Manage Account

<div>How will God respond to one’s prayer to grow taller?</div><div>Time will tell, but don’t become preoccupied with the matter. It’s not crucial to your salvation, and your genetic makeup will normally hold sway in such matters. Instead, pray regularly to grow in holiness. That will benefit you, your loved ones, and others with whom you interact.
</div>

Will God Make Me Taller?

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:
<ul>
<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>
</ul>
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”?

Here&#8217;s a skeptical meme I recently came across:

There are three problems with this (admittedly kind of funny) picture. Let’s take the first: Christians neglect the poor. 
This hardly seems worth the trouble to rebut. More than any other group you can identify, for centuries Christians have fed the poor, sheltered the homeless and orphan, tended to the sick, protected the refugee, comforted the afflicted, supported the widow and unwed mother, and generally lifted up the down and out. This includes official Church charities, parishes and religious orders, independent charities related to Christian groups or motivated by Christian conviction, and individual Christians who give their time, talent, and treasure to improve the lot of others in the world who need help. Christians do this because their Lord commands it, and a lot of his followers take him very seriously.
It&#8217;s not hard to Google websites that track nonprofits and see the enormous efforts undertaken by Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities, Caritas, and Food for the Poor, to name just a few of the big ones that spring immediately to mind. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
So any meme that starts with the ridiculous premise that Christians neglect the poor hardly deserves consideration for that reason alone. But let’s take a look at the other two assumptions anyway.
Are cathedrals useless? There are two ways we can respond here.
One is point out that the claim begs the question against Christians. This claim would be true if and only if God didn’t exist. If there were no God, it would be futile—and a big waste of time and effort—to erect enormous buildings for glorifying and worshipping him. But if God does exist, then he deserves the best, most beautiful, most sacred things we can make. (And believers deserve places that help lift their hearts and minds to him.) This objection assumes there’s no God to persuade someone to give up on believing in God. That’s classic circular reasoning—begging the question.
Finally, the third assumption: Christians who build cathedrals do so to feed a disordered desire to have expensive and ornate structures. Though this may be true for some, it doesn’t follow that it is true for all. Building ornate structures to glorify the Creator is an appropriate end-goal. If some Christians lose sight of that purpose, building cathedrals (for example) to indulge vanity or for personal profit, the problem is not with building cathedrals—it’s with those Christians’ disordered motives.
The meme may be cute and creative in its own way (when is Elmo not cute?). But trying to score cheap points against Christians and the ancient practice of building cathedrals is a waste of cuteness and creativity.

Quit Snorting Cathedrals! (and Other Atheist Admonitions)

<div>Is a wet dream a sin that needs to be confessed?</div><div>To commit a mortal sin, the act must be objectively sinful, the person must know that it is sinful, and the person must freely choose to commit the sin.
This latter requirement is not possible when the person is asleep and unconscious. So wet dreams are not sinful.
</div>

Nocturnal Emissions Aren’t Sinful

How do you answer a trans or gay person who tries to justify their lifestyle by saying “God made me this way”?

I want to thank Jason for tweeting about St. Bernadette’s church in Scottsdale years ago. It’s what got me to go back to Mass.

Do you think we as Catholics need to separate boys and girls at school more?

I became promiscuous because I was Mad at God. How does someone deal with the pain and anger?

I’d like to share how I overcame my desires when a priest in the confessional gave me the chastity prayer of St. Augustine.

As a father of young girls, how can I tell them that not liking stereotypically feminine things isn’t a sign that they’re actually boys?

Chastity

Not long ago, I received a wedding invitation from a relative. As with many of today’s “baptized pagans”—people who were initiated into the Church but never lived intentionally as an adult Catholic—he&#8217;s planning a secular ceremony. Because he was baptized a Catholic, though, he is still subject to Church law regarding “canonical form” for marriage.
The requirement of canonical form means that, when a baptized Catholic says “I do” in a rite that falls outside of what the Church prescribes (and without getting a dispensation), in fact he does not. The marriage doesn’t take. Two lifelong Protestants can get married in a Protestant ceremony and have a sacramental union, but a baptized Catholic who later became a Protestant cannot. And non-Catholics can contract a valid natural marriage (when one or both parties is unbaptized) by making vows in any number of settings. A baptized Catholic marrying an unbaptized person can’t (see canons <a href="https://canonlaw.ninja/?nums=1117">1117</a>, <a href="https://canonlaw.ninja/?nums=1086">1086</a>, etc.).
This can be tough to take, even for someone (like me) who would be considered a hard-liner on <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-marriage-sex/">Catholic teaching about marriage.</a> Many believing Catholics and regular Mass-goers don’t know about the requirement of canonical form. How much less would someone who hasn’t been inside a church since infancy? And why should someone who doesn’t even believe that Catholicism is true even care? And yet the Church exercises its power to deprive such persons of a valid marriage.
It’s a purely juridical power. There is no necessary reason why such a person couldn’t marry outside canonical form. There is no concession to reality (like a previously contracted valid marriage) that the Church is forced to make. It’s just a matter of law; a law that could be different.
In fact, not very long ago, the law was different. Canon 1117 used to allow for “a formal act of defection” from the Church that would dispense a person from canonical form. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apl_20091026_codex-iuris-canonici.html">did away with that provision</a> and changed the text of several relevant canons. I can see the practical arguments for that change. You never want to encourage formal apostasy, of course. Requiring canonical form also discourages secret marriages that can become practical headaches. And, as Benedict himself pointed out, invalidity due to defect of form makes it easier for tribunals to annul marriages of people who later wish to return to the Church and remarry “following the failure of a preceding marriage.”
On the other hand, though, keeping material apostates on the books doesn’t seem to be of much benefit for them, or the Church, if they’re just technical Catholics who don’t actually believe or practice the Faith. Furthermore, denying such people the sacramental graces of marriage (if they’re both baptized) or the bond of a natural marriage (if the other person isn’t) seems contrary to concern for their souls and their families. And the ease with which such unions can later be annulled, pace B16, could be considered a bug, not a feature!
But my biggest problem is pastoral. Do we think that such people will be more likely to return to the Church upon learning that Rome has stretched out its arm to deny them marriage, or less? What would you think of a religion—with which you don’t identify in any way—that claims to be able to neutralize your marriage on a legal pretext? Would you be attracted or repulsed?
In my relative’s case, I suspect that it would be an obstacle, not an aid, to re-evangelization. It wouldn’t come across as one of those hard truths that nonetheless compel by their power. It would just seem mean.
Catholicism isn’t a club that you join and un-join. I get it. Baptism is an indelible mark on the soul, not a mailing list you unsubscribe from by checking a box on a screen. At the same time, I think we have to recognize that many people have been initiated into the Faith but never assented to it by an adult act of the will. Their souls are Catholic forever, but their hearts and minds are something else. We have to reckon with that, too.
At a time when Catholic leaders are talking about all kinds of ways to accompany and extend mercy to those on the “peripheries,” some of these ways quite dubious, it seems fitting to consider easing the legal requirements of canonical form so as not to deny valid marriage to those who are capable of it. That would be an act of mercy wholly within the Church’s power that legitimately accompanies people where they are—and does not strain doctrine or morals to do so. And from there, we may hope that the graces and goods of marriage will make them more responsive to our prayers and pleas for their return to the Faith.

No Marriage For You!

Is purgatory biblical, or is it just a Catholic man-made tradition? In this video, Joe presents four different arguments showing the existence of purgatory IS biblical, and responds to four of the most common criticisms of the doctrine of purgatory.

Is Purgatory Biblical?

Episode 61: Year B &#8211; 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode, we’re going to focus on three details that are relevant to apologetics. The first comes from the first reading, which is taken from Jonah 3:1-5, 10. The related apologetical topic is God’s immutability (the doctrine that God can’t change). The other two details are in the Gospel reading, which is taken from Mark 1:14-20. The related apologetical topics are Jesus’ divinity and Messiahship.
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012124.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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Hey everyone,
&nbsp;
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.
&nbsp;
I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
&nbsp;
In this episode, we’re going to focus on three details that are relevant to apologetics. The first comes from the first reading, which is taken from Jonah 3:1-5, 10. The related apologetical topic is God’s immutability (the doctrine that God can’t change). The other two details are in the Gospel reading, which is taken from Mark 1:14-20. The related apologetical topics are Jesus’ divinity and Messiahship.
&nbsp;
Let’s start with the detail from the first reading. After we’re told that the people of Nineveh repented of their evil ways, we’re told the following, “When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.”
&nbsp;
There are two questions that arise here: 1) Is the Bible affirming that God directly causes evil? 2) Is the Bible affirming that God changes?
&nbsp;
Concerning the question of whether the Bible is affirming that God directly causes evil, it depends on which kind of evil we’re talking about. If the question pertains to moral evil, or sin, then the answer is no. In no way can God cause moral evil; otherwise, he’d fail to love himself, which is metaphysically impossible. For further details on this, see my article, “God does not cause us to sin.”
&nbsp;
If the “evil” is natural evil, or suffering, then I would argue that God can and does directly cause such “evil.” The key, however, for reconciling this with God’s goodness is to see that such caused evil takes on the form of punishment and thus is taken up into the order of the good.
&nbsp;
Imposed suffering in and of itself is an evil. But when such suffering is imposed on account of a proportionate crime, then such suffering takes on the character of a good. Punishment is good because it rectifies that which is disordered. It puts things right by associating displeasure with bad behavior, which is the order that should have been present in the first place. Moreover, punishment manifests the truth of such an order.
&nbsp;
Now, in the case of the people of Nineveh, the Bible is revealing that their evil ways were meritorious of a proportionate imposed suffering, or punishment. This being the case, such imposed suffering, or evil, caused by God wouldn’t have been inconsistent with his goodness.
&nbsp;
What about the question of whether this passage affirms that God changes? This is an important question because philosophy tells us that God can’t change. Are we to believe that the God of the philosophers is incompatible with the God of the Bible?
&nbsp;
The answer is no. And the key is that the author is employing anthropomorphic speech, which is speech that attributes to God human characteristics to help humans relate to God but are not meant to be taken literally.
&nbsp;
Aquinas addresses the same sort of question when he deals with an objection that arises from the language of God repenting that he made wicked men during the days of Noah (Gen. 6:7). Here’s his response:
&nbsp;
These words of the Lord are to be understood metaphorically, and according to the likeness of our nature. For when we repent, we destroy what we have made; although we may even do so without change of will; as, when a man wills to make a thing, at the same time intending to destroy it later. Therefore, God is said to have repented, by way of comparison with our mode of acting, in so far as by the deluge He destroyed from the face of the earth man whom He had made.
&nbsp;
For Aquinas, describing God as repenting is simply a way of describing God’s actions according to our mode of acting, which is an anthropomorphism. The ascription is justified because there is a similarity. The similarity, as Aquinas explains, is that what was made is destroyed. Insofar as this is present in our mode of repenting and in God’s providential plan, the Bible describes God as repenting.
&nbsp;
But due to the greater dissimilarity, the ascription is metaphorical. The difference is that when we repent it involves a change of will whereas for God there is no change of will because the order of cause and effects is determined from eternity in a single act of will.
&nbsp;
Now, Aquinas is addressing God repenting in the case of destroying wicked men. In the passage from Jonah, there is no destruction of anything. Rather, such destruction is not brought about when, so it seems, God intended for it to be brought about. So, it seems a bit more difficult to explain.
&nbsp;
Again, the ascription can be described as an anthropomorphism. The similarity would be that no destruction would result on account of the Ninevites’ repentance. The dissimilarity, however, would be that our intention to destroy would change to an intention to not destroy whereas for God no such change of intention is involved. God simply wills from all eternity that the Ninevites do not experience destruction on account of their repentance and the biblical authors describe that reality according to our mode of changing intention.
&nbsp;
So, there’s no conflict between what we know about God’s immutability by way of philosophy and the Bible’s language of God repenting of destroying the Ninevites.
&nbsp;
Let’s now turn to the Gospel reading and the two details present there. Here’s the Gospel passage from Mark 1:14-20:
&nbsp;
After John had been arrested,
Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God: 
&#8220;This is the time of fulfillment. 
The kingdom of God is at hand. 
Repent, and believe in the gospel.&#8221;
As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, 
he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea; 
they were fishermen. 
Jesus said to them, 
&#8220;Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.&#8221; 
Then they abandoned their nets and followed him. 
He walked along a little farther 
and saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. 
They too were in a boat mending their nets. 
Then he called them. 
So they left their father Zebedee in the boat 
along with the hired men and followed him.
&nbsp;
There are two details that I want to focus on here. The first is the content of Jesus’ preaching: “the kingdom of God” and “the gospel.” Both can only be appreciated against the backdrop of the Jewish prophetical tradition.
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Consider, for example, “the gospel,” or euangelion. Isaiah 40:9-11 states, “
 
 “[9] Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings [Gk., euangelizomenos]; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the Cities of Judah, &#8220;Behold your God!&#8221;… the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules….[11] He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.”
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Jesus is proclaiming the fulfillment of this “good tidings”: God is in their midst, God is coming with might in judgment on the enemies of God’s people, and God is gathering his sheep.
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But more specifically, Jesus is proclaiming that he is God in their midst, he is bringing victory over the enemies of God’s people—sin and death, and he is gathering his sheep. Recall, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd . . . I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:14, 16).
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The “kingdom of God” signifies the fulfillment of God’s promise of his servant David to rule over the reunited Israel. Ezekiel 37:24-28 reads,
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24 &#8220;My servant David shall be king over them…25 They shall dwell in the land where your fathers dwelt that I gave to my servant Jacob…and David my servant shall be their prince for ever. 26* I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them… will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore&#8230; 27* My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people&#8230; when my sanctuary is in the midst of them for evermore.”
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Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is a proclamation of his Messiahship.
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The last detail that I want to focus on is James and John’s immediate leaving of their father to follow Jesus. Recall, “Then [Jesus] called them. So they left their father Zebedee in the boat
along with the hired men and followed him.”
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Scripture scholar Mary Healy, in her book The Gospel of Mark, explains,
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[I]n response to Jesus’ call, there is a complete abandonment of both occupation and father. To part so suddenly with their father would have been shocking in the social context of the day, where family obligations were paramount (see Sir 3:16). It illustrates the absoluteness of Jesus’ claim, taking precedence over even the closest human bonds (Mark 10:29–30).
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In other words, Jesus’ call for them to leave their father and follow him hints to his self-understanding of being divine. How could Jesus make such a claim unless he believed himself to be God?
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So, the first reading and the Gospel for this upcoming 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, doesn’t disappoint when it comes to apologetical topics. We have opportunity to reflect on
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<ul>
<li>God’s causality in relation to evil,</li>
<li>God’s immutability,</li>
<li>Jesus’ Messiahship, and</li>
<li>Jesus’ divinity</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 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time. Peace!
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Does God Ever Change?

<div>Why does God make humans go through life and then face judgment instead of giving us the choice to be with him or not instantly upon creation? Life brings impediments that can us lead astray and that would not be there with an instant decision.</div><div>Our salvation is worked out over the course of a lifetime and not instantly upon creation because we are embodied persons and not angels. Angels, being pure spirit, made their decision for or against God at the moment of their creation. If they chose against God, they fell forever with no chance of repentance. That is because pure spiritual beings are not subject to change over time. Humans, being embodied persons, are subject to change over time, and therefore can continue to repent until death.
Catholics sometimes wonder if it is unfair to the angels not to have a chance to repent; you&#8217;re wondering if it is unfair to humans to have to go through life. The answer in both cases is that angels and humans were created differently, and our respective judgments correspond to the gifts and the limitations we each experience according to our nature. For more information, I recommend reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Beginners-Frank-Sheed/dp/1887593926">Theology for Beginners</a> by Frank Sheed.
</div>

Why Can’t We Be Saved at Our Creation?

<div>I conditionally baptized my infant grandson in the hopes that my daughter would convert and have him baptized. Did I baptize him validly?</div><div>Provided you used water and the valid sacramental form the Church prescribes, namely, baptizing your grandson “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” you validly baptized him. There is also the issue of intending what the Church intends, which is also needed for a valid baptism. Some might argue you didn’t have this intent because you only intended to conditionally baptize him as a protective measure, not actually baptize him.
I don’t think such an argument has merit, because conditional baptism takes place only when there is doubt about whether a person was actually baptized, and so the intention of one who conditionally baptizes is to make sure a person is actually baptized.
The question becomes whether you should have acted unilaterally in baptizing your grandson. In case of danger of death, such a baptism would be morally permissible. In the absence of such a condition, which seems to hold true in your grandson’s case, since you mentioned no serious illness, you should have deferred to the rights of the parents—in this case, your daughter and her husband if she’s married—and then trust in God (see the Catechism 1257-61).
At this point, I would tell your daughter what you did and have a fellow faithful Catholic whom she also greatly respects with you when you do, in case your daughter becomes angry with you. In any event, ask her forgiveness for violating her parental rights but convey you were genuinely looking out for your grandson’s temporal and eternal well-being. Then make it a habit to pray for your grandson and your daughter daily and seek to be a regular part of their lives. Your daughter may want some distance for a while and only want you to interact with her son provided you don’t do anything religious. In that case, quietly pray while you are with him and his mother and trust in God for the long term.
</div>

Did I Validly Baptize My Infant Grandson?

Sometimes the Old Testament can seem radically different from the New. There appear to be curses, harsh judgments, and capital punishments instead of the tender loving care of Christ as seen in the New Testament. However, the reason we think this way is because God fully reveals himself in the New Testament. He comes in the flesh, embraces children, says to turn the other cheek, and forgives his torturers. The unseen God became a man suddenly and revealed his heart in ways that people could not have fathomed over the previous 1,700 years or so.
It&#8217;d be like seeing the end of the story or visiting a class at the end of the school year, where a teacher has a deep bond with his students, and everybody knows the rules and one another. Yet we can focus on how the class is growing in intimacy and forget something. God has been patient with some of his disobedient children from week one, and he spells out future grave warnings to Billy in seat six if he continues on his path. Jesus is still substantially connected to the Old Testament, as we will see.
Whereas the New Testament is the last week of school, the Old Testament is the first week of school. God needed to be the first-week high school teacher in a rough part of town. The ancient Near East was the rough area, which did not have a strong police force, guarded prison systems, or an understanding of the inestimable value of the human being. Canaanites were throwing their babies into a furnace to appease the demon-god Molech. The ancient Israelites did not respect God; they literally witnessed multiple miracles in Egypt and then started worshipping a golden calf almost as soon as they got out of there! God needed to be stern and communicate in the ways that the people would understand.
In the analogy of the last week of school versus the first week of school, the teacher stays the same. His approach differs over time, but he is essentially the same person. The same applies to Jesus, whose teachings and actions have significant precedent and carryover from the Old Testament. Let’s look at some passages from the New Testament while keeping the “harshness” of the Old Testament in the back of our minds.
Jesus warned that the destruction by fire of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:23-29) would happen again (Matt. 11:23-24). The city of Capernaum was to receive an even more severe experience of fire and brimstone than Sodom! Jesus also threatened a false prophetess named Jezebel, saying that if she continued with her sexual sins, she would become sick, and if anyone committed adultery with her, then he would receive great tribulation, and her children would die (Rev. 2:20-23). Jesus, like Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, is not a tame lion.
Capital punishment was acceptable in the Old Testament. Jesus said it would be better for someone to have a millstone fastened to his neck and he be “drowned” in the sea than to mislead a little one (Matt. 18:6).  God punished Israel in the Old Testament with the destruction of the holy city, Jerusalem, and Jesus prophesied that it would happen again (Matt. 24). In Jude 5, Jesus is said to be the one who saved Israel from Egypt during the Exodus with Moses, but not only that; he was the one who destroyed those who did not believe! That is probably a reference to the generation that died in the forty-year wilderness wanderings (ca. 1400-1200 B.C.). Jesus is not exactly night and day from the Old Testament.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus offered curses and woes in similar fashion to the Old Testament (Matt. 11:20-24, 23:1-37, 26:24). He cursed Israel with the phrase “May you never bear fruit again” (Mark 11:13-14, 20-21, NIV). Jesus delivered seven woes to the Pharisees due to their prideful hearts (Matt. 23:1-37). The gentleness and humility of the Son of God do not exclude his justice.
The parables of Jesus buttress the point powerfully as well. For within them, he offers punishments for evildoers that seem substantially similar to the Old Testament punishments. Check out five of them.
<ol>
<li>In Matthew 18:34-35, God is described as a king who finds out that, after forgiving a servant of his debt, the servant refuses to forgive other people’s debts. “And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him.”</li>
<li>In Matthew 22:1-13, God is described as a king inviting people to a wedding. When one of the people attending does not follow the decorum, he says, “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (v. 13).</li>
<li>In Luke 19:11-27, God is compared to a king giving money to his servants and expecting them to use the money to expand the kingdom. He then says to his enemies who refuse his rule, “Bring them here and slay them in my presence” (v. 27).</li>
<li>In Luke 20:9-18, God is compared to a vineyard owner who sends servants and ultimately his own son to the tenants over his vineyard. When the tenants abuse the servants and kill the son, God says he will “come and destroy these vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others” (v. 16).</li>
<li>In Luke 12:41-48, God is compared to a master over a house who installs a manager over to distribute food. If the manager over the house grows lazy while the master is away, and begins to beat the servants and eat and drink gluttonously, the master will arrive and “cut him in pieces” (v. 46).</li>
</ol>
These punishments for evildoers do not seem to be far from the Old Testament. Torture, binding of limbs, slaughter, destruction, and dismemberment are actions that grind up against the image of Jesus being completely separate and “pure.” In fact, at times, the Old Testament appears to be kinder and softer than the New!
This can also be seen in light of Jesus’ seemingly new teaching about hell. The Jews understood an earthly capital punishment, but not so much a state of eternal suffering. Jesus may have shocked the living daylights out of his audience when he spoke of an eternal hell after death (Matt. 25:46). Such a teaching makes the passages from the Old Testament seem desirable!
All of this is not to say that Jesus is terrifying, and so we should cower at his presence. Jesus, as the embodiment of God, stays with his classroom through and through, with abundant patience. From Abraham down over a thousand years to the first-century Israelites who meet Jesus, God is a Father who does not abandon his children.
That deep bond between teacher and student inspires trust, for this is a teacher who is literally willing to give up his life for his classroom. He has our ultimate good at heart. God’s rules evoke the tender father, who tells his child, “Don’t hurt yourself.”
(If you’d like to read more, I recommend Paul Copan’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/God-Vindictive-Bully-Reconciling-Portrayals/dp/1540964558">Is God a Vindictive Bully?</a>, which this article draws from.)

Old Testament God Mean, Jesus Nice?

Episode 34: Year A &#8211; 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we zero in on three details in the readings for this upcoming 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A. The first two come from the second reading, taken from Romans 8:18-23. The relevant apologetical topic that each relate to, though in different ways, is the problem of evil. The third detail is basically the whole of the Gospel reading, which is Jesus’ parable about the Sower and the seed in Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23. The relevant apologetical topic that I will draw out is the possibility that Christians can lose their salvation, which refutes the notion prevalent among some Christians that once we’re a Christian we are eternally secure in our salvation.
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071623.cfm">https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071623.cfm</a>
Looking for Sunday Catholic Word Merchandise? Look no further! <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday">https://shop.catholic.com/catholic-answers-merchandise/?q=sunday</a>

Jesus’ Teaching against Eternal Security

Joe breaks down how Christ and the saints teach us to use fasting, almsgiving and prayer to combat the Triple Concupiscence.
Transcript:
JOE:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer and the season of Lent starts tomorrow. For many Christians, it&#8217;s a time to give up chocolate and such, and that&#8217;s fine, but it kind of misses the point. I don&#8217;t want to have a forgettable lint, and I don&#8217;t want your Lent to be forgettable either, because the fact is lint in penance has the power to completely transform our lives. But for it to do that, we need to know what the Bible highlights as the three sources of temptation and sin, and then the three tools that Jesus gives us to combat these sins. So let&#8217;s talk about our problems first and then look at the solutions. When we talk about types of sins, there&#8217;s various formulations, for instance, number the seven deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Or you can group the sins by which of the 10 commandments they violate.
For instance, sins of theft, covetousness, and so on. But there&#8217;s another way of grouping the sins, one which even many Christians are unfamiliar with, even though it&#8217;s a grouping we find within the Bible itself. St. John warns us in one John chapter two that there are three types of sin that are incompatible with the love of God. These are sometimes called the triple concupiscence, meaning they&#8217;re the three types of temptation, and these temptations are lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life. Understanding each of these three types of sin is critical to see where in your life you might be drawn away from the love of God. Now, the first of these three is pretty straightforward, lust of the flesh. You have a natural desire for food, for drink, for sex and the like. Those things are good in themselves. Without food and drink, you don&#8217;t survive without sexual reproduction, the species doesn&#8217;t survive.
But these desires, like all earthly desires, can become disordered. That&#8217;s going to include the sin that we normally call lust, disordered sexual desires, but it&#8217;s also going to include sins like gluttony and drunkenness. But there are other kinds of disordered desires as well, other kinds of lusts that we might have. And John calls this second category, lust of the eyes. So think about this as the desire to have more and more stuff, the most money, the latest technology, the best clothes and his car and so forth. Now, you might be confused here between the term lust of the flesh and lust of the eyes. After all, seeing a beautiful woman might be a trigger for sexual lust. But the idea is that at root, the desire for things like food, drink and sex comes from within it&#8217;s internal. Even in a world with that advertising or external temptation, you&#8217;d still desire those things, but your desire for material goods is a desire introduced to you.
From outside you see an ad, you find out your friend has some cool gadget, you hear about a new product, and now you start to covet it. So lust of the flesh deals with physical things that we crave naturally. These are kind of the temptations that come from within. Lust of the eyes deals with physical things that we crave, but they&#8217;re not natural cravings. They&#8217;re introduced to us from outside, but we&#8217;re not just drawn towards physical pleasures, the pleasures of the flesh or material possessions. We also crave non-physical things. We crave things like glory and honor. And as with pleasures and riches, it&#8217;s not inherently evil to desire those things. It&#8217;s not bad to want to be great when the apostles debate amongst themselves about which of them is the greatest. Jesus doesn&#8217;t rebuke them for wanting greatness. He shows them what Christian greatness looks like.
But as with the other two kinds of desire, our desire for excellence can easily go overboard. So St. Thomas Aquinas will describe pride as the appetite for excellence in excess of right reason. And this sin pride is actually the worst of the spiritual traps as CS Lewis put it in mere Christianity, it was through pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind. So these are the three kinds of temptations we&#8217;ve got to watch out for. Lust of the flesh is about the sinful pursuit of bodily pleasure. Lust of the eyes is about the sinful pursuit of riches and pride of life is about the sinful pursuit of honor and renowned our own glory and our desires. These make good servants, but they make terrible masters. So if you haven&#8217;t yet, this might be a good point to pause and consider which of these three areas is your biggest weakness? Where are your worldly desires leading you away from God? What will destroy your relationship with God if you don&#8217;t watch out for it? And just as importantly, what can we do about it? Now, Jesus has entrusted us with three spiritual weapons in particular against these three types of temptation. And during the season of Lent, the church reminds us of these three weapons. Tomorrow, if you listen to the call collect during mass, you&#8217;re going to hear this prayer
CLIP:
Grant, oh Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting, this campaign of Christian service so that as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint. So we are in
JOE:
The midst of a spiritual battle, a military campaign in the army of the Lord, and our weapons are the weapons of self-restraint. Well, what are those weapons in particular? We just heard about one of them fasting, but there are two others, prayers and alms giving or good works. Now, Jesus points us to each of these three weapons and they correspond with the three areas of weakness that we&#8217;ve just seen. Jesus introduces him to us by telling us to beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them. So these are the three ways that he tells us to practice our piety, but he warns us to do them not for the praise of men, but for our own spiritual good and to grow closer to God. Now, Jesus tells us that when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right-handed is doing.
And he says that when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and that when you fast anoint your head and wash your face. Now, that&#8217;s a fascinating set of instructions. Jesus has just called up the hypocrites for praying, fasting and giving alms in an ostentatious way to win the approval of others. But he doesn&#8217;t tell us to avoid praying, fasting, or giving ohms. He just tells us how to do those things better. In fact, these works of piety are optional. It&#8217;s not a question of if you pray, if you fast or if you give alms, it&#8217;s a question of how to do it when you do it. So these three weapons are perfectly suited to combat the three types of temptation that St. John warns us about. Fasting helps us in our fight against the lust of the flesh.
Alms giving helps us in our fight against the lust of the eyes, and prayer helps in our fight against the pride of life. But let&#8217;s take a closer look at each one to see why that is. So let&#8217;s say you struggle with lust of the flesh at heart. The problem is this. You&#8217;ve got a hard time saying no to your bodily desires. You fight it hard, maybe even to say not right now or not so much. Maybe it&#8217;s your drinking or food or sexual desire, whatever. It&#8217;s what&#8217;s the best weapon to combat that fasting? Back in the four hundreds, Pope St. Leo, the great pointed out that in the Old Testament when Israel sinned against the Lord, the prophet Samuel told them to return to the Lord of all their heart, to put away their foreign gods and to serve God only and that he would deliver them.
And what did they do? They turned back to God with prayer and with fasting, and sure enough, God delivered them. Leo reflecting on this suggested that just as the Israelites restored their powers of mind and body by the injunction of a fast, so too we can only win the fight against our spiritual enemies through prayer and fasting. And he suggested that we should seek divine aid by the observance of the heavenly bidding, knowing that we cannot otherwise prevail against our adversaries unless we prevail against our own selves. Simply put, if you can&#8217;t say no to your own body, you&#8217;re not ready for spiritual combat. And the way you learn to say no to your body is by doing it. The linin fast is a time to say no even to things which aren&#8217;t of themselves sinful, so that you&#8217;re that much more prepared to say no when you&#8217;re tempted by things that are sinful.
And this by the way, helps to explain why the linin fast is a communal fast. Look, it&#8217;s good for Christians to be in the habit of private personal fasting, the kind that Jesus speaks about in Matthew six. But there are also times when like Israel in the Old Testament, the whole Christian people pray and fast together, not as an ostentatious display to try to impress one another, but because as Pope Leo the great said, it&#8217;s during this time of Lent that the greatest and most binding of fast is kept and its observance is imposed on all the faithful without exception because no one is so holy that he ought not to be holier nor so devout that he might not be devourer. But our fast can&#8217;t just be simply self-denial. Otherwise, the Saint Augustine points out it could easily become a mere self-improvement project, kind of like a diet by itself.
He warns fasting Chas your own self. It does not refresh others. So how can our fasting profit others? Well, by combining fasting with the other spiritual weapons of prayer and of allum giving, Augustine asks, how many poor may be filled by the breakfast we have this day given up? So a good spiritual practice to be in is to take the money you saved from fasting you didn&#8217;t get lunch or breakfast that day, and then give it to those who need it as alms. Now that sound biblical counsel, God warns for the prophet Isaiah about those who fast only to quarrel and to fight saying that fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. Instead, the true fast is to share your bread with the hungry. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry. And he will say, here I am.
And Augustine warns that when we do this, when we give alms in this way, it&#8217;s important that we do it cheerfully for if you give your bread reluctantly, you&#8217;ve lost both the bread and the merit of the action. So being intentional about this is key in helping us against the second kind of temptation, pride of the eyes. This practice of generosity with the poor is critical if we want the love of God to continue to abide within us. The Saint John warns if anyone has the world&#8217;s goods and sees his brother in need yet closes his heart against him. How does God&#8217;s love abide in him? Little children let us not love and word or speech, but indeed and in truth. So just as getting in the habit of saying no to the body is the way we discipline the body instead of being the slave to our bodily desires, getting in the habit of giving away money is key for disciplining our tendency towards covetousness.
It&#8217;s disciplining our relationship with money and material things. To put it another way, I&#8217;m less likely to spend my money frivolously or in a greedy way if I&#8217;ve already given it away to somebody who needs it more than I do. And look, if you are looking to give away your money, you&#8217;re free to do that at our patreon shameless joe.com. But saying anything more than that would truly be shameless. So that&#8217;s going to lead us with our third and final spiritual tool and our final temptation. You might have noticed a moment ago that God says through Isaiah that when we are praying and giving to the poor, then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry. And he will say, here I am. In other words, true fast and alms giving are meant to be accompanied by prayer and vice versa. In Augustine&#8217;s words, would you have your prayer fly upward to God make for those two wings of alms and fasting?
So these three tools aren&#8217;t just individually worthwhile weapons in our spiritual battle. They&#8217;re meant to go together. And of the three prayer is the most powerful in the fight against the worst of the three temptations, namely pride of life. CS Lewis describes it like this quote, in God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself unless you know God as that. And therefore, though yourself is nothing in comparison, you do not know God at all. As long as you&#8217;re proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people. And of course, as long as you&#8217;re looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. So pride of life is the temptation by which we make everything more and more about us and we can start to look down on those around us and to enjoy them looking up to us.
And the ultimate remedy for that is simply to stop looking down and to start looking up and to recognize our smallness before God. But then Lewis considers what he calls a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? And he answers this question, I&#8217;m afraid it means they&#8217;re worshiping an imaginary God. Worse. Jesus describes the self-righteous Pharisee as going into the temple and praying to himself. So it&#8217;s clear that we&#8217;re called not only to prayer, but a kind of honest prayer in which we realize around nothingness in relation to God. It&#8217;s the humble and honest prayer of the tax collector who beats his breath saying, God, be merciful to me as sinner. Humility and prayer are thus closely linked and they serve as our greatest tool against the devil.
There&#8217;s a saying from the desert Fathers, the devil can imitate everything. As for fasting, he never ate. As for watching, he never slept. But humble mindedness and love he cannot imitate. So let there be a great effort on our part to have love within us and to hate pride through which the devil fell out of heaven. That&#8217;s an important reminder for us. This lint at the end of Lent, we&#8217;re praying to ourselves saying, God, I thank thee that I&#8217;m not like other men, extortion, unjust, adulterers. Even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get. We might look great on the outside, but our lint will have been a failure. Instead, let&#8217;s take this time of LT not only to fight against whatever inclinations we find within ourselves towards sin, but also to grow in our humility and in our relationships with God and with neighbor. As St. Thomas Aquinas points out, those three spiritual weapons also repair the three kinds of relationships in prayer. Our relationship with God improves in alms giving. We improve our relationships with our neighbor and in fasting we improve our relationships with ourselves. If you want to know more about the history of the season of lint and how it was practiced in the early church, check out, the history of Lint You Never Knew For Seamus, I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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This Is Why Your Lent Keeps Failing…

What Simulation Theory Proves About Atheism

<div>Can a baptized Greek Orthodox, who wishes to convert to Catholicism but doesn’t know if he was confirmed, confess in the Catholic Church?</div><div>It would be rare for a Greek Orthodox person to be baptized but not receive confirmation. It is the tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church to administer all three sacraments of initiation (baptism, confirmation, First Communion) at the same time.
The Code of Canon Law (can. 844 §3) does permit members of the Orthodox Churches to receive sacraments in the Catholic Church. Therefore, a person baptized Greek Orthodox could go to confession in the Catholic Church, even if he was not confirmed.
</div>

May the Orthodox Go to Catholic Confession?

In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Trent Horn to discuss why some individuals, like Randy from Alberta, choose not to identify as Catholic. Trent continues with details on how historical injustices do not negate the truth of religious beliefs, particularly the existence of God.
Transcript:
Caller: Yeah. Being a Canadian, it can never be a Catholic or a Christian just for the fact of the way North America was kind of stolen and the persecution that the Native Americans suffered when the Christians and Catholics came here by the millions and took their land.
Trent Horn: What do you, what do you mean that, by that, do you mean when people settled here two or 300 years ago, you wouldn&#8217;t, you can&#8217;t adopt the belief they have now because of their actions back then?
Caller: You bet
Trent Horn: you, yeah. Okay, would you. So I&#8217;m also guessing you wouldn&#8217;t belong to any Native American tribe that stole land from another tribe. Well, I am part Native. Native American there, but you are. Okay. Have Native American tribes ever taken land from other tribes? I&#8217;m sure they have, yeah. Okay, does that prove that everything they believe in their tribe is false?
Caller: Well, yeah, but Native people, you know, kind of came here for tens of thousands of years and then the Christians and Catholics, that is the Europeans came by the millions.
Trent Horn: Right. Well, so, so Randy. Overran their lands. Right. So Randy, what it seems to be is that, you know, 10,000 years ago there was a land bridge. Then people from Asia came here to North America. Various tribes engaged with one another, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not peacefully. Then you had European settlers that came here that engaged with these tribes, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not peacefully. But to me it doesn&#8217;t seem like the actions of someone in the past prove whether what someone believes now or the belief system as a whole is false or not. You know, for example, whatever settlers did 300 years ago, like when it comes to the question of just being a Christian, that doesn&#8217;t prove whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. Right. So what do you identify? What is your belief system? Now? How would you describe yourself?
Caller: Well, I&#8217;m not a believer in any faith area.
Trent Horn: Okay, well what would it take for you? So do you believe in God? No. Okay, so right off the bat, well, you know, why don&#8217;t you believe like the existence of God doesn&#8217;t depend on Christian behavior in, you know, in a certain context. So why don&#8217;t you believe in God? Well, that&#8217;s. Well, because there&#8217;s so many and it&#8217;s all human beliefs there. But again, it gets back to how the Native Americans were treated. Right? The so called Gods, God forbid, people came here by the millions and pushed them off their lands and there&#8217;s a trail of tears. Okay, well Randy, let&#8217;s assume, I think that&#8217;s a more complicated scenario you&#8217;re making it out to, but let&#8217;s just assume that you&#8217;re right, that Christians acted horribly 300 years ago. Can a bad person still believe true things? Okay, I&#8217;m just asking you a question. Can a bad person still actually have true beliefs?
Caller: Sure.
Trent Horn: Okay. Should we have true beliefs? We as in who? You and I? Should we try to make sure that what we believe is true? Well, yeah. And I believe there&#8217;s no God, so I know I&#8217;m right. You believe there is. So how do you do?
Caller: Sure.
Caller: And then I want to ask you about that. How do you know there is no God? How do you know that?
Caller: Well, it&#8217;s. It. It&#8217;s. Man made
Trent Horn: Okay, but you&#8217;re just saying the same thing again. You&#8217;re saying, I believe there&#8217;s no God because God was made up, which is the same as saying there is no God because there is no God. Where&#8217;s your evidence? Okay, well, I&#8217;m pretty sure I haven&#8217;t seen a God or you haven&#8217;t seen a God, you know, so. Okay, you may. You can&#8217;t see God because he&#8217;s immaterial, but you can know God exists based upon effects in the world. So, for example, if a. Let&#8217;s say a car showed up in your driveway with a card in the windshield wiper and it says, you know, happy birthday, would you say that someone gave you that car or that it just kind of popped into existence from nothing? Sure. Somebody built it and somebody gave it to me. Okay. Why would you think that? Well, because it&#8217;s in your yard. Right. And it&#8217;s not just going to pop. You know, things don&#8217;t just pop into existence from nothing like that. Sure. So the same. So the same would be true for the universe. If we have scientific evidence and also we have philosophical evidence that the universe came into existence, there was nothing, and now there&#8217;s a universe, which is much more impressive than a car that came into existence, you know, 13, 14 billion years ago, Then shouldn&#8217;t we apply that same logic and say, hey, there&#8217;s a cause behind this, something greater than the universe itself? So where would God come from? Obviously, somebody must have created God. Well, that intuition of yours is helpful. You&#8217;re saying, so if something exists, it needs a cause. So that shows us the universe has got to have a cause. Now, what if I asked you this question? Let&#8217;s say there&#8217;s a bunch of boxcars going down a train, right? In order for a boxcar to go down a train track, what has to pull it? Well, locomotive. Okay, but what&#8217;s pulling the locomotive? Well, an engine, right? What&#8217;s making the engine go? So my point Here with the analogy is when you ask the question, who made God? That&#8217;s sort of like asking what&#8217;s pulling the locomotive. God is very different from the universe, just like the locomotive is different from the boxcar. That if something exists or it moves and it changes, or we need a reason to explain that. But our reasons, we just can&#8217;t have an infinite number of reasons. Because in the end, if you have an infinite number of reasons, this did this, then this, and this and this, and there&#8217;s an infinite chain, you actually don&#8217;t explain anything at all. Instead, you need some kind of ultimate explanation that is the cause of everything, but itself is not cause. And that&#8217;s kind of the fundamental argument for the existence of God. So. So I tell you what, Randy, we&#8217;re going to have to go to a break here soon. Why don&#8217;t you stay on the line and our call screener will get your contact information, and I&#8217;d like to send you a copy of my book, why We&#8217;re Catholic. And you can start right at the beginning. I talk about why you should believe in God, then why you should believe in Jesus, then why you should be Catholic, and you can go through that and see what you think of the reasons. I&#8217;ll probably be back on air in, I don&#8217;t know, probably about a month or so. And if you read through, you can always call me back and you can discuss what you think of the arguments in there. So please stay on the line and I&#8217;d like to send you a copy of why We&#8217;re Catholic.

I’m Not Catholic Because I’m Canadian…

The author of the highly acclaimed book, On the Third Part of the Secret of Fatima, helps explain the controversies surrounding the apparition. A meticulously researched account, On the Third Part of the Secret of Fatima replaces sensationalism with scholarship, and helps set the record straight.

Fatima’s Secrets in Context

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

Some Protestants criticize the doctrine of purgatory by saying it’s “bad news” in contrast to the “good news” of salvation revealed in the Bible. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory is indeed good news, even providing consolation for believers. It does so in a variety of ways. 
For one thing, purgatory consoles believers who struggle with sin. We’re all too familiar with our own weaknesses. Perhaps it’s binging of Netflix, texting when someone is trying to have a conversation with you, a brief indulgence of an uncharitable thought, a failure to promptly meet the needs of your spouse or friend when able. The list goes on and on.  
It would be pretty darn hard to go through a day without falling short of Christian perfection in some way, at least for us ordinary folks. Such a task would be heroic. Heroes are rare!  
Now think about the fact that death can surprise us at any moment. Jesus says, “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matt. 24:44). Elsewhere, he says, “Remember then what you received and heard; keep that, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you” (Rev. 3:3). 
If death can come upon us so quickly, and we’re as spiritually ill adjusted as we are, it would seem there’s no hope for us entering into the glory of heaven. We might not die with our wills turned fully away from God as our life’s goal, but the guilt of venial sin and the effects of sin would impede us from entering such glory. Despair of final salvation would be inevitable—that is, if purgatory weren’t real.  
Purgatory remedies that despair and infuses joy within the soul. It allows believers who love Jesus but continue to struggle with sin in their lives to know that their shortcomings against Christian perfection are not enough to guarantee keeping them from the glory of heaven. What’s so bad about that?
Purgatory also consoles us in that it manifests God’s love for us. God loves us so much that he does everything he can to make it possible for us to be united with him, including providing us a postmortem opportunity to be freed from venial sin and any remnants of sin that impede us from entrance into heaven.  
Isn’t God’s love for us part of the gospel’s “good news”? Sure, it is! Purgatory is a doctrine that manifests such love to us. And all this applies to those we love as well. So purgatory consoles us not just with regard to our own entrance into heaven, but also with regard to our loved ones.  
Purgatory gives us the assurance that even though our loved ones die without the perfect holiness required for heaven, we know they’re not forever excluded from there. The late Marian scholar Fr. Martin Jugie puts it beautifully:  
<blockquote>They who mournfully follow the coffin, are consoled with thoughts of the mercy of God; of the expiation of venial sin and the cleansing of the wounds, left by mortal sin, after death; of extenuating circumstances which may have rendered certain sins venial for the dear deceased one. The anguished heart, torn with dread about the fate of the loved one, clings to this last hope, and there finds solace and some peace.</blockquote>
That’s good news!  
Next, the doctrine of purgatory provides consolation for a believer because it offers hope that our loved ones who die with imperfection aren’t forever excluded from heaven. But a believer might still be disheartened by the thought that if his loved one isn’t in heaven yet, then he can’t have a relationship with that person in the present moment. He would have to wait.  
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The doctrine of purgatory entails that we can assist our loved ones in purgatory by offering the Mass, prayers, indulgences, almsgiving, and other works of love for them. This is based on the Christian belief in the communion of saints, which includes the souls in purgatory.  
The holy souls are still members of the mystical body of Christ. Death did not separate them from us. As St. Paul writes, “who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall . . . [the] sword? . . . I am sure that neither death . . . nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 38-39).   
From this it follows that we are not separated from our loved ones who might be in purgatory. We are still united to them by grace. Consequently, our relationship with them can continue. We don’t have to wait until they get to heaven. That provides a believer great consolation. That’s definitely not bad news.  
Some Protestants say we’re blurring the real distinction between the visible (Christians on earth) and invisible (Christians in purgatory) dimensions of the one body of Christ. Just because there’s one body, so it’s argued, it doesn’t follow that our relationship with each dimension is the same.  
It’s true that our relationship with our loved ones in purgatory is not the same as our relationship with them here on earth. But the relationship we have with them by grace is the same. In fact, it’s even better because they’re confirmed in grace without the possibility of falling from it. From this it follows that the relationship with them is secure, on condition that we stay in grace.  
This relationship we have with them by grace is what allows us to continue expressing love toward them, even though it’s not the same kind of expressions of love as when they were on earth. We can’t hear or see them when we talk to them. We can’t give them a hug. But we can pray for them and will what’s good for them—namely, the removal of any impediments to entrance into heaven.  
The relationship might not be the same. But it is a relationship nevertheless! 
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One rationale for this is that the souls in purgatory are perfected in charity. Since charity involves not only love of God, but also love of neighbor, and love of neighbor is expressed in intercessory prayer, it seems reasonable to conclude that the souls in purgatory would express their love by interceding for us.  
That our loved ones in purgatory are praying for us is a consoling thought. Their prayer for us, and our private request for their prayers, is one way by which we keep a relationship with them.  
It’s good news to know we have friends who can’t waver in charity and are constantly praying for us. For St. James says, “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects” (James 5:16).   
The consolation we can provide the holy souls in purgatory in turn brings us consolation. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that love is “to wish good to someone,” “just as he wills good to himself.”
It follows from this definition of love that the good the souls in purgatory experience by having their impediments to heaven removed is experienced as our own good. That means that their consolation is our consolation; their source of joy is our source of joy. As the late Frank Sheed writes, “there is a special joy for the Catholic in praying for his dead, if only the feeling that there is still something he can do for people he loved upon earth.”

Keeping Up with Loved Ones in Purgatory

How do we reconcile parts of both scripture and tradition that seem pessimistic about many being saved with other parts that are more optimistic?

Does infallibility produce an infinite regress?

How would Joe’s argument against the Protestant view of scripture handle views of perspicuity that are more limited?

How do we know that Matthew wrote Matthew and John wrote John and Revelation? We don’t have any other writings to prove that from.

What does CCC 841 mean when it says we and Muslims together adore the one God?

How do Isaiah 53 and Galatians 3:13 fit into the Catholic view of atonement as opposed to penal substitutionary atonement?

Ask Me Anything

How do you get from basketball to the diaconate, with a lot of suffering in between?  Here’s one way.
My journey with Christ began back in high school, with an event that looked completely ordinary and non-spiritual. I was playing basketball with some friends when I suffered a back injury for the first time. Little did I know in the moment that my life would completely change.
You see, this injury didn’t go away. Instead, I developed what my doctors thought was chronic neck and back pain, and it has plagued me ever since. Over the years, my list of symptoms grew longer and longer. I loved to play sports growing up, but because of these physical limitations, I had to rediscover who I was.
I began to focus on school by studying and reading. I saw my parents’ great love for learning about our Catholic faith, and I followed their example. Studying the Bible and other books like it, became an ordinary part of my life.
I remember thinking one day, why am I doing this? I was “wasting” so much time reading about God. When would I ever use it? In the moment, it didn’t look as though I would ever use it. But I didn’t care. In the moment, reading about God gave me a joy and a purpose I needed in order to persevere through the physical pains and limitations that I had.
Thanks be to God, about a year ago, I was finally diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Ankylosing Spondylitis. Now I understood why my body didn’t heal thirteen years ago, when I was in high school. I had an illness that requires treatment. Finally, the mystery was solved, and I had hope of a brighter future.
When I started reading the Bible, I didn’t know what God had planned for my future. All I knew was that it was worth it in the moment. Many years later, I’ve used that knowledge a lot. I taught a Bible study at the Newman Center at Southern Utah University when I was a nursing student. I’ve received two Master’s degrees from St. John’s Seminary. I’m a deacon.
St. Paul tells us in Romans 8:28 that “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” I didn’t know what God had planned for my future when my illness began. But God did.
I suffered a lot, and I have to admit that even now it&#8217;s tough to accept just how difficult life became. The pain was that bad. What made it impossible to handle was the fact that there was no hope for years, because the doctors didn’t understand why I was in pain.
Yet I&#8217;ve received a tremendous blessing through my years of illness. Through it all, I&#8217;ve had an encounter with the living God. I can say without a doubt that had it not been for my illness, I wouldn&#8217;t have developed a personal relationship with Jesus.
We hear our Protestant brothers and sisters speak about a personal relationship with Christ. That personal relationship is not only for them; it’s for Catholics, too. Because of my illness, I had to reorient my life, to reach out for something that could provide stability. That &#8220;thing&#8221; that I grabbed onto as I was drowning in despair was our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Think about the sick who encounter Jesus in the Gospels. Their illnesses and pain drove them mad. They searched with all they had for a cure. Think of the woman who spent all she had on doctors, searching for relief, to no avail (Mark 5:24-34). Then think about all the sick who in their madness searched Jesus out. Think about that “obnoxious” blind beggar who heard Jesus passing by (Luke 18:38-43). He screamed out, &#8220;Lord Jesus, have mercy on me!&#8221; The people around him told him to shut up because the way he was acting was mad. But he screamed out all the more, because he knew healing was worth it! In the eyes of the world, this beggar was acting crazy. Yet his illness freed him to call out to our Lord with all he had, even if it might humiliate him to do so.
If Jesus allows us to be afflicted with illness or some other heavy cross, we can go to our doctors, because they have treatments and cures, but we also need to cry out to him in prayer. He may heal us; after all, anything is possible for God, and healing us is easy for him. But his answer might instead be &#8220;I am <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/tracking-down-pauls-thorn-in-the-flesh">not going to heal you</a> right now&#8221; (see 2 Cor. 12:1-10). That was his answer to me for thirteen years. He may never heal us or free us from the burden. If that&#8217;s the case, we are called to cling to him all the more.
God will not abandon us—especially when we are suffering, because that is when he is closest to us. I don’t know the cross you are carrying. But I know that everybody is carrying a cross, and I know that God has good plans in mind for you. Rather than focusing on the pain, let us throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus by praying all the more fervently. Jesus is looking for us to persevere in prayer, and he promises that he will respond . . . even if he doesn’t take away our crosses (Luke 11:5-13).

When God Gives You a Cross

Pope Leo I vs. Attila the Hun

Question Covered:
<ul>
<li>06:49 &#8211; Can you explain the concept of a new Heaven and a new Earth? </li>
<li> 15:19 &#8211; How can I help my Christian Grandmother’s salvation without hurting her feelings? </li>
<li> 21:19 &#8211; Can you explain what Paul meant by handing a sinner&#8217;s flesh to Satan so his soul can be saved in 1 Cor 5:5? </li>
<li>30:50 &#8211; Can you explain why temporal sinfulness can merit eternal punishment?  </li>
<li>43:47 &#8211; How does Purgatory work and how can we get out? </li>
<li>47:19 &#8211; My priest wrote that the worst pain you can have is in purgatory, where in the bible might this be? </li>
<li>51:17 &#8211; Does Mark 14:7 excuse us from giving to the poor?  </li>
</ul>

The Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell

In this episode Trent examines how some online Christians contradict Christ&#8217;s call to charity through their profane behavior.
Transcription:
Trent:
In today&#8217;s episode, I&#8217;m going to talk about a growing trend among online Christians that promotes vulgarity, verbal abuse and even blasphemy. I showed and even uttered this vulgarity in the original episode I recorded, but I realized that was as imp prudent as showing pornography in order to fight pornography. So here is an edited version of that episode to better serve you. God bless. Lately I&#8217;ve been seeing more and more self-professed Christians use profane, abusive, and even blasphemous language on the internet and it needs to stop. With that said, I want to be clear that the church does not have a teaching on specific curse words. Language changes so much, so it would be extremely difficult for the church to do something like that. So while the church doesn&#8217;t teach on specific words, the church does have teachings on the sinfulness of hateful desires, which these profane words often but don&#8217;t always, but often correlate.
So there could be instances where it&#8217;s listed to use profanity maybe to make a rhetorical point, for example, on the Colbert report, Stephen Colbert informally debated psychologist vi Zimbardo and Colbert refuted Zimbardo&#8217;s claim that God is the cause of evil. Zimbardo said that Colbert must have done well in Sunday school to which Colbert epically responded. I teach Sunday school Mothereffer. You could still argue Colbert shouldn&#8217;t have been profane, but in the context he wasn&#8217;t trying to abuse Zimbardo. Now, some people may still disagree with the profanity there, but other people might say profanity is acceptable in certain contexts as long as it does not become excessive. In fact, that&#8217;s one of the criticisms of Mark Wahlberg&#8217;s film Father Stew, was that it had an excessive use of profanity and one could justify profanity being used in at least some cases to portray Father Stew&#8217;s vulgar preconversion lifestyle.
But many film goers saw the use of profanities being excessive, so the studio released a version of Father that dropped 100 swear words and all religious profanity. By the way, I just want to say you guys have been freaking awesome in your support of the Council of Trent. I never have to swear in anger at your lack of support, and if you want to help us keep growing, please subscribe to the channel and support us over@trenthornpodcast.com. Didn&#8217;t even need profanity to make my point. And by the way, the word profane, which we der profanity from profane just means not sacred. The profane is the opposite of the sacred as can be seen in Mee Elio&#8217;s 1957 book, the Sacred and the Profane, the Nature of Religion. So while profanity isn&#8217;t intrinsically sinful, it is sinful to take something that is sacred, including a sacred name and use it for a nons sacred or to use it for a profane purpose like expressing frustration or anger. Doing so will get you slapped by Sean Connery,
CLIP:
Two selfless martyrs, Jesus Christ. *slap* That&#8217;s for blasphemy.
Trent:
The catechism says blasphemy is contrary to the respect do God and His holy name. It is in itself a grave sin. The second commandment forbids the abuse of God&#8217;s name, IE, every improper use of the names of God, Jesus Christ, but also the Virgin Mary and all the saints. A clear example of this would be the woman at a protest of the Daniel Penny trial who said,
CLIP:
These wonderful white people, I hope they celebrate their Christmas while the Neely family is praying and asking God for comfort. God damn them in goddamn America.
Trent:
Before he was dismissed from the clerical state, father Frank Pavone got in trouble for abusing God&#8217;s name. When he tweeted about this GD loser Biden and is morally corrupt, America hating God, hating Democrat party, a post he later apologized for and went to confession over. But blasphemy doesn&#8217;t just involve using God&#8217;s name as a curse. It also involves making crew jokes about God or the saints. Remember, blasphemy is when we profane the sacred. For example, it is blasphemous to use the sanctuary of a church for a vulgar music video. It&#8217;s happened in 2023 in a Sabrina Carpenter music video, which led to disciplinary action against the priest who unwittingly allowed this to happen. It also includes making crude jokes about God or the saints that I&#8217;ve alluded to in previous episodes, and I won&#8217;t repeat here. Now, obviously nobody&#8217;s perfect. We all say things we regret, but it&#8217;s one thing to struggle with bad language and then be contrite about it.
It&#8217;s quite another thing to revel in bad language and verbal abuse while claiming to be Christian. Once again, it&#8217;s not about the specific curse words themselves. That&#8217;s not what I&#8217;m concerned about as much as I&#8217;m concerned about their use in abusing other people. The catechism says deliberate hatred is contrary to charity. Hatred of the neighbor is a sin when one deliberately wishes him. Evil hatred of the neighbor is a grave sin when one deliberately desires him grave harm. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. You can&#8217;t love your enemies when you tell them f you or call them derogatory names. Here&#8217;s a quote from a self-described Catholic with a large platform berating a man for liking a meme he didn&#8217;t enjoy. He said, look at this disgusting fat P word.
Look at this effing ft tar, and for those who say, this influencer was just joking around, I&#8217;ve mentioned before Proverbs 26 18, like a madman who throws firebrands arrows and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, I&#8217;m only joking, but here&#8217;s what Saint Alfonso Leggo thought of these kinds of jokes, the mouths of hell, which frequently utter immodest words, often regard them as trifles and are careless about confessing them, and when rebuke for this, they answer. I say these words in jest and without malice, in jest, unhappy man. These jests make the devil laugh and shall make you weep for eternity in hell. St. John Ani, likewise said, in spite of its enormity, its horror, its blackness. Is there a more common sin than swearing than the uttering of blasphemies implications and curses? Do we not all have the sorrow of hearing such language coming from the mouths of children who hardly know they&#8217;re our father?
Horrible words which are sufficient to draw down all sorts of evils upon a parish. There&#8217;s also something ironic about how these online Catholics interpret scripture. So when the Bible talks about something that they obsess over, they&#8217;ll interpret it very literally. They&#8217;ll read Ephesians chapter five saying, wives also be subject in everything to their husbands and say, that means wives must do anything their husband asks, even if it&#8217;s ally sinful, which is insane, but those same people will simply ignore what Paul said about filthy speech. Even in the same letter where Paul writes, let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion that it may impart grace to those who hear. Let there be no filthiness nor silly talk, nor levity, which are not fitting. But instead, let there be Thanksgiving or Colossians three, put them all away, anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul.
Talk from your mouth. Some of these profane online Christians even try to use the Bible to justify their abusive language and profanity. They do this by citing Philippians three eights use of the word scuba on which they say means in most translations, however, the word is rendered refuse as in the RSV, which says, indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. My Lord, for his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as refuse scuba on in order that I may gain Christ. It&#8217;s something of a biblical urban legend that scuba on means or that it was an abusive insult. The word means garbage or dung. When it&#8217;s talking about fecal matter, there is little evidence. The word was used as an insult or was considered rude because it was used in ancient agricultural reports to describe the waste that appears in threshing floors when wheat is harvested.
The first century Jewish author philo uses it that way and the same word is used in Serac 27 4. When a sea is shaken, the refuse remains. There are a few cases in scripture where prophets like Elijah own their opponents by making fun of their non-existent God who can&#8217;t take part in a miracle off, or some of the biblical authors express their human emotions. Like in Galatians five 12 where Paul gets so mad about the Judaizers that he says they should just cut off their whole members if they love circumcision so much, but in general, scripture teaches us to be patient with opponents not to own them. Paul wrote in two Timothy 2 24, 25, the Lord&#8217;s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher forbearing correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth.
Compare this to another prominent Christian YouTuber who told a former female Pornographer, I&#8217;m not going to take correction from a whore. Get effing real, get effed. When someone becomes Christian through a valid baptism, that sacrament washes away his or her past sins, so it&#8217;s not okay to use those sins as a slur against the person just because you&#8217;re having a heated disagreement with them, especially when the slur makes it sound like they still engage in the sinful behavior. One Corinthians six, nine through 11 says, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the immoral nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God, such were some of you.
We should treat former prostitutes and pornographers like we treat former abortionists or former gang members. We should pray for them and encourage them to share their testimony when it&#8217;s genuinely helpful to other people, especially those who might be struggling with those same sins, while at the same time being cautious about giving these new converts a large public platform since they need to grow into their new faith and it&#8217;s easy at the start of your new faith to be theologically confused. Check on my episode on how to engage New OnlyFans converts in the description below. We should be kind to converts with especially sinful or dark pasts, but we should also remind them that they have an obligation to show charity to others even if other Christians mistreat them. It&#8217;s kind of like that meme where the Christian hardcore biker is peacefully praying while the suburban Christians mock him.
All of this is why St. James said the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set a blaze by a small fire if the tongue is a fire, profanity, and harsh language, while not intrinsically evil can act like gasoline being poured on that fire and inflame hateful desires. By the way, what I&#8217;m saying here is not tone policing or being effeminate as some of my critics are bound to say. In fact, I&#8217;ve seen some of these Catholic critics say, stop listening to feminized P words. Sometimes men speak directly and use harsh language. Yes, men should be direct and sometimes harsh. Sodomy is perverted. Transgenderism is a mental disorder. Abortion is murder, but you can be courageous without being crude. A real man knows when to hold his tongue so he can save profanity for the times when it isn&#8217;t sinful to utter, but instead as a powerful rhetorical effect.
That&#8217;s why the book of Sax says, do not accustom your mouth to Lew vulgarity for it involves sinful speech. A man accustomed to use insulting words will never disciplined all his days. Christians who use excessive profanity or abusive language remind me of junior high students who smoke cigarettes or vape in order to look cool. Even though when they do that, it&#8217;s as the kids say, cringe. Finally, we have to take into account how people hear our words so we don&#8217;t become a scandalous stumbling block to those who need to hear the gospel, but might be put off by one&#8217;s choice of profane or abusive language. That&#8217;s why St. Paul says, conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so that you may know how you ought to answer every one. Thank you so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.

The Problem Of Profane Christians

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The sacrifice of Christ and the Eucharist are one single sacrifice.

In this free-for-all-Good-Friday Trent shares some resources to help you defend Jesus&#8217; crucifixion.

FFAF: Defending Jesus’ Crucifixion

In this episode Trent sits down with Jimmy Akin to debrief his recent debate on the reliability of the Gospels with renowned scholar and critic Bart Ehrman.

Has Bart Ehrman Disproved the Gospels? (with Jimmy Akin)

In this episode, Trent continues his discussion of the papacy with the Protestant YouTube channel “Gospel Simplicity.”

Sharing the Papacy with a Protestant (Part II)

In this episode, Trent examines Protestant views of salvation and shows why they don&#8217;t make sense apart from one Catholic doctrine about sin.

Protestants Should Believe in this Catholic Doctrine on Sin

In this episode Trent shares a conversation he took part in with atheist Alex O’Connor, agnostic Joe Schmid, and Protestant Cameron Bertuzzi on the problem of evil.

DIALOGUE: Does Evil Disprove God? (with Alex O’Connor, Joe Schmid, and Cameron Bertuzzi)

It’s official: the Horn family is leaving the state of California. Trent will still be working for Catholic Answers but in this episode find out why they’re leaving and where they’re going!

Why we’re leaving California

Modern people often have an unrealistic view of &#8220;development&#8221; in the early Church, thinking that ideas such as the divinity of Christ or practices such as the celebration of the Mass were products of early Church life rather than things received directly from Jesus. Joe Heschmeyer, author of The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, helps debunk some myths about where the Mass came from.

The Mass in the Early Church

Karlo Broussard explains the important theological distinctions we must make when determining if a grave offense (such as leaving the Church) will condemn someone to Hell, and why we can never know for certain whether any one soul has lost their salvation.

Can You Lose Your Salvation By Leaving the Catholic Church?

Trent Horn explains to a caller who is living chastely in an invalid marriage why he is allowed to enter the Church but is not allowed on a retreat, and lists the steps he can take to rectify the situation.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Vince in Cape Girardeau, Missouri listening on 89.1 FM, Vince, you are on with Trent Horn.
Caller: Thank you so much for taking my call. Trent, my question is this&#8230;let me preface with, what I&#8217;m rejecting is the apparent contradiction in the application of the Catholic morality code. I came into the Church in 2014 with an invalid marriage. My wife had been married previously and I had not, and we got married before I came into the Church some years before. I was told initially that I couldn&#8217;t come fully into the Church because of the marriage and so I asked the priest, &#8220;Does it matter if I&#8217;ve been living in abstinence?&#8221; And he said, &#8220;Yes that does, if you&#8217;re living as brother and sister you can come into the Church.&#8221; So I get that.
Well, this year in January, I had one of my RCIA teachers asked me if I would like to go to a Cursillo movement in March, and I said absolutely, I was excited and it thrilled, and then when I sold out the paperwork and then, you know, he was going to be my sponsor, he said, &#8220;Well, the priest has said that you can&#8217;t go because of your marriage, even though I&#8217;m still living abstinently from my wife. So the most important thing, coming into the Church, is allowable and acceptable; however for me to utilize the&#8230; like the Cursillo movement, the tools I guess, so to speak, to advance my faith, and help me be able to share my faith, I mean I can&#8217;t take part in that, because of the invalid marriage in which I&#8217;m still living abstinently, so do I stay where I&#8217;m at, and have conjugal relations, and just go to confession every week, or, you know, what—I am rejecting the application of&#8230;it&#8217;s not consistent. I can come into the Church but I can&#8217;t go to a Cursillo movement. Can you help me with that?
Trent: I think I can, though I do commend you, Vince, as people have been discussing in the Catholic blogosphere and news a lot lately about those individuals who are in invalid marriages, and speaking about whether they can receive Communion or not, and whether we can expect anyone to live as brother and sister, to live chastely if they&#8217;re in an invalid marriage, and many people just say, &#8220;Well, it can&#8217;t be done.&#8221;
Well you, my friend, are living proof it most certainly CAN be done, and so I commend you for that, and to—in this day and age when people think that God&#8217;s grace is&#8230;its power has no standing, can&#8217;t hold a candle to the power of the sexual urge, it&#8217;s very very sad, even when some Catholics say, &#8220;Well, yeah yeah, there&#8217;s grace, yeah yeah yeah, but look, you can&#8217;t expect people to live this way.&#8221; Yes you can, &#8217;cause as St. Paul says in the letter to the Philippians, through Christ—&#8221;I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me.&#8221; So don&#8217;t give that up, continue to let God&#8217;s grace in your heart and to live the moral life you are living now. And it&#8217;s wonderful to see that, to uphold the beauty and dignity of marriage in what you&#8217;re doing.
So I would say it&#8217;s definitely—it makes no sense to say—I mean the only argument one could give is if, maybe if you were a leader in this program, and there&#8217;s a worry about about scandal or something like that, but I would say that if you have made this commitment to living chastely, that shouldn&#8217;t be an impediment at all to taking part in a retreat or any kind of other spiritual practice. Now, is the priest who said this, Vince, the same priest you spoke with about coming into the Church in the first place, or a different priest?
Caller: No, actually, it&#8217;s not. Since I came into the Church, there has been a changing of the guard, so to speak, so yeah, the priest that has told me that I can&#8217;t go to the Cursillo movement is a different priest than the one who said that I could come into the Church under the condition of chastity.
Trent: It reminds me of what happened to the Israelites in the Exodus. It says in the book of Exodus, you know, Joseph, a Hebrew, saved Egypt, and all the Jews were welcome to be there, and the book of Exodus says, well, then there was a new Pharaoh that came into town who didn&#8217;t know Joseph, and then everything fell apart for the Hebrews after that and they were enslaved. So here&#8217;s another priest that&#8217;s come along and may not be as familiar with your situation, you know, so I would recommend stay living the chaste, moral life you&#8217;re living, and understand that in living this life, the devil is going to throw all kinds of temptations at you, including temptations to be frustrated or want to give that up, through other Catholics who are not understanding, so I pray that you don&#8217;t give in to that temptation.
And to find a resolution here, you may want to appeal to go to maybe a larger regional director for the Cursillo movement, or a representative from the diocese, from the office of marriage and family, for example, in your own diocese, to go one rung up and say, &#8220;Hey, here&#8217;s my situation, I really want to do this, and the person involved here isn&#8217;t understanding. Can you help me?&#8221; It&#8217;s just similar to how we would resolve an issue anywhere else. That might be what I would recommend, but I&#8217;d also recommend to keep praying and stay strong in the face of temptations like these, to want to kind of give up in frustration, so do you see what I&#8217;m saying here?
Caller: I do. And you have been helpful, and you&#8217;ve given me a resource and I so much appreciate it, and I listen to the show often, a Catholic channel every day basically, and it has been very helpful and I appreciate you, Trent, thank you so much.
Trent: No problem. Stay strong, God bless, my friend Vince, have a good one.

Contradictions in the Church’s Application of Moral Teachings?

Is the ‘Church’ an invisible body of believers?

If God Is All-Good, Why Does Evil Exist?

Does “Pointless Evil” Disprove God?

Problem of Evil: Could It Justify the Devil?

&#8220;If God Is All-Good, Why Does Evil Exist?&#8221; This episode delves into the complexities of evil and suffering, addressing questions such as whether &#8220;pointless evil&#8221; disproves God&#8217;s existence and if the problem of evil could justify the presence of the devil. Join us as we explore these challenging topics with clarity and depth.
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If God Is All-Good, Why Does Evil Exist? Evil and Suffering

Do you know someone who isn’t exactly hostile to God and religion but just doesn’t seem to care much about them one way or the other? Such a person exhibits religious indifference:the failure to think seriously about religion and accordingly to give God his due. 
This is a general definition, but in real life indifference occurs in a variety of forms and to varying degrees. One common form of indifference involves a failure to take religion seriously due to disbelief in a personal, present God. Such disbelief leads the indifferentist to treat all religious beliefs and behaviors as absurd since God—whatever he may be—cannot know (or care) what we do in this life. This radical closed-mindedness towards religion that results from such skepticism is called closed indifference. 
Not every unbeliever is a closed indifferentist. Some skeptics take religious claims seriously. This was notably evident in the twentieth century, before the rise of the New Atheism. Atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie, for example, made an honorable attempt at rebutting theistic arguments when he published The Miracle of Theism in 1982. Many theistic philosophers took his philosophical charges against the classical arguments for God’s existence seriously then—and still do today. 
Mackie was not alone. Antony Flew, one of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, was respected by believers and unbelievers alike. Indeed, Flew took the arguments against and for God so seriously that at the turn of the millennium—despite his first-rate philosophical contribution to atheistic thought—he would argue himself into deism, finding himself rationally unable to reject the existence of God. In a discussion in 2004 with Christian professor Gary Habermas, Flew said: 
<blockquote>I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence is now much stronger than it ever was before. And it was from Aristotle that Aquinas drew the materials for producing his Five Ways (<a href="https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/lts_fac_pubs/333/">“My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism,”</a> online at digitalcommons.liberty.edu).</blockquote>
Aristotle’s first cause argument for God so impressed Flew that it led him to theism, even though he insisted his “discovery of the divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena . . . a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith” (<a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/Flewq.html">“There Is a God”</a>). 
Catholics everywhere, like Flew, have also found the Aristotelean approach to arguing for God—especially as developed later by St. Thomas Aquinas—to be deeply compelling. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, would beg to differ. Consider the following remarks in The God Delusion, which are representative of all-out dismissal of St. Thomas’s philosophical case for God: 
<blockquote>Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design.</blockquote>
In only a few pages, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/dawkins-vs-aquinas-fail">Dawkins attempts to reduce</a> to mere rubbish Aquinas’s classic Five Ways and his related arguments for the divine attributes. But as other critics have pointed out, one can hardly take seriously this four-page attempt to take down one of Western civilization’s greatest philosophers. If Dawkins wants to take a serious stab at heavy hitters such as Aristotle and Aquinas, so be it—but he should at least try. We should not take Dawkins seriously, except for the fact that many armchair skeptics today have done so. 
Such dishonest caricaturing is symptomatic of closed indifference; and the intellectual apathy it betrays has upset even fellow unbelievers such as philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse, who writes: 
<blockquote>
Unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, “What caused God?” as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/02/atheism-dawkins-ruse">“</a>Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute,” online at theguardian.com).
</blockquote>
How do we awaken the closed indifferentists? The solution could be as simple as reintroducing arguments for God’s existence and inviting the spiritually indifferent into a serious discussion. It could be that many closed indifferentists have simply never heard a proper explanation of such proofs before. Antony Flew admitted, after his conversion to deism, “I was not a specialist on Aristotle. . . . I was reading parts of his philosophy for the first time.” It is easy to assume nonbelievers have heard more than they have.
It could also be the case that, in addition to never hearing a clear and rational case for belief in God, many indifferentists have never been challenged to give an account for their own skepticism. As the respected atheist philosopher Quentin Smith observes, “The great majority of naturalist philosophers have an unjustified belief that naturalism is true and unjustified belief that theism (or supernaturalism) is false” (<a href="https://www.pdcnet.org/philo/content/philo_2001_0004_0002_0195_0215">“</a>The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” online at pdcnet.org). 
We might also remind closed indifferentists of the costs of their beliefs. Many skeptics are strict materialists, for example—they believe in nothing outside of physical reality. This obviously rules out God, angels, and the like. But this also means that mental thoughts, for instance, amount to nothing more than a kind of secretion of the brain. It also means that we have, to quote biologist Anthony Cashmore, no more free will than a bowl of sugar. This calls into question whether we can really be responsible for our actions—a line of reasoning most closed indifferentists probably haven’t considered. 
Since God has placed in our hearts a hunger for him and his truth, I would like to think that, deep down, every human being has in interest in religious questions—like those regarding the meaning of life, morality, and life after death. Our evangelical task, therefore, is, first and foremost, to show that we are willing to take the indifferentist’s thoughts and questions seriously and, second, to be prepared to give a compelling account for the hope that is within us. We plant the seeds; God takes care of the growing.

‘It Doesn’t Matter:’ How to Deal with Closed Indifference

Did The Vatican Just REVERSE Its View On Mary?

The public, worldwide conversation about UFOs (also known as UAP) has become more widespread and mainstream in recent years. It presents Catholics with a challenge: Does the Church teach that angels are the only form of nonhuman intelligence created by God? Is belief in extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) or other forms of nonhuman intelligence (NHI) contrary to the Catholic faith?
For essential context in this discussion, we must consider the history of the NHI conversation in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Have there been prominent, theologically faithful voices over the centuries who believed in NHI, or were at least open to the possibility of it, and saw no conflict between that notion and the truths of divine revelation?
There have been indeed.
Pre-Christian Greek philosophical ideas about the cosmos served largely as the “science” of the day for most Catholic thinkers in the ancient and medieval worlds. The two most influential Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, insisted that the Earth was the center of a single universe, with the other heavenly bodies revolving around it. They thought Mars, Venus, and the other planets were wandering stars, with no concept of a planet as a rocky or gaseous ball on which life could exist. There was thus little room in the dominant ancient Western cosmology for extraterrestrial intelligence. Such creatures would have nowhere to live.
Even so, the possibility of two particular forms of ETI was admitted. Aristotle once suggested that the moon might be inhabited. Plato thought the stars were sentient beings with souls that moved their bodies across the sky. This latter notion of ETI was considered a reasonable possibility by St. Augustine (354-430), one of the greatest theologians of the ancient Church.
Not surprisingly, then, most Catholic thinkers who considered the matter throughout these centuries had no notion of intelligent life on other planets. But some believed in a different kind of nonhuman, non-angelic intelligence: They thought at least some of the pagan mythological figures, such as centaurs, satyrs, and fauns, actually existed. Among those who held this view were St. Augustine (City of God, XV, 23) and <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3008.htm">St. Jerome</a> (347-420), the latter known as “the father of biblical scholarship.”
The medieval world was largely still under the influence of Aristotle, especially St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). So he had no concept of planets as we know them, and thus no speculation about inhabited planets. He was open, however, as Augustine had been, to the ancient idea that the stars are intelligent living creatures, constituting a different form of ETI.
In the fifteenth century, one prominent Catholic thinker made a decisive turn from the ancient, earth-centered model of the cosmos. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a German theologian, philosopher, and astronomer, anticipated many aspects of modern cosmology. The universe has no center, he insisted; earth is only one planet among many; the heavenly bodies are made of the same basic elements as earth and (he speculated) most likely host intelligent species.
We might have expected Cusa’s rather radical break with philosophical tradition to provoke considerable opposition. Yet his appointment as a cardinal, a papal legate, and a papal adviser, and his participation in the General Council of Basel (1431), all suggest that within the Catholic Church, he was respected and embraced by authorities at the highest levels. Meanwhile, his contemporary, the French philosopher and theologian William of Vorilong (also known as Guillaume de Varouillon, ca. 1392-1463), was speculating about an infinity of inhabited planets.
In the following generation, Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish mathematician, astronomer, and doctor of canon law, sparked the famous “Copernican revolution” of the sixteenth century in science with his heliocentric (“sun-centered”) model of the cosmos. His findings implied that the planets have physical compositions similar to that of the earth. Though we have no record that Copernicus pondered their possible inhabitants, this new realization led many of his followers to propose the existence of ETI.
In the seventeenth century, the discoveries of the Catholic astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), after considerable controversy, opened the door to further speculation about ETI. In his Apology for Galileo (1633), the Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher Tomasso Campanella (1568-1639) noted that no decree had ever been issued by the Church denying the possibility of other inhabited worlds. That notion was contrary to Aristotle, he said, not to Scripture.
Around the year 1700, the Italian exorcist Fr. Ludovico Sinistrari (1632?-1701) argued confidently that the Christian faith did not rule out extraterrestrial intelligence. He also cited approvingly the statements of Augustine and Jerome that affirmed the existence of non-angelic NHI, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/54243/pg54243-images.html">offering evidence</a> from his personal experience and that of other exorcists that such creatures are real.
In the eighteenth century, the Croatian Jesuit priest, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711-87) taught at the Collegium Romanum and the University of Padua. He proposed the existence of not only ETI, but entire parallel universes existing outside our own. His speculations foreshadowed in certain ways our modern theories about the possibility of a multiverse.
By the nineteenth century, the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence had become widespread among Catholic and other Christian theologians. Those who thought the existence of ETI to be certain, probable, or at least possible included prominent clergymen, religious, and theologians in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States. Among those best known in the U.S. were Fr. Joseph Pohle (1852-1922), a member of the founding faculty of The Catholic University of America in D.C. and author of Star Worlds and Their Inhabitants; Fr. George Mary Searle (1839-1918), director of the astronomical observatory of the same university; and Fr. Januarius De Concilio (1836-98), a college and seminary professor who attended the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore and played an essential role in creating the standard edition of the popular Baltimore Catechism.
In that same century, Ven. Andrea Beltrami (1870-97), an Italian Salesian priest who received the habit from St. John Bosco, reportedly prayed for the inhabitants of other planets and devoted one of sixteen books he wrote (yet unpublished) to the topic of ETI.
One last Catholic voice of the nineteenth century deserves mention. The celebrated German mystic and stigmatist Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) allegedly received private revelations throughout her lifetime, including visions of inhabited celestial bodies. Some have questioned whether the documents of her visions were altered. But we should note that for half a century after their publication, a number of eminent Catholic theologians who examined the documents apparently found no reason to doubt that the existence of the extraterrestrial creatures she reported would be in accord with the Church’s teaching.
In the early twentieth century, research into paranormal phenomena was one of the many interests of the English Jesuit Fr. Herbert Thurston (1856-1939). A prolific scholar, he made extensive contributions to the Catholic Encyclopedia, writing on spiritual, historical, liturgical, and literary subjects. Thurston came to conclusions similar to those of Sinistrari: Numerous cases brought to exorcists, he reasoned, seem to involve examples of NHI that are not demonic.
In the mid-twentieth century, a flurry of brief speculations about ETI by Christian theologians appeared in response to the beginning of the Space Age. The most energetic discussions of the possibility came from Catholic theologians, and the dominant position of this group was that belief in extraterrestrial intelligence is consistent both with science and with the teaching of the Church.
Later in the century, some highly intriguing references to ETI came from three canonized saints. According to the French Catholic philosopher and theologian Jean Guitton, Pope St. Paul VI (1897-1978) once told him that he found the possibility of ETI reasonable and could see how the universal Church could include such creatures. The renowned Italian Capuchin friar, priest, and mystic St. Pio of Pietrelcina (also known as Padre Pio, 1887-1968) once declared emphatically in private conversation that other beings exist on other planets who did not sin and fall as we did.
More recently, Pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005) was once asked in a public audience by a youngster, “Holy Father, are there any aliens?” Tellingly, the saint did not reply, “No, that would be contrary to our faith,” or “If they exist, then . . .” Instead, he said simply, “Always remember: They are children of God as we are.” (This anecdote is <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/134453494/Corrado-Balducci">reported</a> by Msgr. Corrado Balducci in “Ufology and Theological Clarifications,” remarks presented at Pescara, Italy, June 8, 2001.)
The Holy Father’s reply is especially important for the debate about what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches about ETI. He was the pope who commissioned the Catechism and oversaw its creation, and then approved, promulgated, and warmly endorsed it in an apostolic letter. Who could be a more reliable interpreter of its meaning?
If this pope had believed that the existence of ETI is contrary to the Catholic faith and the teaching of the Catechism, he would have been obliged to say so to the youngster, and to all in the audience that day. To do otherwise would have been to mislead them.
All these faithful Catholic voices from across the centuries obviously don’t prove the existence of non-angelic, nonhuman intelligence. We should also note that other theologians throughout history have argued against such possibilities. But this brief historical survey does demonstrate that many highly regarded Catholic thinkers have concluded that the existence of such NHI would not be contrary to the Catholic faith.

Aliens and the Catholic Church

Joe dissects the argument that the Presentation at the Temple in Luke 2 is proof that Mary sinned, because she had to make a &#8220;sin offering.&#8221;
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer, and I wanted to respond to an argument. I sometimes see Protestants raise against the Sinlessness of Mary. The argument is very simple. If Mary was sinless, then why does Luke 2 22 to 24 show her offering the required sin purification sacrifice commanded in Leviticus 12 for women after childbirth? And sure enough, Luke two describes Mary offering a sacrifice in the temple according to what is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtle doves are two young pigeons. Now, Luke is quoting Leviticus 12, which in most English translations says it&#8217;s about a sin offering to be made after a woman has born a son. So it looks like a slam dunk case Mary must have sent, and you&#8217;ll find even well-respected Protestant scholars making this argument. For example, norm Geisler and Ralph McKinsey argue in their book Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, that scripture disproves Mary&#8217;s Sinlessness because she even presented an offering to the Jewish priest arising out of her sinful condition, which was required by law.
This would not have been necessary if she were sinless, but if that&#8217;s right, what sin did Mary commit that required a sin offering? Leviticus 12 is about the offering women make after giving birth to a son, but hopefully no Christian thinks that this proves it was a sin for Mary to give birth to Jesus. So what is actually going on here as we&#8217;re going to see Leviticus 12 is talking about ritual purification after childbirth. It&#8217;s not talking about moral guilt. And there&#8217;s a fascinating aspect to the passage that the early Christians realized and many people today don&#8217;t, that Mary was explicitly exempted from needing to make this sacrifice, and yet she did so anyway. But if Mary didn&#8217;t need to make the sacrifice, then why did she? Well, speaking of sacrificial offerings you don&#8217;t need to make. I want to thank everyone who does just that over@shamelessjoe.com.
It&#8217;s wonderful to not need to take sponsors and you all make that possible. I try to show my gratitude by sharing cool perks like ad free episodes that drop a day early. I&#8217;m going to have a longer version of this episode along with things called Joe Notes that have sources used in each episode with a PDF cheat sheet so you can geek out on whatever the topic is, plus weekly live streams in which I answer patron questions. So if you want to join the party, come over to shameless joe.com if you&#8217;re already there. Thank you. So the first thing to know is that what Mary is offering in the temple is what&#8217;s called a hatta In Hebrew, this is often translated as SAN offering, but it&#8217;s actually a purification offering. The Jewish scholar Rabbi Jacob Milgram pointed out decades ago translating the Hebrew here is sin offering is inaccurate on all grounds, contextually morphologically and etymologically.
That is calling it a sin offering doesn&#8217;t really capture either what the Hebrew actually says or what the context means or what the sacrifice actually is. Now I&#8217;m going to spare you the finer details of the grammatical argument except to say that he points out that the Hebrew conjunction here always means purity or purification and other scholars agree. So there has been a shift among some scholars and some Bible translations to translate this as purification offering instead. But most people, and most Bibles still know it as sin offering. But even if you don&#8217;t know Hebrew, you can see that Milgram is right, that the offering is not principally about the forgiveness of sins. It&#8217;s about being purified to go before God. Leviticus actually prescribes a different type of sacrifice called the guilt offering for the forgiveness of moral transgressions. But the hatta is offered for instances in which you become ritually impure and couldn&#8217;t enter the temple.
Now, to be sure that could be because of some sin you&#8217;d committed either intentionally or unintentionally, but it could also happen for reasons having nothing to do with sin. For instance, if a woman menstruated or if a man had a bodily discharge that rendered you ritually unclean, and you needed to offer the hit habitat, likewise, think about the way sick people like lepers were treated. They had to announce that they were unclean. But the Bible isn&#8217;t saying that they are morally sinful for being lepers. The problem is that they&#8217;re potentially contagious and they&#8217;re also richly impure. And so if you were sick and then recovered, the priest would make a huta to render you clean again. Now the same rules applied if you touched a dead body say, now if you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, this is what&#8217;s going on. The priest and Levite are worried about helping this man because he might already be dead and touching a dead body renders you impure and you can&#8217;t go into the temple.
You would need a purification offering an attack before you did so. But Jesus is clear that the priests and Levite are wrong in this instance. They shouldn&#8217;t be so worried about ritual impurity that they&#8217;re unwilling to help their neighbor. In fact, Jesus repeatedly criticizes those like the Pharisees who obsess about ritual impurity rather than about moral purity. Think about the difference like this. If you commit a mortal sin, you need to go to confession before mass. But if you go on a morning run and get all sweaty, you need to take a shower and change clothes before mass. So both of those things are in some way about going before the Lord in the right way, but it would be a mistake to conflate them or to assume that this means running and being sweaty as a sin. I can&#8217;t be too careful, but it&#8217;s not sinful.
Ancient Jews and early Christians understood this difference. As Rabbi Milgram points out, the ancient rabbinical commentators were very clear that these sacrifices are prescribed for specific physical impurities, whether that&#8217;s having given birth suffering from leprosy. In the case of a Nazarite touching a dead body and not one sage claims that the afflicted brings this sacrifice because of his sins. Indeed, this idea is vigorously denied. Milgram actually offers one example that is so clear. I&#8217;m not sure how someone would even argue against it in Exodus 29 when it&#8217;s talking about the right for the ordination of priests and for the consecration of the altar, a hatta, a purification offering is made for the altar. Now, obviously it makes no sense to say that the altar send and it needed to be forgiven. Rather the altar is being consecrated just as an individual be cleansed from all impurities before entering the temple or embarking on divine service.
Okay, so given all of that, why is Mary making a hatta in the temple 40 days after Christmas? Well, because childbirth makes you richly impure, and Leviticus 12 says that you were to make a purification offering 40 days later. This has nothing to do with sin here and everything to do with the fact that women have come in contact with blood during childbirth. That is why Leviticus 12 explicitly talks about the blood of her purifying. And again, hopefully no Christian is going to argue. This means it was sinful for Mary to give birth to Jesus or that the birth of Christ was a kind of transgression that needed a sin offering as atonement. Instead, the presentation of the temple is about exactly what Luke tells us. It&#8217;s about their purification according to the law of Moses. But there&#8217;s another dimension as well that I think is just fascinating here.
Leviticus 12 doesn&#8217;t just talk about a woman who has a son. It talks about a woman who conceives and bears a male child. On the surface, it might just sound like it&#8217;s spelling out the different stages of pregnancy like it does in Isaiah seven where it says that a virgin will conceive and bear a son. But in Isaiah seven, the verb used as hurrah, which just means conceive. But in Leviticus 12 here, the root word is actually coming from Zara, which means seed. The Hebrew here literally seems to be saying that a purification offering is needed when a woman receives seed and bears a male child. This might not seem like an important point. I mean, how else is a woman going to get pregnant? Well, there is one obvious exception, and early Christians like origin noticed remarkably quickly, I might add that Leviticus 12 literally does not apply to Mary because of the virgin birth.
Since Mary never received seed, she was free from the demands of the law, and yet she submits to the law. Anyway, that is, she knew she wasn&#8217;t bound by Leviticus 12 here, she could have just stayed home. So why doesn&#8217;t she? Well, for starters, it&#8217;s probably fair to point out that her neighbors wouldn&#8217;t have known the virginal nature of Jesus&#8217;s conception and birth. So rather than going around insisting, no, trust me, this was a virgin birth, she avoids scandalizing others by simply submitting to the law. And her son actually does something similar throughout his earthly ministry. For instance, in Matthew 17, Jesus points out that he and Peter are actually exempt from paying the temple tax yet to avoid giving scandal, causing offense, he performs a miracle and pays it for the two of them anyway. Now, this fact, Mary&#8217;s voluntary submission to the law would give rise to some beautiful reflections like this one from the venerable bead dearly beloved brothers.
Let us look more carefully at the words of the law which we have set before you, and we will see most clearly how Mary, God&#8217;s blessed mother and a perpetual virgin was along with the sun sheor most free from all objection to the law. Since the law says that a woman who had received seed and given birth was to be judged unclean, and that after a long period she, along with the offspring she had born were to be cleansed by victims offered to God. It is evident that the law does not describe as unclean that woman who without receiving man&#8217;s seed, gives birth as a virgin, nor does it so describe the son who is born to her, nor does it teach that she had to be cleansed by saving sacrificial offerings. So neither Mary nor Jesus are actually impure here. Neither one is in need of sacrificial offerings to purify them here.
And yet bead says, but as our Lord and Savior, who in his divinity was the one who gave the law when he appeared as a human being willed to be under the law so that he might redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. He&#8217;s quoting Galatians four there. So to his blessed mother, who by a singular privilege was above the law, nevertheless did not shun being made subject to the principles of the law for the sake of showing us an example of humility according to that saying of the wise man. And here he quotes, sir, act three. The greater you are, the more you should humble yourself in all things. So where is evangelicals like Geisler and McKinsey? See, and Mary&#8217;s purification a proof of her sinfulness. That argument is based on a misunderstanding of the attack and one which frankly treats Christmas as a sin that needs atoning.
The much older and better Christian reading is that Mary&#8217;s offering in the temple here points to her incredible humility and offering a purification sacrifice that strictly speaking, she didn&#8217;t need to offer. No, Luke two doesn&#8217;t show us that Mary was a sinner. But in fairness, Luke two by itself doesn&#8217;t show us that Mary wasn&#8217;t a sinner. I know many Protestants get very hung up on this Catholic teaching, understandably so, which is why you have people using Luke two as evidence that she did sin. They&#8217;re taught that Jesus was the only sinless human who ever lived. And since we&#8217;re not explicitly told in scripture that Mary never sinned or that she wasn&#8217;t immaculately conceived, therefore, it must not be true. But you may be surprised to find out that many early Christians believe that she was sinless. So if that&#8217;s not explicitly spelled out in scripture, why do so many early Christians believe she was without sin? Well, I explore one of those reasons right here. For Shameless Popery. I&#8217;m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
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Does Luke 2 DISPROVE Mary’s Sinlessness?

Genesis 6 says that shortly before the Flood, “the sons of God” married “the daughters of men,” who gave birth to unusually tall people whom the Bible refers to as the Nephilim (Aramaic, “giants”).
In a <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-angels-mate-with-human-women">previous post</a>, we mentioned the three main theories about this mysterious incident:
<ol>
<li>The sons of God were the righteous line of Seth, and the daughters of men were the wicked line of Cain.</li>
<li>The sons of God were human rulers, and the daughters of men were common women.</li>
<li>The sons of God were fallen angels, and the daughters of men were human women.</li>
</ol>
As we saw, the first of these doesn’t work because the line of Cain went extinct with the Great Flood, and Genesis says the sons of God also mated with the daughters of men after the Flood, allowing the Israelites to later encounter “the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim)” (Num. 13:33) when they entered the Promised Land.
The second theory is also problematic because the phrase “sons of God” is never used for human rulers in the Bible.
On the other hand, “sons of God” is consistently used in the Old Testament to refer to high-ranking angels, which would support the third interpretation.
Modern people tend to dismiss the third option because angels don’t have physical bodies, but this is something doctrinal development has made clear. This fact was not clear to the ancient Israelites, who didn’t have a problem with embodied angels, and when trying to figure out what an ancient text means, we need to determine what it would have meant to the original author.
Further, Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas have held that even if angels don’t normally have physical bodies, they can assume them. So before we set the third theory aside, let’s consider what evidence we have for it.
One of the books that some New Testament authors read was 1 Enoch. This book is directly quoted in Jude 14-15, which describes it as containing prophecy.
In 1 Enoch, a group of angels decide to leave heaven and marry human women. They also teach mankind destructive skills like how to make weapons for war, how to make cosmetics for seduction, and how to perform magic. They corrupt mankind by these skills, and after they get married, their sons are violent giants, and the resulting corruption brings on the Great Flood.
The fact is that the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 is the most ancient one we have on record. In The Word Biblical Commentary on Jude 6, the British scholar Richard Bauckham writes:
<blockquote>According to Jewish tradition, [angels] descended from heaven to marry human wives and corrupt the human race in the period before the Flood. This was how the account of the “sons of God” in Gen 6:1-4 was universally understood (so far as our evidence goes) until the mid-second century a.d., though the tradition took several varying forms.
From the time of R. Simeon b. Yohai in the mid-second century a.d., the traditional exegesis was replaced in Judaism by an insistence that the “sons of God” were not angels but men. In Christianity, however, the traditional exegesis had a longer life, questioned only in the third century and disappearing in the fifth century.</blockquote>
This understanding was not limited to just one or two sources. In The Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis 6:1, another British scholar, Gordon Wenham, writes,
<blockquote>The “angel” interpretation is at once the oldest view and that of most modern commentators. It is assumed in the earliest Jewish exegesis (e.g., the books of 1 Enoch 6:2ff; Jubilees 5:1), [the Septuagint], Philo De Gigant. 2:358), Josephus (Ant. 1.31) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QapGen 2:1; CD 2:17–19). The [New Testament] (2 Pet 2:4, Jude 6, 7) and the earliest Christian writers (e.g., Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen) also take this line.</blockquote>
The angelic interpretation of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 is thus the universal and earliest view in both Jewish and Christian circles, across a wide range of sources.
What all of the sources have in common, though, is that they were all written in the period around the birth of Christ—either a few centuries before or afterward. But Genesis itself is from an earlier period, and how a text was later interpreted does not automatically tell us how it was interpreted at the time it was written. What would help is if we had material from before Genesis was written that could shed light on the matter . . . and we do.
One of the things that scholars of Genesis have noted is that its author frequently engages in anti-pagan polemics by giving an orthodox alternative to the ideas of surrounding pagan cultures. This is why in Genesis 1:16, he says that “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night,” but he does not name them as the sun and the moon.
The reason is that the words for “sun” and “moon” were also the names of the sun god and the moon god, and he doesn’t want the reader thinking that the high God made the sun god and the moon god. The message is, “They’re just lights! Don’t worship them!”
For those familiar with the ancient Near Eastern background that the author of Genesis is undermining, the background to Genesis 6 is clear. In Mesopotamian literature, there was a group of demigods known as the Apkallu. They were wise and taught mankind the skills that made Mesopotamian civilization great.
The Apkallu also mated with human women before the Great Flood and fathered divine-human hybrid children who were Mesopotamian king-heroes.
The Flood itself comes about differently in Mesopotamian mythology. There, the Flood happened because the human race multiplied so much that it was making too much noise at night and keeping the gods awake, so they sent the Flood to get rid of the problem.
It thus appears that the author of Genesis is rebutting these Mesopotamian ideas in his introduction to the Flood narrative.
Instead of the Apkallu being the good guys who made Mesopotamia great, the sons of God were fallen angels who abandoned heaven and improperly mated with human women. And the skills they taught corrupted mankind and brought on the Flood, which wasn’t a petulant act of the gods because mankind was making too much noise; it was sent because of man’s wickedness.
It thus looks as though we have evidence for the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 both before Genesis was written (with the Mesopotamian Apkallu) and after it was written (in the Jewish literature from around the time of Christ).
This provides significant support for the angelic interpretation, but is there any way we can confirm it? That’s what we’ll discuss in my next post.
Posts in series: <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/are-the-nephilim-biblical-aliens">one</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/7-mysteries-about-the-nephilim">two</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-angels-mate-with-human-women">three</a>

Rebellious Angels and the Great Flood

New Year’s Day promises two certainties: college football bowl games and Christmas trees on the curb. To Catholics, of course, January 1 is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. It&#8217;s a Holy Day of Obligation, and the final day of the Octave of Christmas.
The Church, however, is so generous with joy. She does not end our celebration of the Incarnation with the conclusion of the Octave of Christmas. She extends it to Epiphany. Twelfth Night, as our English brethren call it, is an event Catholics in America should celebrate with more enthusiasm (think: roaring bonfires, grilled meat, lots of singing, red wine, brown ale) and might very well do if it were observed here on the liturgical calendar on January 6, as it is in England, Australia, and Canada, to say nothing of Vatican City.
But the celebrating doesn’t stop there! After Epiphany, the revelry continues until the Baptism of the Lord, the first Sunday after January 6 (usually). And if you want to be really traditional, you can celebrate what the faithful called “Christmastide” before the liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council. In the old rite, Christmastide lasted for forty days to correspond with the forty days of Lent, and the forty days from Easter to Ascension Thursday.
A forty-day party? Gloria in Excelsis! (And people say Trad Cats are a dour bunch.)
Christmastide ends on February 2, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also called Candlemas Day. On this day, the faithful take candles that they will use throughout the year in their homes to Mass to have them blessed.
Here is how the brilliant Benedictine abbot Dom Prosper Guéranger helps us understand the totality of the mystery of Christmastide:
<blockquote>We apply the name of Christmas to the forty days, which begin with the Nativity of Our Lord, December 25, and end with the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, February 2. It is a period, which forms a distinct portion of the Liturgical Year, as distinct, by its own special spirit, from every other, as are Advent, Lent, Easter or Pentecost. One same mystery is celebrated and kept in view the whole forty days. Neither the feasts of the saints, which so abound during this season; nor the time of Septuagesima, with its mournful purple, which often begins before Christmastide is over, seem able to distract our Holy Mother the Church from the immense joy with which she received the glad tidings from the angels (Luke 2:10) on that glorious night for which the world had been longing for 4,000 years. The custom of celebrating the solemnity of our savior&#8217;s nativity by a feast of forty days&#8217; duration is founded on the holy gospel itself; for it tells us that the Blessed Virgin Mary, after spending forty days in the contemplation of the divine fruit of her glorious maternity, went to the Temple, there to fulfill, in most perfect humility, the ceremonies which the law demanded of the daughters of Israel when they became mothers. The feast of Mary&#8217;s purification is, therefore, part of that of Jesus&#8217; birth; and the custom of keeping this holy and glorious period of forty days as one continued festival has every appearance of being a very ancient one, at least in the Roman Church.</blockquote>
The feast in the new rite is called the Presentation of the Lord—same joyful event, different emphasis—but if you really want to be a “sign of contradiction” (get it?), do as they did in ages past! Keep your tree and your decorations up until Candlemas!

Keep Your Christmas Tree Up!

When I was a Baptist, I was stunned to learn that Martin Luther anachronistically read his disagreements with Catholics into the Bible, taking St. Paul out of his original context and making the text on salvation say something it doesn’t. During my time at Harvard, now as a Catholic, I’ve heard the same point on Luther reaffirmed, but this time directly from some of the world’s top biblical scholars. If Luther got justification wrong because he read his sixteenth-century context into the first century, then what else might be off?
The dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees on the tradition of the elders is another example of a Protestant misreading of the Bible. Although Jesus disputes the oral, extrabiblical tradition of the elders, which the Pharisees cite as an authority, Jesus does not reject oral tradition itself. In other words, Jesus rejects certain oral traditions here, but not because they are oral tradition rather than the written word.
Let’s first read the debate in context.
The argument erupts because the Pharisees note that Jesus’ disciples do not wash their hands before eating, which is a Jewish tradition or custom (Matt. 15:1-2, Mark 7:1-5). Jesus charges the Pharisees with hypocrisy, citing Isaiah 29:13, and says, in Mark 7:8, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” In Matthew 15:6, he says, “So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God.”
How does Jesus back this charge? He seemingly changes topics by mentioning that the Pharisees would force someone not to help his mother and father, thus violating one of the Ten Commandments, if the money with which he would have helped his parents is declared “Corban,” or pledged as an offering to God (Matt. 15:3-6, Mark 7:9-13). Jesus emphasizes in both Gospels that the Pharisees are willing to side with a human tradition against the scriptures.
So how does Jesus’ argument deal with the hand-washing tradition? After all, this hand-washing ritual does not technically contradict anything in the Bible. The tradition is likely meant to make the everyday people pure, or pure according to the Pharisees, like the priests in the Temple who are biblically commanded to wash their hands (Exod. 30:17-21).
Rather than dealing directly with the hand-washing tradition itself, Jesus undermines the credibility of the Pharisees, or their vision of how to obey God, which calls into question their traditions, including hand-washing. It’s the equivalent of discrediting a politician and his policy proposals by mentioning a terrible law he once supported.
The earliest document of Rabbinic Judaism, the Mishnah, explains why the Pharisees had extrabiblical laws. It says in m. Avot 1:1, “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.” The idea of building “a fence round the Torah” echoes Deuteronomy 22:8, where a fence is supposed to be made around rooftops so that it is impossible for someone to fall off.
The tradition of the elders is part of this fence. It is supposed to help people not to violate God’s law. Jesus, however, is calling into question the fence of the Pharisees and whether it successfully helps people follow God. Christ does this by questioning whether the Pharisees really understand what God wants, especially given what God has said in Scripture.
There are two things worth noticing. First, Jesus does not completely reject extrabiblical tradition. At most, Jesus is rejecting traditions that contradict Scripture or come from a system that fundamentally misunderstands Scripture. The burden of proof, then, is on the Protestant to show that Catholic traditions actually contradict the Bible or come from a system that fundamentally misunderstands Scripture. That’s a high burden of proof.
Second, Jesus’ argument in its original context concerns moral customs and not the later debates on Tradition between Protestants and Catholics. The fundamental debate between Jesus and the Pharisees is on righteousness according to the Torah. It has nothing to directly say about other kinds of oral traditions, meaning Jesus could technically agree that Moses and Joshua orally commanded later Jewish leaders to make a fence around the Torah, but Jesus simply questions the fence in operation during his time on earth.
Thus, the debate in its original context does not ultimately say what Protestant apologists need it to say.

A Bad Argument for Sola Scriptura

I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times. I know I have. “I can’t worship a God who would send people to hell for not worshipping him.” Some will make a similar claim: “I can’t believe God would send my loving family member to hell for simply being atheist.” These claims make sense to many, but do they hold up to scrutiny?
First things first: I am not here to make judgments on any specific person who has died. God would not be very happy with me if I tried to do that. However, there’s a good reason why Catholics generally claim that we have to believe and worship God in our lifetime in order to be in heaven in the next lifetime.
Many people describe God as “loving”—but there is more to it than that. God actually is love itself. We have two main reasons for believing this.
First, it’s explicit in Scripture. St. John tells us in his first letter that “anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8) John doesn’t tell his audience that God is loving. He tells them that God actually is love.
Another reason we have for believing that God is love itself comes from philosophy. All theists believe that God is necessarily all-loving (i.e., God cannot exist if he is not all-good). All theists also believe that God is self-sufficient, meaning that God is not reliant on anything outside himself to exist. This all seems straightforward. But what if love were something outside God? This would mean that God is reliant on something outside himself to exist. After all, if love does not exist, then God would not exist. This would then mean that God is not self-sufficient—a nightmare for Christian theology!
Another way to think about this would be to consider a situation in which God were “accidentally” all-loving. Essentially, this means that God can be all-loving or not all-loving, and it would not change who he is. God could still exist if he were not all-loving. If this were true, love would either be:
<ul>
<li>caused by something outside God</li>
</ul>
or
<ul>
<li>caused by God.</li>
</ul>
If something outside God made him who he is, we run into problems. This means that God is reliant on something outside him to make him who he is. And so God cannot be God without something that is not God. Likewise, if God caused himself to have these accidents (i.e., God caused himself to be all-loving), then he would change in time: God was not all-loving before, and after, he is. But because there is no “before” or “after” in the general view of God, this cannot happen.
This type of philosophy also helps us to make sure we are worshiping God and God alone. For instance, say someone starts worshiping God because of his love. This would be a rational thing to do, since God’s love is the reason we exist and have the ability to go to heaven. Many Christians throughout history have worshiped God because of his love.
However, what happens if God’s love is something outside himself? In that case, we would be worshiping God and God’s love. This isn’t to say we aren’t worshiping God when we do this; rather, we are worshiping God and something else that is not God as well. If we want to worship God alone, we had better not worship God because of his love . . . if God’s love is something outside God. But since it’s rational to worship God because of his love, and Scripture tells us to worship only God (Exod. 20:3), we can conclude that God is the same as his love. Similarly, in worshiping God’s love, <a href="https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/01/divine-simplicity-and-uncompromising.html">we are really worshipping God</a>.
No matter what reason seems more persuasive to you, it’s vitally important that this technicality is discussed. If God is love itself, the hypothetical quotes I gave in the introduction do not hold up. If God is love itself, and I tell him I do not want anything to do with him in this life, he will allow me to do as I choose and go to a place without love (hell). Alternatively, when we spend time with God in this life, we are showing him that we want to be close to love. That is what allows us to enter heaven.
All in all, it’s vitally important that we make the clarification that God is not merely a loving being, but actually love itself. We have different reasons for believing this, from scriptural to philosophical, but it’s the conclusion to that realization that is most important—when we show God we do not want anything to do with him in this lifetime, we are showing God we do not want anything to do with love. This concludes with God allowing us to go to a place that has no love: hell.

A Loving God Requires Hell

Every time I get dressed, I have an opportunity to ennoble and inspire. How I dress sends a message to all who see me regarding my sense of self-value and my regard for others. I can elevate godless society with beauty. This is the fruit of the virtue of modesty, one of the most hated words in the modern vocabulary.
There is a kind of dressing that respects cultural expectations, but that also inspires and elevates those who see me. This manner of dress answers the call of the Lord Jesus to be salt of the earth and leaven in the dough, a kind of missionary fashion. We must remind ourselves that the virtue of modesty is not a negative condemnation of women, but rather an exhortation to dress appropriately with respect to the occasion, in honor of our station, and with sufficient fabric that draws attention to our faces rather than particular body parts.
I am a full-time wife and homeschooling mother, so I dress in a way that shows the honor of my chosen vocation. I take ten minutes in the morning to put on a lovely outfit, arrange my hair, and put on mascara—not from insecure vanity, but so that I know that I am ready for the day and won’t give another thought to my appearance as I seek to love my family and friends well.
If I were a man, I would have the same responsibility to dress with respect to the occasion, my station, and the dignity of my body. Men dress modestly by dressing with decorum and respect. This is how they show all who see them that they value themselves, their families, and their work.
We might think we have only two options in American culture: embrace cultural pressure to devalue our bodies and be overly casual, or reject our culture and dress like the Amish. But unless we actually are Amish, both options are insufficient. We want to neither embrace the culture of the world nor reject it totally. We want the middle path, the golden mean of virtue, which recognizes the opportunity to evangelize culture through dressing nobly.
We can consider the two extreme poles of vice that lie on either side of the golden middle of modesty: shamelessness and bashfulness.
Shameless dressing is pervasive in our culture. One way it is expressed is through the uglification movement. We see it everywhere: tattoos covering the body, half-shaved heads, piercings everywhere. Anthony Esolen <a href="https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/pagans-without-nature">calls</a> such aberrations ugly, self-advertising, and narcissistic. Deliberate uglification recalls what Saint Augustine said about the devil: he cannot create, but can only corrupt and pollute the good that God has made.
Another expression of shameless dress is the overtly sexy style, which presents the body as an object for lustful viewing. I dressed in an overtly sexy manner before I knew better, and I was aware of the seductive power that I wielded over the opposite sex. This style of dress is more prevalent among women than men, but certainly men, too, can show off their bodies inappropriately.
When I had my conversion to the Catholic faith, I felt ashamed of how I had presented myself. But my solution swung to the opposite extreme: now I wanted to cover up with too much fabric, shapeless and baggy.
This was not a migration to virtue, but rather an embrace of the flip-side vice: the vice of bashfulness, which St. Thomas Aquinas describes as misdirected piety. In my case, I rejected my feminine beauty out of shame, and I wanted to hide from the world. (Nor is this sort of bashfulness restricted to women! Men can be inappropriately bashful, too.)
It was not until I discovered the true definition of modesty that I understood the missionary, evangelizing opportunity I had to dress in a noble and respectful manner. Virginia Nunziante, who wrote the introduction to Christian Fashion in the Teaching of the Church, <a href="https://voiceofthefamily.com/item/christian-fashion-in-the-teaching-of-the-church/">notes</a> the rich opportunity that comes with virtuous dressing : “Beauty and elegance can serve as instruments of the apostolate and the foundation of an authentically Christian fashion” (p. 38).
The love of Christ compels us. The harvest is rich, said Jesus Christ. When we choose honorable modesty in dress, avoiding shamelessness on the one hand and bashfulness on the other, we burn with zeal for the salvation of lost souls. The harvest is so great, and how we dress is an effective tool to reap it.
“Let your light shine before men,” said the Lord Jesus, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Shining before all for the Father’s glory is at the heart of the virtue of modesty.
Many times in the twelve years since I began to dress in a noble way, I have had the opportunity to plant a gospel seed because someone liked my outfit. I can convey that I don’t completely reject the culture in which I live, yet I also preserve the mystery of femininity by forsaking a sexy or edgy look. And if compliments come—“I love your outfit,” or “Your skirt is so pretty,” or “You should come in here more often!”—I don’t have to second-guess myself, wondering if I’m indulging my vanity through my clothes or seeking to draw attention to myself. Rather, adhering to solid, time-tested principles of dress can shrink the ego while also promoting loveliness—it is not so much about how beautiful I am as it is about how beautiful this way of dressing, of presenting the human person, is. I didn’t come up with it, I don’t deserve any special credit for it, and it will work just as well for anyone else.
The heart transformed in Christ ever seeks a connection, a starting point for a conversation. Like Saint Mary Magdalene, I have met the risen Christ and want to talk about him with everyone who’ll listen. Maybe a compliment at the salon can open up a conversation about our Lord. Even when no words are exchanged, a cheerful smile from a respectably dressed man or woman sends a message of encouragement and light, perhaps planting a seed of curiosity as to what makes that one different.
That is modesty. It truly is the golden road, the happy path between two poles. The virtue of modesty, sometimes described as <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3160.htm">a daughter of temperance</a>, promotes human flourishing. Let us not dive headfirst into the culture and mimic its shamelessness, nor reject the culture and hide in bashfulness and shame. Rather, we can evangelize with our whole selves, even without words, down to how we present the “very good” bodies with which God endowed us.

Why Modesty?

How to Explain the Catholic Faith in 30 Seconds

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Where do Catholic Marian teachings come from? 🤔 @AllieBethStuckey

Cy Kellett welcomes Catholic apologist Tim Staples for a discussion on why many Jews did not see Jesus as the Messiah.
Transcript:
Cy: Why didn&#8217;t the Jews recognize Jesus as the Messiah? And the spirit of it was kind of like, well, wasn&#8217;t it just obvious? I didn&#8217;t feel like it was obvious, but I couldn&#8217;t communicate it well to this person. So you communicated in a way that will like, why didn&#8217;t the Jews recognize him if it&#8217;s all so obvious?
Tim: Right. Well, I think that a few did, but very few. Okay, we need to point that out too. There was Simeon and Anna and a few. But the question is obviously a valid one and a good one. But I think what happened is the popular culture had sort of excised certain texts about the Messiah that he was to be a king. Right, right, certain texts.
And let&#8217;s face it, you know, we tend to look at the aspects of the faith that are more favorable to us, things that we like, those are a little more pleasant. Why do you think Christmas is so much more popular than Easter or Good Friday, certainly, or the whole Easter season and Lent and so forth leading up?
Yeah, because Christmas, you have the joy and peace and of course, wonderful. All of which is true. But crucifixion and resurrection, that one, we&#8217;ll set that aside. When&#8217;s Christmas again?
So in the popular culture, the Messiah was gonna be the one who would crush the Roman Empire, establish Israel and the Kingdom of David, reconstituted all over the world. That&#8217;s what. And they&#8217;re looking at Isaiah 2, the lion will lay down with the wolf, or the lion with the lamb and so forth. And all of those texts that refer to peace throughout the world and forever and ever.
Right. So texts of scripture like Isaiah 53 and Wisdom chapter 2 and Psalm 22, all those suffering servant texts, let&#8217;s just say they weren&#8217;t on the top 10 hit list. They weren&#8217;t on the top hundred hit lists. Those things tended to be shelved a bit.
And so when Jesus comes, he was not what they were looking for. That is the popular culture. This guy is supposed to come and think about this, Cy, even after the resurrection. And Jesus has been with them 40 days and now he&#8217;s getting ready to ascend. And what do the apostles, or at least some of them say? Will you restore the kingdom now?
Right. You talk about, you know, Jesus is like, okay, you know, just hang out until Pentecost, alright? And it&#8217;ll all make sense to you. Now, would he establish his kingdom? Yeah, he already had and he already is and he will in full. But they even at that time were not ready for the fullness of understanding of what was coming.
So to me, it&#8217;s understandable why they would have missed their own Messiah, except for the very few. But if they would hang out, if you would hang out and look a little deeper and ask yourself, how is this guy raising the dead? How is this guy? Those were the ones who converted, were the ones who listened to the message and they saw what he did.
But even they didn&#8217;t have full comprehension. They just knew. I haven&#8217;t seen any of you guys raise the dead lately. I haven&#8217;t seen any of you guys, you know, cure the blind. Because of course, that had never happened in the history of Israel. No prophet, no one had ever healed the blind. But prophetically, of course, Isaiah 61 said he would do that. He would open the eyes of the blind and so forth.
And so those whose hearts were really looking and were open to truth were the ones that found him. But you know what? Whenever I answer this question, Cy, I always have to say this. The question shouldn&#8217;t be, you know, why did so many miss it? It&#8217;s why do I believe it? Why? Why has God graced me with this incredible gift? Gift to believe.
Like you said in your book, this teacher of strange things who says a lot of things that disrupted folks. They&#8217;re like, who is this guy saying the kinds of crazy things that he&#8217;s saying? Sorry, this guy is not. No, get out of here. When he says he&#8217;s going to be the judge on the last day, when he says he would raise the dead in John chapter six,
Right. He said, you believe in me and I will raise you up on the last day. I mean, the stuff that Jesus said was crazy. So, I mean, forgive me, folks. I don&#8217;t mean that it really was crazy, but it sounded crazy. It sounded so crazy that really, it really should make us appreciate the gift of faith.
And folks, remember, we&#8217;re the guys running around saying, we eat Jesus every day at Mass. Yeah. Guess what? That sounded crazy to me as a Protestant. I said, the Catholic Church is crazy. But just like her Lord and Savior, you know, Jesus performed miracles. He did stuff that made you. If you were open and if you were willing to consider what he is saying and what he&#8217;s doing.
You realize what C.S. Lewis said. This guy, he&#8217;s either a liar, a lunatic, or he is the Lord God of creation come in the flesh. And the Catholic Church is the same way. Yeah, we say a lot of stuff that appears to be absolutely crazy. But guess what? You got another decision to make. And I did as a Protestant, so I just give thanks to God for the gift of faith that I have.
Cy: You might not be surprised to hear this. That answer is better than the one that I gave.
Tim: All right, we&#8217;ll take a quick break.
Cy: It&#8217;s Ask Me Anything. All lines full except one&#8230;

Why Didn’t the Jews See Jesus as the Messiah?

<div>I have a Jewish friend who claims that "sabachthani" does not mean "forsaken." Can you clarify?</div><div>Language, words, and translations can be a bit tricky. To claim that sabachthani does not mean forsaken is either right or wrong, depending on context.
Sabachthani generally means to have been abandoned or left behind, but it means to have been abandoned for a purpose or reason.
When we generally think of &#8220;forsaken,&#8221; we think of an uncaring abandonment. The Aramaic word for being abandoned without care or because of being unwanted would be taatani. The Aramaic for being abandoned because of being forgotten would be nashatani.
In the context of Jesus on the cross, it is clearly a reference to being abandoned, but it does not imply that Jesus felt his Father carelessly abandoned him.
In some ancient cultures, in order to pass from boyhood to manhood, the young male would have to spend the night alone in the wilderness. Alone and in the dark, the young male might wonder, &#8220;Why did my father leave me in this place?&#8221; But the young male knows there is a purpose to being there and that his father knows what he is doing and is doing so with love.
</div>

Does ‘Sabachthani’ Really Mean Forsaken?

Proof that Catholics Worship Objects!

Please pray for me.
Few words come so easily to Christians, aware as we are of our absolute reliance on God. Thanks to social media, we now hear it ten times as often as we used to. Praise God for that! St. Paul tells us that it is “good, and pleasing to God our savior,” when we pray for each other (1 Tim. 2:3).
And yet, the adversary just can’t leave well enough alone. Our Lord <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206%3A1-18&amp;version=RSVCE">warned</a> that pious acts like prayer, fasting, and almsgiving can be corrupted by impure intentions; so too, a mere prayer request, so innocuous on its face, can sometimes be a cover (conscious or not) for a sneaky indulgence in vice.
Whether it’s the stalking horse money ask (“We need your prayers most of all, buuuuuuut if you’d also support us . . .”) or the Christian-flavored “vaguebooking” (“It’s all just too much . . . you think you know a person . . . pray for me to have the strength”), we can probably all think of some type of online prayer request that makes us raise our eyebrows.
Here are two that I want to discuss:
<ol>
<li>The (not-so-) secret boast</li>
</ol>
Leaving for my two-week Europe vacation today! Pray we have a safe flight!
Happy anniversary to the greatest husband/wife in the world! Asking you all to pray for another blissful ten years of marriage!
You’ve been blessed. Awesome! Genuinely happy for you. There’s nothing wrong with openly rejoicing in the Lord’s blessings. But is that all you really wanted to tell us? If so, why attach a prayer request at all? Are you sure you’re not laminating on a spiritual veneer, for optics?
On the flip side, if you really are genuinely seeking divine aid, why attach that request to a cheery sentence about how great everything is going? A friend might reasonably wonder, “Is anything actually…wrong?”
I can imagine some legitimate motives for the examples I gave. Maybe you’re terrified of flying across the ocean. Maybe you’re profoundly aware of how God’s grace sustains your marriage in spite of your personal flaws. What I’m saying is: if such a motive inspires your prayer request, that should accompany it instead of—or at the very least, in addition to—the sunshine and rainbows.
<ol start="2">
<li>Gossipy</li>
</ol>
I heard from my friend that so-and-so’s marriage is REALLY rocky, so she needs our prayers.
This one we all kinda know. It&#8217;s a longstanding Christian meme, which means it happens often enough in real life to be joked about. Let’s examine ourselves: are we really bringing this up out of wholesome, unselfish concern for so-and-so’s marriage? Or are we just hoping that our friends will ask, “Oh no, what happened??” It shouldn’t be difficult to discern.
But here&#8217;s a subtler version:
Can you pray for so-and-so who seems SO determined to hate me?
I’ve made this very request myself. Our Lord tells us to love and pray for our enemies, so simply asking my friends to pray for this person instead of fuming felt like a win. And yet . . . see how just a little bit of fuming still slipped in? Looking back on that request, I can honestly say now that I was hoping, at least a little bit, that my friends would commiserate about this person’s behavior. Fortunately, they had more sense than I.
I want to emphasize that I am not claiming it’s necessarily a sin to make prayer requests that are worded similarly to these examples. I don’t want to make anyone scrupulous about asking for prayers, of all things! I am saying that whenever we speak in public (and yes, that includes social media), we should be examining our motives and staying honest with ourselves—even when we’re asking for prayers. The tempter has a sneaky way of hijacking pious actions with just a pinch of vice. If you can honestly say that you’re motivated by charity, send out that supplication.
If not . . . well, that’s another thing to pray for.

Don’t Post that Prayer Request

In December 2022, Pope Francis <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-francis-rants-against-delinquent-priests-who-withhold-absolution-2/">gave a talk</a> to a group of seminarians in December.
Reportedly, the pope said that priests should not refuse absolution to penitents. However, the same story discusses him saying priests should check with their bishop before denying absolution.
Unfortunately, there are no recordings or transcripts of exactly what was said, so we can’t know. However, we can review the basic principles on this topic.
The first thing to say is that withholding absolution is a real possibility. When Jesus granted the power of absolution to the disciples, we read,
<blockquote>Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:21-23).</blockquote>
Jesus thus told the disciples that they needed to make a choice: to either forgive or retain sins.
He thus did not envision the disciples granting absolution in each and every case. Rather, he called upon them to make a decision—to exercise discernment, as our Jesuit friends would say.
Jesus thus envisioned the disciples withholding absolution in some cases, but on what basis? Obviously, as wrenching a decision as withholding absolution is not to be made capriciously. So what would justify a priest in doing it?
In Scripture, the fundamental condition on which God forgives sin is repentance. If a person repents of his sins, God is willing to forgive. But if he clings to his sins, his salvation is in jeopardy.
This is the rational basis on which a priest can decide whether or not to absolve a penitent. If the individual has repented of his mortal sins, he is to be absolved, and if he has not repented of them, he is not to be.
The mere fact that an individual has come to a priest for confession indicates a desire for forgiveness, and it creates a presumption that the person is repentant. Confessing your sins is not fun, and subjecting yourself to the shame of doing so in order to be forgiven suggests that you regret what you did and have repented.
Therefore, in general, priests should presume that the individual has repented and absolve him. But the presumption of repentance can be overcome.
If a penitent behaves in the confessional in a way that is inconsistent with repentance, the priest is warranted in inquiring further—asking questions to see if the individual is repentant or not.
This can be a delicate matter. Many penitents recognize that, out of human frailty, they are likely to fall into the same sins in the future. But that does not mean that they are not repentant now. They may regret what they did, they may want not to sin in the future, and they may be hoping for grace—including the grace of confession—to help them not to sin, even though they are objectively likely to.
Such penitents are to be absolved as long as their will is currently turned away from sin.
But if the individual is genuinely non-repentant—showing no signs of contrition and being perfectly comfortable with committing mortal sin in the future—then denying him absolution is warranted.
Discerning this is a delicate enough matter that in some cases it could be advisable for a priest to check with his bishop.
Fortunately, stark unrepentance is rare when it comes to people going to confession, and—at least in the United States—the denial of absolution is very rare.

When Would a Priest Withhold Absolution?

Apologists for Islam usually say the primary miracle that proves the truth of their religion is the unique literary quality of the Quran. But others offer additional miracles allegedly performed by Muhammad, the founder of Islam. An example of one such claim is in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJEaAinrccg&amp;t">a video</a> put out by Muslim apologist Sheik Uthman: that Muhammad split the moon in two and that several witnesses, including non-Muslims, saw it.
First, he points to the Quran as evidence of Muhammad splitting the moon, specifically Sura 54:1-3, which says, “The hour has drawn near, and the moon has split. Yet whenever they see a miracle, they turn away, and say, ‘Continuous magic.’ They lied, and followed their opinions, but everything has its time.” But this doesn’t say Muhammad split the moon, nor does it say who saw this miracle.
Details about Muhammad and other witnesses come from Sahih al-Bukhari, which is a collection of hadiths, or oral traditions about Muhammad. This collection was compiled by Muhammad al-Bukhari around the year 846, or over two hundred years after Muhammad died. Using Sahih al-Bukhari to bolster the moon-splitting miracle would be like saying the evidence we have that Jesus rose from the dead comes from St. Cyprian of Carthage in the year 250, where he claims that Paul, Peter, and the other apostles saw Jesus rise from the dead, and then we know all these facts about Peter, like that he had a mother-in-law, etc.
So I’m skeptical of this testimony, just as I’m skeptical of similar reports even in Catholicism of alleged miracles of the saints that come in stories first recorded hundreds of years later. This isn’t a case of me judging one religion with a different standard from how I judge my own.
We also need to ask: what kind of miracle are we talking about?
Some Islamic scholars say this passage in the Quran refers only to what will happen at the Day of Judgement, or that it’s metaphorical, so it’s not something we’d expect others to record. Or it was just that God caused a group of people to see something that looked like the moon being split in two. I’m more open to that sort of claim, since I believe that God had done things like that before. The description of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still may be a similar optical miracle that only those in that battle saw, or it could be a metaphor, as I note in my book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/hard-sayings-a-catholic-approach-to-answering-bible-difficulties-softcover/">Hard Sayings</a>.
But even if these testimonies were reliably preserved and were sincere, by the time Muhammad died in 632, he was a victorious military leader who had unified the entire Arabian peninsula under Islam. There’s not much to dissuade someone from making grand claims about a person like that. However, the apostles made their claims about Jesus after he died a humiliating death and themselves suffered persecution and utter destruction to affirm that Jesus rose from the dead. Even former enemies of Christianity like St. Paul did the same, so this counts in favor of testimony for the bodily resurrection of Jesus because we wouldn’t expect this kind of testimony unless Jesus really did appear to people after his death.
But it&#8217;s not just that we do not have good evidence for Muhammad’s splitting of the moon. We also have evidence against it.
If Jesus rose from the dead and appeared only to Paul and his disciples, then we’d expect the kind of testimony we have today in the New Testament. We wouldn’t expect ancient Roman and Greek historians to say this happened, because the risen Jesus never appeared to them; we’d expect them to say only that Christians believed that this happened. But if Muhammad really did split the moon in two in the seventh century (and Uthman endorses the literal approach to this miracle), we’d expect corroborating physical evidence and corroborating non-Muslim evidence from other cultures at the time.
For example, Uthman shows some NASA pictures of ridges on the moon and talks about how the moon could have actually split, though he doesn’t say this proves that Muhammad split the moon in two. If it did split in half, we’d expect some evidence of this on the moon unless God miraculously repaired the damage. In fact, in 2010, NASA scientist <a href="https://sservi.nasa.gov/?question=evidence-moon-having-been-split-two">Brad Bailey responded to Muslim questions</a> about these photos, saying, “My recommendation is to not believe everything you read on the internet. Peer-reviewed papers are the only scientifically valid sources of information out there. No current scientific evidence reports that the Moon was split into two (or more) parts and then reassembled at any point in the past.”
Even if God caused this miracle to leave no evidence of a split on the moon’s surface, we’d expect non-Muslim cultures to have recorded this event in either written or oral forms.
If the miracle happened at around 9:00 P.M. Mecca time, then it would still be the early evening, or between 6 and 9 P.M., in Europe, Israel, and North Africa; the late evening, like midnight, in India; and the middle of the night, like 3:00 A.M., in China and Japan. Even in the late hours, there would have been people awake, like the guards in forts or settlements, to have witnessed this. We’d expect it to wind up in folk tales or even be written down in early medieval historians like Venerable Bede in England in 731 or a court historian in the Tang Dynasty in China.
St. John Damascene died in the year 749 and is one of the first fathers of the Church to directly engage Islam and its claims. He never describes anyone, even Muslims themselves, appealing to the miracle of the splitting of the moon as evidence for Islam. Instead, he writes, “When we ask again: ‘How is it that when he enjoined us in this book of yours not to do anything or receive anything without witnesses, you did not ask him: “First do you show us by witnesses that you are a prophet and that you have come from God, and show us just what Scriptures there are that testify about you”’—they are ashamed and remain silent” (The Fount of Knowledge).
Uthman, along with many other Muslims, claims there is an ancient manuscript that describes an Indian king converting to Islam after witnessing this miracle. But Uthman doesn’t tell us how old the manuscript is that he’s describing that references this event. The earliest sources for this alleged event seem to come from Muslim accounts written hundreds of years after the fact.
There are also other historical facts that contradict these claims. For example, popular legends say the oldest mosque in India was constructed by Malik Bin Dinar in 629 after the king’s conversion, but this conflicts with medieval Muslim accounts of no mosques being present during that time, along with the fact that Malik Bin Dinar was born several decades after Muhammad’s death.
In <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Historical-Aspects-of-the-Legend-of-Cheraman-of-in-V.A/f8862f0107c06a2eec2803a6939b546b1c9fcd4e">Haseena’s article</a> “Historical Aspects of the Legend of Cheraman Perumal of Kodungallur in Kerala,” he notes that “this fascinating tale of a Kerala king meeting the Prophet Muhammad was first recorded in 1510 CE by the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa.” But Barbosa says Muslim traders helped the Indian king convert in the tenth century, not some moon miracle in the seventh century.
The Indian historian A. Sreedhara Menon writes in his book A Survey of Kerala History that Islam may have arrived in Kerala by the seventh century but quotes Muslim travelers, like Sulaiman in 851, who say they know of no one who embraced Islam in the area at that time. Here is his verdict:
<blockquote>On careful consideration of all aspects of the question, it would be seen that the Cheraman legend was only the figment of the imagination of some early writers. It is exceedingly doubtful if any Cheraman emperor became a convert to Islam.  . . . The Cheraman legend is thus beyond doubt an anachronism.</blockquote>
In conclusion, we see that there is very little evidence for Muhammad being a miracle-worker or an actual prophet sent by God. More than that, we see a good body of evidence against these claims. The earliest Muslims did not even appeal to these kinds of miracle claims to prove their faith.
In contrast, the origin of the Christian faith in light of Jesus’ apparent defeat on the cross can’t be explained apart from Christ vindicating his identity as a prophet, a miracle-worker, and most importantly the Son of God by rising from the dead. And that is why someone who is considering Islam should see that Muhammad is not a prophet. The time of prophets giving public revelation ended with Jesus Christ, or, as Hebrews 1:1-2 says, “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”

Did Muhammad Split the Moon?

<div>Are generational sins a reality that exists in the New Testament? It seems Jesus is tacitly acknowledging their reality in John 9:1-3. If not, why did it cease from the old?</div><div>Modern psychology has largely validated the idea that many behaviors are passed on from generation to generation. Medicine has always known that this is the case with many bodily conditions. This involves both good and bad things. Thus, it is clear that Divine Providence so governs human life as to include also the passing of both good and bad things from one generation to the next. Indeed, a foundational and essential Christian doctrine, the doctrine of original sin is such a teaching. So there is nothing that would distinguish the Old and the New Testaments in this regard.
Simply, under the New Testament the means of overcoming an inherited evil or of making the best use of an inherited good would be more powerful and effective. Perhaps it is for this reason that under the New Testament we do not emphasize the generational aspect of human qualities as we might have without the helps and remedies we possess.
One thing is certain: personal moral guilt cannot be inherited, even if some of the effects of personal moral guilt can be. You rightly point out that the text of John 9: 1-3 does not rule out the possibility of a punishment being passed on from one generation to the next. Indeed, Our Lord&#8217;s teaching that it was for the glory of God that the man was born blind would have to be true, even if one reason for his blindness had been the punishment or correction of his parents. One can well imagine, for example, a child born with some defect because of his mother&#8217;s unhealthy or immoral behavior during her pregnancy overcoming this defect with courage so that God&#8217;s work could be made manifest in him through Christ.
</div>

Sins Passed Through Generations

Jimmy Akin clarifies what simony is understood to be as a Catholic. He explains that the key to understanding simony lies in the intention behind the purchase.
Transcript:
My question is about simony. I&#8217;m I&#8217;m new I&#8217;m still going through RCIA or I guess it&#8217;s OCIA now and There was this list of some mortal sins that I was going through and some simony and just you know buying like blessed items I think
But I had read that I guess it
Sorry, I understand it
It was people are trying to buy blessings from the apostles or something originally, but then it Ended up to include other things. So my question is like would this be buying like stuff out of the church or like if you&#8217;re in a gift shop and They said oh these have been blessed already and then you&#8217;re paying them
Okay, sure. I need I I need to ask a question It sounds like you were going over an examination of conscience or a list of mortal sins And was buying blessed objects on that list. Did I hear that correctly? Yeah
Okay, you may want to consider the list Because buying a blessed item is it&#8217;s it&#8217;s at least badly phrased buying an item that has been blessed is not itself simony furthermore not all simony is mortal sin Some simony is now the term you&#8217;re right comes from Scripture where in chapter 8 of the book of Acts Simon Magus tries to buy the from the Apostles the ability to bestow the Holy Spirit on people and That&#8217;s where this sin gets its name. It&#8217;s after Simon Magus. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s called simony
But
And and essentially what simony is is offering or receiving money in exchange for something holy But that doesn&#8217;t mean that every time you purchase something that&#8217;s holy that it is You&#8217;re actually committing simony. It&#8217;s only simony if you&#8217;re offering money for the holiness So the standard way to look at it is If let&#8217;s say someone has a rosary and they want to sell you a rosary it has not been blessed So simony is not on the table. You can buy the rosary from them and let&#8217;s say you pay $5 Okay. Well, let&#8217;s suppose then someone goes over to Rome and has the Pope bless the rosary so now it&#8217;s a blessed rosary the person can come back and Sell you the rosary because you&#8217;re paying for the rosary you can pay the same five dollars and it&#8217;s not simony But if they say oh the Pope bless this I&#8217;m gonna charge you ten dollars
Well, then you&#8217;re paying five dollars for the blessin and that is simony So it you can buy the item for whatever the value would otherwise be What you&#8217;re not supposed to do is pay extra for the blessin and even if you do Five dollars is a minimal amount. It&#8217;s not going to be a mortal sin It needs to be something more substantial than that Just like you tell a little white lie to someone Maybe it was a little sin, but it&#8217;s not a mortal sin or you steal a dollar from a person who has thousands of dollars It&#8217;s it is sin, but it&#8217;s not a mortal sin There needs to be some serious substance there and the same thing is true in this area
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Is Buying Blessed Items Simony?

Trent sits down with Dr. Scott Hahn to talk about his new book on sacred scripture and the Bible’s journey to being viewed in popular culture as a “secular book” began even before the Protestant Reformation.

FFAF: My Most Valuable Books!

I’m Protestant. How would you respond to the claim that the Catholic Church is a cult?

Why do people have misconceptions about Catholicism, especially to other Christians faiths?

What do you recommend doing to dispel someone from the idea that Catholicism is just another denomination?

How would I respond to the claim that the Church for the first 700 years was trying to limit its ideas?

I’m Protestant but my son is Catholic. My daughter’s father-in-law told me that he was going to go to hell for not converting me. How do I respond?

Some Protestants argue that Catholicism is a cult—how should you answer? Andrew Petiprin tackles this common objection and discusses misconceptions about the Church, early Christian history, and the differences between Catholicism and other denominations.

How Do You Respond to the Claim That the Catholic Church Is a Cult?

By Bill Lauto, Environmental and Shroud Scientist
Northeast Regional Leader for SAGE and Othonia in U.S.
Most of us grew up learning about the crucifixion of Jesus with artwork. All would depict the nails through Jesus’ hands and one nail through his feet. Paintings, sculptures, and movies would show one foot placed on top of the other, on top of a wooden wedge.
<h2>Does This Really Matter?</h2>
These images of Jesus’ crucifixion became tradition. However, for those with faith, these traditions were not the important realizations about Jesus sacrificing his life. What mattered was for us to know that Jesus suffered for our sins so we may have eternal life. His sacrifice shows that God knows about our suffering here on earth. Yet there are some who blame God for our suffering, failing to recognize that we are given free will. We have the choice to heal or to make war and crucify the Son of God.
So certain details, such as where exactly the Romans placed the nails, really do not matter for our lives here on this earth. Nevertheless, skeptics try to use enigmas such as this to claim—for example—that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/shroud-of-turin-full-disclosure">the Shroud of Turin</a> is fake while ignoring the complete picture. Therefore, let us review and evaluate to have a better understanding and a probable conclusion to these questions.
<h2>When Did the Nail Controversies Start?</h2>
Initially, we have prophecies found in the Old Testament, Gospel writings from eyewitnesses, and over one thousand years of artwork showing the nails through Jesus’ hands. We should also consider the possibility that in the earliest depictions of the Crucifixion, the artist would render the nails in the hands from information provided by and preserved from oral traditions whose original sources saw the actual Shroud. Only one nail wound is depicted on the Shroud, on the topside of one hand.
In 1950, a French medical doctor named Pierre Barbet published his detailed accounts of the medical conditions shown on the Shroud of Turin. His interpretations are presented in his book, A Doctor at Calvary. Barbet demonstrated that a nail through the soft tissues of a human palm would rip upward between the fingers due to the body’s weight and cause the body to fall off the cross. He then presented the hypothesis that the nail went between the wrist bones and through the other side, on an angle to match the visible wound shown on the Shroud. This provided an explanation as to how the nail held up the body. Additionally, Barbet posited that the nail did damage to the median nerve in the wrist, causing the thumbs to contracted inward—something that we know today with medical studies is not true. In fact, the opposite would occur: the thumbs would be forced to hold an outward position.
Barbet’s theories resonated despite being based on minimal studies.
By 1951, this was the first of many controversies revolving around the nails. How many nails were used—three or four? Were Jesus’ feet nailed into each side of the vertical post, or were the Romans so efficient that they needed only three nails? Does the Shroud provide any answers?
<h2>What Do We Know Today?</h2>
A key catalyst for science to provide answers to these questions came in 1988. A medical doctor named Frederic Zugibe presented his studies, done in the 1980s, in The Cross and the Shroud. Zugibe had a Ph.D. in human anatomy and was a forensic pathologist examiner in New York. His extensive research showed that Barbet’s had three miscalculations.
Barbet’s location for the nail through the wrist did not correspond to the wound on the Shroud, nor to the wounds of any stigmatists. Additionally, that location would miss the median nerve, thus requiring another reason as to why the thumbs are not visible on the Shroud.
Zugibe demonstrated that nails going through the space between the index and middle fingers and above the small bones of the palm would not break any bones and would support a body’s weight. This location directly aligns with the topside hand wound shown on the Shroud and stigmatists. The absence of the thumbs on the Shroud works in tandem with all studies showing a relaxed position of the fingers after death. The thumb goes downward and under the other fingers.
Recently, I was honored to speak at the 2025 International Scientific Shroud Conference in St. Louis, where I meet <a href="https://www.shroudofturin.com/founders.html">John Jackson</a>, one of the lead scientists from the 1978 STURP Team. I heard his presentation about two new theories that assist in answering questions surrounding the nails.
By studying blood flow on the Shroud and the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/holy-shroud">Sudarium</a>, Jackson presented a new position for the Sudarium covering Jesus’ face when he was dead on the cross. The discovery of stitching marks that would have closed a casing along the top of the Sudarium for a cord to go through led him to recreate tests showing the Sudarium tied around Jesus’ forehead and hanging down to his stomach. This conforms with using a Sudarium as an apron, sun protection for the head, and to cover eyes for unpredictable dust storms.
With my 2,000-year-old climate research showing evidence of a dry and very hot climate—a major factor for airborne dust—I concur. This position of the Sudarium matches the top part of the blood stain from the spear wound and the blood or fluid from around the nose, and it shows a “square” blood-stained nail hole with a round nail head. This occurred when the arms were crossed over each other at the bottom part of the Sudarium as they carried Jesus’ body to the tomb. Perhaps with additional research and high-definition photographs, we may see if this nail mark lines up with Zugibe’s research.
Jackson also presented, based on the Shroud’s blood patterns, that only three nails were used, and there was no wooden wedge. Jesus’ left foot was turned sideways with the toes pointing to the left and placed against the vertical beam. The flat bottom of his right foot was then forced onto the top of his left ankle, and one nail was driven through the top of his right foot and his left ankle. When Jesus pushed himself up to take in oxygen, he was balancing on one nail, with his left foot’s toes pointing sideways and his right foot’s toes pointing down to the ground.
All this, shown on the photograph Jesus gave us of himself, a nanosecond before the Resurrection.

Where Did the Romans Drive the Nails?

Jim Blackburn explains what constitutes an adulterous action, how it can go beyond mere physical actions, and what we might call adultery in today&#8217;s world of online dating.
Transcript:
Host: Go now to Alison in Pittsburg, Kansas listening on 93.1. Alison, is Pittsburgh, Kansas anywhere near Benedictine College?
Caller: Yeah, a couple hours away.
Host: Oh, that&#8217;s near in Kansas. Oh wow, you guys&#8230;we call that far away here in California.
Jim: I don&#8217;t know, here in Southern California that could be 10 miles.
Host: Yeah, that&#8217;s a 10 mile drive here. All right, well that&#8217;s just because our guest Sara yesterday was from Benedictine College. Alison, your question for Jim Blackburn.
Caller: Well, I know that committing adultery is a mortal sin but what I didn&#8217;t know is what exactly that was. Does that mean making love to somebody who&#8217;s not your spouse, or is an online affair adultery, or&#8230;what exactly does it encompass?
Jim: Well, in the technical sense, adultery is when a person is married and has an intimate relationship with someone else, and that generally means, you know, physically intimate, although I suppose in our minds, in our souls, we can commit adultery as Jesus said. You know, a man who looks at another woman with lust in his eyes has already committed adultery. So we could commit adultery in our will, I guess I should say, and by entertaining the idea of entering into say a sexual relationship with someone who&#8217;s not our spouses. So that could be the sin of adultery. It might not be the traditional definition of adultery in the strict sense, but it certainly could be the sin of adultery.
To commit a mortal sin&#8211;you mentioned that adultery is a mortal sin, and it is a grave sin, and if someone commits adultery knowing that they&#8217;re committing adultery, knowing that it&#8217;s a grave sin, and they freely are entering into that, then that is indeed a mortal sin. Okay Alison?
Caller: I think so. So like an online affair, if they&#8217;re doing it, and they know they&#8217;re doing it, they know it&#8217;s wrong, then it&#8217;s adultery and it&#8217;s mortal sin?
Jim: Yes, I would say it certainly could rise to that level, if your will is engaged in this relationship to cheat on your husband, and your, you know, your will is there, then you&#8217;ve already committed adultery in your heart, in Jesus&#8217; words. That&#8217;s&#8211;you know, we can sin in our minds. We can sin just by engaging our will in something that is sinful. So if you&#8217;re at that level, then I would say yes, you are committing adultery and, you know, if you knew it at the time that you did it, and you&#8217;re freely choosing to do it, then it&#8217;s a mortal sin, it&#8217;s something you should talk to your confessor about, something you should confess.
If you want to take, say, a particular example, maybe something that you&#8217;ve gone through yourself, I recommend seeking spiritual direction. Talk to a spiritual director about it. A spiritual director can spend more time with you, talk about some things that we might not want to get into on the radio, and give you some advice and help you determine, is this something that has risen to the level of a mortal sin, is it something that you need to confess? Even if it&#8217;s not, even if it hasn&#8217;t come to the level of a mortal sin, it would seem that it&#8217;s at least venially sinful. And that&#8217;s something the Church&#8211;the Church recommends that we confess even our venial sins. Okay Allison?
Caller: Yeah, that makes more sense when you talk about the will being engaged. Okay. You don&#8217;t actually have to be physically engaged, necessarily. So thank you very much.
Jim: Sure, and read Matthew in chapter 5, verses 27 to 28 and the surrounding verses there, and see how Jesus talks about this, how he talks about sin and that, you know, &#8220;You&#8217;ve heard it said this, but I say this,&#8221; he&#8217;s showing us that sin can be much more broad than just simply, you know, a strictly speaking, breaking one of the 10 Commandments in the most strict sense. We can commit sins in other ways. So read that, chapter 5 of Matthew, and I think that might be helpful to you.
Host: Thank you very much, Allison, for that call.

What Does Adultery Encompass?

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

<div>Why is human cloning wrong?</div><div>Cloning would be a violation of the rights and dignity of the human person. It turns a human person from an expression of love into a product. A human being is a gift from God in which the parents are called to act as stewards of such a great blessing. Cloning, on the other hand, produces an attitude that a human child is something (rather than someone) that we create and own and can do with as we choose.
<blockquote>The child has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage: it is through the secure and recognized relationship to his own parents that the child can discover his own identity and achieve his own proper human development. The parents find in their child a confirmation and completion of their reciprocal self-giving: the child is the living image of their love, the permanent sign of their conjugal union, the living and indissoluble concrete expression of their paternity and maternity. By reason of the vocation and social responsibilities of the person, the good of the children and of the parents contributes to the good of civil society; the vitality and stability of society require that children come into the world within a family and that the family be firmly based on marriage (<a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html">Donum Vitae</a> II, A, 1)</blockquote>
</div>

Why Is Human Cloning Wrong?

Every Lent, Catholics hear the familiar summons to pray, fast, and give alms. Yet behind these seasonal practices stands something far older and far more robust: the Church’s unapologetic embrace of asceticism and mortification. To many Protestants—and even to many Catholics—this sounds extreme, medieval, perhaps even unhealthy. Why would the Church encourage bodily discipline in an age already obsessed with fitness, productivity, and performance? Didn’t Christ come to set us free?
He did. And that is precisely the point.
<h2>Biblical, Not Bizarre</h2>
Asceticism is not a Catholic eccentricity; it is biblical Christianity. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Every athlete exercises selfcontrol in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. . . . I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:25, 27).
“Pommel” is not a gentle word. Paul is describing discipline, even force. He understands that the Christian life is not passive. It is a race to be run, a fight to be won (see 2 Tim. 4:7). And Jesus speaks in even more arresting language: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell” (Mark 9:4345).
No serious Christian interprets this as a literal command to mutilate. But neither can we dismiss its force. Our Lord is teaching that sin is so grave, heaven so real, and hell so terrible that decisive action—even painful action—is warranted.
Add to this Christ’s own example. Before beginning his public ministry, he fasted for forty days in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-2). He tells his disciples, “When you fast” (Matt. 6:16), not “if.” And he insists that certain demons are driven out “only by prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29). The Son of God did not need purification, yet he embraced fasting and suffering to teach us the way of freedom.
<h2>The Logic of Love</h2>
The Catholic Church has never seen mortification as self-hatred. Quite the opposite. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The way of perfection passes by way of the cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle” (2015). Elsewhere, it speaks of “interior penance” as a radical reorientation of the whole life toward God (1430-1431) and of the need to discipline our appetites so that grace may flourish.
Mortification, then, is not about punishing the body. It is about ordering the whole person—body and soul—toward love. Because the human person is a unity, what we do with the body affects the soul. To fast, to deny oneself a pleasure, to endure discomfort patiently—these train the will, strengthen the heart, and make room for God.
Think of athletes. No one calls it mutilation when a runner wakes before dawn, endures soreness, and restricts his diet for the sake of a race. We admire the discipline because we understand the goal. If we can grasp the logic of physical training for a perishable crown, how much more should we grasp spiritual training for an imperishable one? 
<h2>The Witness of the Saints</h2>
The saints are the Church’s spiritual Olympians. From St. Benedict of Nursia throwing himself into thorns to overcome temptation to St. Philip Neri wearing uncomfortable garments in hidden penance to St. John Paul II quietly sleeping on the floor, mortification has marked every age of holiness.
Consider St. Aloysius Gonzaga, who once described himself as “a crooked piece of iron” needing to be made straight by the hammer of penance. His practices were severe, and not all are to be imitated. But what shines through his life is not gloom, but joy. Those who knew him described a serenity and humility that radiated from disciplined love.
Importantly, the Church has always insisted on prudence. St. Ignatius of Loyola counseled moderation and discernment. Bodily mortifications, he taught, are useful—especially when combating real temptation—but “are neither good for all, nor should they be used at all times.” For some, recreation and rest better serve charity and long-term fidelity. The goal is not self-inflicted suffering for its own sake, but growth in holiness.
<h2>A Protestant Objection?</h2>
Many Protestant communities emphasize interior faith and trust, sometimes wary of any bodily disciplines that appear “works-based.” Mortification does not earn heaven. Rather, it disposes us to receive grace more fruitfully. Scripture links bodily discipline and spiritual vitality: “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13). The key phrase is “by the Spirit.” Asceticism is not Pelagian self-salvation. It is cooperation with grace.
In fact, refusing all discipline can subtly affirm a very modern heresy: that freedom means indulging every impulse. The Church proposes something far more liberating—that freedom means the capacity to choose the good, even when it costs us.
<h2>Should We Do More for Lent?</h2>
Lent is not a Catholic “self-improvement challenge.” It is a school of love. But love always involves sacrifice. The Church obliges fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and abstinence from meat on Fridays as a baseline. These practices unite us to Christ’s passion and train our desires.
The question for each of us is simple: Where am I weak? Where do I lack mastery? Is it speech? Then perhaps a measured silence. Is it comfort? Then perhaps a colder room, a simpler meal, a resisted impulse to complain. Is it digital distraction? Then perhaps a deliberate fast from screens.
Mortifications need not be dramatic. In fact, the most powerful are often hidden: leaving a shoe slightly uncomfortable, rising promptly without the snooze button, accepting criticism without self-defense. Our Lord warns us not to disfigure our faces to be seen by men (Matt. 6:16-18). The Father who sees in secret rewards what is done in secret.
But we should not fear adding something intentional this Lent—especially if it stretches us. The cross is the shape of Christianity. If Christ fasted, if Paul disciplined his body, if the saints trained for glory, then asceticism is a path to joy.
In a world that tells us to indulge every appetite, Catholic mortification stands as a quiet, radical witness: we are made for more than comfort. We are made for communion. And sometimes the way to Easter morning runs straight through the discipline of the desert.

Make Mortification Great Again

Some Catholics are concerned by the fact that Vatican II and the Catechism say that Muslims worship God. Some outright reject this teaching as “modernism” infecting the Church.
In this video, Jimmy Akin explores where the claim that Muslims don’t worship God actually comes from and points out that this idea is not found in Catholic Tradition.
The mere fact that Muslims don’t believe in the Trinity doesn’t mean they aren’t directing their worship to God—any more than it does for non-Christian Jews.
Jimmy even quotes one of the great, saintly reformer popes of the Middle Ages to show that Catholic Tradition has long recognized that Muslims worship God.
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Transcript:
Coming Up
In the last few years, there has been a sometimes-heated discussion in certain Catholic circles about whether Muslims and Christians worship “the same God.”
Some have outright rejected the Catholic Church’s teaching about Muslims.
Others haven’t rejected it but find it troubling.
What many people aren’t aware of is just how far back in Catholic tradition the idea that Muslims worship God goes.
* * *
Howdy, folks!
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The “Same God” Problem
The phrase “same God” is fraught in that it can mean different things. Obviously, Muslims do not worship God as a Trinity of Persons, so they do not worship the same God in that sense. However, they do worship God as the single, omnipotent Creator who appeared to Abraham.
Without getting into deeper philosophical waters about what counts as sameness and difference—we can talk about that in another episode—it’s worth noting that Vatican II does not use the phrase “same God.” Instead, it says that Muslims worship “the one and merciful God” (Lumen Gentium 16) and “the one God” (Nostra Aetate 3).
Despite the concerns expressed by some modern traditionalists—namely, that this sort of language is one more example of modernism infecting the Church—the recognition that Muslims worship God has not been controversial in Catholic history. Catholic Tradition actually incorporates this concept.
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A Protestant Origin?
It appears that the idea that Muslims don’t worship God actually comes from outside Catholicism and originates in the Protestant community.
A key text in those circles is 2 Corinthians 11:4, which says that
If someone comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough (2 Corinthians 11:4).
This is used to argue that a different understanding of Jesus invalidates one’s faith, since one has “a different Christ.”
This is then often backed up by appeals to Galatians 1:8, where Paul says that
Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed (Galatians 1:8).
Some Protestant apologists apply this chain of reasoning to us—to Catholics—and argue that we are not Christians, alleging that we have a different understanding of the gospel than they do.
Fortunately, that issue can often be resolved, and we’ll be talking in future episodes about what the gospel actually is and how much convergence there is between Catholics and various Protestant streams of thought.
Protestant apologists also apply the same reasoning to argue that Muslims worship “a different God” from the God of Christians, since they reject the doctrine of the Trinity and thus that Jesus as the Son of God.
And some in contemporary traditionalist Catholic circles have picked up this line of thinking.
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What About Jews?
There is an obvious objection, which is that non-Christian Jews also reject the Trinity, but Catholic Tradition has never held that Jews don’t worship God.
The doctrine of the Trinity had not been clearly revealed in Old Testament times, and Jews prior to the time of Christ did not believe in it. Jesus even acknowledges this. As he says in John 14:1,
You believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1).
The Trinity was new revelation with the Christian age, but that didn’t stop previous Jews—or those who maintained the previous, non-trinitarian understanding of God—from genuinely directing their prayers to the Creator of the universe.
This is a reflection of the fact that you don’t have to know everything about someone in order to talk to him or give him honor and worship.
But if non-Christian Jews disbelieve in the Trinity and nevertheless worship God, then the same will be true of Muslims, who do the same thing. They may not understand God with the full Christian understanding of him—just as contemporary Jews don’t—but they do recognize that there is a Creator who appeared to Abraham and to whom they direct their worship.
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Into Catholic Tradition
What may come as a surprise is that this has been the traditional Catholic understanding.
If you read traditional authors interacting with Islam—like St. Thomas Aquinas or St. John Damascene—they definitely criticize Islam, but you don’t find them saying things like, “Muslims worship a different God from the God we Christians worship.”
The more one delves into the Tradition, the more clear it is that Catholics have accepted the basic premise that Muslims—despite what is flawed and incomplete in their understanding of him—do worship God.
This comes out more clearly the deeper one goes into the Tradition, as we can see by examining the footnotes of Vatican II’s discussion of the subject.
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Vatican II
There are two passages where the council discusses Muslims. One is in Lumen Gentium 16, and the other is in Nostra Aetate 3. The latter says,
The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,* who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even his inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, his virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving, and fasting.
Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Muslims, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom (Nostra Aetate 3).
There is a footnote toward the beginning of this passage, just after the statement that Muslims “adore the one God, living and subsisting in himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth.” It reads,
* Cf. St. Gregory VII, Letter XXI to Anzir (Nacir), King of Mauritania (PL 148, col. 450f.)
Now, it’s always a good idea to look up the original sources to see what they have to say, so what did Pope St. Gregory have to say?
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Pope St. Gregory VII
Pope St. Gregory VII reigned from 1073 to 1085, and he was one of the great reforming popes of the Middle Ages.
He was a key figure in the investiture controversy and promoted the right of the Church—rather than the state—to install bishops and abbots.
It was to placate Gregory that the Holy Roman emperor himself—Henry IV—did penance barefoot in the snow at Canossa.
Gregory mandated that priests be celibate, and for the efforts of his reign, he died in exile.
He was beatified by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584 and canonized by Pope Benedict XIII in 1728.
Unfortunately, few look up the letter that Nostrate Aetate cites, and that’s understandable to an extent.
It’s difficult to find the letter in English, but it is revealing about the Medieval Catholic attitude toward Muslims. And it’s worth reading the letter in full so that we can see the relevant statement in its full context.
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What Gregory Said
The letter is written to King Anazir of Mauretania, which was a Muslim majority nation that is part of modern Algeria, and it says:
Gregory, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Anazir, king of the province of Mauretania Sitifensis in Africa, health and apostolic blessing.
Your highness sent to us within a year a request that we would ordain the priest Servandus as bishop according to the Christian order. This we have taken pains to do, as your request seemed proper and of good promise.
You also sent gifts to us, released some Christian captives out of regard for St. Peter, chief of the apostles, and affection for us, and promised to release others. This good action was inspired in your heart by God, the creator of all things, without whom we can neither do nor think any good thing.
He who enlightens every man that comes into the world enlightened your mind in this purpose. For Almighty God, who desires that all men shall be saved and that none shall perish, approves nothing more highly in us than this: that a man love his fellow man next to his God and do nothing to him which he would not that others should do to himself.
This affection we and you owe to each other in a more peculiar way than to people of other races because we worship and confess the same God though in diverse forms and daily praise and adore him as the Creator and ruler of this world. For, in the words of the Apostle, &#8220;He is our peace who has made both one&#8221; (Eph. 2:14).
This grace granted to you by God is admired and praised by many of the Roman nobility who have learned from us of your benevolence and high qualities. Two of these, Alberic and Cencius, intimate friends of ours brought up with us from early youth at the Roman court, earnestly desiring to enjoy your friendship and to serve your interests here, are sending their messengers to you to let you know how highly they regard your prudence and high character and how greatly they desire and are able to be of service to you.
In recommending these messengers to your highness, we beg you to show them, out of regard for us and in return for the loyalty of the men aforesaid, the same respect which we desire always to show toward you and all who belong to you. For God knows our true regard for you to his glory and how truly we desire your prosperity and honor, both in this life and in the life to come, and how earnestly we pray both with our lips and with our heart that God himself, after the long journey of this life, may lead you into the bosom of the most holy patriarch Abraham (Letters 3:21).
This letter is very diplomatic but also revealing.
Although Gregory was firm on the clerical investiture of bishops in Christian lands, he was prepared to accept Anazir’s request to have a particular priest ordained as a bishop in a non-Christian land. This is different from European states insisting that they had the right to appoint bishops.
For our purposes, the most important thing is that we see that one of the great reforming and saintly popes of the Middle Ages had no difficulty acknowledging to a Muslim leader that “we worship and confess the same God,” although in “diverse” or different forms, and that both Christians and Muslims “daily praise and adore him as the Creator and ruler of this world.”
It is helpful to be deep in Tradition, and achieving that goal can involve checking the footnotes.
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Do Muslims Worship God?

Episode 79: Year B &#8211; Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
In this episode, we confine ourselves to the Gospel reading for this upcoming Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Year B, taken from Matthew 28:16-20. There are several details that relate to a variety of apologetical topics, two of which deal specifically with this Sunday’s solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: The trinitarian formula for baptism and the revelation of the Trinity. The other apologetical topics that come to fore are the Sacrament of Reconciliation and apostolic succession.
Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/052624.cfm">Click Here</a>
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The Instruction of the Trinitarian Formula for Baptism

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Some people who deny Jesus even existed claim nearly 40 ancient authors who should have mentioned Jesus failed to do so, but Trent shows why this argument from silence fails.
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Did Ancient Writers Overlook Jesus?

How does the soul know whether it’s in heaven, hell or purgatory?

How do I bring up the conversation about converting to a spouse who is not friendly to Catholicism?

Why don’t we hear about the intercession of the Old Testament saints?

Can a person be in good standing with the Church and be an annihilationist?

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In this heartfelt episode of Catholic Answers Live, we address one of the most difficult situations a Catholic can face: What if your spouse is resistant—or even hostile—to the idea of conversion? We offer practical and pastoral advice on how to approach this conversation with patience, love, and truth, without pushing them away.
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How to Talk About Converting When Your Spouse Isn’t Open to the Faith

Was Jar-Jar a Sith lord?

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What are your thoughts on embryo adoption?

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Hi Trent. How do I approach a friend who believes many of our dogmas, but feels like he’s growing spiritually in his charismatic church, so he feels no need to change?

Do you have any recommendations on trying to evangelize family members who are atheists?

Hi Trent! What does Pope Leo’s statement on not using the title of Mary as co-redemptrix mean for the direction of the Church? Why was that statement important? As a new convert, I am unsure of the importance of the “Mater Populi Fidelis,&#...

How’s Laura?

Hi, Trent. What do you think a pastor of a parish can do to keep his college-bound parishioners from straying from the Catholic faith?

In this wide-ranging Catholic Answers Live episode, Trent Horn tackles everything from pop-culture mysteries like whether Jar-Jar Binks could secretly be a Sith Lord and how the Home Alone dad could afford his lavish lifestyle, to serious moral and theological questions including embryo adoption, the strongest arguments against utilitarianism, and the best defenses of natural law ethics. Listeners also hear practical advice on helping friends who are drifting into charismatic churches, evangelizing atheist family members, and keeping college-bound Catholics rooted in the faith, along with a thoughtful explanation of Pope Leo’s comments on Marian titles such as Co-Redemptrix and Mater Populi Fidelis.
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