in the mid-point of Pope Francis’s pontificate instead of at the tale end of it where progressive Catholicism’s impact started to fade out.
But as I said, I’m glad I wrote it even if writing on current discourse subjects can cause a book to lose impact when the discourse isn’t current. As Henry David Theorue said, “Read not the time, read the eternities.”
And finally, number 13, my most recent book 2025’s Salvation is from the Catholic Church.
A tier. I’d call this a return to form in that I’m focusing on what matters most, how to get to heaven, and engaging Catholic and protestant disagreements on this issue involving questions people will still be talking about decades or even centuries from now.
Our editor really helped me during the writing process and encouraged me halfway through to not let the book be a slow burn that meticulously answers objections, but to come out the gate swinging, which I did by presenting ten ways God uses the universal Church established by Jesus Christ to save us.
This includes the Church giving us right theological and moral beliefs, right worship and sacraments, the right pastors, the right spiritual reinforcements, and even the right proofs and wonderful signs that confirm the Church’s divine mission. I then go through 15 common objections to the Catholic plan of salvation and I’ve written in it in a way that isn’t trying to take cheap shots at protestants or reduce all of Protestantism to just cringey mega churches.
If you want other great books that go deeper on the Church’s teaching on salvation see my colleague Karlo Broussard’s books on baptism and purgatory, Jimmy Akin’s the Drama of Salvation, and Salvation: What Every Catholic Should Know by Michael Barber.
So those are the books and going forward I’m feeling God really putting me on a trajectory of focusing on bringing the most number of people who are the furthest away from Christ into communion with him and his Church. That’s what I want to focus on so I have some more book projects in the wings ready to do that and if you want to help us create those books please support the Counsel of Trent at trenthornpodcast.com because your support allows me time to write books along with writing episodes for the channel.
And don’t’ forget to register for our April 11th conference in Dallas where you can meet over 30 Catholic online creators and hear great talks on how to evangelize our culture, just go to conference of trent dot com.
Thank you for watching, leave a comment below about what you think fo these books, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

Honestly Ranking Every Book I’ve Written

Our in-house-philosopher, Karlo Broussard, author of <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/prepare-the-way-overcoming-obstacles-to-god-the-gospel-and-the-church/">Prepare the Way: Overcoming Obstacles to God, the Gospel, and the Church</a>, joins us for a three-part conversation about relativism. What are the arguments in its favor, and are they convincing?