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Protestants, many of us Catholic apologists argue, effectively act as their own popes. The reason why, we allege, is that every Protestant is ultimately accountable to his personal interpretation of divine revelation, which for Protestants is solely the sixty-six-book Protestant Bible. Every Protestant, we posit, acts as his own magisterial authority, both in interpreting the Bible and even in deciding what constitutes the Bible, given their rejection of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals">deuterocanon</a>.
But not so, declare our Protestant counterparts! They, like us Catholics, have confessions and creeds to which they submit. Carl R. Trueman, one of the most brilliant and interesting intellects in modern Protestantism, last year <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/11/protestants-need-to-go-back-to-basics">urged</a> his fellow Protestants to return to “orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession.” Kim Riddlebarger, a co-host of the popular White Horse Inn podcast, <a href="https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/about-the-author">declares</a>, “If you were to ask, ‘what is it that defines Christianity?’, my answer now would be ‘the definition of Christianity is given us in the Creed.’”
Recently, a friend sent me a video of Methodist lay apologist Joshua Pearsall, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjbNPvzH8QI&amp;t=105s">makes a similar argument</a> in reference to my book, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-obscurity-in-scripture-disputing-sola-scriptura-and-the-protestant-notion-of-biblical-perspicuity/?srsltid=AfmBOor7SNuNT5o002l6Y6MiuN14F4UagxCOJWCBmGhv1rN3cnnkD79G">The Obscurity of Scripture</a>. Citing confessional standards of such denominations as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and his own Methodist tradition, Pearsall asserts, “You literally can’t be your own pope. You are accountable to the standards of your tradition and of course the Scriptures on top of that.” Others, such as <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/10/01/the-reformation-as-renewal-is-an-exemplar-of-special-pleading/">Reformed scholar Matthew Barrett</a> in his recent work The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, claims much the same.
I can appreciate the thinking behind this Protestant line of argumentation. Indeed, I would have mouthed similar things fifteen years ago when I was a Presbyterian seminary student. Of course I wasn’t like those ignorant, low-church evangelicals with no knowledge of church history, no knowledge of Nicaea or Chalcedon, no knowledge even of their own Protestant theological ancestry. I eagerly submitted to the Westminster Standards, believing them to be an accurate interpretation of biblical truth.
But that, I eventually realized, was exactly the problem. I adhered to Reformed confessional documents based on their conformity to Holy Scripture—but whose interpretation of it? My own, ultimately. Nor was this my own novel understanding of how things are supposed to work within the Protestant paradigm. This is precisely the way they are supposed to work.
Why, for example, was I a Presbyterian rather than an Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist? Why was I submitting to the Westminster Confession of Faith rather than the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, or the Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith? Because I, as a conscientious, “Bible-believing” Christian, had determined that the particular confessional documents of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) were sufficiently biblical to merit my allegiance. My own pastors and professors told me that if I believed another Protestant denomination was more biblically faithful, I should follow my conscience and go there instead.
Who is in the interpretative drivers’ seat in such a scenario? The individual Christian, naturally. If Carl Trueman, Kim Riddlebarger, Matthew Barrett, or any other Protestant Christian read his Bible and came to believe that his particular Protestant tradition and its confessional documents are erroneous, it would be his prerogative to either protest those errors within his own denomination or, if he viewed them as sufficiently egregious, to join a different ecclesial community. He might even feel compelled to establish his own.
And that explains not only five hundred years of fissiparous Protestant history, but the remarkable explosion of non-denominational, Bible-based, evangelical churches in the last few generations. All of them purport to be simply returning to the fundamentals of Scripture, and all of them cannot help but offer their own bespoke takes on Christian doctrine and praxis.
Granted, I presume that many if not most Protestants do not intend this. They do not want to be postmodern individualists determining reality for themselves. They want to be embedded in the history and traditions of Christianity. That’s why they constantly cite not only Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, Turretin, Cranmer, and Owen, but also Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Jerome, and Augustine. What Catholics and traditionally minded Protestants share is a desire to be united to something greater than themselves, a proclivity for the ancient and venerable. We all want to believe that our faith was not born yesterday, but descends from the apostles.
The question is whether the Protestant paradigm, in any of its manifold manifestations, is actually capable of coherently doing so. What I came to realize almost fifteen years ago is no, it cannot. Even Pearsall in his YouTube videos attempting to refute my book cannot help but undermine his position, acknowledging that many Protestants are failing to honor their own confessional standards . . . and then immediately admitting that confessional standards are not infallible and “can be corrected down the line if they need to be.” Corrected according to what standard? The standard of the individual’s interpretation of Scripture.
In other words, Protestant creeds and confessional standards have only as much authority as Protestants are willing to grant them. If a Protestant comes to assess them as inadequate, on whatever grounds related to his conscience, he may edit or even dispense with them. And this applies not only to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant creeds, but the ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. This is why Protestants <a href="https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/ask-ligonier/what-does-it-mean-that-the-first-seven-church-councils-were-ecumenical">pick and choose which ecumenical councils they accept</a>. Indeed, many Protestants even argue that <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/confess-jesus-descended-into-hell/">parts of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed</a> are unbiblical and need not be accepted. And why not?
Catholics do not inhabit the same paradigmatic position. We do not pick and choose which councils or creeds to which we submit. We accept the authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church en totale, because we recognize that it has been granted that authority by Christ himself, preserved by the Holy Spirit. Such a recognition requires an act of faith, but it is based on evidence and reason, pre-eminently the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/my-church-is-more-credible-than-yours">motives of credibility</a>. And, unlike Protestants, whose interpretive authority of divine revelation rests in the conscience of each individual Christian, Catholics acknowledge a living Magisterium, whose voice is manifested not only through ecumenical councils, but, in certain narrow circumstances, through the living pope.
Creeds can’t save Protestantism from its inevitable descent into an individualism that equates to every individual Christian acting as his own pope. Only the Catholic Church with its internally coherent and historically verifiable magisterial authority can resolve the Protestant’s dilemma and give him the certitude that he is indeed following Christ and the fullness of his teaching, rather than the (often well-meaning) whims of his own conscience.

Creeds Can’t Save Protestantism

The Romans, as any first-year Latin student can tell you, were in the practice of ending their sentences with verbs. Regina agricolam amat, for example—literally, “The queen the farmer loves.” Unless you are Yoda, however, you would speak this sentence in English this way: “The queen loves the farmer.” (Something tells me this relationship is not going to work out.)
In any case, Latin word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, object, verb. In English, word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, verb, object. Because Latin nouns are declined—that is, they are assigned distinct endings for how they function in a sentence—it is easy to identify the subject and the object.
The Church preserves the practice of ending sentences and clauses with the predicate. Indeed, here is a sentence from Benedict XVI&#8217;s renunciation of the Petrine Office.
<blockquote>
Nunc autem Sanctam Dei Ecclesiam curae Summi eius Pastoris, Domini nostri Iesu Christi confidimus sanctamque eius Matrem Mariam imploramus, ut patribus Cardinalibus in eligendo novo Summo Pontifice materna sua bonitate assistat.
</blockquote>
 And here it is in English:
<blockquote>
And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff.
</blockquote>
I’ve put the verbs in italics so that you can see where they fall in their respective clauses.
What’s the point of this little exposition on Latin syntax? Well, sometimes a translator can alter the quality of a sentence, even unintentionally, by failing to appreciate how a verb at the end of sentence delivers a certain emphasis. Here is an example that you will know. It is the second sentence of Pope Leo XIII’s exorcism prayer that we know as the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.
First the Latin (with diacritics from the 1962 Roman Missal):
<blockquote>
Ímperet ílli Déus, súpplices deprecámur: tuque, prínceps milítiæ cæléstis, Sátanam aliósque spíritus malígnos, qui ad perditiónem animárum pervagántur in múndo, divína virtúte, in inférnum detrúde. Amen.
</blockquote>
And here is the English:
<blockquote>
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
</blockquote>
Now, before I make my point about verbs, there are a few things about the English translation that are of interest:
<ul>
<li class="p1">“Rebuke” is not a strict translation of imperet, which really means &#8220;rule&#8221; or &#8220;command.&#8221; But &#8220;rebuke&#8221; gives a more militant emphasis to the prayer, so a gold star to the translator for that one.</li>
<li class="p1">“Wander . . . through” is a faithful translation of pervagantur (we find the same root in “vagabond” and “vague”), but I prefer “prowl” because it has an emphasis of menace.</li>
<li class="p1">“Divine power” would be a more faithful translation of divina virtute than “power of God” (and you hear some people say that), but even &#8220;power&#8221; does not give the Latin sense of virtu, which really means something closer to “manly strength” and even “courage under fire” or “courage in adversity.” (For an extensive consideration of this concept of virtu and what it meant to the Romans, see Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.) The fact is, however, that we really don’t have an English word for this concept, so “power” is about as close as we can come without ham-handing the translation.</li>
</ul>
But here is the main problem with the English. The ending of the prayer, we have to admit, is a bit of a downer. This prayer is a vigorous battle cry, and the English translation ends with an image of defeat—that is, “the ruin of souls.” Not inspiring, I’m afraid, and certainly not what Leo intended.
The Latin, however, ends with the action verb detrude, from detrudere, which means “to thrust away.” In fact, I prefer “thrust into hell” to “cast into hell,” and detrude in English is a transitive verb that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “to thrust or force down.” Whether you like “thrust” or “cast,” the sense at the end of the prayer when it is said in Latin is one of victory, not of defeat. We have an image of the vigorous warrior-angel casting Satan and his demons into hell. In English, we are left with an image of souls falling into perdition.
There is a canard about translations: they can be faithful or beautiful. Alas, here the translator has been as faithful as he can be while still hewing to the practices of English word order. If he wanted to preserve the sense of vigorous victory, however, he would have to get a little creative and add another verb—in this case, “bind.” Sure, he would have to take some liberty with the original Latin, but in so doing, I think he would better preserve the martial quality of the prayer. How about this?
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray . . . and do thou, o Prince of the heavenly host, by the divine power, bind Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls, and thrust them into hell!
Feel the difference? I think Leo would approve.

St. Michael Prayer: A Better Translation?

Cy Kellett talks about beauty and the revitalization of culture with Bernardo Aparicio Garcia, founder and publisher of Dappled Things, a literary magazine dedicated to providing a space for emerging writers to engage the literary world from a Catholic perspective. Why does the literary world need the Catholic perspective? Bernardo gets into that and more in this wide-ranging interview.

Dappled Things

<div>If I commit a good act, such as protesting an abortion clinic, but the act produces bad consequences, such as provoking stricter anti-protest legislation so that fewer sidewalk counselors are allowed outside the clinic, have I done a bad act? </div><div>Not necessarily. Our good actions do not cause the bad consequences that accompany them sometimes; they are just occasional opportunities for people to do evil in reaction to them. They are not the causes of the bad actions. If this were not the case, what could we say of God himself as Creator? Surely there would be no sins at all if he had not created angels and men, creatures capable of sinning!
The principal example would be the Incarnation of the Lord. How many sins would never have been committed if the Savior had not revealed himself to us, only to be rejected by many, or if he had not taught the new law, which is far more demanding than the old. But this is most certain: &#8220;Christ Jesus came into the world to call sinners,&#8221; and there would be no forgiveness for us if he had not come.
Of course, it is necessary for us to evaluate our actions prudently and seek to avoid their being the pretext for any evil deeds. But it is impossible to do any good without the possibility that our good deed may be misused or misinterpreted by someone. So go ahead and do what you are doing, at least until some prudent persons determine that it is no longer useful for your cause.
</div>

Can Bad Consequences Make a Good Act Bad?

Jimmy Akin addresses the ongoing controversy surrounding the alleged apparitions of Our Lady in Međugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

New Medjugorje Apparition?

<div>Matthew 24:36 says, "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the son, but the Father only." If Jesus is God, wouldn’t he know when the end would come? Why then does it say "nor the son, but the Father only"? </div><div>The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains the orthodox interpretation of these words of the Lord:
<blockquote>By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal. What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal (474).</blockquote>
What this means then is that &#8220;not knowing&#8221; refers to his not being sent to reveal the day and the hour in his human nature, leaving that office to the Father. It has always been understood that as God, Christ knows the day and the hour but that in his mission on Earth he was not sent to reveal this. We need to remember that the word to know in the Semitic senses used in Scripture is very diverse and rich and does not refer only to mental information but to actions and offices.
</div>

Jesus Knows When the End Will Come

Ever wondered about the mysterious and obscure aspects of the Catholic faith? Dive into our podcast where Jimmy pushes the boundaries of apologetics, blending insights from various fields. Ready for an accessible, informative, and entertaining journey?

The Jimmy Akin Podcast

Tim Staples cites Scripture and early Church writings to refute the common Protestant claim that the Eucharist is only a symbol of Christ&#8217;s body.

Is the Eucharist Just A Symbol?

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

Should a Non-Catholic Sign Himself?

<div>What happened to the Church teaching about Limbo?</div><div><a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/limbo">Limbo</a> was never an official teaching of the Church, as The Catholic Encyclopedia, published in the early 1900s, makes clear. But it was a common theological opinion for a good number of years. Limbo describes a place where unbaptized children and those unbaptized persons who had reached the age of reason but had not committed mortal sin would go upon their deaths. It is not heaven yet it is a state of complete natural happiness.
For more on this subject, please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/out-on-a-limbo">this article</a> by Catholic Answers founder Karl Keating.
</div>

Whatever Happened to Limbo?

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Is the Eucharist REALLY JESUS?

Does the Bible predict or explain pagan gods? How do Greek and Roman deities fit into the ancient Jewish worldview? In this video, Jimmy Akin unpacks this question and discusses leading theories on this matter.
Transcript:
Adam and Eve were the first human beings. How come there was this period of time, or how about all these cultures and people and beliefs that people had that had nothing to do with the Jewish God? What about, you know, like the ancient Greek philosophers not talking about God a lot? Or did they?
Oh, they talked about—they talked about all kinds of gods. They had loads of them. Um, but, uh, in terms of where the idea of pagan gods came from, there&#8217;s not a single answer to that question. Now, there are, um, there are various ways of answering it, and some of them are found in the Bible. Like, for example, um, there&#8217;s one passage that talks about how people made statues, and then they—of, of, of humans—and then they, uh, began to regard these statues as statues of deities. And that&#8217;s how, uh, the idea of, of some pagan gods came about.
But that&#8217;s not actually the majority explanation in the Bible. There, the biblical worldview holds that there are—there is more than one spirit up in heaven. I mean, God, he&#8217;s the supreme spirit, he&#8217;s the creator, he&#8217;s the one who made everything. But he&#8217;s not the only dude up there.
Um, in the Old Testament, God is depicted as, uh, as being surrounded by a heavenly court. And there are different levels within that court. Some people rank higher in the heavenly court than others. Some people rank lower in the heavenly court than others. The ones that we get to deal with—the angels—that term just means messenger. And if you think about any king&#8217;s court, the messengers, they&#8217;re like the lowest, you know. They just run—they just run messages from one place to another.
Um, but there are much higher officials in the court. There are also, you know, a king is going to have his army, and he&#8217;s going to have his high counselors. He&#8217;s going to have a prosecutor. That&#8217;s what Satan is. Uh, Satan means, in Hebrew, means—means adversary or prosecutor.
And so we see, uh, in various books of the Old Testament—and it&#8217;s also referenced in the New Testament—um, uh, you know, discussions of the heavenly court that surrounds God. And according to Deuteronomy, what happened was, when the nations divided—so this is when they&#8217;re starting to separate and become independent nations—God put each nation under a different high-ranking heavenly official.
Um, they&#8217;re sometimes referred to as the sons of God. They&#8217;re also sometimes referred to as the sarim, sarim being a Hebrew word that means prince or commander. And so God, like, put a different—different heavenly official over each of the nations, but he kept Israel for himself. And he eventually, uh, enlisted Michael, the angel Michael, to, uh, help him in overseeing Israel.
But he put each nation under its own prince or its own son of God. And eventually, those—a lot of those sons of God went bad, and they started opposing God&#8217;s plan. We see references to that, for example, in the Book of Daniel, where there are wars in heaven between the, uh, good angels like Michael and Gabriel and the bad angels like the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece.
And this is the biblical explanation—the main biblical explanation—of the origin of the pagan gods. They&#8217;re angels that God entrusted the nations to that then went bad and started demanding that people worship them instead of the true God.
Brian, that brings us to the break. I hope that that was helpful to you. Thank you very much for the question. Lots of lines full, but we got lots of time left with Jimmy Akin.
&nbsp;

A Biblical Explanation for Pagan Gods

Mary shows us the RIGHT WAY to read Scripture.

The annual celebration of Thanksgiving is one of the few remaining modern occasions where openly religious and civil sentiments intersect. Americans on the fourth Thursday of November still voice something of a social expectation that some acknowledgment of debt is owed in a world otherwise marked by entitlements. Precisely to whom that debt is owed is somewhat ever murkier, some even suggesting that it is more of a “debt of memory,” to contemplate the blessings of liberty and prosperity. But sufficient fumes still remain that most Americans invoke a beneficent God as the recipient of that gratitude.
Is there a distinctive Catholic approach to Thanksgiving? I ask that not especially as a holiday as much as a phenomenon. My answer is yes.
In his pre-papal book on the implementation of Vatican II, Sources of Renewal, the future St. John Paul II wrote about “consciousness” and “attitudes.” Consciousness is an awareness of a particular dimension of faith, an awareness that keeps that particular understanding in our sights, a lens through which we see reality. For example, Wojtyła spoke of “creation” as a consciousness: if I see the world as the intentional gift of God, that will affect how I approach it. It will engender “attitudes” about how to look at the world, both positive (“this is what it is”) and negative (“this is what it isn’t).
Let me argue that thanksgiving is a basic attitude of the Christian toward everything . . . because everything he has is a gift.
As beguiling as creation sometimes is, the Christian is aware that of everything that is, none of it has to be. Nothing had to be, and in a world beset by terrorism, war, and violence, we are also increasingly aware of the fragility of what is.
Dame Julian of Norwich captures this in one of her visions. She says that God showed her something like a walnut. Wondering why she saw this, she asked God and was made to understand that it represented “all that is.” Astonished that all the things that tempt man in the material world could be contained in such a small and fragile vessel, she was beset with the question of how it continues nevertheless to exist. God’s answer was simple: “Because I love it.”
In a series of lectures in Austria recently transcribed and published, Josef Ratzinger (prior to his papal election) spoke of creation as “the divine project.” Creation is not some thing that evolved by happenstance or even just started from a divine bang only for its own internal dynamism to take over. Creation is part of God’s plan, and since God’s plan is one, creation is inherently tied to salvation: to God’s plan to enter in loving relation with those created persons called human beings he created and, through them, to give voice to the whole cosmos to the greater glory of God.
When we realize the contingency of everything that is, and yet its—and our—existence being personally willed and wanted “because I love it,” should the human response be anything less than thanksgiving? Isn’t that response captured in the verse of an old Polish hymn (Kiedy ranne wstają zorze)?
And man, whom You without limit
Have showered with all your gifts, 
Whom You have created and redeemed, 
Why wouldn’t he praise You?
Our age pays at least lip service to “social justice,” yet we often forget that for St. Thomas Aquinas, religion as a virtue is part of the cardinal virtue of justice. Justice is about giving another <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/when-you-really-just-need-to-kill-someone">what is owed</a> him, his “due.” People have no greater “due” than to him from whom their existence, at its start and in its continuation at this moment, comes. At the very least, thanksgiving is what we owe him from whom we have everything.
Yet, as Preface IV for Weekdays in Ordinary Time reminds us, God has “no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift. Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to your greatness but makes us grow in your grace.”
As much as basic fairness requires us to acknowledge that everything we have comes from God, the truth is that even the good desire to thank him is God’s own gift. So, in giving thanks, it is not just that we discharge an obligation in justice that—when compared to the immensity of the gift—can never be commensurate. No, thanksgiving perfects our own consciousness of our created dependence on God and shapes our attitude toward life. A person who recognizes his dependency is less likely to succumb to illusions of self-sufficient grandeur, exaggerated autonomy, or defining “one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Nor is it just a question of acknowledging our dependency. Americans give thanks for <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/freedom-and-the-americans-error">freedom</a>, something also ultimately rooted in creation (we are made in God’s image, one aspect of which being that we enjoy free will) and redemption (Jesus came to give us true freedom).
So a distinctly Catholic approach to Thanksgiving recognizes that the attitude the holiday seeks to embody should, in fact, be the attitude that marks a person’s approach to life every day of the year. The Church not only preaches, but practices that: she celebrates the Eucharist—a Greek word that itself means “thanksgiving”—every day of the year (but <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/no-communion-on-good-friday">Good Friday</a>). Each and every day, the Church invites her children to give thanks for creation and redemption. For the Church, every day is Thanksgiving.
And, again, that celebration of Thanksgiving “makes us grow in [God’s] grace.” In its votive Mass for Thanksgiving Day, the Church uses the Gospel of Luke, 17:11-19, the account of Jesus healing ten lepers, only one of whom returned to say “thank you.” “Ten were healed, were they not? Where are the other nine?”
The leper who returned to give thanks was a Samaritan—i.e., someone whom Israel considered not truly worshiping God because not truly part of the covenant. Yet—in contrast to his Jewish brothers who were part of that covenant and revelation and so should have known better—he did come to give thanks. He embodies the model of the real attitude of thanksgiving.
Having raised kids in Generations Y and Z, I had plenty of exposure to “Barney,” the purple dinosaur, who reminded children that “‘please’ and ‘thank you’—they are the magic words.” Magic not because <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-to-do-with-witches">they cast spells</a>, but because they speak love to another person, human … or divine. Let them be a Catholic’s “magic” words every day—not just, but especially on, the fourth Thursday of November.
Happy Thanksgiving!

What Catholics Should Be Thankful For

Trent Horn explains what confirmation bias is and why it is not a valid reason to discredit faith in any <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/religion">religion</a>.
Transcript:
Host: Let&#8217;s go real quick to try to get this in before the break, Anonymous in Fairfax, Virginia, listening online, you are on with Trent Horn, what&#8217;s your question, Anonymous?
Caller: Hey, so I just recently watched a video on Vice news that was talking about <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/interview-with-an-exorcist">exorcisms</a>, and they showed this one atheist activist named Michael Shermer who was trying to debunk exorcisms, and one of his premises was that &#8220;You know, religion and faith and all that, it&#8217;s nothing more than just confirmation bias.&#8221; And I kind of hear this a lot too, that, you know, &#8220;Oh, faith is nothing more than just confirmation bias. People with their beliefs, they&#8217;ll go wherever their beliefs&#8230;&#8221; You know, kind of ad hoc. But how do you respond to stuff like that, Trent?
Trent: What I would say is that confirmation bias is not an objection to Catholicism, or even to religion in general. Confirmation bias is a psychological defect that all people suffer from, including atheists. It&#8217;s just a part of the human condition, as fallen creatures, as fallible creatures. Confirmation bias is a tendency among human beings to only notice evidence that supports a belief they already hold, and then to ignore or suppress evidence that contradicts that belief.
And everyone does this, including atheists, and I would say even Shermer himself would do this, that if you were talking about exorcisms that he and others may bring up, yeah, there are cases where you might say someone who seems possessed may have a mental illness and it&#8217;s indistinguishable, but then people don&#8217;t bring up the other cases where the person who&#8217;s possessed speaks a language they never knew before, or has superhuman strength. That part gets kind of pushed to the side. That would be an example of confirmation bias. I don&#8217;t know if Shermer does that, but I can imagine there are atheists who do.
So I would say, to repeat that, well we have a little bit of time, I can go into this before we have to go to a break, that confirmation bias, it is a psychological defect, an error in thinking, everybody suffers from it. So everyone has to watch out for it, so there are atheists—and I&#8217;ve seen this in literature, where atheists will attack, you know, weak arguments against the Catholic faith, but then they don&#8217;t deal with other stronger issues or things that may contradict a belief that they hold.
So everyone does this, we have to be watchful for it, but it&#8217;s not an objection against the faith. It&#8217;s just something everyone has to watch out for, and Catholics believe in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/arent-faith-and-reason-incompatible">faith seeking understanding</a>, and everyone&#8217;s biased, but we can work hard to look at evidence objectively, and I would say the evidence objectively supports the truth of the Catholic faith.

Is Religion Just ‘Confirmation Bias’?

In this engaging clip, Cy Kellett and Trent Horn dive into a thought-provoking discussion about why some individuals, like a viewer from Ohio, choose not to embrace Catholicism. Drawing from personal experiences in a Pentecostal background, they explore the impact of miraculous claims and the complexities of faith, challenging assumptions about doctrine and authenticity in religious practices.
Transcript:
Caller: So I would say the reason I am not Catholic is because of the denomination I was born and raised in. I was born and raised in a Pentecostal denomination. You know, emphasis on spiritual church services, speaking in tongues, healings, things like that.
We have ministers all the time from foreign countries that told us miracle stories, converting people by the millions. There&#8217;s one story of a woman who had a kidney that miraculously grew back after this Pentecostal preacher laid hands on her. So I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s that environment that I&#8217;m not Catholic and also because, well, can these people be teaching false doctrine if all these miracles are happening? So that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m not Catholic.
Trent: Sure. I think those are two good points. Number one, it seems to be you&#8217;re thinking, well, if these people are capable, let&#8217;s assume that at least some of the miracle claims they&#8217;re making are authentic. I mean, there have unfortunately been cases of preachers, including Pentecostal preachers, who claim to be faith healers. But it seems quite suspect what they&#8217;re exactly doing.
But let&#8217;s just. I think it&#8217;s. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s improbable that some non-Catholic Christians, whether they be ministers or lay people, are capable of performing miracles or having God work through them. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s improbable. But I don&#8217;t think that it follows that because God works a miracle through them, that God validates their theology completely.
It reminds me in the Gospels when there were the apostles, those who were following Jesus, that there were other people who weren&#8217;t direct disciples, who were also casting out demons and doing things. And Jesus said, look, if they&#8217;re not against us, they&#8217;re with us. Though that wouldn&#8217;t mean they had the same apostolic authority as Peter, John, and the other apostles just because other Christians, God empowers them to do miracles.
Because would you agree that, I mean, there are, you know, you said you grew up in the Pentecostal tradition. Would you agree that it&#8217;s possible there are, let&#8217;s say, Calvinists who have done miracles? God has worked through them with charisms. But that wouldn&#8217;t mean you should become a Calvinist, right?
Caller: Well, I guess that&#8217;s a fair point because I&#8217;ve heard of Mormon missionaries, to change the subject a little bit, who have prayed for miracles. Like I saw one video where they claim to stop a drought. And this one lady was cured of cancer after he was baptized in a Mormon baptism. So I guess that&#8217;s a fair point, right?
Trent: And that&#8217;s actually a great example because Mormons are not Christians. So God, I mean, He could choose to work a miracle through anyone, even someone who&#8217;s non-Christian, who&#8217;s not a believer. I mean, you know, God spoke through Balaam&#8217;s donkey, for example, in order to move him.
So there could be non-Christians or non-Catholics God could work through to do a miracle, but that doesn&#8217;t mean automatically their theology is correct. God&#8217;s sovereign. He can choose to do miracles through whoever He wants. For me, I would rather look at trying to determine which theology to believe in. I try to say, look, which one coheres with Scripture and two, which one coheres with history?
Because the Bible, you know, we didn&#8217;t have the Bible in the first century. There wasn&#8217;t a canon, really. There wasn&#8217;t one that was universally recognized until the 4th century. I would say, well, what does early tradition, history, and Scripture tell us? And my full study has led me to the Catholic faith.
I&#8217;d also offer you one more thought, Cole, and that would be that some of the traditions in Pentecostalism, so, you know, charism, speaking in tongues, healings, those kinds of things, they&#8217;re not contradictory to the Catholic faith. Catholics would agree that God can give different charisms to people all the time.
In fact, there are a group of Catholics that have a special devotion to that. They&#8217;re called Charismatic Catholics or part of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal. And that&#8217;s something you could look into, that you can kind of see there how those elements of spirituality that you may find to be positive within Pentecostalism, the Catholic Church also fully supports as well, as long as it doesn&#8217;t contradict Catholic doctrine or Catholic dogma.
Trent: So does that sound like something you might want to look into or&#8230;
Caller: Worth the thought?
Trent: Sure. Yeah. Well, why don&#8217;t you take a look at it? And again&#8230;
Oh, go ahead.
Caller: Well, I just like to say, well, just these preachers have such&#8230; They seem to have such authority when they&#8217;re speaking, and that&#8217;s just hard to kind of argue against, you know.
Trent: But remember, though, when you say authority, they may sound very confident, they may sound, you know, bombastic, they may sound very winsome. I&#8217;ll agree with you there. There are Protestant preachers that can preach up a storm, my friend, but we have to always be careful.
I remember, I believe it&#8217;s in the letter to the Thessalonians, Paul says there will come a time where people will not stand for true doctrine and hoping that their ears will be tickled or pleased, they will go after false teachers. So just because someone&#8217;s really impressive to listen to, sometimes that&#8217;s a warning sign they can be leading people astray.
So when we say speak with authority, we should not mean that they&#8217;re very confident. We should ask what is their authority? Who gave them the right to speak on behalf of Christ? If it&#8217;s just, well, I read the Bible, how do you know your interpretation is right? First Peter 1:20 says, no prophecy of Scripture comes about by one&#8217;s own interpretation.
So I would say the real authority lies in those people who are the successors of the apostles. And we find that apostolic succession fully in the Catholic Church. So something to think about and do. Call back at another time or maybe in an open forum if you want to get more answers.
Cy: Cole, thank you very, very much for that call. Our topic this hour, why aren&#8217;t you a Catholic? Why are you not a Catholic?

Pentecostal Miracles are Why I’m Not Catholic…

Reject the Mass, reject history.

Salvation often seems more like a Protestant issue than a Catholic one. And when Catholics don’t engage with the doctrine of salvation, they can develop some misunderstandings about it.
For instance, the topic of salvation can be grouped in our bookstores in the “self-help” section. Lots of things under that heading can be helpful, but salvation is not a self-help concept, as we will see. Another misunderstanding is viewing the issue purely from a “fire insurance policy” framework. Salvation is objectively a “saving” from hell, yes, but that significantly condenses the breadth of the matter.
<h2>Not Just Self-Help</h2>
Salvation isn’t something we do to become better. Rather, it is about something that God has done for us. God has given us a gift beyond comprehension.
Before exploring this gift, it will be helpful to get some background on what the ancient Roman Empire thought about gift-giving.
Recently within Pauline scholarship, John Barclay published a monumental work called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Gift-John-M-Barclay/dp/0802868894">Paul and the Gift</a>.” He notes how gift-giving was a major part of daily life in the ancient world, and how the Greek word charis was used often by nonreligious writers. A wealthy individual would give a gift to somebody he considered worthy—that is, someone who would not pocket the gift and walk away. Rather, the worthy person would gratefully receive the gift and give a gift back in return. A relationship of mutual gift-giving would develop.
With this background in mind, let’s look at Paul’s famous quote on gift-giving. He says, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). God has engaged in gift-giving to humanity! How exciting! Everybody likes to receive gifts.
But there are some differences between what God does in Ephesians 2 and what the ancient world thought of gift-giving.
God does not focus on giving gifts to worthy individuals, as the Romans did. Like the parable of the sower (Matt. 13), God spreads the gift-seeds recklessly, whether on good soil or bad soil. The latter looks like an utter waste of seed! Yet Paul says in his letter to these Romans that Christ died for the ungodly and unworthy (Rom. 5:6). This is saying that the gift God offers to humans is to unworthy receivers. Humans are sinful, defiant, and inclined to nasty selfishness. It flips the Roman concept of charis on its head. Surely humans are just going to pocket salvation and walk away. Yet God gives gifts to all.
A good example of this gift-giving in the Gospels is the episode of Zaccheus. In Luke 19, a worker for the Romans, Zaccheus, is approached by Jesus, who desires to give the gift of his presence. Anybody in his right mind would not offer a gift to this guy. He is not worthy and, from a human standpoint, will not offer a gift in return. Zaccheus is stealing from the people of Israel as a tax collector. His primary concern is taking money with the force of the Romans behind him, not receiving and giving gifts!
Keep in mind who the Romans were, too. They were terrorists and bullies. There are coins that depict them raping their subjects. Any basic respect for the human person went out the window for the Romans. Zaccheus is on the wrong team! He should not be approached by Jesus! Certainly, he will be ungrateful for a gift.
Yet Zaccheus turns into a worthy recipient. He experiences a conversion instantaneously, it seems, and gives a gift back to Jesus in a way that he knows Jesus would want: to return his stolen goods back to the injured parties and to give alms to the poor. Jesus gives a gift, it is received, and a gift is given back.
Now let’s turn to the specific gift God gives to humanity. Primarily, it is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This gift of atonement and payment of debts is for another article, but what needs to be highlighted here is that humans receive this gift by dying and rising themselves. What do I mean? They mystically, invisibly, and spiritually enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Humans are “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20), are “buried with him&#8221; under the waters of baptism (Rom. 6:3), and “rise” to new life (Col. 2:12).
This concept of entering into Jesus’ resurrection life is connected to the second misconception about salvation:
<h2>Not Just Fire Insurance</h2>
Salvation is not just a protection against hell, although that is a weighty advantage in and of itself. Condensing it into a “get out of hell free” card is a tremendous disservice. For it’s also about new life.
Humans receive the gift of Jesus’ resurrection life—the life that involved Jesus being able to defy logic and reality when he appeared to the disciples in their room although their doors were locked (John 20:26). This is the life that changes wealthy people to suddenly give their lives to lepers, whose skin is decaying and falling off (St. Francis of Assisi). It is the life that changes the jobs of comfortable people to the jobs of suddenly picking dying people off the streets and caring for them with tenderness (St. Mother Teresa). In a word, we enter Christ’s school of love.
This new life involves an ontological change in our being. Humans *partake* of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). They share in Jesus’s divinity. Christians truly become the body of Christ, which is why when people persecute Christians, Jesus says they are persecuting him (Acts 9:4-5).
Christians are literally what their title is: Christian means “little Christ.” As Fr. Jose Maria Castillo once emphasized, when I look at my hand, I don’t look at just a hand—I look at Jesus’ hand. This is why numerous miracles occur even today (see the studies found in Craig Keener’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Today-Supernatural-Modern-World/dp/1540963837/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1J4GIO1GWC71G&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.IEObadFBzNp20zQW9K9lACoOaVYMT44Yzluw1iWwWxNi6ZpbGpEZ3pzhC1x7f1UndqUbOr8pUid3ms3QnrRJZia7orlcmTBVxWlu5-Urwy-oXzH-AvKGW0zqd9hKc0VUZOkr_ZzbvZpjsF1PTEBjuzuBLSkUe35d3w2B6aTvF9Pl2rchtg0iYCVMIfZ4qzFimh3Kh-d9Nq7BIdQ_abP0EZ3piaiRVY3JHpvJg4u_TXQ.EqAJ7n0m484ej3Sv0hl9e4e74spdn5gv99WC2anfgw8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=miracles+by+craig+keener&amp;qid=1762965501&amp;sprefix=miracles+by%2Caps%2C118&amp;sr=8-1">Miracles</a>). I witnessed one last year at <a href="https://www.damascus.net/">Damascus Catholic Youth Summer Camp</a>, in fact.
To conclude, salvation is neither a self-help issue nor just about fire insurance. However, there is a sense in which salvation is self-help. For if you truly care about your well-being, you’ll gratefully receive the gift of salvation from Jesus. You’ll die to your old ways of selfishness and pride, enter into a gift-giving relationship with God, and give immense gifts back to God (the highest gift of which is your gift of self). As Paul continues in Ephesians, “we are his [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). We are made for giving gifts back to God, for God is the one invisibly propelling us to do this. Nor is salvation just fire insurance; rather, it is about receiving the gift of eternal life.
(To learn more about other misunderstandings on the topic of salvation, see the book by my professor at the Augustine Institute called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Salvation-What-Every-Catholic-Should/dp/1733522182">Salvation</a>.)

Salvation Is Better than You Think

Gary Zimak gives some advice on staying close to God while trying to discern his will for our lives.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Jennifer in Algonquin, Illinois, listening to <a href="https://www.ewtn.com">EWTN</a> on WSFI. Jennifer, your question for Gary Zimak.
Caller: Hi, thanks so much for your time.
Gary: Hey, Jennifer.
Caller: So my question is with anxiety and discernment. For me personally, I&#8217;m trying to discern a vocation, and every single person in my life is very much more on the secular side, or even anti-Catholic specifically, so every voice in my life is saying &#8220;No, don&#8217;t do that,&#8221; but there&#8217;s also part of me that&#8217;s like, &#8220;Well, what if?&#8221; So how do you move through the fear to actually determine what God really wants you to do?
Gary: Good question, and this is something that, even though I&#8217;m married, I have a family, I, five years ago, made the decision to go into full-time ministry. So this is a constant question for me: &#8220;Lord you really want me to keep doing this?&#8221; Because it gets challenging financially sometimes, so I&#8217;m very familiar with this whole idea of &#8220;Lord, what do you want me to do?&#8221;
One thing I would recommend&#8211;and I have a lot of details in my book &#8220;Faith, Hope and Clarity,&#8221; that really grew out of my own discernment&#8211;I would say stay close to the Lord, keep asking Him, &#8220;Lord, do you want me to do this? What do you want me to do?&#8221; You can always go through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, there&#8217;s some books written that simplify the Spiritual Exercises, which were written in order to help people discern vocations.
And then oftentimes the Lord, after we&#8217;ve discerned, we think, &#8220;Well, this is what I should do,&#8221; He wants us to try things and then pay attention to circumstances. I thought I was called to be a permanent Deacon one time&#8211;nothing worked out at all for me in that regard, so now looking back I don&#8217;t think it was the Lord&#8217;s will for me. But I would say stay with Him, keep asking Him, and then if you get an inspiration, try it and see what happens. Mother Angelica was big on that. If she got an idea, she ran with it, and she said, &#8220;If it&#8217;s from the Lord it&#8217;ll work; if not, it&#8217;ll fall apart.&#8221; Hope that helps.

How Do I Tackle Anxiety When Discerning a Vocation?

<blockquote>As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” As he said this, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing. (John 9:1-7).</blockquote>
Wow! If ever there were a reading that is right on target for our current days of bodily fears and dangers, this is it. Two marvelous truths are both implied and concretely shown in this delightful gospel lesson. (Note: Read the whole passage, not just the portion given above: how charming are the Lord and the Blind Man! They are like true, humble brothers, each made for the other for the glory of God.) There are of course many other truths found in this richly woven tapestry of spiritual power; we will speak of two of them here.
1. We are our bodies.
When you see or touch or hear my body, you see, touch, or hear me. Here, in contrast, is a surprising look into the religious beliefs of some Jews of our Lord’s time (and even among some sects of religious Jews now). Notice that the Savior’s disciples seem to think someone might be able to sin before he is born. They believed that the soul existed before it entered the body. This was a common error: it was hard to eliminate among the first Christians and even was considered by some of the early Church Fathers and writers.
Why do we reject this idea, common as it has been? Because, again, we are our bodies, living by the power of our spiritual souls. The very word soul means that it is a principle of life in a body, not a simple spirit. Our soul comes to be, is created by God, at its union with the body. A body is simply dead without a soul, and a soul is “out of place” without a body. My mother’s body lying in its grave is not my mother. My mother’s soul in the life to come did not give birth to me. She is both.
That is why death is a loss, and why we fear and mourn it. And that is why we are so afraid of epidemics and pestilence. We do not want ourselves or our loved ones to experience the separation of soul and body that is death. Angels do not fear disease; they do not need to take any precautions; they do not observe “social distancing.” Neither do the Risen Lord and His Holy Mother, likewise glorious, because they are immortal; they cannot die. Even the disembodied souls of the saints in heaven and the souls in purgatory, who will not die a second time, still are not “completely” immortal until their bodies are no longer dead, but alive!
Disease points to death, and death is the end of our complete, personal existence. This is a fearsome thought. We know that only a power infinitely greater than ours can heal all bodily disease and overcome death in the resurrection to endless life in body and soul.
2. The Body of God is God. Believe in, touch, receive, love, see, hear, desire, embrace the body of Christ, and you believe, touch, receive, love, see, hear, desire, and embrace God himself. This is because he was incarnate in a body, and he did not abandon it ever. His is always the body of God; he is not dead. He is ever your Jesus. This is why the Lord used his body to work miraculous cures.
St. Thomas Aquinas comments on the passage above and, speaking of the Lord’s miracles, says, “Frequently he uses his body in his miracles in order to demonstrate that his body, insofar as it is the instrument (literally “organ”) of his Godhead, has received a certain saving power&#8221; (Commentary on the Gospel of John).
We must stir up our faith and desire for the body of our God and the saving power it possesses to heal and even to raise up from the dead. It is a truth of the creed that we infallibly profess and declare that he will raise us up from bodily death on the last day by the power of his own incarnation, of his own body.
Let us confront sickness and death with this confidence, and all will be well! The same body that is the battleground of sin, passions, and sickness will be the place of victory, health and healing, and undying life. All glory to the glorious body of the Lord, born of the Virgin Mary, and dwelling in our tabernacles! All glory to the resurrection of his holy ones, unto which happy lot may he draw us by the power of that same body!
He is the one who said, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth [in his body on the cross], will draw all men to myself,” and elsewhere, &#8220;He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.&#8221; Let us feed on him by faith and love, and this will calm our fear of bodily death!

The Christian Confronts Death

<div>Is John the Baptist Elijah? </div><div>John the Baptist is believed to have the role of Elijah. He is not literally the person Elijah.
Elijah did not die but was taken up to heaven (2 Kings 2:1-11) and thus the Jewish people believe he will physically return to Earth from heaven before the coming of the Messiah (Sirach 48:4-11, Malachi 3:23-24). That is why John the Baptist denied he was the literal physical return of Elijah from heaven, but the Gospel affirmed he was a &#8220;typology&#8221; of Elijah (Luke 1:17).
</div>

Is John the Baptist Elijah?

If you listen to Catholics discussing the Blessed Sacrament today, you’re likely to hear—not just, but especially in traditional circles—an emphasis on the Eucharist as “sacrifice” and a complaint about overemphasis on the Eucharist as a “meal.”
Maybe you’ve wondered: what are they talking about?
Well, discussion of the Eucharist as sacrifice is certainly no novelty. In fact, it’s probably how most Catholics predominantly discussed the sacrament, certainly until not too long ago.
But sacrifice? We’re in the twenty-first century, remember?
Okay, but that doesn’t make the Eucharist any less real as a sacrifice.
In the ancient world, including the times described in the Old Testament, sacrifice was the way one sealed a covenant. A covenant was not just a “contract” or an “agreement.” It was a life commitment between two parties. To enter a covenant was to undertake a most solemn obligation on which the parties staked their lives. You’ve heard the expression “cross my heart and hope to die”? That child’s phrase today expresses something of the gravity of the commitment two parties that bound themselves to each other made.
Covenants were brought into being with blood because, for most human beings in antiquity, blood was the seat of life. If your blood was spilled, you were weak. If spilled too much, you were dead. That is why animals were offered in sacrifice: their blood was supposed to represent the human covenant-makers.
Covenants could be between equals, but they usually were between unequals, between a superior and a subordinate. A defeated king who now became a vassal to his conquerer was bound by covenant.
And when God made covenants—with Abraham, with Moses, with Israel—those were most definitely covenants between unequals.
Covenant partners bound themselves by their lives to do (or not do) something vis-à-vis the other. A vassal bound himself not to be disloyal to his king and to defend him. Israel bound itself to keep God’s Law, and God bound himself to be their God and they his people.
God’s first covenant is creation: God bound himself to man in a special way by creating him in “his image and likeness.” Man broke that covenant by wanting to be not God’s image and likeness, but rather “like God” himself, deciding for himself what is good and what is evil. Israel broke God’s covenant by its constant religious backsliding.
“Again and again you offered a covenant to man and . . . taught him to hope for salvation.”
The final and definitive covenant, “the new and everlasting covenant,” is made with God in Christ. It is made with his blood, “not the blood of bulls and goats” (Heb. 9: 13-14), but of a human being who, at the same time, was God. As man he offered himself absolutely to God; as God, his offering is absolutely perfect. Jesus did what we could not but needed to do. He offered himself on the Cross, unto death.
But what does this have to do with the Eucharist?
Jesus explicitly speaks of the Eucharist as his body and his blood. They do not “represent” or “symbolize” his body and blood; they are his body and blood, “the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” That act of Jesus’s absolute submission to his Father’s will, even unto death, is re-presented in every Mass.
Jesus clearly intended the Eucharist to be part of his offering on the cross. Catholic theology speaks of the Eucharist as making the “sacrifice of Christ present.”
But Jesus instituted the Eucharist on Holy Thursday night, and he didn’t die until Good Friday afternoon. So how are they connected?
Let’s remember that, for God, time is not past, present, and future. Jesus is not sitting at God’s right hand, waiting to see how history will turn out. “All time belongs to him,” we say during the inscription of the paschal candle at the Easter vigil. For us, mortal creatures, time is experienced as unfolding: past, present, and future. For God, all time is now.
So, yes, Jesus offered himself once and for all (a prime Protestant contention that also corresponds to Heb. 10:10). But Jesus’ offering encompassed his passion, death, and resurrection on Calvary that was already anticipated in the Last Supper and is made present in every Eucharist that has been celebrated from then until the end of time. This is Jesus offering himself.
Jesus enjoined his apostles to “do this in memory of me”—not as an afterthought, not as a “hey, Jesus did this, and isn’t it nice?” No, “memory” here in a Jewish context has a specific meaning. It is a making present of the thing being remembered here and now.
The Last Supper was a Passover meal. The Passover prefigures the Eucharist. When God institutes the Passover, he instructs Moses that Israel is to keep this “memorial” forever (Exod. 12:14) because every generation of Jews stands together with Moses and Aaron and the Jews of Egypt with whom God made this covenant. Even today, during the Passover meal, the youngest child asks, “Why is this night different from all others?” Take note of the verb and adjective: the child does not ask “why was that night different,” but “why is this night different?” Before Almighty God, every Jew who was, is, or will be was part of that Passover.
And if the Passover merely prefigures the sacrificial offering of the Lamb of God, the real offering on Calvary presupposes just as real a memory: whoever belongs to Christ is joined, in every Eucharist, to the Upper Room and Calvary. If by baptism we become part of Jesus’ death (Rom. 6:31-11), well, baptism makes us participants in that death in order to make us part of the mystical body of Christ.
So is the Eucharist a meal? Yes, but a unique kind of meal, because it is also a sacrifice, thanks to which (and thanks only to which) we are saved.
By taking part in and receiving the Eucharist, we—the mystical body of Christ—join the supreme offering of our head to God. That is why we speak of the priest as celebrating in persona Christi. It’s not “Father John’s Mass.” It’s Christ’s Mass, who acts through human ministers to accommodate us, mortal creatures bound to space and time, raising us up to God’s dimension not bound by such limits.
(To read more on the Eucharist as sacrifice, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c1a3.htm#1367">1362-72</a>.)

The Eucharist as a Sacrifice

Tim Staples delves into the complex theological concept of the kenosis, the self-emptying of Jesus Christ. The discussion explores whether Jesus withheld divine attributes during His earthly life and how the hypostatic union between His divine and human natures impacted His experience.
Transcript:
Is there any evidence for Jesus withholding divine attributes?
Right. Okay. It&#8217;s not that He withholds divine attributes.
It would be more proper to say, because of course, when you&#8217;re talking about Jesus in His divine personhood, He possesses all the divine attributes in full, because He&#8217;s God. The divine nature, as well as the three divine persons, cannot. It is impossible for a divine person to somehow deny the divine attributes. That&#8217;s metaphysically absurd, because they all three, of course, are the one God and possess all the, depending upon how you number them, the 14 or 15 divine attributes. Absolutely. All right. But what we are talking about in Jesus Christ, and here we go again. We&#8217;re talking about the kenosis once again. It&#8217;s in Christ&#8217;s humanity where the second person of blessed Trinity chose to humble himself. Let me think about that. That&#8217;s infinite humiliation of God, right? In the Incarnation,
in His humanity,
He withholds from what is His right, and that is the divine glory. You see, from the instant that Christ was conceived,
He merited by nature infinitely, right? From the first human act that He performed, He merited infinitely, and He continues to merit in every act, all the way up to and through the crucifixion of our blessed Lord, right? How can He merit infinite all the time? He can because of the hypostatic union, because everything that the human nature does must be understood to have as its subject the divine person. That&#8217;s what makes it infinitely propitiatory for our salvation. But He, the second person of blessed Trinity, chose to empty himself. Why?
Because if He accepted in His human nature the full reward of even His first action, guess what? He would be glorified. He would have the gifts of impassibility and subtility and agility and glory. All of that would be fully manifested in His human nature, and so therefore He wouldn&#8217;t be able to suffer. He wouldn&#8217;t be able to die, and so forth. And so He empties Himself of that which, you know,
Catholic theologians refer to it as His divine glory. But I think when they use that language, sometimes people get confused to think somehow He emptied Himself of His divinity. And that is heresy, okay? He can&#8217;t empty Himself of His divine nature. That&#8217;s metaphysically absurd. But what He could do is not&#8230; Here, the second person of blessed Trinity doesn&#8217;t permit the fullness of the glory that He has a right to, because He merited it, to be manifest. Why? So He could suffer and die for our sins, my friend. And you know, Cy and I were talking during the break of how if you look at Matthew 17 verses 1 through 3 in Luke&#8217;s version, in Luke chapter 17 verses 31 through about 35 there, and the transfiguration, what happens? He&#8217;s transfigured before Peter, James, and John. What is He doing? He&#8217;s manifesting what is His right, the fullness of the glory that awaits not only Him, but all of us. Amen. If we are faithful unto death, we will be glorified together with Him, says Paul in Romans chapter 8 verse 17.
We will be glorified together with Him if we suffer with Him in order to get there, right Cy? Well, Jesus, because He had it by right, He could manifest it anytime He wanted to, and He did. He gave them. Peter talks about this in 2 Peter chapter 1. Peter talks about how they saw His glory, and they&#8217;re talking about the transfiguration. Okay, so the point is, though, that Jesus, at every moment, He chose. This is why Jesus said, &#8220;Don&#8217;t you know I could snap my&#8230;&#8221; He didn&#8217;t say, &#8220;Snap my fingers.&#8221; I could call my Heavenly Father, and He would send a legion of angels and rescue me. But how would the Scriptures be fulfilled, right? In fact, He didn&#8217;t even need to call on the angels. He could do it Himself, you know. Jesus could, right? But what? He says, &#8220;How would the Scriptures be fulfilled?&#8221; Every instant. This is an important point to remember here.
When Jesus said in John chapter 10 verse 18, one of the most beautiful Johannine verses anywhere, &#8220;Think not that you take my life. I give it.&#8221; Right? &#8220;I give it as a ransom for many.&#8221; &#8220;I give it.&#8221; Why? Because nobody takes his life. He gives it. He could stop the whole carousel anytime he wants to. But there&#8217;s only one thing that keeps him on the cross, and that&#8217;s love.
The free choice of Him to continue to empty Himself for our salvation.

Did Jesus Christ Abandon His Divinity on Earth?

<div>Why does God allow babies to die from illness and miscarriages to happen?</div><div>Miscarriages and infant deaths are indeed great tragedies. Because of our first parents’ original sin (CCC 390ff.), suffering and death came into the world. And death comes to some sooner than others, including those preborn infants who die via miscarriages and those born infants and other babies who die from illness or other tragic means.
And yet God does not abandon us in our contracted original sin and personally committed sins. He doesn’t let sin, suffering and death have the last word. Instead, he sent his eternal Son to redeem and save us (see John 3:16-17). Indeed, God wants to save everyone, including preborn children who are miscarried and babies who die not long after birth (CCC 1257-61; John 3:16-17; 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9).
In addition, through his one redemptive Sacrifice of the Cross, Jesus also shows how suffering can be redemptive. Similarly, though he does not actively will our sufferings, he can permit them so as to bring about a greater good (see Rom. 2:28), namely our holiness and eternal salvation, and helping foster the same for others, who may have experienced similar tragedies. In the end, we must always remember that death does not have the last word, and that earth is not our lasting home.
</div>

Why Does God Allow Miscarriages and Infant Deaths?

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Is Mormonism actually Demonic?

From the perspective of faith, the four Gospels—like all books of the Bible—are divinely inspired, and this has implications for their truth and reliability. According to the Second Vatican Council:
<blockquote>To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.
Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred scriptures (Dei Verbum 11).</blockquote>
Since, under divine inspiration, the Evangelists wrote “whatever [God] wanted written, and no more,” whatever the Gospels affirm is “affirmed by the Holy Spirit” and so teaches the truth “without error.” The Gospels are thus completely reliable.
This doesn’t mean that what the Evangelist is affirming is always obvious, but it does mean that if we have properly understood what the Evangelist is saying, God guarantees that it’s true.
Not everyone shares the faith perspective, so we should consider how far the reliability of the Gospels also can be shown from the perspective of reason, which can lead us to faith.
In the wave of skeptical scholarship that began a little more than two hundred years ago, everything was questioned and challenged. Skeptics came to hold that the Gospels were written by anonymous individuals, long after the events they portray, and that the stories and sayings of Jesus were the product of long periods of oral transmission in an unreliable game of “telephone.”
There are <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-the-gospels/">reasons to reject each of these claims</a>. The Gospels were <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/who-wrote-the-gospels">written by the men whose names are on them</a>, they were <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/when-were-the-gospels-written">written quite early</a>, and they are <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/where-the-evangelists-got-their-information">based on eyewitness or near-eyewitness testimony</a>. But we have additional ways of showing the reliability of the Gospels from the reason perspective.
The <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/whos-on-first-matthew-mark-or-luke">synoptic problem</a> helps, because it shows us how the Evangelists treated their sources. When Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel, they didn’t radically alter the substance of individual sayings or stories. They polished the language, but they carefully preserved the substance. The fact that there are so many passages with near word-for-word agreement shows how careful they were with Mark. And if they were careful with this source, that gives us evidence that they were careful with other sources they would have used.
We also have evidence that Mark was careful. In the first century, one of the great controversies in the Church was whether Christians had to obey the Mosaic Law, which would mean that certain foods were unclean to eat, as some early Christians claimed (Rom. 14:1, Col. 2:16).
It would have been convenient to have a saying from Jesus that settled the matter, and if the Evangelists had felt free to make up sayings of Jesus, they would have done so. But we find Mark doing something very different. In a discussion with the Pharisees over whether it is necessary to eat with clean hands, Mark records Jesus as saying:
<blockquote>“Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?” (Thus he declared all foods clean) (7:18-19).</blockquote>
The parenthetical statement is an inference Mark draws from what Jesus said. If nothing that enters a man makes him unclean, then that applies to food as well as dirt that might be on his hands. But Mark doesn’t put this inference on Jesus’ lips. He preserves Jesus’ saying intact and draws an inference from it rather than modifying what Jesus said.
The Book of Acts is another boon in assessing the reliability of the Evangelists. Acts covers a much wider span of time (about thirty years) and ranges all over the Greco-Roman world, meaning it gives us many more claims that can be checked. When this is done, we find that Luke was extraordinarily accurate.
British scholar William Ramsay did a study of Acts—expecting it to be unreliable—only to <a href="https://archive.org/details/bearingofrecentd00ramsuoft">conclude</a> that “Acts may justly be quoted as a trustworthy historical authority” and “Luke is a historian of the first rank. . . . In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians” (222).
But what about all those “contradictions” skeptics claim are in the Gospels? It is important to know how to address these claims.
In the first place, the alleged contradictions are never about major matters. Skeptics are not able to point to passages saying Jesus was a Greek rather than a Jew, that Joseph was his biological father, or that he was stoned rather than crucified. Invariably, the alleged contradictions are minor. Thus, even if there were discrepancies among the Gospels, they would be on lesser matters, and their substance would still be correct.
However, it turns out that the alleged, minor discrepancies are not contradictions. They might appear so to skeptics reading the Gospels as if they were written according to modern conventions. But when we examine the way ancient literature was written, we find they are not.
The Second Vatican Council points out the need to study the way ancient authors wrote:
<blockquote>Seeing that, in Sacred Scripture, God speaks through men in human fashion, it follows that the interpreter of sacred scriptures, if he is to ascertain what God has wished to communicate to us, should carefully search out the meaning which the sacred writers really had in mind, that meaning which God had thought well to manifest through the medium of their words (Dei Verbum 12).</blockquote>
Here we will look at three ancient writing practices that can trip up modern readers: selection, paraphrase, and sequencing.
Selection deals with what material an author chooses to include. Because books were fantastically expensive and the Evangelists wanted to keep their works small enough to fit on a single scroll, they had to choose which details to include and which to omit. John even alludes to the fact that he knew much more than he was able to write (21:25).
The Evangelists make choices about what details to mention and omit, and sometimes skeptics portray these as contradictions. For example, Mark 10:46-52 records how Jesus healed blind Bartimaeus at Jericho, although Matthew 9:27-31 indicates that he healed two blind men on that occasion.
This is not a contradiction. Mark simply focuses on Bartimaeus, whereas Matthew mentions the other blind man. This has been compared to how witnesses to a car crash may report different details without contradicting each other.
Paraphrase is using different words to convey the same meaning. We do this constantly in everyday speech. We communicate the gist of what someone said to us without using his exact words. But in written works, we don’t expect to see paraphrases put between quotation marks. This is partly due to the fact that we live in a world of recording devices, and it’s much easier to check what someone said and give his words exactly.
But they didn’t have recorders in the ancient world. They also didn’t have quotation marks (those are added by Bible translators), and so ancient audiences didn’t expect authors to always give exact wording. They expected authors to accurately give the gist of what someone would have said on an occasion, but not the precise wording.
For example, Matthew gives the opening of the Lord’s Prayer like this: “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (6:9-10), whereas Luke gives it in a shorter form: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come” (11:2).
Ancient audiences would regard this not as a contradiction, but as the kind of paraphrase they would normally expect. Both authors preserve the same meaning; it’s just that the wording of the prayer is slightly different.
Sequencing deals with the order in which an author presents his material. This can be done different ways. Sometimes an author may present material in a strict chronological sequence, but other times, he may arrange it by topic.
This can trip up modern readers because we live in an age in which records are often kept about precisely when things occurred. In the ancient world, this usually wasn’t the case. People would remember what happened, but not the exact date. As a result, ancient audiences didn’t expect an author to keep things in strictly chronological order unless he said that is what he was doing.
Thus, when Matthew collects different sayings of Jesus and arranges them into speeches by topic, such as in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7), the original audience would not have understood him as claiming that Jesus literally delivered all these sayings, in this order, on a single occasion. For them, the important thing would have been that Jesus said them, not when he said them.
An awareness that the Evangelists—like other ancient authors—may use topical rather than chronological sequencing thus resolves alleged discrepancies regarding chronology in the Gospels.
Ultimately, there are no contradictions in the Gospels, but showing this requires us to understand what the Evangelists were and weren’t affirming, which requires a knowledge of how ancient literature worked.

Can I Trust the Gospels?

Protestants claim the Bible disproves the Catholic dogma of Mary’s Bodily Assumption in 1 Corinthians 15:22-23. But is this true? Karlo Broussard gives reasons why the answer is no.

Does the Bible Disprove the Assumption?

Jimmy Akin offers a few philosophical and theological counter-arguments to the concepts of karma and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/reincarnation">reincarnation</a>, and cites the letter to the Hebrews as the definitive Christian declaration that we die only once before judgement.
Transcript:
Host: Joshua on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/catholiccom">YouTube</a> Live poses the following question: &#8220;How do we disprove reincarnation through philosophy, if that&#8217;s the best method for resolution?&#8221;
Jimmy: Well, so, it&#8217;s an interesting challenge. There&#8230;reincarnation is something that you can critique on more than one ground. It is possible to mount a philosophical critique of reincarnation, and point out, for example, there are aspects of reincarnation that are potentially problematic.
Like the idea of karma, that whatever you do is going to bounce back on you, and there&#8217;s basically no mercy in the universe, that the universe is a merciless place. And that&#8217;s something that doesn&#8217;t fully appeal to the human heart. The human heart wants to find mercy in the world, and in fact some adherents of Eastern religions talk about mercy and place a value on mercy. But if the universe is fundamentally merciless, per the law of karma, then that would&#8230;then why should they even bother being merciful? Why should that be of value? Well, our hearts tell us that mercy is a value, and so that should tell us that mercy is available in the world, and should be&#8211;there should be some room for cosmic mercy in our worldview as well as cosmic justice.
Now, other forms of the idea of reincarnation may incorporate elements of mercy, so they may not respond to that argument. There are other potential arguments as well. For example, sometimes it&#8217;s proposed, in these religions that believe in reincarnation, that ultimately everybody is going to end up in an ideal spiritual condition, whether that&#8217;s conceived of as Nirvana, or Krishna consciousness, or whatever it may be. But how do you know? How do you know that&#8217;s gonna happen? That&#8217;s&#8211;if the universe is&#8211;it just operates kind of mechanically according to karma, people could descend spiritually as easily as they ascend, so what gives you faith that that people are going to ascend? That&#8217;s not something that falls right out of the concepts involved, and so you can ask for evidence.
Now ultimately, from a Christian point of view, it&#8217;s not a philosophical case against reincarnation that&#8217;s going to be the most convincing. From a Christian point of view, the fact that the idea of reincarnation is not compatible with the Christian revelation is what&#8217;s going to be most convincing. It&#8217;s directly stated in the book of Hebrews that it&#8217;s appointed for man once to die, and then the judgment. So we die once, and then we&#8217;re judged by God. We don&#8217;t die over and over again. That&#8217;s the specific idea that was out there in Greek culture that the author of Hebrews is responding to. He&#8217;s not just saying that out of the blue, he&#8217;s saying that in response to a cultural background where many people did believe in reincarnation. And you find the same theme echoed over and over again in the Church Fathers. You can check out my book &#8220;The Fathers Know Best&#8221; if you want examples of that.
But from a Christian point of view, I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s not the philosophical arguments that are ultimately decisive&#8211;although they can be helpful. I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s the Christian revelation, and so in talking with someone who believes in reincarnation, I would either, if they&#8217;re already a Christian of some sort, even if they&#8217;re at, say, a New Age-er who still has some kind of belief in Christ, I would try to build on that.
I would also say I understand&#8211;if they&#8217;re not, let&#8217;s say they&#8217;re Hindu&#8211;I would say &#8220;I understand and respect your position; here&#8217;s why I don&#8217;t believe in reincarnation, and let&#8217;s talk about the basis of the Christian faith, then. Because if the Christian faith has a good basis, that means you would want to take its teachings&#8211;like resurrection is our fate, not reincarnation&#8211;you&#8217;d want to take those seriously too, so let&#8217;s talk about the reasons why one should take the Christian faith seriously. And to your knowledge, was there ever a time where maybe a Christian group or something grasped on to&#8211;ignored, for example, that admonition from the letter to the Hebrews, and nonetheless believed&#8211;&#8221; You find scattered instances all the way down through history, because, you know, people get crazy ideas that are inconsistent with the teaching of the Church in every age.
And certainly that&#8217;s been true in recent in in recent times. In the last 150 years there has been a lot of interaction between East and West, and various groups have tried to hybridize eastern and western religious concepts, like the Theosophical Society and the New Age movement and things like that. So you do find people who are trying to kind of straddle that east-west divide these days.

How to Disprove Reincarnation

<div>Which animals does the Bible say were present at Jesus’ birth?</div><div>The Gospel writers do not directly mention animals present at Jesus&#8217; birth. Artists have inferred from the infancy narratives that there could have been a donkey (for Mary to ride during the journey to Bethlehem, since she was pregnant), oxen (since the Holy Family took shelter in a stable with a manger, which is used for feeding cattle), sheep (under the care of the shepherds), and camels (for the wise men to ride on their journey to visit the child Jesus). If we include the presentation of Christ in the Temple as part of the infancy narratives, then there were also two birds, either turtledoves or pigeons, which Joseph and Mary gave as their offering.
</div>

Animals at the Manger

It is fairly unusual for Good Shepherd Sunday to coincide with Mother’s Day—a secular American holiday, to be sure, but to say that it has nothing to do with the Church calendar doesn’t really change its influence. Add to this the novelty and rarity of a papal conclave—or at least that’s what it was when I was first preparing this homily; now, of course, we have a new pope!—so we do have quite the competition of ideas striving for our attention.
As usual, though, divine providence can use all these things for our advantage, so I want to begin with something of a bundle of all these thoughts at once before homing in on what is ultimately my theme for the day: that the love of the Good Shepherd fills us with joy even through suffering.
On Wednesday morning I celebrated a Mass for the election of the pope. This was a first. I was—as is usually the case when encountering traditional liturgical texts for the first time in practice—moved by the words: first, the propers taken from the votive Mass of the Holy Spirit: “Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered; let them also who hate him flee before him.” That felt right somehow. And then the collect asked that God would provide to the holy Roman Church a pontiff who might please God by showing “tender care” toward us and by “studying to preserve thy people in safety.” The proper color is red, which is also famously the color for cardinals who by receiving those robes profess their willingness to die for their mother, the Church. That mother gave birth to them in the waters of baptism, which <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/whats-so-important-about-blood-and-water">flowed from the side</a> of Christ. Likewise, they offer themselves in love and in potential suffering in order to “birth,” in a way, that man who will succeed St. Peter as the prince of the apostolic succession.
All of this is to say that motherhood can never be very far from any real consideration of the Faith, whether in our relationship with the Church, our relationship with Our Lady, or our relationship with the sufferings of this life. For motherhood is a kind of intrinsic suffering—and I don’t mean by that that it is all pain, but that it involves willingly tying one’s well-being to the good of another, relinquishing a certain amount of control even over one’s own body.
But back to our readings of the day. In Acts, Paul and Barnabas face persecution over their proclamation of the gospel. But the passage ends with this simple statement that the disciples were “filled with joy.” Peter Kreeft gives the vivid image of this joy being “pumped in from the outside” by the Holy Spirit. In other words, the joy is a gift, not the product of hard work or thinking all the right thoughts. But it does seem to go with the suffering. Often when we look at the martyrs of the early Church in particular, it seems like the more intense the suffering, the more intensely we see the joy.
The scene from Revelation builds on this theme with the striking image of robes being washed white with the blood of the lamb. Maybe, like me, you’ve heard that image all your life, so it’s hard to settle on just how weird it is. You don’t get sparkling white cloth from blood. This isn’t some obscure natural analogy. It is, rather, a supernatural insistence that the right kind of suffering—above all the suffering of Jesus, the lamb—is productive of something very different: new life. Again we see the maternal analogy, one famously employed by Julian of Norwich, suggesting that, by his bodily suffering for us, he, who shares our nature, is like a mother whose suffering results in birth. Through the Patristic meditations on the so-called “baptism of blood,” which is to say martyrdom, we can see the red-white contrast in Revelation as a veiled sacramental affirmation that the baptism of blood is not less than the baptism of water. Both cleanse because both unite us to the sacrifice of Jesus.
All of this language of suffering is important for understanding the image of the Good Shepherd. It is a rich image, and there’s good reason that Holy Church in the modern lectionary finds a way to split up the “Good Shepherd discourse” into three distinct moments for the three-year cycle. In other years, we hear more about how the Shepherd “lays down his life” for the sheep, or how the sheep know his voice in distinction from the other false shepherds. But today we hear this short passage emphasizing the relation between the Father and the Son, along with the simple claim—opposing those looking for much more complicated reasons to reject or belief the Lord—that “I know them and they follow me.”
He knows us. That may seem either comforting or terrifying, but I think the point is that the Lord’s knowledge is inseparable from his love. The idea that God knows us, in a dispassionate intellectual way, is not very difficult to grasp or accept. We live, after all, in a world that far exceeds our understanding, so it is not that hard to imagine someone capable of knowing us better than we know ourselves. But we don’t usually think of knowledge as a kind of love.
In a common twelfth-century debate between knowledge and love, academic intellectual pursuit or affective devotional feeling, it was increasingly common, as we see today, to separate intellect and affect, knowledge and love, as separate and opposing forces, even within the realm of faith: do we, fundamentally, believe in order to understand, or do we believe in order to love?
Perhaps one of the greatest insights in that century comes from the Cistercian monk William of St. Thierry, who says, “Love is itself understanding” (Amor ipse intellectus est). This is at times interpreted as a kind of anti-intellectual escapism by which we claim experience and feeling as a kind of knowledge that trumps reason, but I think that to truly understand William’s aphorism it should also be reversed: Understanding is itself love. True knowledge isn’t some kind of abstract and disconnected compilation of information. It is always a personal encounter with truth, and ultimately an encounter with God himself or God’s creatures.
All of this is to say that when the Good Shepherd knows us, this knowledge is love. He knows us not just in the way that we know a table of figures; he knows us for our own good. Hence, “No one shall snatch them out of my hand.”
But the fact that he holds on to us in knowledge and love doesn’t translate into preserving us from all suffering. Just as Paul and Barnabas suffer, just as the martyrs in Revelation suffer, just as Our Lord and Our Lady themselves suffer, perfect love is known only in suffering.
But this is still a good place to be, in the hand of the Good Shepherd. No, he doesn’t promise to preserve us from all suffering, but he does promise to hold on to us and to love us, to bring us with him to good pasture. That is what we need. We might want to be protected from all suffering, but such protection would mean the abandonment of our humanity, the rejection of our ability to grow and mature.
May we continue to grow under the hand of the Good Shepherd all our days until he brings us at last to his Father’s house. And may our new pope, as the new vicar of that divine Good Shepherd, mold his ministry, his governance, and his love for the flock after the example of his Master.

God Knows You . . . No, Really

Are Miscarried Babies in Heaven?

Tim Staples addresses the common question about Mary&#8217;s experience of pain during Jesus&#8217; birth. He explores scriptural references like Revelation 12 and Genesis 3, offering insights into their interpretation and the Church&#8217;s teaching on Mary&#8217;s childbirth.
Transcript:
It seems to be the general consensus that Mary did not have any pain at all during childbirth.
Correct.
Okay, all right. So I&#8217;ve got&#8230; I found two places in Scripture that I&#8217;m just kind of having a hard time resolving with that. I need you to help me out with that, if you don&#8217;t mind. Sure. So the first one is Revelation 12.1 and 2, sorry. Sure. It talks about the woman with the crown of stars and that she was pregnant and crying out with birth pain to the agony of giving birth. Yes. Which, this seems to be, you know, Marian typology here. You know, child seems to be Jesus.
Yes. All right.
And then the other one is Genesis 3.16. Yes. It&#8217;s actually Eve here. Yes. And God is telling Eve, &#8220;I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing.&#8221;
Yes.
So it seems to insinuate that there&#8217;s some, at least small pain there to begin with.
Real quick now, there&#8217;s two distinct questions here. First, that phrase, &#8220;I will increase your labor pains,&#8221; does not mean there were labor pains before. That&#8217;s a common misunderstanding. It&#8217;s an idiomatic expression that simply means there&#8217;s going to be a lot of pain. Right? That&#8217;s number one. I know it&#8217;s popular among Christians to say, &#8220;increase means there&#8217;s already something there.&#8221; It&#8217;s simply not true. It&#8217;s an idiomatic expression. But number two, when you talk about Revelation 12, one thing I point out, in fact, in my book, &#8220;Behold Your Mother,&#8221; I have a section on this, and in fact, I have more than one section on this. I have a whole appendix in the back of the book on this. Tell you what we&#8217;ll do is send you out a free copy of my book. You can read it, and then we can talk about it, because I do a lot more in the book than I can do here.
But one thing that I point out in the book is that there is no scripture scholar, no Protestant scripture scholar that I know of, and no Catholic scholar that I know of that adheres to the ordinary teaching of the church. And I should note here, this is not infallible teaching that Mary didn&#8217;t have labor pains. It&#8217;s never been defined infallibly, but it is a general teaching of what we call the ordinary magisterium of the church. But no theologian in either of these categories that I mentioned believes that the labor pains of Revelation 12 were caused by the head of a baby passing through the birth canal. Because you can go to all the—and I looked at many different Protestant commentaries on this, and they all believe these are spiritual pains, either of the people of God, the Old Testament people of God, but they understand that these are not literal, physical labor pains. So I say, why does everybody get in a tiff when the Catholic church says, &#8220;These are not literal pains caused by the head of a baby passing through the birth canal&#8221;? These are spiritual pains. And especially when you note that you have Romans chapter 8 verse 23, where St. Paul talks about how all of us labor in birth, right?
Awaiting the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the redemption of our bodies. We labor, and he uses that language of the birth pangs of labor. You have the prophecy of Simeon in Luke chapter 2 verses 34 and 35, where Simeon says to the Blessed Mother that she is going to suffer, right?
And, you know,
spiritual pains. She would be what we call a white martyr because she was going to suffer with her son, and those sufferings begin from before she ever gives birth to Jesus Christ. And so then you also have a prophecy like Isaiah 66 verse 7. And remember, Isaiah 66, this is the same chapter that has the New Covenant prophecy in verse 22 that&#8217;s quoted in Revelation 21, the first couple of verses, right? A new heavens and a new earth come down from heaven. That&#8217;s prophesied right here in Isaiah 66. But there&#8217;s another prophecy, and it says this, &#8220;Hark, an uproar from the city.&#8221; I&#8217;m quoting verse 6, &#8220;A voice from the temple, the voice of the Lord rendering recompense to his enemies.&#8221; And then there&#8217;s a quotation mark. &#8220;Before she was in labor, she gave birth. Before her pain came upon her, she was delivered of a son.&#8221; Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Now, if that&#8217;s not about the Blessed Mother, what in the world is it about? The fact is this is in the context of prophesying the coming of the New Covenant that the prophet says,
&#8220;We are going to see something that has never happened before, a woman giving birth without the payings of labor.&#8221;
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Did Mary Have Birth Pains?

Each year, on Holy Thursday, the Catholic Church celebrates the institution of the priesthood. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus “took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me’” (22:19).
The Catholic Church has taught that Jesus constituted his apostles priests of the New Testament with these words (see Council of Trent, <a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/twenty-second-session.htm">Session 22, Chapter 1</a>). True enough, but these verses do not embody the totality of what happens at ordinations to the priesthood today. At ordinations, the candidates kneel before their bishop as he lays his hands on their heads. The bishop also anoints the candidates’ hands with holy oil, called sacred chrism.
Both the laying on of hands and the anointing with sacred chrism are visible signs of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But did the apostles receive the Holy Spirit at the Last Supper? If it was up to speculation, who knows what we might say? However, Jesus made the answer very clear: he would not send the Holy Spirit until after his resurrection. “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor [that is, the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7, see also John 14:26). And so I propose that the apostles were ordained as priests not in one place in the New Testament. Instead, I see their priestly ordination occurring in three different phases: at the Last Supper, soon after Jesus’ resurrection, and finally at Pentecost.
St. John is often depicted with an eagle in part because his Gospel theologically soars above the others. While the other Gospels are doing algebra, the John’s is doing calculus. Here is one example: John’s Gospel is the only one to record the following encounter between Jesus and his apostles soon after the Resurrection.
<blockquote>The disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained (20:20-23).</blockquote>
John was well aware of the gift of the Holy Spirit as he wrote his Gospel. He emphasizes for us that Jesus wouldn’t send the Holy Spirit to the apostles until after the Resurrection. Then he tells us precisely when Jesus breathed out the Holy Spirit upon them.
If my theory is correct, I am inclined to think of Pentecost as the third and final part of the apostles’ priesthood ordination. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was poured into the apostles so powerfully that the people of Jerusalem heard “the rush of a mighty wind” (Acts 2:2). Because of the powerful preaching of the apostles, and because they spoke in tongues, 3,000 people became Catholics and were baptized that day (v. 41)
Therefore, the apostles experienced three ordination moments. The first occurred at the Last Supper, when they were commanded by Christ to celebrate the Mass. The second occurred soon after the Resurrection, when Christ breathed the Holy Spirit upon them and gave them the authority to forgive sins. The third occurred at Pentecost, when the apostles received the priestly charism of preaching, which resulted in a great number of people entering the Catholic Church through baptism.
Let’s look at three objections. First, what about St. Thomas? He wasn’t with the other apostles when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. But this is not a problem. The Old Testament anticipation of this moment can be found at the time of Moses and the seventy elders. Two were not present when God poured fourth his Spirit temporarily, but these had the spirit of God poured into them anyway (see Num. 11:16-30). The story of Moses shows us that the two elders were the exception that proved the rule. Nor every single Israelite, wherever he might be, receive God’s Spirit; only those two elders did. Therefore, the gathering of the apostles, even without Thomas, was important, but not exclusive of this remaining apostle.
Second, John 20:19-23 says Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon the disciples rather than the apostles. But the first Christians interpret this passage to refer specifically to the apostles, not the disciples in general. For example, the third-century bishop St. Firmilian refers to Jesus breathing “upon the apostles alone.” (See also St. Hippolytus of Rome, St. Cyprian of Carthage, and St. John Chrysostom, all in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Early-Fathers-Three-Set/dp/0814610250/ref=sr_1_2?crid=271SPH4DEYP1B&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xTBZlpdcAMfNx3-piXJF9xwgg6MVdp8aYYmZNLzVb7CdzJodWmbhVwbqoUkSW5xd-vRYknlvLWxOLiXVaenOuhKgeCesKW-jDAcvnylDP1nr5qlWA2ZZznjppFalgB1FUr4qTq0RSa4vojZKOi-BorHt6ugBDGgVrPhGeLMpge3lzyQbWzC_LtNyXspH_orpVzNkX-0Pr3t-1sRG550ixmXi4VFZ44mqRUnlqZklPks.9I5P8UWXrZvoKJJHQLXel31SlDwA-Ar6NoSDX7Sf1XM&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=william+jurgens&amp;qid=1774730084&amp;sprefix=william+jurgens%2Caps%2C209&amp;sr=8-2">Jurgens</a>.)
Closer to our day, St. John Henry Newman became a Catholic because he recognized a beautiful consistency between the teachings of the first Christians and the modern Catholic Church. The first Christians interpreted that Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and gave them the authority to forgive sins. Today, through the ordination liturgy, priests receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and the authority to forgive sins as well. They also receive the authority to celebrate the Mass and the charism of preaching.
Finally, we have our third objection: if Scripture wanted us to interpret these three moments as the institution of the priesthood, wouldn’t it make the point in a more obvious and explicit way? Newman thought otherwise. He <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Newman-Worship-Reverence-Ritual-Selection/dp/1960711202/ref=sr_1_1?crid=8GXLGOKBKBTR&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Pf20Z8KBu4uPMhsAZbi6xmvlQf7ZCmZbjmDdETVjECHGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.ZwWvKvY0V4v8AhXdlRmpMf7cmnoF56z4UT0owaaDa6g&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=Newman+on+Worship%2C+Reverence%2C+and+Ritual&amp;qid=1774494666&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=newman+on+worship%2C+reverence%2C+and+ritual%2Cstripbooks%2C153&amp;sr=1-1">taught</a> that many important teachings in the Bible are attested to in only one or two places.
<blockquote>If it be a good argument against the truth of the Apostolic Succession and similar doctrines, that so little is said about them in Scripture, this is quite as good an argument against nearly all the doctrines which are held by any one who is called a Christian in any sense of the word; as a few instances will show (496).</blockquote>
Newman provided at least two liturgical customs widely accepted today: communal worship and worshiping on Sunday rather than Saturday. Certainly, these teachings do not contradict the Bible. But though there are hints of these teachings found there, the Bible doesn’t explicitly command that the new covenant worship should be on Sundays, or as a church community.
In conclusion, my theory is that the apostles’ priestly ordination occurred in three phases. Each phase has been incorporated into the modern rite of priestly ordination. Priests receive the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands by their bishop and through the anointing of their hands with sacred chrism. This special anointing confers the authority to celebrate the Mass, the charism of preaching, and the authority to forgive sins.
As we celebrate Holy Thursday, may we remember to pray for our priests, who have been entrusted by God with a lofty mission.

How the Apostles Became Priests

I enjoy the challenge of <a href="https://youtu.be/CLlZJrSMOo8?si=wQCg-JN9Nn4v_PEi">engaging</a> sophisticated <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/5PF1JgXOKDQ?si=FlCpPWw6dVtfmo2X">defenses of atheism</a> and critiques of Christianity, but sometimes the low-hanging fruit tastes too good to resist. Here’s one meme that at first I thought was a Christian parody of atheism:

Wow. Nobody tell these people about Alexander the Great or his father Phillip II, who lived in the fourth century before Christ. I mean, isn’t Alex a name from the twentieth century? Of course, his Greek name was Alexandros and his father’s name was Phillipos, from which we get the Latinized (and eventually Anglicized) versions of their names.
This happens when you transfer a name in one alphabet to a different alphabet or language. So the English name John comes from the middle English Jan, which comes from the French Jean, the medieval Latin Joannes, and the Greek Ionnaes, and finally the Hebrew Yehochanan which means “God is gracious.”
Here’s a similar meme I came across:
<img class=" wp-image-139122 aligncenter" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/idiot-atheist-meme-2-300x155.jpg" alt="" width="381" height="197" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/idiot-atheist-meme-2-300x155.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/idiot-atheist-meme-2.jpg 720w" sizes="(max-width: 381px) 100vw, 381px"/>
The Greek word Paul uses in Romans 15:28 is Spania, which refers to a region of the Roman Empire called Hispania where modern-day Spain is located. The Latin vulgate calls it Hispaniam. We use the English word Spain because it is the English equivalent of the Greek term Paul used to refer to a part of the Roman Empire.
Finally, even if this were an out-of-place reference to the medieval kingdom of Spain, that would disprove atheism. We have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_46">third-century manuscripts of Romans</a>, which proves it was written over a thousand years before the kingdom of Spain came into existence. Therefore, Paul could have only known about this future kingdom through divine revelation.
Of course, that’s a dumb argument a Christian should never use, even if he’s confronted with dumb memes atheists should never use.

Two Dumb Atheist Memes

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday, one of those more recent observations less familiar to those of us who came into the Catholic Church from Anglicanism and other traditions. The title was only instituted in 2000 by Pope St. John Paul II, at the same time that he canonized St. Faustina, the Polish nun whose visions gave rise to it.
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I say that the “title” is new because in many ways very little has changed about the day. We still hear the gospel reading about St. Thomas which had previously been read on this second Sunday of Easter, or the Octave Day of Easter, since time immemorial. And while the secondary readings were revised in the 1970 Lectionary, they were not changed in with the name in 2000 because they didn’t need to be changed: they already gave a clear focus on the Divine Mercy. So while on one level it is somewhat unusual to promulgate in a formal way something stemming from a private revelation, in this case the revelation’s promotion of this celebration was endorsed by the Holy Father because it so obviously harmonized with public revelation. In other words, St. Faustina merely provided a set of popular vocabulary for what we already knew to be true: that in the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection the floodgates to the mercy of God are open for sinners.
Let us just note briefly the way this theme of mercy suffuses our readings for the day. In Acts, we see the Lord’s mercy towards the sick and afflicted extended, as he promised, to the ministry of his apostles. In this rare papal interregnum we might note that, while the papacy itself is not somehow a guaranteed locale for the miraculous, we see even in the very earliest years of the Church the centrality of Peter’s presence as a sign of Christ’s own enduring presence for his people. In Revelation, St. John sees a vision of Christ in glory dressed as a high priest, which is to say a dispenser of the divine mercy. In the gospel we see first Christ’s implicit mercy to the disciples who abandoned him—he shows up and starts giving them gifts without even waiting for them to repent. We then see his general dispensation of mercy to sinners in the institution of the sacrament of penance — the power of the apostles to absolve sin. Finally we see the Lord’s particular mercy towards St. Thomas who requires extra proofs of the Lord’s resurrection. As St. Augustine reminds us, the fact that the Lord’s wounds remain, when they could easiliy have been healed, is itself proof of his mercy: “For the healing of doubting hearts, the marks of the wounds were still preserved.”
Perhaps the greatest mercy, though, centers on the Lord’s words to St. Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen and believed.” How is this a mercy? It is a mercy because, as I pointed out last week, the Lord does not force his way. Faith is necessary, which is to say it is necessary to make a choice, to move of one’s own will towards God. God desires to save us, not to destroy our will. He gives us ample evidence for belief – indeed in some cases this is quite dramatic, as it is for Thomas. But ultimately he will not force the question, because what he wants for us is a real communion, not some kind of necessary servile submission.
Chrysostom argues, “If any one then says, Would that I had lived in those times, and seen Christ doing miracles! let him reflect, Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
One of the subtler authenticities of St. Faustina’s revelation of the Divine Mercy is just this reminder of the function of miracles and private revelation. Sometimes, like with Thomas, the Lord just gives us what we need. The new description of the Divine Mercy in the 20th century wasn’t necessary in the way that the death and resurrection of Christ were necessary, but I think we might dare to say that it was necessary in the way that the revelation to St. Thomas was necessary — which is to say not strictly necessary, but an act of generosity and mercy and love.
And this brings us back to the subject of miracles in our reading from Acts, because private revelation is one modern version of the miracles we see in the apostolic age. Why didn’t the apostles — or really, why didn’t Jesus himself, just heal everyone? There is always this scandalous question embedded in the reality of miracles, whether it’s a miraculous healing or a miraculous message or event. We hear about these things and we want to make miracles and revelation into a kind of technology where we can guarantee results outside of the usual messy problems of human will and history. In other words, why didn’t the Lord, or his apostolic successors, just heal everybody? Especially in the Lord’s conquest over death in Easter it remains something of a mystery as to why anyone dies at all. Don’t we confess in all our hymns that Christ’s resurrection has destroyed death?
Again, it all comes down to the Divine Mercy. God doesn’t just fix everything that is fixable for the same reason that parents don’t do all their kids work for them, that a teacher doesn’t just do whatever the students want. He knows what he is about; he knows what is good for us better than we do. And it turns out that what is good for us is some miracles, some special revelation, but not so much that we forget the need for freedom and love. The Good News isn’t that we dissolve our humanity but that God care so much for our freedom that he wants to let us choose him and he will keep giving us opportunities to do so even when we might think it is crazy.
This is an unavoidable theme from Scripture and Tradition, and another occasion for Easter rejoicing: As much as we might want to limit the Divine Mercy, we need to settle on the fact that it is infinite. God’s nature is always to have mercy. When we accept this great and undeserved grace we can fully embrace the joy of the season.
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Divine Mercy and Miracles

How are We going to be Resurrected?

Karlo Broussard, author of The New Relativism, answers a caller who asks if people who never knew about Jesus have the chance to be saved.
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Transcript:
I have a question: &#8220;How can a person who never knew Jesus Christ get to heaven?&#8221;
Well, one way in which that could take place is if God sends a prophet to miraculously be present to that person who never knew Jesus and proclaim Jesus to that person, and that person know Jesus right before death, accept Jesus, and go to heaven. Another way would be for God, by way of a miracle and divine power, to infuse knowledge within the mind of that person who never knew Jesus, to know about Jesus and be able to make a choice whether to follow Jesus or not. And if follow Jesus, believe in Jesus, ascend to Jesus, and die in that belief and friendship with Jesus, then heaven would be His. 
Or another way would be in some mysterious way that we do not know, whereby God is able to give the grace of salvation to someone who is not responsible for his or her ignorance of Jesus Christ. For that person, if that person is come honestly seeking truth in the ways that he or she knows how, and is living in accord with that truth according to the capabilities that they have, responding to whatever temporary helps God is giving that person, even though that person doesn&#8217;t have explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ, it is possible that God can communicate the grace of salvation to that person. Because ultimately, Tom, God knows whether that person in the heart of hearts, whether that person is fundamentally oriented towards truth, if oriented towards truth and goodness, then ultimately oriented towards God himself. And if that is the case, and that person has not made any positive act of the will at the moment of death to oppose truth or goodness, as he or she knows truth and goodness, then that person is not positively opposed to God, not positively rejecting God in any way. And so God could possibly communicate the graces of salvation to that person, knowing the inner movements of the heart and the mind, and whether the heart and the mind is ultimately ordered to him who is truth and goodness itself. And so these would be some ways, possible ways, in which a person who never knew about Jesus could actually go to heaven. 
And keep in mind this, lest there be any confusion, whatever grace that person is saved by, the grace that would perfect the soul and give it, you know, the grace that would make it rightly ordered to God as its supernatural end, that grace would come from Jesus Christ and no other. Since our Lord has said in John 14.6, &#8220;I am the way, the truth, and the life.&#8221;

Can You Be Saved Without Knowing Jesus?

<div>What are the suggested readings for a funeral Mass?</div><div>The readings for a funeral Mass may be found in the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/lectionary">Lectionary</a> in the volume that has the Ritual Masses and Votive Masses. Often a parish has a commercially produced booklet that provides a selection of readings for a funeral along with other possible choices for the Mass. These booklets rarely give all the available options. It would be good to ask to see the actual Lectionary, rather than just the planning pamphlet if you want to have the greatest selection possible.
All this being said, letting the family choose the readings is a courtesy. It is actually the right of the priest or deacon celebrant of the funeral to choose the readings, since he will base his homily on them. So, if one is given the opportunity to choose the readings, one might politely choose them while making clear that one is happy with any choice the celebrant may prefer.
Another point, added here for the fun of it: those reading at the funeral should read from the actual Lectionary rather than off sheets of paper or from pamphlets. This is due to the reverence due to the word of God. If such sheets have to be used, at least they should be in some nice, Lectionary-like binder. The best practice is to photocopy the readings from the lectionary that will be used at the Mass and have the readers practice the readings from those. Then the text in the lectionary will appear exactly as they practiced it, but they won&#8217;t have to bring a floppy or folded piece of paper to the ambo, which would be something like bringing up the bread on a paper plate at the offertory.
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Readings for a Funeral Mass

When does a fetus become a ‘person?’

Many Catholics are unaware that Holy Thursday commemorates the institution of Christ’s ministerial priesthood. Perhaps this is due to the absence of Christ explicitly ordaining the apostles in the Last Supper narratives. Are there clues that suggest such an ordination? Karlo Broussard gives the answer.
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Transcript:
Most Catholics are aware that Holy Thursday commemorates Jesus’ Last Supper as the First Mass. But what some miss is that Holy Thursday also celebrates Jesus’ institution of the ministerial priesthood.
When you read the Last Supper narratives in the Synoptic Gospels you don’t find Jesus ordaining the apostles. You’re left wondering, “Where does the Catholic Church get off thinking that Jesus made the apostles priests at the Last Supper?”
There are three clues that support this claim.
First, Jesus commands the apostles to “do this remembrance of me.” The Greek verb for “do,” poieo, can be translated literally as “offer” in the sense of offering a sacrifice, as it is in in Leviticus 9:7 of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament).
Now, offering sacrifice is a priestly function. Therefore, Jesus’ command to offer the Last Supper as a sacrifice suggests that Jesus made his apostles ministerial priests.
A second clue is the washing of the apostles’ feet in John 13:5. This calls to mind the ritual washings of Aaron and his sons, which included the washing of their feet, at their priestly ordination in Exodus 40.
Finally, Jesus says in John 13:8 that the apostles could not take “part” in him unless they were washed. The Greek word for “part,” meros, echoes Numbers <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdGd59Yj8r4&amp;t=1100s">18:20</a> and Deuteronomy 10:9, which refer to the “portion” (Greek—meris) that Aaron and the Levites have in God as priests.
So, did Jesus make the apostles priests at the Last Supper? I think these exegetical points give us sufficient reason to answer yes.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Did Jesus Make The Apostles Priests?

<div>Why did Nicodemus bring such a large amount of spices to the tomb?</div><div>As with the sinful woman who anointed the Lord&#8217;s feet in the house of Simon, the amount used was not dictated by practical necessity but was a sign of the honor due and given to the Lord himself. Forty pounds were used for the funeral of the Rabbi Gamaliel, so a hundred pounds (or more likely about seventy-five of our pounds) would be a sign of extreme veneration of the person of Jesus. This excess is a sign both of the love of Our Lord&#8217;s followers and of his surpassing dignity.
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Why Did Nicodemus Bring So Much Spice?

The gospel is central to the Christian faith, but few people realize how the Bible itself understands the concept.
Previously, I showed that—based on passages in the Old Testament—the New Testament understands the gospel to be the message that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-does-scripture-say-about-the-gospel">the time has arrived</a> for God to inaugurate his kingdom and begin ruling in the world.
Once you realize this, you find echoes of the gospel in other passages that don’t even use the term. For example, if God’s kingdom is now arriving, who has been ruling the world up to now?
There are two answers to this question. One is the human kingdoms that have ruled the world thus far and oppressed God’s people. But now these kingdoms are being supplanted by the kingdom of God. In Revelation, we read,
<blockquote>Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (11:15).</blockquote>
So the kingdom of the world has been replaced by the kingdom of God and Christ. But this announcement—like the gospel itself—is not coming out of the blue. It’s also predicted in the Old Testament. For example, the prophet Zechariah predicts that there will be a day when “the Lord will be king over all the earth” (Zech. 14:9).
In Daniel, we read of a series of pagan kingdoms that oppress God’s people, and then we are told,
<blockquote>And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever (Dan. 2:44).</blockquote>
Later, we read about a similar line of pagan kingdoms, and we learn about the role of the Son of Man in their overthrow. Daniel says,
<blockquote>I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (7:13-14).</blockquote>
The idea of the pagan kingdoms of the world being replaced by God’s kingdom through the Son of Man—or Christ—is one of the expectations established in the Old Testament.
However, the pagan kingdoms of the world are not the only answer to the question of who was ruling before the time of God’s kingdom. The other answer is found on the angelic level—in the invisible world that operates behind the visible, earthly kingdoms.
Scripture gives us glimpses of that invisible world, such as when John tells us, “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).
And when Jesus was tested in the desert, we read:
<blockquote>The devil took [Jesus] up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’” (Luke 4:5-8).</blockquote>
So God had allowed the devil to have spiritual control on the angelic level of all the nations of the earth. And to test Jesus, the devil offered him all these nations in exchange for worship, but Jesus knew that this was not God’s plan and rejected the offer.
Consequently, John tells us, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).
And in John’s Gospel, as Jesus is preparing to go to the cross, he says,
<blockquote>Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (12:31-32).</blockquote>
Thus, Hebrews says that Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that
<blockquote>through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil (2:14).</blockquote>
All this forms the conceptual background to the New Testament understanding of the gospel. It’s the good news that—although the devil has reigned in the world up to now, and there have been a series of pagan empires that have oppressed God’s people—the time has finally arrived for God to come and begin reigning through his kingdom.
This happens because his Son defeats the powers of darkness by his atoning death on the cross and by his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, where he now sits and reigns while the final defeat of the powers of darkness and death is implemented. As St. Paul says:
<blockquote>As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:22-26).</blockquote>
We thus see that there is a central role for Jesus as the Son of God in the New Testament’s conception of the gospel, and that’s not surprising.
Of the more than thirty references you’ll turn up if you search for the “gospel of” or the “good news of,” they don’t all refer to God and the kingdom. Eleven of them—or about a third—refer to variations on the gospel “of Christ,” “of Jesus Christ,” “of our Lord Jesus,” and “of his Son” (Mark 1:1; Rom. 1:9, 15:19; 1 Cor. 9:12; 2 Cor. 2:12, 9:13, 10:14; Gal. 1:7; Phil. 1:27; 1 Thess. 3:2; 2 Thess. 1:8).
In addition, the four documents about the life of Christ are called Gospels—a usage that dates back to the apostolic age.
So Jesus has a very prominent place in the New Testament understanding of the gospel, but this is not the original way it was conceptualized. The Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus all initially announced the gospel as the arrival of God’s kingdom, and this is how it was publicly announced for years—all through Christ’s earthly ministry.
Only Jesus fully understood the role he would play in bringing that kingdom about, he disclosed this only gradually, and even his own disciples did not understand it until he rose from the dead.
Therefore, the role of the Son in the gospel was a secondary announcement. It was added to the original, primary understanding of the gospel of God and his kingdom at a later stage to explain how that kingdom would come about. That’s why the earliest announcements of the gospel put all the focus on God and his kingdom, and the announcements of the gospel in connection with the Son were all given later.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is thus the announcement that the time for God to inaugurate his kingdom has arrived, and the secondary proclamation is that this kingdom will be implemented through God’s Son.
But notice that there’s still something missing from the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel. The passages where the New Testament refers to the gospel just do not focus on individuals. They don’t focus on you, your sin, your forgiveness, you being delivered from hell, or you being united with God in heaven.
That’s not what we find in these passages, and that understanding reframes the gospel away from the New Testament’s conception to present the gospel as if it were about what happens to individuals like you and me. To put it bluntly, the gospel is not about us. It’s about God, his Son, and his kingdom.
Of the more than thirty references to the “gospel of” and the “good news of,” only one of them explicitly refers to salvation. In that passage, Paul says,
<blockquote>In [Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13).</blockquote>
Here Paul identifies “the word of truth” with “the gospel of your salvation.” Salvation is one of the implications of the gospel for us. It is because of the gospel that we can be saved. But a single verse that mentions this fact does not radically change the focus of the New Testament in how its authors think of the gospel.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is still that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived. The secondary proclamation of the gospel is still that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And the fact that we can be saved through the Son is an addendum to these proclamations of the gospel, but it is not the essence of the gospel itself.
We thus see that there are a lot of misconceptions about the gospel—at least if people are taking their own definitions to be what the New Testament means by the word. I covered many of these alternate conceptions <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/misunderstanding-the-gospel">here</a>.
Different groups can use terms however they like, but they are not representing the New Testament understanding of the gospel if they say it is equivalent to
<ul>
<li>the whole of Scripture,</li>
<li>the whole of Christian doctrine,</li>
<li>the whole of Christ’s teachings,</li>
<li>Lutheranism’s idea of anything that preaches God’s grace and forgiveness,</li>
<li>the distinctive doctrines of Full Gospel Pentecostals,</li>
<li>the distinctive doctrines of Calvinism,</li>
<li>the idea of justification by faith alone,</li>
<li>the idea of justification by grace alone, or even</li>
<li>the idea that God has saved us—as individuals—through the death of his Son since we could not save ourselves.</li>
</ul>
No, the core of the gospel, beginning with texts in the Old Testament, is that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived and all opposing powers will be overthrown. The elaboration of the gospel is that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And a happy consequence of that fact is that we can be saved through his Son.
The New Testament’s understanding is not about us as individuals and how we can benefit. The gospel is not about us. Instead, the good news is about what God and his Son are doing in the world, what they’re doing to their enemies—like the devil and the pagan world order. How we can benefit as individuals, how we can get on board with God’s plan, is a consequence of the gospel, but it’s not the essence of the good news.
So what do we need to do to benefit from the good news? Jesus himself told us:
<blockquote>The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15).</blockquote>
Or, as St. Peter put it on the day of Pentecost:
<blockquote>Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).</blockquote>

How People Get the Gospel Wrong

“Put not your trust in princes; in the children of men in whom there is no salvation.”
When King David penned these lines 3,000 years ago, a man might have been excused for looking to his ruler to see to it that his lot in life was not too severe; that justice prevailed in the kingdom; and, perhaps, that some form of higher civilization might be cultivated by royal example or even decree.
Throughout antiquity there have been Herods, Neros, and Caligulas, who exploited their offices for gain or pleasure or both, but there were also Octavians, Trajans, and Aurelians, whose actions were—in the main—motivated by a desire to serve the common good. As Christian Europe took shape, monarchs on the order of Charlemagne, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Phillip II of Spain aimed to unite their governments with the government of God. Some even achieved sanctity along the way: Alfred the Great, who translated Boethius into English; Edward the Confessor, who built the first Westminster Abbey; and Louis IX, the heroic crusader king who also labored to create a just economy for the people of France.
Alas, our own age does not produce the likes of a Charlemagne or a St. Louis and has not for some time. And yet, at the moment in history when we should most be heeding the psalmist’s words not to put our trust in princes, Americans seem to invest no end of hope in today’s version of a prince: the politician.
G.K. Chesterton recognized this trap a more than century ago when he wrote,
<blockquote>At present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man&#8217;s life is the same under a Sultan or a Senate, under Nero or St. Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children will not, to the end of the last evening.</blockquote>
My friends, the crises of our age are cultural and, in the end, spiritual. Saint Paul’s stirring final chapter of his letter to the Ephesians settles the question:
<blockquote>For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.</blockquote>
On this day, many Americans, including a lot of faithful Catholics, will look in the ballot box for solutions to our nation’s ills. To be sure, political battles must be fought, and fought hard, and our votes must be informed by Church teaching. But we must also recognize that these battles are just reflections of the profound and widening spiritual divide that threatens to destroy our nation, and that it is within cultural institutions that the battle for the soul of America must be waged.
What are these institutions? First among them is marriage. And then the family. The family is the natural institution without which there can be no civilization. Marriage pre-exists the Church and all human society.
Next is the Church. Because the Incarnation is nothing less than the moment where God touches human history, the Church is necessary to civilization. There is no going back, and all things in human experience must be transformed in Christ. These include the next set of cultural institutions through which our society lives and breathes—or in which it suffocates, as the case may be. I am speaking of the primary and secondary schools, the colleges, universities, and seminaries. Because of the Incarnation, there can be no complete education that is not Christian education.
Not to be forgotten are the institutions of art, architecture, music, and even popular culture: the film and recording studios, the publishing houses and the presses. Every song we hear or film we see, every book or poem we read (if you are not reading poems, shame on you), every image, painted or photographed upon which we gaze, and the buildings in which we live, work, and worship—all of these have the power to edify, to delight, to inspire. Or they have the power to corrupt us.
Our society lives through marriage and the family, the Church, the schools and universities, and through all of the organs of high and popular culture. When these things are in good health, Christian civilization can thrive. When they are weakened or corrupted, we move toward chaos instead. And such is the condition of our land and of her people today. The solution—indeed, the only solution—is the flourishing of a vibrant Catholic culture on these shores. And we cannot bring forth such a culture through elections or legislation.
How can we, you ask? Nobody ever likes the answer to this question, because none of these suggestions is revolutionary. But trust me, revolutions are bad. Even John Lennon knew that. Instead of revolution, we want restoration—of a Christian polity.
Find a reverent liturgy and assist at it daily. Pray Lauds and Vespers. Get married, or become a priest or religious. After you get married, have children and stay married. Learn Latin. Memorize poems. Read Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Manzoni, Chesterton, Tolkien, and Undset. Read Mother Goose to your young children and Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, and Captain’s Courageous to your older ones. Throw your television in the street and drive over it with your car and then set your car on fire. Unplug from social media. Learn a musical instrument. Plant a garden.
Whatever you do, don’t obsess over polls, or over which prince inhabits the White House or sits in your state capitol. There is no salvation to be found there.

‘Put Not Your Trust in Princes’

<div>What do I say to parents who tell me they will let their child decide on baptism?</div><div>It seems that the parents need instruction in the faith, or that their own faith is not strong. You should encourage them to go to Mass each Sunday and pray with the child at home, even if they are not having the child baptized. How will the child decide if he or she has never been taught anything about the Faith at all? This is just a recipe for having no religion and being ignorant, and ignorance is not a good way to prepare to make such an important decision.
I doubt, however, that these parents know very much about the Faith. Encourage them cheerfully and maybe they will come around.
</div>

Let a Child Decide About Baptism?

Easter Morning Mass celebrated by Fr. Paul Check at St. John Fisher Seminary.

Easter Morning Mass: April 12, 2020

<div>Is fasting on Sundays prohibited by some Church law or is it just not recommended generally?</div><div>The reason fasting on Sundays is not usually done is that fasting is generally considered a penitential exercise, and penitential exercises are normally lifted on a solemnity (which Sunday always is). This is why every Lent many people ask if whatever they gave up for Lent can be partaken of on the Sundays of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/lent">Lent</a>. Each Sunday is also a miniature celebration of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/easter">Easter</a> Sunday, which therefore is considered a day of celebration and rejoicing rather than penance.
However, that being said, personal spiritual fasting is not prohibited on Sundays. Catholics are free to fast in various ways in their personal spiritual journey, though it is recommended that they do so in consultation with a spiritual director.
</div>

Is Fasting on Sundays Prohibited?

In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on three details relevant for apologetical discussions found in the first reading and the Gospel for this upcoming Sunday’s Feast of the Transfiguration. The topics that these details relate to are Jesus’ Divinity and the intercession of the saints.
Readings:<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080623.cfm"> https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080623.cfm</a>
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday</a>

The Transfiguration

The Old Testament struggled with articulating a theology of the afterlife during most of its formation. It initially came at the problem through the lens of justice. God is both good and just. Many people are neither. Sheol, the abode of the dead, is not heaven: it is the place to which all the dead go, a kind of shadowy (hence the word “shades”), inchoate existence. So, at first, the Old Testament tried to do justice in this world: God rewards the good with long life, health, and children. Only the bad die young (and suffer, which is why the Sanhedrin wanted a certain thirty-three-year-old to hang on a tree. It’s also why the first reaction of the apostles to the man born blind is “Who sinned? Him or his parents?”
As nice as that theory sounded, experience did not bear it out. Job and Qoheleth attest to that. At that point, it became a matter of faith. Since you weren’t there to counsel God when he laid out the world, trust him to do what is right and just, even if you don’t understand it.
Good advice, but not wholly satisfying.
The Old Testament finally began to shape a clear notion of the afterlife only with the Book of Wisdom, a book that was written maybe a century before Christ—i.e., at the very end of the Old Testament. Wisdom articulates an understanding of eternal life by starting with not justice (though its vision of reward and punishment is eminently just), but love. If what binds us to God is love, it assures us of life because God is faithful and would not let love aim for the futile. Love by its nature seeks to endure. Would God—who is Love—make that an illusion?
I mention this because it leads to a great film you should (re)watch: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.14b465e1-ad00-f78d-9d2e-417bf079ecf0?autoplay=0&amp;ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb">The Jeweler’s Shop</a>. Based on Karol Wojtyła (Pope St. John Paul II)’s play of the same name, it’s “a meditation on the sacrament of matrimony, passing into a drama.” That’s often what happens to marriage, too.
The film version of “The Jeweler’s Shop” takes liberties with the play’s storyline. That’s largely due to two factors: the demands of a worldwide audience and the context of the original play. More concrete detail is needed to make the story clear to an audience of global viewers. And, although Wojtyła wrote “The Jeweler’s Shop” in 1960, I have the impression he remained under the influence of the “Rhapsodic Theater,” a theatrical form which accented the primacy of the word, in which he participated during the War. A word-focused play does not readily transfer to visual film.
“The Jeweler’s Shop” examines three marriages. Teresa and Andrzej deeply love each other. He dies shortly after their marriage, but not before they conceive a son, Krzysztof. Anna’s and Stefan’s love is initially more superficial and decays into a loveless marriage. They have a daughter, Monika. Krzysztof and Monika eventually marry, bringing to their marriage the baggage of their parents’ marriages, the marriages they have known.
The liberties of the film version of “The Jeweler’s Shop” do not, in the end, interfere with Wojtyła’s original storyline. The changes: Anna and Stefan escape World War II in Poland—in which Andrzej dies—by emigrating to Canada. They eventually sponsor Teresa and Krzysztof, where she carries on a profession as a pianist. Monika and Krzysztof are college-age: she an aspiring ballerina, he a college student.
The Jeweler, played by Burt Lancaster, symbolizes God. Fr. Adam, who is the first of the protagonists to be seen with the Jeweler, is clearly God’s representative. The young people—like the students Wojtyła used to take on hikes—fall in love, albeit with different motivations. Andrzej seeks someone who completes him. Stefan wants to impress Anna and would not necessarily have been bothered if she had slept with him. Andrzej grapples with the “crossroads” that the decision to marry Teresa involves; one gets the impression Stefan runs into or away from things most of his life. Watch how both men deal with women during the forest hike: Stefan ostentatiously “assists” them to descend a hill; Andrzej’s watchful eye is less focused on how she sees him than on what she needs.
I would highlight three scenes in the film: Andrzej’s proposal, Anna’s attempt to sell her wedding ring, and Krzysztof’s proposal.
Teresa and Andrzej walk the streets of Old Town Kraków when they both look at the rings in the Jeweler’s shop window. For a moment, their mutual gaze is reflected in the window along with the Jeweler looking at them—but only for a moment: God leaves room for our decision. Andrzej’s way of proposing marriage is unusual (but faithful to the text): “Will you be my life’s companion?” Before she answers, Teresa runs into an adjacent store, where she quickly buys white, high-heeled shoes. Upon returning to Andrzej, she makes clear that his question required her to “be as tall as you” to face the demands of a lifetime. But before she assents, she asks why he wants to marry her, and he makes clear that, while there were “many other choices,” grace made clear that this woman was she who completed him. Every word in that scene deserves reflection.
Much later, when Anna finds herself in a loveless marriage to Stefan, she tries to sell her ring. She takes it to a jeweler, who declines to buy it because he says it weighs nothing: “Your husband must be alive,” in which case neither ring without the other weighs anything, because they are not “the weight of metal, but the proper weight of man.” Shocked and perhaps angered, she rushes down the street, apparently ready to throw herself at any man who exhibits interest in her. A car trails her. The male driver invites her to “join him.” She reaches for the door handle, but, when she looks again, she sees not the man who flirted with her, but the face of Stefan, from which she recoils. Moments later, when she encounters Fr. Adam, he makes clear to her that “the Bridegroom could have no other face for you” and challenges her, despite her crushed faith, that love is not a moment, but a lifetime and can be rekindled.
Monika and Krzysztof labor under the heritage of their parents’ marriages. Krzysztof suffers from the lack of a male image at home and a mother whose fate was loneliness. Monika labors under the form of her parents’ loveless marriage. She initially repulses Krzysztof’s proposal, which—together with Anna’s encounter on the street—gets the elders talking. Krzysztof, while giving her space, also recognizes that life cannot be indeterminate: he proposes again, this time saying they should marry in Kraków, making clear that he will not leave her and that his having given her time shows he cares. But “time’s up.” “I want more,” says Monika—meaning more than what her parents have—but takes the risk of love and says, finally, “Yes.”
The play grapples with the fact that man is “poor,” with a limited life but a desire for love that lasts. For Wojtyła, the only way to resolve that paradox is to make a choice, to take a risk and, in freedom, pick love, which is what takes us to God. Because, as the Jeweler observes in the film’s final shot, as he closes the door of his shop (just as the Bridegroom calls time on the virgins), “the future depends on love.”

That Time John Paul II Wrote a Play

<div>If a man is unable to climax before a couple stops having sexual intercourse, for whatever reason, is this sinful?</div><div>No, but this is a rather unlikely scenario, and he should see his doctor. We assume, of course, that the couple is validly married.
</div>

Husband Unable to Complete Marital Act

<div>Is it true that there was a time when only bishops are allowed to validly celebrate the Eucharist? If yes, what happened that made the priests permitted to celebrate it validly? Why don’t we allow deacons also?</div><div>Yes, the period between the first Easter Sunday when only the original 11 apostles/bishops (see CCC 860-62) ministered to the time when the first priest was ordained by one of them as a priest, so that he too could offer the Sacrifice of the Mass. That period cannot be pinpointed with historical precision.
Regarding deacons and celebrating Mass, they were and are not ordained to serve as priests who offer the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, but rather as ministerial servants for the larger Christian community (see CCC 1569-71; Acts 6:1-6).
</div>

Time When Only Bishops Celebrated the Eucharist/Mass?

Jimmy Akin explains how we can say that Jesus, who shares in the eternal Divine nature, took on a finite, created body in the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/incarnation">Incarnation</a>.
Transcript:
Host: We go to Russell in Traverse City, Michigan. Russell, you&#8217;re watching on YouTube! Russell, you are on with Jimmy Akin.
Caller: Thank you so much, guys. First of all I wanna say, Jimmy, that Matt Fradd and I hung out a while ago, a few years ago, and he said how much you and I would get along because of our love for comic books, so I&#8217;m super excited right now.
Jimmy: Is that a pun? &#8220;Super excited?&#8221;
Caller: It&#8217;s totally a pun, you&#8217;re welcome. I just want to try to wrap my head around something, and I&#8217;m so glad I get to talk to you cuz I&#8217;m a big fanboy.
Jimmy: Another comic book term.
Caller: Yeah, exactly! So, I&#8217;m trying to wrap my head around God being eternal, Jesus being God, and the fact that He was incarnate, and I&#8217;m trying to, like, it seems to me&#8211;and I am totally open to being wrong&#8211;that His human nature is not his Eternal nature, so I&#8217;m trying to reconcile, like, did He have a body before He had a body in time? Or how&#8211;what&#8217;s the language I can use to explain that Jesus took on a body and that body is not something He had before He came into time? And so if you have anything to help it would be greatly appreciated.
Jimmy: Yeah, sure. So it doesn&#8217;t make any sense to talk about having a body that&#8217;s outside of time, because bodies are created entities, and they therefore occupy time, like all created entities.
And so God&#8211;being uncreated&#8211;in His Divine Nature does not have a body. He exists in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/eternity">the Eternal &#8220;now,&#8221;</a> which is both spaceless and timeless, it exists outside of space and time; and actually, the way the Church conceives of eternity, it&#8217;s just another word for God Himself, He&#8217;s spaceless and timeless. And that means that every moment in history is equally present to God.
Now, at some moments in history, if you were, let&#8217;s say, way before the time of Christ, a thousand years before the time of Christ, then in 1000 BC, God did not have a body in time, because He had not yet incarnated. Then if you advance forward, and you get up to, let&#8217;s say, the year 3 BC, the year that the Incarnation likely happened at Jesus&#8217; conception, then, all of a sudden, God has a body in time in that year. And then as you move forward in time, He&#8211;because Jesus continues to be incarnate&#8211;He has a body at every moment in time after that point.
So from God&#8217;s eternal perspective, God&#8211;outside of time&#8211;God has always been incarnate, starting in the year, let&#8217;s say, 3 BC and moving forward, but not previously. From God&#8217;s point of view, that&#8217;s the way it is now and always has been and always will be, because there&#8217;s no passage of time where God is. In the Eternal &#8220;now,&#8221; where God exists, God has always been incarnate in 3 BC or so and forward, but not previously.
Caller: And so does that mean that like, so, in the eternal now, was&#8211;totally&#8211;I feel like I&#8217;m on track here&#8211;so like, at 3 BC there was the human nature, hundred percent human, hundred percent divine, that all came together in that time period, and then from then on out He has both&#8230;then I have to say that union exists.
Jimmy: So Jesus&#8217;s divine nature has always existed, and his human nature came into existence somewhere around 3 BC, and has continuously been united with his Divine Nature since then.
Caller: This was really super helpful, thank you so much.

How Exactly Did Jesus Take on a Body?

Until the reform of the calendar in 1969, Latin Rite Catholics observed a period of preparation for Lent: the three Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima. The names are derived from Latin numbers: Lent is quadragesima, “forty,” septuagesima “seventy,” sexagesima “sixty,” and quinquagesima “fifty.” It is a (<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/lent-is-old-english-for-spring">very rough</a>) countdown to Easter.
As in Lent, during this period, the liturgical color is violet, and the readings and prayers refer to our need for conversion and penance. This season is actually older than Ash Wednesday; it is discussed in the writings of Pope St. Gregory the Great, who died in the year 604. There is a similar pre-Lent season in the calendars of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cal/living-lent-well">Eastern churches</a>; it was preserved by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and in some Lutheran calendars; it has been restored in Divine Worship, the liturgy of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ordinariate">Ordinariate</a>; and it is still found in celebrations of the pre-Vatican II Mass, the usus antiquior. It is the post-Vatican II calendar, in fact, that is unusual in doing without Septuagesima.
<h2>Septuagesima Is for Preparation</h2>
It is often said that a period of preparation for Lent doesn’t make sense, because Lent is itself a period of preparation for Easter. This argument is not as strong as it may seem. The final period of intense study or training before an examination or athletic competition is, of course, a preparation for that exam or competition, but it does not follow that it should not itself be preceded by some preparation.
But in that case, it might be said, where do you draw the line? Are we to prepare to prepare to prepare?
There is, however, no need to draw a line at all. If you are serious about your academic progress, or your athletic career, you never give up your preparations completely, and certainly not for a prolonged period of time. As Catholics, our entire life is a preparation for death, and it should always have a penitential aspect, however much the degree of penance may fluctuate between specifically penitential seasons and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/catholics-keep-your-trees-up">festive ones</a>.
Lent, in particular, is the Church’s major penitential season, and almost her only one. The “Lent” of Michaelmas, the penitential period before the feast of St. Michael the Archangel (September 29), during which St. Francis received the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/mystical-stigmata">stigmata</a>, is no longer observed; the four penitential Ember Weeks, which once sanctified the four seasons, tend to be ignored; the penitential character of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/halloween-and-the-triduum-of-death">the eve of great feasts</a> has long been forgotten; Advent, the penitential season before Christmas, is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/advent-is-here-prepare-for-judgment">too often</a> a period of party-going and indulgence. Lent is pretty well the only annual, sustained attempt at penance Catholics are likely to encounter. Even this can be besieged by the secular world’s attempts to turn it into a chocolate-eating season. (I buy most of the family’s chocolate Easter eggs at a vastly reduced price immediately after Easter Sunday. The shops don’t seem to realize that the celebration of Easter <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/should-you-be-fasting-during-easter">continues</a> until Pentecost, or even Trinity Sunday.)
<h2>The Importance of Septuagesima Today</h2>
For this reason, some preparation for Lent is even more important today than it has been in the past. In order to get the most out of Lent, one must think seriously about what practices to adopt, and a bit of acclimatization to these practices may well be useful. In the Eastern churches, the two Sundays before Lent are called Meatfare Sunday and Cheesfare Sunday, as they say goodbye to successive kinds of food until Easter.
The usefulness of a time of preparation for the rigors of Lent was affirmed by Pope Paul VI when the subject of Septuagesima came up during the reform of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council. The architect of the reform, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, himself recorded the pope’s explanation:
<blockquote>On one occasion Pope Paul VI compared the complex made up of Septuagesima, Lent, Holy Week and Easter Triduum, to the bells calling people to Sunday Mass. The ringing of them an hour, a half-hour, fifteen and five minutes before the time of Mass has a psychological effect and prepares the faithful materially and spiritually for the celebration of the liturgy.</blockquote>
The decision of the Consilium, the body set up to reform the liturgy, which was accepted by Paul VI, to abolish the season of Septuagesima was based on the argument that (as Bugnini expressed it) “it was not possible to restore Lent to its full importance without sacrificing Septuagesima, which is an extension of Lent.”
That it is legitimate to question the wisdom of this decision is confirmed by the example of the Ordinariates set up for Anglican converts, which have the season of Septuagesima in their proper calendar. Clearly, when this calendar was in preparation, the view of the Holy See went the other way: a lot of water, after all, has passed under the bridge since 1969. It is an important issue because versions of Bugnini’s argument were applied to many other things in the liturgy in addition to Septuagesima. The hope was that a simpler, starker presentation of the central messages of the liturgy would have more impact on the worshipper than what had gone before. The alternative view is that to get a message across, it needs to be pre-announced, repeated in different terms, different aspects of it brought to the fore, and surrounded by ceremonies, symbols, and popular customs that emphasize it, make it memorable, and incarnate it in the ordinary lives of the worshiper. This was, in a nutshell, the view implied by the Church’s liturgical customs over many centuries.
<h2>A More Serious Lent</h2>
Readers may like to consider the key factors impeding the most fruitful use of the great season of Lent and how they can be mitigated. An experience I am sure many will have had is the sense that we have not thought carefully enough about how to mark Lent before Ash Wednesday comes round. Somehow, despite its prominence in the liturgical calendar, it can catch us unawares.
We may not, in fact, be all that keen to think through some serious, but doable, Lenten practice. Any such practice is likely to be a challenge to our natural inertia, and perhaps to our comfort. Choosing a book for spiritual reading or a guide to mental prayer; thinking about practical ways to fast and abstain; finding some charitable work—almsgiving—one can engage in—all of these things require a bit of time and effort. Any practice that requires an adjustment to our routine—getting up earlier, using our lunch break differently, going to a weekday Mass—may require not just forethought, but some experimentation. The problem is that adjusting one’s less practical Lenten resolutions halfway through the second week of Lent can feel like failing.
The answer is to do this thinking and experimentation before Lent starts, in the season of pre-Lent. The time Mass is actually beginning is not the time for us to start thinking about walking to church; likewise, Ash Wednesday is not the moment to be thinking about what to do in Lent. The three Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima are indeed like the church bells reminding us of the imminence of Mass: time to call the children, time to get your coat on, time to leave the house.

What Is Septuagesima?

Last Tuesday night, as I watched the Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/abortion-infanticide-lies-trump-harris-debate-rebutted">I was struck</a> by how both Harris and the moderators downplayed Trump’s claim that Democrats want abortion to be legal in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months of pregnancy. When asked about limits on legal abortion, Harris said she supported “Roe [v. Wade].&#8221; If you were unfamiliar with the details of Roe v. Wade, you might have assumed she was saying it prohibited late-term abortions. But it didn’t.
Roe said that in the first two trimesters (up to when the fetus is twenty-two weeks old), states could not outlaw abortion. Roe also did not require states to ban abortion in the third trimester. They could keep it legal if they wanted. But if they did ban it in the third trimester, they had to allow an exception for abortions to protect a woman’s health.
The problem with this exception is that Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, said that “health” included any factor that was “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, [or related to] the woman’s age.”
Last year one million abortions occurred in the United States, according to the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher institute. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/25/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-us/#when-during-pregnancy-do-most-abortions-occur">And 1% of them happen after the child is 20 weeks old.</a> That means 10,000 children are killed in late-term abortions every year. That’s close to the number of people killed by guns in this country every year. If that’s a big problem, then surely late-term abortion—not even abortion in general, just late-term abortion—must also be a big problem.
But to act like late-term abortion doesn’t happen is an obviously disprovable lie. Trump said, “You can do abortions in the seventh month . . .” to which Harris said, “That’s not true.” But you can find places online like <a href="https://dupontclinic.com/abortion-from-25-31-weeks-6-days/">the Dupont clinic in DC</a> that offers abortion from 25-31 weeks and <a href="https://www.drhern.com/abortion-services/">Warren Hern’s in Colorado</a> that offers second- and third-trimester abortions. Remember, Roe said states could ban abortions in the third trimester, but they didn’t have to; and if they did, they had to leave a meaningless health exception.
Now, some people will say that late-term abortions are only for exceptionally rare cases like when a woman’s life is in danger or when there are severe fetal handicaps. But you don’t do a late-term abortion after twenty weeks, because that takes longer than an emergency c-section; and with a c-section, the child at least has a chance to live. Furthermore, we don’t kill two-year-olds who are dying from a disability, and since the unborn are equally human we shouldn’t kill them for the same reason.
But it’s also simply not true that late-term abortions are obtained just for those reasons. <a href="https://abortiondocs.org/abortionists/william-mudd-martin-haskell/">Martin Haskell</a>, a late-term abortion provider, <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-1996-03-27/pdf/CREC-1996-03-27-pt1-PgH2895.pdf#page=1">testified before Congress saying</a>: “I’ll be quite frank. Most of my abortions are elective in that twenty- to twenty-four-week range. . . . In my particular case, probably twenty percent are for genetic reasons. And the other eighty percent are purely elective.”
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24188634/">A 2013 study</a> said the most common reasons women delayed abortion past twenty weeks included things like the inability to raise funds for the procedure or failing to recognize they were pregnant. It said, “Most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment”
And let’s be clear about what happens in these procedures. The Supreme Court said in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/550/124/">Gonzales v. Carhart</a> of late-term abortions that the abortionist may “kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation. They inject digoxin or potassium chloride into the fetus, the umbilical cord, or the amniotic fluid. Fetal demise may cause contractions and make greater dilation possible. Once dead, moreover, the fetus’s body will soften, and its removal will be easier.” Warren Hern says in his medical textbook Abortion Practice: “A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus” (142).
The facts are clear. Late-term abortion is not a myth. It is murder, and anyone who is simply a decent human being should oppose this evil.

Is Late-Term Abortion a Myth?

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).
In the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Probably many of us need to hear that. Our labor is not in vain. And we need to repeat it because it is not obvious or clear. Whether it’s the mom struggling to keep her household together and wrestle her young children toward holiness, the dad striving to keep his grown children close to the Church, the pastor exhausted by the confusion and corruption in the Church, the penitent who comes back to the confessional week after week with the same list of habitual sins. Be encouraged. In the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Why does St. Paul make this statement in a chapter all about the Resurrection? Because the Resurrection says that things matter. This world is passing away; it will not last. But that doesn’t mean that it will just disappear and fall into nothingness. The whole of salvation history is the story of God’s unwillingness to let his creation fall into nothingness. This world is the seed that will bloom into the glory of God’s eternal life. Our bodies are corruptible, mortal, but they will be “clothed in immortality.”
As Catholics, we understand that salvation is not merely some kind of legal trick by which God allows us to sneak into heaven. Salvation is real. We can actually be transformed, body and soul, into holiness. We can mature and produce fruit. God, like a careful and loving gardener, is tending us, pruning us, nourishing us with his own life. Perhaps we are impatient for our growth. Perhaps, as our Lord says in Luke, we find it much easier to look at other people and point out their fruit, good or bad. But we can do little to help others if we ourselves are starving or diseased.
The spiritual life is, to quote one author, “a long obedience in the same direction.” Like a tree, it has seasons—times of new life, times of death, times of struggle, and times of plenty. In the Lord, our labor is not in vain, because all of our labor is also his. We are his body, the Church. The promise of the resurrection is a promise that this world will not merely be a “vanity of vanities,” as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes comments; all things will be well, no matter how vain they seem at the moment, no matter how tired we become or how boring it may seem. Death will be swallowed up in victory.
As we turn to Lent this week, we enter a new season of work. Holy Church asks this work of us because she truly believes holiness is possible, that Christ really meant what he said about producing good fruit. So there’s no choice but to do it. Submit to the master gardener. Let him tend to your health. Sink in your roots, drink deeply of grace, and don’t be afraid to grow.

Your Work Is Not in Vain

A go-to passage for evidence from Jesus that Christians can lose their salvation is John 15:5-6. Jesus says, 
<blockquote>I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.</blockquote>
Obviously, that a branch can be cut off from the vine implies that it once was a part of the vine, living with the life of the vine. And when it’s cast forth, it dies. 
Just as branches live with the life of the vine when united to it, so too Christians live with the life of Jesus when united to him. And just as branches can be separated from the vine and die, so too Christians can be separated from Jesus and die spiritually, since to be separated from Jesus is not to have salvation. Therefore, Jesus teaches that Christians can lose their salvation.
There aren’t many comebacks Protestants make to a Catholic’s appeal to John 15:5-6. John Calvin argued that Jesus speaks of those who merely appeared to be Christians but were not in reality <a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a>. Since this reading is so contrary to the plain sense of the text (Jesus says, “he who abides in me,” not “he who appears to abide in me”), most Protestants don’t use it.  
(It’s interesting that the only other place where Jesus speaks of abiding in him is with reference to the Eucharist: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” [John 6:56]. The Eucharist is key to remaining on the vine and not being burned.)
There is one comeback, however, that some Protestants use: “Jesus is not talking about eternal punishment. Rather, he’s talking about temporal punishment.” 
Robert Wilkin counters by targeting the Catholic assumption that Jesus is talking about eternal judgment. He argues that Jesus is speaking about temporal judgment. Wilkin supports his claim by appealing to what Jesus doesn’t say. He <a href="https://www.logos.com/product/6668/the-grace-new-testament-commentary?campaignid=638003820&amp;adgroupid=1222657438550414&amp;keyword=%2fproduct%2f&amp;device=c&amp;utm_source=bing&amp;utm_medium=advertising_cpc&amp;utm_campaign=bing_search-keyword_dsa_logos_us_en&amp;msclkid=9d7a32de89f6165d0e9f56701a686718&amp;utm_term=%2fproduct%2f&amp;utm_content=PDP+DSA+Ad+Group">writes</a>, 
<blockquote>Since the Lord did not use the verb to be burned up, but rather the less intense verb to be burned, he is holding open the possibility that the unproductive believer may respond to the burning and return to fruitfulness (450).</blockquote>
For Wilkin, the image of the branch burning up would have to be present if Jesus intended his teaching to mean that a Christian can be definitively separated from Jesus and receive eternal damnation. Since Jesus doesn’t use that image, but rather simply says the branch will burn, Wilkin concludes that Jesus isn’t talking about eternal judgment. 
How can a Catholic answer this Protestant comeback? Well, one glaring problem with this argument is that it doesn’t fit with the viticultural imagery.
 As Catholic Bible scholar Michael Barber argues, “Why would a vinedresser cut off and ‘burn’ a branch in order to restore it?” Burning a branch doesn’t restore the branch; it destroys it.
A second problem is that the language “burned” doesn’t suggest something temporary. The same language jibes just as easily with the view that Jesus is talking about the Final Judgment and the everlasting burning that someone separated from Jesus will experience. That person will be forever “burned.” Given this ambiguity, anyone using the “burned but not burned up” argument would have to provide further evidence to defend his claim that this is a temporary burning. Until he does, this counter-argument is an assertion without evidence.
Finally, consider the Greek. First, there’s nothing there to suggest that this is a temporary burning. Second, there’s only one other time in the New Testament where the Greek word translated as “burned” (kaiō) is used, and that’s Matthew 13:40. It’s used in relation to judgment, and it’s used for the Final Judgment, which implies an everlasting burning: “Just as the weeds are gathered and burned [Greek, kaietai] with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Abide in Me . . . or Be Burned

<div>In Exodus 4:21, God hardens the heart of the pharaoh to say no to the Israelites leaving. Did he take away the pharaoh's free will?</div><div>We always need to remember that Scripture wasn&#8217;t written with the mindset of a twenty-first-century person in mind and that divine revelation was not complete until Jesus Christ. Ancient Scripture speaks in ways familiar to the people of the time, and they were written taking into account what had been revealed up until that point.
The ancient world was replete with the concept that there were good gods and evil gods. The Old Testament often wanted to emphasize the Jewish people&#8217;s monotheism, and thus God was depicted as the source of all things (see Isa. 45:7). When the author says that God hardened Pharaoh&#8217;s heart, he is saying that there were no other spiritual forces (i.e., other gods) at work.
In modern theological language, and with the fullness of revelation received through Jesus Christ, we would phrase it as God permitted Pharaoh&#8217;s hardening of heart. Evil and sin are not more powerful than nor equal to God; therefore, if they exist, it is because God has permitted them to exist. This does not mean that God wills these particular things, but he permits them for a greater purpose. Generally speaking, that greater good is our free will.
As the Scriptures say, God permits the rain to fall on the good and the bad (Matt. 5:45). If God instantly punished the bad and instantly rewarded the good, there would be no free will. We would all be coerced into right action rather than freely choosing it. In this case, Pharaoh saw the goodness of God at work, and instead of accepting it chose to reject it and attack it. Sin hardens hearts and makes us less likely to repent, and God does indeed permit this if we choose.
</div>

Did God Negate Pharaoh’s Free Will?

<div>Why is the call of Andrew and Peter so different in John and Marks’s Gospels?</div><div>The Gospels usually present variations on the same events. This increases rather than undermines their credibility. The accounts in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all very much in line with the quality of each Gospel. The same is true of St John&#8217;s Gospel. There are so many elements that go in to the apostles&#8217; initial knowledge of and contact with the Savior, and the role of St John the Baptist was key among many of the first followers of Christ as they began to understand that He was indeed the messiah whose immediate coming they professed. Thus the differences, not discrepancies.
</div>

Why Discrepancies in the Gospels?

<div>Would a person be able to receive communion if they lived seperately from their spouse?</div><div>From a canonical perspective, the individual would be eligible to receive Communion.
From a moral perspective, the individual would need to examine his conscience as the motives for living separately from his spouse. If the motives are selfishness, greed, escape from responsibility, etc., then the individual&#8217;s separation would be sinful and most likely require confession and an attempt at reunion to receive Communion with a clear conscience. If, however, there are serious issues or a threat to well being (emotional or physical), then the individual can receive with a clear conscience.
</div>

May Separated Spouses Receive Communion?

Can God’s will for us change over time?

“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”
We’ve been walking through John 6, and the “hard saying” in question is the teaching that we can have life only through eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man. This morning, we might also add the “hard sayings” of St. Paul in Ephesians 5 on wives submitting to their husbands and husbands loving their wives. That one is so hard that the lectionary permits us to cut it out. But just avoiding difficult scriptural passages rarely creates a healthy spiritual climate, so I think we’d better take it seriously.
I’ll come back to Ephesians in a moment. For now, let’s consider again what exactly is so “hard” about the Lord’s teaching on the Eucharist. Last week, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/unless-you-gnaw-and-chew-my-flesh">we recalled</a> how the Jewish consciousness would likely recoil at the idea of drinking blood. So this is the first and most obvious difficulty. Many centuries later, after long meditation on the Eucharist, we can speak with precision about the Blessed Sacrament—about what it is, about what it isn’t. For example, it is the real and substantial body and blood of the incarnate Son of God, but it is not ordinary human flesh that is ordinarily bloody and . . . well, fleshy. Its reality is hidden. But none of that is known by the disciples. When Jesus suggests, in today’s section, that no one can come to him unless drawn by the Father, part of what he means is that receiving this teaching requires a supernatural faith, which can only later come to deeper understanding. All of this in some ways may have deepened the scandal. First, this guy tells everyone to drink his blood. Next, his insane disciples all just accept this statement as if it were no big deal.
To be fair, if you follow the personalities of the disciples, it’s pretty unlikely that they accepted it in some kind of naïve and blind way. I suspect that there were a lot of questions, and even more confused facial expressions than were recorded by John. But even if they had questions or doubts, they knew at this point that Jesus was worth it all, that somehow the only way to understand was to plunge deeper into the mystery of this man and his teaching.
The second difficulty or hardness about the Lord’s “saying” centers less on the immediate offensiveness of flesh and blood and more on the suggestion, from a spiritual leader, that true spiritual life has something definite to do with the body.
Not that mainstream first-century Jewish culture was afraid of bodies. It was no mere “spiritual” religion, but a set of complex bodily and social practices. Yet, despite inhabiting this world, Jesus does persistently push against it, especially in his interactions with the scribes and Pharisees. His famous sermon on the mount can be summarized as a radical spiritualization of the law—don’t just worry about murder; worry about hatred. Don’t just avoid adultery; avoid all lust. Time and again, he speaks about the inner, spiritual life that was at times, especially among the teachers of the law, lost amid the quarrels about obscure points of ritual and textual tradition.
Today, we seem to have the opposite problem. Modern people chafe at “organized religion,” as if it were somehow coherent to insist that a way of life be “unorganized,” delighting in any spirituality that rejects rules and embraces the mysterious inner voice. These are the people who post memes insisting that if Christians really followed Jesus, they wouldn’t actually, you know, follow Jesus or do any of the stuff that he said, much less be a part of the Church that he founded, because the important thing about Jesus wasn’t Jesus, but a vague sense of spirituality detached from ordinary realities.
So what I’ve described as the second “hard” aspect of the Lord’s saying is maybe on average harder today than it was for most people in the first century. We really love the idea of a spirituality, or religion, or whatever, whose demands are entirely intellectual, or at the very least whose “religious” demands simply enable us to live in a way that makes sense to our other tribal identities and not stick out too much. The idea that we might have to participate in some particular rite or ceremony or sacrament, and that this is central and necessary, and not merely occasionally useful, comes across as offensive, and exclusive, and threatening to our sense of individual liberty.
But hold on—doesn’t Jesus go on in today’s passage to say that “the spirit gives life,” not the flesh? Last week, I said I didn’t remember hearing a Protestant explanation of the “flesh and blood” language in John 6, but I recall now hearing the argument that according to Jesus, we have to understand “my flesh” and “my blood” as <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/if-you-dont-eat-youll-die">spiritual metaphors</a> for his teaching. This is a tempting line of thought—partly because, again, it frees us from the burden of “religion” and its external forms, which seems a necessary thing for modern man. Yet we face the odd problem that, if this is really what the Lord meant by his flesh and blood, presumably it would not have caused so many followers to walk away scandalized. In fact, “flesh,” in John and other writers, is often shorthand for nature corrupted and enslaved by sin. But John also speaks of the Word becoming flesh. So surely not all flesh is bad. Flesh is enlivened by spirit. And anyway, the flesh of the Son of God cannot be said to be “of no avail.”
Apart from the reminder that the disciples need divine assistance to understand his teaching fully, the Lord presents here what we might call an uncontroversially traditional understanding of human nature. Human beings are body and soul. Our spiritual nature is the higher part, the part that gives flesh its meaning. But this meaningfulness is meaningless without its matter. So fully human, rational life must be spiritual life, not life lived merely in the body and merely serving bodily needs. But we cannot be human and be pure spirit. The spirit gives life… to the body, not just in general.
So again, I think we face this “hard” teaching that, actually, the true spiritual life is not a complete separation from bodily life, but rather a bodily life empowered by and directed by the spiritual life. We should therefore insist that the “spiritual” interpretation of Christ’s flesh and blood is “spiritual” exactly because it insists on a real, substantial, fleshly set of actions: take, eat, this is my body which is given up for you. If you really want to be spiritual, you have to be in the body.
This is one way of summarizing the set of teachings from Pope St. John Paul II on the “theology of the body.” The Holy Father writes, in Veritatis Splendor, “The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator.”
All of this brings me back to Ephesians and the idea of submission. Many of the difficulties that people have in this passage stem from a failure to read the overall context, which is Paul’s command to “be subject to one another” (5:21) out of reverence for Christ. Within this broader culture of mutual submission, we find that, in marriage, wives should “submit” to their husbands, and that husbands should love their wives “as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.” So if there’s anything lopsided there, it is arguably on the side of the husbands, who are basically commanded to die for their wives. Though this passage has undeniably been used in history in a misogynistic way, that use is far from its meaning.
The fact that, even so, people balk at it, comes down to that same antagonism toward “organized religion,” and to any kind of spirituality that dares to tell us what to do with our bodies. The hard saying is that Christianity isn’t just a bunch of nice feelings mixed with provocative social media posts. It is hard work, because it requires that we do certain bodily things, that we discipline our actions and our feelings, and not just in our heads. Marriage is a great sacrament, according to Paul, precisely because it is a bodily sign of the universal way that the human person finds his joy not in service of self, but in service of the ultimate other: God.
We meet that other, the heavenly bridegroom, at this altar, where he lays down his life for us, his bride. His love is no phantom idea, but expressed in a body given for us. Dare we submit, and receive the gift? Dare we persist when the world walks away, unsettled by the demands of faith? “Will you also go away?” Jesus asks. May we answer with St. Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

When Religion Isn’t Good Enough

<div>Can a Catholic church have a celebration during Advent?</div><div>Yes, a Catholic church can have a celebration during the Advent season.
The confusion arises because both <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/advent">Advent</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/lent">Lent</a> use the liturgical color purple and omit the Gloria at Mass. During Lent, parishes curtail and avoid celebrations due to the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/penance">penitential</a> nature of the season. People, therefore, assume that the same is true of Advent. However, Advent is not listed as a penitential season (canon 1250), and instead of prohibiting unaccompanied music and altar flowers as during Lent, the Church puts forth only that they should be done in moderation during Advent (GIRM 305).
</div>

Celebrations OK During Advent

Many people, particularly within our pews, do not know the reasons for the use of incense in worship. Even I, when I was a Franciscan friar using incense as an altar server, often thought, “Why?”
All of us who see incense need to reflect on its purpose, for we don’t do meaningless activities at Mass. When I reflected on its place in Scripture, I found that there is a surprising number of verses on the matter.
The first instance of incense appears over a thousand years before Jesus. It was the major event on Mount Sinai in Exodus 24: God came down as a large cloud over the mountain, with fire, and Moses was called up into the cloud. God did not come down casually with a human face. Nobody could even see him! He was clouded in mystery. Exodus 24:15-18 reads,
<blockquote>Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.</blockquote>
This powerful event would have been imprinted onto the consciousness of every Israelite, for God showed up powerfully and mystically. It would have led ancient Israel to have radical respect for God. For people cannot control something that they cannot even perceive! Like a teacher with his students during the first week of class, the cloud literally put the fear of God in them. They recognized the gravity of just whom they were dealing with. That was the power of a cloud of smoke—it veiled Israel’s vision and thereby increased their awe and respect for God.
I’d argue that this event was recalled nearly every day in the Tabernacle and Temple rite of burning incense. For God commanded Aaron, Israel’s first high priest, to create a cloud of incense within their sacred space every morning and every night (Exod. 30:7-8). As biblical scholar L. Michael Morales <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Shall-Ascend-Mountain-Lord/dp/0830826386">says</a>, incense is a smokey cloud, like on Sinai (99). It was as if Israel replicated God’s past mighty presence on Sinai into a memorial.
The same is true with the Catholic Church’s utilization of incense today. It brings us back thousands of years to the time of Moses and ancient Israel, who got to behold the miraculous and stupefying face of God. The Church’s reasoning seems to be that if the Jews did this all the time, and Jesus did not come to abolish, but to fulfill (Matt. 5:17), then shouldn’t we do the same?
I’d argue that we also need a visible reminder of God’s presence. The Jews knew that the human heart is forgetful. They literally kept a piece of Scripture above their foreheads (called phylacteries) to avoid forgetting it, and they likewise kept the Sinai event consistently before their eyes and noses. We should as well. Just as incense reminded them of God’s smokey presence and his past deeds within salvation history, and increased their sense of awe and respect for him, it can do the same for us.
There is so much more. Consider Numbers 16, where the Israelites murmured after Korah rebelled against Moses and Aaron’s priestly authority . . . and suddenly died. God swiftly intervened in vindication of his chosen priestly authorities, and he delt the temporal punishment of a deadly plague to those murmuring. In response, Moses told Aaron to grab some incense to cover the people as a means of “atonement” (Num. 16:46). When Aaron did this, he “stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped” (v. 48). This suggests that those on the side of Aaron who had the incense around them did not die, whereas everybody else without the incense did. Incense literally protected the Jews from God’s just punishment for their sins!
Yet how did it protect them? To this, I would apply what the early Christians said about incense. They said that the sweet smell of incense cloaked the foul-smelling sins of the people. <a href="https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf07.xii.ii.html">The ancient liturgy of St. James</a> says, “Accept from us, thy unprofitable servants, this incense as an odor of a sweet smell, and make fragrant the evil odor of our soul and body, and purify us with the sanctifying power of thy all-holy Spirit.” Incense brought atonement in Numbers 16 because of the truth that anybody covered with incense smells blameless and sweet to the Holy One. This can help atone for sins.
Eschatology (the end things) is connected to incense as well. For if God dwells in the clouds of heaven, then incense brings us into heaven. When the prophet Isaiah saw a heavenly vision of God, he saw the surroundings “filled with smoke” (Isa. 6:4). The Psalms refer to God being surrounded by clouds (97:2). Jesus ascended into heaven on a cloud (Acts 1:9). If heaven, our eternal destination, is cloudy or smokey or “incensey,” and the Mass is heaven on earth, then incense and Mass would go hand in hand.
In fact, whenever Scripture talks about the place of heaven, it seems always to be fuming with smoke or incense. The heavenly liturgy found in Revelation is full of it. The “four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Rev. 5:8). If we add up all those bowls of incense, it totals to at least twenty-eight thurifers at the Mass in heaven (and we often complain at just one!). This was probably why the early Christians burned incense in their liturgies. It was found in Revelation and was a handy symbol for prayer rising up to and being received and attended to by God. Incense reminds us of the heavenly things.
There is more to talk about, such as the three Magi offering baby Jesus frank-incense (Matt. 3) and the prophet Malachi predicting that every place will have incense offered to God (1:11), but I think that’s enough for one article. Incense veils our vision of God, increases our respect for him, reminds us of him, memorializes his past deeds, atones for sins, and reminds us of our true home in heaven.

Why Have Incense at Mass?

<div>What does it mean to put on the breastplate of righteousness?</div><div>St. Thomas teaches that the image of the breastplate is used because righteousness or justice protects the other virtues as a breastplate protects the body. So it is a characterization of justice as a universal virtue underlying all the other virtues.
</div>

Why Is Righteousness a ‘Breastplate’?

<div>Why do we usually only receive the host nowadays in spite of giving equal weight eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ?</div><div>The Catholic Church teaches that Jesus Christ is present (body, blood, soul, and divinity) under both species of Communion. Therefore, to receive either the host alone or to drink from the chalice alone is to receive the true and real presence of Jesus Christ.
<blockquote>[The Council] declares, moreover, that though our Redeemer at the last supper instituted and administered this sacrament to the Apostles under two forms, as has already been said, yet it must be acknowledged that Christ, whole and entire, and a true sacrament are received under either form alone, and therefore, as regards its fruits, those who receive one species only are not deprived of any grace necessary to salvation (Council of Trent, On Communion, First Decree, ch. III).</blockquote>
While receiving Communion under both species is a &#8220;fuller&#8221; outward sign of receiving from the table/altar of the Lord, it is not necessary in order to receive the fullness of the sacrament. In many places it is simply impractical to distribute Communion under both species due to the physical layout of the church, number of parishioners and available ordinary or extraordinary minsters, etc. There is also the issue of knowing how much to consecrate.
</div>

Why Is the Chalice Rarely Given?

In anticipation for the the release of my NEW BOOK ON THE EUCHARIST, this week I&#8217;m asking: what is the connection between the Eucharist and the New Covenant, and why do we need the Eucharist to make sense of Christianity?

Christianity Cannot Exist without the Eucharist

<div>Why do we praise God?</div><div>Imagine someone who never grew up being told to say thank you. Such a person would never be really be appreciative of anything he received in life because he would simply expect it to be done. He would have no appreciation for the hard work, sacrifices, or generosity of others. And while others might simply shrug off his lack of appreciation, he missing out on a part of life that comes from appreciating others and being grateful for what we receive.
The Prefaces for the Eucharistic Prayers speaks well when it states:
<blockquote>Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is right and just.</blockquote>
We give praise first and foremost because it is right to praise God&#8217;s goodness. After all, God could be less merciful and still be perfectly just.
The praise we give to God is partly our just duty to God but also helps to keep us mindful of God&#8217;s goodness and love.
As the Preface IV for weekdays states:
<blockquote>For, although you have no need of our praise,
yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, 
since our praises add nothing to your greatness, 
but profit us for salvation . . .</blockquote>
If we fail to appreciate God&#8217;s goodness and mercy and fail to grasp his generosity in our lives, we stunt our spiritual growth. We would risk falling into the sin of presumption and losing our salvation.
</div>

Why Do We Praise God?

In these past three weeks of Advent, our lectionary readings and prayers have largely focused on the Second Coming, the second advent of the Lord, when he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I have often suggested that this makes sense because if the Lord came once, he can come again, and so preparing for a remembrance of the first advent is also useful preparation for the second.
One of our more memorable Advent hymns takes up this theme: “O come, o come, Emmanuel.” The verses of this carol are an English paraphrase of an old series of liturgical texts called the “great O antiphons.” An antiphon is just a short verse of prayer that is said before and after a psalm or a canticle at the daily office. And the great O antiphons are said in the seven evenings leading up to Christmas Eve. So, at Evening Prayer, beginning on December 17, we start with “O wisdom” and move down the list:
O Wisdom
O Adonai 
O Root of Jesse 
O Key of David 
O Morning Star 
O King of the Nations (that’s today!) 
O Emmanuel
These are all wonderful little pieces of the tradition, and I encourage you to look them up if you have the time, or listen to various musical settings, like my favorite rendition in German by Arvo Pärt. They each give expression to one of the Old Testament images of the Messiah, and the theme is clear: do not tarry, but come now and deliver us. The Latin words of these seven antiphons even form a backwards acrostic: Ero cras. I will be here tomorrow.
There is an alternate tradition, which comes from medieval England—and which has been retained in some form in the Ordinariates—that adds an eighth antiphon at the end. Unlike the others, though, which address themselves to the various titles of the Christ, this eighth antiphon suddenly turns to Mary:
O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be? 
For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after. 
Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? 
The thing which ye behold is a divine mystery.
Rather than destroy the clever Latin acrostic, this one letter just slightly changes the meaning. Instead of “Ero cras”—I will be here tomorrow—it becomes “Vero cras”—truly, tomorrow!
Clever acrostics aside, the last antiphon raises the question: Why, after this extended focus on the coming Messiah, do we all of a sudden turn to Mary?
In a way, our readings today pose the same problem. We have been hearing all about how, at the end of days, Christ will come again in great power and glory to judge the world. We have been hearing from John the Baptist about how we must prepare for the coming storm, for the fire that will destroy all that does not bear fruit. And then today, all of a sudden, we turn to this human moment with Mary and Elizabeth—the two unexpected pregnancies with two different joys.
“How shall this be?” That is the antiphon’s question, but you may remember that it is very similar to Mary’s question at the Annunciation: “How shall this be, since I know not a man?” Joseph makes no recorded response when he is told by the angel in his dream to trust Mary, but surely his thought must be similar: “How shall this be?”
What the angel says first to Our Lady is, of course, what angels always seem to say in Scripture: Be not afraid. But in for Joseph, it’s a little different. Usually, the angel says, “Don’t be afraid” because the natural human reaction to seeing an angel is . . . well, to be afraid. Real biblical angels are not the happy little chubby cherubs you see in modern European art: they’re terrifying, otherworldly beings whose presence is intuitively dangerous. But in Joseph’s case, the command takes a different form: “Do not be afraid . . . to take Mary your wife into your home.”
For Joseph, the vexing thing is not the angel, but the deeply complicated social predicament he’s in—his wife (and it’s important to note that in Jewish law <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-christmas-mysteries-through-jewish-eyes">she was his wife</a>) is pregnant, and he knows that the child cannot be his. And yet here the angel tells him that this complicated predicament will, in the end, be the cause not of fear, but of joy and wonder. A virgin has conceived, as the prophet foretold. And the child will be the Son of God.
Once again, Joseph’s angelic visit parallels Mary’s in an interesting way. In both cases, fear is dispelled, and the potentially paralyzing “How can this be?” gives way to trusting wonder.
And in our Gospel today, when Mary meets Elizabeth, the wonder unfolds with the meeting of the unborn John the Baptist. He leaps. Elizabeth rejoices. Mary sings her Magnificat.
This is, in God’s economy, how Christmas works. The fear of judgment, the fear of apocalypse, the fear of the second coming of the Lord, is transformed into wonder and joy at the mystery of the Incarnation.
In this story, the opposite of fear is not confidence, or bravery, but wonder. “O virgin of virgins, how shall this be?” This is a consistent theme through the nativity stories: the wonder of Mary at her pregnancy, the wonder of Joseph at God’s work in Mary, the wonder of Elizabeth at her meeting with the “mother of [her] Lord,” the wonder of the shepherds at the angels’ song.
To wonder at something, in these stories, is to admit that it is a mystery, to admit that it cannot be summarized or explained in a simple way. It just has to be experienced. There’s no substitute for the thing itself and its inexhaustible fullness.
As we enter the final stretch of time before Christmas, this should be our goal: to live not in fear, but in wonder. This means, first, that the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-three-advents-of-christ">advents</a> of the Lord—both the first and the second—are not something to be feared, but to be wondered at; not something to worry us, but something to excite our imagination. There is a practical aspect to this that we do well to remember: If we’re doing something for Christmas that causes more anxiety than it evokes wonder, we should think twice about doing it.
The second thing to say about living in wonder rather than fear is that wonder is not always positive. There is, the Bible makes clear, a kind of wonder at the presence of evil. For many people Christmas is as much a time of sorrow as of joy. This is not new: Mary’s wonder continues from her miraculous pregnancy all the way to the cross, when she wonders—and weeps—at the mystery of evil. By long tradition the Christmas octave includes at least two major feasts of martyrs, St. Stephen and the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-could-the-holy-innocents-be-martyrs">Holy Innocents</a>. And so it is with us: Evil and tragedy are not something to be explained, or avoided, out of fear, but something to be endured with hope based on the wonder and joy of the gospel.
This is no easy stance either way. I don’t know if it’s harder to recapture the childish wonder of Christmas or to claim the proper Christian wonder in the face of sadness. But we could do worse than look to and Mary and Joseph and Elizabeth as models, and even to call on them for help. God grant that, like them, we may receive the Lord Jesus not with fear—not with calculation and explanation—but with true wonder, love and affection.

Fear and Wonder

<div>I am a Christian but not Catholic. I have a miracle to report. How do I do that?</div><div>I infer you asked for the intercession of a particular candidate for sainthood regarding your reported miracle. If so, through an internet search you should be able to find the postulator and related association that is advancing the person’s cause for canonization. Perhaps check with the local Catholic diocesan chancery if that effort fails.
If the reported miracle you witnessed involved the intercession of a canonized saint, you might want to report that to your local diocesan newspaper, as someone there may be interested in the story. And you could possibly let the local diocesan bishop know too. But the Church normally investigates closely only miracles that regard the canonization causes of holy Church members.
</div>

How Do I Report a Miracle?

Today Joe tackles the Protestant accusation that Catholics practice necromancy when they pray to the Saints. We take a look at 1 Samuel 28 and Saul&#8217;s consultation with the Witch of Endor.
Transcript:
&nbsp;
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. Today I want to consider two contradictory arguments often made by the very same people against the Catholic practice of praying to the saints and Mary in heaven. So some Protestants will regard this practice simply as pointless. Why not just go directly to God? But other people will go beyond that and say it&#8217;s not just pointless, it&#8217;s actually sinful, and they&#8217;ll accuse Catholics of engaging in idolatry for asking those who have died to pray for us. In fact, some go so far as to say that if you do this, you&#8217;re guilty of the sin of necromancy. Now that is a pretty strong claim and it should be backed by pretty strong evidence. So is it true? Do Catholics practice necromancy? Are they trying to consult the dead to gain secret, forbidden knowledge? Well, the answer to that question, it&#8217;s probably first good to go back and just say, what do we even mean by necromancy?
In the modern age of popular fantasy video games, when we hear words like necromancy or necromancer, it might invoke images of walking skeletons and zombies. But in the Bible, necromancy means something a little different. Necromancy refers to the practice of contacting the dead to try to gain hidden knowledge or control events, and in the Bible it is strictly forbidden. So when these Protestants accuse Catholics of engaging in necromancy, when they pray to the saints, they&#8217;re putting the practice of saint a prayer to the saints in the same category as something like trying to conjure up the dead or Ouija boards or sorcery or any kind of OC cult practice that engages in this kind of forbidden spiritual necromancy and looking at people who argue that this practice is necromancy. A lot of the arguments don&#8217;t actually make sense together. So recently I heard the Protestant ministry got questions making the case that this Catholic practice is necromancy, and I got to say, I&#8217;m kind of surprised they didn&#8217;t notice that two of their arguments back to back contradict each other. Take a listen.
CLIP:
Praying to the dead is strictly forbidden. In the Bible, Deuteronomy tells us anyone who consults with the dead is detestable to the Lord. The story of Saul consulting a medium to bring up the spirit of the dead Samuel resulted in his death because he was unfaithful to the Lord. He did not keep the word of the Lord and even consulted a medium for guidance. Clearly, God has declared that such things are not to be done.
Joe:
So that&#8217;s the first argument. When Catholics pray to the saints, this is just like going to a witch specifically, and this is going to be important. It&#8217;s like what happened when Saul goes to the witch of indoor to try to conjure up the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel. Then literally though, the very next argument they make is this one,
CLIP:
Consider the characteristics of God. God is omnipresent everywhere at once and is capable of hearing every prayer in the world. A human being on the other hand, does not possess this attribute.
Joe:
So did you catch that contradiction? Remember the two claims of this? Number one, praying to the dead is evil. It&#8217;s akin to King Saul trying to conjure up Samuel. And number two, praying to the dead is futile. The saints aren&#8217;t omnipresent, and apparently you have to be omnipresent to be able to hear prayers. Those are the two arguments, and I could see either one of them being coherent by itself, but what we should notice is they can&#8217;t both be true. If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of the biblical texts we&#8217;re talking about here, God questions is relying on this event again, king Saul going to the witch of indoor in one Samuel chapter 28, and the first thing you should notice is that the dead Samuel absolutely can hear Saul, even though he&#8217;s not omni Thep present, they have a full on conversation, and Samuel not only knows what&#8217;s happening in Saul&#8217;s life, he accurately foretells that Saul and his sons will die the next day, which they do. So if you&#8217;re going to say that praying to the saints is forbidden in the Bible, you can&#8217;t argue both that it&#8217;s evil because it works, but in a cult way and that it doesn&#8217;t work at all.
Now, I know that some people, certain Protestants and Seventh Adventists who don&#8217;t believe that the soul continues to exist when we die, who think that what happens here in one Kings 28 isn&#8217;t kings. Saul has a conversation with Samuel because under that theology, it couldn&#8217;t possibly be Samuel because he&#8217;s dead, and so how could he be aware of what&#8217;s going on? I actually recently did a debate very much related to this point, which I&#8217;ll link to in the description below if you want more on that in a particular Catholic Adventist conversation. But when confronted by verses like these, SDA apologists will claim that what Saul is talking to isn&#8217;t Samuel the Old Testament prophet, but is instead a demon or a familiar spirit.
CLIP:
Y&#8217;all remember the witch of Endor when Saul, God wasn&#8217;t talking to Saul at all, and so Saul goes to a witch and the witch allegedly pulls up Samuel and the Bible just talks about it like, yeah, she pulled up Samuel. Y&#8217;all need to understand that wasn&#8217;t Samuel. That wasn&#8217;t Samuel, you guys,
Joe:
But if you read for Samuel 28, it repeatedly stresses that this was in fact, Samuel. In verse 11, Saul asks the witch of indoor to bring up Samuel. For me, this is necromancy. This is forbidden, but it&#8217;s clear what he&#8217;s asking for and the witch seems surprised when it seemingly works, and we are confronted with Samuel. Now, for her part, she claims it&#8217;s an Elohim, a God or a spirit, but the biblical author says that it&#8217;s not. It&#8217;s Samuel. For instance, in verse 12, he identifies this as Samuel in verse 14, he says, Saul knew that it was Samuel and then reaffirms that it&#8217;s Samuel in verse 15 and in verse 16, if that&#8217;s not enough, Samuel actually rebukes for engaging in necromancy right there in verse 16. And then as I said before, he accurately foretells the future In verse 18, a prediction that comes true even if you don&#8217;t just take the biblical author&#8217;s word for it when he says over and over again that it&#8217;s Samuel and refers to his prophecy as the words of Samuel, you should also be asking, well, why would a demon rebuke someone for sinning and how would a demon accurately foretell a future event he has no knowledge of?
So all of that, I think pretty decisively shows that yes, in fact the deceased Samuel is well aware of what&#8217;s going on. It&#8217;s just not true. You have to be omnipresent to be able to respond to prayers or to talk to someone on earth or to know what&#8217;s going on on earth, right? We have plenty of biblical evidence for that. After all, Moses and Elijah seem to be well aware of what&#8217;s going on in the ministry of Jesus when they talked to him at the transfiguration. Abraham seems to be well aware of what&#8217;s going on in the rich man&#8217;s family when he talks to him in Luke chapter 16. So it&#8217;s just not true When people tell you the dead cannot hear you, and the reason for this is Jesus explains is because they&#8217;re not dead in the full sense. Sure bodily, they are dead, but spiritually they&#8217;re alive with Christ, which is why Jesus can respond to the Sadducees by reminding them that God is the God of the living and not the dead, and therefore when he&#8217;s the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that means we have to acknowledge Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as alive, not simply dead.
This is why they can hear you and why people who deny this Jesus&#8217;s words to them are you are quite wrong. Even if you ignore all of the biblical evidence, even if you reject everything I say here and insist, no, I still think it was demon even then it would disprove the idea. You have to be omnipresent to be able to communicate with someone on earth because the demons aren&#8217;t omnipresent so much for the argument that the saints can&#8217;t hear you. What about the argument that this is necromancy? So why is it okay to pray to saints? But it wasn&#8217;t okay what Saul was trying to do with Samuel, and it&#8217;s not okay to use Ouija boards or have a seance or the like.
CLIP:
I&#8217;m going to tell you straight up, if you&#8217;re praying to saints, you are not praying to Peter or Paul or Timothy. You are praying to demonic spirits. You&#8217;re praying to familiar spirits if you&#8217;re praying to saints.
Joe:
Well, to answer that question, another way we could ask it would be what is the difference between the miraculous and the magical? Because on the surface, understandably, people might be confused. Consider Exodus chapter seven. You have Aaron who takes his staff and it turns into a serpent. And then you have the Egyptian magicians using OC cult arts who turn their staffs into serpents. Those look the same, but one is good and one is evil. Why at the heart of it, the answer is quite simple. The miraculous works through God. It relies upon God&#8217;s goodness and divine power, the magical distrust either God&#8217;s power or goodness and tries to work around God or else force his hand. When Saul cannot get what he wants by going to God, he doesn&#8217;t feel like his prayers are being answered. He tries to go around God. He tries to find out the information he needs by either forcing God&#8217;s hand or using occult forces to find it out for himself.
That is sinful. That is a distrust in the power and goodness of God. On the other hand, when somebody prays their rosary or asks a saint to pray for them, when we say things like, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, at the end of the Hail Mary, we are relying quite explicitly on the fact that God is powerful and good and loves to answer our prayers. This is why intercessory prayer exists in the first place. We go to everyone, whether it&#8217;s our brothers and sisters here on earth or our brothers and sisters who are already enjoying the fullness of God in heaven, and we ask them to pray for us because we believe in the goodness of God, whereas the magical relies on not believing in the goodness and power of God. And just to be perfectly clear, it is entirely possible to believe that Jesus Christ is our one mediator between God and man, the one who alone could die for our sins as St.
Paul says in one Timothy chapter two, and believe that we still need intercessory prayer, as St. Paul also says in First Timothy chapter two, those two things aren&#8217;t just compatible. They&#8217;re both explicitly taught in sacred scripture. So there you go. The Bible teaches us very clearly that the righteous dead can and do hear us, and that intercessory prayer, including what&#8217;s going on when we&#8217;re asking the saints to pray for us, is good, not evil. The miraculous may look like the magical, but it&#8217;s actually the opposite of the magical. Praying to the saints is just the opposite of necromancy. Final point, I want to say a special thank you to everyone who is liked, shared, commented, and done everything else to boost kind of the spread of this channel. And also for all of you financially giving over on Patreon, shameless joe.com, you guys have really helped revolutionize this so that it sounds and looks, I think a lot better than the old days when it was pretty obviously just me in a basement with PowerPoint. So thank you for all you&#8217;ve done. If you want to be part of that good work, I encourage you to engage in whatever way you see fit. For Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

Do Catholics Practice Necromancy?

In this video, a caller asks Dr. Karlo Broussard and Cy Kellett about the difference between the development of doctrine and if Catholic doctrine has changed over time.
Transcript:
Caller: He said doctrine has never changed in the Catholic Church, but doctrine has been developed. Now, my question is, what is the standard to know whether doctrine has been changed versus developed?
Karlo: Okay, great question. All right. So first of all, the first question to ask would be, what did this individual mean by doctrine? Now, a charitable reading of that statement would be, I&#8217;m assuming that by doctrine never changing, he means teachings within the infallible category. So any teaching that has been set forth by the Church in an infallible way, meeting the conditions for the charism of infallibility to be present there and take place where the Holy Spirit protects the Church from error, then it is true. No doctrine has ever changed if we mean by doctrine, teachings within the infallible teaching category.
Now, with regard to doctrine outside of the infallible category, that category of fallible teaching, fallible doctrine that in principle is subject to change, and you may very well find some change in non-infallible Church teaching.
Now, what would be such a change? That would be X to not X or not X to X. Right? So, you know, it would be some statement like, okay, this is true. And then later it would be, this is not true, or reverse that this is, you know, this is not true. And then later the Church coming around and saying it is true.
So here&#8217;s a hypothetical possibility. So it is, at one time it was part of ordinary Church teaching, which means non-infallible category. We&#8217;re outside of that infallible category. We&#8217;re in the fallible teaching category, okay? Where the Church and her ordinary teaching was supporting the idea of the limbo of the children, like an unbaptized infant existing in the afterlife, neither heaven nor hell, natural bliss kind of thing, okay?
And at one time, the Church in her ordinary teaching was supporting that idea. Like if you go publicly and deny that, you&#8217;re being too rash and you need to be quiet. That&#8217;s what the Church basically said many years ago. Now, it&#8217;s kind of like this debate of a theological opinion. Well, Catholics would be permitted to hold that idea, and other Catholics would be permitted to not hold that idea. We can kind of like present our arguments back and forth and disagree.
But now, let&#8217;s say, hypothetically, this hasn&#8217;t happened yet, Scott, but it could technically in principle happen where the Church would come out in her ordinary teaching, let&#8217;s say the Pope and the encyclical. It&#8217;s not infallible. He&#8217;s not like going to say, hey, you Catholics, you need to believe what I say here under the pain of mortal sin for the sake of salvation. But he just presents it in his ordinary teaching that the limbo of the children does not exist. That would actually be a change in doctrine in teaching.
Now remember, we&#8217;re still in the non-infallible category. We&#8217;re in the fallible category. But nevertheless, that would be a change. That&#8217;s an example of a change going from X to not X in this case.
Now here would be an example for a development of doctrine. Consider this, Scott. In the early Church, from the mid-second century A.D. 150, we have Justin Martyr, say, reflecting on Mary as the new Eve, untying what, undoing what the first Eve did. Through Eve, she was a virgin and her disobedience brought death. Mary, a virgin, through her obedience brings life. And that life is Jesus Christ.
Saint Irenaeus of Lyon in A.D. 180 to 185, right? Late second century. He teaches the same idea, Mary the new Eve.
Okay, so here&#8217;s development of doctrine. The Church in her wisdom and through her saints and through the theologians, through her prayer, through her liturgy, reflects on that principle, on that theme of Mary, the new Eve. And then as she reflects on that theme of Mary, the new Eve, she has and attains a more penetrating knowledge of what that teaching, what that idea entails, like baked into the idea, or the idea is pregnant with further meanings, further implications.
What would those further implications be from Mary as the new Eve? Well, given biblical typology, the first Eve was created immaculately, free from original sin. And if Mary is the new Eve, like these early Christians said, then it would follow that Mary also would be free from original sin upon her creation, hence the Immaculate Conception.
Notice there, Scott, there has not been a change in teaching. There has been a more penetrating knowledge coming to see that which is baked into a certain idea present in the early Christian faith and seeing the implications of that idea.
Now, of course, this is not just the second century. We can argue for a new Eve motif or theme being present in Scripture itself in Genesis 3:15. So we see the new Eve present in divine revelation itself. But then the Church sees pregnant with that idea, pregnant with the further truth, sees Mary&#8217;s Immaculate Conception baked into that divinely revealed truth of Mary being the new Eve, and then comes to a greater light and an understanding of that divine revelation involving and including Mary&#8217;s Immaculate Conception.
That would be an example of a development of doctrine. What do you think of that, Scott?
I&#8217;m sorry? What do you think of that, Scott? Is that helpful?
Caller: That is very helpful. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Karlo: You&#8217;re welcome, my friend. Thanks for calling. We appreciate you.
Cy: Absolutely. Scott, thanks for the call. Appreciate that. Go ahead and give us a call again in the future. This was a really great conversation, very informative.

Do Catholics Change Their Teachings Over Time?

Whether fertility is good might seem a weird question—except, in our times, it seems that those who say it is, as J.D. Vance did during his campaign for vice president last year, are deemed “weird” by cultural movers and shakers. The reaction to Vance’s encouragement of people having babies demands we address this question.
Yes, Virginia, fertility is good. That is the classical perspective of Judaism and Christianity. God pronounces it good in the first words he speaks after creating human beings male and female. “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).
St. John Paul II was wont to note that this is God’s first blessing to newly created man and woman, the “only creature God wanted for himself.” Everything else God creates, he subordinates to human dominion. Man is the only creature whom God directly wanted for himself (for man) and himself (for God)—as a person with whom he could enter into a personal relationship.
God created the human person “in our image and likeness”—not “my” image, but “ours.” Already we see that God is not alone, an isolated individualist, but a communion of persons. And God does not create the human person alone, but in a complementary two-some. (In Genesis 2, where the Yahwist writer does separate the creation of man from woman, God is anthropomorphically presented as recognizing that “it is not good that the man should be alone.”)
So, not only is God a communion of persons, who creates human beings as a communion of persons, but his first blessing on the human couple is fertility, enabling them to perpetuate and expand that communion: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
In traditional Jewish law, Genesis 1:28 is presented as both a blessing and a mitzvah, a commandment—indeed, the first command God gives human beings. It is God’s intent that the human person have babies. This is why celibacy was so radical a New Testament change: it was not a value in Old Testament Judaism.
As Catholics, we affirm that grace builds on nature. That’s why the Church would affirm that this “fertility is good” perspective is not some quirky Catholic doctrine relevant only to Friday fish-eaters. No—it’s grounded in and binding on every human being as part of natural law.
Genesis does not present God making Jews and Catholics in his image and likeness. It presents him as making “man”—i.e., all humankind—in his image and likeness. The fact that something has theological justifications does not mean that it only is justified theologically.
Take Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Put most basically, they recognize that human development is a progressive getting out from one’s self toward other persons. A child passes critical developmental milestones when he realizes that Mommy is not just the food-and-comfort extension of me, but somebody else. (That’s another reason why fatherhood is more than just insemination and why fathers and mothers are not merely interchangeable, socially gendered “parents.”) He gradually advances from dealing with others to taking responsibility for another (marriage) to taking responsibility for someone who does not yet exist—i.e., children (“generativity”). This progressive going out of self toward another is prerequisite to every human being’s normal development, even if it also tallies with the biblical injunction about needing to lose one’s self to find it (Matt. 10:39, 16:25).
So fertility is good. But what kind of good?
In philosophy, there are two kinds of good: a bonum honestum, or something that is good in itself, and a bonum utile, or something that is good because it is useful. Catholic thought regards fertility as a bonum honestum.
Fertility is good because life is good. Period. Not because it is useful—nor does it cease to be good when it is not useful, when it is inconvenient or problematic.
Here is precisely where the nub of the modern problem lies.
The modern world would have you believe that fertility has no inherent significance, no intrinsic value. Fertility is “good” if it is “good for you,” if it is useful or convenient to your “life project” at this moment. If it’s not, then it’s bad, something to be suppressed, eliminated, destroyed. Fertility—and by extension, life—gets its value from how it fits or does not fit your life project.
That’s why fertility—a perfectly normal and natural dimension of a healthy, post-pubescent human being—is destroyed, temporarily (contraception) or permanently (sterilization). It’s why the current transgender mania defends permanently destroying the fertility of a minor child, even before that fertility has normally developed, as “health care” and “therapeutic.”
But consider this: if fertility has no inherent meaning or value except what a particular person assigns to it, that means that every normal human being is naturally developmentally deformed . . . because every normal person is fertile, a man from puberty onward and a woman intermittently from puberty until menopause. That would mean that the default method of function of only one of the nine systems of the human body—the generative (note what that word entails)—is congenitally defective.
Do you really believe that?
There is a reason why kids once upon a time played Mommy and Daddy. There is a reason why, once upon a time, people—in contrast to our era—married. There is a reason why people wanted to have babies (and why parents and in-laws sometimes obtrusively wanted to nudge that process along). These are natural and normal things of human life and development.
What is “weird” is the idea that human beings develop “normally” by being isolated individuals at odds with their biology, at odds with how human beings have developed for millennia, at odds with “what comes naturally” . . . in order to fulfill the expectations of a particular socio-cultural construct of our time.
The question ultimately comes down to this: is fertility good? And—pace the Planned Parenthood message—the answer of our Judaeo-Christian heritage has been unequivocally “yes.”

Why You Should Have Babies

Shortly after our wedding, my wife flew to Chicago on a business trip. We knew that it was to our advantage that she go, but it was a sad parting at the airport all the same. Once her plane had disappeared beyond the clouds, I couldn’t stand it, I missed her so much. So I, never having visited Chicago before, hopped on a flight to the Windy City. The assurance that I would see my beloved again kept me joyful through all the aches and pains of air travel . . . but not joyful enough.
Today is Ascension Thursday, when we celebrate a sad parting—but also one of the most joyful in human history, because of what it promised.
There’s a touch of the Crucifixion’s sadness in the Ascension. In both cases, Jesus left the apostles, left us, left the world. But Jesus’ death sent the apostles scrambling with terror; his rising left them gaping (Acts 1:10) with awe and, later, jubilation (Luke 24:52-53).
When Jesus promised his followers that he would die, St. Peter contradicted him (Matt. 16:22). By the time he told them he’d leave them to be with the Father, they’d caught on, at least enough that there are no contradictions recorded there. But we can’t hold it against the apostles if they felt a little sad when Jesus told them he’d be going. Indeed, the way St. John tells it, he had to take pains to alleviate their sorrow: “It is to your advantage that I go away” (16:7).
They might have felt hopeless, too, because what is hope? The Catholic Encyclopedia <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/hope">calls it</a> “a divine virtue by which we confidently expect, with God’s help, to reach eternal felicity as well as to have at our disposal the means of securing it.” Could there have been the divine virtue of hope among men before the Ascension? If so, it was new—Jesus had opened up heaven only at his Resurrection, forty days prior, and if the apostles were baptized by then, it was likely <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/were-the-apostles-baptized">only recently</a>. So the virtue of hope, God-given at baptism, might not have fit not so well yet. In any event, you could call the pre-Christian world hopeless and mean it literally. Thousands of years of that lay on the apostles’ shoulders when their teacher told them he was hitting the road.
Hope “is an infused virtue,” meaning that it is “directly implanted in the soul by almighty God.” Our Lord throughout his ministry may have been divinely infusing hope in ways his disciples couldn’t see, but his works visibly laid the ground for it. He tended not to make his followers do something without showing them first. He publicly cast out demons (Mark 1:26, 5:13, 9:25) and then empowered his disciples to exorcise (16:17). He showed them healing and then promised that they too would heal. And on the day of his ascension, he showed them—and us, through their witness—the path to heaven. All that remained for the apostles was to follow him, which they now could do, confidently expecting that eternal felicity.
Jesus didn’t have to rise up into the sky right in front of the apostles’ faces, but he did. What better way to instill their hope? It shows: immediately after Jesus left them, off they went, “continually in the temple blessing God” (Luke 24:53), and blessing him on and on through their own ministries and into gruesome martyrdoms for love of him.
Airplanes allow us to do our own little re-enactments of the Ascension. The script has its parallels: your beloved disappears into the clouds, and you stare up, slack-jawed, until some agent not even trying to pass himself off as a white-clad angel tells you to get a move-on, you’re clogging up the drop-off lane with your now suitcase-less and beloved-less car. Usually, you hope for your beloved to come back, confident that that return flight will show up at the scheduled (or, perhaps more likely, delayed) time.
That’s human hope. On a divine level, we wait for Christ to return, as the angels foretold (Acts 1:10-11)—but the Second Coming <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/apocalypse-not">will not be pretty</a>, and we can’t be blamed for preferring to be in heaven already at that point. And then there’s what the apostles did. With divine hope, they hopped to their feet and worked, confidently, with the spiritual means at their disposal, to reach eternal felicity with the ultimate beloved.
We faithful are like earnest children, arranging our lives for God as children draw pictures to impress their parents. In my little crayon picture, I raced to Chicago—cramped, famished, bedeviled for my half of the armrest, but delighted to walk those unknown streets with my wife of only a few months.
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Granted, it wasn’t exactly divine hope, nor is Chicago the best analogue for heaven, if we’re being honest. But marriage is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/man-woman-and-marriage-under-lockdown">a symbol of God</a>, so God must have infused at least a spark of my desire to pursue my wife. More than I knew, it turned out: Anticipating a delightful weekend for two, I’d forgotten that marriage is a symbol of the trinitarian God. There, in Chicago, we learned we were expecting our son, and that was closer to heaven than anything I’d yet experienced.
On Ascension Thursday, God was good enough to give the apostles the theological virtue of hope, to fuel them on the path he showed them to something they knew they wanted but could not fully comprehend (1 Cor. 12). They knew, by the grace of God at the Ascension, that if they pursued him whom we should love above all others, they would attain not just what they knew and hoped for humanly, but also what they couldn’t know and yet still hoped for divinely.
When our loved ones leave us, and we miss them, and we hope so hard to be reunited with them, let’s remember the Ascension and the little pictures we draw for God. All our good acts, all our hopes, are ultimately a shadow of our hope for him, and it’s thanks to him on this <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cal/cal-8032">very special Thursday</a> that we know which way to go.

Hope Until We Meet Again

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DAY 275
CHALLENGE
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“The Gospels say that Jesus was crucified between two robbers (Matt. 27:38; Mark 15:27), but this is inaccurate. We know that the ancient Romans only crucified people who committed acts of rebellion.”
DEFENSE
Romans did crucify robbers, but these two were likely rebels.
Robbery isn’t the same as theft. Theft is taking someone’s property, but robbery is taking it by force. There’s an inherent element of violence in robbery that differentiates it from theft.
When robbery is committed on water, it’s called piracy. Pirates are robbers who travel by water, and we know the Romans sometimes crucified pirates. For example, as a young man and before he was a political leader, Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held for ransom on an island. “But after his ransom had come from Miletus and he had paid it and was set free, he immediately manned vessels and put to sea from the harbour of Miletus against the robbers. He caught them . . . and crucified them all, just as he had often warned them on the island that he would do, when they thought he was joking” (Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar 2:5–7).
Because of the violence inherent in robbery, it often blended into rebellion. Gangs of robbers would hide in the countryside, taking valuables from both locals and travelers by force, and the political authorities would send men to battle them. Alternately, political revolu- tionaries would hide out in the countryside, taking what they needed from others by force, and the political authorities would pursue them.
Either way, robbery was associated with battling the political authorities, and thus there was a single Greek word to describe a person who did these things: lēstēs. It can be translated either “robber, high- wayman, bandit” or “revolutionary, insurrectionist, guerrilla” (Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, and Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Early Christian Literature, s.v. lēstēs).
This is the word used for the two “robbers” crucified with Jesus. It’s also used to describe Barabbas (John 18:40), “who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city, and for murder” (Luke 23:19; cf. Mark 15:7).
Scholars have suggested that, as a “notorious prisoner” (Matt. 27:16), Barabbas led the insurrection and the two “robbers” were his followers. Originally, Barabbas their leader would have been crucified between them, but Jesus took his place.
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Between Two Robbers?

With election season passions heating up, Catholics are more willing than ever to excommunicate each other online. But what, exactly, does it take to be put out of the Church? We asked the king of careful distinctions, Father Sebastian Walshe.

Who Gets to Be Called a Catholic?

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DAY 70
CHALLENGE
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“Abortion is a religious issue, and those who disapprove of abortion must not impose their religious beliefs on others.”
DEFENSE
Abortion is not a “religious issue.” It is a human-rights issue.
Even if abortion were a religious issue, there is no reason why religious people should set aside their moral values on this topic or any other. Religious values have played an indispensable role in issues from caring for the poor and the sick to ending slavery and tyranny. To suggest that religious people should not bring their values to bear on public issues also misunderstands the nature of democracy, which exists precisely to allow people to express their views on how society should be run.
But the truth is that abortion is not a religious issue. When people say it is, they imply that it is a matter of faith rather than reason. This is false. A powerful case against abortion can be made without bringing religion into the discussion. Unborn children simply are innocent hu- man beings, and their innate right to life must be respected like that of any other innocent human being (see Days 88, 185, 191, 202).
It is a scientific fact that the unborn are living human organisms. This is not a religious claim. It does not depend on the teaching of any church or spiritual leader. It is a matter of basic biology, and only deliberate self-deception could allow one to avoid this fact.
Once you recognize that, the question is what you will do in re- sponse: Will you acknowledge the right to life possessed by all in- nocent human beings? Or will you begin the rationalizations people engage in when they wish to deprive an entire class of human beings of their right to life—whether that class be unborn children, the men- tally retarded, Jews, or anyone else.
In other words, the question is whether you will side with those who justify and commit genocide or with those who seek to protect innocent human beings.
From a moral perspective, the correct choice is obvious, but too many today use the claim that abortion is a “religious issue” simply to shut down rational discussion of the subject and evade the clear impli- cations of the facts.
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Abortion as a “Religious Issue”

This year has been a pretty good one for the Satanic Temple. They&#8217;ve even gotten a good deal of positive press. So who are they, what do they believe, and are Catholics obligated to battle them in the streets? Karlo Broussard examines their seven tenets to see.

Satanic Temple for Beginners

What are your thoughts on Matthias being appointed to replace Judas?

If I could learn a language to read the bible, which should it be, Ecclesiastical Latin or Biblical Greek?

Why doesn’t the Church gather frequently to infallibly define everything?

How would I explain that there is only one God to a Mormon?

What is your best argument for the Assumption of Mary?

Ask Me Anything

What do you think about the reference to a Biblical creator in the Declaration of Independence?

Did the Declaration of Independence reference the Biblical Creator, or was it a more general idea of God? In this episode, we discuss The Church Against the State with Dr. Andrew Willard Jones, exploring the historical tension between secular and religious authority.

Did the Declaration of Independence Reference the Biblical Creator?

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer joins host Thomas Graf to address a caller’s worry about why so many Catholic LGBT youth seem to be leaving the faith.
Transcript:
Caller: Hello, guys. It&#8217;s a pleasure talking to you both. So my question is this. I read online that over 60% of Catholic LGBT youth end up leaving the faith by the time they turn 29. I don&#8217;t know if this is true or not, because there are several figures. Some say like 50%, some say 80%, but I think the point still stands. So my question is this. What are we doing wrong as Catholics, and what can we do to prevent them from leaving to begin with?
Joe: Yeah, that&#8217;s a really good question. I think there&#8217;s a couple of things. One, I&#8217;m actually a little dubious about any of those survey questions because the huge underlying question is what defines someone as LGBT youth? If it&#8217;s someone living a gay lifestyle, then obviously people who have left the church are way more likely to self-identify that way than people who are living chastely who might have same-sex attraction. So that&#8217;s going to create some really skewed numbers.
So I don&#8217;t know what the actual numbers are. Nevertheless, whatever the numbers are, we don&#8217;t want people to leave the church, and we want to help give them the tools to be the full, vibrant members of the church that God created them to be.
So I&#8217;d say, number one, one of the attractive things about the broader, whatever you want to call it, LGBT community is the creation of a sense of identity. One of the hallmarks of the modern age, regardless of one&#8217;s sexuality, is a yearning for identity, a yearning for a sense of belonging, and for a sense of knowing where you belong in relation to others.
And we live in a world that has really stripped that away from a lot of people, where people feel very alone and isolated. You add to that things like sexual shame, and it can be this incredibly isolating and incredibly unhappy sort of experience.
And so creating community and creating identity is really vital work. Again, regardless of one&#8217;s sexual attraction orientation, whatever, this is really important work to do.
In the case of people who say, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;ve got these sexual desires that the church tells me are wrong, but the broader culture celebrates and tells me they&#8217;re good and normal and I can be happy,&#8221; it&#8217;s easy to see the appeal.
Now, I think we have to continue telling the truth about this and to say this won&#8217;t make you happy. The point of us saying this is wrong is not to shame or condemn you. The point of us saying this is wrong is to warn you this is not where you will find the true happiness God intended for you.
So I would say, in addition to stressing that you have a home here, you have a place, you have an identity here, and it&#8217;s something bigger than your sexual identity or attraction. It&#8217;s being a beloved son or daughter of God. That&#8217;s immeasurably more.
Because all of us have this battle where we have to say, &#8220;Okay, do I want to live by my sexual and romantic urges, or do I want to live in accordance with my baptismal priesthood and in accordance with the idea that I&#8217;ve been made a beloved son or daughter of God?&#8221;
If you discovered tomorrow that you were a misplaced royal and you actually were the next in line for the throne, this would be incredibly transformative for your life. But you&#8217;d be expected to live a different way. And that&#8217;s how Christianity is as well. You have a royal identity, but with that comes a duty to live in a certain way in accordance with your dignity, in accordance with who you were made to be.
And there are some things that you might want to do that aren&#8217;t in keeping with that dignity. So I would stress those things. Stress the sexual identity in the broader context of your identity in Christ and the sexual morality, and everything flows from that naturally, because morality is always tied to identity.
If I want to know what I am allowed to do, I have to know who I am and what is expected of me. So I would say stress those things and then be honest about the often painful outcomes of people who&#8217;ve gone the other way with it. That all that glitters is not gold and the grass is not greener on the other side there. That it&#8217;s often a place of real misery.
If you want some concrete tools, the Courage program that Father Paul Check has been involved with, and Father Paul Scalia was very involved with, has provided a great deal of support in just creating some identity for people with this struggle.
I know Desert Streams has done great work. Andy Kaminsky and Marco Casanova—actually, I&#8217;m newly godfather to his daughter as of yesterday—do tremendous work in this area. Both of those men have come out of that lifestyle and embraced a different way of living and are tremendously happy as a result of it. Not in a sense of repressing their identity, but finding a yet deeper identity.
So I think that would be the kind of notes I would hit and then just, you know, recognize like, you&#8217;ve got to give people some space. There&#8217;s a natural shame around sexuality, and you don&#8217;t want to lean into that in a way that makes it worse. But you want to give space for people to be struggling and to fall short sometimes.
Thomas: Tony, thank you so much for that call. We are near the end of the show, so I do want to just head right down the line and go to our next caller, Sherry.

Can We Help LGBTQ Youth Stay Catholic?

<div>In many prayers and novenas, virginity is described as glorious, undefiled, pure, etc. Can't marriage be just as glorious, undefiled, and pure? That language seems to look down on marriage as second rate.</div><div>No doubt marriage can and should be holy. Thus the term “holy matrimony” (see Eph. 5:21-33). And thus <a href="https://churchpop.com/2017/07/07/10-holy-married-couples-who-were-both-saints/">saintly married couple</a>s like <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/2001/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_20011021_beltrame-quattrocchi.html">the Quattrochis</a> (now Blessed) and <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-pope-married-couple-saints-20151018-story.html">the Martins</a> (canonized in recent years), the latter the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
And yet, as St. Paul writes in I Corinthians 7:32ff., the unmarried are freer to serve the Lord with single-mindedness.
Bottom line, each person should rejoice over his God-given vocation, whether to single life in service of the Lord or holy matrimony, and strive to live it in an abundantly fruitful way (see John 10:10).
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Is Marriage “Second Rate” to Celibate or Consecrated Life?

It’s common for skeptics of Christianity to claim that the word Easter comes from the name of a pagan deity called Ishtar, suggesting that the Christian faith has pagan roots. But no matter how prevalent this contention has become, it has no basis in history or reality.
In Jeremiah 44:15-17, the people of Judah reject the prophet Jeremiah’s message in preference to their idolatrous worship of an entity called “the queen of heaven”—apparently the pagan deity Ishtar. Commentators seem to be in general agreement that Jeremiah’s “queen of heaven” is Astaroth or Ashtaroth—Astarte in the Septuagint, which is the Greek Old Testament. Literally, Astaroth means “the moon.” The moon was a Sidonian idol worshipped by the Phoenicians and worshipped as Ishtar by the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Babylonians. In nature worship, the sun and the moon were considered the king and queen, respectively, of the celestial heavens.
Some people have inferred that Easter is the English derivation of the Greek Astarte, but there is no linguistic or historical basis for this. In addition, the English word Easter is said to have derived from an Anglo-Saxon pagan goddess named Eostre. This theory was based on an incorrect conclusion by St. Bede the Venerable about the etymological origins of the English month that coincides with spring and the celebration of Easter, Eosturmonath. But, as Anthony McRoy, a fellow of the British Society for Middle East Studies, notes, <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/2009/april/was-easter-borrowed-from-pagan-holiday.html">there is no historical basis for this derivation</a>. He notes that St. Bede himself said his conclusion was based on his interpretation rather than a generally held position or proven fact.
Also, there is no doubt that the focus of Easter for St. Bede and English Christians in general, was and is Jesus, the Passover Lamb who died on our behalf and rose from the dead.
Indeed, in most European countries, the name for Easter derives from the Greek word Pascha, which itself is derived from the Hebrew Pesach—i.e., the word Passover. Thus, the term paschal sacrifice refers to Jesus’ one sacrifice, and paschal candle is another name for the Easter candle.
So where did the English get their word for the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection? McRoy <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/2009/april/was-easter-borrowed-from-pagan-holiday.html">notes there are two main theories, both of which are plausible</a>:
<blockquote>One theory for the origin of the name is that the Latin phrase in albis (“in white”), which Christians used in reference to Easter week, found its way into Old High German as eostarum, or “dawn.” The other is that Eosturmonath simply meant “the month of opening,” which is comparable to the meaning of “April” in Latin. The names of both the Saxon and Latin months (which are calendrically similar) were related to spring, the season when the buds open.</blockquote>
In either case, the claim that the English celebration is rooted in pagan goddess worship simply has no historical basis, even if some anti-Catholic polemicists have gotten a good deal of mileage out of it.

Easter Is Not a Secretly Pagan Holiday

<div>If Jesus ascended to heaven 40 after being risen from the dead, where was he all this time</div><div>Jesus spent his post-Resurrection period on earth ministering to his apostles and other disciples.  This can be seen in various biblical accounts, including John 20—21, Luke 24, Matthew 28, Mark 16, and Acts 1.
The 40-day formation period between the Resurrection and Ascension inspired the Church to use this period for new Catholics, who typically come into the Church at Easter, to deepen their formation. It’s called <a href="https://acmrcia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/Catechesis%20in%20Mystagogy.pdf">Mystagogy</a>, which typically extends the RCIA period until Pentecost.
Jesus reigns with the Father in heaven and yet, because of his omnipotence, is able to remain with us (Matt. 28:20), most profoundly in the Sacrifice of the Mass, which we offer prayerfully in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19-20).
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Where Was Jesus Between Resurrection and Ascension?

The Gospel of Mark tells us of Jesus’ lawbreaking:
<blockquote>One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain.
And the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, ”Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?”
And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:23-28). </blockquote>
Did thunder rumble in the distance as Jesus pronounced this last phrase? It would certainly have been appropriate if it did, since to be “lord” over something is, in this sense, to be its ruler, its absolute master . . . and every Hebrew in Palestine knew very well that it was God himself who had instituted the Sabbath, on the seventh day of creation.
Yes, Jesus presents a less astounding argument as well (though still startling enough to his contemporaries): King David did this without your criticizing him, therefore I, Jesus, David’s successor, can do it, too. Technically speaking, Hebrew priests profaned the Sabbath every week by working to replace the showbread in the tabernacle, and after the new loaves were set out, the priests ate the old ones (Exod. 25:30, Lev. 24:5-9). David, who cannot have been a priest in the ordinary sense—a priest, that is, after the order of Aaron (he belonged to the wrong family, that of Judah)—laid claim to this priestly privilege by eating the showbread himself and even offering it to his men. Now Jesus (also a Judahite, not a Levite) asserts for himself membership in the same “new extraordinary priesthood” to which his forefather David had prophetically laid claim. But “lord of the Sabbath” was something else again.
That title implied another argument altogether, an argument too flabbergasting for most Jews to entertain long enough even to put into words. “I, Jesus,” said the Nazarene in essence, “am lord of the Sabbath; and as such, I am sovereign over it. It’s mine; and I will do with it as I please, with or without your leave. If I keep its restrictions, I keep them because I choose to do so, not because they will make me good or because not keeping them would make me a sinner, but simply because it is seemly for me to do so for the time being, just as it was becoming of me to accept the baptism of John. But make no mistake: Moses’ law does not apply to me now and never did apply. Moses was not lord of the Sabbath—he would have rent his garments, in fact, had anyone dared to call him that—but I am. I can dispense my servants from some of it, or all of it. I can even abrogate it altogether if I so choose, so that it will apply in its original form to no one any longer—not even to you Jews. If I so choose. This is what I, Jesus, mean by ‘lord of the Sabbath.’”
Certainly a neat, tidy answer—but what an answer!
And so the problem of our Lord’s so-called lawbreaking turns on nothing less than a correct appraisal of his own identity. What Jesus was doing and saying couldn’t ultimately be separated from the question of who Jesus is—and that was the whole difficulty in a nutshell.
The Catechism explains the lawbreaking problem in this way: “In presenting with divine authority the definitive interpretation of the Law, Jesus found himself confronted by certain teachers of the Law who did not accept his interpretation . . . guaranteed though it was by the divine signs that accompanied it” (582). Were the signs, in fact, divine? And in what sense? On these kinds of questions hung all his right to appropriate that astounding title—lord of the Sabbath—and without that right, his appropriation is usurpation. And yes, blasphemy. Confronting the absurdity they thought could be “discounted” was (and still is) inescapable.
The apostles were the first to confront this Sphinx’s Riddle. For them, there was no getting away from it, since the devils had been screeching it in their ears for weeks! “And demons,” Luke records, “came out of many, crying, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he [Jesus] rebuked them, and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Christ” (Luke 4:41). And the apostles knew already that many of his miracles had been accompanied by this same demand for secrecy. When he raised the daughter of Jairus from the dead, “her parents were amazed; but he charged them to tell no one what had happened” (Luke 8:56). And then, speaking to witnesses at Decapolis, where he opened the ears of a deaf man, “he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it” (Mark 7:36). It appears that Jesus really did seek to control the time and the pace at which the profounder facts about himself were revealed.
Yet what did “Son of God” really mean in this context? As we’ve seen, Nathanael of Cana was able to cry out, at the very beginning of his journey without any training from Jesus at all, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!” And in that private setting, Jesus accepted the affirmation and made no attempt to shush the confessor. What, at that early stage, had Nathanael meant by the term?
Son of God, according to the old <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14142b.htm">Catholic Encyclopedia</a>, was a title “applied in the Old Testament to persons having any special relationship with God.” In the book of Job, for instance, the angels who present themselves before the Lord are called “sons of God” (1:6). “Angels, just and pious men, the descendants of Seth,” the Encyclopedia continues, “were called ‘sons of God’ (Job 1:6; 2:1; Psalm 89:7; Wis. 2:13; etc.). In a similar manner it was given to Israelites (Deut. 14:50); and of Israel, as a nation, we read: ‘And thou shalt say to him: Thus saith the Lord: Israel is my son, my firstborn. I have said to thee: Let my son go, that he may serve me’ (Exod. 4:22). The leaders of the people, kings, princes, judges, as holding authority from God, were called sons of God.”
All this being the case, is it possible that Nathanael meant nothing more than “I accept you, Jesus, as our long-awaited messianic king”? Possible, yes—but to insist on that “nothing more” ignores the display of supernatural knowledge that occasioned his outcry, and also the more advanced state of development that the term had reached by the eve of Christ’s advent. “The theocratic king as lieutenant of God,” often a type of the messiah to come, was also called “Son of God” in the Old Testament. Perhaps the plainest example of this is Psalm 2:6-7—“I have set my king [David] on Zion, my holy hill. . . . You are my son; today I have begotten you”—an excellent illustration of how the prophecies about “messiah as God’s own Son” acquired a more literal meaning as time went on.
We need not assume then, that Nathanael was ready at that point to make anything like an exact affirmation of the divinity of Christ that would have passed the test of orthodoxy we would find in later Catholic creeds, but he almost certainly did use “Son of God” to avow a newfound belief, at least, that the Nazarene must represent some kind of unique personification of God’s saving purpose.
It was a start, anyhow.

Jesus Christ, Lawbreaker

In this video, Holy Land tour guide and author Steve Ray gives an inside look at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, on a special Holy Week segment. Host Cy Kellett joins him to explore the historical and spiritual significance of the tomb of Jesus, the crucifixion site at Golgotha, and the surrounding garden.
Transcript:
Steve: Just so you&#8217;ll know, this is the church. See if I can do this right. This is the church of the Holy Sepulcher. Today, what it looks like today, okay, people go in there and say, that doesn&#8217;t look like a hill and a garden and a tomb, but this is what it looked like at the time of Jesus. See, there&#8217;s a little hill there where the cross was. And see, carved into the hill is a tomb. And then Queen Helena came, and she cut that all away and built this church over it, which was the size, I hear, of three football fields. And then that&#8217;s what it looks like today. Built over both. Under the big dome is the tomb. Under the other dome there is the cross, all under one roof. And since we&#8217;re showing pictures, here is what it looks like. If you were to walk upstairs right now, there would be no people there. Just like that. But that is up a level. Up. You have to go upstairs. That&#8217;s Calvary, and that is an altar. And when you reach down, like Janet and I are doing here, which we&#8217;ve done a hundred times or more, when you reach down and you touch the stone under that altar, okay, I tell my group, your hand, if you touched it 2,000 years ago, your hand would come up sticky with his blood.
Cy: Oh, my.
Steve: That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re touching, the top. And people go down and they touch it, and they just cry. And at the top, right next to that stone where the blood was, is this image. Look at that. Isn&#8217;t that haunting? That&#8217;s Mary watching her son be crucified. And Simeon the Prophet had told her, a sword will pierce your soul also. And that picture just gives me goosebumps. It&#8217;s not a picture, actually. It&#8217;s a glass bust, like a statue inside glass. And it never ceases to. Hair stands up on the back of my neck. I get chills. But those are just a few. Just to get us started as to the physical place. It&#8217;s really there.
Cy: Yeah. That&#8217;s extraordinary, that. I mean, this is the story of Jesus. It&#8217;s always, you know, in the scriptures, they&#8217;re careful to tell us what year in the reign of what emperor and all these details and who was the governor and all that. And all of it checks out. There&#8217;s one that people have a little bit of trouble with, the governor of Syria, but there&#8217;s no reason to have trouble with that. But people do. But historically and archaeologically, it all checks out. But tell me a little bit about Helena, if you would. Christ is crucified probably in the year 30 AD and she gets there maybe 300 years after that. Just about 300 years after that.
Steve: Okay, so the sequence.
Cy: Yes, go ahead.
Steve: The sequence is Jesus is crucified on that hill called Golgotha. Calvary is a Latin for it. I find it interesting that all the Protestants have Calvary Baptist Church. They take that right out of the Latin Vulgate of the Catholic Church. That&#8217;s where you find the word Calvary. It&#8217;s the only place it is. But anyway. And he&#8217;s buried on top of there and it says that it&#8217;s in a garden. And they just have released information that they did archaeological testing underneath. And they found the remains of grapevines and olive trees. It really was a garden under there. And then they had into the rock the tomb cut. The early Christians came and they prayed there and they worshiped there and they never forgot that place.And then Emperor Hadrian came along in 135 and he built pagan shrines over these holy sites to obliterate them, to erase them from the face of the earth. So over the place of the holy Sepulcher was built a pagan temple to Venus.
Cy: Yeah
Steve: So now that stood there until 320. So for over 200 years, there you&#8217;ve got. Nobody could go and see it. It&#8217;s a pagan temple. Then Queen Helena came after her son Constantine legalized Christianity in 313. And she came and she saw. I&#8217;m making this up, but this is how I imagine it happening. She found a little local boy and she said, little boy, where was Jesus crucified and buried? And he took the queen by the hand. He says, come with me, come with me. And he took her over. He said he was crucified and buried and rose again right under that pagan temple to Venus. And so she knocked it down, dug underneath, and guess what she found? She found the tomb, she found the cross. She actually found the cross that today you can go down. It&#8217;s a long stair down. It&#8217;s called the Chapel of Helena. And there was a bunch of old crosses that had been thrown in there and forgotten. So she brought a bunch of sick people and she touched all of them. And the one that healed everybody she touched, she said, this must be the true cross. And that&#8217;s where we get. Like sometimes you see a relic of the true cross. And it&#8217;s from Helena&#8217;s cross that she discovered there. And so then she built this beautiful, beautiful church over that. And it&#8217;s been there ever since. And we&#8217;ve never forgotten where it was ever since. The same story I could tell you about Bethlehem over the cave where he was born. In Bethlehem also Hadrian built there. She knocked it down, found the place. So these Hadrian, I love it when the devil gets his plans foiled and ends up finding out he&#8217;s helping God instead of hurting God. He&#8217;s going to obliterate all these holy sites. All he did was mark them for future generations.
Cy: Oh, that&#8217;s a very good point.
Steve: When Helena came. De marked them all. There were like four of these pagan shrines. Under those are the holy sites. Dug them up, built beautiful churches, and we&#8217;ve been going there ever since.
Cy: So you can make a pilgrimage there now, but you would say, say in the year 150 or something. Do you think Christians made pilgrimages there even though it was under a temple?
Cy: Oh, yeah, they made pilgrimages early on. And I have a book here called *Egeria&#8217;s Journals*. She went in 381 and she wrote her records. But there are other. Justin Martyr, for example, he was second century and he said, and him and John Chrysostom, third century, said that pilgrims come even at this late date to view the places where Jesus was crucified. So he said that when you go to Nazareth, they still have some of the things that Jesus and Joseph made because his families would have kept those things. And they still remembered that I was a great, great, great grandson of, you know, Jesus&#8217; uncle. And so there&#8217;s records even way back of pilgrims going there.
Cy: So where Jesus was crucified, how far outside the walls of Jerusalem is that? And how near is it to the gates entering and exiting ancient Jerusalem?
Steve: It would have been right outside the city gates. And this is an interesting thing because the Protestants came along and I don&#8217;t mean to, you know, I was one of them once and my parents made me take them. When I took them, they wanted to go see the garden tomb because the Anglicans in 1850, so it was like 150 years ago or two. General Gordon didn&#8217;t like the Holy Sepulcher because it was too Catholic and it was inside the city walls. And he said, but the Bible says it was outside the city walls. So he went outside the city walls, looked, he found an old tomb. And above it, it was a quarry, so it looked like you could make out of it a little bit like a skull. He said, this must be it. So they bought that land. And the Protestants, the fundamentalists, they go there and they say, this is the garden tomb where Jesus was really crucified and buried, but it wasn&#8217;t even thought of until 150 years ago.
But the thing is that he didn&#8217;t do his homework because at the time of Christ, Calvary was outside the city walls. In 44 AD, they built the walls further out, which then encompassed it. But at the time of the crucifixion, it was outside. So when I tell my story, I give a talk called the Stations of the Cross, where I go through each one of the stations and describe it medically, historically, geographically. And I said, it says Jesus fell the third time. It doesn&#8217;t say he fell the third time. But if you&#8217;ve been beat up like he was and you&#8217;re carrying £110 on your back, stumbling through these streets, you got blood in your eyes, you can&#8217;t even see, of course he&#8217;s going to fall. But I just say that to answer your question, at Jesus&#8217; time, when he&#8217;s going outside the gates, he fell and he had that cross on his back and Cleopas, I mean Simeon, was helping him carry it. And I think Jesus looked up and he saw, there&#8217;s. That&#8217;s where I&#8217;m going. Right there outside the gates, there it was.
Cy: Oh, I see. And this was not a unique event. This is where they crucified people. It was a billboard. When you drive into Houston or San Diego or any of these places, there&#8217;s billboards. What are they doing? They&#8217;re telling you something you need to know before you come into the city. Right.
Cy: Well, the Romans, they crucified people at the city gates, right? On the main thoroughfare, right? Coming in, because it was a billboard that said, here&#8217;s what will happen to you if you defy the power of Rome. And they left men, sometimes on those crosses alive for a week. They kept them alive. And sometimes they would just leave the bodies there until they rotted. And this was the Jews, they didn&#8217;t like that. So they quickly got them off. But this is what they did. They would hang them there in the city gates so that they would be a billboard to everyone else, be terrified of Rome and never do anything to violate.
And an article, I got an article coming out, in Catholic Answers magazine. Yep. And my article is, was Jesus crucified naked? It&#8217;s going to come out at 8 o&#8217;clock Good Friday morning. And we worked on that. And I sent that into him a while ago. But it was the utter degradation, the utter dehumanization of the victim to be hanging there completely naked. You lose control of your bodily functions. You&#8217;re there in front of all the people who are in Jerusalem coming in and out. Yeah. And it was not only meant to be painful, it was meant to be the utter humiliating degradation of the human being. And it was a warning to never do that. So it was right outside the city gates, and everybody coming in and out of that major city gate would see Jesus hanging there.
Cy: We&#8217;ll talk about who was at the foot of the cross. There&#8217;s more people than you might recollect were at the foot of the cross. Steve will go through them with us right after this as we begin Holy Week on Catholic Answers Live.

The Church Built on Jesus’ Grave

When it comes to the vocation to marriage, Catholics sometimes lean towards one of two extremes. Some of us are drawn towards the secular, romantic concept of a “soulmate,” that there’s one person out there somewhere just for you. Others reject this in favor of the idea that, since marriage is a natural vocation, it doesn’t particularly matter who you choose (or who chooses you), so long as you’re both free to marry one another, and like each other sufficiently well. If the first one is the “soulmate” view, we might call the second one the “warm body” view. It’s decidedly less romantic. But are either of these views correct?
On the contrary, a richer understanding of the theology of vocations is important for approaching marriage (and priesthood and religious life) in a healthier way. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, “to call.” Every “vocation” is a calling from God. So in this sense, we can say that everyone has a vocation to become a saint, since we know that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).
But God doesn’t just say, “go be a saint” in some generic and un-nuanced way. After all, there are as many different types of saints as there are saints. Rather, he has a plan for you specifically. As King David proclaims in Psalm, “Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Ps. 139:16). In the words of the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_13021998_new-vocations_en.html">Pontifical Work for Ecclesiastical Vocations</a>, “holiness is the universal vocation of every man, it is the main road onto which converge all the little paths that are particular vocations.”
To be a saint is our universal calling. How we get there is the little path of “particular vocations.” That includes “vocation” in the way we often use that term (am I called to priesthood? marriage? religious life?), but it means something more specific yet. If you’re called to diocesan priesthood, for which diocese? If you’re called to religious life, for which community? If you’re called to marriage, to whom?
But it’s possible to take the particularity of God’s call in an extreme direction, and that’s the danger of the idea of “soulmates.” The danger here is twofold. First, if you imagine that, in the entire world, there’s one and only one person God is okay with you marrying, those daunting odds are likely to be debilitating.  I’m reminded here of the song “<a href="https://youtu.be/cUFL8WSxTgY?si=7WJFNsJ8Bt8BOM8-">Whole Wide World</a>” by Wreckless Eric (familiar to some readers from the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which it was <a href="https://youtu.be/bFU545ZtOpE?si=1uOfi2wdmEsGvz-P">performed by Will Ferrell</a>), in which the singer laments:
<blockquote>When I was a young boy
My mama said to me
“There&#8217;s only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti”
I&#8217;d go the whole wide world
I&#8217;d go the whole wide world just to find her</blockquote>
If that was how the vocation to marriage looked, virtually none of us would ever manage to get married.
But the second danger is that this romantic vision of “soulmates” can easily become selfish and unrealistic: we imagine that our true vocation is to find the one person in the world who can complete us and solve all of our problems. But that’s not what a real vocation looks like at all. As <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/vocations/documents/papa-francesco_20140115_51-messaggio-giornata-mondiale-vocazioni.html">Pope Francis has warned</a>, “no vocation is born of itself or lives for itself.” Every true calling from God is a call to deeper love: for us to grow both in our love of him and in our service towards our neighbor (whether that means serving our spouse, our religious community, our parish, or something else).
Instead, on the road towards sanctity, we’re called to discern what’s in front of us. Where is God calling me right now? Who is God asking me to serve today, and how? Whether we’ve found our vocational state in life or not, we should be in the habit of asking this of God regularly, and being open to whatever answer he may give us. This is a surer way to proceed towards our ultimate vocation of “saint” than either pining after an imagined soulmate or marrying the first person willing to put up with us.