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DAY 99
CHALLENGE
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“God imputes righteousness to us; he doesn’t infuse it, as the Catholic Church teaches.”
DEFENSE
This involves several misunderstandings.
The words “impute” and “infuse” are derived from Latin terms—imputare and infundere—that respectively mean “to reckon” and “to pour in/on.”
The image of God imputing righteousness suggests a legal or commercial context where God either legally declares us righteous or credits righteousness to our commercial accounts. The image of God infusing righteousness suggests a context in which God pours righteousness into us like water into a vessel. Despite the way this challenge is posed, Catholics don’t deny God imputes righteousness to us. They have the same verses saying this in their Bibles that Protestants do (e.g., Gen. 15:6, Rom. 4:3–6, Gal. 3:6, James 2:23).
Also, the image of infused righteousness isn’t frequently used in Catholic documents. It’s only mentioned once in Trent’s Decree on Justification (chapter 16), and not at all in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification and its Annex. The Church more commonly uses the language of infusion concerning the Holy Spirit and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity (cf. Acts 2:17–18, Rom. 5:5, Titus 3:6).
Ultimately, both the images of imputation and infusion can be used to describe God’s saving action. They don’t need to be understood as mutually opposed, so we need to be on guard against mere quarrels about words (1 Tim. 6:4; 2 Tim. 2:14).
Although Catholics don’t deny God reckons people righteous, they do understand God’s word as effectual, so it brings about the effect God declares (Isa. 55:11). Thus, when God reckons or declares people righ- teous, they become objectively (metaphysically) righteous (see Day 350).
This does not mean their behavior instantly changes (though God does begin a work of sanctification that leads them to behave more righteously over time). It does mean that they “are made innocent, immaculate, pure, guiltless, and beloved of God, heirs indeed of God, joint heirs with Christ; so that there is nothing whatever to hinder their entrance into heaven” (Trent, Decree on Original Sin 5).
This point is frequently misunderstood in Protestant apologetics, which often claims that the idea of infused righteousness means a person is not made perfectly righteous when he is first justified. He is (see Day 257).
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Imputed versus Infused Righteousness

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Did Jesus Have a Miraculous Birth?

For millennia, people assumed that the heart is the seat of our thoughts and emotions. Even the Bible and Church documents use this language. But more recently, medical science has suggested that the head—not the heart—is where our thoughts and emotions come from.
In this episode, Jimmy Akin looks at how we can understand the heart-centered language in the Bible and Church documents in light of head-centered science. He also throws up several cautions about taking the head-centered science too strictly and why we have reason to think that neither the heart nor the head is the ultimate cause of consciousness.
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Transcript:
Coming Up
People celebrate every St. Valentine’s Day using heart shapes. Greeting cards bear them, cakes and candies are made in this shape, and they’re used as decorations on anything connected with the holiday.
The shape—usually red, with two round lobes at the top and a point at the bottom—is idealized and only approximates what a human heart looks like, but it’s so common that it can raise a question: Why do we use the heart shape in the first place?
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Howdy, folks!
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The Head-Centered Model
At least in the secular sphere, Valentine’s Day is a holiday that celebrates romantic love, but in modern medicine the heart is just a set of muscles that rhythmically contract to push blood around inside our bodies. What’s the connection?
The answer, as you might expect, goes back quite a ways. People have always known the organs of the body. Between cutting up animals and cutting up other people, they were quite familiar with them. But they didn’t always understand their functions.
For example, today we associate thought with the brain. This is known as the cephalocentric or “head-centered” view, but this view wasn’t dominant in history.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was one of the best anatomists in the ancient world. He noted all the blood vessels around the brain and concluded that its function must be to allow the blood from the heart to cool down (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals 2:7). The brain was, in essence, a heat management organ.
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The Heart-Centered Model
On the other hand, there seemed to be a direct connection between the heart and mental phenomena. If you’re seized by a strong emotion—like love, lust, fear, anxiety, or excitement—your heart speeds up. In the absence of such emotion, it slows down.
Sometimes—particularly at moments of peak emotion—your heart may even “skip a beat.” (Technically, one chamber beats early, before it’s fully filled with blood, so you don’t feel the beat; then it over-fills as the normal cycle reasserts itself and you feel a more pronounced thump.)
It thus became natural for people to associate the heart with mental functions like emotions and intellect.  This is known as the cardiocentric or “heart-centered” view.
Several other factors may have also contributed to this view, such as the fact the heart is hidden (like our mental functions), that it is at the center of our bodies’ extensions (suggesting it’s important), and the fact that if it stops working, you die (associated with the spirit leaving).
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Biblical History
Whatever the factors played a role in its rise, the idea that the heart is the seat of the mind was common in ancient cultures.
Thus when the ancient Egyptians mummified you, they kept your heart inside your body, but they took out the brain so that its moisture wouldn’t cause the body to rot. This would have been done for the two ancient Israelites who we know were mummified, the patriarchs Jacob and Joseph (Gen. 50:2-3, 26).
The Israelites also accepted the cardiocentric model. Thus a man is said to rejoice “in his heart” (Exod. 4:14) or to have his heart “broken” (Psa. 69:20)—an expression we still use today. Angry people have their hearts grow hot (Psa. 39:3), and hearts “melt” with fear (Deut. 20:8). The heart is the seat of courage (2 Chron. 17:6), and God may fulfill the “heart’s desire” (Psa. 21:2).
In addition to the heart being seen as the place of these emotions, it was also seen as the seat of the intellect. Thus, before the Flood, God saw “that every imagination of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5), and when Abraham heard the prophecy of Isaac’s birth, he laughed to himself and “in his heart” said, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” (Gen. 17:17). This mode of language is even applied to God himself, for after the Flood, “the Lord said in his heart” that he would not curse the ground again because of man (Gen. 8:21).
The cardiocentric model continued to be used in the New Testament, where the heart is still spoken of as the seat of emotions. Thus Paul tells the Colossians to sing “with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16), and he tells the Thessalonians that he wishes God will “encourage your hearts” (2 Thess. 2:17).
The heart is similarly envisioned as the seat of the intellect. Thus Simeon prophesied that through Jesus the “thoughts from many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:35), and when the disciples argued about who was the greatest, Jesus knew “the thoughts of their hearts” (Luke 9:47).
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Post-Biblical History
The image of the heart continued to be prominent in the post-apostolic age.
After the year 1000, devotion began to grow to the heart of Jesus. A prominent example is the Sacred Heart of Jesus devotion reportedly revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675.
This devotion depicts Jesus’ heart surrounded by flames of love, with a crown of thorns and a cross above it, and a solemnity commemorating the Sacred Heart is celebrated on the third Friday after Pentecost.
Ordinary people continue to use language based on the cardiocentric model today, such as when we say that someone is “big-hearted,” “cold-hearted,” or “tender-hearted.” We may say that they have a “heart of gold,” a “heart of stone,” or that they are a “bleeding heart.” People “learn things by heart.” And, of course, the Grinch’s “heart was two sizes too small.”
We do this without even thinking about it, the same way we speak of the sun rising and setting despite what Copernicus and Galileo had to say.
Now, for us ordinary individuals, this doesn’t raise much of an issue. The presence of the cardiocentric model in folk expressions is no big deal.
But what about when the language appears in Scripture or Church documents—like those approving the Sacred Heart devotion? Does it conflict with the cephalocentric model that regards the head rather than the heart as the seat of mental activity?
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How the Head-Centered Model Began
The cephalocentric model also has a long history. It actually pre-dated Aristotle, having been proposed by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras around 550 B.C. Fans of the theory included Aristotle’s teacher Plato, and the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, so it’s not like the idea was absent from Western thought.
Following the scientific revolution, evidence mounted that the brain was more associated with thought than the heart, and by the early 1800s, neuroscience had developed to the point that cephalocentrism was firmly established.
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Heart-Centered Language in Church Documents
The Church knew this, and so in 1899, Pope Leo XIII explained the Sacred Heart in symbolic terms, stating that, “There is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another” and that “whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine heart is really and truly given to Christ himself” (Annum Sacrum 8).
Similarly, in 2024, Pope Francis stated that,
Devotion to the heart of Christ is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus. What we contemplate and adore is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart. That heart of flesh is seen as the privileged sign of the inmost being of the incarnate Son and his love, both divine and human. More than any other part of his body, the heart of Jesus is the natural sign and symbol of his boundless love (Dilexit Nos 48).
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Heart-Centered Language in the Bible
What about the Bible? Does the cardiocentric language it uses mean that the biblical authors didn’t understand the role of the brain and the heart?
Well, they lived before the scientific revolution, so they would not be expected to, and that’s not a problem from the perspective of biblical theology.
The Second Vatican Council taught:
Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings (Dei Verbum 11).
It also taught:
For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another (Dei Verbum 12).
But there’s a difference between what someone asserts and what he assumes.
We therefore must distinguish between what the biblical authors assumed to be the case and what they were asserting by the language they used.
When Luke says that Jesus knew “the thoughts of [the disciples’] hearts” (Luke 9:47), he’s asserting that Jesus knew their thoughts, not that these thoughts were literally housed in their hearts.
We don’t know which school of thought Luke subscribed to. As an ancient physician, he may have been a cardiocentrist or a cephalocentrist, but either way it was normal for people of his day to speak of thoughts as coming from the heart.
That’s just one of the expressions they commonly used—like we do today.
In any event, Luke is not trying to teach us a medical theory; he’s telling us that Jesus knew what the disciples thought, and this assertion—not any background assumptions in the way it is expressed—is what is guaranteed to be true.
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Reasons for Caution
On the other hand, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume a strict correlation between the brain and mental phenomena. In the first place, there’s what’s known as “the little brain in the heart” or intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS). It’s about forty thousand neurons that help regulate the heart’s activity, and things like a racing heart can affect emotional states (e.g., by causing fear and panic).
Even more surprisingly, there is evidence from heart transplant surgeries that something more than the physical organ—at least information—can be passed between patients. In one example, neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall recounts the cases of men he refers to as Jim and Frank.
Jim had bad lungs and received a heart-lung transplant. However, Jim’s own heart was still good and was given to Frank. After the transplant, Frank’s personality changed to be more like Jim’s, Frank began exhibiting Jim’s food preferences, and during intimate moments Frank began calling his wife by the name of Jim’s wife (The Heart&#8217;s Code, pp. 123-124).
Ultimately, neither the heart nor the brain may be essential for mental activity. Consistent with Christian teaching on life after death, the evidence of Near-Death Experiences reveals that people continue to have conscious experiences even during cardiac arrest, when the heart has ceased beating and brain activity goes offline within seconds. Yet people in this condition accurately report things happening around their physical bodies and even in other rooms of hospitals that they have no sensory access to.
All of this serves as a warning against reductionistic theories that would too closely tie mind and emotions to physical organs like the heart and the brain. Given the complexity of what we observe, this whole area is still—as it was in biblical days—a mystery.
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If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and get early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!

The Mystery of the Heart

What would it be like to go on a bus trip between hell and heaven? In this episode Trent sits down with Pints with Jack co-host David Bates to talk about C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce.

C.S. Lewis’s Trip to Heaven (with David Bates)

In this episode Trent sits down with Sam Tideman of Transfigured to discuss biblical unitarianism. They also discuss how Catholics have an easier time defending the Trinity.

DIALOGUE: Is Jesus God? (and the “Protestant Trinity Problem”)

With &#8220;Oppenheimer&#8221; filling up the cinemas, and today being the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, we take a look back at an earlier episode we produced about the morality of dropping the atom bomb.
Can a Catholic assent to blowing up entire cities? What about when to do so will save perhaps millions of lives? Catholic Answers President Chris Check joins us as we consider again America&#8217;s use of Atomic weapons to end a long, bitter war with Japan.

(Encore) Was Dropping the Atom Bomb Moral?

In this episode, Trent takes on the empty absurdities of liberal Christianity.
Transcription:
In a 2009 speech given at an atheistic conference, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term deepity to refer to statements that seem profound at first glance but upon closer examination turn out to be trivially true at best like (“Love is just a word”) or just nonsense (“Have faith in faith”). Some atheists say theology is just a bunch of “deepities” and in this episode I’m going to expose liberal theology that really are just a bunch of worthless deepities.
Before I do that though the existence of bad theology doesn’t prove there is no good theology just as pseudo-science doesn’t disprove real science or philosophy that is just word salad, like the word of Deepak Chopra, doesn’t disprove real philosophy.
One good example of “junk” liberal Christianity can be found in a 2019 New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/christian-easter-serene-jones.html">interview with Serene Jones</a>, a Protestant minister and president of Union Theological Seminary. Here are a few of her “deepities”:
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<li class="li3">“[The] empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.”</li>
<li class="li3">“Living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true.”</li>
<li class="li3">“The message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death.”</li>
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When I hear this kind of talk, I think of <a href="https://comb.io/Z2xbyA">the episode of The Simpsons</a> where Rev. Lovejoy is selling ice cream flavors such as “Blessed Virgin Berry” and “Command-mint.” He then offers Lisa “Unitarian ice cream”. But it’s just an empty bowl. Lisa remarks, “There’s nothing here,” to which Lovejoy responds, “Exactly.”
According to their website: Unitarian universalists “beliefs are diverse and inclusive. We have no shared creed. Our shared covenant (our seven Principles) supports “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Liberal Christianity at least tries to pay lip service to Jesus but it often comes off more like a unitarian wannabe.
A good way to expose the emptiness of liberal Christian “deepities” is to ask some simple questions: How is love stronger than death? What makes love “true”? In doing this, you can show that the person is just dressing up secular, hopeful thinking with religious language.
I also notice that adherents of liberal Christianity often defend their position by casting traditional concepts of God and faith as being for simpletons. However, their hasty dismissals often reveal their own simplistic grasp of theology. For example, Jones says, “Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts.”
I expect this misrepresentation of the Trinity from village atheists, but not from a so-called “Christian” minister, who should understand that God became man to freely offer himself as a sacrifice of love that outweighs the evil of our sins.
Jones also says Christians who are “obsessed” with the Resurrection have a “wobbly faith.” She writes, “What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.” Well, tell that to St. Paul, who declared, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).
Jones tries to defend her assertion about the unimportance of the Resurrection by saying, “The stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves.”
Now, it’s true the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-fake-resurrection-in-marks-gospel">shorter ending of Mark</a> does not contain an appearance of the resurrected Jesus, but it certainly contains a resurrection account because the young man at the tomb tells the women, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:6-7, emphasis added).
This leads to another good question to ask: How is a non-miraculous Christianity different from morally upright atheism? Jones says hell is just the reality we create when we “reject love” and in this Easter represents “love triumphing over suffering.” But you can be an atheist who puts hope in love and patiently endures suffering, so why even bother being a Christian? Indeed, when the non-Christian interviewer asks if Jones is a Christian in spite of denying Jesus’ miracles, she answers, “Well, you sound an awful lot like me, and I’m a Christian minister.”
You might think she’s a Christian based on her saying all people are saved, which is what universalists teach. But when she was asked in the New York Times interview what happens after death she said ““I don’t know! There may be something, there may be nothing. My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife.”
Jones might say her theology isn’t equivalent to atheism because she believes in God, but her God is so limited and disinterested in human affairs that he might as well be nonexistent. For example, Jones says she doesn’t worship an all-powerful, all-knowing God, because that’s a product of “Roman juridical theory and Greek mythology” (even though Greco-Roman deities were limited in power, knowledge, and goodness). She also claims that God doesn’t answer prayers, and instead of “controlling the world,” he merely “invites” us into love, justice, and mercy.
This is fairly common among liberal Christians. William Lane Craig once asked John Dominic Crossan, one of the world’s most famous New Testament scholars, if God exists. Crossan gave a vague answer saying God is just what we believe in. So he asked if God existed during the Jurassic age when there were no humans to believe in him?
William Lane Craig:
During the Jurassic Age when there were no human beings? Did God exist?
John Dominic Crossan:
Meaningless question,
William Lane Craig:
But surely that&#8217;s not a meaningless question. I mean, it&#8217;s a factual question. Was there a being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe during that period of time when no human beings existed? It seems to me on your view, you&#8217;d have to say no.
John Dominic Crossan:
Well, I would probably prefer to say no because what you&#8217;re doing is trying to put yourself in the position of God and ask, well, how is God apart from Revelation? How is God apart from faith? I don&#8217;t know if you can do that.
The God of many liberal Christians might as well be a self-help book you pick up every few months for advice. By the way, I appreciate when you guys like our videos and subscribe to the channel, since that is one part of my work where self-help won’t help, your help is always greatly appreciated.
I also appreciate when atheists call out Christians who believe in such a concept. For example, the atheist B.C. Johnson once criticized liberal answers to the problem of evil that claim evil exists because God just isn’t powerful enough to stop it. He writes: Such a God if not dead, is the next thing to it. And a person who believes in such a ghost of a God is practically an atheist. To call such a thing a god would be to strain the meaning of the word.
With this understanding of God, it’s not surprising that places like the United Church of Canada that have ordained women like Gretta Vosper to be ministers in spite of the fact that Vosper is an atheist. One of her books’ titles perfectly summarizes the essence of liberal theology: With or Without God: Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe.
One of my favorite take downs of liberal Christianity comes from the late atheist Christopher Hitchens. In 2012 Unitarian Universalist Marilyn Sewell interviewed Hitchens and criticized him for not engaging more “liberal Christianity” instead of what she’d consider fundamentalism. Like Serene Jones, Sewell calls herself a Christian but she believes Jesus was merely a model of social justice and that salvation is a metaphor for how one can go from “being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life.”
In response, Hitchens bluntly said, “If you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
Our Easter joy is not found in something meaningless such as “hope in hope” or “faith in faith.” Our hope also isn’t grounded in the platitudes of liberal Christianity. Listen to how Serene Jones describes her faith and how hollow it is compared to God demonstrating his love for us through his life, death, and resurrection.
Serene Jones:
We are God created, Jesus grounded grace, bounded love founded church grounded. We proclaim the universal reach of God&#8217;s love and mercy, and we affirm that we are interwoven in the depths of the earth, bound together and in spirited with the breath of God&#8217;s life, and despite the harsh truth that we turn away from it and sin and seek our own destruction, the spirit moves back through us and calls us to seek life abundant. That&#8217;s it.
Whatever that is, it isn’t Christianity. And even within the Catholic church you can find nuns and priests members of the parish council preaching this kind of nonsense. And young people are sick of it. It’s why the Associate Press covered a story back in April about the growth of young traditionalists within the Catholic faith.
Christianity is grounded in Christ, the reality of who Christ is grounded in his resurrection from the dead. That is the only fact that explains the advent of Christianity in an ancient world that didn’t build religions around platitudes. The only reason the disciples did not think their rabbi was just another failed messiah like all the others is because he proved he was not a failure to them three days after his crucifixion. God proved “love is stronger than death,” not through humanistic platitudes, but through a glorious triumph over the grave. As Christ himself declared, “I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18).
*This* is the Faith in which we have faith and it is more comforting than the drivel of liberal Christianity. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a blessed day.

The Emptiness of Liberal Christianity

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DAY 165
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“The Catholic Church hid God’s commandment against idolatry by removing it from the Ten Commandments.”
DEFENSE
The Church didn’t try to hide the commandment against idolatry. In fact, it condemns idolatry.
The Ten Commandments are in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. If you look in a Catholic Bible, the prohibition is right there: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exod. 20:4–5; Deut. 5:8–9).
The Catechism also forcefully condemns idolatry (CCC 2112–2114).
What the Church does—like every Christian community—is pro- vide short summaries of the commandments for memorization. The full text of the Ten Commandments is between 300 and 400 words long (varying by translation), so every group uses a brief, memorizable list instead.
In Catholic and Lutheran lists, the prohibition of idolatry is subsumed under the broader commandment “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3; Deut. 5:7). Some communities treat these as separate commandments, but this is a matter of choice. We are told that there are “Ten Commandments” (Exod. 34:28), but the text contains more than ten requirements and prohibitions. Interpreters must group some of them together to make the total come out to ten, but there is no single way to do this.
“The division and numbering of the Commandments have varied in the course of history. The present catechism follows the division of the Commandments established by St. Augustine, which has become traditional in the Catholic Church. It is also that of the Lutheran confessions. The Greek Fathers worked out a slightly different division, which is found in the Orthodox Churches and Reformed communities” (CCC 2066).
In the ancient world, having other gods meant worshipping idols, so it makes sense to see the prohibitions on both as bringing out different aspects of the same commandment.
The common way of numbering the Ten Commandments in Jew-ish circles agrees and groups the prohibitions on polytheism and idola- try together in a single commandment.
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Hiding the Commandment Against Idolatry?

In this episode Trent examines how Protestant arguments against Catholicism can backfire.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl5TFrpNCXU">Correcting Conservatives on IVF after the Alabama Ruling</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7oyZjlEDU">The case against IVF (with Stephanie Gray Connors)</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waIR7rOSbAw&amp;t=3s">The &#8220;Christian Avengers&#8221; on Catholicism (REBUTTED)</a>
Transcription:
Trent:
Sometimes Protestant social media accounts will try to make Catholics look bad, but they end up either making Catholicism look good or they make themselves look like heretics. So in today&#8217;s episode, we&#8217;re going to look at five common ways Protestants end up dunking on themselves when they try to own Catholics on social media. Number one, awful is actually awesome. Some Protestant accounts like to share Catholic content that they consider unusual or off-putting and then use that to try and impugn Catholicism as a whole. One account that does this a lot is protest here, which to be fair shows absurdities across a wide range of Christian denominations. For example, here&#8217;s one video of which the account says. If someone asks you to describe protest his content, you can show them this video. A gay pastor dressed up as a Jedi singing Charles Wesley&#8217;s Servants of God. Your master proclaim to the tune of the Star Wars theme song, servants of God, your master proclaim and Publish Your Abroad is his wonderful name. 
That&#8217;s bad. It&#8217;s even worse than the Life Day song set to the tune of a new hope from the 1978 Star Wars holiday special where you can see Harrison Ford dying on the inside as he has to sit through this monstrosity. A lot of protest yet is legit cringey content, and so when it comes to the Catholic Church, which has 1.4 billion members, you&#8217;re bound to find similar cringe somewhere on the internet. I&#8217;m looking at you hoverboard priest, but what many people think is cringe actually isn&#8217;t, for example, it&#8217;s not cringe to ask you to subscribe to the channel so you don&#8217;t miss out on our content and to support us@trendhornpodcast.com so we can keep producing all this great content sponsor free and it&#8217;s also not cringe to be a Catholic that can also have fun in the secular world. For example, here&#8217;s a post on protest here featuring the DJ priest from the Last World Youth Day, Padre GME remixing the Mario theme for a concert to me Mario. What&#8217;s funny is I know some Catholics who also do not like this, but far more non-Catholics would be impressed by this and want to learn more about the DJ priest in his faith. Next, here&#8217;s a clip they posted of children kissing a crucifix to honor Christ, which isn&#8217;t bad considering many people kiss pictures of their deceased loved ones. Or here we have this celebration in Europe of a float depicting Jesus meeting and embracing a float depicting his mother Mary and then everybody celebrates. 
This is awesome and it kind of makes a nice argument for Mary&#8217;s bodily assumption into heaven because the only way Jesus could physically embrace his mother as any good son should would be if he took her body up to heaven along with her soul. Of course, some Protestants will still consider this cringe-worthy idolatry, but many Protestants are also likely to see this as intense love of Jesus and his mother manifested in rituals that the American evangelical mind can&#8217;t comprehend like churches using incense and worship, even though Revelation eight three says, an angel was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints, or this clip protest he posted of the Italian procession of the desal, which they say is a three hour funeral procession during Holy Week where hundreds of women completely covered in black mourn the death of Christ, sharing and participating in Mary&#8217;s desolation at the death of her son. 
Okay, but what&#8217;s wrong with trying to enter deeply into the mystery of Christ&#8217;s passion? Nothing. Now, this may seem like extremism or superstition to some Protestants, but to many others who are starved of ritual in an increasingly sterile postmodern age, it&#8217;s a refreshing sign of a faith that desires to be radically lived out and shown to the entire world. Number two, oops. Protestants do that too. This happens a lot when non-denominational Christians and some evangelicals criticize Catholicism. They think Protestantism is just their megachurch and weekly Bible study at Caleb&#8217;s house, and so they ignore how many things they reject are also held by mainline Protestant denominations and groups who have a stronger connection to the Protestant reformation. For example, in this graphic on alleged Catholic traditions, not in scripture, it says among other things, the different dress of priesthood and laity. Even though many Protestant ministers wear vestments or collars, it&#8217;s only some evangelicals who rock the skinny jeans and cool glasses to seem hip and like everybody else. 
In fact, the clerical collar often called the Roman collar was invented by a Presbyterian clergyman in 1865. Also, this graphic mentions baptism of bells, which I&#8217;ve seen other Protestant works complain about. This seems to be a reference to blessing church bells and according to the Catholic encyclopedia, one might as well be scandalized that the ceremonial usually followed in the launching and christening of a ship. The phrase baptism of bells is merely popular and metaphorical. This also happens when Protestants complain about Catholic errors like infant baptism, the priesthood celebrating Lent or the ability to lose salvation. Since many other Protestant denominations also practice or believe these so-called errors, many of the Protestant reformers and even some Protestants today hold to the perpetual virginity of Mary. So it&#8217;s doubly ignorant to call these distinctly Catholic errors because they are neither distinctly Catholic, nor are they errors. Now, to be fair, Catholics can be guilty of the same thing when they reduce all of Protestantism to Pastor Bob&#8217;s strip mall church. 
Also, we really can&#8217;t use the pastor Bob Jab anymore, not that we should have used it in the first place because we now have Pope Leo the 14th, AKA Pope, Robert Preva, AKA Pope, Bob the Supreme pastor Bob of the entire church. Number three, I&#8217;d rather be a heretic than a Catholic. This happens a lot when you talk about Maryology and especially Mary being the Theotokos or mother of God. A while back I posted that Mary is the most important human person who ever lived. Now, in retrospect, I could have been clearer in making my point if I had said, Mary is the most important creature who ever lived because she bore in her womb the creator who redeemed us. But I kind of wanted to stir the pot and see if people could understand, find theological distinctions. So I said, Mary is the most important human person who ever lived in response. 
I got a flood of comments from Protestants and even from a few Catholics saying that I&#8217;m a heretic because Jesus Christ is obviously the most important person who ever lived, but this has the potential to go into some very heretical Christology very quickly. Jesus Christ is the most important person who ever walked the earth, no doubt, but I said Mary was the most important human person, which is a distinct category from person in general. When the world did not exist, one God existed timelessly and perfectly as three divine persons, father, son, and Holy Spirit after the world was created, one of these divine persons, God, the Son who has a divine nature, took on another nature, a human nature and became man. This is the mystery of the incarnation. A divine person takes on an additional nature that is fully human without losing his divine nature or mixing the two natures. 
One of the most important truths about God is that God does not change. God is pure actuality the source of all existence that sustains all things without needing to be sustained by anything else. But if you say Jesus was a human person, then that would mean the divine person of the sun who existed from all eternity changed and became a different kind of person. But God cannot change. Human nature changed forever when it was assumed by the sun, but the person of the sun did not change. If the person of the sun changed that the incarnation, then he wouldn&#8217;t be God because God does not change. James one 17 says, every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. And something similar happens when Catholics post about Mary being the mother of God and then some evangelicals try to dunk on them, but end up sounding like Muslims when they say things like God has no mother. 
Jesus is a divine person. Mary gave birth to a divine person, therefore Mary is the mother of a divine person, or Mary is the mother of God. If you deny that Mary is the mother of God, you will almost always end up denying that Jesus is God and embrace the historian heresy that says Jesus was basically two persons, not one person. This is why the confessional churches from the Reformation condemned nestorianism, and it&#8217;s mostly modern evangelicals who unknowingly revive it. For more on that, see my episodes on Marius Theotokos link below. Number four, ignoring critical context. I covered this in a previous episode so I won&#8217;t go on about it at length, but this can be one of the sleaziest ways to try to someone and in the age of the internet where it&#8217;s really easy to find a source you&#8217;re misrepresenting, it rarely goes well for you. 
In this case, I was saying that I don&#8217;t like the phrase Muslims and Christians worship the same God for the same reason. I don&#8217;t like the phrase Catholics worship Mary. Both are technically true based on older definitions of the word worship, but they&#8217;re so easily misunderstood that it&#8217;s not even worth using them in conversation. But then one Protestant account took me out of context and just ran with the idea that I said, Catholics worship Mary and purposely cut out the very qualification that is necessary, something nearly all the commenters noted. So this backfired on that poster. Since then, I also have a new example when it comes to language and context changing over time. Here&#8217;s the question, do Christians indoctrinate their children? The answer is yes, if you are using the older definition of indoctrinate to just mean teach, but the answer is no. If you&#8217;re using the newer definition of indoctrinate, that refers to uncritical submission. But now some atheists is going to clip me saying, do Christians indoctrinate their children? The answer is yes. I also want to point out though that some Catholics said that this was still my fault because real Catholics don&#8217;t say Catholics worship Mary, and so I&#8217;m just a hack theologian. Some people even sent me this video from Father David Michael Moses to kind of rub in my face. 
CLIP: 
When someone tells you Catholics worship Mary, they are lying. They&#8217;re bearing false witness. If you hear someone say this, it&#8217;s a clear sign that they&#8217;ve done zero research and they do not know what they&#8217;re talking about. 
Trent: 
Now, I like father&#8217;s content, but it&#8217;s risky to make universal statements like Catholics never say X because we have 2000 years of magisterial documents that may very well have X in them. For example, Pope Pius the 10 19 0 4 in cyclical on the Immaculate conception says for it to be right and good worship of the mother of God ought to spring from the heart. And Pope Saint John Paul II said in Redemptorist Modern that Mary occupies a privileged place in the worship of the ancient Oriental churches with an incomparable abundance of feasts and hymns. In both cases, the original Latin does not use the word laia or sacrificial worship and adoration given to God alone. However, these idiomatic English translations approved by the Vatican do reflect how many Catholic translators, especially older European ones, would use the term worship in a wider sense to mean venerating Mary as the most important of God&#8217;s creatures. 
What&#8217;s interesting is that a version of this pitfall also exists for Protestants who try to dunk on Catholics. A Protestant might confidently say a Christian would never say X and then be surprised when X is in the Bible. For example, I&#8217;ve seen Catholics post this online during Lent in my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ afflictions for the sake of his body. That is the church. Some Protestants attacked this, but then the other shoe drops when it&#8217;s revealed that this is a quote from Colossians 1 24. I&#8217;ve even seen Protestant posters fall for this when Catholics post Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with the Luke 1 28, and Faith Without Works is dead. James two 17. So the lesson to learn is when you come across a shocking statement, be sure to get the context behind the statement before you make what could turn out to be a rash judgment in response to it. 
And finally, number five, actually Catholics have a good point. Sometimes Protestants will leap onto a Catholic view they think is insane, but after a little bit of reflection they&#8217;ll see it actually makes sense. I&#8217;ve seen a lot of this recently online where Protestants would mock medieval Catholicism just a few years ago. But now after seeing how crazy the world has become, they abandoned things like the Baptist idea of separation of church and state and go full Deus volt integralist. Christian Nationalist or Protestants might dunk on Catholic morality but realize it&#8217;s a better application of Christian principles they already hold. For example, Indiana Bruner did that when he posted this on X Catholics being against IVF is no more rational than Christian scientists being against ibuprofen. Then some Catholic users pointed out to Indiana that many Protestants also oppose in vitro fertilization because it almost always involves the intentional destruction of embryonic human beings, something he as a devout pro-life Christian should oppose. 
Indiana then posted this after receiving this clarification, I was unaware that embryos are discarded in the process. I&#8217;ve changed my mind thanks to everyone who respectfully informed me of my error. I have a family member who was born this way and seeing him take his first steps the other day made me sympathetic to the process for more on the evils of IVF that go beyond just the killing of human embryos. Check out these episodes below. Catholics don&#8217;t treat modern medicine as some kind of demonic deception. In fact, I forgot to post this verse from the Old Testament when I was discussing giving thanks to God for Laura&#8217;s healing through the highly skilled surgeons and oncologists who&#8217;ve helped her. It&#8217;s SERAC 38 verses one through four, which say this, honor the physician with the honor do him according to your need of him. For the Lord created him for healing comes from the most high and he will receive a gift from the king. 
The skill of the physician lifts up his head and in the presence of great men, he is admired. The Lord created medicines from the earth and a sensible man will not despise them. But even if IVF could be done where all of the produced human embryos are implanted in a woman&#8217;s womb, that wouldn&#8217;t make it okay. I would ask Indiana and other Protestants who see no problem with IVF, would it be sinful for an unmarried Christian man to pay a sperm donor, an egg donor, and a woman to be a gestational surrogate womb and then have this child delivered to his front door once he or she is born? Should two gay men be legally allowed to use this same process to produce children for their households? If you think contraception is okay because the Bible does not condemn it, then good luck using the Bible alone. 
To argue that IVF that doesn&#8217;t intentionally kill human embryos is also evil. If you as a Christian condemn IVF because it separates the good of procreation from the good of sexual union, then you should be against contraception for that exact same reason. But that&#8217;s tough to argue for while you&#8217;re trapped in what I call the straight jacket of Sola scriptura, which I explain more in my response to the Christian Avengers in that episode listed below. So those are five ways Protestants accidentally dunk on themselves when criticizing Catholics. But the same thing can happen to Catholics and really to anyone who is more concerned with getting somebody they disagree with instead of trying to get at the truth in the most careful way possible. And to help us do that here at the channel, I&#8217;ve enlisted help to review our episodes to make sure they&#8217;re accurate. So I&#8217;d like to thank Redeem Zoomer for his review of today&#8217;s script. I&#8217;d like to thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.

5 Ways Protestant “Dunks” on Catholics Backfire

I need help believing in the Trinity.

I was raised Protestant and my parents are anti-Catholic. Would it be dishonoring my parents to convert?

I’m not Catholic because of how Catholicism is practiced and not necessarily about dogma.

My one hang up to convert is adoration.

Is there any connection between Matthew 7:24-27 and Matthew 16:18?

&#8220;How can I believe in the Trinity?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the complexities of faith, including concerns about conversion from Protestantism and the potential conflict with family beliefs. Other topics include the challenges of Catholic practices versus dogma and the significance of adoration in the conversion process.
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How Can I Believe in the Trinity? Why Aren’t You Catholic?

On May 2, 2024, the House of Representatives passed the “<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090/text">Antisemitism Awareness Act</a>,” partly in response to an uptick in antisemitic displays at U.S. college campuses in recent years. The act could help students file civil complaints if they feel they have been victims of antisemitic discrimination.
The Catholic Church condemns all unjust discrimination, and <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240202-lettera-ebrei-in-israele.html">Pope Francis even said</a> this past February that the Church “rejects every form of anti-Judaism and antisemitism, unequivocally condemning manifestations of hatred towards Jews and Judaism as a sin against God.”
Some critics are concerned that the bill’s definition of antisemitism, which is drawn from the <a href="https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism">International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance</a>, is too broad and would make basic Catholic doctrine antisemitic. They focus on one part that says it is antisemitic to “[use] the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” In response, they say that the Bible and many Church Fathers speak about “the Jews” killing Jesus.
So is it accurate to say “the Jews killed Jesus”? Is it antisemitic?
The Second Vatican Council taught that “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today” (Nostra Aetate 4). Some Catholics, however, argue that all the unconverted Jews in the time of Christ (thus exempting the Blessed Virgin and the apostles) were responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion. Some even claim that all unconverted Jews in history since the Crucifixion carry a unique guilt for Christ’s death that other sinners do not share.
It is obviously false that all non-Christian Jews at the time of Christ’s death were responsible for his crucifixion, for the simple reason that not all of them were consulted! Only a tiny portion of the Jewish population called for his death. Further, many Jews who did not formally become Christian still had a positive attitude toward Jesus and his movement (see Acts 2:47) and almost certainly would not have approved of Jesus’ death.
When it comes to later Jews being responsible, this idea comes from an interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel, which describes Pilate washing his hands, saying, “I am innocent of this righteous man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” Matthew then says the crowd answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (27:25).
What do we make of this “blood curse”? To start, the biblical text never says God honored it. Nor would such a curse, even if it was honored, apply to every future Jew, since nearly all of them are not descended from the small crowd present at Jesus’ sentencing.
In the second volume of his work Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI writes:
<blockquote>When in Matthew&#8217;s account the &#8220;whole people&#8221; say, &#8220;His blood be upon us and on our children&#8221; (27:25), the Christian will remember that Jesus&#8217; blood speaks a different language from the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24): it does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings reconciliation. It is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. . . . Read in the light of faith, it means that we all stand in need of the purifying power of love which is his blood. These words are not a curse, but rather redemption, salvation (187).</blockquote>
For another interpretation, the crowd’s exclamation in Matthew 27:25 may refer to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 as being part of a divinely appointed punishment upon those who rejected Jesus. It was not uncommon in Israel’s history for future generations to be afflicted because of the sinful actions of Israel’s rulers, such as Solomon’s idolatry (1 Kings 11) being the catalyst for the division of the kingdom and the Jews’ subsequent exile into Babylon.
Historically, some Catholics, including through medieval regional councils and in papal documents, did argue that Jewish hardships throughout history represented a similar kind of punishment for Jewish involvement in the Crucifixion. However, these assertions did not rise to the level of definitive magisterial teaching. In fact, the sixteenth-century Catechism of the Council of Trent rejects the idea that Jews bear more guilt for Jesus’ crucifixion than non-Jews:
<blockquote>In this guilt are involved all those who fall frequently into sin; for, as our sins consigned Christ the Lord to the death of the cross, most certainly those who wallow in sin and iniquity crucify to themselves again the Son of God, as far as in them lies, and make a mockery of him.
This guilt seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same apostle: If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know him, yet denying him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.</blockquote>
But even if Jews throughout history are not uniquely responsible for the death of Jesus, what about “the Jews” of Jesus’ time?
The Catechism of the Council of Trent refers to “the Jews” killing Jesus, and several Scripture passages (John 5:18, Acts 10:39) use similar language. In 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15, St. Paul says, “For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea; for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men.”
Paul’s phrase “the Jews” is a reference not to all Jews, but to a particular group of Jews in Palestine who were persecuting the Church. Other scholars have proposed that the Greek word Ioudaiōn in the New Testament can also be translated Judeans and that in some verses, this context makes more sense than the broader term “Jews.”
John 7:1 says, “After this Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him.” But there were plenty of Jews in Galilee, so what is meant in this passage is not “Jews”—i.e., non-Christian followers of Yahweh—but rather Judeans, and specifically the Jews loyal to political leadership in Jerusalem. This interpretation also makes sense of Paul’s exhortation to imitate the Christians in Judea who withstood persecution at the hands of the persecutors in that area, the Judeans (a role Paul once held before his conversion).
The Catechism also gives this insight into how we ought to understand Jewish responsibility for Christ’s death:
<blockquote>The historical complexity of Jesus&#8217; trial is apparent in the Gospel accounts. The personal sin of the participants (Judas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate) is known to God alone. Hence we cannot lay responsibility for the trial on the Jews in Jerusalem as a whole, despite the outcry of a manipulated crowd and the global reproaches contained in the apostles&#8217; calls to conversion after Pentecost. Jesus himself, in forgiving them on the cross, and Peter in following suit, both accept &#8220;the ignorance&#8221; of the Jews of Jerusalem and even of their leaders (597).</blockquote>
It is inaccurate to say, as some critical scholars might allege, that the Romans were completely responsible for Christ’s crucifixion. Scripture clearly teaches that some members of the Jewish leadership saw Jesus as being such a grave threat to the social order that he needed to be killed (John 11:50). However, as we saw in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council quoted earlier, this guilt cannot be laid upon all unconverted Jews at that time, and much less so on Jewish people throughout history. Indeed, we must remember humanity’s collective involvement, through our sins, in Christ’s death on the cross. This is why the Catechism states that
<blockquote>in her magisterial teaching of the Faith and in the witness of her saints, the Church has never forgotten that &#8220;sinners were the authors and the ministers of all the sufferings that the divine Redeemer endured.&#8221; Taking into account the fact that our sins affect Christ himself, the Church does not hesitate to impute to Christians the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus, a responsibility with which they have all too often burdened the Jews alone (598).</blockquote>

Did ‘the Jews’ Kill Jesus?

What are blessings REALLY? Why do we say, “God bless you”?
In this episode, Jimmy Akin masterfully unpacks the mystery of blessings! From praising God to powerful invocative prayers that call down good, to constitutive blessings that consecrate people, churches, and objects. Discover who can give them (spoiler: even YOU!), how they actually work and why every baptized Christian is called to be a blessing. Get ready—your view of “God bless you” will never be the same!
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TRANSCRIPT: 
Coming Up
The two great commandments are love of God and love of neighbor.
Part of loving your neighbor is willing his good, and God is the source of all that is good in the world.
So Christians sometimes love their neighbors by explicitly wishing that God will help the person by doing good for him.
They say things like, “God bless you!”
That statement is a blessing, but over the last 2,000 years, blessings have taken a wide variety of forms, and they can be a little confusing.
So what are blessings? What do they do? And who can give them?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
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What Are Blessings?
The English word Bless is used to translate the Latin word Benedicere and the Greek word Eulogein. Both of these mean “To speak good.”
In Scripture, the terms have a variety of uses. For example, one may bless God by speaking good of God—i.e., praising him.
For example, in Psalm 68, we read:
Psalm 68:26, ESV
Bless God in the great congregation,
the Lord, O you who are of Israel’s fountain!”
And in James 3:9, we read:
James 3:9, ESV
With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father.
In addition to praising God, another prominent use of the term blessing is speaking good about something other than God in hopes of bringing about good effects.
Thus in Genesis 27, the patriarch Isaac intended to bless his son Esau to bring good things upon him, but through Rebekah’s intervention, this blessing was stolen by Jacob.
To bless is the opposite of to Curse. In Latin, the term for cursing is Malidicere, and means “To speak evil.”
When a person curses something, he speaks evil about it hoping to bring about evil or bad effects.
For example, in Numbers 22-24, the Moabite king Balak sought to have the prophet Balaam curse Israel to harm the nation, but through God’s intervention the curse was turned into a blessing.
Blessings and curses of this type are sometimes called Invocative because they invoke either good or evil upon the person or thing.
Whether the blessing or curse ultimately achieves its effect depends on the will of God, who is the one being invoked and asked to help or harm someone.
Another kind of blessing has developed which involves permanently changing the status of someone or something by setting it apart for a holy purpose.
This type of blessing is sometimes called a Constitutive Blessing because it constitutes the person or thing in its new, holy status. This form of blessing is also sometimes referred to as a Consecration.
The Catechism states:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1672
Certain blessings have a lasting importance because they consecrate persons to God, or reserve objects and places for liturgical use.
Among those blessings which are intended for persons—not to be confused with sacramental ordination—are the blessing of the abbot or abbess of a monastery, the consecration of virgins and widows, the rite of religious profession, and the blessing of certain ministries of the Church (readers, acolytes, catechists, etc.).
The dedication or blessing of a church or an altar, the blessing of holy oils, vessels, and vestments, bells, etc., can be mentioned as examples of blessings that concern objects.
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What Can Be Blessed?
A wide variety of people and things can be blessed.
The Catechism specifically mentions persons, meals, objects, and places.
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Who Is Involved?
There are several parties that can be involved in a blessing. They include:
<ul>
<li>The person being blessed (or those that are helped by a blessed object or thing)</li>
<li>The person who performs the blessing</li>
<li>The Church, which has authorized some blessings to be given in its name</li>
<li>God, who is the ultimate source of all blessing</li>
</ul>
As James 1:17 says:
James 1:17, ESV
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
Now, the Church is not directly involved in all blessings but only those it has authorized. These may be considered Official Blessings. They involve the intercession of the Church, as expressed through the authorized person performing the blessing.
Other blessings—such as those performed by ordinary people (e.g., when we say “God bless you” to someone)—may be considered Unofficial Blessings.
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Are Blessings Automatically Effective?
Are blessings automatically effective? The answer depends on whether it is an official, constitutive blessing or not.
In the case of official, constitutive blessings—such as the blessing of an abbot or abbess or the blessing of a church or an altar—the answer is yes, the blessing automatically takes effect.
If the Church’s official rite of blessing has been used for an abbot or abbess, that person really has been consecrated or set aside for a holy office, even if the man or woman is personally unworthy.
Similarly, if a church or altar has been consecrated, it really has been set apart for sacred use.
When it comes to invocative blessings, the matter is different. Blessings are not sacraments but sacramentals. In fact, the Catechism notes that
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1671
Among sacramentals, blessings (of persons, meals, objects, and places) come first.
Sacraments are rites instituted by Jesus that God has promised to use to distribute his grace—especially sanctifying grace—so long as the recipient does not put a barrier in the way of receiving it.
By contrast, Sacramentals are rites instituted by the Church, and so God has not promised to distribute his grace on each and every occasion that they are performed. The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia states:
Catholic Encyclopedia, “Blessing”
Blessings are not sacraments; they are not of divine institution; they do not confer sanctifying grace; and they do not produce their effects in virtue of the rite itself, or ex opere operato. They are sacramentals.
Similarly, the Catechism states:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1670
Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church&#8217;s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it.
In general, whether an invocative blessing has its intended effect will depend on the piety of the one receiving the blessing and whether it is God’s will for the person to receive the intended good.
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What Effect Do Blessings Have?
What effects do blessings have? The Catholic Encyclopedia states:
Catholic Encyclopedia, “Blessing”
They produce the following specific effects:
<ol>
<li>Excitation of pious emotions and affections of the heart and, by means of these, remission of venial sin and of the temporal punishment due to it;</li>
<li>freedom from [the] power of evil spirits;</li>
<li>preservation and restoration of bodily health.</li>
<li>various other benefits, temporal or spiritual.</li>
</ol>
All these effects are not necessarily inherent in any one blessing; some are caused by one formula, and others by another, according to the intentions of the Church.
The particular effects that a blessing involves will depend on the words used in the blessing—i.e., what does the blessing ask God to do?
For information about that, one should consult The Book of Blessings for the words used in official blessings.
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Who Can Perform Blessings?
Who can perform blessings? There has long been an association between blessings and the priesthood. In Numbers 6, we read:
Numbers 6:22-27 
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and his sons [that is, the priests], saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them,
‘The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.’
So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”
However, blessings were not restricted to just the priests. In the Old Testament, the patriarchs gave blessings to their children, and various prophets (including Balaam) also pronounced them.
Furthermore, Israel—like the Church—was called to be “a kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6, Revelation 1:6). As a result, there are situations in which laity also can give blessings. The Catechism explains:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1669
Sacramentals derive from the baptismal priesthood: every baptized person is called to be a “blessing,” and to bless.
Hence lay people may preside at certain blessings; the more a blessing concerns ecclesial and sacramental life, the more is its administration reserved to the ordained ministry (bishops, priests, or deacons).
The Church’s Book of Blessings notes who can perform which individual blessings.
Sometimes this will be the bishop, sometimes a priest, sometimes a deacon, sometimes a lay person, and sometimes any one of these.
Among others, laity are authorized to perform the blessing of an Advent wreath, a Christmas manger or Nativity scene, a Christmas tree, and throats on February 3rd or St. Blaise’s Day.
They also are authorized to help with the distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday, though the blessing of the ashes is reserved to a priest or deacon.
There are no limits to who may perform unofficial blessings. Any person can say, “God bless you” to another, bless a meal, or bless their children.
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Learning More
If you’d like to learn more about blessings, the single most authoritative source on them is the Church’s Book of Blessings. It contains not only the texts used for individual, official blessings, it also contains introductions to the individual texts, as well as a general introduction to the subject of blessings.
Another helpful resource is Fr. Stephen J. Rossetti’s book The Priestly Blessing: Recovering the Gift. It contains a discussion of the history of blessings in light of Church teaching and the opinions of theologians.
* * *
If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!

What Are Blessings?

“But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified.’”
Who killed Jesus? One of the great sins of Christian people in history has been the facile assertion that Jesus was killed by the Jews. This made Christians in the Middle Ages, and not a few modern Catholics, feel good about themselves because they were not the “Christ-killers.” But of course the assertion doesn’t really make sense. Jesus was, after all, a Jew—a fact that I know can come as a shock to so many of those people I still meet from time to time who think they must know everything about the faith because they “went to Catholic school.” And the people actually putting him to death, in all four of the Gospels, are the Roman authorities, led by Pontius Pilate.
And so now, after the Holocaust, many anxious Christians, trying to be more sensitive, answer the question with a different facile assertion: that the Romans killed Jesus. But of course that assertion doesn’t really make sense, either. It’s not as though the Jewish people of Jerusalem stood by powerless while the Romans did their business. They were there.
So were we all.
Not literally, of course. But this week isn’t just about the literal; it’s about truth. And I think on this question our hymns and our poetry and our art so often get it right when our histories miss the point: We killed Jesus. You and me. Not the Romans. Not the Jews. Not any other group that we can think of that keeps us at a safe distance. We did it.
I think that is, front and center, the challenge and the gift of Holy Week. We have to confront what we’ve done and who we are. This isn’t an exercise is self-pity or moralism, as if every time you tell a little lie, you’re killing Jesus, or every time you disobey your mother, you’re killing Jesus. That’s not the point. The point is that we are part of that crowd of people who don’t really know what they’re doing, who find themselves doing something together that no one would have really thought to do on their own, who find themselves full of contradictions and emotions they don’t understand, who move almost without thought from singing praise to shouting hate, from worship to murder.
That, friends, is us, whether we acknowledge it or not. I’ve seen it in myself, over and over again, in the ways that my temper will flare up at something stupid and I find myself cursing under my breath at people I love more than anything in the world. I see it in my children, who can go from sweet, playful innocence in one moment to cruelty in the next. Lord knows that it appears in the confessional, where otherwise good people find themselves falling into sin. This is who we are.
Going through the work of Holy Week—and, let’s be honest, it is work—is like looking in a mirror, a brutally honest mirror that will show us everything that we never wanted to see about ourselves. It’s not meant to be fun. But it is meant to be good. Because although the Church shows us everything that we never wanted to see, it also shows us everything that we never dared to hope: how all of the worst things about ourselves, like our capacity to kill God, can become the very best things—how God in his grace and mercy and love can make us beautiful.

Who Killed Jesus: The Romans or the Jews?

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DAY 112
CHALLENGE
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“The Catholic Church is wrong to teach that its Magisterium is superior to the word of God.”
DEFENSE
The Church teaches that the Magisterium serves the word of God.
During his earthly ministry, Jesus commissioned his apostles and others to teach in his name, telling them: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me” (Luke 10:16).
He further commissioned this teaching authority to continue to the end of the world, saying: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:19–20). Today this teaching authority, known as the Magisterium (from the Latin, magister, “teacher”), is exercised by the bishops, the successors of the apostles.
Although it was established by Christ, the Church does not regard the Magisterium as superior to the word of God but as its servant. Vatican II taught: “This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in ac- cord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed” (Dei Verbum 10).
The idea that the Magisterium is superior to the word of God is false. It plays a subordinate role in helping the faithful identify and understand the word of God. Thus the Magisterium helped the Church discern the canon of Scripture—which books were divinely inspired and which were not. It similarly helps the Church discern which Traditions are of apostolic origin and which are not. And it helps the Church understand the contents of both Scripture and Tradition.
However, in all these things, the Magisterium is a guide and not a source. The source is the word of God, as expressed in Scripture and Tradition. The Magisterium is subordinate to these, as illustrated by the fact that it is the word of God that gives the Magisterium its au- thority (see the verses above), not the other way around.
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The Magisterium and the Word of God

In this episode Trent sits down with award-winning actor Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump, Apollo 13) to discuss how Gary&#8217;s foundation serves members of the armed forces. They also talk about Gary&#8217;s role in the upcoming Christian film “I Still Believe,” based on the true story of singer Jeremy Camp.

Film, Faith, and Service (with Gary Sinise)

In this episode Trent sits down with fellow apologist Suan Sonna as they discuss five pieces of evidence in the Old Testament that point towards Christ’s desire to establish a hierarchical teaching authority for believers, or the Church.

5 Jewish Proofs for the Magisterium (with Suan Sonna)

In this episode, Trent gives an update on how his family is handling the recent severe winter weather hitting the state of Texas as well as his thoughts on whether Catholics should support “cancel culture”.

Thoughts on “Cancel Culture” and Frozen Texas

Episode 68: Year B &#8211; 4th Sunday of Lent
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, there are two details in the readings for this upcoming 4th Sunday of Lent, Year B that we’re going to focus on that are relevant for apologetical discussions. The first comes from the second reading, taken from Ephesians 2:4-10, and it relates to the important topic of the relationship between our good works and salvation. The second detail comes from the Gospel reading, which is taken from John 3:14-21. The relevant topic there is the nature of the “eternal life” promised to those who believe, and whether such life proves the doctrine of “once saved, always saved.”
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031024-YearB.cfm">Click Here</a>
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">Click Here</a>
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How Good Works Fit into Salvation

Dive into the mystery of the Book of Revelation with Jimmy Akin on this thrilling episode of The Jimmy Akin Podcast! Jimmy begins unraveling the controversy surrounding the Bible’s most enigmatic book, exploring its vivid symbols, dramatic visions, and the debate over its author—John the Apostle or John the Elder? He examines why Revelation was written, its prophetic warnings of persecution, and God’s judgment on the Roman world. Join Jimmy as he decodes this ancient text, challenging popular “end-times” theories in a captivating journey through Scripture’s ultimate prophecy!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
The book of Revelation—also known as the Apocalypse of St. John—is the most controversial book of the Bible.
Reading it is a fascinating, mesmerizing experience.
It is filled with dramatic images, compelling symbols, and enduring themes.
But what do we know about who wrote it—and why?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
You can help me keep making this podcast—and you can get early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
&nbsp;
Introduction
Revelation is so rich and thick with symbols that it can be daunting—and not just for ordinary laypeople. Many ministers hesitate to tackle it.
For example, it was the only book of the New Testament that the Protestant Reformer John Calvin did not write a commentary on.
But countless authors have written commentaries and other books expounding Revelation and what they think it means.
These books contain a bewildering array of different and conflicting interpretations, which contribute to the controversy surrounding it.
In recent years, there has been a flood of books, movies, and videos about Revelation.
Many explore what various “prophecy experts” hold will happen in the near future.
An example is Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth, which sold millions of copies and led to him writing popular follow-up books like The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, The Terminal Generation, and Planet Earth: The Final Chapter.
In such works Lindsey and other authors taught their readers to expect an imminent “rapture,” where all true Christians would be caught up to be with Jesus in heaven while all hell breaks loose on earth.
And the Rapture is something we can talk about in a future episode.
A set of books that popularized these ideas in fictional format was the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Spanning 16 volumes, these novels imagined what the world would be like before, during, and after the rapture and related events.
Despite the fact they were fiction, they claimed to be based on what Revelation predicted for our actual future.
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A Perennial Temptation
It’s a perennial temptation to see the events of Revelation being fulfilled in one’s own day.
For the last two thousand years, many have thought that the world was about to end, and numerous authors have predicted exactly when in their lifetimes it would happen.
What all these efforts have in common is that, so far, all of these predictions have been wrong. They’ve all failed.
Scholars have dubbed the enterprise of interpreting Revelation in terms of current events “Newspaper Exegesis.”
Exegesis is the study of how to interpret a text, and newspaper exegesis involves bending Revelation and other prophetic texts to fit whatever happens to be in the news.
Some Evangelicals even have weekly radio programs and TV shows devoted to looking at current news items and reading them in light of what they take to be Bible prophecy.
But is this the right approach?
Should we really assume that the book of Revelation is talking about events in our near future and that the world is about to end?
The controversy over the book is principally due to the question of how it should be interpreted, and the different principles used to interpret it are responsible for the bewildering variety of theories that people have claimed it supports.
This is the first in a series of occasional episodes where we’ll be looking into the mystery of the book of Revelation.
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What is the book of Revelation?
Revelation is one of the books of the New Testament.
Many assume that it was the last book of the Bible to be written, but this is something we do not know. Other books may have been written later.
One reason people think Revelation was written last is the fact it’s printed in the back of the Bible, making it last in canonical order.
This is because Revelation contains prophecies that describe the end of the world, so it’s logical to place it last in sequence.
But just because it’s last in logical order doesn’t mean that it was written last in chronological order.
The book of Revelation is also unique because, although the Old Testament contains many prophetic books, Revelation is the only one in the New Testament.
The four Gospels and the New Testament letters contain individual prophecies, but only Revelation is devoted entirely to the subject of prophecy.
Revelation also is different from the prophetic books of the Old Testament.
Works like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel contain revelations that the prophets received at various points in their careers, and the books collect these prophecies and weave them together with historical incidents from their lives.
By contrast, Revelation presents its prophetic material as a single, grand vision.
We even know what day of the week the author began receiving it—a Sunday—because he tells us it began when
Revelation 1:10-11, ESV
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write what you see in a book.”
So on the Lord’s day—or Sunday—John received the vision that he wrote in the book.
It’s possible that he saw the vision all on a single day or that it started on a Sunday but he saw it in parts, and he just doesn’t mention the gaps between individual visions.
One way or the other, he apparently received it all in a short space of time rather than over a lengthy prophetic career.
The book is also different in another way.
While the Old Testament prophetic books are written to a general audience, Revelation is written to a specific one.
In fact, its literary form is that of a letter.
It uses the standard opening for first century letters, which involved a (Sender) to (Receivers) formula.
Thus, after an opening title and exhortation, we read,
Revelation 1:4, ESV
John to the seven churches that are in Asia.
The Asia being referred to here is not the continent of Asia but the ancient Roman province of Asia Minor, which is in the western part of the continent of Asia, in the western part of what is now Turkey.
And we know that there were more than seven churches in Asia Minor at the time, but John is writing to seven of them because seven is a number that symbolizes completeness.
So—in a way—John is writing to all churches.
The book of Revelation is thus, in essence, a gigantic letter communicating the prophetic material the author received.
And, by ancient standards, it was gigantic.
As E. Randolph Richards writes in his book Paul and First Century Letter Writing:
<ol>
<li> Randolph Richards, Paul and First Century Letter Writing</li>
</ol>
In the approximately 14,000 private letters from Greco-Roman antiquity, the average length was about 87 words, ranging in length from 18 to 209 words.
By contrast, Revelation is 9,852 words long in Greek, making it more than a hundred times the size of a normal letter!
It’s longer than any other letter of the New Testament, and it’s almost as long as the Gospel of Mark.
John’s readers must have been astonished when they got it!
Now, when inspiring Scripture, God used the knowledge and background of the biblical authors, and it is clear that John had a detailed, intimate knowledge of the Old Testament prophetic books.
Revelation contains more than a hundred references to them.
And now that Jesus had come, the author realized that the whole prophetic enterprise of the Hebrew Bible was coming together and being crowned by his own work.
As scholar Richard Bauckham states in his book The Climax of Prophecy:
Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy
[John] understood his prophecy to be the climax of the tradition of Old Testament prophecy, because in the revelation made to him by Jesus Christ was disclosed the secret of the divine purpose for the final coming of the kingdom of God.
John thus realized that he was writing a work that summed up and brought to culmination the labors of all the biblical prophets before him.
Revelation is a momentous book!
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Who wrote Revelation?
What do we know about who wrote the book of Revelation?
Well, four times, the book of Revelation identifies its author as “John.”
<ul>
<li>Revelation 1:1</li>
<li>Revelation 1:4</li>
<li>Revelation 1:9</li>
<li>Revelation 22:8</li>
</ul>
But John was an extremely popular name at the time.
In fact, John was the 5th most common name for Jewish men in Palestine in this period.
The fact John does not further identify himself—like calling himself John Mark, John son of Zebedee, or John of Jerusalem—shows that he must have been well-known to his audience.
Revelation 1:9, ESV
I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
He only says that he is your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus.
The only biographical detail he adds is that, when he saw the vision, he “was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
Patmos is a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. It is only 13 square miles in size.
The fact John says he was on the island because of “the testimony of Jesus” could mean that he was there on an evangelizing mission, but the context of persecution and tribulation has convinced scholars that John was on Patmos as a punishment for his Christian preaching.
This has led some people to claim that Patmos was a penal colony, but the evidence does not support that.
It is more likely that John had been banished or exiled to Patmos from a major city.
Banishment was a common way of dealing with troublesome, upper-class individuals as an alternative to execution or forced labor.
A person in exile would be allowed to live in a remote location—away from where he had been causing trouble.
And this seems to have been why John was on Patmos.
There is also a question of which John wrote Revelation.
Historically, the most popular view is that it was John son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles.
This view can be traced to as early as A.D. 155, when it was endorsed in the writings of St. Justin Martyr. In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, he stated:
Dialogue with Trypho the Jew 81:4
There was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him.
However, there is a dispute about this in the early Church Fathers.
Some say that they do not know who wrote Revelation and doubt its apostolic authorship.
Others suggest that it was written by a figure known as John the Elder or John the Presbyter. Elder and = Presbyter mean the same thing.
According to early sources, John the Elder was not one of the Twelve, but he was an eyewitness of the ministry of Christ.
In later years he—like John son of Zebedee—lived in Ephesus, resulting in two famous Johns having their tombs there (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:4-6).
Some Church Fathers also attribute some of the Johannine books of the New Testament to him.
St. Jerome reports that many held him to be the author of 2 and 3 John (Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men ch.s 9, 18),
And some in the early Church suggested John the Elder was the John who wrote Revelation (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:6).
This may be supported by the fact that John the apostle was an uneducated, Galilean fisherman from the lower class (Acts 4:13) and not the kind of person who would receive the mild punishment of exile.
It has been argued that John the Elder was a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy.
And the option of exile was often applied to members of the upper class when the death penalty would have been used on members of the lower class who had committed the same crime.
&nbsp;
Why Was Revelation Written?
Whoever wrote the book, the reason why it was written is made clear in its opening verse, which describes it as
Revelation 1:1, ESV
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.
The Greek term for Revelation— = Apokalupsis—is the origin of our word “apocalypse.”
That’s why the book is sometimes called The Revelation of John and sometimes = The Apocalypse of John.
Or, more simply, the book of Revelation.
And—by the way—the word is singular, not plural. It’s Revelation, not Revelations. If you say Revelations, plural, you’ll signal that you don’t have any real knowledge of the book since you aren’t getting its name right.
So don’t do that.
In the first century, the word revelation meant “a revealing,” so the book reveals information given by Jesus Christ.
And that information concerns “what must soon take place” from John’s first century perspective.
He was writing to warn his readers of a series of events in the Roman world that would involve the persecution of Christians and God’s judgement on the pagan world order that oppressed them.
So what were these persecutions, and what were the judgments?
Those are things we’ll talk about in an upcoming episode.
* * *
We’re now into our second year of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, and I want to thank all our viewers and listeners for joining us!
If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video
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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!

The Book of Revelation

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Introduction
The history of Christianity is one of debate. As the Gospels reveal, Jesus was challenged right from the start. Rival schools like the Pharisees and Sadducees posed pointed questions to him, trying to trap him in his words and even to get him in trouble with the authorities. Some of Jesus’ most famous statements were responses to challenges from his critics:
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<li>“What God has joined together, let man not put asunder.”</li>
<li>“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”</li>
<li>“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”
Our world is very different from the one in which Jesus lived. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. If people posed challenges to Jesus, they will do so to us as well.
A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher (Luke 6:40).
In our religiously fragmented but highly interconnected world, people from countless perspectives pose challenges to the Faith every day—in conversations, through the mass media, and on the Internet. There is no escaping this daily onslaught.
The solution is to mount a daily defense—to respond to the many challenges that we, as believers, are presented with. Hence this book: It takes up a different challenge every day of the year (plus a bonus challenge for leap year), and shows how you can defend the Faith and give answers to those skeptical of it.
Each page is devoted to a single challenge, which is posed at the top of the page in the challenge section. The defense section that follows contains a brief summary of what you can say in response. Obviously, there is much more that can be said on each subject, but here we will cover the highlights—the key talking points. In some cases there will also be a tip, which will frequently be a recommendation for a book where you can learn more.
Challenges to the Faith are often unexpected, and the ones in this book are arranged in a way that reflects that. Each day presents you with something new, often dealing with a very different subject, so there is constantly something fresh to learn and think about.
The book is designed so that no matter when in the year you first pick it up, you can start on Day 1 and read straight through for a whole year. It’s also designed so that you can quickly find responses to challenges that people put to you. Just check the alphabetical index in the back to find specific responses.</li>
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If the Faith is faced with many challenges today, the good news is that there are solid answers, so we should not be surprised or intimi- dated by them. Instead, we should be prepared. As St. Peter said:
Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts reverence Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence (1 Pet. 3:14–15).
May God bless you and your efforts as you learn and defend his holy Faith.
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The Need for a Defense

A few weeks ago, Allie Beth Stuckey released a video entitled “The Mary Debate” where she gave a series of rebuttals to Catholic beliefs about Mary. One rebuttal was directed toward the Catholic’s appeal to Luke 1:28, where Mary is said to be ‘full of ...

I’m a Southern Baptist and my son is a recent convert to Catholicism. Did Christ have to die for Mary?

Do we have any insight on Mary’s parents’ knowledge for her pregnancy before visiting Elizabeth or did they find out when she returned?

Are we preaching a different gospel message since the Marian dogmas are now required for salvation?

Did Mary know that her son was God or Messiah?

Don’t Protestants have to accept Mary as sinless due to Jesus getting his flesh from Mary?

&#8220;Did Christ have to die for Mary?&#8221; Tune in as we also tackle whether Mary’s parents knew about her pregnancy before visiting Elizabeth and discuss the necessity of Marian dogmas in relation to the gospel message. Join us for a thought-provoking hour of apologetics.
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Did Christ Have to Die for Mary, Marian Dogmas, and Grace?

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

Listen to Shameless Popery on Catholic.com:
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Did God really abandon Jesus?

The Actual Problem with The Viking’s Male Cheerleaders

The Resurrection is a HISTORIC EVENT!

Who received the first eucharist? Which scripture is the best to show as evidence for the real presence?

How do we respond when a Catholic says they are getting more out of going to a Protestant church? How do we bring them back?

How is the death penalty an immoral thing, and why is it changed for the first time in history?

What is the response to the justification that the reformation is valid because the reformers followed the example of the apostles being kicked out of the temple?

I see a lot of inconsistencies in the Catholic Church. I have an issue because if Doctrine can change how can I agree with what will change in the future?

Why do Catholics pray the hail mary so much during the rosary? Isn’t it against scripture?

&#8220;Who received the first Eucharist?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the significance of the Eucharist and the scriptural evidence for the real presence of Christ. Other topics include how to address Catholics who feel more fulfilled in Protestant services, the morality of the death penalty, and the rationale behind the Hail Mary prayer in the rosary.
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Who Received the First Eucharist? Real Presence and Prayer

In this inaugural episode of the Cy Kellett show, Cy sits down with Nick Madden of Sent Ventures and Red Door Escape Rooms to discuss how to direct ethical, Catholic companies in our world today.
To watch the entire episode visit the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0WwundQWb8">Cy Kellett Show YouTube Channel</a>
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Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit <a href="https://www.catholic.com/speakers">Catholicanswersspeakers.com</a>
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Building Catholic Companies in the Secular World

Episode 40: Year A &#8211; 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on one detail that’s relevant to apologetics: the keys of the Kingdom of heaven given to Peter, which is found in the Gospel reading for this upcoming 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time, taken from Matthew 16:16-20. Many familiar with apologetical discussions know that this detail relates to the Papacy. Many also know that its relevance to the Papacy becomes especially clear when this detail is read within the interpretative context of Isaiah 22:15-22, some of which (vv.19-23) is the first reading for this upcoming Sunday’s Mass. But perhaps what many don’t know is how Protestants counter this parallel in support of the Papacy. That’s the focus of this episode.
Readings:<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082723.cfm"> https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082723.cfm</a>
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The Sufficient Cross Still Needs Good Works

When can you fulfill your Easter duty?

How can we know that the Scriptures are divinely inspired?

Have you in your learnings come to understand what causes Same-Sex Attraction? Is there a theory you find convincing? Do you have a theory of your own?

Is monasticism selfish?  For example, how could have the apostles fulfilled the Great Commission if they were cloistered? And how would that apply today?  Can evangelization be accomplished from inside a monastic cell?

It seems to me that God’s ultimate goal is to get us back bodily in heaven with him. Would that be like the garden of Eden again and how does us eating the eucharist help with that? Or does it? It seems we need to eat our savior to be bodily with...

If somebody does something evil out of stupidity, how responsible is he for said action? Can he be at least partly excused?

This might sound silly, but I’ve wondered it a lot: If you are in mass and you’ve fasted the hour but find something in your teeth, does it break the fast to swallow it?

Would it be moral to shoot down a hijacked plane full of civilians over an unpopulated area, if it is believed the hijackers intend to crash it in a populated area? Would this be considered doing evil that good may come of it or double effect?

When exactly can Catholics fulfill their Easter duty, and why does the Church require it? In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, Jimmy Akin answers thoughtful questions from listeners on a wide range of topics. He explains how we know the Scriptures are divinely inspired without falling into circular reasoning, discusses theories about the causes of same-sex attraction, and examines whether monastic life conflicts with the Church’s mission to evangelize. Jimmy also explores the relationship between the Eucharist and the resurrection of the body, moral responsibility for actions done in ignorance, whether swallowing something stuck in your teeth breaks the Eucharistic fast, and how Catholic moral theology evaluates difficult scenarios like stopping a hijacked plane. A wide-ranging discussion covering Scripture, moral theology, and practical questions about living the Catholic faith.
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When Can You Fulfill Your Easter Duty? Jimmy Akin Answers Your Catholic Questions

Episode 108: Year C &#8211; 3rd Sunday of Advent
In this episode, we focus on details from each of the readings for this upcoming 3rd Sunday of Advent, Year C. The first detail, which is found in the first reading, taken from Zephaniah 3:14-18, is the prophecy of the day for Israel to rejoice, the theme for Gaudete Sunday. The related topic, so I will argue, is Jesus’ divinity. The second detail comes from the second reading, taken from Philippians 4:4-7, and the related apologetical topic is the intercession of the saints. One of Paul’s exhortations seems to conflict with the Catholic practice of invoking the saints to intercede for us. The remaining two details come from the Gospel reading, which is taken from Luke 3:10-18. The two apologetical topics are the Sacrament of Baptism and the reality of Hell.
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/121524.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Christ’ Divinity and the Intercession of Saints

The Protestant “Word of God” Fallacy

In this episode Trent and Suan Sonna breakdown a Protestant argument which claims that Catholic approaches to proving the papacy could also be used to show that St. Paul was the first Pope, thus invalidating the argument. But Trent and Suan show how these arguments misunderstand scripture and Catholic defenses of the papacy.

The “Pauline parody argument” Against the Papacy (with Suan Sonna)

The Sign of Peace: What Are We Supposed to Do?

Stock Protestant objections to the practice of invoking the saints to pray for us have been around for quite some time: “Jesus is the one mediator,” “we shouldn’t communicate with the dead,” “the dead can’t hear us,” etc. And a plethora of successful responses have been given. So, whenever a non-stock objection comes along, it’s quite nice.
Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund has provided us such an opportunity. In <a href="https://opentheo.org/i/5431341150608907844/praying-to-the-saints-a-protestant-critique">his video</a>, “Praying to the Saints: A Protestant Critique,” he argues that when we consider “how the prayers to the saints actually played out” in medieval piety, we discover that it led to many distortions.
Ortlund gives several examples. I can’t quote them all. But here are some relevant excerpts that include the primary “distortion” that concerns him:
“Lord, we ask that Thou, placated by the intercession of all Thy saints . . . We pray thee, Lord, that the merits of blessed Mary, who is both perpetually a virgin and the bearer of God, may attend us and always implore Thy forgiveness for us” (Cursus Honarum of the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to the Ordinarium of the Church of Hildeshelm).
“O noble Mary, excellent above all, procure for us forgiveness.”
“O holy virgin Mary, and all the saints and elect of God, come to aid me, wretched one, now and in the hour  of my death, and make the Lord our God propitious to me by your merits and prayers.”
“Through you forgiveness is granted to the guilty” (Sequence to Our Lady and Sequence in Praise of the Virgin).
For Ortlund, the above invocations are “inherently wrong” and in “error” because the soteriology (study of salvation) embedded within them is flat-out contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. As he puts it, “it is subtracting from the sufficiency of Christ because the specific tasks that are the property of Christ in the gospel are being assigned to Mary here.” Which tasks? Procuring the forgiveness of sins and propitiating or placating God, which, for Ortlund, can be done only by the death of Jesus on the cross.
It’s because of these distortions, Ortlund explains, that Protestants, including himself, are concerned with the practice of invoking the intercession of the saints. And such a concern is good enough reason for him not to engage in the practice, at least when combined with the lack of New Testament and early Christian evidence that Christians requested that the saints in heaven pray for them.
We’ll set aside for now Ortlund’s concern about the lack of early evidence for invocations. It’s his concern about these so-called distortions, and his reasoning about them, that I would like to focus on here.
Assuming for argument’s sake that these requests are distortions, notice how Ortlund concludes that we shouldn’t invoke the saints’ help because such invocations have played out in a way that violate the Bible’s teaching on salvation—namely, that we are forgiven of our sins through the merits of Jesus’ death on the cross.
Now, one might think Ortlund is guilty of committing the association fallacy, which asserts that the quality of some things within a category (when not essential to the things within the category) is a quality of all things within that category. If Ortlund were to conclude that all invocations of the saints are violations of the gospel because some were, then he would be guilty of fallacious reasoning. But Ortlund simply argues that such invocations can lead to violations, and on this basis, he chooses not to engage in the practice.
But why should we reject the invocation of the saints simply because some invocations lead to a violation of the gospel (again, assuming that the above invocations are violations of the gospel)? We don’t reject interpreting Scripture just because some interpretations lead people to destruction (2 Pet. 3:15-16). Nor do we reject the practice of religion simply because some who practice it do so in a way that leads to unjust conflict and violence.
Concerning the interpretation of Scripture, we realize that it’s not interpretation that leads to destruction. Rather, it’s specific interpretations along with whatever method the interpreter is using. Similarly, when it comes to religion, we realize that it’s not religion that leads to conflict and violence. Rather, it’s the perversion of religion by the one causing unjust conflict and violence.
The same line of reasoning applies to the so-called “distorted” invocations of the saints. In the examples Ortlund gave, it would be the specific requests that are “distorted” and the soteriological beliefs driving these specific requests. And if that’s the case, there’s no need for Ortlund to persuade others away from the practice of invoking the saints’ intercession. There could be some invocations that are not problematic and thus worthy of Christian practice.
Now, this response assumes that the requests in the above excerpts are actual “distortions.” But we have good reason to think they’re not.
Recall that Ortlund is concerned with the invocations because they take away from the sufficiency of Christ insofar as they attempt to procure the forgiveness of sins from and propitiate or placate God. Notice the hidden assumption: nobody except Christ can procure the forgiveness of sins from God or propitiate him. 
If by “procure” Ortlund has primary causality in mind, then we agree. Only Christ is the efficient cause of the forgiveness of sins. But that’s not how the above excerpts should be read. The “procuring” is by way of request. In other words, the above prayers are simply asking Mary to pray that God would forgive us of our sins.
Is it okay for Mary to do this? Well, it’s not at all different from Paul praying, “May the Lord grant [onesiphorus] to find mercy from the Lord on that Day [the Day of Judgment]” (2 Tim. 1:18). If Paul can pray for a Christian to be forgiven by God, so can Mary. And if it’s okay for Mary to do this, then the above requests made of Mary is not a “distortion” of the gospel.
Concerning the request that Mary would propitiate or placate God, all this entails is a request that Mary would ask God to be more favorable to us. If Paul and Mary can ask God to forgive our sins, which is just one way in which God can be favorable to us, then Paul and Mary can ask God to be favorable to us in other ways.
As much as I appreciate Ortlund’s honest and charitable expression of his concerns with the Catholic practice of the invocation of the intercession of the saints, when it’s thought through, the concern dealt with in this article doesn’t justify a rejection of invoking the saints. Not only are the requests in the excerpts not violations of the gospel, which is a major motivation behind his concern, but his reasoning is fallacious even if we grant that these requests are perversions. If Ortlund wants to justify his rejection of the practice of invoking the saints, he’s going to have to ground himself in better arguments.

Should Mary Just Mind Her Own Business?

On November 1, 2025, St. John Henry Newman was officially named the thirty-eighth Doctor of the Church. Then, on November 4, Pope Leo XIV and the Vatican released to the public the document <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20251104_mater-populi-fidelis_en.html">Mater Populi Fidelis</a>.
If I were to tell you that Mary is the cause of our salvation, I would expect you to call me a heretic. Yet that is exactly what Newman did—and so this requires a thorough explanation. Nor did Newman come up with it. Instead, he was quoting the thirty-seventh Doctor of the Church, St. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/irenaeus-doctor-of-unity">Irenaeus of Lyons</a>.
Irenaeus is not a new saint. He was born around the year A.D. 140 and died around 202. Pope Francis only recently declared him thirty-seventh Doctor of the Church, in 2022. Now, three years later, Newman is the next theologian to be given this extremely rare title. When we consider that both of them called Mary the cause of salvation, we have to explain what they meant by that.
We’ll start with Scripture, lest Catholics be accused of adding to the Bible. From the beginning of the Bible to its end, wherever we find Jesus, we also find (either directly or indirectly) the presence of Mary. From the first moment that sin entered the world, in his merciful love, God promised us a redeemer: his son, Jesus Christ. In the same breath, God also promised to send us Mary, when he said to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).
From the beginning of the Bible, the prophecy of Jesus’ victory over Satan included Mary. At the end of the Bible, in Revelation 12, we again see Jesus battling it out with Satan. But he isn’t alone. Instead, there Mary is, battling Satan right next to him.
Turning our attention to the Gospels, we continue to see Mary cooperating alongside Jesus in his mission of redeeming humanity from sin.
First, Mary says “yes” to God’s plan when the angel Gabriel appears to her to tell her that she will be the mother of the Messiah. (Luke 1:26-38).
Second, when Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the Temple, Simeon prophesies about Jesus and Mary. Speaking to Mary, he says, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also)” (Luke 2:34-35).
Third, it is Mary who initiates Jesus’ public ministry when she requests that he work his first public miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. Jesus and Mary are at a wedding when the wine runs out. To save the newly wed couple from public humiliation, Mary tells Jesus that they have no more wine. She then turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he [Jesus] tells you.” The rest is history (John 2:1-12).
Lastly, Mary is there at the foot of the cross. Certainly, that is the moment when her soul is pierced by the sword prophesied by Simeon (John 19:25-27).
Jesus’ crucifixion is a clear example of how Mary cooperated in Jesus’ work of salvation. Mary must have felt every blow that Jesus endured. It wasn’t her body that was crucified, but her motherly heart.
Now that we have seen the <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/bible-mary-the-mother-of-jesus-in-the-word-of-god/?searchid=10644186&amp;search_query=bible+mary">biblical roots</a> of Mary’s cooperation in Christ’s act of redemption, we can better understand why the earliest Christians had so much to say about who she was. Three of the earliest Christian writers present Mary as the Second Eve: Tertullian, St. Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. As Eve had played an active role in causing Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, so too did Mary play an active role in Jesus’ work of redemption.
John Henry Newman observed that these three Church Fathers “do not speak of the Blessed Virgin merely as the physical instrument of our Lord’s taking flesh, but as an intelligent, responsible cause of it” (Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, vol. 2, 35).Regarding Irenaeus, Newman wrote that he “represents St. John [the Apostle], for [Irenaeus] had been taught by the Martyr St. Polycarp, who was the intimate associate of St. John, as also of other apostles” (33). For Irenaeus, Eve was “the cause of death both to herself and to the whole human race,” whereas Mary was “the cause of salvation” (34).
Newman was struck so strongly by Irenaeus’s phrase that in his book Meditations and Devotions, he quotes this same sentence while capitalizing this phrase so we wouldn’t miss it: “the CAUSE OF SALVATION” (85).
Here is where the “correction” from Mater Populi Fidelis comes in. We can see now how Newman took the Eve-Mary parallel and ran with it, attributing an active role to Mary in our redemption paralleled by Eve’s active role in the Fall. It is excesses like this that Mater Populi Fidelis is aiming to restrain.  The document subtly warns us not to give Mary’s active participation in redemption equal credit with Christ’s participation: “When we strive to attribute active roles to [Mary] that are parallel to those of Christ, we move away from the incomparable beauty that is uniquely hers” (33).
Admittedly, to refer to Mary as the cause of salvation takes the Eve-Mary parallel to a whole new level.  I had thought it was credible because it had been written by the two most recent saints to be named doctors of the Church: Irenaeus and John Henry Newman. But here we are.
<a href="https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/mary-mother-jesus-and-all-believers-not-co-redeemer-vatican-says">Pope Francis</a> acknowledged that it is out of love for Mary that some of us have taken her role in salvation too far.  Christ is the source of all graces, not Mary.  Mater Populi Fidelis shows this by reflecting on the Immaculate Conception and the infallible definition of the doctrine.  It states that Mary, “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ . . . was preserved immune from all stain of original sin” (<a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9ineff.htm">Ineffabilis Deus</a>). She wasn’t saved by her holiness.  She was saved by grace, and grace is a free and unmerited gift from God.  After receiving this gift of grace, Mary cooperated with it, whereas Eve did not cooperate with the grace she had been given.
As we bring this article to a close, let’s make sure not to throw Newman under the bus. What did he mean by “the cause of our salvation”? He wrote, “Well as [Mary] rewards her friends, she would deem him no friend, but a traitor, who preferred her to [her son Jesus]” (79). Mary is like the morning star, who does not shine for herself, or from herself, but she is the reflection of her and our Redeemer, and she glorifies him. When she appears in the darkness, we know that he is close at hand. He is Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.
Newman also didn’t mean that Mary is equal to Jesus. For Newman, Jesus is God, and therefore there is an infinite gap between him and Mary. However, Jesus loves his mother so much that he wants us to love and honor her, too. That is why Jesus is so responsive to her prayers and intercession. Mary is deserving of all the honors the Catholic Church has bestowed upon her because it is fitting for her who is truly the Mother of God (72).
Given this, we should reason that if Newman had been given the benefits of the theological advancements that have been made since he died in 1890, he would have corrected the excesses in his Marian theology as well. My final word of caution is that we shouldn’t ignore Newman’s Mariology because of the excesses.  If we do, we will miss out on his brilliant defense of the doctrine of the immaculate conception.

Immaculate Mary and John Henry Newman

Ranking the BEST (and worst) Arguments AGAINST Catholicism (tier list)

Some Protestants argue that Paul’s letter to the Galatians shows Peter was just one leader among many—not the first pope. In this episode, I explain why Galatians 2:6 and 2:9 don’t undermine Peter’s unique role and actually make good sense within the broader biblical case for the papacy.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Was Peter really the first pope—or was he just one “pillar” among others? Some think Paul teaches the second view in his letter to the Galatians! But I don’t think he does.
Hey guys, Welcome back to the channel! So glad to have you with me. If you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and hit that bell notification so you can be notified when new videos are released. Also, I’d like to invite you to consider helping keep this podcast going by financially supporting us on Patreon at doctorkarlo.com with “doctor” spelled out.
So, when it comes to the Catholic claim that Peter was the first pope, there’s definitely no shortage of objections. But today, I want to zero in on a couple of them that come straight out of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. There are two verses in Galatians 2 that Protestants often bring up as evidence that Paul didn’t see Peter as “the pope”: verses 6 and 9. Verse 11 is another but we’re gonna save that for some other time.
So let’s start with Galatians 2:6. Paul writes,
[PHONE READ]
And from those who were reputed to be something (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who were of repute added nothing to me.
At first glance, it seems like Paul is putting himself on the same level as Peter—basically saying, “Hey, Peter’s not above me.” Protestant apologist Jason Engwer, a frequent contributor for the Protestant blog triablogue.com, took this line in a 1999 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220706184848/http:/www.biblicalcatholic.com/apologetics/debate15.htm">debate</a> with Catholic apologist Mark Bonocore. Here’s what he argued:
[PHONE READ]
Paul asserted his equality with, not his superiority to, the other apostles ( . . . Gal. 2:6-8). Paul was not a pope, nor was Peter or any other apostle. It is the express testimony of Paul that what Peter and other prominent church leaders were meant nothing to him. . . . The equality and independence of Paul are a contradiction of the doctrine of the papacy.
And Jason isn’t the only one who reads Paul this way.
Tony Dupree, writing for renew.org in an article called <a href="https://renew.org/contributor/tony-dupree/">“Was Peter the First Pope?”</a>, says this about Galatians 2:6:
[PHONE READ]
Paul identifies these men “reputed to be something” in verse 9: James, John and Cephas (another name for Peter). What? Peter, the Pope, could add nothing to Paul? God shows no partiality? Doesn’t this description make you wonder about the Catholic teaching of the Papacy?
Protestant apologist Jim McCarthy falls right in line. In a 2024 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHLKoMSaFyU">interview</a> on The Berean Call YouTube Channel, he stated the following:
[VIDEO]
in chapter 2:6 5:36 [Paul] goes out of his way to say that when 5:38 he went to speak to these men he he just 5:40 saw them as brothers in Christ he didn&#8217;t 5:42 see them as a hierarchy or someone to 5:45 whom he had to submit in terms of being 5:48 the head of the universal church. 
So the question is: does Galatians 2:6 really prove that Paul didn’t see Peter as having a higher rank of authority?
I don’t think so. And here’s a few reasons why.
First, the argument assumes that Peter’s authority meant nothing to Paul. But that’s not what Paul is saying. What meant nothing to him was the reputation—the high esteem—that Peter, James, and John had in the eyes of the Galatian Christians.
Evangelical scholar Richard N. Longnecker points this out in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Word-Biblical-Commentary-Vol-Galatians/dp/0849902401">Galatians</a>. He says it’s not that Paul is dismissing Peter or the apostles themselves, but rather the inflated claims that the Jewish converts (whom Longnecker calls “Judaizers”) were making about them. He puts it like this:
[PHONE READ]
Contrary to many who deny irony in Paul’s usage, it seems hard to ignore at least a certain “dismissive” tone in Galatians 2—a dismissal, however, not of [Peter or] the Jerusalem apostles themselves, but of the Judaizers’ claims for them.
And what might these claims be? D.B. Orchard, in his commentary on Galatians in A Catholic Commentary of on Holy Scripture, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Commentary-Holy-Scripture/dp/B000P0NEAI">answers</a>, “the fact that the Twelve knew Jesus in the flesh before his Resurrection.” It was this fact that made them of “repute” in relation to Paul.
And if you look closely, Paul’s whole point in this section is about reputation. He says:
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<li>v. 2—“those who were of repute”</li>
<li>v. 6—“who were reputed to be something”</li>
<li>v. 9—“who were reputed to be pillars.”</li>
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So what’s Paul really saying? He’s saying, “Look, just because these guys are highly respected doesn’t mean I’m any less of an apostle. Jesus himself called me, and that makes me just as much an apostle as them.”
But here’s the key: being equal in apostleship doesn’t mean equal in rank of authority. Think about it. My wife and I are completely equal in dignity as human beings, but I still have the role of headship in our family. Or take Catholic Answers: Chris Check and all of us apologists are equally full-time employees, but Chris is the president—he’s the one steering the ship.
So, Paul’s comment about him being equal as an apostle doesn’t knock Peter off his role as chief apostle. In fact, Matthew 10:2 actually calls Simon protos—“first” when he lists the apostles, not in the sense of order, but in the sense of rank.
Now, another big problem with the Protestant argument is that it overlooks some key contextual details that actually show Paul recognizing Peter’s authority.
Take Galatians 1:18-19. Paul talks about his first trip to Jerusalem after his conversion:
[PHONE READ]
“Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.”
Notice that? Paul goes out of his way to visit Peter and spends more than two weeks with him. James is mentioned almost as an afterthought. Why would Paul single out Peter like that if he didn’t see him as being in charge?
So, if anything, that passage shows that Paul considered Peter the main guy during that visit.
Galatians 2:2 is another contextual detail. There, Paul writes,
[PHONE READ]
I went up by revelation; and I laid before them (but privately before those who were of repute) the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, lest somehow I should be running or had run in vain.
The Greek word Paul uses here for “laid before them” is anatithemi. Greek scholars note that this word means “laying for the sake of consideration.” For example, the Greek-English Lexicon for the New Testament and Early Christian Literature (famously referred to as BDAG, which is an abbreviation for names of the editors), defines the Greek word anatithemi as
[PHONE READ]
to lay something before someone for consideration, communicate, refer, declare w. connotation of request for a person’s opinion . . . I laid my gospel before them Gal. 2:2. 
So here’s the question: why would Paul feel the need to lay his preaching before Peter for consideration if he didn’t see Peter as the visible principle of unity for preaching the gospel?
Bottom line: Galatians 2:6 might look at first like it undermines Peter’s authority. But when you look at the context, it’s not doing that at all. Paul isn’t rejecting Peter’s role as leader—he’s just pushing back against the inflated reputation the Jewish converts were attaching to Peter, James, and John.
And when you look at the bigger picture, Galatians actually supports the idea that Paul recognized Peter’s leadership in the early Church. Which means Galatians 2:6 really can’t be used as proof that Paul rejected the papacy.
Okay, let’s now turn to the objection from Galatians 2:9. Here’s what Paul says:
[PHONE READ]
“When they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship.”
Now, you’ll notice Peter—called Cephas here—is listed second, right after James. And some argue that this proves Peter wasn’t unique in his role as the foundation of the Church, let alone the first pope.
Engwer, again, is someone who makes this point. He does so in his article, <a href="https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-pillars-of-roman-catholicism.html">“The Pillars of Roman Catholicism.” </a>Here’s how he puts it:
[PHONE READ]
It’s doubtful that people would have been grouping Peter with other apostles as pillars of the Church and naming him second, after James, if he was thought of as a pope. Catholics emphasize Peter being the foundation of the Church in Matthew 16, which sounds a lot like the pillar concept in Galatians 2:9. It’s unlikely the early Christians thought of Peter as such a unique foundation—an infallible ruler over all Christians—yet saw him the way Paul describes him here.
So, here’s the argument in simple form:
<ul>
<li>Premise 1: If Peter was uniquely the foundation of the Church, like Catholics say, he wouldn’t have been listed second in Galatians 2:9.</li>
<li>Premise 2: But he is listed second.</li>
<li>Conclusion: Therefore, Peter wasn’t unique as the foundation of the Church—he wasn’t the pope.</li>
</ul>
Let’s take a closer look at this.
The key assumption here is that being listed second means Peter wasn’t superior in rank—less important than James.
But is that a fair assumption? Not really.
Think about it: when we list people in a sentence or an email or a story, we don’t always put them in order of rank or importance. A lot of times, names just come to mind as we’re writing. The specific order of importance or greatness would only be of interest if that’s what we’re after.
This could have been the case for Paul. Paul could have been simply listing the names as they came to mind, without any intention to list them according to rank.
So unless Paul explicitly says he’s listing people based on rank—and he doesn’t—there’s no reason to assume that’s what’s going on.
Even if Paul were trying to say something with the order, it still wouldn’t disprove Peter’s special role. Why?
Because as I just showed from Galatians 1:18-19, Peter actually is portrayed as the top leader, even above James.
Now, let’s talk about James for a minute. Which James are we dealing with?
This isn’t James the brother of John—he was killed by Herod in Acts 12:2. This is James, the “brother of the Lord,” who stepped up to lead the Church in Jerusalem after Peter left.
That shift is hinted at in Acts 12:17, where Peter escapes prison and tells the others, “Tell this to James and the brothers.” After that, Peter leaves Jerusalem, which opened the door for James to take leadership in that local Church.
We even have early Church sources backing this up.
Eusebius, in Church History (Bk. 2, ch. 1), says James,
[PHONE READ]
“whom the ancients surnamed the Just on account of the excellence of his virtue, is recorded to have been the first to be made bishop of the church of Jerusalem. This James was called the brother of the Lord.”
Jerome says the same in Lives of Illustrious Men, writing that
“James was once ordained by the apostles bishop of Jerusalem.”
So by the time Paul visits Jerusalem in Galatians 2:9—which was 14 years after that first visit, recorded in Gal. 2:1—James had become the local leader.
Protestant New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce explains in his The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text:
[PHONE READ]
On Paul’s earlier visit to Jerusalem, Cephas was the most important man in the church; Paul went up specifically to meet him, and adds that he also saw James. But all our evidence (scanty as it is) indicates that James became increasingly influential in the Jerusalem church. An opportunity to increase his influence at the expense of Cephas/Peter came with the latter’s departure from Jerusalem after his escape from Herod Agrippa’s prison (Acts 12:17) (pg. 121-122). 
These circumstances of James being the bishop in Jerusalem could explain why Paul lists James first: to acknowledge his current leadership in the Jerusalem church. Peter, meanwhile, was only there temporarily—for the Council of Jerusalem.
Here’s another interesting possibility. Paul may have listed James first to make a strategic point.
In Galatians 2:12, Paul mentions the “circumcision party”—Jewish Christians who believed Gentiles had to be circumcised. Paul says these guys came from James, and Peter ended up fearing them.
These people highly respected James. So if they were going to try and use anyone to argue against Paul, it would’ve been James.
But Paul flips the script.
He points out that James, Peter, and John all gave him the right hand of fellowship. They all approved of his ministry to the Gentiles—including James.
So, maybe Paul lists James first to hammer that home. In effect, he’s saying: “Even the guy you think would be on your side agrees with me.” That would totally undercut the circumcision party’s argument.
Here’s the takeaway:
Every argument is only as strong as the assumptions behind it.
In this case, the assumption that Peter being listed second means he wasn’t the pope just doesn’t hold up. There are plenty of good reasons Paul might have listed James first and not Peter:
<ul>
<li>It could’ve been random.</li>
<li>It could’ve reflected James’s role as bishop of Jerusalem at the time.</li>
<li>It could’ve been a deliberate move to disarm Paul’s opponents.</li>
</ul>
So no—Galatians 2:9 doesn’t prove Peter wasn’t the first pope.
There’s just not enough there to overturn the much broader biblical case for Peter’s special role, especially what we see in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus names Peter the rock.
So next time someone says, “Peter was just one of the guys—not the guy,” you’ve got some solid responses to offer.
At the end of the day, Galatians doesn’t knock Peter off his role as chief apostle—it actually makes sense once you look at the context. Paul was pushing back against inflated reputations, not Peter’s authority. And the order of names in Galatians 2:9 just doesn’t carry the weight Protestants want it to.
Bottom line: Peter wasn’t just a “regular ole pillar”—he was the rock Christ set at the foundation of his Church.
Well, my friends, that’s it for today! If you found this video helpful, make sure to like, subscribe, and share it with someone who might need to hear this. And for more resources, check out my website at karlobroussard.com.
If you want me to come and speak at your event, visit catholicanswersspeakers.com.
Lastly, I’d love for you to consider supporting me over on Patreon. I can’t continue doing this podcast without your financial support. You can find me over at doctorkarlo.com with “doctor” spelled out.
Thanks for hanging out, and I’ll see you next time!

Peter, a Regular Ole “Pillar”?

Episode 11: Year A—Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we look at three details in this upcoming Sunday Mass readings that are relevant for apologetical discussions. The details that come from the Gospel, which is Matthew 5:13-16, are Jesus’ teaching about “salt losing its flavor” and Christians being “the light of the world.” The third apologetical detail, which is Paul’s deemphasis of human wisdom, comes from the second reading, which is taken from 1 Corinthians 2:1-5.
The Readings: <a href="//bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/020523.cfm">Click Here</a>
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">SCW Merchendise</a>

Salt with No Flavor Is a Loss of Salvation

In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reviews his recent interaction with the book and film version of Bonfire of the Vanities.
Trent Horn (<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/pbxQ1WFUH0RCm_h9CQznOqAna4SjV-_U44aPg_m3Nfw4ZzvyQgc79VJgj3TDYM1WxFCD4OzcltiwuX8nfMCt0iBuQo8?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=0.15">00:00</a>):
It&#8217;s time to go back to the eighties, 1980s, New York, especially crime, corruption, Giness, dirtiness, everybody&#8217;s fake. It&#8217;s all depressing. Let&#8217;s turn that story into a movie and who should we cast to be in the movie? America&#8217;s Lovable Splash Actor to Hanks. That&#8217;s the story of Bonfire of the Vanities, the Tom Wolf novel published in 1987. I just read the book for the first time and I just figured I&#8217;d chat about it here on Free for All. Friday, Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. Friday I talk about whatever I want to talk about and I try to keep up with books. I always try to pick a new classic or something to be able to read and listen to broaden the horizons, if you will. I&#8217;ve had a hard time though, I mean with my wife&#8217;s medical diagnosis things. I was churning through books at the beginning of this year and I was really enjoying it.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/Aeq1gmoqAQg2erkErxttnFfwPxooX37lhZf3nkotxWoWV14L8MmSx4xmrgb1BXYu7GDwHS4PGhQlOZjzVMbd6lNckAU?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=52.11">00:52</a>):
After the diagnosis though, I really fell off the wagon of reading things. I slowly got back into it though. And so I wanted to read this one just because I had heard of it before. I really had only heard of the book as a failed movie adaptation, the 1990 film, which I had not seen either. All I knew was when you think about failed movie adaptations, people have always told me the prime example of that is Brian De Palma&#8217;s 1990 film Bonfire The Vanities, and Brian De Palma is a very good director. I think the one that when I think of him, I think of Mission Impossible. He did the 1996 Mission Impossible. I was 11 when I saw that, and that just blew my 11-year-old mind. This is cinema. This is not just going to the movies, but it&#8217;s action and it&#8217;s interesting, it&#8217;s complex and really enjoying that, but everybody seems to agree that the ball was really dropped on Bonfire of the Vanities.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/BV0rmHO3k4LekLIKl_6EnUxPbIMJ9AhyJD2WiOHMwGznnvEIi8lvuDe_WHlpiHXibYAAMOh7b6-IUTSGJbPCn8Vkd10?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=105.63">01:45</a>):
So lemme talk about it. Just going into the story, the movie, it&#8217;s all really fascinating. So Wolf published a novel in 1987, and it is about racism, class, politics, and greed. 1980s New York. It&#8217;s really the quintessential 1980s New York book. If there&#8217;s ever a book that encapsulated 1980s New York, this is it. So the book, the main character, the main character is a guy named Sherman McCoy, who is a bond trader. So he&#8217;s selling bonds on Wall Street and Wall Street&#8217;s, a lot of greed, corruption. People are making money hand over fist. They&#8217;re spending lavishly millions of dollars on apartments, fancy parties. It&#8217;s all vapid and empty, and McCoy is just not a very good guy. The book opens with him taking his dog for a walk in the rain. So he has an excuse to go to a payphone to call Maria, who is the woman that he&#8217;s having an affair with.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/7rYwpf0mXclMOGexAulnAyNPUHZN-DIr1amC_yHFZYRigsBBb9AJUJd2dB0TX2XgR7e45rYwSjmFq_CyonW2liU4HFE?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=164.01">02:44</a>):
Maria Ruskin. So he is going out and then he accidentally calls his wife, is Maria there? She&#8217;s like, Sherman, is that you? He&#8217;s like, yeah. Then he goes back and then she&#8217;s onto him like, you&#8217;re calling this woman. What&#8217;s going on? He&#8217;s like, I didn&#8217;t call this woman. And then it goes from that. He&#8217;s having this affair with Maria. The novel really starts to pick up when he is driving in a car with Maria, they take a, he misses his exit and they end up in the Bronx. They end up in the bad part of New York. They&#8217;re driving around, they don&#8217;t know where they&#8217;re going, how to get out of there. They get stuck, I think behind, there&#8217;s a local parade or something, and there&#8217;s a lot of drug dealers, crazy people, criminals. And we got to get out of here and they&#8217;re driving and they tried to get back on the expressway to get back to Manhattan.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/-J1K87Gz8PiWUd-ICbf-HFMugnKpwRHOYApSOZEGRQcV8g9swI7doARrKJJk1_4nbmJ6SCUNsLg6m-4KavXSOXpLXsk?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=207.76">03:27</a>):
And the expressways, the ramp they want to get on is blocked by some trash or garbage, probably placed there to stop people. So McCoy gets out to move it. Two black guys, well, one of them is more like a young guy, a kid. They come up to him and the novel&#8217;s very ambiguous about what&#8217;s going on. That Sherman Overreacts pushes him over, jumps back in the car, and it seems like the car may have nicked one of them. And they drive off and they think, oh, that was a really close one. Then they come to hear that the boy, one of the boys hit his head from that, went to the hospital and then ends up in a coma. And now the local Reverend Reverend Bacon, who is basically a race hustler, he is kind of like Al Sharpton and he wants justice for this.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/V_VGPTC7NWPnfzZXLP5bBRtZI5WIKSWJquPx-PZRNVx5_62t1J5XcO3F4h2tBgCBsnR55o2YvlT46DFI6tNoXs1SGjs?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=253.57">04:13</a>):
But in the book you find out that he&#8217;s corrupt also, that he&#8217;s hiring ex-cons to work for things for charities, funneling money around. And the Episcopal church is trying to reign him in and they&#8217;re too timid to do that. They don&#8217;t want to be called racist. And so he is demanding justice. And there&#8217;s a disgrace, alcoholic author, Peter Fallow, who&#8217;s a British guy trying to regain his reputation. And he stokes this outrage of a conspiracy that some Wall Street guy ran over this poor black kid for no reason whatsoever. And he&#8217;s a racist and evil and all these elements come together. And then there is a district attorney who&#8217;s a Jewish guy, Kramer, and he is trying to sleep with a girl who was on one of his juries and impress her in the jury box. So he wants to bring the guy who ran over this kid to Justice will bend the rules to do that. And it turns into this huge legal fiasco. And McCoy&#8217;s life slowly begins to unravel throughout all of this, that once he was this privileged jerk, he&#8217;s just a S sniffling. No one in this is good. But what&#8217;s interesting is how it reflects just the grimy fakeness of New York in the late eighties. There&#8217;s particular scene I love where they&#8217;re at a dinner party and Wolf describes how everybody laughs and it&#8217;s so annoying how they laugh. And she laughed with a percussive.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/SZ9ACheyPeHUKvyUPYjbKqI9c36fxCCnNZsPY8mN4BtZSOnmc2_pc2IvRUBWMQNVQJkKbcijLoaJnXkDkdmA41QWG0w?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=330.19">05:30</a>):
The way he describes how everybody laughs is like the typical thing at a Hoy toy. Posh plays, everyone laughs, but they&#8217;re clearly being fake and it is just grading to have to think about. And all the characters are really interesting, but none of them are likable. Fallow is clearly trying to regain his lost career and he&#8217;s a wreck, but he&#8217;s also British and looks down on everyone else. And so it makes it interesting to have his perspective. Maria is McCoy&#8217;s love interest, and she&#8217;s also two-faced, and it&#8217;s sad. He also has a daughter and he&#8217;s trying to care for her as well. But he basically neglects her in all of this while trying to be a good person, not really trying to be a good person. He&#8217;s trying to just get away with everything. The end of the story is, oh, and by the way, also driving around, I love the scenes.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/MeIKKqc17ikLRUV9VhdZQuCCas2ZWI18VRCm8hTji0vWtDI1ubIRSwi0KL1GBWCuNBNmGwAlQZP5MOs--jd5T7AqJMM?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=377.27">06:17</a>):
They describe how all the Wall Street traders wait for their private cars to pick them up because nobody in their right mind would use the subway In New York in the 1980s, it was really Giuliani who cleaned up New York in the nineties that changed. You do not go to New York in the 1980s for a tourist visit. Now it&#8217;s gotten dangerous again with all the crazy people on the subways and stuff, but you don&#8217;t go there. So I love how it describes everything. It&#8217;s just really interesting in that regard. I&#8217;m not going to give away the ending here, but it&#8217;s a drab ending. Nobody comes out really on top or good or anything like that, but it&#8217;s an interesting character study and it&#8217;s a good well-written story. And Wolf even went to traitors to learn about it. He spent time down at, what do you call the courthouse and police processing to really understand everything that&#8217;s going on.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/1_TR7pB4zC8LpPqR1ybBgcDuf4xMeLyrjYy12965Z9o7d8_UxbQIuWbdsDKuyh9tVzSyXiTnjijbEh_lwlcwK4TuIGc?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=427.82">07:07</a>):
So it makes for a really interesting book if you can trudge your way through. It&#8217;s a really good book. It&#8217;s a good book. It&#8217;s a good story. So then people, a lot of directors are like, we can&#8217;t turn this into a movie. How would we do that? It&#8217;s long. It&#8217;s really long. It&#8217;s not that complex of a plot, but there&#8217;s a lot of description, a lot of important scenes in it. Like I said, it&#8217;s almost 700 pages, but then De Palma tried, and there&#8217;s actually on Turner Classic movies, there&#8217;s a podcast that actually different seasons they do behind the scenes. And there&#8217;s one that is just an expose on bonfire to the vanities of the 1990 film and how much of a mess it was trying to make this film and why it failed. Right now, the film, the 1990s film has a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes released in 1990.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/NSOukijT6WUZh9VANhhAhOkj-9PR9KnX4EDGIHDEX3tDwySDU5HwFCepy2eaozLFplgJe35M4B3sImKIiJXFeiEQo2A?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=475.22">07:55</a>):
And why did it fail? I would say the number one reason that the film failed was, well, the source material itself. It&#8217;s not something that lends itself while the film, because like I said, everybody in it is unsympathetic. There&#8217;s no one you can really root for, but if you&#8217;re going to be true to the story, and that creates a dissonance about it, it was hopelessly miscast was the problem. So the main character, Sherman McCoy, is this privileged unlikeable jerk who tries to work the system and you don&#8217;t like him. Now, you can make films about unlikeable people in the founder, Michael Keaton is really the bad guy of the film. It&#8217;s the story about Ray Croc founder of McDonald&#8217;s. But it&#8217;s fascinating to see how he progresses in his machinations. So it&#8217;s a really good film in that regard. But so McCoy&#8217;s not a good guy, but who did they cast to play him?
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/6RixFzedBSka_B1LWhcvsc559ZghUBDMn8UwHZqyhW_5pudISGdKFk176RMXJtMyzOiQmKVyKurgY3ZaWVcUBsFAwpE?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=522.74">08:42</a>):
Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is an amazing actor, but the one role Tom Hanks cannot play unlikeable. Think about it, what Charact does Tom Hanks play? He was in Splash. He&#8217;s in big, he&#8217;s Woody. Woody is not the, well, what&#8217;s funny is Woody becomes unlikable a bit, but he&#8217;s still a really likable person you want to root for, but it&#8217;s a horrible caster. McCoy, and then they&#8217;re Peter fallow. Peter Fallow is supposed to be this alcoholic out of touch Brit, and because he&#8217;s British, when he goes and interviews people about, well, what was life like for this kid in Harlem? Or I think he was in Harlem or in the Bronx. He&#8217;s in school trying hard, but it&#8217;s just a mess. And he doesn&#8217;t quite get in the book. He comes from Uppercrust British society, but they didn&#8217;t hire a Brit to do fallow for the film. De Palmer thought like British people. I did a film before that failed and there was a British character and I didn&#8217;t like him.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/Y-jHVoZa2fWqiLxfsuZIS0wCNB4xLBz_T7ZZ0VfH1b7MkmOZs7ByxbJbOp0Abby5TfWfniRdxI1bDUwq1gh_SJCAn1o?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=582.81">09:42</a>):
So instead they hired Bruce Willis, Bruce Willis, and it&#8217;s told from Fallows perspective. And so it&#8217;s so really bizarre. Also, they really tone down how Reverend Bacon was just as corrupt. It goes to being a weird morality tale that doesn&#8217;t go anywhere that much. They change a lot to try to make McCoy&#8217;s character more sympathetic, but a lot of it just ends up falling flat. And then they also cheat out that in the book everybody&#8217;s corrupt and crooked. But in the movie, they decide to have Morgan Freeman, lack of twine, lack of twine play the judge in the courtroom who dresses everybody down with one of his typical Morgan Freeman&#8217;s speeches, which is absent from the book entirely. Melanie Griffith is fine. As Maria Ruskin though, I thought it was really hard to take her seriously doing that Southern Bell accent, but I guess she was trying really hard with that.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/wUMtRfqO_frbcKSN4ij2s4KnPgvjzuJczc_Q2IviwahhOiVM_MHbr7oXlERFHwDr1vS213NOrkaBt6QF3hrrPuvWbnc?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=638.28">10:38</a>):
But all in all, you lose a lot of the nuance that when you watch the movie, you&#8217;ll just be like, oh, it was okay. I guess when you read the book, you just see this great story. You see element, you&#8217;re like, oh, I remember that from the book. But it&#8217;s all chopped up and thrown onto celluloid. It&#8217;s not like a cohesive hole that really gets into each of the characters and everybody&#8217;s there. And like I said, then it ends with, it&#8217;s a weird redemption arc from McCoy when I prefer the bitter ending that he gets what he deserves in the novel itself. So that was just my little mini review today, finally got through that book. I think you may find it interesting. Don&#8217;t watch the movie. If you are going to watch the movie, read the book first so the source material is better.
(<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/PtmhaUUiFfPrLE1P3CuBL1jiAvRITzi7YH5GPhwDTzz-TaKa4wjmxtsGScqhoPFODj2PWUbv98NzoYVRldLQrcHDRyA?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&amp;ts=675.63">11:15</a>):
That&#8217;s all the advice I have for you all. So, oh, I was also going to say, if you read the book by the way, it will feel like mid two thousands Black Lives Matter, race arguments. It will sound very, very, very familiar where you&#8217;ll see the cynicism, the political maneuvering, especially those Reverend Bacon and others, just like the rhetoric we saw with Black Lives Matter and a lot of that. So really, really interesting in that respect. So just for that to see that history kind of repeats itself, you&#8217;ll find interesting. Bonfire of the Vanities, read The Wolf 1987 novel, the movie. It&#8217;s a good compare and contrast I guess, if you get through the book. So thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
&nbsp;

FFAF: The Bonfire of the Vanities

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DAY 33
CHALLENGE
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“John the Baptist was the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. When the disciples ask Jesus why the scribes say that Elijah must come before the Messiah, Jesus says he already had come. &#8216;Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist&#8217; (Matt. 17:13). Also, Luke says John the Baptist will have the spirit of Elijah (Luke 1:17).”
DEFENSE
John the Baptist functioned symbolically as a new Elijah, but he denied actually being Elijah in person (John 1:21).
The New Testament repeatedly states that we will be resurrected, not reincarnated. Jesus’ Resurrection is recorded in all four Gospels (Matt. 28:6–7; Mark 16:6, 14; Luke 24:5, 34; John 21:14), and it sets the pat- tern for ours (1 Cor. 6:14). Thus he is referred to as “the firstborn of the dead” (Col. 1:18; Rev. 1:5). The New Testament is emphatic about our resurrection (1 Cor. 15), stating that “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27).
In Matthew, when the disciples ask their question about Elijah, they have just seen Jesus transfigured along with Moses and Elijah (Matt. 17:1–9). Elijah—not John the Baptist—had just appeared to them, and they were wondering if this was the fulfillment of the prophecy that Elijah would return before the Messiah (Mal. 4:5–6).
John the Baptist could not be the reincarnation of Elijah because Elijah never died. Instead, he was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:1–15). At that time, Elijah’s servant, Elisha, asked that he be allowed to inherit a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, which he did (2 Kings 2:10–11, 15). Elisha could not have been the reincarnation of Elijah because they lived at the same time. For Elisha to inherit a double portion of Elijah’s spirit meant that he was able to inherit Eli- jah’s role as a prophet; he had the same prophetic spirit, not the same individual soul.
When Luke’s Gospel says John the Baptist “will go before [Jesus] in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17), it is saying that John the Baptist will inherit Elijah’s function and strength as prophet the way Elisha did.
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John the Baptist and Reincarnation

My Thoughts on Jordan Peterson’s Jubilee Appearance

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

Imagine you are a judge on a high court, hearing a case debating the meaning of a law. One plaintiff presents his case, citing the language of that law, as well as the language of various other laws. He reads the laws reverently, periodically inflecting his voice to emphasize certain passages, or pausing to note that the passage clearly proves that he is right. Then he sits down.
The other plaintiff rises and proceeds also to cite the law. Some of the passages he reads are the exact same ones read by the first party, and sometimes they are other passages from other laws. He also reads reverently, and sometimes with inflection. Like the first lawyer, he periodically pauses to note that the passages clearly prove he is right. Then he also sits down.
You sit there scratching your head, then take a deep breath. You address both lawyers, noting that neither side actually offered an argument. They both simply quoted from the law and asserted that it clearly proves that his side is the right one. But of course, they can’t both be right. After all, they hold different interpretations of the law. Both agree that the law is legitimate, but they disagree over its meaning. But how are you, the judge, supposed to go about determining which side has the stronger position if they don’t present an argument?
Although I’ve never actually heard of such a mind-numbingly asinine thing happening in a courtroom, it happens quite regularly in Protestant apologetics. Methodist apologist Joshua Pearsall in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkz-xaWAdGQ">recent YouTube critique</a> of my book <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-obscurity-in-scripture-disputing-sola-scriptura-and-the-protestant-notion-of-biblical-perspicuity/?srsltid=AfmBOoqhkyIo-wqV3C3OL_9yY7Y8YMNQnF-2Flle3xqHtaxiemjcc-DE">The Obscurity of Scripture</a> spends most of the video quoting Scripture, at one point adding, “It is through the Scriptures; it is not through the Magisterium that we ‘need’ to interpret history and interpret the Scriptures.” Later, after more reading from the Bible, he asserts, “We only know the Lord through his divine revelation, which is only the Scriptures. It is not a supposedly infallible magisterium.” (For the record, pace Pearsall, the Catholic Church does not teach that the Magisterium is divine revelation—only Scripture and Tradition have that title. The magisterium is an infallible interpreter of divine revelation.)
Pearsall is not alone in this manner of rhetorical presentation. Presbyterian pastor Anthony Rogers in his own <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_9xVFS5g_HU">YouTube rebuke of my book</a> accuses me of “attacking the Word of God” and “engaging in colossal criminality” for my critique of the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity, which, generally speaking, holds that Scripture is clear with regard to what is necessary for salvation. In support of his charges against me, Rogers cites Genesis 1 and notes: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and no voice came back out of the void or out of the darkness saying, ‘Could you speak more clearly?’” (Again, pace Rogers, my argument is not that God is incapable of creating via his Word as he does in Genesis 1, but that his Word as manifested in Holy Scripture is not so clear that the self-identifying Christian is capable of certitude regarding what is necessary for salvation or the essentials of the Faith without recourse to an interpretive authority.)
Lest you think this is only the province of YouTube apologists, The Gospel Coalition’s website <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/the-clarity-of-scripture/">defends the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity</a> by asserting that “the double grounding of the doctrine of the clarity of Scripture [is] in what the Bible says about God and what the Bible says about itself.” The article then cites a host of biblical verses in support of that thesis. The Westminster Confession of Faith, one of the most influential confessional documents in the Reformed tradition, also bases its defense of perspicuity exclusively on Bible verses: Psalms 129:105 and 130.
In a sense, this thinking is not so surprising. Many Protestants describe the Bible as “self-authenticating,” an idea traceable to the early Reformers. John Calvin argues in his Institutes of the Christian Religion that the ground for Scripture’s authenticity is not outside Scripture, but in Scripture itself (1.7.4-5). It is the Holy Spirit, Calvin believed, that would inwardly teach the Christian the authority and meaning of the Bible. This thinking is also a function of the doctrine of perspicuity: If Scripture is clear, what is interpretation but simply acknowledging what is obvious on the page? Do you “interpret” two plus two?
Yet, as I hope I have demonstrated via my courtroom analogy, interpretation is necessary. Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and all manner of other people who describe themselves as Christian believe in the authority of Scripture, even if they may disagree as to what exactly constitutes Scripture, what translation to use, and what exactly is meant by its “authority” (i.e., if the Bible is inspired, infallible, inerrant, none of the above, or all three).
But what happens when individuals or theological traditions disagree about the meaning of Bible passages? One could presume that every other interpretation but yours is de facto wrong, though there is then the question of what evidence, besides the sheer force of your will, supports this presumption. There would also be the nagging problem of other people deciding that your position is de facto wrong! (Amazingly, many never get beyond this. They simply presume they have the Holy Spirit and others don’t.)
This is one of the inherent problems with the perspicuity thesis: when it relies on Bible passages as its evidence, it necessarily presumes the very thing it is seeking to prove—namely, Scripture’s clarity (i.e., “Scripture clearly proves it’s clear”). That is the logical fallacy of begging the question. This is because Christian traditions (such as Catholicism) interpret those alleged perspicuity-supporting proof-texts differently (see my book if you want some examples). Pearsall can quote Psalm 19 or Psalm 119 in defense of perspicuity, but Catholics also believe those psalms to be divine revelation. If he wants to make an argument against the Catholic side, rather than just an assertion, he needs to address how Catholics interpret those verses. Rogers can say Genesis 1:3 proves perspicuity, but if he wants to convince anyone besides those already inclined to agree with him, he has to address the Catholic view of Genesis.
Once we start doing the more laborious work of evaluating competing interpretations of Scripture, we encounter a new dilemma: What criteria do we use to weigh various pieces of evidence, such as vernacular language, textual analysis, historical and archaeological data, Patristic sources, regarding which biblical interpretation is the stronger one? And in trying to answer that, we are effectively admitting that extra-biblical means are required to determine what Scripture says . . . which, unfortunately for Protestants, undermines the doctrine of perspicuity. And if they do try to use extra-biblical sources, such as the Church Fathers, they then have to make some account of what authority Patristic sources possess in their own Protestant paradigm, and why they accept some Patristic teachings (say, on the Trinity) and not others (say, on praying for the dead). Hence why many Protestants are hesitant to defend perspicuity by means other than simply citing Scripture.
There are differences between assertions and arguments, as debates over Scripture’s clarity demonstrate. Knowing the difference, and being able to identify it, is incredibly helpful in studying interreligious debates and in being able to contribute charitably to that conversation. And if we can do nothing more than assert our position, we’re not really having a debate at all. We’re just grandstanding.

Quoting Scripture Is Not an Argument

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Episode 26: Year A &#8211; The Ascension of the Lord
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on five details that come each of the readings for the Ascension of the Lord, Year A, which for most dioceses in the United States was transferred from May 18th to this Sunday, May 21st. The topics that these details highlight are as follows: Jesus’ resurrection, the baptism of the Holy Spirit and its relation to the Sacrament of Confirmation, Jesus’s Messiahship, Jesus’ Divinity, and the trinitarian formula for the Sacrament of Baptism.
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Episode 55: Year B &#8211; 2nd Sunday of Advent
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on two details that pertain to apologetics. The first comes from the first reading, taken from Isa. 40:1-5, 9-11. Its apologetical significance comes to light when read in tandem with the Gospel reading, which is taken Mark 1:1-8. The apologetical topic that relates is Jesus’ divinity. The second detail comes from the second reading, taken from 2 Peter 3:8-14. The related topics there are predestination and Christian universalism.
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/121023.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Hey everyone,
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Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
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I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
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In this episode, we’re going to focus on two details that pertain to apologetics. The first comes from the first reading, taken from Isa. 40:1-5, 9-11. Its apologetical significance comes to light when read in tandem with the Gospel reading, which is taken Mark 1:1-8. The apologetical topic that relates is Jesus’ divinity. The second detail comes from the second reading, taken from 2 Peter 3:8-14. The related topics there are predestination and Christian universalism.
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Let’s get started with the detail from the first reading. The verses that I want to highlight are verses 3 and 9:
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3 A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God …. 9 lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!
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The thing to note here is that it speaks of “God”: a highway is made straight “for God,” and the voice says, “behold your God.”
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Now, given that we’ve already talked about this prophecy in relation to Matthew’s appeal to it in Matthew 3:3, which was the episode 2, the episode for the second Sunday of Advent for Year A, I’m not going to dwell on it here. You can relisten to that episode to get the details.
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But suffice to say that these details, when read in tandem with Mark’s quotation of Isaiah 3:3 found in the Gospel reading for this upcoming Sunday, reveal Mark’s belief in Jesus’ Divinity. Here’s the reasoning: If the voice prepares a way for God, and Mark identifies John the Baptist, who is preparing a way for Jesus, to be that voice, then it follows that Mark believes Jesus to be divine, just like Matthew. So, the first reading and the Gospel reading for this upcoming Second Sunday of Advent, Year B, give us an opportunity to reflect on Mark’s belief in the divinity of Jesus.
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The next detail from this upcoming Sunday’s readings that has apologetical significance comes from the second reading, which is taken from 2 Peter 3:8-14. The key verse is verse 9: “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard ‘delay,’ but he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”
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There are a few apologetical topics that this detail relates to.
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First, it relates to the topic of predestination. Predestination is the theological doctrine that God elects/chooses to bestow upon some the grace of final perseverance in virtue of which those upon whom such a grace is bestowed go to heaven.
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But the question arises, “What about those who end up in hell? Are they ‘predestined’ in the same manner as those predestined to heaven—that’s to say, positively willed/moved to reject God and thereby merit damnation?”
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Here is where 2 Peter 3:9 comes into play. Given 2 Peter 3:9, we must say no. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches as much, quoting 2 Peter 3:9 for support:
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God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of her faithful, the Church implores the mercy of God, who does not want “any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (1037).
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Note the verb “predestines.” This refers to God’s positive election of some within this order of providence to receive a grace that moves the will to remain faithful to God until death and thereby attain final salvation. This is a positive willing on God’s part.
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According to the Catechism, God doesn’t will damnation along these same lines. In other words, God doesn’t positively will that some within this order of providence choose against God until death and thereby attain eternal damnation. He’s not moving these people to damnation by causing them to sin. God can’t do this, metaphysically speaking, lest he fail to love himself, which is absurd. Rather, God permits some to fall into sin and remain in such sin until death.
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Of course, such permission of damnation raises the question, “How does this jibe with God’s ‘desire that no man perish’?” There seems to be an incompatibility between the revelation that God desires none to be lost and the revelation that some are in fact lost.
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If God desires all to be saved, and his will can’t be frustrated, then it would seem all must be saved, in which case no one would go to hell and the belief of Christian universalism would be true (the belief that all will be saved in the end). But most Christians reject such universalism.
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So, do we have to give up on the doctrine of hell to affirm Peter’s statement in 2 Peter 3:9?
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Perhaps we can begin to resolve this tension by drawing a parallel with sin. Take the statement, “God desires/wills that no one sin,” a statement that’s consistent not only with philosophical reasoning but also with divine revelation.
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One way to interpret this would be to say that God “wills”—that’s to say, positively causes everyone to in fact (actually) persevere in the good and never turn away from it. Obviously, this is not what we mean, since not everyone is like the Blessed Virgin.
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Another interpretation would be that God “wills”—that’s to say, creates or determines a certain order for human behavior insofar as we’re rational animals that sin would contravene or conflict with.
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God has created us with a nature that serves as the measure for what’s good for us insofar as we’re human beings. Given that this order of good inscribed within our natures is constitutive of the nature that God has created us with, we can say that God “wills” what’s good for us insofar as we’re human beings.
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Now, God has also created us with powers for sake of knowing this order of good and behaving in a way that’s consistent with it. We call these powers intellect and free will.
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So, for any voluntary behavior that’s not consistent with, or conflicts with, this order of good, i.e., sin, we can say, “That’s contrary to God’s will.” Why? Because someone engaged in a human act that contradicts, or violates, God’s established design or order for a human act—namely, consistency with/conformity to what’s good for us as human beings.
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On this interpretation, the statement “God desires/wills that no one sin” is in no tension with the fact that some people sin. The metaphysical reality is simply that some people use free will to contravene God’s established order or design for how humans ought to behave.
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With this in mind, let’s come back to Peter’s statement in 2 Peter 3:9: “God desires no one to perish but that all should come to repentance.”
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We can read Peter’s statement like that of our interpretation of the statement, “God desires no one to sin”—namely, God has “willed,” or ordained, that within this scheme of providence we have a certain order to the supernatural end of heaven (a condition of which is repentance), which the damned contravene when they end their lives in final impenitence. In this sense, we can accurately say “God wills no one to perish” and those who do perish constitute a state of affair “that’s contrary to God’s will.”
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In other words, everyone is created by God with a supernatural (over and above nature) ordination to heaven and someone who dies in final impenitence would contravene such an order. That’s the metaphysical reality. Consequently, on this interpretation, the statement, “God desires no one to perish and come to repentance,” is not in tension with the revealed fact that some end up not repenting and perishing.
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Given the above line of reasoning, we can conclude that Christians don’t have to give up on the doctrine of hell and embrace Christian universalism to affirm 2 Peter 3:9. There is a plausible explanation as to what Peter means without having to affirm that God ensures that all will be saved in fact.
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Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming Second Sunday of Advent, Year B, provide us with ample opportunity to prepare ourselves for apologetical discussions, especially when it comes to
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<ul>
<li>The early Christian belief in Jesus’ divinity,</li>
<li>The belief that God doesn’t “predestine” any to hell, and</li>
<li>How to meet a challenge of Christian universalism</li>
</ul>
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As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.
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One last thing: if you’re interested in getting some cool mugs and stickers with my logo, “Mr. Sunday podcast,” go to shop.catholic.com.
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I hope you have a blessed Second Sunday of Advent. Until next time, God Bless!
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Are We Predestined to Go to Heaven?

How can the Catholic Church teach that we need to worry about losing our salvation through mortal sin when the Bible teaches that we have been sanctified once and for all? Karlo Broussard tackles another Protestant challenge.

Are Your Future Sins Forgiven?

Discover when Luke and Acts were REALLY written! Jimmy Akin dives into the shocking abrupt ending of Acts—why does it stop right in the middle of Paul’s dramatic Roman trial with no verdict? Using rock-solid evidence (even quoting a famous liberal scholar!), Jimmy argues both books were finished during Paul’s house arrest in Rome: Luke in A.D. 59, Acts in A.D. 60. Mind-blowing early dates that crush late-date myths and supercharge the Gospels’ credibility! Must-listen!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
When were the four Gospels written?
Ultimately, from a faith perspective, the precise dates don’t matter.
What matters is that they are divinely inspired and thus authoritative for faith.
However, by showing that the Gospels were written in the first century, within a few decades of Jesus’ life, their credibility is strengthened even from a secular perspective.
Today virtually all scholars—whether skeptical or believing—acknowledge that the Gospels are first century documents.
The real question is how early in the first century they were written.
That’s what we’ll examine in this series of occasional episodes on the podcast.
And today we’re going to be looking at when the Gospel of Luke was written—as well as its companion, the book of Acts
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get yourself early access to new episodes—by going to <a href="https://patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast">Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast</a>
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The Importance of Acts
More than a century ago, the liberal German scholar Adolf von Harnack published a work titled The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels in which he considered this question.
In Episode 50 of the podcast, I talked about the conclusions von Harnack came to in his book and how they’re quite similar to mine—even though von Harnack was a theological liberal and I’m not.
I promised that I’d tell you the reasons for the dates that I assign to the Gospels in future episodes, so that’s what we’re going to be doing today—beginning with Luke and Acts.
As you might guess from the title of von Harnack’s book—The Date of Acts and the Synoptic Gospel—he considered the date of Acts first.
The reason is that it’s easier to establish this date and then use it to determine the dates of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) with respect to it.
Acts is important because it’s the sequel to the Gospel of Luke. At the beginning of Acts, Luke writes:
Acts 1:1-2
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up.
That’s a description of the Gospel of Luke, which covers the ministry of Jesus and ends with his ascension into heaven.
So Luke was the “the first book” and Acts is now the second book or the sequel to Luke.
Since Luke was written before Acts, the date of Acts determines the latest possible date for Luke.
So . . . when was Acts written?
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Acts’ Sudden Ending
The first twelve chapters of Acts are concerned principally with St. Peter, and from chapter 13 onward, St. Paul becomes the focus of the narrative.
Beginning in chapter 21, Paul makes a fateful trip to Jerusalem, being prophetically warned along the way that if he goes there, he will be arrested.
This indeed happens, and the rest of the book is taken up with the consequences of this event.
Paul spends years in custody, and in chapter 25 a turning point occurs when the new Roman governor, Porcius Festus, arrives.
To avoid having the outcome of his trial affected by the hostile Jewish authorities, Paul invokes his Roman citizenship and the right to have his case tried before Caesar (the Caesar in question being Nero at the time). Festus then replies:
Acts 25:12
You have appealed to Caesar; to Caesar you shall go.
The rest of the book is taken up with the events leading up to Paul’s voyage to Rome and what happened on that trip.
Acts ends in chapter 28 with Paul under house arrest in Rome, awaiting his trial. Luke simply says:
Acts 28:30-31
And he lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered.
The end. That’s it! We get no resolution on what happened when Paul appeared before Nero.
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The Significance of the Ending
Many scholars have argued that the book’s abrupt ending reveals when it was written.
It makes no sense, if Luke knew the outcome of the trial, for him to cut off the narrative at this point.
He has been building toward this climactic event for eight chapters—a quarter of the entire book—and yet he doesn’t tell us what happened!
This is all the more striking, because whatever happened to Paul would have suited Luke’s purposes.
If Paul was acquitted at this trial then Luke could portray Paul and the gospel as gloriously vindicated.
If Paul was imprisoned or martyred then Luke could portray Paul as gloriously and heroically suffering for the gospel, as he has done so often in the book, or even Paul being gloriously martyred for the gospel.
Either an innocent or a guilty verdict would make a very compelling ending.
We learn from later sources that Paul was actually released, and he conducted a further period of ministry, only to be re-arrested and then martyred after Nero found it convenient to blame Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64.
With Paul’s death by beheading likely taking place in A.D. 67.
Yet Luke gives us neither of these endings—either with Paul being declared innocent of the charges against him (which he was), thus vindicating the gospel and the Christian faith . . . or with Paul suffering and possibly dying for the sake of the gospel.
The only reasonable conclusion is that he didn’t do this because he couldn’t: The trial had not yet happened.
Von Harnack comments:
The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels, pp. 95, 97
Throughout eight whole chapters St. Luke keeps his readers intensely interested in the progress of the trial of St. Paul, simply that he may in the end completely disappoint them—they learn nothing of the final result of the trial! . . .
The more clearly we see that the trial of St. Paul, and above all his appeal to Caesar, is the chief subject of the last quarter of the Acts, the more hopeless does it appear that we can explain why the narrative breaks off as it does, otherwise than by assuming that the trial had actually not yet reached its close. It is no use to struggle against this conclusion. If St. Luke, in the year 80, 90, or 100, wrote thus he was not simply a blundering but an absolutely incomprehensible historian!
Von Harnack also points out that Luke repeatedly records prophecies of future events in Acts, yet he makes no mention of Paul’s ultimate fate, which is something he could have related as a prophecy if he was writing after the fact:
The Date of the Acts and the Synoptic Gospels, pp. 97-98
St. Luke allows Agabus to foretell a famine, to foretell St. Paul’s imprisonment in Jerusalem; he suffers St. Paul himself (on the voyage) to foretell, like a fortune-teller, the fate of the ship and all its passengers; he in many chapters of the book deals in all kinds of “spiritual” utterances and prophecies—but not one word is said concerning the final destiny of St. Paul (and of St. Peter)! Is this natural? There are prophecies concerning events of minor importance [in the book], while there is nothing about the greatest event of all!
This further reinforces the conclusion that Acts was written before the trial to which it has been building had finished.
And on this I absolutely agree with von Harnack.
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The Date of Acts
So in what year was Acts written?
Well, when does its narrative break off?
The specific year is disputed by scholars.
The two years Paul spent under house arrest in Rome begin shortly after the arrival of the governor Porcius Festus, who ships Paul off to Rome.
The problem is that we do not know precisely when Festus arrived in Judaea.
This is the key event for determining when Paul’s voyage to Rome began and thus when his two-year period of house arrest began.
Many estimate that Festus arrived in A.D. 59, and so Paul arrived in Rome early in 60, and his house arrest lasted from A.D. 60-62.
However, I have done a (currently unpublished) study of the issue, and I agree with scholars such as Jack Finegan and Andrew Steinmann that Festus arrived in A.D. 57.
That would mean that Paul arrived in Rome in early 58, and his house arrest lasted from A.D. 58-60.
Since Acts ends with the house arrest having lasted “two whole years,” that means Acts was written at the end of those two years.
I thus conclude that Acts was written in A.D. 60.
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The Date of Luke
Since Luke refers to his Gospel as “the first book,” we know that the Gospel of Luke was written before Acts, but how much before?
A careful study of the end of the Gospel suggests it was not long.
This can be seen by comparing its end with the end of one of Luke’s sources—the Gospel of Mark.
The original ending of Mark may or may not have been lost, but it concludes in a way that indicates what would have happened next.
An angel tells the women who have come to Jesus’ tomb:
Mark 16:7 (cf. Mark 14:28)
But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.
Mark thus envisions a post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus to the disciples in Galilee. This is also what happens in Matthew (See Matt. 28:7, 10, 16-20).
However, Luke omits Mark’s reference to the disciples going to Galilee and focuses instead on post-Resurrection appearances that occurred in Jerusalem and its vicinity (See Luke 24:13-53).
He makes no mention of the disciples going to Galilee. Instead, Luke records Jesus telling the disciples:
Luke 24:46-49
Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.
Notice: Repentance is to be preached to all nations “beginning from Jerusalem” and the disciples are to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”
This difference has led some to accuse Luke of contradicting Mark and Matthew, but that’s not true. In reality there is no conflict.
The truth is that Jesus appeared to the disciples both in the vicinity of Jerusalem and in Galilee.
This is something the Gospel of John makes clear, as John reports resurrection appearances both in Jerusalem (See John 20:19-31) and in Galilee (See John 21:1-23).
Luke simply focuses on the first location, while Mark and Matthew focus on the second.
For our purposes, the question is: Why did Luke choose to end his Gospel as he did?
The obvious answer is that he was already planning what he was going to write in Acts.
Thus at the beginning of the Acts, he records Jesus telling the disciples:
Acts 1:8
But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.
This directly echoes the end of Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus says.
Luke 24:49
“And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”
The statement in Acts that “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” refers to the events of Pentecost, and it corresponds to the statement in Luke that the disciples are to “stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”
Luke 24:46-48
Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.
Similarly, the statement in Acts that “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” is the outline of the book of Acts, and it corresponds to the statement in Luke that “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in [Christ’s] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
Other elements of the end of the Gospel are also recapitulated in Acts, including the Ascension (Luke 24:51// Acts 1:9-11), the disciples returning to Jerusalem (Luke 24:52//Acts 1:12), and their regular worship in the temple (Luke 24:53//Acts 2:46, etc.).
The presence of these elements at the end of Luke, and particularly the way Luke diverges from Mark, indicates that he was already planning what he would write in Acts.
That means that it can’t have been long between when Luke composed his Gospel and when he composed Acts.
If there had been a gap of years between the two, Luke’s ending would not dovetail with the beginning of Acts the way it does.
I therefore estimate that Luke was finished immediately before Acts, likely in A.D. 59, and that Luke used the two-year period of Paul’s house arrest in Rome to finish gathering material for and to compose his two works.
In fact, much of the material found in the first twelve chapters of Acts—which focus on Peter—as well as some of the material unique to Luke’s Gospel, likely came from interviews that Luke conducted with Peter in Rome during this period.
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Conclusion
We thus find there are good reasons for thinking that Luke and Acts were both composed during Paul’s two-year house arrest in Rome, likely with Luke being written in A.D. 59 and Acts being written in A.D. 60.
But what can we say about when the other Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and John—were written?
Stay tuned, and we’ll look at them in future episodes.
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When Were Luke and Acts Written?

Does Jesus’ Childhood Make Sense?

Do We Leave Time When We Die?

5 Books that Almost Made It into the Bible

How I Would Share Christianity With a Trans Person

Episode 143: 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
In today’s episode, we focus four details in the second reading and Gospel reading for this upcoming 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C that relate to apologetics. Three of the four come from the second reading, which is taken from Hebrews 12:1-4, and the related apologetical topics are: the Communion of Saints, the doctrine of eternal security, and the divinity of Jesus. The detail in the Gospel reading, which is taken from Luke 12:49-53, has to do once again with the divinity of Jesus and the importance of truth.
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081725.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Once Saved Always Saved? What Hebrews 12 Really Says

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DAY 169
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CHALLENGE
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“The argument from contingency is flawed: (1) Everything could be fated, so nothing would be contingent; (2) we can explain how things are by their history, which could be infinite; (3) there could be multiple ultimate causes; (4) you could call the first, necessary cause something other than God; and (5) if everything needs a cause, then God also must have a cause.”
DEFENSE
None of these objections overturn the contingency argument.
First, the argument from fate simply proposes a single, ultimate cause—fate itself—for contingent things. It doesn’t show they aren’t contingent. It is not necessary for a person to be standing the way it is necessary for a square to have four sides. People can stand or sit, but squares must have four sides. If a person is fated to stand, he could also be fated to sit, and his posture is contingent.
Second, history (and whether history might be infinite) is not part of this argument. We are asking why things are the way they are now, not what history preceded this.
Third, one could trace the chain of causes for each of the many contingent things up to higher causes, but these would not end in a multiplicity of ultimate explanations, for explanations converge as we go higher. An example is the four fundamental forces of physics (electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity), which explain the state of innumerable contingent physical things. An important goal of science is to find ways to unify these forces and any others that exist.
There cannot be a multiplicity of ultimate explanations. If one pro- posed a certain set of explanations as ultimate, then they would have to exist within some kind of framework that would allow them to relate to one another. Otherwise, they would not be able to interact to pro- duce the contingent states of affairs we see. However, the framework would then be more fundamental than the proposed explanations, so they would not be ultimate.
Fourth, one can always reject the term “God,” but this argument shows that there is a First Cause that is a necessary Being. This does not prove the full Christian understanding of God, but it can be supplemented by other arguments.
Fifth, God would not need a cause because, per the argument, God is necessary rather than contingent.
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Objections to the Contingency Argument

My Take on Bible Scholar Dan McClellan

As an infant, I had a rare disease, which (left untreated) has a mortality rate of upwards of 80 percent. Thanks be to God, my mother’s persistence meant that doctors realized what was going on just in time, and my life was spared. It was on St. Joseph’s day, 1985, that I was released from the hospital.
Since then, Joseph has been in my life in a variety of ways. When I was a lawyer, I could turn to St. Joseph the Worker. When I was in seminary, I was inspired by the way he modeled chaste, celibate love for the sake of Jesus and Mary. And now, as a husband and father, I’m inspired by the way he shows what married love and fatherhood ought to look like.
I can envision a possible objection here: how can St. Joseph be a model for fathers when he’s not even Jesus’ real father? Perhaps you’re remembering when Mary and Joseph find Jesus in the Temple, and Mary says to him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” If so, you surely remember Jesus’ reply: “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:48-49). Some <a href="https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/stewart_don/faq/what-everyone-needs-to-know-about-jesus/29-is-the-virgin-birth-to-be-understood-literally.cfm">Protestant commentaries</a> see in Jesus’ response here a total denial of Joseph’s fatherhood, arguing that this passage shows that “his Father was God, not Joseph,” and that “while people may have assumed Jesus was Joseph’s son, in reality, he had no human father.”
That’s a serious misreading of the passage. One clue is that St. Luke, who has just told us about the Virgin Birth in the prior chapter, nevertheless refers to Joseph and Mary as Jesus’ “parents” three times (Luke 2:27,41,43) in this chapter. But the error is deeper than just a misunderstanding of the Holy Family. If adopted fathers aren’t true fathers, and adopted sons aren’t true sons, then we’re all in trouble. After all, we’ve been adopted as sons and daughters of God, and are destined to receive heaven and earth as our inheritance. As. St. Paul says (Gal. 4:4-7),
<blockquote>but when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.</blockquote>
So, in a very important sense, we need to start by saying that yes, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Man-Named-Joseph-Guardian-Times/dp/168192952X/">Joseph is Jesus’ father</a>. It’s through Joseph’s lineage (see Luke 1:27) that the Evangelists show us that Jesus fulfills the prophecies about the Messiah being a son of David. And it’s important that the finding in the Temple episode ends with Luke telling us that Jesus “went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them” (2:51). Jesus perfectly observed the Fourth Commandment—“honor your father and your mother” (Exod. 20:12)—toward Joseph and Mary.
Nevertheless, it’s true that St. Joseph isn’t Jesus’ father in every sense. Most strikingly, he’s not Jesus’ biological father. But more significantly, Jesus’ obedience to his heavenly Father is superior to any earthly obedience, a fact he highlights in his response to his mother. So Joseph is a father, but he is also a sort of “stand-in” for Jesus’ truest father, God the Father. Pope Francis captures this dynamic well in his apostolic letter <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20201208_patris-corde.html">Patris Corde</a>. Drawing upon the Polish writer Jan Dobraczyński, he describes Joseph as “the earthly shadow of the heavenly Father.”
Is that really unlike the rest of us fathers? St. Paul tells the Ephesians that “I bow my knees before the Father (Patēr), from whom every family (patria) in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14-15). The Catechism points to this passage in reminding us that God the Father “transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father” (239). Later, we’ll be reminded that “parents must regard their children as children of God and respect them as human persons” (2222).
That is, it’s not just Jesus who owed a higher authority to God than to his earthly father. That’s true for my children (and all children) as well. Given the unique circumstances of who his son was and how he came into this world, Joseph was keenly aware of this fact. But it’s worth remembering for the rest of us as well. In the secular world, children are sometimes treated as mere consumer goods to be acquired . . . or <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-hardest-teaching-of-them-all">manufactured</a> in a lab, if need be. It’s easy for kids to be treated as little more than extensions of their parents’ personalities, or as letterboards upon which mom and dad can make personal statements to the world.
In the Christian world, we sometimes deny the full humanity of our children by an exaggerated vision of “male headship.” The Evangelical pastor <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/february/5.50.html">Steven Tracy tells</a> the horrifying story of a man caught physically and sexually abusing his own children. The man explained, “I guess I did it because I was the head of the family, and it was my right to do whatever I wanted to my wife and kids.”
But the truth is, our kids aren’t simply automatons created to do our bidding or to complete us in any sense. Instead, they are first and foremost God’s children, and we’re just taking care of them. Like it or not, they have a calling in this life that we didn’t choose for them: their true Father did. And that means we need to know when to back off and let them be about their Father’s business.

Joseph Really Is Jesus’ Father

Death Dynasty! Who Were the Herods?

Signs of the Demonic

Who are Seventh-day Adventists, and what do they believe? For starters, they&#8217;re Adventists, meaning that they believe that Christ is about to return. The &#8220;Seventh-day&#8221; part of their name refers to their believe that Christians should make holy Saturday, not Sunday (which they view as a compromise with paganism and with Catholicism). And behind a lot of this is the theology and alleged revelations of a woman named Ellen Gould White, who accused Constantine and the pope of changing the Christian holy day from Saturday to Sunday. So how might a non-Adventist respond?

Are Seventh-Day Adventists Right about Sunday Worship?

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DAY 312
CHALLENGE
“Catholic teaching on merit is unbiblical. We can’t merit anything before God.”
DEFENSE
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The term “merit” (Latin, meritum) refers to a reward. By extension, it has also come to refer to actions that God chooses to reward. The doctrine of merit is thus the biblical doctrine of rewards under another name.
The Bible is clear that our actions in this life can affect the degree of reward we receive in heaven. Jesus told us: “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:20–21).
Sometimes people imagine there will be no degrees of reward in heaven—that going to heaven is the only reward God gives. However, Jesus indicates that individual actions we perform are the subject of rewards.
He warns that certain actions will not receive rewards, such as doing good deeds to receive praise from men (Matt. 6:1–2, 5, 16), while other actions will receive rewards, such as doing good deeds to please God (Matt. 6:4, 6, 18, 10:41–42).
Similarly, Paul indicates that some people will enter heaven with greater rewards than others. He speaks of how individuals build on the foundation of Jesus Christ by doing various things, and he says that one day these works will be tested by fire. He then says, “If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor. 3:14–15). Some individuals, therefore, will both enter heaven and receive rewards in addition to that, but others will simply enter heaven.
Paul also discusses the nature of the rewards that we will receive, writing: “For he [God] will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Rom. 2:6–7).
Here he indicates that those who display “patience in well-doing” (literally, “in good work”) seek the rewards of “glory and honor and immortality” from God, and this hope does not disappoint, for God gives them “eternal life.”
TIP
See also Day 354.
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Merit and Reward

In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent explores the now defunct anti-drug program D.A.R.E. and why it failed to keep kids off drugs.
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Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
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Do you know how to say no? Are you able to say no? Not to The Counsel of Trent podcast, of course. Our podcast is awesome. Always say yes to new episodes. But saying no to drugs. I dare you to say no to drugs. Because it turns out if I do that, you actually are more likely to say yes to drugs because the whole thing was a giant failure.
Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast. I&#8217;m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Monday and Wednesday we talk apologetics and theology, how to explain and defend the Catholic faith. But on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. Whatever springs into my mind that I feel like talking about, I think you might enjoy me talking about it as well. I think for those of you especially who are around my age bracket, you have very similar nostalgic memories and things that are coming back to you as you start reaching your 30&#8217;s, 40&#8217;s, and it&#8217;s time to look back as you look ahead to the future.
For example, how do I talk to my kids about difficult issues like drugs? You got a lot of people that say drugs should be legal, and you drive by marijuana dispensaries, and it&#8217;s a lot different than I was a kid. And I remember back when the federal government was really invested in trying to get me to not do drugs. So if you&#8217;re in my age bracket, did you graduate high school the late &#8217;90s, early 2000s? If you did, you probably remember then going to elementary school in the late &#8217;80s and the early &#8217;90s. And you remember D.A.R.E., Drug Abuse Resistance Education. It had the cool red font D.A.R.E., and you could get your own D.A.R.E. T-shirt. And people would come. The guy&#8230; People were giving the talks. You could&#8230; Black T-shirt with the red D.A.R.E. letters on it. Just say no to drugs.
And I remember D.A.R.E. It was intense, actually. Because the people who came to teach it, they were cops. They were police officers. These weren&#8217;t people who were really trained to actually educate children and give them successful strategies and decision-making strategies. I think they were there really to scare us straight. That reminds me of that episode of The Office with Michael Scott. &#8220;I&#8217;m here to scare you straight.&#8221; Either to really scare us or, I&#8217;m going to be honest with you, I think a lot of them went there to tell kids, &#8220;You can say no to drugs. And by the way, if you know anyone who&#8217;s doing drugs, you can tell me. Because I&#8217;m a police officer, and that makes my caseload way easier if you rat out your parents or rat out other people who are doing drugs. So why don&#8217;t we all sit down in a circle? And the first question is, &#8216;Do you know anyone doing drugs, and where do they live?'&#8221;
But the program, what&#8217;s hilarious&#8230; Obviously drugs are bad, okay? Drugs are bad. Obviously drugs&#8230; It depends, of course, what you mean by drugs. But illegal drugs are often abused. They&#8217;re illicit. Legal drugs can be abused, right? The biggest crisis we have in our country now is people abusing legal opioids and the opioid addiction. Whereas back when I was a kid in the &#8217;90s, I think they were telling us the biggest thing is don&#8217;t do crack. Me, some suburban kid in the white part of town. &#8220;Don&#8217;t do crack, kids.&#8221; I don&#8217;t think in suburbia there&#8217;s that much of a crack epidemic going on, but it was all a thing back in the &#8217;80s. So I think that&#8217;s what everybody wanted to&#8230; You probably should have told us just not to smoke or drink, but I remember it was always about methamphetamines, speed, crack, crack cocaine. I&#8217;m thinking, &#8220;Wow, I don&#8217;t think anybody in this class has come anywhere close to these sorts of hard drugs.&#8221; Marijuana, maybe. I&#8217;m sure that happened, but not this other stuff.
So I have an article here I want to read to you and just talk about the D.A.R.E. program. &#8220;D.A.R.E. began in 1983. The federal government introduced this program. It was developed by Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and started in the LA Unified School District. And so D.A.R.E. workshops were delivered by policemen who would go into classrooms, kindergarten through grade 12, aimed at teaching kids to reject drug use and violent gang culture.&#8221;
I remember also being told to not wear gang colors. That was the other one. I remember one day they said, &#8220;Gangs are bad, okay? You don&#8217;t want to join a gang. You got your family. That&#8217;s the gang you need to have.&#8221; And being told&#8230; I remember being told in class, &#8220;Don&#8217;t wear gang colors.&#8221; But then none of the lecturers ever told us what gang colors there were. What am I actually not allowed to wear? And so you&#8217;re living in a state of fright. Or you&#8217;re told something generic like, &#8220;Don&#8217;t wear red because the Bloods wear red.&#8221; What is it? Bloods wear red. Crips wear blue. Or Latin Kings, they wear yellow. I don&#8217;t know. But it&#8217;s don&#8217;t wear red because gangs wear red. So if you wear your red Mario Brothers T-shirt, you&#8217;re going to get shot outside this&#8230;
I don&#8217;t mean to make fun of this. Obviously gangs and drugs are bad, and they&#8217;re still bad in really bad school districts around. But D.A.R.E. was not a really good&#8230; It was not a good program to try to combat gang violence or drug use. What it was trying to do.
So read the article here. It says, &#8220;After 10 years of the D.A.R.E. program, the American Psychological Association ran a study of over 1000 people who received D.A.R.E. education in the sixth grade. The study assessed the efficacy of the program by tracking the subsequent drug use of the subjects when they hit their 20s. The results of the study found that the program had no meaningful impact on rates of drug use, attitudes toward drugs, or self-esteem. The National Institute of Justice research found the program has some effect, but on a modest scale. And another study carried out by the University of Illinois concluded that the D.A.R.E. program was counterproductive. Students who participated in D.A.R.E. were more likely to use drugs.&#8221;
And that kind of makes sense to where I was at. A bunch of suburban kids, and this cop comes in and tells us, &#8220;Don&#8217;t do crack cocaine. Don&#8217;t do methamphetamines. Don&#8217;t smoke marijuana.&#8221; Why? You seem really uptight and bent out of shape. You don&#8217;t want us to do something? Maybe I do want to do it because it&#8217;s really fun, and I&#8217;m getting into the years where I&#8217;m going to be rebellious soon.
&#8220;Psychologist William Coulson said, &#8216;D.A.R.E. gives kids the confidence to say no to drugs and to say yes to drugs. It gives them more confidence than they should have.&#8217; By this, Coulson implies that the program educated students about drugs they were otherwise not aware of. One theory is that the D.A.R.E. program educates children on drugs, but approaches it from a non-educational standpoint by telling kids to say no instead of telling them what happens if they take the drug. This can lead to children participating in risky, ignorant behavior.&#8221; And I remember this. I remember it would tell you about drugs, say no to drugs, and there would be videos telling you what happens when you&#8217;re on drugs. But they weren&#8217;t graphic enough to scare us.
Honestly, you know what the scariest thing was to scare me away from drugs as a kid? There were these&#8230; The commercials. Public service announcements online. I think I was in junior high, so that would&#8217;ve been &#8217;98, &#8217;99. And it was smoking, and it had people vomiting up maggots into a sink. And there was actually a warning on the PSA saying, &#8220;Graphic. Caution advised,&#8221; to say this is what smoking is doing to you. At least that was graphic and would scare you. I don&#8217;t want to smoke or do something like that.
But I remember once watching a D.A.R.E. video. And they&#8217;re like, &#8220;What are methamphetamines? Methamphetamines are also called speed. People who take methamphetamines have hyperactive energy.&#8221; And I remember the clip was of this woman running around her kitchen, but she wasn&#8217;t running. She was just walking and they sped up the video. She wasn&#8217;t even trying to act frantic. She was probably walking normally and they just sped up the video to three times the speed. And she&#8217;s walking super fast around the kitchen, and she takes the milk. And instead of putting the milk in the refrigerator, she puts the milk in the oven. Crazy high jinks when we&#8217;re on meth. We&#8217;re on methamphetamines, we might forget to put the milk away. Getting more animated for this one maybe&#8230; Could be the methamphetamines.
But I remember that you would watch these, and it made drugs&#8230; Say no to drugs. Drugs are bad. But it wasn&#8217;t really encouraging you that much to not do drugs. Or gangs seemed cool. There was a whole&#8230; That we can go out and do stuff together, and they&#8217;ll accept me, and you can have a gun, and own an area of town.
When I was a kid, there was only one gang I wanted to join, and that was the Foot Clan. So you had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out. I think that was what, 1990? Live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it was actually kind of dark and gritty for a kid&#8217;s movie. The sequel Secrets of the Ooze is&#8230; Parents complained so the Turtles could not use their ninja weapons anymore. Super lame. But I remember in there the Foot Clan. One of the&#8230; The teenager in the movie gets tempted to join the Foot Clan and work for Shredder, and it was awesome. They were a gang, right? But it was an awesome gang. They had a half pipe where you could skateboard, they had arcade games, they had ninja weapons. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Forget what this D.A.R.E. guy told me. If the Foot Clan tells me to join their gang, I want to be in. Shredder, sign me up.&#8221;
Anyway, it goes on to say here. &#8220;The D.A.R.E. program lost funding in 1998, and has since been replaced by the keepin&#8217; it REAL program.&#8221; REAL is all in caps. But the program is KIR, keepin&#8217; it REAL. &#8220;This program is more interactive based on the criticism that D.A.R.E. workshops just consisted of police officers standing up and talking. In keepin&#8217; it REAL workshops, students work together and practice saying no to each other through role playing. The keepin&#8217; it REAL website suggests that the program reduces rates of alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco use by 45%. Other people recommend things like cognitive behavioral therapy to help young people develop proper thinking habits, the ability to assess situations.&#8221;
And honestly, if I&#8217;m going to tell my kids about drugs, I&#8217;m not going to scare them to death. If you touch a marijuana joint, you&#8217;re going to die. You&#8217;re going to go crazy and get reefer madness. You go crazy, reefer madness. It&#8217;s just like anything. You don&#8217;t want to oversell the risk. I&#8217;m just going to tell my kids, &#8220;Look. Drugs, like a lot of things in life, are bad for you. They can be addictive. They&#8217;re unhealthy. And even if the worst things don&#8217;t happen, they&#8217;ll probably just make you lazy, and waste your time, and make you somebody you don&#8217;t really want to be. When you could be spending your time, energy, and your money on stuff that&#8217;s going to make you way happier in life.&#8221;
And I think that&#8217;s important. When you give people a message, you don&#8217;t want to overdramatize. &#8220;This is so bad. I&#8217;m not even going to say any more. Just say no.&#8221; You don&#8217;t want to act like it&#8217;s not a big deal either. You just want to be sober and realistic when you&#8217;re telling people, especially young people, about dangers. And then encourage them to say, &#8220;Look, you&#8217;re smart. You can think through a situation. How do you make the right decision in these different cases?&#8221;
And it&#8217;s important to be able to overcome peer pressure, not just to be some kind of weirdo. Don&#8217;t just say no. You can tell your friends, &#8220;I&#8217;m not interested in that. It&#8217;s not really my thing. I don&#8217;t really like smoking. I don&#8217;t like drinking. I&#8217;m okay. Why are you pressuring me? Why are you being weird? That&#8217;s kind of weird. You&#8217;re only going to be happy if I do this with you? Why do you care what I do?&#8221; I&#8217;m one of the cool kids. I know how to say no in a cool way. Not really. I&#8217;m still trying to figure that out.
All righty. Well, thank you guys so much. I hope this was a helpful retreat back into the nostalgia laden past of D.A.R.E., and all the things they told us as kids that may or may not have been true. Or at least may or may not have been effective. But thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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FFAF: The D.A.R.E. Program (and Why it Failed)

In this episode, Trent examines the issue of &#8220;childless cat ladies&#8221; and the larger problem of demographic winter.
Transcription:
Trent:
In a 2021 interview, JD Vance said, the US is among other people run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they&#8217;ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. The comment generated backlash and it resurfaced. When Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president signing her endorsement as childless cat lady. A lot of people criticize Vance&#8217;s comments as misogyny from the MAGA crowd, but setting aside his specific wording, they do point to a larger problem in our society when it comes to people, be they men or women choosing pets or other pursuits over procreation. Even people like Pope Francis who can hardly be called a MAGA supporter, recognize the problem. During a September, 2024 visit to Indonesia, Pope Francis praised Indonesians for having large families in contrast to people in other countries. He said Those people have a law of death that comes about when one limits births and criticized the purposely childless for choosing to have pets over children.
CLIP:
Keep it up. You&#8217;re an example for everyone. For other countries that may be, and this might sound funny, these families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child.
Trent:
In 2022, Pope Francis was even blunter than JD Vance and said, couples who chose to have dogs or cats instead of children were being selfish. In response, critics said this was hypocritical because Pope Francis like nearly all Catholic priests except for some in the Eastern church or Anglican converts doesn&#8217;t have any children, but the Pope wasn&#8217;t saying every single person in the world needs to have children. He&#8217;s pointing out that many couples as well as unmarried people, refuse to either get married or to have children because they want to put their desires ahead of the needs of other people in society. That is the textbook definition of selfishness. Caring about yourself to the point of causing detriment to other people. This is evident in the popular and insufferable weird dinks TikTok videos where couples who are double income know kids dinks brag about how much this choice lets them spend a bunch of money on themselves and time on their own happiness or be selfish.
CLIP:
We&#8217;re dinks. We go to Trader Joe&#8217;s and workout classes on the weekends. We&#8217;re dinks. We get into snobby hobbies like skiing and golfing. We&#8217;re dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We&#8217;re dinks. We&#8217;re already planning our European vacation next year, dinks, we get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more we&#8217;re dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We&#8217;re dinks. We can play with other kids and give them back.
Trent:
Notice that instead of using their extra disposable income for charity or their extra free time to volunteer, they brag about how they can live consumerist lifestyles focused on maximizing their own pleasure. This is also true of people who brag about not getting married, like one popular account on X that features a woman who posts videos of herself dancing that say, imagine being 42 and being this happy. The right hates this. Of course, there are many people who want to get and want to have children, but tragically cannot due to circumstances beyond their control, and not everyone who chooses to be childless or single are as obnoxious as these people, but when lots of people choose to live this way and especially when they encourage other people to do that, this creates negative effects for society as a whole that makes the behavior selfish. First, those who make this choice often later come to regret it and then resort to evil methods to solve the problem they&#8217;ve created like having children through in vitro fertilization, which inhumanely creates children in a laboratory and in many cases purposely kills the children that were created.
These so-called surplus embryos. Full human beings, the church has condemned IVF and Pope Francis recently called for a global ban on gestational surrogacy, the renting out of pregnant women&#8217;s wombs. Second, when enough people choose to not have children, this creates an unbalanced society that doesn&#8217;t have enough children to support an aging population. In the past 70 years, marriage and birth rates have plummeted to their lowest levels in history. People were twice as likely to get married during the Great Depression than they are today. Even though we live in an age of unprecedented prosperity relative to all of human history. Pope Francis said this kind of behavior creates a less humane society and here&#8217;s a recent BBC news report on the problem.
CLIP:
The birth rate is the average number of children that each woman has and when birth rates are discussed, you&#8217;ll see this number a lot. 2.1, this is the birth rate needed to maintain population levels. South Korea&#8217;s not close. Last year its rate was North 0.72. Japan is at 1.26. To put this in context, the EU average is 1.53 and the UK is at 1.49 and that is a record low. In fact, many countries are now below 2.1 and as people live longer combined with low birth rates, elderly people will make up a greater proportion of the population. As we&#8217;ve seen in Japan.
It&#8217;s no surprise that Japan, which has had this very, very long, very low fertility rate and the oldest population in the world, has got the worst government finances in the developed world because the government is indeed spending more and more on healthcare and pensions and has fewer and fewer taxpayers.
If that&#8217;s Japan in the uk, a shift in the makeup of the population is coming. By 2070, the number of workers is projected to rise by a million. The number of pensioners will rise by 5 million. This will inevitably create pressures. The economist argues that for countries with low birth rates, the implications are higher taxes. Later retirements lower real returns for savers and possibly government budget crises.
Trent:
Now, some people might say it isn&#8217;t my responsibility to have kids so that someone in 50 years can have a retirement, but those same people often say we have a responsibility to not have kids in order to stop things like climate change. As noted in a recent Los Angeles Times article with the headline, it&#8217;s almost shameful to want to have children or in countless news stories like this one,
CLIP:
So I am giving up my dream of having a family because I will only have children if I know they have something to live for.
An alarming statement from a young woman terrified about the consequences of climate change. 18-year-old Emma Lim is starting a campaign and pledge to not have children until leaders take climate change. Seriously,
Trent:
These people agree we have moral duties to make sacrifices for the good of society, but they only want hip virtue, signaling, sacrifices and responsibilities like wearing a mask or driving a Tesla, not the less glamorous responsibility of changing diapers in a minivan. The problem of demographic winter is something that has happened throughout history and yet we refuse to learn from it. For example, the Greek historian Polyus described in the second century before Christ, how ancient Greece declined due to theself behavior of men and their effect on the population rates In our time, all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population for this evil grew upon us rapidly and without attracting attention by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idol life and accordingly, either not marrying at all or if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born or at most one or two out of a great number for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury.
The Hellenic empire fell in the next century overtaken by the Roman Republic and one of the first laws the Roman Republic passed were penalizing, unmarried and childless couples with higher taxes while giving benefits to families that had more children. Rodney Stark&#8217;s book, the Triumph of Christianity reveals how Pagans had lower rates of reproduction due to practicing female infanticide and holding marriage in low esteem. This allowed Christianity to dramatically increase as a presence in the Roman Empire and later the medieval world. The other problem though with childless cat people be they men or women, is the damage they often inflict upon themselves. Pope Francis describes how the dink lifestyle often ends in disappointment saying in the end, this marriage comes to old age and solitude with the bitterness of loneliness. Now, there are lonely people who have children and there are happy childless people. Demographics become destiny for society as a whole, not necessarily every single individual that it&#8217;d be foolish to ignore the risks of living this kind of me centered lifestyle and more and more people are coming to see how foolish it is. People like Melissa Purling who wrote an article for Business Insider titled I&#8217;m 38 and single, and I recently realized I want a child, I&#8217;m terrified. I&#8217;ve missed my opportunity personally, married at 22 but refused to have children with her husband. They later divorced and now at 38 she wants children, but worries, she missed her chance. In an interview she said the following about the feminism that drove her to this tragic decision,
CLIP:
I feel unbelievably betrayed by feminism. I was constantly fed this idea that women can do everything we don&#8217;t really need. Men, women can can have the great career and have the kids that they like and change the tires and do this. I mean, I grew up thinking and men are great, but I can do all the same things. I do feel in many ways betrayed by that line of thinking. You
Trent:
Can find similar videos all over the internet of women saying that feminism betrayed them and now they feel like they will never be able to have children that they desperately want, and you can find people who say they&#8217;re totally fine, but they don&#8217;t act like it. People like feminist Anita Sarkisian who is unmarried but recently had a wedding themed party for her 41st birthday, which is a totally normal thing to do, right? I believe what we&#8217;re seeing now is the consequence of so-called third wave Feminism that was at its peak in the mid nineties and up to the 2010s while first wave feminism focused on voting equality with men and second wave feminism focused on workplace equality with men. Third wave feminism focused on so-called sexual equality with men. Women wanted to be freed from older social norms like saving sex or marriage and wanted to be free to be as promiscuous as men without being hindered by various slurs used to describe this behavior.
These were women in high school and college in the nineties and early two thousands who were exposed to radical forms of feminism on the internet as well as changing views of female happiness in media. Think of the promiscuous women on sex in the city, which ran from 1998 to 2004 were the cast of friends which ran from 1994 to 2004, which presented a model of adulthood that resembles delayed adolescence. But 20 years later, many of the women from this generation now find themselves in the throes of powerful maternal desires to have children, but no viable way to satisfy those desires due to a lack of suitable partners interested in women their age and a much, much lower chance of becoming pregnant, and it isn&#8217;t just women, I believe in 20 to 30 years we&#8217;re going to see a similar reckoning with young men who have bought into red pill propaganda that says marriage is a death sentence for them and they should lead a playboy lifestyle instead and not get married.
This is why I debated Pearl on pints of Aquinas and pointed out that statistically never married men were unhealthier and less happier than ever married men, a group that includes divorced men, red pillars, who tell men that they&#8217;ll be miserable if they get married are the photo negative of radical feminists who told women decades ago they will be miserable if they get married. We&#8217;re now seeing the bitter fruits of radical and it may take a few decades to see those same bitter fruits with red pilled men who chose a life apart from the sacrifices in marriage that perfect men. But I do think some of the cracks are starting to show. I know some of these men and they&#8217;ve told me I think I could have been a good father and they have this sad era about them because they ordered their life around short-term pleasure instead of long-term joy cultivated through discipline and even though it&#8217;s easier for a 50-year-old man to get married than a 50-year-old woman, it&#8217;s much harder to be a 60-year-old dad of a rambunctious 10-year-old or an 80-year-old grandparent of newborn grandchildren.
If you manage to live that long and if you want to see more about what&#8217;s wrong with so-called red pill thinking, check out my discussion with Jordan Cooper in the link below. Finally, I want to be clear that I am not saying everyone is called to marriage. Some people are called to serve society in religious or secular occupations that are incompatible with marriage. I&#8217;m also not saying people just belong to the state as part of a socialist collective, and we have to do only what the common good desires. In fact, it was socialists who wanted to abolish the family so that the state could be the foundation of society. The foundation of society is not the state and it&#8217;s not the individual. The foundation of society is the family, a union of husband and wife from which children naturally proceed. Not everyone will choose to be married, but that is the normal choice most people will make and when the family stops being the foundation of society, whether through rigid ideology or empty fleeting fads, you get serious problems for society and for the individuals who think making life all about them will make them the happiest.
Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

The Real Problem with “Childless Cat Ladies”

Is Saying “Christ is King” Antisemitic?

Day 23
CHALLENGE
“Matthew and Luke contradict each other. Matthew says that the Jewish priests bought the field of blood (Matt. 27:7–8), whereas Luke says that Judas Iscariot did (Acts 1:18–19).”
DEFENSE 
Matthew and Luke are in fundamental agreement, and there are many ways the different attributions can be explained. Both authors agree that Judas Iscariot’s betrayal led to a field in the area of Jerusalem becoming known as the field of blood. Both also say that this field was paid for with the money that the chief priests had given Judas to betray Jesus. Both are thus agreed about the basic facts. How, then, can we account for the different way the two authors describe the purchase of the field? One proposal is that the reference in Acts (“Now this man bought a field with the reward of his wickedness”) is meant to be ironic rather than literal. It occurs in a speech that Peter is making, and it has been suggested that Peter merely meant that Judas got his just deserts. The money he originally meant to spend on himself ended up paying for a graveyard. This is possible, but as we observe elsewhere (see Day 124), the biblical authors sometimes omit the agents who perform an action in order to bring out the significance of the principal figures with respect to whom the action is performed. Thus we read that Moses built the tabernacle (2 Chron. 1:3) and Solomon built the temple (1 Kings 6:1–38), though in reality both were built by workmen acting on the leaders’ behalf (Exod. 38:22–23; 1 Kings 7:13–45). Sometimes the agents get mentioned and sometimes they don’t. It is therefore possible that Matthew chose to mention the role of the priests: They were the agents who actually bought the field. By contrast, Luke wants to bring out the significance of the fact that it was Judas’s money, without going into the mechanics of how the transaction was made. He thus omitted reference to the priests and only mentioned Judas. Or this choice may have been made by someone earlier in the chain of tradition than Luke, who simply reported the tradition as he had it. Either way, it would be in keeping with the known practice of omitting agents to bring out the significance of the principals.

Who Bought the Field of Blood?

What does it mean to be a man? How can society help men become the heroes God wants them to be when society says we should fear masculinity? In this episode, Trent unpacks these important questions with the Diocese of Phoenix’s vicar of evangelization Fr. John Parks.

What is Authentic Manhood? Part 1 (with Fr. John Parks)

With the recent end to the NFL season and the dawn of a political rematch between President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, it seems timely to ask: is it wrong to root AGAINST the other side, instead of just rooting for your own side? Isn&#8217;t that the sin of envy? Well&#8230; it depends.

Is Envy always wrong?

In this episode Trent talks about Patreon’s “de-platforming” policy and the issue of free speech, including common ways people misunderstand it.
<a href="http://www.catholicanswersspeakers.com/trent-horn-speaker/">Book Trent</a> to speak at your parish or next event.
Want more from Trent Horn?
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<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/made-this-way-how-to-prepare-kids-to-face-todays-tough-moral-issues/">Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues</a></li>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/why-were-catholic-our-reasons-for-faith-hope-and-love/">Why We&#8217;re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, And Love</a></li>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/persuasive-pro-life-how-to-talk-about-our-cultures-toughest-issue/">Persuasive Pro-Life: How to Talk About Our Culture’s Toughest Issue</a></li>
<li><a href="https://shop.catholic.com/answering-atheism-how-to-make-the-case-for-god-with-logic-and-charity/">Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity</a></li>
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What “Freedom of Speech” Really Means

Why is precise language necessary in the valid and effective administration of the sacraments?

How can a person open themselves to receiving God’s love rather than trying to earn it?

What is the theological and spiritual significance of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Scripture?

In this episode of Catholic Answers Live, listeners ask deep and thought-provoking questions about Scripture, the sacraments, and God’s love. Why is exact language so essential when administering the sacraments? How can we dispose ourselves to receive God’s love rather than trying to earn it? We also explore the powerful Old Testament moment when Jacob wrestles with the angel—what does it mean, and why is it significant? Join us for a rich conversation that blends theology, spiritual insight, and biblical understanding, helping Catholics and seekers alike grow in knowledge and faith.
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Wrestling with God’s Love: Sacraments, Grace, and Jacob’s Struggle

The Book of Proverbs is a powerful mix of human striving for wisdom and divine inspiration. Far more than just a collection of sayings, the proverbs form a blueprint for Christian living. In this installment of CA Focus, Father Mitch Pacwa, host of <a href="https://www.ewtn.com">EWTN</a> Live, shares some of the history and import of the proverbs with us.

The Proverbs Explained

In this episode, Trent shreds the low-hanging fruit of popular online atheist memes.
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Transcript:
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I enjoy the challenge of engaging high-level defenses of atheism, but sometimes the low-hanging fruit just tastes too good to resist. Today, we are going to rebut some hilarious atheist memes, because of just how bad they are. So let&#8217;s get started. Here&#8217;s the first one. &#8220;How did Jesus find guys named Peter, John, James, Matthew, Andrew, Philip, Thomas and Simon in the Middle East?&#8221; And a comment under this meme says, &#8220;This is the one that gets me. When was the last time you met Jews named Mary or Joseph? Jesus is Spanish. Mary&#8217;s sister&#8217;s name is Elizabeth, a name that came into vogue in 1400s England, probably when half this stuff was written.&#8221;
First, there are lots of famous Jews named Joseph. The first one I can think of is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the actor who says he&#8217;s 100% Ashkenazi Jew. The name itself comes from the Hebrew Yosef. And Jesus, not Jesus, comes from the Hebrew name, Joshua or Yeshua. The simple explanation is that ancient names change over time when they&#8217;re copied into other languages, which brings me to the second point. Nobody tell these people about Alexander the Great or his father, Philip the Second who lived in the fourth century before Christ. Isn&#8217;t Alex from the 1990s for a name?
Of course, his Greek name was Alexandros. And his father was Philippos, from which we get the Latinized versions of their names. This happens when you transfer a name in one alphabet to a different alphabet or language. So the English word John comes from the Middle English Ion, which comes from the French Jean, the Medieval Latin Ioannes, the Greek Ioannis, and finally the Hebrew Yochanan, which means &#8220;God is gracious.&#8221; So there&#8217;s nothing mysterious about modern names being used to pronounce more unfamiliar ancient names. And here&#8217;s a similar meme. &#8220;Paul talks about going to Spain in Romans chapter 15.&#8221;
&#8220;Paul died around 70. A.D. Spain was established in 1479 A.D. Hashtag atheist.&#8221; Checkmate. You got us. The Bible was actually written in the 15th century. And all the evidence that existed beforehand must have been planted by lizard people, or some other conspirator. The Greek word Paul uses in Romans 15:28 is Spania, which refers to a region of the ancient Roman Empire called Hispania, where modern day Spain is located. The Latin Vulgate calls it Hispania. Also people from Spain don&#8217;t call it Spain, just as people from Germany don&#8217;t call that country Germany in their native language. In German, it&#8217;s Deutschland. And in Spanish, the nation of Spain is Espana. In fact, this is the word used in Spanish translations of Romans 15:28. Just as we use an English equivalent of Espana, the Bible uses the closest English equivalent of Paul&#8217;s reference to Roman Hispania.
Next, we have, &#8220;Humans waiting to be brainwashed,&#8221; with a bunch of babies all labeled &#8220;Atheists.&#8221; This is probably based on the idea that an atheist is just someone who lacks a belief in God. But if that&#8217;s all atheism is, then it&#8217;s a terribly uninteresting worldview. It&#8217;s boring. If the majority of people that hold your position are babies, maybe it&#8217;s not a useful position after all. Babies are also amoral, because they lack a moral code. Babies are anarchists, because they lack a belief in government. But that doesn&#8217;t prove belief in morality, or belief in government only comes from brainwashing, and there&#8217;s no good reasons to believe in those things. Here&#8217;s a similar one. &#8220;Atheism is not defined by what we believe. It is not a belief system. It has no religious doctrine. It&#8217;s just a rejection of a claim that has no supporting evidence.&#8221;
All right. Do you believe that the existence of God has no supporting evidence? Is that the reason you reject that claim? If atheism has nothing to do with beliefs, then who cares what it says? Atheism is only worth considering if it says something about the way the world actually is, if it informs our beliefs about the world. And classical atheists had the guts to not just say they lacked a belief in God, but that God does not exist. If you say you lack a belief in God, because you don&#8217;t know if God exists, that&#8217;s fine. You just don&#8217;t get to call yourself an atheist. You are actually an agnostic. And don&#8217;t give me the, &#8220;I&#8217;m an agnostic atheist.&#8221; Does God exist? You can say &#8220;Yes,&#8221; or, &#8220;Probably yes,&#8221; which makes you a theist. You can say, &#8220;No,&#8221; or, &#8220;Probably no,&#8221; which makes you an atheist. Or you can say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; which makes you an agnostic. End of discussion.
Here&#8217;s another one. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t this the most wonderful irony? An anagram of religion is I leg iron?&#8221; Okay, well, an anagram of science is its incest. And you can make a naughty anagram of atheist if you start with the word ate. But yeah. This one is really stretching to find something. Also, did you know that an anagram of like and subscribe is, &#8220;Debunks irascible?&#8221; So if you want to help us debunk irascible, or easily angered non-Catholic critics, please like and subscribe to the channel. And definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com. Next, &#8220;Bible, an ancient novel full of murder, corruption, homophobia, bestiality, incest and cruelty. It is often read to children on Sunday.&#8221; First, there&#8217;s no homophobia in the Bible, because homophobia isn&#8217;t a real thing. There are people who are cruel towards those experiencing same sex attraction. And that&#8217;s wrong. But usually homophobia is a slur that&#8217;s used against people who simply think that sex is only moral when it&#8217;s the expression of marital love between men and women.
Number two, there are four passages that condemn bestiality in the Bible, but no depictions of bestiality, which is a relief. It&#8217;s hilarious also to hear this complaint, because it reminds me of this meme of a guy throwing away a Bible saying, &#8220;Finally, a world of pure rationalism,&#8221; who then picks up a book defending bestiality called Can Animals Consent? In fact, I cover the modern defense of bestiality that some atheists make more in this previous episode that you can watch if you can stomach it. And speaking of unnatural things, here&#8217;s our next gem of a meme. &#8220;Homosexuality is not against nature. More than 500 species are known to practice same-sex coupling. Religion is against nature. No other animal practices it.&#8221; Replace homosexuality with infanticide, or rape, or murder and you see just how bad this argument is.
Saying, &#8220;Yeah, but lots of animals do it. So what&#8217;s unnatural about it,&#8221; is astoundingly dumb. When we say &#8220;against nature,&#8221; we don&#8217;t mean, &#8220;Has no parallel among non-human animals, or doesn&#8217;t exist in the natural world.&#8221; We mean against human nature, or the way humans ought to behave as humans. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s an insult to say to a person he is acting like an animal at the dinner table. Here&#8217;s another one. &#8220;Science, because reality is so much better than making stuff up.&#8221; And then we have The Last Supper that&#8217;s populated with a bunch of different scientists. At least the person who made this meme, tried to find scientists who at least identify as atheists, or agnostics, or do not believe in God, people like Stephen Hawking, or Richard Dawkins, or Neil deGrasse Tyson. But as I&#8217;ve shown in my previous research, most scientists do believe in God, or some higher power.
Also, there are some blunders here. This looks like Isaac Newton, who also wrote on theology, as well as science. So he definitely wasn&#8217;t an atheist. But even if I&#8217;m mistaken, and that&#8217;s somebody else besides Isaac Newton, that&#8217;s definitely the Greek Philosopher Aristotle, who believed there was one infinite God, or prime mover that kept the entire universe in existence. And front and center is Albert Einstein, who was not an atheist. He did not believe in a personal God. But as his colleague, Max Jammer writes in his book, Einstein and Religion, he notes how Einstein did believe in a God that created the universe. And he even denigrated atheists for their dogmatic opposition to religion. The next one says, &#8220;Atheist temples, more than one book available.&#8221; This is probably the silliest one, because this is a photo of the Long Room in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. The library was built when the college was founded in 1592 as a religious institution. And one of the first important works housed in the library was an eighth century illuminated manuscript of the Bible called The Book of Kells.
It was the Catholic Church that invented the concept of the university in the Middle Ages, and subsidized the study of astronomy in order to better understand the calendar, and worship God. For example, Catholic cathedrals were built with a knowledge of where the sun would be throughout the year as it shined through stained-glass windows. According to historian J.L. Heilbron, &#8220;The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages, into the Enlightenment than any other, and probably all other institutions.&#8221; So it&#8217;s my hope that the atheists who made these memes will go and check out a library, and learn more about the cultural advances that the Catholic Church has offered to the world, and how Christianity has improved the world, primarily by giving us a savior, and to also see the historical evidences for our faith.
Hey guys. Thank you so much for watching. If you want to help the Counsel of Trent grow and expand, be sure to like this video. And click subscribe. You can also check out my other videos. And definitely consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com.
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Hilariously Bad Atheist Memes (REBUTTED)

Joe explains how Trent changed his mind on what is the most important aspect of Mary&#8217;s Immaculate Conception and her lifelong sinlessness.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Hesschmeyer In February, 2024, Mark&#8217;s one of the greatest tragedies to befall mankind. I was wrong about something and worse, Trent Horn was right. Now, for context here, Trent Horn and I and some other people we&#8217;re doing a two day brainstorming retreat, and one of the topics that arose was the idea of Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness and why we believe in that as Catholics and Trent made an argument for Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness that I&#8217;d never heard before and one that I initially dismissed as a stretch, which I&#8217;ve now come to see as profoundly true. Now, before I explain why I want to give at least a quick word of gratitude to all of my supporters, all of our supporters, really over@shamelessjoe.com. Now, we recently got a chance to meet some of you at the Catholic Answers Conference, which was incredibly cool. Now we&#8217;re also working on new show notes or Joe Notes that lay out the sources that I quote from or cite and summarize the main points and episodes you can get access to those as well as exclusive question and answer live streams each week for as little as $5 a month.
And just so you know, your direct support is what keeps this channel sponsor free and the quality high. So we hope to see you over there, shameless joe.com. Okay, now I&#8217;m back to the dark day in question. I should be very clear again, Trent and I didn&#8217;t disagree that Mary was without sin. We agree on that. The question was why? Because if you&#8217;d asked me before, why is Mary without sin, my usual answer would be to look at the way scripture seems to present Mary as the arc of the new covenant through a mode of analysis that we sometimes call Mary and Typology. Let explain what this means. Go back and look at Old Testament passages like Second Samuel chapter six. There we&#8217;re told that David arose and went to move the Ark of the Covenant through Judea to bring it to his new capital Jerusalem.
They&#8217;re traveling with the ark amid the hill country of Judah and David and all the house of Israel were making Mary before the Lord with all their might, but they end up stalled in the hill country of Judea for three months leading David to ask how can the ark of the Lord come to me after three months, they may get back to Jerusalem and David dances before the ark were in a priestly effort. Now, I want to compare that Old Testament event to something that happens in the New Testament, namely St. Luke&#8217;s account of the visitation in Luke one. You&#8217;ll notice it begins by telling us that Mary arose and went and where does she go? Well, she goes to the hill country of Judah, of course, and the unborn John the Baptist, the son of Zacharia. The priest dances in his mother&#8217;s womb in the presence of the unborn Jesus and Mary stays there for three months before returning home.
But while she&#8217;s there, her cousin Elizabeth asks her a question that echoes King David&#8217;s. And why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Now, it seems to me those are not just coincidences. The language is the same, the location is the same, the duration is the same, both involve singing and dancing, and the two questions seem to be obviously connected. But while David asked, but the ark of the Lord, Elizabeth now asks about the mother of my Lord. So it seems to me the best reading of this passage is that Luke is showing us that Mary is the ark of the new covenant, and that makes sense. After all, the original arc was the place of God&#8217;s presence. We&#8217;re told that God is enthroned upon the cherubim in the Ark, and now God has done something greater. He has been made flesh in the womb of Mary.
So it doesn&#8217;t seem coincidental to me that for instance, in Revelation 11 and 12, John says that he sees the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then immediately begins describing how he sees the mother of Jesus. But if Mary is the new Ark, it makes sense that she&#8217;s completely pure and without sin. After all, the original arc was so holy that when USA touched it, he was struck dead on the spot. That&#8217;s why they get stuck in the hill country of Judea for three months. But the incarnation is greater than the divine presence in the original arc of the covenant. So the sinlessness of Mary seems to make sense, seems to follow. So that approach made sense to me before actually still makes sense to me, and it seems to match up with some of the early Christian descriptions of Mary, for instance, as the New Eve.
But Trent went in an entirely different direction drawing on the work of Dr. Jack Mulder. He argued that the immaculate conception of Mary was actually essential in securing Mary&#8217;s free consent to the incarnation of Jesus. In other words, it was important that Mary be without sin so she could give a free and uncoerced yes to God when the angel Gabriel enunciated to her telling her that she was to be the mother of our Lord. Now, as I say, when Trent originally laid out this argument, I found it unconvincing, but a few things have happened since then that have changed my mind. First was Trent pointed me to the catechism of the Catholic church, which says in paragraph four 90 that in order for Mary to be able to give the freest cent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be wholly born by God&#8217;s grace.
And this idea is linked in the next paragraph to the immaculate conception. Now, that could just mean that it was divine grace that gave Mary the strength to say yes, to say, behold, I&#8217;m the handmade of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. But I had to admit that this gave some more weight to Trent&#8217;s argument. Then a few weeks later, a second thing happened. I was involved in an inquiry session for people with questions about the Catholic faith, and a young woman asked me about the immaculate conception. I answered her argument in the way I ordinarily would, and she didn&#8217;t seem convinced. I pause and then say, I recently heard another argument from Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness. I&#8217;ll let you decide for yourself what you think of it. I laid out the argument to her and it was like a complete light bulb moment for her.
She immediately resonated with it and it seemed to convince her, and that was a moment for me. I realized that I hadn&#8217;t been considering Mary&#8217;s situation from a woman&#8217;s perspective at all. After all, think of some of the news stories that came out from things like the Me Too movement. Many of these were cases in which men like Harvey Weinstein or Louis Cck made unwanted sexual advances to women. But the allegations weren&#8217;t usually that the women had said no. The allegations were that the women didn&#8217;t feel free to say no. So they said yes, but they said yes under duress because they were aware of this enormous power imbalance between themselves and these powerful celebrities. So maybe if you want, you can think of it in a different context. You could imagine a stranger pointing a gun at you and asking politely to kindly donate to their personal wellness fund.
In that situation, do you really feel free to say no? Is that charity or a stickup? So imagine that instead of marrying you have the angel Gabriel approaching a sinful woman, someone deeply aware that God could justly damn her at any moment. How free does she feel to object to God&#8217;s plan to bring his son into the world through her maternity? After all, the threat posed by the prospect of eternal damnation is equal to the strongest imaginable threat. That&#8217;s at the heart of Dr. Muller&#8217;s argument. As I understand it, the relationship that obtained between it&#8217;s between Mary as mother of Christ and God&#8217;s role as father to Christ necessitates a consent free from any coercion on the part of Mary and Mary&#8217;s freedom would&#8217;ve been unavoidably compromised by sin. We can think about that in several different ways because first of all, sin including original sin, darkens the soul in such a way that we don&#8217;t want the good things that God wants for us, this is one of the reasons we need divine grace.
Without the aid of grace, we don&#8217;t choose God. As Jesus says in John six, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. So all of us need divine grace, and that&#8217;s actually true of Mary as well. She&#8217;s full of grace for her to be able to say yes, she had to be holy born by God&#8217;s grace. I mention this because sometimes people object to the immaculate conception thinking that it means Mary didn&#8217;t need a savior, but that&#8217;s not the case. Rather, it&#8217;s a God predestined Mary in this special way to be saved by grace from the first moment of her conception. You can save somebody from a car accident by pulling them from the wreckage, but be better to keep them from crashing in the first place. In both cases, you&#8217;re saving them. In Mary&#8217;s case, God&#8217;s doing the second one.
He&#8217;s saving her before she falls. So Mary&#8217;s still only able to say yes to Gabriel because as Gabriel reminds her, she&#8217;s full of grace. But it&#8217;s important to understand that God&#8217;s grace is not about overpowering our free will. It&#8217;s about liberating our free will from its enslavement to sin. Think about it like this. The person who&#8217;s not addicted to drugs still could do drugs, but they have a much easier time just saying no than a person already addicted. Likewise, the point here isn&#8217;t that Mary couldn&#8217;t sin, it&#8217;s that her will was much freer than our wills not to sin. Because unlike us, she wasn&#8217;t a recovering sin addict. And so if Mary was either without the divine grace to say yes to God&#8217;s will, or on the other hand, without the freedom to say no to the invitation to motherhood like this, then her freedom would be radically curtailed.
But instead, God gives Mary these tremendous gifts of grace, which enable her to give the free ascent of her faith to the words of the angel Gabriel. So approaching Mary&#8217;s consent to the incarnation this way actually led me to the third thing that changed my mind. Isaiah chapter six. In that chapter, the prophet Isaiah has a vision in which he says, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and his train filled the temple. The angels are performed crying out Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And you might think for a prophet that seeing God like this would be pretty amazing, but that&#8217;s not Isaiah&#8217;s reaction at all. He panics and he cries out, woe is me for I&#8217;m lost, for I&#8217;m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.
And look, Isaiah is not wrong to react in this way as the book of Revelation shows nothing I pure can stand before God. So the only way Isaiah can withstand God&#8217;s presence is by having his sinfulness purged away. An angel takes a burning coal from the altar and presents it to his lips saying, behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven. Isaiah&#8217;s reaction is the understandable one, and you can find versions of this throughout the Bible, people responding to the presence of God with a holy terror. But Mary responds with a strange calmness. Consider she&#8217;s just been told not only that she&#8217;s going to look upon the face of God, that he&#8217;s going to make his dwelling within her very body. She&#8217;s not like Isaiah seeing God in his heavenly temple. She&#8217;s going to become his earthly temple, and yet she doesn&#8217;t react like Isaiah does, like any of the others. There&#8217;s no note of panic. There&#8217;s simply this docility, this openness to whatever it is God has in store. Behold, I&#8217;m the handmade of the Lord. Let it be to me, according to your word, Trent and I, we&#8217;ve disagreed on things over the years and I think we&#8217;ve learned a lot from one another. I hope I can say that in this case, I&#8217;m actually really happy to be wrong, and Trent was even gracious enough to share his own thoughts.
&#8220;Trent&#8230;&#8221;:
People often ask me who I think the best Catholic apologist alive is, and I always tell them with some hesitation, Joe sme, not because he&#8217;s smarter than me, though he probably is, but because when he walks into a room, people actually want to listen to him. I walk in and folks are like, oh no, here comes the debate club kid again. Joe walks in and it&#8217;s, wow, is this theology or the cover of gq?
Joe:
Yeah, that was definitely not ai. Now, if you want to find out more of why the yearly Christians thought Mary was the New Eve, I cover that right here for Shameless Popery, I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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I Was Wrong (Worse: Trent Horn Was Right…)

Most Catholics have heard of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is referenced dozens of times throughout the Catechism, mentioned in the sermons of bishops and priests quite often, and generally known as the “main character” of Catholic theology even by those outside of the Church. Few, however, know about the theological tradition that the Angelic Doctor belonged to—and which bears significant importance for us today.
As opposed to dogmatic or positive theology, which explains and proves the truths of the Faith from Scripture and Tradition, scholastic theology (or scholasticism) explores the nature of these truths and their place within the Catholic faith. It enables the theologian to synthesize the faith and resolve apparent contradictions. To put it succinctly, the maxim of scholastic theology is “faith seeking understanding.”
The rise of scholasticism was concurrent with—and in many ways caused by—the rise of universities in Christendom. Scholastic theologians, also referred to as schoolmen, often belonged to theological schools that held to and preserved their own theological tradition. Thus, it is not uncommon to hear about disputes between Thomists (followers of St.
Thomas Aquinas) and the Scotists (followers of Bl. John Duns Scotus) on how the sacraments cause grace in the recipient, and, though belonging more to speculation, whether or not God would have become man if Adam had not sinned.
At the center of medieval scholastic theology is Peter Lombard (d. 1160)’s Sententiae or Sentences, a four-book work on theological judgments about the Christian religion. The work systematically covers questions about the one God, his triune nature, creation, man, sin, the Incarnation, redemption, and the last things. It is divided into four books and sectioned by “distinctions.” Shortly after its publication and approval from theologians, a commentary on the Sentences became a requirement for a Master’s degree in theology. Thus, the procedure later theologians followed when inquiring into what different theologians taught on a certain question was to refer to their commentary on the Sentences, each of which was uniformly organized after Lombard’s original work. For example, if I want to know what St. Bonaventure taught about the different aspects of purgatory, I simply go to the locus classicus of purgatory: book four, distinction 21. Every commentary on the Sentences is uniformly structured like this, allowing one to easily compare the teachings of the scholastics by simply referencing the proper book and distinction.
<h2>Should We Reject Scholasticism?</h2>
Many today want to forget and move past this historical period of theology, labeling it irrelevant and outdated. Others reject scholasticism due to its “heavy” reliance on extra-biblical, Aristotelian terms, such as “substance,” “virtual,” and “relation.” But these charges fail to demonstrate any true reason to reject such a powerful and beautiful theological system.
First, several recent popes have commended scholasticism as being integral to Catholic theology. Pope Benedict XVI said:
<blockquote>Still today, in reading the Scholastic summae one is struck by the order, clarity, and logical continuity of the arguments and by the depth of certain insights. With technical  language, a precise meaning is attributed to every word and, between believing and understanding, a reciprocal movement of clarification is established.
Dear brothers and sisters, in echoing the invitation of the First Letter of Peter, Scholastic theology stimulates us to be ever ready to account for the hope that is in us (cf. 3:15), hearing the questions as our own and thus also being capable of giving an answer. It reminds us that a natural friendship exists between faith and reason, founded in the order of Creation itself” (General Audience, October 28, 2009).</blockquote>
Pius XI, in his reformation of Catholic universities, commended the scholastic method as an authentic medium of doing theology in the Church:
<blockquote>Sacred theology is to be handed on with both the positive and the scholastic method; therefore, having explained the truths of faith and proved them from Holy Scripture and Tradition, the nature of those truths and their intimate reason are to be studied and illustrated according to the principles and teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/la/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-xi_apc_19310524_deus-scientiarum-dominus.html#%3A~%3Atext%3DHaec%20autem%20disciplina%20methodo%20cum%20positiva%20tum%20scholastica%20tradenda%20est%3B%20ideo%20veritatibus%20fidei%20expositis%20et%20ex%20sacra%20Scriptura%20et%20Traditione%20demonstratis%2C%20earum%20veritatum%20natura%20et%20intima%20ratio%20ad%20principia%20et%20doctrinam%20S.%20Thomae%20Aquinatis%20investigentur%20et%20illustrentur">Deus scientarum Dominus</a> 29).</blockquote>
In fact, Pope St. Pius X identified the dislike of scholasticism as one of the errors of the modernists.
<blockquote>For scholastic philosophy and theology they have only ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is on the way to modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for this system (Pascendi Dominici Gregis 42).</blockquote>
As for the application of extra-biblical terms, we should keep in mind that the early Church, before scholasticism, also did this in its defense of trinitarian orthodoxy, with terms like “consubstantial” and “person.”
<h2>Why Read the Scholastics?</h2>
Scholasticism is not even primarily about niche theological questions, like whether the fire of purgatory is material or not. In exploring the nature of the mysteries in our faith, the mind, already believing in these, begins to understand their interconnectedness, opening the path for deeper meditation and contemplation before the Lord.
Scholastic theology also helps us synthesize Catholic doctrines. Some that seem to contradict at first, such as the belief that baptism is necessary for salvation and that a baptism of desire can substitute the absence of the sacrament, are easily resolved when we understand that baptism is necessary per accidens but sanctifying grace is necessary per se; the former may be substituted but is the ordinary means to an end, and the latter, being absolutely necessary, cannot be substituted, which is supplied by repentance, faith, and the desire for baptism. When asked how baptism can save us while upholding that we are saved by Christ alone, we may reply that baptism is the instrumental cause of our justification, whereas Christ’s passion is the meritorious cause: Christ achieved our salvation on the cross but applies it through the sacraments.
<h2>Where to Start?</h2>
Aquinas’s works, most of which have an English translation, are available for free at <a href="http://aquinas.cc/">aquinas.cc</a>. There is his famous Summa Theologiae, in which he treats the Christian faith systematically, which he never finished.
In his exposition on the Ave Maria, he comments on St. Gabriel’s annunciation to the Virgin Mary, reflecting the contemplative mind of the medieval Church regarding the Mother of God. His commentaries on the Pauline epistles are especially illuminating for understanding Catholic teaching on grace, which Aquinas claims is the subject of Paul’s “entire teaching.” Aquinas synthesizes all of Paul’s letters by showing how the Apostle presents the grace of Christ as diffused throughout the body of Christ: from our head to the pastors and the faithful of the Church—both considered in itself and in its operation through the sacraments.
Some prominent contemporaries of Aquinas, like his teacher, St. Albert the Great, have also written wonderful works, such as <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Medieval-EN/XCT.011.html%3Bchunk.id%3D00000007">On Cleaving to God</a>. One may also read <a href="https://www.franciscan-archive.org/scotus/">Scotus</a> or St. Anselm’s <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Medieval-EN/XCT.005.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxMDAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000007">Why God Became Man</a>.
Later Thomists, like Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., have amazingly edifying works like <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Contemporary-EN/XCT.145.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxODAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000005">On</a> <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Contemporary-EN/XCT.145.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxODAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000005">Providence and Trust in God</a>, along with <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Contemporary-EN/XCT.144.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxODAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000005">his commentary</a> on Aquinas’s treatment on grace.
In fact, some of the best defenses of the Catholic Faith were written by scholastics. One interested in defending the Faith against Islam or Eastern Orthodoxy may read St. Thomas’s De Rationibus Fidei (“Reasons for the Faith”), in which he explains and defends uniquely Catholic doctrines against these groups. Bellarmine has several volumes in his work Controversies where he defends the Catholic faith against the Protestant Reformers and their successors. Cardinal Franzelin, S.J.’s On Divine Tradition offers a fantastic explanation of the Catholic view of Sacred Tradition, occasionally responding to Protestant objections. The Sacrae Theologiae Summa is a great theological manual that covers all aspects of Catholic theology written by theologians who attended and influenced the Second Vatican Council. All of these have English translations and many be published online for free under public domain. Dozens of important theologians could be listed for each century, but when one becomes acquainted with just a few, he quickly becomes introduced to their contemporaries and grows in understanding of the scholastic tradition all the more.
In sum, scholasticism is not dead. It remains alive within the ecclesial tradition, practiced by those in the theological schools and commended by the Magisterium as most helpful.

The Way a Catholic Should Think

In this episode, Trent responds to conservatives who support or have confusing messages about IVF in light of the Alabama State Supreme Court&#8217;s ruling on the matter.
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Transcript:
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court declared that human embryos used in IVF labs were legal persons, which caused several IVF clinics in the state to pause their services since IVF involves the willful killing of some of these human beings. But several conservatives who have opposed abortion, at least in the past, have said in response that they object to the court&#8217;s ruling and they see nothing wrong with IVF and they think it should be legal. And in today&#8217;s episode, I&#8217;m going to show you why they&#8217;re wrong. But to do that, I need to give you some background on IVF and also on what happened in the state of Alabama. So IVF or in vitro fertilization is a process where a woman&#8217;s eggs are fertilized by a man&#8217;s sperm but not inside her body. Instead, this happens in a laboratory Petri dish. Some of the newly created human embryos, which are just young human beings, are then placed back into the woman&#8217;s body where they continue to develop and are born nine months later.
Embryos that are not placed in the woman&#8217;s body are either destroyed or placed indefinitely in cryogenic preservation. In 2020, a patient at the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Alabama wandered into a storage area and accessed some of the frozen embryos. The patient burnt their hand from the extreme cold used to preserve the embryos and dropped them, causing some of them to die. Four parents of the embryos later sued the clinic for the wrongful death of these children. This would be no different than a group of parents suing a daycare for being so lax with safety standards that a stranger could walk in and accidentally kill their newborns. This month, the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled that human embryos qualify as children under the state&#8217;s wrongful death statutes. While many media outlets quoted one of the concurring opinions in the ruling that mentioned God, the court&#8217;s main opinion doesn&#8217;t talk about God.
Instead, it says, &#8220;All parties to these cases, like all members of this court, agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends a death. The parties further agree that an unborn child usually qualifies as a human life, human being, or person, as those words are used in ordinary conversation and in the text of Alabama&#8217;s wrongful death statutes.&#8221; That is true as everyone acknowledges throughout all stages of an unborn child&#8217;s development regardless of viability. When it comes to abortion, the unborn child is usually treated as an unwanted child or not even as a child at all. However, in vitro fertilization, it&#8217;s different. The parents usually treat these human embryos as their own children. That means if their children die because of negligence, the parents want this to be treated as the wrongful death of a child and not merely as the wrongful destruction of personal property.
But you can&#8217;t treat these embryos as human beings only when it&#8217;s convenient and then ignore their humanity when you do something else like purposefully destroy them. For example, imagine a couple of the frozen embryos and the father has the embryos destroyed. Could the mother sue for the wrongful death of her own children? What makes the most sense is to treat these human embryos as human beings because that&#8217;s what they are. Even IVF customers and IVF clinics agree they&#8217;re human beings, but if these human embryos are human beings, how should the law treat them? Let&#8217;s get into what some conservatives who are pro IVF have said about this case. They basically come in two types, IVF is great or IVF is bad, at least in some ways, but we can reform it. Donald Trump represents the first option.
I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious little beautiful baby. I support it. And today, I&#8217;m calling on the Alabama legislature to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in Alabama, and I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;re going to do that.
And the National Republican Senatorial Committee has advised Senate candidates to, &#8220;Clearly and concisely reject efforts by the government to restrict IVF. It is imperative that our candidates align with the public&#8217;s overwhelming support for IVF and fertility treatments.&#8221; And here&#8217;s Jack Posobiec, a Catholic commenter who&#8217;s going to speak at an event sponsored by Catholics for Catholics who probably represents the second reform IVF group. He wrote on X, &#8220;Embrace adoption for IVF embryos. Don&#8217;t end IVF. This is the pro-life answer.&#8221; He then said this.
I think there&#8217;s an interesting question here that we could bring up possibly for the debate. And Charlie, this might be something that we could brainstorm over because if the issue is the discarding of the embryos that the pro-life community&#8230; And I personally believe rightfully so that we should talk about this because we do believe that it&#8217;s human life as pro-lifers, then the real question is, shouldn&#8217;t we try to find perhaps a productive use for this? And I&#8217;m not talking about scientific experimentation, but what about a donation bank or something of this if there are extra embryos that are made and then not used.
So there&#8217;s a lot of issues that need to be teased out here. But before we do that, don&#8217;t forget to like this video, subscribe to our channel and support us at trendhornpodcast.com. All right, so what are these issues? Well, one thing is that we have to separate the different moral arguments against IVF from one another. The main argument most pro-life conservative support is that IVF is wrong because it involves destroying human embryos. Although someone like Posobiec might say, &#8220;We can get around that by just adopting all the abandoned embryos.&#8221; But there are other reasons to morally oppose IVF. The most basic reason would be that children have a right to come into existence inside their mother&#8217;s body and be protected from coming into existence in a laboratory, where they might be shipped off to their mother&#8217;s womb or a stranger&#8217;s womb or to cold storage indefinitely. The moral argument often gets obscured by pointing to children who came from IVF and assuming that their intrinsic goodness validates the method that brought them into existence.
But children who came into existence through acts of adultery, fornication, rape, prostitution, or via surrogacy, those children&#8217;s lives are intrinsically good. But that does not mean the way they came into the world is good or that that way should be defended. Other practical arguments against IVF include its connection to exploitative practices like surrogacy or commercial egg donation. The documentary exploitation, which is linked below exposes how young college age women who are often struggling financially are coerced by offers of tens of thousands of dollars to donate their eggs, even at great risk to themselves. Or they might be coerced into carrying these IVO embryos to term as surrogate mothers. Pope Francis has recently called for a global ban on surrogacy, saying, &#8220;I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child based on the exploitation of situations of the mother&#8217;s material needs.&#8221;
Another practical argument against IVF is that there is no objective way to stop its use at just infertile married couples. The US once tried to make contraceptives only legal for married couples, but the right of single people to have what married people can access was later upheld in the 1972 Supreme Court case of Eisenstadt v. Baird. So there&#8217;s nothing to keep a man from ordering a sperm donor, an egg donor, have embryos created from that in IVF, use a surrogate womb to gestate the child, and then have the child delivered to him the consumer. Here&#8217;s one story about John, an unmarried self-identified gay man in Atlanta who saved up hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire a child through the IVF process. And another story of an unmarried man in Britain who hoped to use IVF to become a single father after this became legal in 2019.
So whether it&#8217;s someone like Trump who thinks IVF is tremendous, or someone like Posobiec who thinks it can be reformed, I would tell them that IVF is intrinsically evil. It is evil by its very nature because it perverts the maternal process of creating a child. And it&#8217;s also evil because it&#8217;s associated with a whole host of moral hazards that are bad for society like gamut donation and surrogacy. Now let me try to steelman Posobiec&#8217;s position. When he says don&#8217;t end IVF, I hope as a Catholic, he means it would not be prudent to try and ban IVF right now. Because we should end IVF. We should do that even if it would take a very long time by changing public opinion because in virtual fertilization is evil, it harms children, and it harms society. But perhaps what PO soc means is just don&#8217;t end IVF right now in this election cycle.
And from a strategy perspective, this can be acceptable. We as Catholics are allowed to recognize that it isn&#8217;t always politically feasible to achieve the goods that we want or to ban the evils that need to be banned. And this may be the case that&#8217;s not politically feasible to ban in feature fertilization right now due to its high level of popular support. In politics, you have to pick your battles. And given the difficulty pro-lifers have had with banning abortion at the ballot box since Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers have to be realistic about what they can accomplish with their finite resources. In fact, the Alabama Attorney General has even said he has no desire to prosecute IVF clinics. And the Alabama legislature and governor want to pass a bill that would exclude IVF embryos from being considered legal persons.
In the gospel of life. Pope St. John Paul II said the following of pro-abortion laws, which could also apply to laws dealing with IVF, &#8220;When it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well-known could illicitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality.&#8221; So Posobiec&#8217;s steelman position might be this, don&#8217;t outlaw IVF right now since you&#8217;re going to lose. Instead, prohibit the intentional destruction of embryos created through the IVF process, but keep IVF legal. However, IVF clinics would still shut down under those regulations because they all basically end up destroying human embryos that are considered as one poster on X called them low quality, which often refers to embryos with genetic conditions like down syndrome. Another part of IVFs dehumanizing process.
And as I noted, it would be hard to get a ban like this passed in the first place. But you don&#8217;t have to propose banning the destruction of IVF embryos. Instead, you can just ask people this question, parents who have children through IVF see these embryos as their babies, so shouldn&#8217;t those parents be allowed to treat those embryos like babies? This approach would allow parents to sue IVF clinics for wrongful death when embryos are negligently killed or tie up these clinics in family court proceedings where the embryos have to be treated like children in things like divorce cases. Instead of a controversial frontal assault on IVF, we could promote a solution most people in society can be on board with that ends up undermining IVF anyways and leads to clinics voluntarily shutting down.
This kind of approach is also called a Fabian strategy. It&#8217;s named after Quintus Fabius Maximus. He used small skirmishes to slowly wear down the much stronger Carthaginian army led by Hannibal in the second Punic war instead of a frontal assault. Hannibal, by the way, is the guy who crossed the Alps with elephants. So you win by slow attrition rather than by a full-frontal assault. A similar approach was used to end the slave trade in England in the 19th century. As dramatized in the 2006 film, Amazing Grace, abolitionists who oppose the slave trade passed a law that simply targeted the use of neutral flags during the 1806 war with France. And this had the unintended effect of making the slave trade unfeasible for most British slave trading companies. By the way, it&#8217;s a great film that I definitely recommend you go see. Finally, some people say human embryos aren&#8217;t persons because they&#8217;re just a few cells. But I remind them that humans are not constructed with cells like a building is constructed with bricks, where it would make sense to say a few bricks is not a building.
Instead, human beings develop like a photograph and we are present at the very beginning. When you take a Polaroid picture, everything is present the moment the picture is taken. It just takes time to recognize that once the image develops. And the same is true of human embryos. Everything that makes this child a human being is present from fertilization. It just takes time to develop so that we can recognize it. So when it comes to the issue of in vitro fertilization, we should heed Jesus&#8217; advice in Matthew 10:16: &#8220;Be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.&#8221;
We should acknowledge the goodness of children who come into existence from IVF while also showing people the badness of everything associated with IVF, like killing unborn children, exploiting women, and allowing children to essentially be purchased by anyone through a commercial process. And then ask if this is a price we are willing to pay for fertility treatment. We should then be shrewd in discussing how the law should treat IVF. And as pro-lifers, we can offer a consistent solution that only focuses on helping parents who use IVF to treat their children like children, that would indirectly cripple the IVF industry. If you&#8217;d like to learn more about this subject, check out my interview with Stephanie Gray Connors, who&#8217;s written an entire book on IVF called Conceived by Science. And don&#8217;t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.

Correcting Conservatives on IVF after the Alabama Ruling

In this episode Trent shows you the best of “the worst” anti-drug, anti-bullying, and “stranger danger” PSA’s he endured as a child.

Drugs, Bullies, and Stranger Danger!

Episode 121: Year C &#8211; 2nd Sunday of Lent
In today’s episode, we focus on four details that are relevant for doing apologetics found within all the readings for this upcoming Second Sunday of Lent, Year C. The first comes from the first reading, which is taken from Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18. The related topic is two-fold: whether justification is a one-time event in the past or a process, and the nature of justification itself as interior righteousness. Next, the two details come from the second reading, taken from Philippians 3:17—4:1. The apologetical topic related to these two details are the veneration of the saints and the doctrine of hell. Finally, the last detail is found in the Gospel reading, taken from Luke 9:28b-36. The relevant topic there is communication with the dead.
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031625.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Is Justification a One-Time Event or a Process? | 2nd Sunday of Lent

In this episode Trent’s wife Laura answers Patron questions and anything goes: From TLM to TMI!

Ask My Wife Anything!

<div>Episode 87: Year B &#8211; 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time </div>

<div>In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on two details in the readings for this upcoming 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B. The first detail is found in the second reading, taken from Ephesians 2:13-18. The relevant apologetical topic is that we as Christians are no longer bound by the ceremonial precepts of the Old Covenant, which would include the Sabbath. The second detail is in the Gospel reading, which is taken from Mark 6:30-34. The relevant topic, which isn’t all that apologetical in nature, is the Church’s teaching on the proper rest that needs to be taken on the Lord’s Day.</div>
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Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072124.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Christians Free from the Ceremonial Laws

Is the Church drifting from the Truth?

What does Vatican I say about the papacy?

Why baptize infants if they can’t consent?

How to treat same-sex attracted friends?

&#8220;Is the Church drifting from the Truth?&#8221; This episode explores the implications of Vatican I on Church teachings, alongside discussions on the papacy, the rationale behind infant baptism, and how to approach friendships with those who are same-sex attracted.
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Is the Church Drifting From the Truth? Vatican I and Baptism

In this episode, Trent is joined by John DeRosa of the <a href="http://www.classicaltheism.com/episodes/">Classical Theism</a> podcast who interviews him about his recent debate with Alex O’Connor on Pints with Aquinas.