Manage Account

“There were giants on the earth in those days,” we read in Genesis. The gauzy way we view the past can exaggerate the greatness of our forebears, but when I think of David Carlin, who died shortly before Christmas after a long life, I can’t help but think that he was a man whose likes we won’t see again in these days.
I came to know Dave in the early 2000s, when I edited his first two books. Two decades of ensuing friendship would increase my respect and fondness for him, but right from the start I sensed in him something rare and compelling. A philosopher and sociologist by training, and a college professor by day, he took up politics, too, reaching the rank of Senate majority leader for his home state of Rhode Island. And he looked the part: with his silver hair, strong jaw, bushy brows, and electric smile, he would have appeared right at home at a Kennedy reunion in Hyannis Port.
Dave’s politics, too, were straight from the Irish-Catholic, New England, mid-twentieth-century form book. He proudly called himself a “Blue Dog” Democrat. Not to be confused, he warned me, with “Yellow Dog” Democrats—those who were so party-loyal that they would vote for a yellow dog if it had a D next to its name—the original Blue Dogs were a particular breed: frugal, working-class and devoted to unions, distrustful of the rich <a href="https://www.catholicity.com/commentary/carlin/04442.html">and of Republicans</a>, fans of New-Deal-era policies that they credited for their families’ upward mobility, and, perhaps most notably, socially conservative.
Above all, Dave was a faithful, foursquare Catholic, and pro-life to the core—from a time when pro-life Catholic Democrats still roamed the earth in abundance.
Beginning in the late eighties and accelerating through the turn of the millennium, though, the landscape had begun to change. As his party became more culturally elitist and more identified with social, especially sexual progressivism (championing abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, transgenderism, godlessness, and deviance, with ever-decreasing tolerance for dissent within the ranks), he found himself increasingly estranged from his roots. One of Dave’s great intellectual gifts was summed up in a maxim he liked to quote—“Ideas have consequences”—and he foresaw with clarity that a political philosophy committed to such ideas was ultimately incompatible with Catholicism. One would have to go.
He even <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Can-Catholic-Democrat-David-Carlin/dp/1933184191">wrote a book about it</a>; and even though at the book’s end he made allowance for Catholic Democrats of his vintage to stay within the party to change it, in the two decades that followed, he seemed to lose hope in that possibility. As many Democratic social conservatives and blue-collar folk migrated toward the right, he (reluctantly and sorrowfully) did, too.
Or did the right migrate toward him? To my knowledge, Dave never abandoned any of his paleo-Democrat principles or turned in his Blue Dog card. That integrity alone marks him as a rare sort, as does his farsightedness about the connection between ideas and social change. (He modestly credited such gifts to a rigorous Dominican education.)
Dave’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-Catholic-Church-America/dp/1928832792/">other book</a> in which I had a hand also displayed his rarity. In an analysis that combined sociology, philosophy, and religious history, he sought to identify the reasons for Catholicism’s decline beginning in the late 1960s. In internecine Catholic polemics today, we often see blame put on the Council generally, or on liturgical reforms, Communion in the hand, “infiltration” by some shadowy evil, and so on. Others, conversely, blame a failure to accept and nourish Vatican II’s vision with sufficient zeal.
Dave, however, didn’t pick a predictable side, because he thought all these answers were simplistic. The Council did play a role, he wrote, but not primarily through anything it expressly said or did. Rather, in its innovations (however defensible they might have been) it shattered the Tridentine Church’s sense of immutability. By itself, this might have been worked through, but it unfortunately happened at the same time as two other phenomena: the generalized rebellion against authority of the late sixties and the ascendancy of secularism. These three factors combined in a potent poison cocktail.
The Church (in the West, at least) had for centuries stood guard against its old Protestant foe, he said, but when it finally let down its ramparts to enter a new age of ecumenical (and interreligious) friendliness, it found that familiar enemies had been replaced by the forces of unbelief: in theology and philosophy, in behavioral sciences, in the arts, in popular mores. And it wasn’t prepared for that fight, at least not in the era’s climate of social upheaval and fresh doubts about former certainties.
In drawing out this point, Dave presented what I’ve called the Carlin Thesis, which I have never stopped finding insightful and useful. The post-Reformation history of Christianity, he demonstrated, has been a succession of compromises with the prevailing secularism, in each case producing a Christian-secular synthesis that left Christianity de-contented in doctrine, squishier in morals, more skeptical about the Bible, and less reverent in worship.
This movement applies mostly to historical Protestantism, he noted. But postconciliar Catholicism has suffered from it, too, and it will continue to suffer whenever Catholics likewise compromise; when our attempts to bring Christ to the world make us worldly instead. Let us heed that warning!
All this is now beyond Dave’s care, as he begins his journey to a new, perfect, and lasting world. But the force of his writing, advocacy, public service, faithful witness, and gentlemanly bearing remains for us to profit from. I pray for the repose of his soul, and I look ahead hopefully to meeting him again in glory.

In Memoriam: David Carlin

Discover

This week, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) published the declaration <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20231218_fiducia-supplicans_en.html">Fiducia Supplicans</a> (FS), which reflects on the theology of blessing and, for the first time, sanctions clerical blessings of same-sex couples and mixed-sex couples in irregular unions. This has sparked no little controversy, particularly since that same dicastery ruled out, with the pope’s approval, the possibility of any such blessings just two years ago. The implications of the change are complex and far-reaching. In this Catholic Answers Roundtable, we offer perspectives from Catholic Answers staff on this text and what it means.

Blessing Same-Sex Couples: a CA Roundtable

Of course you can’t baptize with Gatorade. Everybody knows this. When a blogger got the Catholic Answers <a href="https://wvw.catholic.com/ai">AI apologetics app</a> to say you could, in an emergency situation, it was justly mocked all over the Catholic internet. When CNN and countless news sites <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/14/business/video/ai-catholic-priest-gatorade-baptize-digvid">ran stories</a> about that app, they led with the same lurid, ludicrous Gatorade angle.
Whatever else we might say about Catholicism, there’s one thing on which everyone can agree: Gatorade isn’t valid matter for baptism.
Except . . . wait a second . . . maybe it is?
Sacramental theologians classify types of sacramental matter in three categories: certainly valid, doubtful, and certainly invalid. These classifications find their way into sacramental manuals that become normative guides for practical reference in seminaries, parishes, dioceses, and so on. This is necessary because, even though the basic prescribed matter for the sacraments is pretty straightforward—things like bread, water, wine, oil—in each case, there are many possible small variants. Each needs to be examined and held up to Catholic standards for liceity (adherence to Church requirements for legally proper celebration of a sacrament) and validity (suitability for effecting the sacrament).
Water is the matter (specifically, what&#8217;s called the proximate matter) for the sacrament of baptism. For the licit (lawful) celebration of the sacrament in an ordinary circumstance, it must be pure, clean, blessed, fresh water. But the category of valid matter for baptism is larger. The Catholic Encyclopedia, drawing on the sacramental tradition, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/baptism#vi-matter-and-form-of-the-sacrament">notes that valid matter includes</a> liquids like sea water, bog or marsh water, dew, melted ice, and condensation. The water can be “fresh or salty; hot or cold; colored or uncolored.” It doesn’t have to be blessed to be valid matter.
In <a href="https://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/ITOPL_OCR-layer-only/7c%20&amp;%208.%20Moral%20Theology%20&amp;%20Sacraments/Sacraments/d-The%20Administration%20of%20the%20Sacraments-%20Halligan%20OP_OCR.pdf">The Administration of the Sacraments,</a> a well-regarded 1963 manual by Dominican Nicholas Halligan, we find still more specificity. Water that seeps from walls is valid, as is “water mixed with a small amount of an extraneous element.” Certainly invalid, on the other hand, are substances like blood, oil, urine, gravy, shoe polish (!), and “all things not in a liquid state.”
Then we have the doubtful category. These are liquids that are water-like but about which validity can’t be determined for certain or fully agreed upon. Doubtful substances may be deemed more or less probable in their validity, and different people may rank their probability differently. The Church hasn’t ruled definitively on them, and theologians are still hashing out the arguments. Halligan lists in this category such liquids as light broths and tea, water extracted from vines or flowers, and even “thin ink.”
So where does Gatorade fit in?
Well, let’s use “Gatorade” as a stand-in for a category of modern non-alcoholic beverages that are mostly water, including thirst-quenching sports drinks, sodas, and the kind of flavored sparkling waters that line the aisles of your local Costco. What are they? That is, what are they made of, on a molecular level?
Sports drinks come in many varieties, ranging from roughly 90 percent water (with the rest consisting of sugars, salt and other minerals, and coloring) to 99 percent water in the clear, sugar-free versions. The range is similar for colas and other soft drinks: some are packed with significant amounts of sugar by weight, whereas others, like Diet Coke, are 99 percent water. Then come drinks like <a href="https://www.lacroixwater.com/">La Croix</a> and <a href="https://www.sanpellegrino.com/us/essenza-flavored-sparkling-water">San Pellegrino Essenza</a>, marketed under names that may or may not include “water” and composed of 99+ percent water with trace amounts of flavoring and no caloric matter. (In contrast, common fruit juices, which are invalid matter, range from 50 to 85 percent water.)
How do those numbers compare to substances in the “valid” category? Well, without a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrometer">spectrometer</a> handy to analyze various kinds of bog, swamp, and cave-wall water, it’s hard to say, but we do know that sea water is about 96.5 percent true water. The rest is salt, minerals, and traces of decaying seaweed, whale poop, microplastics, and everything else floating around the teeming brine.
That number seems like a good baseline for what qualifies as valid baptismal matter, at least with regard to water purity. And, judging by that criterion, the sugar-free sports drinks, diet colas, and flavored waters seem to compare well. After all, those drinks are really just “flavored waters” or “slightly impure waters” to one degree or another. That they may be colored, unlike pure water, does not invalidate them as baptismal matter. And some of these sports and soft drinks are actually more water-y, in their composition, than sea water.
But wait: as many will point out, the spectrometer is not the final judge of whether a substance is suitable for baptism. It also has to be something that, as the Encyclopedia puts it, “men will ordinarily declare water.” That’s because the sacrament is a sign, not the product of a recipe. Applying this commonsense test, they will say that these beverages in question aren’t valid matter because we don’t call them “water,” and so they can’t signify what water signifies—cleansing—in baptism.
Although this strikes me as teetering on the brink of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-bread-what-is-wine">nominalism</a>—things are what they are, not <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-protestant-roots-of-the-pronoun-wars">what we call them</a>—the point about sign-value is important. Yes, Diet Coke is 99 percent water, and sea water is only 96.5 percent. Yes, Diet Coke, like true water, will hydrate you if you drink it, whereas sea water can kill you if you drink it. And yes, Diet Coke can actually be a <a href="https://www.cookist.com/7-things-that-can-be-cleaned-using-coca-cola/">pretty good cleansing agent</a> (arguably more so than baptism-valid muddy water or bog water). But, Diet Coke is called “Diet Coke,” and sea water is called “water,” and if it’s the sign of water you’re after, that matters.
If, however, an argumentative person wanted to press the Gatorade case, he might point out that many of these sports drinks, soft drinks, and hybrid flavored waters have simply been given their names by the machine of modern marketing. Is Madison Avenue’s word dispositive in the world of Catholic sacraments?
What would a medieval peasant think of Gatorade? Very possibly he would call it slightly sweet, slightly salty water. The bubbles of Diet Coke would tickle his tongue, and he would have nothing in his experience to compare with its artificial sweetener, but I bet he would describe that liquid phenomenon as something in the neighborhood of water. (He certainly would not call it wine or a spirit, or oil, or blood, or poison.) It took modern focus groups and clever ad men to give new, catchy names to what our forebears would recognize as tricked-up water variants.
And where would we be if they hadn’t? What if the <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gatorade-sports-drinks-inventions">scientists at the University of Florida</a> in the 1960s had called their new hydrating drink “sports water” instead of “Gatorade”? Would it have been valid matter in that case?
Perhaps not all the variants of Gatorade we have today. Just as the alcohol content in wine can affect its validity as matter for confecting the Precious Blood, so too, perhaps, may excessive sugar or mineral content—say, pushing a liquid below sea water’s 96.5 percent purity threshold—take a soft drink out of the valid category for baptism, no matter what we call it. But the no-calorie thirst-quenchers and lightly flavored sugarless sparkling drinks? At the very least, we ought to recognize the case they make for being valid matter. They are almost entirely water, they can do everything water does, and the names by which we call them could be considered mere accidents of corporate branding rather than indicative of their ontology.
Without further magisterial guidance, though, we can’t say that these drinks belong in the certainly valid class, though possibly those beverages with “water” <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Propel-Flavored-Electrolytes-Vitamins-Ounces/dp/B000VDV27Q/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KnBe5WT3QcdBKubIxLsUM6du1XbeiFfRAhzGPHlf-0j69UgNJ5UUf5qSSELmyLlI1eQ4ypvTCbQX7nIC9STkuVXOnFX-vdWZpTaTpHrkJTWDUOB7y4or6eIPyHQ0yogBgBTV7fSprN2qOHkKFfqhYvEjLY16-dONT4YoSdr-JxKvZHPuVriK3PRBnNrc3cXvaqHG575ttHAwSoaF-3cCssYRDCSfJjiPEQWEknilonvwOSO8uuD9Bpoxb7zLOz5V3pv0f809N1f8q2kV4vqw1ajq3gCIk6LnU-_0_phfZVk.52VXsgjXEKztqOJDkOU4YhK94spz_8c08aJoBBlcgA4&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=sugar+free+sports+drink&amp;qid=1718744522&amp;sr=8-2-spons&amp;sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGY&amp;psc=1">in their name</a> already would have a strong-enough case. And of course they’re unquestionably illicit. So don’t baptize with them!
Unless . . .
Here we arrive at that middle category: liquids of “doubtful”—that is, uncertain—validity. These are liquids that, according to Halligan, “do not certainly imply natural water” or whose “mixture with other elements almost supplants the water.” We noted some examples above, and if our sports drinks and other beverages under discussion do not reach the level of valid, they would certainly wind up here—and likely at a higher level of probability than some other doubtful liquids, such as soup and ink.
This category is important for more than just wonkish theology debates, because doubtful liquids, in Halligan’s words, “can and must” be used to baptize in a case of necessity (danger of death) when there is no certainly valid water available (emphasis added). Even those liquids, he adds, “with the least probability” of validity can and must be used. This reflects the consensus tradition and practice of the Church when dealing with doubtful matter. (Baptism may never be attempted with invalid matter.)
Imagine you are hiking in the desert with your unbaptized friend. You wander from the trail and get lost, and then he suffers a bad fall. He can’t walk, he may have internal injuries, you have no cell service, and it is very possible that he will die before you both can be rescued. Frightened, but possessing a sound mind, he makes a statement of faith and asks you to baptize him. You can&#8217;t find any stream, pond, or even puddle nearby, but you have a few bottles of a certain orange sports drink.
There is no debate about what you can and must do: take the Gatorade and baptize him. Halligan advises adding a few words noting the doubtful nature of the matter (e.g., “If this be valid matter, I baptize you . . .”). Then, if he makes it back to safety and recovers, he must be baptized again in a licit rite, likewise with added conditional language acknowledging that the first baptism might have been valid.
And if he doesn’t make it back? Well, doubtful means not certain. But you will have done your full duty as a Christian, within the bounds of what is reasonable and permitted by the Church. And you will have good reason to hope that he was reborn as a child of God and set on the path to his eternal reward.

Gatorade: A Sin-Quencher?

In the biblical, Christian worldview—among those who accept biblical inspiration—extraordinary recorded events may be purely natural phenomena, wholly supernatural, or a combination. That’s the question to be pondered with regard to the plagues of Egypt. Here, I shall explore the notion that six of the ten plagues of Egypt may have a plausible natural explanation or cause.
Greta Hort (1903-1967), a brilliant Danish scholar, wrote <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zatw/html">an influential article</a> about this, called “The Plagues of Egypt.” I don’t read German, so I will rely on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Egypt-Evidence-Authenticity-Tradition/dp/019513088X">the descriptions</a> of archaeologist James Hoffmeier and scientific articles dealing with similar subject matter.
<ol style="font-weight: bold">
<li>
<h3>Plague of Blood</h3>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>Moses and Aaron . . . lifted up the rod and struck the water that was in the Nile, and all the water that was in the Nile turned to blood. And the fish in the Nile died; and the Nile became foul, so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile; and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt (Exod. 7:20-21).</blockquote>
Hort tied this “plague” to the Nile’s annual rise in July through September, where it is usually reddish in appearance owing to the presence of Roterde, particles of soil, suspended in the water. Hort posits a scenario that could result in the four conditions of red color, death of fish, foul smell, and undrinkability: millions of organisms called flagellates (Euglena sanguinea and Haematoccus pluvalius), probably originating from Ethiopia, in the floodwaters. At night, flagellates require more oxygen, which would cause the death of fish.
An article in Live Science, entitled “The Science of the 10 Plagues,” <a href="https://www.livescience.com/58638-science-of-the-10-plagues.html">opines similarly</a>:
<blockquote>The sudden appearance of red-hued waters in the Nile could have been caused by a red algae bloom, which appears when certain conditions enable a type of microscopic algae to reproduce in such great numbers that the waters they live in appear to be stained a bloody red. . . . These algae blooms can certainly be harmful to wildlife, as the algae contain a toxin that can accumulate in shellfish and poison the animals that feed on them.</blockquote>
Now, a suspicious reader could fairly object that these explanations deny a literal turning to blood of the Nile, which the text, prima facie, seems to assert. But it’s a question of whether the text must be taken literally, or whether it can be properly interpreted as phenomenological language, or the language of appearances. We know that the Bible often expresses that sort of language, and also that it does so specifically regarding “blood,” like in Joel 2:31 (“the sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood”) and Revelation 6:12 “the full moon became like blood”).
Joel 2:31 seems at first glance to read literally, whereas Revelation 6:12 uses the comparative and analogical term “like.” I daresay that no serious commentators would interpret either passage literally. They both clearly employ a metaphor for “red color.” Perhaps Exodus 7:20-21 is an instance of the same thing.
<ol style="font-weight: bold" start="2">
<li>
<h3>Plague of Frogs</h3>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt (Exod. 8:6).</blockquote>
Hort argued that the next five plagues were caused by the first. Frogs typically show up at the end of the Nile’s flooding in September and October. Exodus 7:25 states that “seven days passed” between the first and second plagues. The death of the frogs (Exod. 8:13) was—so Hort surmised—due to bacillus anthracis from the dying and decomposing fish. The Live Science article <a href="https://www.livescience.com/44760-raining-frogs.html">provides more examples</a> of this strange phenomenon:
<blockquote>As it happens, the phenomenon of “raining frogs” has been reported multiple times throughout history and in a range of locations around the world. A report published July 12, 1873 in Scientific American described “a shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance,” following a recent rainstorm. . . .
And in May 2010 in Greece, thousands of frogs <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/frogs-still-causing-traffic-jams-in-greece">emerged from a lake</a> in the northern part of the country.</blockquote>
<ol style="font-weight: bold" start="3">
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<h3>Plague of Gnats</h3>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>Then the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Stretch out your rod and strike the dust of the earth, that it may become gnats throughout all the land of Egypt’” (Exod. 8:16).</blockquote>
The Live Science article on the plagues makes the rather obvious point that a “pile of dead frogs” would naturally lead to “a swarm of insects of some sort.” This is perhaps the most plausible natural explanation of any of the plagues, and it would apply to the next one as well.
<ol style="font-weight: bold" start="4">
<li>
<h3>Plague of Flies</h3>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>Else, if you will not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies on you and your servants and your people (Exod. 8:21).</blockquote>
Flies are, of course, always present when dying and dead organic matter is to be found. A study from the journal Caduceus notes that fly bites <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8673614">might have led</a> to the plague of boils later on.
<ol style="font-weight: bold" start="5">
<li>
<h3>Plague of Pestilence</h3>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>For if you refuse to let them go and still hold them, behold, the hand of the Lord will fall with a very severe plague upon your cattle which are in the field, the horses, the asses, the camels, the herds, and the flocks (Exod. 9:2-3).</blockquote>
Hort maintains that this was a result of anthrax spread by the frogs of the second plague. Live Science offers a plausible theory of what may have caused this:
<blockquote>Rinderpest, an infectious and lethal viral disease . . . is thought to have originated in Asia, and traveled to Egypt 5,000 years ago . . . the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/science/16pest.html">reported in 2010</a>. Its mortality rate was exceptionally high, often exceeding 80 percent. It killed an estimated 200 million cattle in the eighteenth century, according to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1043905/pdf/medhist00027-0064.pdf">a study published</a> in the journal Medical History in 1997, and when rinderpest emerged in Africa in the nineteenth century, it killed 5.2 million cattle, causing one third of the population of Ethiopia to die of starvation, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.319.5870.1606">a study published</a> in the journal Science reported in 2008.</blockquote>
<ol style="font-weight: bold" start="6">
<li>
<h3>Plague of Boils</h3>
</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>And it shall become fine dust over all the land of Egypt, and become boils breaking out in sores on man and beast throughout all the land of Egypt (Exod. 9:9).</blockquote>
Based on Deuteronomy 28:35 (knees, legs, foot), Hort deduced that this was caused by a fly from the fourth plague: Stomoxys calcitrans, which carried anthrax. The infection would have been spread as a result of these flies coming in contact with rotting animals after the fifth plague. Stomoxys calcitrans, also known as the stable fly, is indeed able to transmit disease, including boils. A scholarly article <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3756335">devoted to this topic</a> states,
<blockquote>Anthrax . . . affects animals and humans, inducing pulmonary, gastro-intestinal, or cutaneous symptoms, including a boil-like skin lesion. . . . Outbreaks are most common in areas characterized by alkaline, calcareous soil, and in warm environments with periodic episodes of flooding. . . .
B. anthracis infections can also be mechanically transmitted by stable flies.</blockquote>
Another similar article <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/10/5/172/htm">noted</a> that “most of the soils in Egypt are alkaline, with pH values from 7 to 9.”
Of course, there are four more plagues to explore: hail and thunderstorms, locusts, darkness, and the taking of the Egyptian firstborn. Can we find natural explanations—albeit not purely natural explanations—for these as well? The answer is yes . . . with one exception.

6 Biblical Plagues Explained by Science

Former inmates often struggle adjusting to everyday life. In this episode, we talk to Joe Gilbreath, founder of RiseUp Industries and Mike Lucero on bringing hope to those adjusting to life after prison.
<a href="http://riseupindustries.org">riseupindustries.org</a>

Hope and Life After Prison

Yesterday <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-to-believe-in-god-simplified">we covered</a> two arguments in favor of the existence of God that seem complicated—and are—but can be boiled down to their essentials for the amateur apologist. Today, we’ll go through three more.
3. The Argument from Consciousness
Life presents to us an extremely rich qualitative dimension, which is to say, the entire “what it is like”-ness to being you and experiencing the things you experience. The spicy scent of ginger tea, the easy sight of the flamingo, and the luscious guitar sounds of Ratt drive the point home.
The way naturalists usually tell it is that consciousness is a late and local phenomenon, something that emerges from purely mindless physical stuff. Simply put, whatever is fundamental to the naturalist is, effectively, whatever consciousness is not: it is not feeling, not sensing, and not “about” anything (the way thoughts are about things).
But the immediate problem is that it seems extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to construct consciousness from an utterly unconscious base, as described by naturalism.
Just think about it. How does one take mindless atoms and make a unified center of conscious awareness, a subject that binds together so many different thoughts and feelings through intervals of time?
The problem is not just a matter of trying to establish sufficient material complexity, but also how one leaps, as if by magic, across profoundly different kinds of reality. Compare: just as the number and arrangement of white LEGO blocks is irrelevant to constructing a purple tower (even infinite time and number of pieces won’t help), it seems that the same problem, if not significantly worse, applies when it comes to constructing a unified conscious being from the disparate mindless blocks that the naturalistic worldview has to offer.
The problem doesn’t end there, however. For even if the naturalist can make sense of how consciousness could emerge from an unconscious base, he doesn’t have a good story for explaining why it would emerge. Consciousness seems wasteful for the naturalist, since it’s the mindless atoms that do all the work, anyway. (Remember that according to naturalism, the physical realm causes and determines the mental realm, not the other way around.) Thus, there is no good naturalistic-evolutionary account for why the emergence of consciousness would happen, even if the emergence of consciousness could happen.
Classical theism avoids both issues since theism isn’t committed to everything reducing to physics (which is absurd anyway, but whatever—set that aside). In a real sense, molecules aren’t fundamental in classical and Christian theism. Persons are. Theism starts not from a principle of indifference, but a principle of perfection, where everything in the created world is not just less than, but infinitely less than what stands at the foundation. Surely it is easier to think of how we can get something lesser from something (infinitely) greater than it is to think of how one can get something so profound as consciousness from something entirely bereft of thoughts and feelings, like atoms.
Moreover, theism gives reason to expect conscious beings. We are good to have around. God would know this and would be motivated to bring us about. So not only is our emergence possible on theism, but it is also expected. All this gives another powerful reason to accept classical theism over atheistic naturalism.
4. The Argument from Fine-Tuning
We have a basic intuition that stuff that seems “well put together”—i.e., complex stuff, with functionally interrelated parts—is the product of intelligence. This intuition is frequently applied in experience: we see a mousetrap or a Nintendo Switch or the Mona Lisa, and we naturally think some intelligent being produced it. By and large, this intuition is frequently confirmed in experience. Certain things seem to obviously be the product of forethought, which implies that creative intelligence (the ability to engage in relational thinking), not blind (unintelligent) natural forces, is responsible.
But the atheist says, “Not so fast: evolution shows us how things that appear designed are actually the product of totally unintelligent, pitiless forces of nature.”
However, as the best science informs us, evolution requires a very special physical setup to occur, and the physical setup of our universe is incredibly “fine-tuned” or “really well put together” concerning the necessary conditions for the emergence of interactive life. Physicists tell us that if things were just a teensy-weensy bit different concerning, say, the expansion rate of the universe, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the weight of the electron, or many other examples, the emergence of intelligence life would not be possible, because in many cases chemistry would not be possible, or the universe would have collapsed back in on itself, or some other catastrophic scenario. This conclusion enjoys overwhelming expert consensus, from theists and atheists alike. Where the disagreement largely lies is in what explains the fine-tuning.
From the best of what we know, scientifically speaking, evolution requires a physical system that appears “well put together,” a sort of “Goldilocks” situation, where things are just right for evolution to take hold and eventually produce beings like us. Once all that is understood, it becomes clear that evolution does not defeat our frequently confirmed intuition that stuff that appears well put together is best explained by intelligent agency, something capable of foresight.
At this point, the atheist might say <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/what-the-heck-is-the-multiverse">the multiverse</a> could explain fine-tuning. The theist can respond, maybe it does. But how does that help? As physicist Luke Barnes <a href="https://youtu.be/lQ8kznYUdv8?si=cRoMhnLUH2n5hmV7">explains</a>, any theoretically plausible model of the multiverse itself requires fine-tuning; thus, the problem is just relocated, not actually resolved. So until someone can propose a multiverse model that is predictively useful as a physical theory and does not itself appear well fit together (finely tuned), the theist is justified in maintaining his intuition that things that appear well put together are well put together because something intelligent is behind them.
The basic intuition is undefeated “all the way down.” There is thus no reason—from science, anyway—to think things that strongly appear to be the product of intelligence somehow aren’t.
Finally, when it comes to an entire physical universe being well put together, it does not take a lot of imagination to suppose whose intelligence is behind it.
(A note: Someone might worry that God is a poor explanation of the physical universe because God would be more complex than the physical universe. This is false. In the most relevant sense, God is far simpler than any physical reality, since God is an unrestricted act of understanding. In other words, God is the absolutely simple and immaterial first principle of all, a being of pure positiveness, with zero limitations or arbitrary restrictions, lacking all internal complexity, especially physical complexity. That makes God not only simpler than any possible physical explanation, but the simplest conceivable explanation there is.)
5. The Argument from Suffering
Recall the argument from consciousness. There it was made clear that the naturalistic worldview holds that our mental life is something late and local, preceded by and entirely caused by unthinking, unfeeling physical bits. Such commitments are what cause many naturalists to endorse a position called epiphenomenalism (an epiphonema is just something that is itself caused but causes nothing) when it comes to our mental life, or our thoughts and feelings. This is a spooky position and contrary to common sense, since it implies, for example, that our desiring coffee—that is, the feeling of wanting coffee—has nothing to do with our going and getting coffee. Such a feeling just coincidentally (magically?) attends to blind physical forces causing the action of “getting coffee.”
Now, to be clear, epiphenomenalism is as self-evidently false as anything in philosophy could be, and to the extent that naturalism is committed to epiphenomenalism, is even more reason to reject naturalism.
But there is yet another problem. Typically, the naturalist tells us that the vast suffering of our experience is far better expected if God does not exist and if naturalism is true, and so we should endorse naturalism over theism. But this story is way too superficial and ignores too much of what actually goes on in naturalistic research programs, including philosophy of mind. So let’s connect some dots.
Evolution selects for outcomes and functions that confer survival advantage, not feelings, per se, and human functions for the naturalist are possible without feeling. For example, the function of me pulling my hand away from the prick of a pin does not require any painful feeling—it requires no feeling at all within the naturalistic understanding, because the feeling is causally irrelevant. Further, if there is a feeling attendant to some function of human behavior, the feeling could have been literally anything; pulling my hand from the pin could have been correlated with the feeling I feel when listening to the Barney theme song, tasting a grape, or looking at my grandmother’s bunion. Why? Again, because the feeling plays no role in what “the physics” is doing, since the feelings are determined by the physics and the physics is in no way determined by the feelings. (For the naturalistic, remember, the causality is entirely in one direction.) Thus, the outcome would have been the same no matter what the feeling is, or if there is any feeling at all, because it is entirely the unconscious, unfeeling physical processes that matter, that do the functional work and that, ultimately, are selected for. Feelings don’t have anything to do with it, and so it just doesn’t seem there is any need for feelings to be there at all, or to be as “fitting” as they are, if the common naturalistic account of things is correct.
We can only scratch the surface of this argument here. The point for now is simply that once these (admittedly subtle) points concerning the mental and physical are understood, naturalism has no real story to tell for the actual distribution of suffering in our world. Things could have gotten along in just the same way they have without any feelings, good or bad. Things could have been far better or far worse, feelings-wise. The problem is that naturalism, when systematically articulated and consistent with its own inner logic, does not adequately predict any specific degree or distribution of suffering. It leaves all possibilities wide open.
However, once we grant a few plausible points about suffering, including that suffering can be spiritually medicinal (soul-healing and soul-building) alongside other plausible stories about God’s governance (particularly about letting natures play their part, including the natures of free beings), there is a strong theistic story we can tell that makes the distribution of suffering in this world not entirely surprising.
I cannot rehearse this story now, but the simple point is this: naturalism has no explanatory story to tell—ultimately—anyway, about the suffering we experience. Some story is better than no story, and so even the suffering of our experience is evidence for rather than against the existence of God.
Okay—there you have it: three arguments (and two before those) for the existence of God, somewhat simplified.
I must apologize to the reader for the length of this “simplified” summary of arguments. There is still a fair bit going on in the presentations above, to be sure. Still, I have distilled each argument to the extent I am able without omitting any seriously crucial aspect or presenting the arguments in ways that might lead to false philosophical conceptions about God or something else, like morality. If these arguments interest you enough to want to pursue them further, my forthcoming book <a href="https://amzn.to/3EHtNar">The Best Argument for God</a> deals with these topics in satisfying detail. And the theme of this year’s <a href="https://www.catholic.com/conference">Catholic Answers conference</a> is—what else?—“I Believe in God.”

So You Want to Explain Why You Believe

<div>Who were the three women at tomb of Christ?</div><div>Mark 16:1 says they were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.
Mary Magdalene is, of course, one of Christ’s first and closet women disciples, from whom seven demons had been exorcised (Luke 8:2).
Mary the mother of James is not the mother of Jesus, as many modern-day Protestants believe, but another Mary who is elsewhere also identified as the mother of a son, Joseph (Matt. 13:55-56, Mark 15:40). For more on the perpetual virginity of Mary the Mother of Jesus, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-case-for-marys-perpetual-virginity">please see this article by Tim Staples</a>.
Salome is a disciple who, like Mary Magdalene, also witnessed the crucifixion (Mark 15:40). The parallel passage on the crucifixion in Matthew 27:56 conveys she is the mother of the apostles James and John and thus the wife of Zebedee.
</div>

Which Women Were at Christ’s Tomb on Easter Sunday?

<div>What happens if an annulment isn’t granted and a couple is remarried and want to become Catholic?</div><div>I infer you’re speaking about a scenario in which a divorced-and-civilly-remarried couple have sought annulments from their previous marriages, one or both spouses didn’t receive an annulment, and yet they still desire to become Catholic.
First, did they appeal their decision(s) regarding the annulment(s)? That would be the first step, assuming they are still within the time frame to make an appeal. If not, and they were not counseled that they had a right to appeal a diocesan tribunal’s decision, which would seem rather unusual, they could possibly seek to appeal on those grounds.
In any event, if they do not receive a declaration of nullity on appeal, I suggest they seek spiritual counsel from a good, faithful priest who&#8217;s also known for his pastoral mercy. Because a Church tribunal had judged that they remain validly married to other spouses, one option would be to satisfy the normal &#8220;obligation to separate&#8221; in such circumstances, as Pope St. John Paul II noted in his 1981 apostolic exhortation (<a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_19811122_familiaris-consortio.html">Familiaris Consortio 84</a>), in which case the individuals could seek to become Catholic as a non-couple. In addition, for such a couple to remain together, John Paul II added there would need to be a serious reason(s), e.g., for &#8220;the children&#8217;s upbringing&#8221; of any child procreated in the relationship, or if one is elderly and dependent financially on her invalidly married husband.
Also, if they remained together under the same roof, and because of their existing valid marriages to other spouses, they would have to live as brother and sister in perpetuity, i.e., without conjugal relations as husband and wife. Such a living arrangement would certainly involve self-sacrifice, but with God’s grace, it would not simply be possible but certainly preferable to flouting Christ&#8217;s teachings on marriage, as well as because of the graces our Lord Jesus would give them to do so.
Further, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/divorced-and-remarried-can-we-become-catholic">as I have written elsewhere</a>, the Church requires divorced-and-invalidly-remarried couples to have their previous marriages adjudicated, and, if they receive declarations of nullity, they could get married as part of being received into full communion in the Church, and thus would also receive other sacraments in the process (e.g., confession, confirmation, and the Eucharist). To do otherwise would be to put the ecclesiastical cart before the horse, so to speak, and also risk scandal, including the couple&#8217;s leaving the Church if one (or both) didn&#8217;t receive annulments.
If a divorced-and-invalidly-remarried couple didn’t receive annulments, had serious reasons to stay together, and were truly committed to living as brother and sister the rest of their lives, they could possibly contact their local diocesan bishop to see whether an exception might be made in permitting them to become Catholics in their extraordinary circumstances. I’m not aware of such a precedent, but it might be possible in such extraordinary circumstances, provided the couple had embraced a life of complete continence with childlike docility and were committed to living such a life the rest of their lives, or until such time that it was prudent for them to separate.
Any such permission would ultimately have to come from the Holy See in Rome, whether from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and/or the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline for the Sacraments.
If such special permission were granted, and if their divorced-and-remarried status were known in the parish, they would likely be directed to come up for blessings at Communion time during weekly Sunday Mass, and then receive Holy Communion privately, lest public scandal occur, <a href="http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2016/10/16/serving-the-divorced-and-remarried-well/">as I&#8217;ve written elsewhere</a>.
However, first things first. Contact a local parish pastor and also the diocesan tribunal to see where exactly they stand regarding the annulment process.
Finally, to further understand why the Church takes so seriously the sacrament of marriage and the reception of Holy Communion, please see <a href="http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2016/10/16/serving-the-divorced-and-remarried-well/">my related essay</a> in connection with serving well divorced-and-remarried couples.
</div>

What If You’re Remarried and an Annulment Isn’t Granted?

<div>Is it okay to have a child baptized with two sets of godparents?</div><div>No. Canon law provides that one godparent is sufficient but that there may be two, so long as there is one of each sex (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann834-878_en.html">canon 873, Code of Canon Law</a>). There is no provision for more than two godparents.
If the parents wish to honor another couple at the baptism, and that couple are both baptized Christians, they may ask the couple to be Christian witnesses to the baptism together with the Catholic godparents (<a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/directory-on-ecumenism-2345">Directory on Ecumenism 98</a>).
</div>

May a Child Have Four Godparents?

What has Tim Staples Learned after a quarter -century of doing Catholic Apologetics?

Are Catholics still obliged to follow Ember Day?

Why should we trust the Catholic Church and its authority? My friend is a non-Catholic and is concerned he will be deceived. He is trying to trust the Catholic Church but doesn’t know how.

My adult son has left the faith and challenges me about it. He sent me a video of someone saying if Adam and Eve are the parents of humanity, how did we end up with so many races and genetic backgrounds. How would we answer this?

Why does the Catechism teach Muslims worship the same God, when the God of the Koran is so vastly different from the God of the Bible? Is there a way to tell if another monotheistic religion worships the same God or not?

&#8220;What has Tim learned after 25 years of apologetics?&#8221; In this episode, Tim reflects on his extensive experience in Catholic apologetics, addressing questions such as the obligation of Catholics to follow Ember Days and the trustworthiness of the Catholic Church&#8217;s authority. He also tackles challenges faced by parents with children who have left the faith and discusses the complexities of interfaith dialogue regarding the nature of God.
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What Has Tim Learned After 25 Years of Apologetics? Faith and Authority

Here's what worshiping the saints would ACTUALLY look like.

#Shorts #CatholicAnswers #catholic #catholicism #catholicchurch #catholicprayer #catholicprayers #saint #saints #idolatry #christian #christianity #prayer #intercession #Jesus

Here's what worshiping the saints would ACTUALLY look like.

Responding To The “Fatima Nettles” Controversy

How can I rectify the evil caused by free will and the love of God?

How did Protestants come up with the concept of the Rapture? How can I combat this?

Can you explain the difference between Thomistic predestination and the Calvinist view?

Why does the Bible use the translation “the Jews” instead of “Jewish Authority”? &nbsp;

Both Thomism and Calvinism talk about predestination—but they mean very different things. We break down the Catholic (Thomistic) view vs. the Calvinist model, focusing on grace, free will, and God&#8217;s sovereignty in salvation.
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What’s the Difference Between Thomistic and Calvinist Predestination?

<div>I want to get married but don’t want a wedding. What are my options?</div><div>I am not entirely sure what you mean by &#8220;wedding.&#8221; I will assume you mean that you do not want a full nuptial Mass. In that case, there are a few options:
<ul>
<li>A Liturgy of the Word with the exchange of vows. This is the usual choice when one spouse is not Catholic.</li>
<li>Exchanging vows at any regular parish Mass. I have seen couples exchange vows at a regular Sunday or daily Mass.</li>
<li>A simple exchange of vows and reception of the marriage blessing with nothing else. This is rare but not unheard of.</li>
</ul>
If the marriage is between two Catholics, the normative expectation is that the exchange of vows will take place within Mass (<a href="https://litpress.org/Products/GetSample/4641/9780814646410">Order of Celebrating Matrimony,</a> 29).  In this situation, you would need to explain to the priest your reasons for not wanting to exchange vows during a Mass.
</div>

Can I Marry Without a Wedding?

Is it impossible to avoid circular reasoning when talking about religious authority? Many Protestants would argue yes. “It is inevitable, it is inescapable to argue in a circle when you are talking about the issue of authority,” argue Reformed podcasters Jacob Stabler and Paul Liberati <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-protestant-view-of-the-authority-of-scripture/id1725870035?i=1000660462331">in an episode</a> of their “Protestant Podcast” from last year.
Nor is this an uncommon position among prominent Protestants. Scholar Matthew Barrett—<a href="https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/sbc-seminary-profs-departure-to-anglicanism-prompts-discussion-of-baptists-tradition/">who recently garnered headlines</a> for moving from the Southern Baptist Convention to Anglicanism—in God’s Word Alone: The Authority of Scripture, argues, “Any appeal to an ultimate authority is necessarily circular. After all, there is no higher authority to appeal to. If there were a higher authority outside of Scripture to appeal to, then Scripture would no longer be the highest authority.” Dutch-American Reformed professor Cornelius Van Til <a href="https://presupp101.wordpress.com/van-til-quotes/van-til-quotes-on-circular-reasoning/">argued something similar</a>: “[The] position we have sought to outline is frankly taken from the Bible. . . . From the non-Christian point of view our position with respect to God and Scripture is the product of ‘circular reasoning.’” And Wayne Grudem <a href="https://stustation.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/systematic-theology-by-wayne-grudem-part-3/">asserts</a> in his popular evangelical textbook Systematic Theology, “All arguments for an absolute authority must ultimately appeal to that authority for proof: otherwise the authority would not be an absolute or highest authority.”
<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/dueling-ultimate-authorities">If this is true</a>, it means that the logical fallacy of question-begging—in which an argument is made that presumes precisely what is in question—is acceptable when we make an appeal to an ultimate authority. This is a curious position to take, because it would mean that in certain circumstances, God is free to flout the logical principles that govern creation, and that even define his essence. Jesus Christ is, after all, the Logos, reason itself (see John 1:1-3). For God to commit logical fallacies would be to act contrary to his being.
Another problem with this argument is that it implicitly grants that there is no means of actually debating the veracity of claims of divine revelation—be it in Scripture or anywhere else— because those who make such an argument are effectively asserting that they are permitted to commit a logical fallacy. Yet that amounts to nothing more than simply asserting that Scripture is an ultimate authority, as if our interlocutors are simply supposed to accept our opinion regardless of whatever concerns those interlocutors might have.
Moreover, the claim that all appeals to an ultimate authority are circular amounts to what is called fideism—the idea that faith is informed not by reason, but simply by an exercise of the will. But if that’s the case, then the contest among competing claims to ultimate religious authority is either one of coercion (who possesses more power to exercise his will over others) or sentiment (who is able to make the more effective appeal to our emotions, which then inform the will). I doubt that many Protestants would want to accept that their religious beliefs are ultimately determined by force or feelings.
That leaves us with reason. All arguments are mediated to us through our intellects. Certainly we can allow sentiment to override reason, but I hope most of us would agree that reason and not feelings should carry the day. For example, we believe that the three sides of a triangle equal 180 degrees because this fact conforms to reason, and our intellects, properly formed, are capable of grasping it. It is not because the nature of triangles is “self-evident” to us, nor because we “feel” it. Again, the existence of God can be proved because his existence conforms to reason communicated via arguments, not because he is “self-evident.” Indeed, classic Thomistic arguments for the existence of God (“the Five Ways”) are appeals to an ultimate authority that are not circular, but rather argue from effects to God as first cause.
The basis for our reasoning is something the Western philosophical tradition calls “first principles”: foundational propositions or premises that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or premise, at least not directly. First principles include such axioms as that the whole is greater than the parts, or that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time (the law of non-contradiction). To argue otherwise would be self-defeating for any attempt to think reasonably. They are also things even children intuitively appreciate.
Belief in Holy Scripture as an ultimate authority that operates in the same way as reason—as if the Bible’s authority is itself a “first principle”—is self-defeating. Otherwise, why not believe in the Quran or Upanishads, Buddha or Odin, if their veracity or divinity is established by mere arbitrary assertion? If we abandon reason as the means by which we evaluate arguments regarding Scripture or God, all we have left is either emotivism (e.g., “I believe X because X feels right to me”) or purely random arbitrary choice, a cast of the dice.
Christians should believe in the veracity and divine origin of Scripture because they are persuaded by reasonable arguments, not simply because we assert them based on our interpretation. And, in truth, those who claim that Scripture is self-authenticating cannot help but undermine their own position by making arguments. They appeal to the historicity of the Bible, to its internal coherence, to its remarkable relevance to the human condition across millennia. The Westminster Confession of Faith, an English post-Reformation-era document, declares,
<blockquote>The heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God (1, 5).</blockquote>
Of course, if the Bible “evidences itself” by appealing to criteria such as efficacy, majesty of style, and coherency, then we are evaluating it based on criteria external to itself that are defined and understood apart from the Bible, meaning that reason would still be the operative force.
To anticipate a possible objection, does not making reason, rather than the Bible, the means of authenticating its divine origin result in deifying man’s reason, effectively placing man above God? No, it does not. As I’ve noted above, God is reason itself. Man participates in God’s reason whenever he thinks logically. (The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/01/18/what-is-analogy-a-thomistic-introduction/">refers to this as analogy</a>.) To go back to our triangle example, God created the triangle, and when we perceive the triangle accurately, we analogically participate in God’s conception of it. Thus, by reasoning about what constitutes divine revelation, we are doing precisely what God intends for us to do as creatures created in his image and bestowed with intellects and wills.
Let me anticipate one more Protestant objection: doesn’t the Catholic Church engage in circular reasoning with regard to its magisterial authority, because, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRamK_fmPO0">some Protestants claim</a>, people should trust the Catholic Church because it claims to represent God? Yet, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/my-church-is-more-credible-than-yours">as I’ve argued elsewhere</a>, the Catholic Church never teaches that people should trust the Church simply because it asserts that they should—rather, the Church relies on what are called motives of credibility, which are various pieces of evidence about its authority that are accessible to human reason. These include such things as miracles, prophecies, the holiness of the saints, and the Church’s stability.
In sum, circular reasoning is not necessary to believe in an ultimate religious authority. But reasoning is.

Stuck in a Circle with You

The late Reformed scholar B.B. Warfield <a href="https://archive.org/details/calvinaugustine0000warf">said</a> that the Reformation was “the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the church” (322). More specifically, Evangelical apologist Daniel Corner, who rejects the doctrine of eternal security, writes, “Church history declares Augustine was the originator and developer of OSAS” (once saved, always saved) (23). Even Catholic historian James Papandrea <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/handed-down-the-catholic-faith-of-the-early-christians-softcover/?searchid=13056074&amp;search_query=handed+down">writes</a>, “Augustine is the originator of the idea of perseverance as ‘once saved, always saved” (71).
But what is the full story about Augustine and one of Protestantism’s favorite doctrines?
St. Augustine formulated many soteriological ideas that would become touchstones of so-called Reformed thought. These include effective/irresistible <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1510.htm">grace</a> (32-33), total depravity (29), and <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/15121.htm">unconditional election</a> (36). These form the T, U, and I of the famous Calvinist acronym TULIP.
It should be noted that the three doctrines listed above are not uniquely Protestant. They also find similar expression in the Catholic Thomist tradition. The biggest differences between some versions of Thomism and Calvinism are limited atonement (all Catholic traditions teach that Christ’s death was universal in scope), and perseverance of the saints (all Catholic traditions believe that not all truly regenerate people will necessarily persevere in salvation). We will examine Saint Augustine’s views concerning this latter difference.
In short, Saint Augustine endorses the Catholic view. However, it is understandable why some would presume that he endorsed eternal security. Concerning the predestined, he <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1513.htm">writes</a>, “Of these no one perishes, because all are elected” (14). Indeed, “the faith of these, which worketh by love, either actually does not fail at all, or, if there are any whose faith fails, it is restored before their life is ended” (16). Upon first glance, these passages seem to fit quite nicely within an “eternal security” framework.
However, he also states, “Whoever are elected are without doubt also called; but not whosoever are called are as a consequence elected” (14). This is an important distinction: God elects some to salvation and perseverance unto final glory, whereas some he elects to salvation without perseverance. The passages cited above affirm the certain perseverance of the elect, but not of all the regenerate.
Augustine also writes, “It is, indeed, to be wondered at, and greatly to be wondered at, that to some of his own children—whom he has regenerated in Christ whom he has given faith, hope, and love, God does not give perseverance. . . . Who would not wonder at this?” (18). Elsewhere, he equates the final fate of these with others who were never saved and with those who lost their salvation: “Those who have not heard the gospel, and those who, having heard it and been changed by it for the better, have not received perseverance, and those who, having heard the gospel, have refused to come to Christ, that is, to believe in him . . . are not made to differ from that lump which it is plain to condemn” (12).
So, even though Augustine held to doctrines that later Calvinists would recognize as irresistible grace, total depravity, and unconditional election, he denied what would later be called the perseverance of the saints or eternal security. For he did not believe that Scripture teaches the necessary perseverance of all the regenerate. Rather, only those elected to final glory will necessarily persevere and achieve it, and not all the regenerate are so elected.
In On Rebuke and Grace, Augustine explicitly states that those who lose the grace of salvation cannot maintain that they never really received it: “If, however, being already regenerate and justified, he relapses of his own will into an evil life, assuredly he cannot say, ‘I have not received,’ because of his own free choice to evil he has lost the grace of God, that he had received” (9).
John Jefferson Davis, in <a href="https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/files_JETS-PDFs_34_34-2_34-2-pp213-228_JETS.pdf">a history</a> of the perseverance of the saints, writes the following concerning Augustine’s views on the subjective sense of assurance:
<blockquote>Unlike Calvin and those in the later reformed tradition, however, Augustine does not believe that the Christian can in this life know with infallible certitude that he is among the he is among the elect and that he will finally persevere” (213-214).</blockquote>
Concerning Augustine’s views on the objective reality of whether all the regenerate will receive final glory, Davis writes, “it is possible to experience the renewal of baptismal regeneration, and the justifying grace of God, and yet not persevere to the end.”

What Augustine Really Taught About Heaven

Some Christians claim the Catholic Church’s seven sacraments aren’t in the Bible at all. How do you respond to that broad objection?

Let’s start at the foundation — where in Scripture do we see the idea that God communicates grace through outward signs?

Baptism is accepted by most Christians, but Catholics see it as more than a symbol. What’s the biblical evidence for baptism actually saving us?

Many people say Confirmation is just a Catholic “add-on.” What are the scriptural roots for a sacrament distinct from baptism?

When it comes to the Eucharist, the biblical debate can get intense. How do you show from Scripture that Jesus meant His words—“This is my body”—literally?

But what about when Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me”? Doesn’t that prove that the Eucharist merely a meal in which we recollect on the tings that Jesus did?

Confession to a priest is one of the hardest for non-Catholics to accept. Where does the Bible show that God gave men the authority to forgive sins?

Anointing of the Sick is sometimes seen as “Last Rites” only. How do the Scriptures present this sacrament, and does it match Catholic practice?

Marriage as a sacrament—some say the Bible just sees it as a natural institution. How do you show from Scripture that it’s a channel of grace?

Holy Orders—where in the Bible do we see a distinct, ordained priesthood in the New Covenant?

&#8220;Are Sacraments Biblical?&#8221; This episode tackles the claim that the Catholic Church&#8217;s seven sacraments lack biblical support, addressing foundational questions about God&#8217;s grace through outward signs. Discover the scriptural basis for baptism&#8217;s saving power, the distinct nature of Confirmation, and the authority behind Confession, all rooted in Scripture.
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Proving Every Catholic Sacrament from the Bible – Part 1 (Encore)

It’s September—the perfect time to go to the beach. Or at least it is if you care about fostering modesty in yourself and your children.
Recently, a mother called in to Mother Miriam Live to ask whether it’s a good idea to take her kids to the beach, given the temptations for her son to “stare at bare legs.” Mother Miriam <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0VuPAV7ppY&amp;t=2s">responded</a>, in part,
<blockquote>
I wouldn’t do it. I would never take a child—I wouldn’t take anyone to a beach. I wouldn’t go to the beach myself. I wouldn’t do it. That sort of immodesty—it’s sin. It’s outright sin. And I wouldn’t expose anybody to it, nor would I go myself.
</blockquote>
She referred to the “naked girls,” whom the mom’s sons would first have to look at in order to discern whether to look. “You’ve already seen it. It’s too late. And it’s all around you.”
A coworker asked me to write about how my family handles this. The framing of the pitch is important: not whether I, as a father raising six young kids of both sexes, think beaches are a hotbed of immodesty. They absolutely are. Given that . . . just . . . how?
First, we go off-season. Our East Coast destination has delightful weather for most of May and all the way through September. The crowds are much reduced in number and in kind. Retirees and homeschooling families make for far fewer bikinis.
Second, we go off-hours. We avoid the beach at the hottest time of the day. This accords better with our family’s sleep schedule—up at the crack of dawn, desperate for a nap midday, back at ’em late afternoon until dinner and bedtime—and saves us <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/how-a-big-catholic-family-affords-groceries">a lot of money</a> and aggravation on sunscreen. Plus even fewer bikinis.
Third, we educate. After all, “fewer bikinis” never means “no bikinis.”
It struck me to hear Mother Miriam’s caller zero in on parents “taking their kids, specifically their sons, to the beach.” But here in the real world, all my sons want to do is build a sand suspension bridge (good luck) and see how deep they can go into the ocean (please don’t).
They don’t notice the “bare legs”—not yet. My daughter does. Even at her very young age, she’s sizing up the girls, noticing how they differ from herself, and asking her parents about them. Right now, she’s the one who most needs our attention, and our protection.
There will be plenty of time, as my sons’ <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/if-you-dont-teach-your-kids-about-sex-guess-who-will">years of innocence</a> are concluding, to educate them about custody of the eyes. For now, we content ourselves to teach all our children (but again, with a focus on our daughters) that it’s ridiculous to show your underwear in public.
Yes, ridiculous. When we read the climax of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the kids are meant to laugh with the crowd. Likewise on the beach. It’s rude to point and laugh, and we teach that. But if strutting in your underwear—and that’s what a bikini is at its most “modest”—doesn’t get you made fun of, it’s only thanks to the decency of the onlookers.
I don’t mean to be flippant about this. Young kids can understand it, without mature concepts infringing on their childhood. We can, later on, juxtapose modern society’s squandering the body’s loveliness with the dignified treatment Catholic morality invites. The memory of ridiculous littoral exhibitionists parading their private parts can be the foundation, without psychosexual baggage forced too young, for deeper lessons about the body’s proper use.
Mother Miriam suggested that her caller “invest in a huge portable pool. . . . That should be the beach recreation for your family.” Sure, that’s one possible solution, though we’ll have to address the mall and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/you-can-be-covered-and-still-immodest">the gym</a> and the public square next. I’ve offered my solutions here. My point is not to bicker about the particulars, but simply to insist that the “naked girls” do in fact call for a solution.
I can’t force all the girls not to flaunt their bodies, nor can I force all the boys not to ogle them. But I can seek out seasons and locations that preserve my own girls and boys from a culture of relentless flaunting and ogling. Moreover, I can dress my girls with dignity, and guide my boys’ eyes to innocent things, for the time God has given them to me, until these precious people depart from my arms with the moral grounding to keep it up on their own.
That’s how we go to the beach: for a third of the price, with more than a scrap of sand for ourselves, in September.

Is the Beach Too Immodest for Catholics?

<div>How can Catholics defend their blasphemous teaching about Mary? Mary gave birth to Jesus, but to call her “the Mother of God” is idolatrous, because she is not greater than Jesus. In addition, Mary has no special role in our salvation, nor is she the “queen of heaven” or “our spiritual mother” in general. Consequently, to pray to Mary and the other “saints” who have died is blasphemous, because it contradicts Scripture on conjuring the dead, as well as that Jesus is the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim. 2:5, emphasis added).</div><div>
<h3>Short Answer:</h3>
Mary is the Mother of God, because Jesus—her Son—is God. She is also our spiritual mother in heaven (Rev. 12:17) and thus able to intercede for us with Jesus.
<h3>Long Answer:</h3>
As the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus is Mary’s creator, and yet because Jesus is “the Word became flesh [who] dwelt among us” (John 1:14), he is both true God and true man. Consequently, by virtue of the Incarnation—i.e., Jesus’ becoming man through the power of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35)—Mary is the Mother of God, not simply the mother of his humanity—or him as a human person alone, as if Jesus were two persons. Rather Jesus is a divine Person who became fully human through the Incarnation. Also, we see that Mary’s divine maternity is a gift from God, not something she merited on her own (Luke 1:26-38), and a gift to fulfill the Father’s plan to send his only begotten Son to serve as our Savior (John 3:16-17).
Because Mary is the Mother of God, in whom God the Son dwelt most intimately, she is also the Ark of the New Covenant, as there are many scriptural parallels between Mary and the Ark of the Old Covenant, in which God manifested his presence most intimately on earth prior to his Incarnation. Also, corresponding to Jesus’ status as the New Adam (see Rom. 5:12-21), Mary is the New Eve and thus conceived without sin like the first Eve. Mary doesn’t merit this status by her own account, but rather—like her divine maternity—she receives her Immaculate Conception as a gift from God; and yet, unlike the first Eve who fell with the first Adam in committing original sin, Mary freely cooperates with the Lord and his grace in remaining free from sin her entire life. Consequently, she is assumed into heaven upon the conclusion of her earthly life, and her Assumption is not a latter-day doctrinal novelty that the Church created. Scripture portrays Mary as the holy queen of heaven (Rev. 12:1), not to be confused with the idolatrous one which the prophet Jeremiah condemns. Indeed, Mary is our spiritual mother, who looks out for us “her offspring . . . those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Rev. 12:17, emphasis added).
St. James teaches that the prayers of a righteous man on earth avail much (James 5:16). How much more powerful, then, are the prayers of those men in heaven, i.e., the saints, “the spirits of just men made perfect”? (Heb. 12:23). Here we distinguish between praying to the saints in heaven vs. Old Covenant necromancy. And if the queen mothers of the Old Covenant kingdom of Israel held sway with their royal sons, how much more does the Blessed Mother, who is the New Covenant queen mother, because her divine Son is king of the restored and fulfilled Davidic kingdom of Israel (Luke 1:32-33; Rev. 17:14), which encompasses heaven and earth?
Because Mary and the saints reign with Jesus in heaven as divinely exalted collaborators, we ask for their prayerful intercession. To be sure, the Bible supports praying to the saints, not the worship of them. Finally, as with the seven sacraments, our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters affirm Mary’s heavenly queenship and thus her maternal care for us here on earth.
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Is Praying to Mary Blasphemous, and How Do Catholics Justify It?

What are the top three reasons to reject Sola Fide?

How did Luther justify the rebellion to himself?

Why should I believe the Romans 4 says the exact opposite of James 2. Romans 4 is about justification before GOD, James 2 is justification before MEN.

Protestant friend challenges me with the following. He claims the church is inconsistent cause parishes give just the bread, and others give the bread and wine.

&#8220;Why reject Sola Fide?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the key reasons against the doctrine of justification by faith alone, including insights into Luther&#8217;s self-justification for his rebellion. The conversation also addresses the apparent contradictions between Romans 4 and James 2 regarding justification, as well as challenges about the Eucharist practices in different parishes.
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Why Reject Sola Fide? Justification and Church Practices

Many non-Catholic Christians disdain the crucifix, because they believe it distracts from our Lord&#8217;s victory over sin and death. They prefer the bare cross, which they think better reflects the triumph of his subsequent Resurrection, whereas a crucifix focuses on Jesus’ death or even defeat, as if he still needs to suffers for us. Not surprisingly, then, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/when-did-jesus-finish-his-sacrifice">the sacrifice of the Mass</a> is often caricatured <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-mass-beats-the-4th-of-july">as the blasphemous re-crucifixion of Jesus</a>.
St. Paul has a better both/and idea. He knows that the Resurrection is an indispensable aspect of Christ’s one paschal sacrifice (1 Cor. 15:12-18). Yet he also knows that Christ’s crucifixion depicts how much Jesus loves us in atoning for our sins (John 15:13; see Heb. 9:11-14), and that the Lord’s embracing his own cross—the cross—helps us better to understand the call to carry our own (Matt. 16:24-26).
Indeed, Paul understands that “Christ crucified” graphically symbolizes that Jesus has vanquished sin, death, and the devil and thus necessarily implies his resurrection. It also illustrates that we need a savior and thereby directs our need to repent and become his disciples:
<blockquote>For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. . . .
For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 1:22-25, 2:2).</blockquote>
Jesus concurs: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” which he proclaims at the beginning of his public ministry (Matt. 3:17), and thereafter along with apostles, illustrating <a href="https://www.catholic.com/bible-navigator/necessity-of-baptism">that baptism is fundamental in becoming his disciple</a> and having our sins forgiven (Matt. 28:18-19; Acts 2:37-39).
<h2>The Crucifix: A Tangible Reminder (Matt. 28:20)</h2>
These truths all help explain why a crucifix—and not simply a bare cross—is the most universally recognized symbol of Catholicism and Christianity in general. As a cradle Catholic—and praised be our Lord Jesus Christ for the efficacy of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/infant-baptism">infant baptism</a>!—I “got it” at a very young age regarding these sacred images in my home and parish church (<a href="https://saintmaryofredford.church/tour">St. Mary of Redford</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/21400866648/">in Detroit</a>). Seeing our Lord’s corpus on a cross greatly helped me encounter our divine Savior as a child (Matt. 18:1-4; 19:13-15), just as Paul knew it would.
So when I continued to see crucifixes in my classrooms at <a href="https://www.detroitcatholic.com/news/former-st-mary-of-redford-school-to-be-transformed-into-supportive-housing">St. Mary of Redford Grade School in Detroit</a> and <a href="https://fgrhs.org/">Fr. Gabriel Richard High School in Ann Arbor</a>, I knew I was at home. They never confused or repulsed me, let alone cause me to get angry at another religious group for our Lord’s death. I understood that I contributed to putting him on the cross—that we all did through our personal sins. The sacrament of confession made me intimately aware of these realities—and is designed to do so—and so I was and am grateful that Jesus came to redeem us (John 3:16-17; 12:31-33).
<h2>Girding our Loins for Our Own Good Fridays</h2>
Because of his victory over sin and death, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit, further empowering us to live as credible witnesses for his kingdom (Acts 1:8; 2:1-47; see <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm#III">CCC 156</a>). We need to understand what has Lord has done so that we can embrace his call to holiness and share the good news with others. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/where-is-confirmation-in-the-bible">The sacrament of confirmation</a> calls us—and equips us—to participate personally in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20):
<blockquote>It gives us a special strength of the Holy Spirit to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross:
Recall then that you have received the spiritual seal, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence, the spirit of holy fear in God&#8217;s presence. Guard what you have received. God the Father has marked you with his sign; Christ the Lord has confirmed you and has placed his pledge, the Spirit, in your hearts (CCC 1303).
</blockquote>
Trials will come for us, as they did for Jesus, as <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032026.cfm">the first reading for Mass on March 20</a> captures well:
<blockquote>For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him
and deliver him from the hand of his foes.
With revilement and torture let us put him to the test 
that we may have proof of his gentleness 
and try his patience (Wis. 2:17-18).</blockquote>
Jesus lives out these words in establishing the New Covenant, enduring mockery from the very people he came to save, as we hear in <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032926.cfm">the Passion narrative</a> on Palm Sunday:
<blockquote>Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, if you are the Son of God, [and] come down from the cross!” Likewise the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him and said, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. So he is the king of Israel! Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” The revolutionaries who were crucified with him also kept abusing him in the same way (Matt. 27:39-44).</blockquote>
Jesus redeems and offers them salvation (Luke 23:34, 1 Tim. 2:4). We cannot act differently, remembering that our mission is to everyone, because everyone is made in God’s image and likeness (Gen. 1:26-27), and thus one for whom our Lord died and offers salvation (2 Pet. 3:9), which is a reminder of our own need for God’s mercy. To help us love those who hate and persecute us (Matt. 5:43-48), we should remember that our incontrovertible enemies are not “flesh and blood”—i.e., mere human beings—but that we are contending “against the principalities, against the powers,” the devil and all of his demonic minions (Eph. 6:12).
Paul exhorts us to fully arm ourselves (Eph. 6:10-18) and lets us know that our armor includes <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-seven-sacraments-a-comprehensive-list">the sacraments</a>—those weapons of our warfare” that “are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:3-4).
This brings us back to the crucifix and Christ’s one paschal sacrifice that it symbolizes. The sacrament of the Eucharist is “the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-the-eucharist-is-the-source-and-summit-of-christianity">source and summit</a> of the whole Christian life,” because it enables us to offer anew Christ’s one propitiatory sacrifice (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c1a3.htm#V">CCC 1366-1367</a>), and also because it provides us to consume our New Covenant Passover Lamb of God <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-mass-beats-the-4th-of-july">through liturgical remembrance</a> in a bloodless, sacramental manner at every Mass, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-the-point-of-a-priest">according to the order of Melchizedek</a>—which Jesus assures us will lead us unto eternal life if we receive him reverently (John 6:53-58, Matt. 28:20; see 1 Cor. 10:14-22, 11:23-32).
Our Lord has traveled this road before us. Let us persevere, with his support, because he is trustworthy (John 8:31-32, 14:6; Rom. 8:28).

A Crucifix, Not Just a Cross

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DAY 295
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CHALLENGE
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“The Gospels contradict each other on the time of the Crucifixion. Mark says Jesus was crucified at ‘the third hour’ (Mark 15:25), and all three synoptics record the darkness from ‘the sixth hour’ to ‘the ninth hour’ while he was on the cross (Matt. 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44), but John indicates that Jesus wasn’t yet crucified at ‘the sixth hour’ (John 19:14).”
DEFENSE
John uses a different way of reckoning hours than the synoptics.
There are four natural points where one could begin counting hours: midnight, sunrise, noon, and sunset. Each has been used by different cultures. In America, we use midnight and noon (thus “one o’clock” is the first hour to strike after both).
In first-century Judaea, the custom was to count twelve hours from sunrise, as illustrated in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20:1–16, where a man hires workers at the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hours. The last group are said to work “only one hour,” while those hired earlier bore “the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”
The Roman practice, however, was to reckon the day as beginning at midnight (cf. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2:79[77]). We can show that John was using this method in his Gospel and counting the hours from midnight: “For example, in John 1:39 a reckoning from the morning would make the ‘tenth hour’ four o’clock in the afternoon, but a reckoning from midnight would make it ten o’clock in the morning, the latter being more appropriate to the fact that the two disciples then stayed with Jesus ‘that day’” (Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., §19; Finegan also offers additional examples).
The timing of the Crucifixion is thus described in the synoptics using the Jewish system of counting hours and in John by the Roman system. Thus in John, Pilate brings Jesus out to the crowd at “about the sixth hour” after midnight (around 6 a.m.). According to Mark he is then crucified at “the third hour” after dawn (around 9 a.m.). And according to all three synoptics, darkness covered the land from the sixth to the ninth hours after dawn (from around 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.).
TIP
See also Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul, 10, 293–96.
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The Time of the Crucifixion

Many years back, my father took us along to Florida on a work trip. With seven kids in the back of a gray Chevy Suburban, he pulled off the main drag to show us a “neighborhood.” Or rather, he pulled into a series of empty blocks and streets to show us that there was no neighborhood. No houses, no cars besides our own, no dogs, no kids, no backyards. The streets were there, but no life.
What we were seeing was a development that had been stymied by the 2007-2008 real estate crash that kicked off the Great Recession. Some investors had bet big, and in that case, they lost big in laying the groundwork for a neighborhood that never was anything more than empty streets.
Highways, avenues, and boulevards don’t exist for their own sake. Life would be miserable without them, but their existence is bound up with connecting people and places. They are just a part of, and not even the most important part of, a neighborhood.
Catholics have a similar view of the State’s relation to the rest of society. The State is a natural part of human existence, and its just authority comes from human nature. Therefore, in principle, it is ultimately divinely sanctioned (CCC 1884). But the Church in its teaching does not confuse “the State” with the rest of society, but rather part of a social fabric that serves a particular role in helping the other parts—particularly the family and the Church—achieve their legitimate and good ends.
A society, as the Catechism defines it, is “a group of persons bound together organically by a principle of unity that goes beyond each one of them.” It is not just practical for man to have societies, but rather a “requirement of his nature” (1879).
The Church rejects individualism, understood as each person being an atomized self-contained unit that can be perfected and fulfilled all alone and against others. In the beginning, God declared that “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Adam and Eve were ordered “to be fruitful and multiply” and create the first family, and therefore the first society.
The Church is not “Libertarian,” or at least not the caricatured version that thinks <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/taxation-can-be-theft">taxation is always theft</a> and that those in government should never build roads. But the Church just as fiercely stands in opposition to those who would have the State usurp the roles, responsibilities, and powers of the other parts of society.
Like a road, governments’ legitimacy and usefulness are integrally connected to their boundaries. We can drive quickly down highways because people, animals, and other things we don’t want to run over with cars are not there. We can have cookouts in the backyard, take naps on our living room couches, and close our eyes in prayer after Mass because we are confident that SUVs and semitrucks won’t come barreling through. As emphatically as it rejects atomized individualism, the Church sets up clear guardrails against collectivism and government overreach. Paragraph 1885 of the Catechism sums it up:
<blockquote>The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention. It aims at harmonizing the relationships between individuals and societies. It tends toward the establishment of true international order.</blockquote>
Pope St. John Paul II reiterates this thought when reflecting on Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum. John Paul, carrying with him the memory of Nazi Germany and the reality of the Soviet Union, is clear that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-government-should-do-for-the-poor">it is not a Catholic idea</a> that the State ought to expand to solve every social problem. He reminds us that Leo “frequently insists on necessary limits to the State’s intervention,” “inasmuch as the individual, the family, and society are prior to the State, and inasmuch as the State exists in order to protect their rights and not stifle them.”
Resistance to those in government encroaching on the rights of the rest of society is practically in American DNA. We take for granted that the rule of law constrains not just citizens, but government action as well. But that is only because the United States and the West—albeit the mixed influence of the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation—is the fruit of Christendom. The Caesars proclaimed themselves god-emperors, and the pharaohs were deified. The unification of the Temple and State gave uncontested legitimacy to what we would consider absolute tyranny. The family, the individual, and religion itself were unified with and therefore subservient to the State.
Our Lord, through the Church, broke that mindset. The martyrs in the Colosseum gladly honor the emperor, as St. Paul instructs them to, but will not offer a pinch of incense to him. St. Ambrose bars Emperor Theodosius from entering the cathedral due to the unjust blood on his hands. From the conviction that Our Lord meant what he said when he commanded us to “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but render to God what belongs to God,” society in the Christian West was transformed. The many parts of it—individuals, families, local communities, businesses, schools, ministries, etc.—were no longer slaves of the State, but instead partners in the enterprise of building the common good, having rights that came from the Creator that the State must recognize.
So what impact should this have on our attitudes, behavior, and political life?
Reflexively crying &#8220;fascist&#8221; or “communist” at every political candidate who advocates for some government program or agency would be inordinate. But it would be just as inordinate for Catholics to demand every proposed government initiative without critical thought, and even worse to accuse those who have concerns with a seemingly ever-expanding government of being “radical individualists.” Rather, when looking at societal problems, we need to keep in mind that there is a burden of proof that the State needs to clear if it starts intervening in the affairs of families, local communities, etc. There may be a case for such intervention, but a case must be made. Good intentions do not equate to prudent or just solutions.
The Church’s teaching is clear: the State is a part of (and not the most important part of) society. Catholics cannot pawn all problems off on the government. Government is not capable of solving all things, just as roads are not capable of giving shelter, warmth, or security. If we are good citizens and good disciples, we need to step up in our families, parishes, civic organizations, and local communities. These are the houses, yards, and parks that make our neighborhoods alive. Let’s not, as the poet sang, “pave paradise and put up a parking lot” by ceding responsibility for our families and neighbors to people in government because we are too lazy or self-absorbed.
G.K. Chesterton expertly sums it up:
<blockquote>Now, I know there is a feeling that Government can do anything. But if Government could do anything, nothing would exist except Government. . . . The State can only free society from the criminal; the Church sought to free the criminal from the crime.
Abolish religion if you like. Throw everything on secular government if you like. But do not be surprised if a machinery that was never meant to do anything but secure external decency and order fails to secure internal honesty and peace.</blockquote>

The State Is Not Society

Featured Guests: Karlo Broussard, Carrie Gress, Scott Weeman, Tim Staples
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hDwRQKsjoc&amp;t=21s">00:21</a> Is receiving the Eucharist necessary for salvation? – Karlo Broussard 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hDwRQKsjoc&amp;t=316s">05:16</a> How is toxic femininity affecting modern society? – Carrie Gress 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hDwRQKsjoc&amp;t=851s">14:11</a> What do you do when you’ve tried everything and can’t seem to reach a loved one struggling with addiction? – Scott Weeman 
<a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hDwRQKsjoc&amp;t=1044s">17:24</a> How can we resolve doubts and difficulties as Catholics? – Tim Staples

Catholic Answers | Season 5 | Episode 1

There are people or institutions we follow on the assumption that doing so will help us get more beliefs right. We call these people or institutions epistemic (from episteme, meaning knowledge—epistemic refers to belief formation). In fact, we rely on epistemic authorities all the time—especially in science and medicine, but also in far more mundane situations, like hiring a trail guide for a hike.
Our powers of reasoning and private judgment are often sufficient to recognize when an epistemic authority is needed, and to identify who or what that authority might be. However, although our rational faculties might be perfectly capable of identifying an epistemic authority, they are usually not adequate to replace one.
This is obvious in cases like medicine, where a certain level of expertise is required to navigate complex conceptual terrain. We can recognize that we lack the expertise, that an epistemic authority is needed, and we can often discern such an authority (namely, a doctor). But it would be foolish to think that because we can identify a medical expert, we’re also qualified to “figure it out on our own” or just “do our own research.” In some situations, it really is unreasonable and even irresponsible to bypass an epistemic authority and try to work things out as a fallible, non-expert individual.
Now, what about religion—specifically Christianity? Here, too, there are good reasons to expect epistemic authority—that one would be required and, indeed, provided. If God reveals propositional truths—that is, specific claims or statements meant to be understood and affirmed as true—then he should also provide a reliable means of transmitting and interpreting and preserving them. And not just any authority, but one capable of teaching without error on matters essential to salvation. In other words, there are good reasons to expect something like a living, infallible Magisterium—and that is precisely what the Catholic Church claims to possess.
Let us consider some  “epistemic challenges” for the Catholic Church to overcome.
If God is going to reveal something, then for that revelation to be useful and accessible to the people it’s revealed to, it would have to be delivered in the language and customs of that culture. However, times change—cultures, attitudes, and languages evolve—so as revelation is passed down, it must be properly interpreted. Otherwise, propositional revelation will become increasingly confusing or even outright unintelligible.
Thus, an authority capable of preserving, transmitting, and interpreting that revelation wouldn’t just be helpful; it would be almost certainly necessary if successful transmission is to occur. Surely this is something God would want—and something all Christians agree that God did want.
It is clear that God was not so worried about “being interpreted properly” that he gave us some highly technical, logically rigorous version of revelation. In other words, Scripture is not a philosophical treatise in the style of analytic metaphysics. God didn’t say, “I possess maximal power constrained only by logical possibility and the coherence of my essential attributes.” He said, “Nothing is impossible with God.”
This is a tame and easy example. Many other passages are far more obscure to a modern audience because they are so deeply embedded in the assumptions of a culture long since past. Think, for instance, of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper—&#8221;This is my blood of the covenant&#8221; (Matt. 26:28)—which to a first-century Jew would immediately recall the blood sacrifices of Exodus 24, but which a modern reader could easily miss entirely. Or his parable of the wedding feast (Matt. 22:1–14), which is suffused with prophetic allusions to Israel’s covenant history yet can sound to modern ears like little more than a quirky banquet story.
The simple point is this: No degree of rigor would ever fully prevent the problem of obscurity for future generations. A far better—and perhaps the only really feasible—approach to divine revelation is to deliver it in the language most accessible to the people at the time . . . and then, as we’ll see, provide an epistemic authority to ensure its successful transmission and interpretation across changing contexts.
What we received, in other words, was revelation heavily clothed in the culture it was delivered in—and because of just this, we have strong reason to think that interpretive authority must accompany such revelation. We have reason to expect, in other words, a religious epistemic authority. Moreover, we know that Christ left disciples—representatives—who functioned in this role (not only this, but surely this) and who were able to teach on Christ’s behalf and explain what God’s revelation truly means. This epistemic authority was not confined to a single individual, but was embodied in an institution: a visible, hierarchical Church. And it makes sense that in any institution, you’d need a clear principle of unity—someone or something capable of settling disputes, not only doctrinal, but also juridical, as they arise. In that context, something like a chief executive—a head, if you will—makes a lot of sense.
What we have, then, are expectations—formed simply by reflecting on the kinds of mechanisms needed to ensure the effective transmission and interpretation of revelation—of something very much like the Catholic Magisterium and the papal office.
But why should this authority be infallible—that is, incapable of binding the entire Church to error on essential matters (faith and morals)? Simply, I think, for the reasons John Henry Newman <a href="https://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/index.html">articulated</a>:
<blockquote>In proportion to the probability of true developments of doctrine and practice in the Divine Scheme, so too is the probability of the appointment in that scheme of an external authority to decide upon them, thereby separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corruption, and error, from which they grow. This is the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church.</blockquote>
If errors are allowed to creep into the deposit of faith as doctrine develops—and some level of development is inevitable, since all Christians are minimally committed to the idea that doctrine grows in clarity and articulation (think of the Trinity, Christology, etc.)—then those errors will eventually compound. And if they compound unchecked, the Church will no longer be generally reliable, and the content of revelation will become, for all practical purposes, useless—so riddled with distortion and falsehood that there will be no point in providing such revelation at all.
And so we have very good a priori reasons to expect that, given the logic of revelation, God would establish not only an epistemic authority, but an infallible one. Notice that the scope of this authority is restricted—we shouldn’t expect people in the Church to be right about everything (especially in matters outside of faith and morals), nor should we expect them all to be saints (clearly false). Rather, we should expect that God would provide a mechanism to ensure that the revelation he gives does not become corrupted or lost. It is a protective measure—and ultimately, a gift—for the Church, the body of Christ as a whole—not just for the pope, or the college of cardinals, or any individual officeholder.
In other words, God gives us the authority of the Catholic Magisterium so that we are never put in the impossible position of having to choose between heresy and schism. And if you think it would be most unreasonable for God to do that—to offer revelation without any safeguard against its distortion—then you already have good reason to believe that God would establish such an infallible authority.
The Protestant paradigm offers no living, infallible epistemic authority. Just sola scriptura. And <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-amazing-self-reading-self-interpreting-bible">no book interprets itself</a>. So inevitably, the final arbiter is the individual—and nothing beyond himself. But that individual is—according to his own paradigm—no less fallible than the many Christians throughout history he believes got these matters wrong. For any intellectually honest or responsible individual, this ought to inspire skepticism—a lot of skepticism—about how they could possibly know that their doctrines are true, that their interpretations are correct, and that they have the right canon of Scripture. Within their own paradigm, they really shouldn’t feel confident about any of it!
It’s really not difficult to see why an authority of the sort described here is required for propositional revelation. Nor is it difficult to discern what Church that might be, since, really, the Catholic Church is the only candidate with a tenable claim to historical continuity while also meeting the a priori expectations of an authoritative magisterium. It meets the expectations, and it has the history to back it up. There are no other serious contenders.

What the Catholic Church Has to Prove

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

<div>Didn’t previous ecumenical councils teach that unbaptized infants could not enter the beatific vision? Or were these teachings considered fallible?</div><div>Previous ecumenical councils did not specifically teach the fate of infants who die before baptism. The First Vatican Council proposed a teaching on a limbo-like state for such infants, but it was never brought to a vote at the council.
A few regional councils addressed original sin and waded into the discussion of infants who die before baptism, but these councils are not infallible.
The Ecumenical Council of Florence (1431-1449) declared that all who die in original sin end up in hell but not in equal punishment with those who died in mortal sin. This would seem to logically include infants who die before baptism. However, we do know that the Church has always accepted that the righteous before Christ (who died in original sin) were able to attain heaven after the Resurrection, so this teaching clearly accepted that God makes exceptions to this rule. While man is bound by sacraments, God is not.  Although all who die in original sin descend to hell, it is also entirely possible that God can remove original sin from the souls of those he chooses right before their death.
The Ecumenical Council of Trent (1545-1563) stated that there is no other means of salvation other than baptism for infants. This is true in the same sense as we stated above. There is no other means that we have in this world, but God can act however he chooses.
Even today the Church strongly urges parents to baptize their children as soon as reasonably possible after birth (Code of Canon Law, can. 867 §1; Catechism of the Catholic Church 1261).
</div>

Fate of Unbaptized Infants at Death?

It&#8217;s long been a hot topic to discuss the similarities and differences between men and women—with little apparent agreement as to what are or are not universally recognized similarities and differences. But the &#8220;battle of the sexes&#8221; is miscast. The real issue, so often overlooked, is that men and women are equally human, yet not interchangeable.
Any discussion about the natures of men and women requires doing what is forbidden in our age: making generalizations, even referencing stereotypes. Men and women generally exhibit collective features, which doesn&#8217;t mean that there are no exceptions, but societies function on the basis of the rule, not the exception.
We have a tendency to view any recognition of one sex&#8217;s strengths as the other sex&#8217;s weakness, but doing so prevents an objective approach to the complementary nature of our creation.
To point to men&#8217;s obvious physical advantages is not to say that women are less than men—because that would be to hold women to a false standard (men’s). We must not fall for the modern error of seeing the perfect woman as a man. Nor is it pointing at male failure or inadequacy versus women to say that women are inherently more nurturing—for the ideal man is not a woman.
The modern desire to eliminate differences between the sexes is to reduce people to androgynous objects that can only aim at an ideal that they were not made for. It&#8217;s the product of trying to take complementary sexes that were obviously made for each other and deprive them of their Creator, and thus their purpose and their beauty.
Despite the attempts at recreating us as androgynous creatures, we are quite different in a lot of ways. Our physical disparities are the most obvious to anyone who has engaged in any strength-based exercise with someone of the opposite sex, but we even think differently.
Women are more prone to discussing the personal. They want to know whether the opinion that you hold is a result of some unspoken experience, a deeply rooted trauma, or an attachment to a moment of joy, as well as how it might affect your decision-making in the future. They want to know what you feel and why. Most will then happily share and draw parallels from their own experiences. This is how they bond, forming friendships that are deeply emotional and personal.
Men tend to think in more abstract terms, divorcing themselves from the topic they are discussing. The project becomes the focus of attention, not their affections toward it or what it might remind them of. Men seem to create the closest bonds when they join to conquer a project—as a platoon, a group of builders, amateur hunters, etc. It&#8217;s the urge of conquest and shared victory that make brothers-in-arms.
Although it&#8217;s tempting for us to put these two “thinking methods” against each other, both approaches have their proper application and provide regulation against the harmful excesses of the other. A man&#8217;s wife can be invaluable when she calls him to reassess his motivation for an action that he had falsely considered an impersonal judgment. A woman&#8217;s husband can help her to see beyond her pain and toward a larger picture when she&#8217;s too close to a situation to view it objectively.
When tragedies happen, women are likely to fall into a supportive role, driven to help the weakest and most vulnerable. Even when the event is minor, women rush to provide emotional support to the person who is discouraged.
Men are the problem-solvers. It is the frustration of many a wife that when she begins venting to her husband about what distresses her, he immediately presents solutions instead of joining her in her distress. He is thus interpreted as being unempathetic or, worse, &#8220;not loving.&#8221; Yet he shows that he loves her by fixing what ails her.
When we deny these roles, we get inferior versions of both sexes and a society that is less than it could be.
When women aspire to be the sexless creature of modernity, they often present with an over-compensatory aggression. They deny all of their femininity and pretend to think and be as men. They are the modern feminists who hate men, in part for having features they cannot quite attain, such as masculine strength.
When men aim for the same sexless creature, they grow effeminate, reaching neither the masculine that they deny nor the feminine, instead stunted at a juvenile state of emotionalism.
Those wrapped in contest between the sexes only do further harm. Just as feminists create more reasons for men to distrust women, many men who falsely claim to be &#8220;traditionalist&#8221; see women as objects to dominate, thus creating more feminists. It&#8217;s the consequence of a rage-induced tunnel vision that tragically denies the beautiful truth of men and women created as distinct and complementary. We were made for each other.
The chatter about the so-called &#8220;gender war&#8221; misdirects our attention because it is dominated by secular voices. They cannot see that the sexes provide the perfect complement, because that would provide evidence for a Creator. Our union could not be by mere chance, because it is perfect. When men and women work together, their thinking is balanced, between the abstract and the personal, the logical and the emotional, presenting compassionate solutions in the home and beyond.

What the Battle of the Sexes Misses

As a young Greek Orthodox Christian growing up in suburban Buffalo, James Likoudis sensed the deficient unity of the Orthodox communion of churches. Like Catholics, the Orthodox have all seven sacraments, including <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/apostolic-succession">validly ordained apostolic successors</a> as their bishops. But because they lack the divinely founded principle of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/pentecost-and-the-papacy">unity</a>—the primacy of St. Peter and his papal successors—ethnicity and, often, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-i-didnt-convert-to-eastern-orthodoxy">related nationalist politics</a> take precedence over <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-rite-not-to-be-roman">a common, unifying faith</a>. In his own experience, because the Greek Orthodox church was in Buffalo and his parents didn’t own a car, the Likoudis family rarely made it to the Sunday Divine Liturgy (Mass), even though there was a Serbian Orthodox church only a few blocks from their Lackawanna home.
“It frankly never occurred to me to try to frequent regularly an Orthodox church of another ethnic group closer to home,” writes Likoudis in Eastern Orthodoxy and the See of Peter, which includes his personal journey to Rome. “We were Greek Orthodox, ‘pure Greeks’ (Hellenes), and though we shared a common religion with Orthodox Serbs, Macedonians, and Russians, different languages and customs make it difficult to feel a sense of real solidarity with them.”
In his apologetics and evangelization, Jim always emphasized that Jesus founded a <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/the-church-visible-or-invisible">visible Church with a visible hierarchical structure</a> (Matt. 16:18-19; 18:15-18)—and if the Church’s leadership was needed in the earliest years, how much more in subsequent decades and centuries, when Jesus and his hand-picked apostles were not visibly present to preserve what the Lord had started during his earthly ministry? Likoudis took his cue from Jesus himself, who prayed that his disciples “may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-helpful-question-for-our-protestant-friends">so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me</a>.”
Because Jesus is eternal God (John 1:1-3, 14; 8:58-59), his words are guaranteed to come to fruition (Isa. 55:10-11), so that his Church would be visibly one, so the world could believe in him—and so that the Church could and would progressively make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:18-20), and the gates of hell would never prevail against it.
The college-aged Likoudis could see that the Orthodox churches, despite their beautiful liturgies “and other elements of sanctification and of truth,” as <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html">Vatican II</a> recognizes in Lumen Gentium 8, had not been able to call an ecumenical council for almost twelve hundred years, let alone validate one, nor could they—as he would see in time—definitively pronounce on the pressing moral issues of our modern day.
Jim was not a “Triumphalist Catholic,” viewing himself as superior to his beloved Orthodox brethren, other Christians, and non-Catholics in general. Rather, he strove to follow Jesus on Jesus’ terms. Because he came to know that Jesus Christ founded his one Catholic Church, Likoudis knew that any catechesis or ecumenism that diminished the divine identity of the Church, with its divinely ordained primacy in teaching and governing power of St. Peter and his papal successors (see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/bible-navigator/primacy-of-peter/luke2231-32">Luke 22:31-32</a>), was bound to fail in one way or another—and thus undermine the Church’s saving mission, including by promoting, wittingly or unwittingly, religious indifferentism. The words I’ve italicized are reflective of Likoudis’s apologetics and the title of his magnum opus, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-divine-primacy-of-the-bishop-of-rome-and-modern-eastern-orthodoxy/">The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy</a>. (I was blessed to serve as an editor for my dear friend and mentor for the updated edition.)
I recall when a young Alan Schreck equivocated on the Church’s divine identity in his catechism Basics of the Faith, which Servant Books originally published in the latter 1980s:
<blockquote>These teachings [of Vatican II] are intended to break down the simple and incorrect dichotomy of one church being the “true church” and all others being “false” churches. Catholics believe that the Catholic church is unique not because it is the only true church or body of Christians but because it possesses the fullness of Christian truth and the means of salvation.</blockquote>
Likoudis, who by then had become the president of the lay apostolate Catholics United for the Faith (CUF), responded that Schreck’s catechism “has many fine qualities with its author manifesting a flair for explaining simply various aspects of Catholic teaching.” Still, in an exchange with Schreck in the February 16, 1989, issue of The Wanderer, Likoudis noted,
<blockquote>To allege, as Prof. Schreck does, that the one true Church also exists, however imperfectly, in other churches and ecclesial communities, is to radically alter the meaning of “the one true Church” as traditionally professed by Catholics. Vatican II declared that there was but “one and unique (only) Church” founded by Christ, and Prof. Schreck concedes that this was simply another way of saying “the one true Church,” “but he does not seem to see that conciliar teaching identifies this “one and only Church of God” and “only Church of Christ” with the visible Catholic Church in this world. This is because he posits an unwarranted distinction between the Church of Christ and the visible Catholic Church. But this is what cannot be done. There is only one Church of Christ, the visible Catholic Church built on the Rock of Peter, and though there are elements of the Catholic Church adhered to by our separated brethren, their possession does not suffice to declare “the church of Jesus Christ as a reality that extends beyond the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church,” as Prof. Schreck would like us to believe. Such a notion only serves to promote the error of those who have mistakenly thought that (emphasis original; see <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html.">CDF, Dominus Iesus 16-17</a>).</blockquote>
Schreck humbly accepted this and other constructive criticism from Likoudis, incorporating it into his Essential Catholic Catechism, the successor to his Basics of the Catholic Faith, <a href="https://tanbooks.com/products/books/the-essential-catholic-catechism-a-readable-comprehensive-catechism-of-the-catholic-faith/?srsltid=AfmBOorZRnZDz8TR0rP1dWIGtWnraRjM_Mc0LgCMnx8AelncolyGStXt">which TAN Books republished</a> in recent years.
Amid the confusion prevalent in the post-Vatican II Church, Likoudis covered the gamut, from infallibility to chastity to the liturgy. He also covered the gamut of the media, from appearing on The Phil Donahue Show to writing, with Kenneth Whitehead, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-pope-the-council-and-the-mass/">The Pope, The Council, and the Mass</a>.
Some observed only the publicly pugnacious, fiercely faithful side of Likoudis, but I was edified to see how tenderly Jim loved his wife, Ruth. Their storied union of seventy years has blessedly begotten six children, thirty-five grandchildren, and—at present—forty-seven great-grandchildren, including five who are unborn. All of them, like many people beyond their clan, have benefited from the faithful witness of the Likoudis Catholic patriarch, who understood, embraced, and defended the great gift Jesus has bestowed on the world in founding and sustaining his Church, the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/pentecost-and-the-papacy">restoration</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/jeremiah-3131-34-foretells-the-new-covenant">fulfillment</a> of the Davidic kingdom of Israel.
“It is simply not true, and never has been, that all bishops are equal by divine right as to their authority, and that Our Blessed Lord established a visible Church without a visible head,” Likoudis noted in the preface of the updated edition of The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Modern Eastern Orthodoxy. “It has been a myopic ‘tunnel vision’ of the Church that denies Christ instituted the divine primacy of Peter and his successors in the Church, and it falsifies the import of testimonies to this primacy available from the Fathers, the councils, and even the popes themselves . . . and that even ecumenical councils necessarily required papal confirmation (as Peter ‘confirming his brethren’ [see Luke 22:31]).”
To honor James Likoudis, and to further his work and life mission, the Likoudis Legacy Foundation has been established.

Remembering James Likoudis

Years ago, shortly after entering the Catholic Church, I had some conversations with Andy, a former Bible college classmate. One of those conversations, about the Holy Eucharist, remains clearly imprinted in my memory.
Andy believed that communion—bread and grape juice at his Evangelical church—was symbolic only, the same belief that I held before studying Church history and Catholic theology. I went over some of the history, explained pertinent points of Catholic doctrine, and noted how the two beliefs are quite different, even diametrically opposed.
Andy listened politely and closely to what I had to say, and then said, &#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t really think it&#8217;s a big deal. You believe it&#8217;s Jesus Christ, and I don&#8217;t. But I don&#8217;t see why it&#8217;s an issue.&#8221; I was stunned by his expression of indifference. I had expected him to argue for his position while rejecting the Catholic position. (I&#8217;ve had plenty of those conversations, but this wasn&#8217;t one of them.)
&#8220;But,&#8221; I said, &#8220;if you&#8217;re correct, then I am worshiping bread and wine, which is idolatrous. But if the Catholic Church is correct, why wouldn&#8217;t you want to receive Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist?&#8221;
Andy shrugged. &#8220;I don&#8217;t,&#8221; he repeated, &#8220;think it&#8217;s that big of deal.&#8221;
That conversation came back to me when I recently read an essay titled “<a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2024/11/07/giordano-eucharistic-sharing-ecumenicism-248942">A call for Catholics and Protestants to receive Communion—side by side</a>,” written by Meg Giordano, who teaches &#8220;philosophy at a Jesuit liberal arts college&#8221; and is &#8220;an ecumenical chaplain at that same Jesuit school&#8221;—Le Moyne College, in Syracuse, New York. That explains, perhaps, why her curious essay appears in America magazine, a Jesuit publication.
I say &#8220;curious&#8221; because Giordano—unlike certain Protestants and Catholics—does not argue for Protestants receiving Holy Communion. Rather, she writes,
<blockquote>What I have in mind is the idea of Catholics and Protestants sharing the experience of partaking in the Eucharist each according to their tradition—that is, side by side in a shared space with a Catholic priest serving the consecrated Eucharist to Catholic believers alongside a Protestant minister serving the Communion elements to Protestant believers. In all the places I’ve gone, all the shared spaces of ecumenical Christian experience, this one aspect of Christian identity—some might say the definitive aspect of Christian identity—remains a moment of division among us.</blockquote>
I don&#8217;t doubt Giordano&#8217;s sincerity, but I&#8217;m quite certain that she is “out-Jesuiting the Jesuits” with a combination of loaded sentiment, dismissal of doctrine, and rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Furthermore, despite her apparent protests to the contrary, she ends up in the clutches of indifference that my friend Andy refused to acknowledge and abandon.
Giordano&#8217;s approach involves the classic feint of giving lip service to &#8220;A&#8221; while promoting &#8220;Z,&#8221; which directly undermines &#8220;A.&#8221; So the &#8220;real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,&#8221; she writes, &#8220;is a profound and sacred mystery,&#8221; but her &#8220;experiences of fellowship, love and ecumenism&#8221; convince her that doctrinal differences, though important, must give way before a &#8220;shared Christian faith&#8221; that puts Christ before doctrine.
She appeals to a <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2022/documents/20220909-videomessaggio-comm-crossing.html">September 9, 2022 address</a> given (via video) by Pope Francis to an ecumenical gathering involving Catholics and Episcopalians. It doesn&#8217;t help, alas, that Pope Francis refers to both groups as &#8220;denominations,&#8221; but Giordano&#8217;s focus is on these statements:
<blockquote>Yes, we do not agree on everything. Yes, we have convictions that sometimes seem incompatible, or are incompatible. But that is precisely why we choose to love each other. Love is stronger than all disagreements and divisions. It brings peace, and peace does not seem possible.
That is why I want you to continue to work together on this to achieve unity. . . . Jesus Christ is a bond that is stronger and deeper than our cultures, our political options and even than our doctrines. The Lord! Jesus the Lord!</blockquote>
Giordano apparently takes this to mean that love for Christ can somehow trump or supersede doctrine, but this is a faulty reading. The pope&#8217;s point, I think, is that our shared love of Christ—who is always first and foremost—must inform how we approach and understand doctrine, as there is no conflict between the Incarnate Word (logos) and his words or his teaching (doctrina). If we love Christ, we must embrace and follow his teachings.
It’s notable, then, that Giordano makes vague references to the Last Supper and Christ’s high priestly prayer (John 17) but does not mention <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/caf/why-catholics-arent-wrong-about-john-6">John 6</a> or <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/heres-why-you-can-be-absolutely-sure-that-paul-believed-in-the-eucharist">1 Corinthians 11</a>. But the cherry-picking, emphasizing unity, ignores the historical and, yes, doctrinal basis of unity: apostolic authority and succession, Catholic unity centered on episcopal and Petrine authority, and the reality of magisterial teaching guided and protected by the Holy Spirit. Of course Christ desires that “all of them may be one,” but that fact should raise questions (How so? In what way? By what means?) rather than promote a pick-and-choose approach to faith and doctrine.
The great British priest, author, and apologist Ronald Knox—a convert from the Anglican Communion—addressed this serious Protestant problem nearly a century ago in The Belief of Catholics, in discussing sola scriptura:
<blockquote>The Protestant had no conceivable right to base any arguments on the inspiration of the Bible, for the inspiration of the Bible was a doctrine which had been believed, before the Reformation, on the mere authority of the Church; it rested on exactly the same basis as the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Protestantism repudiated Transubstantiation, and in doing so repudiated the authority of the Church; and then, without a shred of logic, calmly went on believing in the inspiration of the Bible, as if nothing had happened! Did they suppose that biblical inspiration was a self-evident fact, like the axioms of Euclid? Or did they derive it from some words of our Lord? If so, what words? What authority have we, apart from that of the Church, to say that the epistles of Paul are inspired, and the epistle of Barnabas is not?</blockquote>
In similar fashion, Giordano wants to hold on to belief in Christ, love, unity, and fellowship—all of them good things—but avoid the real problem of authority. This should not be a surprise, as every form of Protestantism—however sophisticated or fundamentalist—eventually smashes headlong into the divinely instituted wall of ecclesial authority.
To circumvent this looming obstacle, Protestants can ignore it, deny it, or attack it.  Giordano chooses to ignore it, but she does so with clever appeals of sentiment while relying on an indifferentism that is, ironically, quite secular in nature. She would put Catholic and Protestant “side by side in a shared space,” thus implicitly indicating that the differences are inconvenient rather than consequential. Further, this would lead either to confusion and scandal or to further indifference. In both cases, any real unity would be eroded and diminished.
The obvious (to me) question from a Catholic is simple: why bother becoming Catholic when you can mimic Catholic praxis side-by-side and be &#8220;accompanied&#8221; by Catholics in the process? Well, perhaps that is a feature, not a bug. Could it be, in fact, that Giordano recognizes the real issue and is simply seeking to run around it?
Whatever her exact motives, it is troubling that a Catholic publication such as America magazine features an essay by a Protestant that undermines not only Catholic teaching, but basic theological thought. As any decently catechized Catholic knows, reception of Holy Communion indicates full and public communion with the Church, which is the household of God (1 Tim 3:15), headed on earth by the successor of St. Peter (cf. Matt 16:16-20), and which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
And that really is a big deal.

A Eucharistic Potluck with Protestants

Sola Scriptura: Trying Something New

My business partner just lost his father, how can I help if he is upset with God?

Can you help me stages of forgiveness, and does God have reasons for pairing someone with someone who is causing suffering?

I see a counselor and I am looking to get grief counseling after my wife passed away.

Does suffering more make you closer to God?

&#8220;How can I help a grieving friend?&#8221; Supporting someone in their time of loss can be challenging, especially when they feel upset with God. This episode also addresses the stages of forgiveness, the reasons behind suffering in relationships, and the impact of grief counseling after losing a loved one.
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How Can I Help a Grieving Friend? Forgiveness and Suffering

Year A-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time
In this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word, we focus on one detail that comes from the Gospel reading for the 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A, which, in its long version, is taken from Matthew 5:17-37. The key detail that’s relevant for apologetics is Jesus’ statement that the individual will “be put in prison” and “will never get out till [he has] paid the last penny.” As we argue in this episode, this “prison” is a reference to purgatory.
The Readings: <a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021223.cfm">Click Here</a>
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Evidence for Purgatory in the Gospel

“The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law” (CCC 2291).
<h2>What Do We Mean by “Drugs”?</h2>
Any moral analysis of drug use should begin by acknowledging that &#8220;the use of drugs” is an overburdened phrase, one that strains to encompass a range of substances, effects, and contexts. Also, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) offers moral guidance in paragraphs, not tomes, and few topics can be duly treated within such narrow confines.
That being said, we know the Church’s longstanding formula: full knowledge + full consent + grave matter = <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-do-i-know-if-its-a-mortal-sin">mortal sin</a>. Thanks to paragraph 2291’s repetition of “grave” and “gravely”—to say nothing of “scandalous” and “evil”—and the accompanying carve-out for “strictly therapeutic” use, the thrust of the Church’s general teaching is clear: the knowing, consensual, and non-therapeutic use of drugs is a mortal sin.
Since drug use is such a complex phenomenon, however, it’s natural to wonder whether there might be exceptions to this rule, particularly in the case of psychedelic drugs like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, MDMA, ibogaine, and DMT.
Unlike other drugs that consistently produce the same results, psychedelic compounds generate experiences that are strange, intensely so, and quite unpredictable. The early transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof called them “non-specific mental amplifiers.”
Still, people have found their psychedelic trips at least interesting, if not beneficial. Also, these drugs are not physically dangerous or addictive like fentanyl or cocaine, and media reports promote them, if on slender evidence, as cures for PTSD, depression, addiction, and other ailments. As a result, some of our friends and neighbors who a decade ago wouldn’t have touched an LSD tab with a ten-foot pole now proclaim psychedelics to be the path to all kinds of good things: healing, wisdom, mood enhancement, spiritual encounter, sheer delight—or all of the above.
Such rapturous claims clang against the dire warnings of the Catechism. In the course of giving parish talks about psychedelics, I’ve found that on this topic, at least, many Catholics are indeed dazed and confused.
<h2>The Sanctity of Consciousness</h2>
Although the fact that drugs “inflict very grave damage on human health and life” is certainly a good basis on which to recognize a drug’s sinfulness and forbid its use, it is not the only one. And what the Catholic Church has long recognized, in continuity with its roots in ancient Judaism, is that human consciousness is inherently spiritual.
Our being made in the “image and likeness” of God means, among other things, that we possess rational awareness and free will. Over the course of our lives, we alter this God-given consciousness in various ways, both positive and negative, through our interactions with our environment and with others, including God. In all these interactions, our intentions matter.
It bears pointing out that none of this Catholic anthropology is especially controversial, and many self-styled “psychonauts” agree with the Church’s vision up to this point. Where do we diverge, then, and why?
The Catholic Church, in continuity with Judaism before it, has always encouraged the pursuit of holiness. (“Be holy as I, the LORD, am holy”; “this is the will of God for you, your holiness”; etc.) Distinct from wisdom or benevolence, Jewish and Christian holiness is born from ongoing consecration to the one true God. As such, holiness is not achieved in grand visions or singular moments, but in the small, consistent acts of love, service, and piety that make up a lifetime. Even St. Paul’s encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road was the beginning of a sanctification process, not its culmination, as he himself recognized.
Thus, the question of whether psychedelics generate “authentic” mystical experiences, as recent scientific studies have clumsily tried to evaluate, is a red herring. First, they don’t: the Almighty doesn’t obediently hop to and reveal himself because a human ate a mushroom.
Even if psychedelics did produce a mystical encounter, it wouldn’t matter: a relationship with God is based on faith, not fireworks. To insist otherwise—and to hazard our responsibilities and relationships by ingesting a powerful, unpredictable drug in search of spiritual epiphany—and perhaps afterward to leave the Church while clinging to a private revelation of dubious provenance—is sadly to miss the point.
<h2>Psychedelics and the Christian God</h2>
By proposing to make widely available the divine encounters that used to be the province of spiritual superstars, and by eliminating the need for a pre-existing spiritual practice and discipline, and by downgrading ethics in favor of individual license, psychedelics are a powerful temptation for our unmoored, undisciplined, and spiritually ravenous age. Furthermore, the psychedelic experience gratifies our era’s individualism by tailoring itself to fit each individual psyche.
It is no surprise that many people look to psychedelics to transform Western culture and even to save our species. Nor is it a secret that by and large, the “mystical” experiences offered by psychedelics tend to lead people away from the Church and away from organized religion in general.
Needless to say, this movement away from faith, which is very much an anti-Pentecost unfolding in our own time, is an egregious offense against the Holy Spirit. To embrace a psychedelic as a spiritual aid is to turn a willfully blind eye to the way holiness actually works—in the lives of countless Catholic saints, say, who were both radically loving and psychedelically virginal without exception.
Psychedelics insult the other persons of the Trinity as well. In the case of the Son, they trespass against both his divinity—by denying his unique Sonship and his authoritative commands (including those which come through his Church, like CCC 2291)—and also his incarnate humanity, which was entirely oriented toward our redemption.
There is no end to the cascade of blasphemies and offenses against our Lord, in fact. To offer one example, psychonauts have noticed that the Nahuatl word for psychedelic mushrooms, teonanácatl, which can be translated as “flesh of the gods,” resembles Catholic sacramental language. In their telling, this marks psychedelic mushrooms out as a superior form of the Eucharist.
Now, it’s not clear how a slippery translation of a pre-Christian word serves as an argument; one can just reply that the Aztecs were wrong in their lofty estimation of their mushrooms, as they were wrong about other things. But it is hard not to see a profound poverty of discernment in this ready equation of the Eucharist with a psychedelic mushroom that fueled a regime of human sacrifice.
Finally, psychedelics offend the creative authority of the Father. Although our reason has its uses, it also has limits. Eve learned this the hard way in the Garden of Eden. And as in Eden, God the Father is entitled to set boundaries for his children and to prohibit certain activities.
Will we always understand why? Of course not. We are far less equal to God in our understanding than a human infant is to a parent who insists that it’s bedtime. Yet despite our own admitted limitations, we keep renewing our spirit of rebellion, forging our own shackles and flying high as kites on the updrafts of our own self-esteem. Flatteries and ear-tickling claims can’t come our way fast enough, whether from chatty serpents or breathless podcasters, provided they affirm our self-illusions.
At the end of the day, Catholicism is largely about swallowing our pride and trusting our heavenly Father, whether we understand his designs or not.
<h2>The Dark Side of Psychedelics</h2>
As we’re sometimes reminded, in the original Greek and Hebrew, to sin is to &#8220;miss the mark.” Having shown how the use of psychedelics misses the mark of relationship with the Holy Trinity, we don’t need to go into great detail about the other set of reasons the Church prohibits them—namely, that versions of these drugs have been used since ancient times to worship gods other than Jesus Christ. (Like the Jewish and Christian anthropology described above, this link between psychedelics and non-Christian worship is also uncontroversial—more common ground for Catholics and psychonauts, it turns out.)
Although we can and should hope in God’s mercy, it’s troubling to know that huge numbers of people are rushing to ingest drugs and join rituals associated with a paganism that until a few decades ago had next to zero attractive power for Christians. It’s worth noting that new Catholics in Africa, India, and elsewhere are at this moment fleeing this same paganism with joyful relief. It’s interesting how the First Commandment has become so hard for first-world Christians to fathom now that pleasure, autonomy, and social status are at risk.
<h2>&#8220;Strictly Therapeutic&#8221; Use</h2>
Going back to the text of CCC 2291, we recall that the Church&#8217;s moral evaluation changes when people take drugs on “strictly therapeutic grounds.” Though research is in its infancy, psychedelics hold great therapeutic promise for treating mental illness. If they are found to be beneficial, there will be a strong argument for their distribution and use. (We have not gone into the risks of psychedelics here, but negative outcomes, though rare, are very real, from psychosis to grave self-harm to cases of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder.) Scientists are also working to develop &#8220;non-hallucinogenic psychoplastogens&#8221; that would offer many of the benefits of existing psychedelics (also known as psychoplastogens) without the considerable side effects—the emotional swings, the prolonged disorientation, etc. The Catholic Church could presumably support these non-hallucinogenic compounds without reservation.
Again, the moral question hangs on intention and the cooperation of a competent authority. A soldier engaging enemies on a battlefield stands on different moral ground from a civilian who pulls a gun at a party. It can be morally licit for a woman to take a contraceptive pill for relief from heavy periods, but not to prevent pregnancy.
In a similar way, someone who takes psychedelics on the recommendation of a trusted personal physician stands in a moral position unlike that of a recreational user. The Church’s moral theologians and bioethicists will have their work cut out for them determining which treatments qualify as “strictly therapeutic,” given that psychedelics are currently presented (and very possibly oversold) as cures for such varied conditions. But at a bare minimum, &#8220;strictly therapeutic&#8221; implies that a reputable medical professional—and not just one who is known to have a loose hand with the prescription pad—is involved throughout the process.
Those interested in taking psychedelics for medical reasons are morally obligated to examine and purify their true intentions, and to reckon with the fact that along with psychological risks, these drugs also pose real spiritual risks. From an initial diagnosis to the prescription to administration of a psychedelic drug, it falls on medical authorities to dignify their vocations by showing appropriate care for the human needs of their patients.
<h2>Our Human End</h2>
As intriguing as psychedelics can be, the Church has always taught that God, who is never outdone in generosity, promises something better. By shunning sin—and by submitting to the Church’s infallible teaching when it comes to faith and morals, whether we understand that teaching or not—we are assured of eventually entering into a cosmic experience that will far outstrip even the most blissful psychedelic journey—one that will be bodily, besides, and endless, and interpersonal to its core.
In fact, heaven is as far removed from psychedelic experience as the sun is from the moon. Only in heaven will we find the peace that is so notably absent in the restless explorations and “trips” of today’s psychonauts. There, instead of expanding isolated consciousnesses in the presence of a simulacrum of divinity, we’ll find ourselves extending real, loving relationships with the entire host of heaven: with the companies of loyal angels, and with the innumerable saints washed and saved by Jesus Christ, and with the Trinity who has always been, who presently is, and who always will be perfectly real.

Psychedelics and the Catholic Faith

Joshua Charles explains how typology can be used to show connections between the Old Testament and Gospels as a way to show the validity of Catholic beliefs of Mary.
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Hidden Evidence for Mary’s Role in Salvation

<div>I’m seeking employment in the biotech field. Are there any restrictions as to what I can do? Can I work with human cells?</div><div>The best thing for you to do is to contact the folks at the reliable and sophisticated <a href="https://www.ncbcenter.org/">National Catholic Bioethics Center</a> in Philadelphia. They are happy to engage and answer questions.
Peace to you with prayers for your future work.
</div>

Are There Mays and May-Nots in Biotech Work?

Why do Catholics today celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus? After all, we don’t have feast days dedicated to any other organs of Jesus’ body. There’s no “Solemnity of the Arm of Jesus,” for instance, to honor his baptisms and healings. So why a feast day for his heart?
Biblically, the heart is “our hidden center.” Scripture refers to the heart more than a thousand times, often, as the Catechism (CCC) notes, in the context of prayer (2562-63). The greatest commandment of the Law is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5, Mark 12:30). In speaking of the Sacred Heart, then, we’re referring to the person of Jesus, to his humanity, and to his love for the Father and for us, what the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html">Dicastery for Divine Worship</a> (DDW) calls his “infinite divine-human love for the Father and for his brothers.” In a special way, the image of the Sacred Heart captures the moment in which that love was poured out for us on the cross, when a soldier pierced the side of Christ, and blood and water flowed out (John 19:34).
As the DDW notes, we find devotion to the Sacred Heart throughout the Middle Ages, but it goes from being a personal devotion to a liturgical feast in no small part in response to the heresy of Jansenism. In <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas.html">the words of Pope Pius XI</a>, “the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was instituted at a time when men were oppressed by the sad and gloomy severity of Jansenism, which had made their hearts grow cold, and shut them out from the love of God and the hope of salvation.”
So what was the Jansenist heresy, and how was the Sacred Heart an answer to it?
Although the heresy of Jansenism is sometimes unfairly oversimplified, there were three particular features of the heresy that (inadvertently) produced disastrous effects. The first was a double predestination: that God destined some for heaven and others for hell, irrespective of merits. As Leszek Kołakowski traces in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/God-Owes-Us-Nothing-Jansenism/dp/0226450538">God Owes Us Nothing</a>, Jansenist theology argued that God gives some people the graces necessary for salvation and withholds them from others (pp. 31-35). The result of this idea would be that some people are going to hell, and there’s literally nothing they can do about it. They aren’t saved—not because they refuse God’s overtures, but simply because God doesn’t want to save them.
The second feature regarded imperfect contrition, sometimes known as attrition. In simple terms: If I turn away from my sin out of fear of hell (rather than out of love of God), is that good enough to be forgiven? The Catechism (1453) now clarifies: by itself, “imperfect contrition cannot obtain the forgiveness of grave sins”; however, imperfect contrition is sufficient to receive absolution through the sacrament of penance, since imperfect contrition can be perfected through the sacramental graces flowing from the confessional. But the Jansenists taught the opposite: that even for a valid sacramental confession, a penitent needed perfect contrition. Worse, <a href="https://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/st-margaret-mary-alacoque-reception-sacred-heart">Jansenist priests</a> “routinely withheld absolution, in the belief that few penitents demonstrated sufficient precision and adequate contrition.”
Third, because so few people could count on perfect contrition, Jansenists warned against receiving Communion frequently, in a misguided attempt to avoid the scandal of unworthy reception.
What was the combined effect of these three teachings? That ordinary Catholics doubted God’s love for them; doubted whether they were (or could be) forgiven, even after going to confession; and stayed away from the body and blood of Christ in Communion out of fear, thereby depriving themselves of sacramental graces. The resulting vision of God was thereby distorted. As <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19280508_miserentissimus-redemptor.html">Pius XI would later recount</a>, “God was not to be loved as a father but rather to be feared as an implacable judge.”
This is an important insight. It’s not just that Jansenism got the details of predestination or contrition or sacramental reception wrong. It’s that Jansenism got God wrong, in a fundamental way that many of us still get him wrong today.
Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that it was God himself who set things straight. Whereas multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popes vainly tried to quash Jansenism, Jesus intervened in an unexpected way: through a series of apparitions to a French nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690). In the last and most famous of these apparitions, Jesus showed her his heart and said,
<blockquote>Behold the heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love; and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for me in this sacrament of love.</blockquote>
Theologically, this is the corrective Jansenism needed. Jesus did not deny any of what Jansenism was getting right: that sin offends God, that so many of us seem indifferent to God, that we can slip into ingratitude toward God with startling ease. But rather than express this in terms of divine wrath, Jesus presents it as a tragedy of unrequited love. That is, sinners act this way not because God denies them the graces to do otherwise, but because they fail to appreciate the depth and breadth of God’s love for them. Jesus saw the same problem that the Jansenists saw, but he answered it with open arms and an open heart.
A great difficulty in believing in God’s love and mercy is simply accepting that God is so radically other. It’s hard to wrap our minds around the idea that the uncreated and unchanging God of the universe has a personal love for us. And so Jesus reminds us that he has a human heart, and with it, the full range of human emotions. Yet he is fully divine as well as fully human. Thus, our devotion is not just to the heart, but to the Sacred Heart. Jesus has at once the full experience of human emotions and the perfect vision of divine foreknowledge.
Pius XI illustrates the implications of this divine-human union in a <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19280508_miserentissimus-redemptor.html">beautiful reflection</a> on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. On the one hand, he points out that it was chiefly “because of our sins also which were as yet in the future, but were foreseen” that the soul of Christ became “very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38). In other words, what weighed upon Christ was not principally the looming shadow of the cross, but the weight of our sins.
But there is a happy corollary to this idea: that when we read that “there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him,” this should also be taken as Christ foreseeing our acts of reparation to the Sacred Heart, that “his heart, oppressed with weariness and anguish, might find consolation.” And so, the pope concludes, “even now, in a wondrous yet true manner, we can and ought to console that most Sacred Heart which is continually wounded by the sins of thankless men.”
This is a wonderful and mind-bending insight. The promise of the Sacred Heart is that our actions today are wrapped up (through God’s perfect foreknowledge) with Christ’s experience in Gethsemane, that we are either adding one more burden to him through our sins, or giving him one more consolation through our acts of love and reparation. And so (in <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_03051932_caritate-christi-compulsi.html">yet another encyclical on the Sacred Heart</a>!) Pius XI encouraged that “the Feast of the Sacred Heart be for the whole Church one of holy rivalry of reparation and supplication,” in which we hasten in large numbers “to the foot of the altar to adore the redeemer of the world, under the veils of the sacrament,” pouring our hearts out to his. What better way can we celebrate the triumph of Jesus’ love over the cold justice of Jansenism and our false conceptions of God?

The Sacred Heart Kills Heresy

What do Catholics get wrong about the Mass?

What happens in heaven during the mass?

At what point does transubstantiation happen?

Why does the Creed say Jesus will come back to judge the living and the dead? Why the dead?

After taking communion and most of the church is still kneeling, when is it the correct time to take a seat?

Why do priests have to convalidate masses?

When the priest reads the gospel he makes the sign of the cross on his forehead, lips, and heart. Is this action supposed to be reserved for the priest and not for the laity to imitate?

I went to a Mass where a priest did not wash his hands before the consecration and said the word from memory but changed the words. Was it a valid mass?

How do I explain that the eucharist is under the appearance of bread but is fully Jesus?

Are people who go to mass who believe the eucharist is just a symbol committing a sin when they receive communion?

The church doesn’t allow the scattering of ashes but at the same time there are churches and catacombs made with body parts. How does one reconcile this?

&#8220;What do Catholics get wrong about the Eucharist and Mass?&#8221; This episode addresses common misconceptions, including what happens in heaven during Mass and the moment of transubstantiation. Other questions tackle the significance of the Creed&#8217;s mention of judgment and the proper timing for taking a seat after communion, providing a well-rounded discussion on the liturgy.
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What Do Catholics Get Wrong About the Eucharist and Mass?

<div>I’ve been forgiven in confession of certain sins but find myself dwelling on them. Should I confess them again?</div><div>If you feel compelled to confess these absolved sins anew because you experience renewed feelings of guilt, we encourage you not to.
Through the ministry of his priest, God has indeed absolved you of these past sins. However, absolution doesn’t necessarily mean you will automatically be freed from all of the pain and guilt associated with those sins. When that pain and guilt resurfaces again, simply pray to God that you renew your sorrow for these sins, thank him for his forgiveness, and ask his continued help in your moving forward in the right direction.
And persist in thanking God for his absolution when bad memories resurface. Again, the reality of God’s forgiveness of our sins is not necessarily accompanied by an automatic and permanent feeling of peace. But with the help of God, his priests and related sacramental graces, and the help of others, you will in time more deeply experience his peace (see John 14:27).
In that light, and if needed, you may want to consider speaking with a good Catholic counselor to help you with your unresolved feelings of guilt. To find a Catholic good Catholic therapist in your area, or perhaps to speak to one by phone, contact Dr. Gregory Popcak and his team at the <a href="https://www.catholiccounselors.com/services/our-counselors/">Pastoral Solutions Institute</a>, and/or visit <a href="http://www.catholictherapists.com/a-note-from-the-founder">CatholicTherapist.com</a>.
</div>

What Do I Do When Preoccupied with Past Sins?

<div>Who wrote the book of Revelation? </div><div>The Church does not have an official stance on who the author is.
The author of the book of Revelation calls himself John (Rev. 1:1; 1:4). The only other clue to the author&#8217;s identity is that he states he received his visions while on the island of Patmos (Rev. 1:9).
Tradition has considered this person to be John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee. This tradition is attested to by Irenaeus (Against Heresies, V, 30) and Eusebius (Church History, IV). This tradition, however, is not universal. Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, accepted the book of Revelation as inspired but did not accept that the author John was the same as John the Apostle (Church History, VII, 25). Also arguing against the Apostle John as the author is that several ancient lists of canonical books do not include it.
Complicating the matter is that while most accept the tradition that John the Apostle lived until 95, another strand of early Church tradition held that John the Apostle was martyred around the age of 70. Which tradition someone accepts will determine if he thinks John the Apostle would have been alive to write Revelation at the end of the first century.
While the book of Revelation and the Gospel of John share many similar themes, they differ dramatically in other literary categories.
While most modern scholars think the book of Revelation was written by a Christian prophet named John and not the apostle, the view that it was written by the apostle still exists.
</div>

Who Wrote the Book of Revelation?

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<h3>Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter
Lectionary: 268</h3>
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<h4>Reading 1    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/acts/4:32">ACTS 4:32-37</a></h4>
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The community of believers was of one heart and mind, 
and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, 
but they had everything in common. 
With great power the Apostles bore witness 
to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, 
and great favor was accorded them all. 
There was no needy person among them, 
for those who owned property or houses would sell them, 
bring the proceeds of the sale, 
and put them at the feet of the Apostles, 
and they were distributed to each according to need.
Thus Joseph, also named by the Apostles Barnabas 
(which is translated &#8220;son of encouragement”), 
a Levite, a Cypriot by birth, 
sold a piece of property that he owned, 
then brought the money and put it at the feet of the Apostles.
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<h4>Responsorial Psalm    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/psalms/93:1">93:1AB, 1CD-2, 5</a></h4>
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R.    (1a)  The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
The LORD is king, in splendor robed; 
robed is the LORD and girt about with strength. 
R.    The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
And he has made the world firm, 
not to be moved. 
Your throne stands firm from of old; 
from everlasting you are, O LORD. 
R.    The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia. 
Your decrees are worthy of trust indeed: 
holiness befits your house, 
O LORD, for length of days. 
R.    The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty. 
or: 
R.    Alleluia.
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<h4>Alleluia    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/3:14">JN 3:14-15</a></h4>
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R. Alleluia, alleluia. 
The Son of Man must be lifted up, 
so that everyone who believes in him 
may have eternal life. 
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
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<h4>Gospel    <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/john/3:7">JN 3:7B-15</a></h4>
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Jesus said to Nicodemus: 
“‘You must be born from above.’ 
The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, 
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; 
so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 
Nicodemus answered and said to him, 
‘How can this happen?” 
Jesus answered and said to him, 
“You are the teacher of Israel and you do not understand this? 
Amen, amen, I say to you, 
we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, 
but you people do not accept our testimony. 
If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, 
how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 
No one has gone up to heaven 
except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. 
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, 
so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Source: <a href="http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings">cms.usccb.org</a>

Daily Holy Mass: April 21, 2020

<div>If the Church declares someone a saint, how can we know with absolute certainty that he or she is in heaven?</div><div>While the Church has never formally defined canonization as an act of infallibility, the definitive and therefore infallible nature of this teaching is rooted in its necessary connection with the dogma of the communion of saints, which is professed in the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/apostles-creed">Apostles&#8217; Creed</a> and also—in summary form—within the Nicene Creed&#8217;s profession of &#8220;the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.&#8221; As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) provides,
<blockquote>The supreme degree of participation in the authority of Christ is ensured by the charism of infallibility. This infallibility extends as far as does the deposit of divine Revelation; it also extends to all those elements of doctrine, including morals, without which the saving truths of the faith cannot be preserved, explained, or observed (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c3a3.htm#I">CCC 2036</a>, emphasis added).</blockquote>
St. Thomas Aquinas elaborates:
<blockquote>Since the honor we pay the saints is in a certain sense a profession of faith, i.e., a belief in the glory of the saints, we must piously believe that in this matter also the judgment of the Church is not liable to error (Quodlib. IX, a. 16).</blockquote>
Because the Pope is formally decreeing that all Christians are to believe that a certain person is in heaven, and thus can be prayerfully invoked in a fruitful manner, the certitude of his decree also flows from the pope&#8217;s divinely given charism of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/papal-infallibility">papal infallibility</a>.
</div>

Are Canonizations Infallible?

In this clip, Cy Kellett talks with apologist Jimmy Akin about the concept of the &#8216;rapture&#8217; and whether or not it has biblical roots. Jimmy clarifies the meaning of the term, tracing it back to St. Paul&#8217;s writings in 1 Thessalonians, and discusses the historical context that shaped these teachings.
Transcript:
Cy: We&#8217;re gonna talk about the eschaton. Is the rapture part of it? Like, is that a real thing? And how should we respond to this rapture theology that&#8217;s all around us?
Jimmy: Well, it depends on what you mean. So there is an event that St. Paul describes in 1st Thessalonians 4:17 that has been called the Rapture. Now, raparemur in Latin means to be caught away. And so that&#8217;s where the idea of that&#8217;s where the term rapture comes from. This is not a term that&#8217;s in the Bible. It&#8217;s a Latin term. And it actually can also mean to kidnap, but it also means to catch away.
And there is a passage in 1st Thessalonians 4 where St. Paul is talking about how at a certain point in time in the future, believers in Christ will be caught up to be with Christ and meet him in the air. The context in which St. Paul is saying this now, you gotta understand a little bit of the backstory of St. Paul&#8217;s history with the Church of Thessalonica. He did go to Thessalonica, and he founded a church there. You can read about this in the Book of Acts.
But he only got to stay there for three weeks because the Jews in the city had a riot and he had to get out of Dodge. And he ended up going down to Athens, which is on the same peninsula that Thessalonica is, just down the peninsula from Thessalonica. He was very anxious about what&#8217;s going to happen with his converts that he was with for only three weeks. I mean, can you imagine how much of the Christian faith you would have learned in three weeks if you had not been a Christian?
Well, he was concerned about them and their faith, and he was afraid they were going to fall away since he didn&#8217;t have the chance to stabilize them in their faith. And so he was overjoyed when he got word that, hey, they&#8217;re sticking with the faith, they still believe in Jesus and so forth.
And he thus wrote 1st Thessalonians when he got this word that they&#8217;re doing okay in their faith, but they had some misunderstandings because he hadn&#8217;t been able to teach them very much. One of the things they had was apparently the idea, because, you know, you need to repent before Jesus comes back if you want to participate in his kingdom. Remember, that&#8217;s the gospel. You need to repent and turn back to him.
And the Thessalonians had gotten this idea that you need to do that before you die. They&#8217;d gotten the idea that in order to participate in Jesus&#8217; Kingdom, you need to be alive at the time he comes back. And they were concerned because at least somebody, maybe several somebodies in the Thessalonian Church had died after Paul&#8217;s visit. They were afraid that, oh man, you know, Bob and Alice died. They&#8217;re not gonna get to be part of Christ&#8217;s kingdom. They&#8217;re not gonna be alive when he comes back.
And so St. Paul was writing to comfort them and say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don&#8217;t worry about Bob and Alice. It&#8217;s gonna be okay for them. And so he tells them in 1st Thessalonians 4 that actually when Christ returns, the dead in Christ will rise first, and only then will we living Christians be caught up to be with Jesus in the air. And then we&#8217;ll always get to be with Jesus. So we&#8217;re not going to be left abandoned. We&#8217;re always going to be with him. It&#8217;s going to be great. Don&#8217;t worry. And don&#8217;t worry about Bob and Alice and anybody else who&#8217;s died. Now, Ted and Carol, they might be a different matter, but Bob and Alice, they&#8217;re gonna be okay.
Cy: 1970s film reference. In case anyone&#8217;s wondering.
Jimmy: A film I&#8217;ve actually never seen.
Cy: I don&#8217;t think I have either.
Jimmy: Yeah, but. So that&#8217;s what he&#8217;s doing here. What he does not do is say, well, once we get caught up and we&#8217;re always going to be with the Lord, what happens next?
And according to that school I mentioned at the top of hour number one, dispensationalism, what&#8217;s gonna happen is Jesus is gonna do a U-turn. He&#8217;s gonna come down, the dead Christians are gonna be raised, the living Christians are gonna be caught up with him, and then he&#8217;s gonna do a U-turn and go right back to heaven and stay there for a number of years, commonly seven years, sometimes three and a half years.
And while he&#8217;s doing that, all hell&#8217;s gonna break out on Earth. This is a period called the Tribulation. Tribulation is just a fancy word. It means trouble. So this is the time of great trouble. And the Antichrist is gonna be doing bad stuff and so forth. And then finally, at the end of the tribulation, Jesus is gonna come down out of heaven and squash the Antichrist and reign on Earth for a thousand years, physically present on Earth for a thousand years before the actual end of the world.
And then at the end of the thousand years, there&#8217;s gonna be a final unleashing of the forces of evil, and then we&#8217;re gonna get the general resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment and the beginning of the eternal order. So the people who actually use the word Rapture for this event in 1st Thessalonians are viewing it as part of a larger complex of events where after the Rapture, people go back up to heaven and stay there during the tribulation, and then they come back for a thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, followed by the final unleashing of the forces of evil and the Last Judgment and all that stuff.
So people who use the term rapture for this event are presupposing this whole complex of events. And so I can understand it if someone who does not believe the whole complex wants to say, yeah, I don&#8217;t believe in the Rapture.
Cy: I see, yeah, because you&#8217;re using a shorthand for the whole thing.
Jimmy: Yeah, for the whole thing, yeah. Whereas you&#8217;d be confusing someone into thinking you believe all this big complex model when really you don&#8217;t. But I can also understand someone, and I tend to do this myself, saying, well, yeah, there&#8217;s this event in 1st Thessalonians 4 where believers get caught up to be with Jesus. And if you want to call it the Rapture, that&#8217;s fine with me.
And so I would say I don&#8217;t have a problem saying there&#8217;s a Rapture; we just need to understand it correctly. And then I&#8217;ll go on to explain how I think we need to understand it. So I always like to follow St. Paul&#8217;s instructions to Timothy where he tells Timothy to remind his congregations not to fight about words because it only ruins the hearers.
And so if you don&#8217;t have time to explain, then I&#8217;d say, yeah, or if you don&#8217;t have the knowledge needed to explain, then yeah, you could just say, I don&#8217;t believe in the Rapture. But if you do have time to explain, I tend to want to embrace people and say, yeah, I don&#8217;t have any problem with the idea of the Rapture; we just need to understand it correctly.
So what&#8217;s the correct understanding? Well, as I mentioned, dispensationalism is only about 200 years old. So previous Christians, including the Protestant reformers, did not believe that whole theory I just sketched out about there&#8217;s going to be a Rapture and a tribulation and a thousand. They didn&#8217;t buy that whole theory. Some would believe pieces of it. Like some thought that there would be a future earthly reign of Christ for a thousand years before the final end. But nobody had this specific sequence.
And what everybody historically understood the Rapture to be was what was going to happen at the second coming. And that&#8217;s clear from 1st Thessalonians and it&#8217;s clear from 2 Thessalonians where Paul goes into the same events in more detail. He talks about, because they didn&#8217;t, after 1st Thessalonians, they had three weeks of instruction plus one letter, they still weren&#8217;t really solid on a bunch of stuff.
And so he talks about the same issue again in 2 Thessalonians. He makes it really clear that this event where we&#8217;re caught up to be with is going to be at the end of the world at the second coming at least. And so it&#8217;s not going to be what&#8217;s called a pre-tribulation Rapture where he takes Christians out of the world before the tribulation.
Cy: Got it.
Jimmy: We&#8217;re going to go through the tribulation, and then Jesus is going to come back and rescue us. So what happens after the tribulation? Well, Jesus is not going to do a U-turn. He&#8217;s going to inaugurate his reign. Whether you understand that as an earthly millennium or as the eternal order, he&#8217;s going to inaugurate his reign when he comes back.
And you might say, well then why get, if he&#8217;s just going to come down to Earth and reign, you know, whatever reign it&#8217;s going to be, why does it talk about us being caught up to be with him and meet him in the air? And this is something that relies on a piece of first-century culture that moderns know nothing about.
Today, when a, let&#8217;s say a world leader visits a place, you know, they&#8217;ll fly in on an airplane and they&#8217;ll land at the airport, and then there will be some kind of party there of dignitaries to meet them. You know, the President goes somewhere, the Pope goes somewhere, there&#8217;s going to be this party of dignitaries to meet them.
Well, they had something like that in the first century, only they didn&#8217;t have airports. So what they would do, and this was a well-established custom, if you had someone like a king or a visiting general or something like that who&#8217;s visiting your town, you&#8217;ve got a really important person coming. What you do is, since there&#8217;s no airport to meet him at, you go out on the road to meet him.
And so you might even go two, three days down the road in order to meet him, to show how much you care about him coming to visit you. The farther you go to meet him, the more it indicates you care. And then when he comes, you escort him back to town.
Classical Bible scholars, Protestant and Catholic alike, agree that&#8217;s what Paul&#8217;s talking about here, that the dead who are buried in the earth and the living who are on the surface of the earth will be caught up to meet Jesus as he&#8217;s coming back to reign. And then they escort him back to Earth.
And so a historical and I would say correct understanding of the Rapture is it&#8217;s something that happens at the Second Coming, where both the living and the dead Christians get caught up to meet Jesus and then escort him back to where he&#8217;s going to reign. There is still a difference of opinion among Christians about, well, is he going to reign for a thousand years on Earth before the end, or is this the end, and he&#8217;s going to reign on the new heavens and the new earth? But that&#8217;s the basic, correct understanding of the Rapture.
Cy: That takes us to a break. So we will depart momentarily. Come back. I want to find out about the three days of darkness and the illumination of conscience and some of the things that lots of people talk about, particularly in Catholic circles&#8230;

Is the Rapture Real? Here’s What Most People Miss

Dartmouth provost and former Notre Dame dean Santiago Schnell recently <a href="https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/higher-ed-leader-urges-bishops-to-protect-catholic-identity-at-universities">made headlines</a> for urging the U.S. bishops to better safeguard universities’ claims to Catholic identities. I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with his message—and reliving some of my own wild journey at a so-called Catholic university, when I was a new convert unacquainted with the ideological war waging in Catholic higher education.
The anti-Catholic indoctrination started small and was practically unnoticeable. I was in my freshman biology class when my professor began sharing how science doesn’t really prove anything—since certain proof would require an infinite number of experiments, and that was, of course, impossible. At the time, in my naivety, I thought this was ground-breaking. Little did I know that my professor was regurgitating the untenable philosophy of David Hume, promoting a skeptical worldview.
I found myself in my next semester’s biology class, listening to another professor explain how biological sex and species are both social constructs (hello, nominalism!). He continued that since homosexual behavior exists in the animal kingdom, homosexual relations among humans must be “normal.” At least this time around, I immediately realized his philosophy was poor.
Then came the theology professors. I had heard from some theology-major friends that the theology department was, to say the least, questionable. The professors encouraged students to refer to God by any pronoun, and some even argued that they or she was most fitting. One claimed that Jesus’ call for Lazarus to “come out” of the cave reveals that Jesus was part of the “LGBTQ community.” When Dobbs v. Jackson overturned Roe v. Wade, the theology department responded with a lecture series endorsing so-called reproductive rights. (The university itself even materially cooperates with abortion by <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/catholic-university-chicago-covers-abortion-care-services-through-student-health-plan">covering it in student health plans</a>.)
So, when I discovered that I was required to take a theology class to fulfill my core requirements, I seriously debated taking a class on Islam or Hinduism, which was sure to be less cortisol-inducing than the courses being taught by wolves in sheep’s clothing. Instead, though, I landed on “Jesus Christ in History,” thinking no one could seriously mess history up. How naive was I again.
On the first day, the professor taught that neither the Gospels nor any early Christian until the Council of Chalcedon endorsed Jesus’ divinity. A fellow student in the class told me that the lecture strengthened his faith—his Muslim faith. After class, I confronted the professor, knowing full well the early Christians believed Jesus was God, since I had read their writings myself. He dismissed my objections, simply responding that he keeps his Christian faith and his history separate.
I dropped the class.
Anti-Catholic propaganda wasn’t limited to the classroom. The student life experience included annual drag shows (<a href="https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/students-protesting-annual-drag-show-at-catholic-university-threatened-with-violence">including ones that mock nuns</a>), weekly <a href="https://www.studentsforreproductivejustice.com/">“Free Condom Fridays,”</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DXKQMorEaw7/">LGBTQ masses</a>, and <a href="https://loyolaphoenix.com/2024/12/the-pro-life-league-comes-to-loyola-prompts-counter-protests/">assaults on pro-life students</a>. Even more demonic: the only dormitory with a connected chapel was said to have chapel hours restricted after students were caught having sex in the chapel.
Despite around thirty priests living on campus, the Faith was practically dead. I think this was a trickle-down effect: from priests who preached “queerphobia” as a sign of the times, to those who didn’t properly absolve sins in the confessional, to the Jesuit Superior who said drag shows could be done tastefully, the Faith seemed lacking among clerics, too.
Although I survived my undergraduate years with my new faith intact (<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/youth-losing-their-religion/">most Catholics do not</a>), my soul was left extremely scandalized and disheartened. Worse, I discovered my school was not the exception to Catholic colleges, but was the norm: many Catholic universities host drag shows (<a href="https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/news/2026/05/lavender-lgbtq-events-at-catholic-universities-to-include-drag-show">among other LGBTQ-endorsing events</a>), <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/cna/catholic-universities-among-dozens-of-schools-with-links-to-abortion-industry-study-finds">have ties with the abortion industry</a>, and leave their students <a href="https://cardinalnewmansociety.org/wp-content/uploads/UCLAStudy.pdf">to be more supportive of abortion, gay “marriage,” and fornication</a> following graduation.
Thankfully, Pope Leo also seems to recognize the Catholic university crisis, as he recently <a href="https://www.ewtnnews.com/vatican/pope-calls-catholic-universities-to-be-authentic-instill-passion-for-the-truth">urged Catholic schools</a> to ensure that all academic disciplines are permeated by the Christian vision. Although I wholeheartedly endorse his message, I fear it doesn’t extend far enough. Many schools are not simply neglecting the Christian vision—but are directly attacking it. It’s difficult to find a Catholic school that does not host LGBTQ events, and it’s even harder to find ones that are boldly outspoken against LGBTQ ideology. Conversely, it’s easy to find schools that endorse this ideology and promote it everywhere—even in the chapel.
I am convinced that until the Church begins rigorously enforcing John Paul II’s <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae.html">Ex Corde Ecclesiae</a>, Satan will remain a tenured professor at many so-called Catholic universities, and we will continue to see souls not only become apathetic to the Faith, but directly hostile to it.

Catholic Colleges Are Leading Souls to Satan

Sola scriptura Protestants often assert that although they believe that Scripture is the only infallible authority, there are other authorities, such as tradition and councils, that should be taken seriously. Arguing that Scripture is the only final authority does not mean that there cannot be other, less authoritative authorities, they may say.
Protestant apologist Matt Slick made this argument in a recent discussion. In this video, he defined sola scriptura in <a href="https://youtu.be/5thYrXl3Gcw?si=chHM8c0JURvmmKxL">this way</a>: “The scriptures are the final authority. It doesn’t mean we don’t look at tradition or councils. It means that it’s the final authority.”
As another example, it’s often asserted by Protestants like James White and Jeff Durbin that sola scriptura is not “<a href="https://youtu.be/KPTdOoeofpc?si=Lh2UmrfDXLWohmkh">me and my Bible under a tree</a>,” meaning that sola scriptura Protestants do not ignore the early Church in their arguments, but also recognize that they are not infallible.
This belief may seem reasonable on the surface, but it is not even close to what happens. Protestants like White, Durbin, and Slick will often try to persuade their audience into believing that they care about the early Church councils when they really do not. Or at the very least, they care about them only when they agree with their interpretation of Scripture. Once we recognize this, it only makes sense to conclude that these Protestants really do not care about what these councils teach.
A specific example should make this clear. Protestants will often use what Nicaea I says about the divinity of Christ as a supplemental argument to their predetermined notion as to what Scripture says. They will argue that although these men were not infallible, their decision was authoritative, and we should follow it.
This seems fine, except when we recognize that the council’s canons also assume a trifecta of Church offices (bishop, priest, and deacon), which is not something these men would believe in. Here is canon 15 from the council:
<blockquote>On account of the great disturbance and discords that occur, it is decreed that the custom prevailing in certain places contrary to the canon, must wholly be done away; so that neither bishop, presbyter, nor deacon shall pass from city to city. And if any one, after this decree of the holy and great Synod, shall attempt any such thing, or continue in any such course, his proceedings shall be utterly void, and he shall be restored to the Church for which he was ordained bishop or presbyter.</blockquote>
What is the justification for accepting one part of the council but rejecting another part? It seems to go back to whatever they believe Scripture says. White would likely reject what the council teaches there because he does not believe that the priesthood is something that existed in the <a href="https://youtu.be/Zhm5_AXcqcA?si=IqlkFBZEArQwi5KT">New Testament</a>. So these Protestants do not actually care about what the councils say, and they agree with them only in the sense that they agree with their interpretation of Scripture. Because of this, it makes little sense to argue for something because a council said so when they agree with only that part of the council that agrees with their interpretation of Scripture. In that case, why even bring up the council? Why not just argue with Scripture?
Matt Slick essentially admitted in a recent video that he does not care about the early Church, despite attempting to argue in an earlier debate that sola scriptura is not anti-tradition. In this video, Slick said <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcHgGPAincs">this</a>:
<blockquote>I care about the scriptures. I talk to Catholics—they always want to quote Augustine, they want to quote somebody here. I don’t care. I don’t care about the Church Fathers. I want to see what Scripture says.</blockquote>
Which is it? Can we look at councils as a standard (even if they are fallible) or not?
Some Protestants may object here and argue that there is no inconsistency since they believe that councils are not infallible. Therefore, they can pick and choose different things in them to take seriously. However, this is not the case. Even if a council can be wrong, I still need to provide consistent reasons to accept or reject certain parts of the council. I can’t just arbitrarily dismiss certain teachings without a real consistent reason.
A specific example should make this clear. For example, say someone said, “I believe in the Big Bang Theory because this science book says it.” However, what if that science book also says dinosaurs are walking the streets of Manhattan today? Why can he appeal to that book for one thing but reject it for another? There has to be a consistent, logical reason to accept one thing and reject the other thing.
This arbitrary dismissal of certain things councils teach is known as special pleading—a logical fallacy in which someone applies a principle or rule to others but exempts himself (or his position) without providing a valid reason for the exception. By being inconsistent and appealing to councils and also rejecting certain parts of them, Protestants are committing this fallacy.
All in all, by saying they care about councils while ignoring or dismissing parts of councils contradict their interpretation of Scripture, Protestants are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. To beat the accusation of special pleading, they’d have to present a consistent set of standards for determining which parts of councils to take seriously. However, if the Protestant wants to argue that he takes councils seriously only when they line up with his interpretation of Scripture, we return to the original critique, which is that Protestants really do not care about the councils. They care about only what they believe Scripture says, no matter how much they want you to believe that sola scriptura is not anti-history.

Do Protestants Care About Church Councils?

<div>May a Protestant Receive Catholic Last Rites?</div><div><h2>Question: May a Protestant Receive Catholic Last Rites?</h2>
<h2 class="jsx-8dcf83c09f8769c9">Answer:</h2>
<h3>Short Answer:</h3>
Unless there is a grave necessity and certain faith requirements are met, a Protestant Christian may not receive the Catholic Last Rites (see <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann834-878_en.html">CIC, canon 844 §4</a>).  A Lutheran or other Protestant may receive prayers and pastoral care from a Lutheran pastor (or other Protestant minister as the case may be). But this pastoral care is not the same as the Catholic sacrament of the anointing of the sick, which is an essential part of Catholic last rites, as are, normatively, the sacrament of confession (penance) and the Eucharist (<a href="https://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c2a5.htm#III">CCC 1517; 1525</a>). Because Lutheran communities—and other Protestant <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-is-it-that-rome-claims-to-be-a-church-but-says-that-other-churches-are-ecclesial-communities">ecclesial communities</a>—do not have a valid ministerial priesthood, they cannot validly administer these sacraments.
However, a baptized Catholic who has become Lutheran—or a Protestant Christian otherwise—who wishes to receive Catholic last rites should speak with a Catholic priest about reconciliation with the Catholic Church. In this case, the person could more readily arrange to receive the sacraments of confession, anointing of the sick, and the Eucharist (see <a href="https://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c2a5.htm#II">CCC 1514-1515</a>).
<h3>Longer Answer:</h3>
In the case of grave necessity, e.g., danger of death, and provided they “seek such on their own accord, [and] provided that they manifest Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments and are properly disposed,” they may receive the sacraments of the Catholic last rites (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann834-878_en.html">CIC, canon 844 §4</a>).
Catholic “last rites” are not simply prayers said near the time of death. They normally include three sacraments: confession (penance), the anointing of the sick, and Holy Communion—i.e., the Eucharist given as Viaticum, which is so named and received in preparing to pass from this life to eternal life (<a href="https://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c2a5.htm#III">CCC 1524-1525</a>).
A Lutheran pastor—or other Protestant minister—can certainly pray with a dying person, offer spiritual counsel, read Scripture, and provide other pastoral care. Such prayers can be spiritually beneficial in God’s providence (see <a href="https://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c1a1.htm#VI">CCC 1257</a>). However, Lutheran pastoral rites are not the same as the Catholic sacrament of the anointing of the sick.
The Catholic Church teaches that anointing of the sick is one of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-seven-sacraments-a-comprehensive-list">seven sacraments Jesus instituted</a> for <a href="https://www.catholic.com/video/why-catholics-need-7-sacraments-for-salvation">our salvation</a> and related spiritual sustenance on earth, and so its valid administration requires a validly ordained priest. Because Lutheran communities do not possess a valid ministerial priesthood—nor do they believe in one—they do not validly celebrate the sacraments of the Catholic last rites: confession, anointing of the sick, and the Eucharist; and historically Martin Luther didn’t believe in confession or anointing of the sick. Anglicans and Episcopalians are examples of Protestant ecclesial communities who do believe in all three sacraments, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/how-valid-is-the-consecration-of-the-bread-and-wine-in-a-lutheran-or-episcopal-holy-eucharist">but they do not celebrate them validly</a>.
For someone who was baptized or raised Catholic but later became Lutheran or joined another Protestant community, a desire to receive Catholic last rites can serve as a blessed occasion to speak with a Catholic priest about returning to full communion with the Catholic Church.
In normal circumstances, formal reconciliation begins with confession, through which a person is sacramentally reconciled to Christ and his Church. In addition, once he is reconciled, if a Catholic also needs to receive the anointing of the sick, e.g., when seriously ill or weakened by old age, he may receive this sacrament. Further, when death is imminent, he may receive also Viaticum as part of the Church’s final sacramental care.
Thus, confession is also ordinarily an important part of preparing for death. The Church reminds us that each person faces a particular judgment at death (<a href="https://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a12.htm#I">CCC 1021–1022</a>), so Christians should remain spiritually prepared for the time when God calls them from this life.
If a Protestant Christian is near death and desirous of receiving the Catholic last rites, he should speak directly with a Catholic priest, or have a family member or friend reach out to a priest if he is impeded from doing so. In addition, for persons no longer conscious when a priest arrives, they can still receive anointing of the sick if they “at least implicitly requested it when they were in control of their faculties” (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann998-1165_en.html">CIC, canon 1006</a>).
Catholic last rites are administered to the living; anointing of the sick is not given when there is no doubt a person has died (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann998-1165_en.html">CIC, canon 1005</a>). After death, however, a Catholic in good standing is to receive <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-do-we-offer-masses-for-the-dead">a funeral  Mass</a> offered for the repose of his soul. We should continue to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/all-souls-day-day-of-the-dead-dia-de-los-muertos">pray for the deceased</a> and may also request subsequent memorial Masses for the repose of his soul. We may also offer memorial Masses for a Protestant Christian or non-Christian.
Someone who was formerly a practicing Catholic and is considering receiving Catholic last rites should contact a Catholic priest before a medical crisis arises. This provides an opportunity to discuss reconciliation with the Church, including confession, anointing of the sick, Viaticum, and any other pastoral or sacramental questions—including the arrangement of a funeral Mass if one is reconciled to Christ and his Catholic Church.
For additional questions about the Catholic faith, we have many free resources on our website, which you can access 24/7 via our excellent search engine on our homepage. You may also call our radio program, Catholic Answers Live, at 1-888-31-TRUTH (1-888-318-7884), Monday–Friday from 6–8 p.m. ET.
</div>

May a Protestant Receive Catholic Last Rites?

<div>A friend went to psychic years ago. I lost touch with her. A I responsible for trying to contact her to tell her it’s a mortal sin?</div><div>You say you’ve lost contact with your friend. Do you know how to get back in contact with your friend or know someone who is likely to help you in succeeding in that request?
If you can answer one or both of those questions affirmatively, then, out of charity, it’d be good for you to let your friend know to avoid psychics and trust in God, instead of consulting problematic spirits to deal with life issues (see <a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c1a1.htm">CCC 2115-17</a>). Yet, make sure to approach your friend with humble charity, including because it’s been a good while since you’ve last spoken (see 1 Pet. 3:15). If your friend is Catholic, encourage her to take advantage of the sacrament of reconciliation. If she’s not, encourage her to repent to God on her own.
Further, consulting a psychic is certainly, objectively, gravely wrong. However, remember that mortal sin involves two other components: full knowledge and full consent of the will (see <a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a8.htm">CCC 1857-61</a>). Consequently, while encouraging your friend to repent and avoid this sin, don’t presume to judge her subjective culpability.
If you are not able to contact your friend, pray for her repentance and conversion.
</div>

Should I Reprove a Friend for Consulting a Psychic?

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Biblical evidence for abortion?

Is it possible to apply baptism of desire to the good thief on the cross?

I’m Protestant. Do Catholics have evangelical events where they give people an opportunity to respond to God and be saved?

What is baptism and what does it do for us?

I see salvific baptism in the Church Father but not a lot of infant baptism. Where do we hear about that in the Church Fathers?

Does water have to touch the skin in order for the baptism to be valid?

If baptism has a purifying effect, then why aren’t we being baptized on a regular basis?

What if a person is baptized in a Baptist church in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but doesn’t believe that it’s regenerative. Is it still valid?

More than just a symbol, baptism is a sacrament with real spiritual power. We dive into what it accomplishes, who can receive it, and how early Christians—like the Church Fathers—understood it. Plus, we explore topics like baptism of desire, evangelical outreach, and infant baptism.
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What Is Baptism and What Does It Actually Do? And More on Baptism

<div>Did members of the Nazarene sect believe in Jesus as God?</div><div>In the ancient Church, all the way until the Middle Ages, Nazarene was used to describe those Christian sects that maintained the observance of the Old Law but also accepted the divine Sonship of Christ, his Virgin Birth, and his Resurrection. It is clear that they all accepted that Jesus is the Son of God. Whether, given the imprecision of the formulations of earlier times, they professed his full equality with God the Father in the mystery of the Holy Trinity would be hard to establish.
In any case, the Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. Jerome, and of course the ever-vigilant St. Epiphanius, all are aware of this sect&#8217;s continued existence in Palestine and in Asia Minor. The word Nazarene is used now also of modern Christian denominations that flow originally from aspects of the Methodist movement. These have nothing to do with the Judaising traditions of the ancient Nazarenes. To this day Jews and Muslims tend to call Christians &#8220;Nazarenes&#8221; in Aramaic and in Arabic.
So the name has a certain renewed nobility in these past years since Islamists have killed so many Christians for their faith as &#8220;Nazarenes.&#8221;
</div>

Did Nazarenes Believe Jesus Was God?

Dr. Michael Barber briefly discusses how some Protestants have a kind of tradition, before expounding more fully the Greek etymological roots of the word and how its uses in Scripture relate most of all to the Catholic Liturgy.
Transcript:
Host: Ben in Fairfield, California, listening&#8211;also listening&#8211;on Immaculate Heart Radio. You are on with Dr. Michael Barber, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: Yes, Dr. Barber, just a quick question. Non-denominational Protestants, even though they claim not to have tradition, the Sola Scriptura, they still do have the tradition, and they&#8217;re not anarchists, they have some kind of structured organization, and they do have their own rituals.
Dr. Barber: Absolutely. That&#8217;s 100% true.
Caller: Basically, they&#8217;re just disagreeing with Catholic tradition&#8211;but Catholic tradition can be sourced back through the Bible, and also has a separate authentication, you know, historical authentication, compared to their newer rituals, and traditions, would you agree with that?
Dr. Barber: Right, I think that&#8217;s certainly&#8211;I think that&#8217;s true. Non-Catholic Christians do have tradition. Can we take a step back, or are we up against a break here?
Host: You have about a minute.
Dr. Barber: Okay, one thing that I really want to underscore is, I don&#8217;t want us to fall into a trap that I think we can sometimes fall into: Tradition isn&#8217;t just a bunch of data. It&#8217;s not like, okay, here are a whole bunch of key concepts, and key ideas, that have been passed on. It&#8217;s not just that, right? And if you look at Scripture very carefully, you&#8217;ll recognize this, because the word that&#8217;s used for tradition, &#8220;paradosis&#8221; in the Greek&#8211;or, you know, that&#8217;s the noun form&#8211;the verb is &#8220;paradidomi.&#8221; So &#8220;paradosis&#8221; means &#8220;tradition,&#8221; the noun; &#8220;paradidomi&#8221; would be &#8220;to &#8216;tradition&#8217; something,&#8221; &#8220;to pass something on,&#8221; right? &#8220;To hand something over.&#8221;
And it&#8217;s a really important word. It&#8217;s used throughout the New Testament in ways people may not expect. So for example, in Romans 8, it talks about how God the Father &#8220;paradidomi,&#8221; how he gave us His Son. And we also read in Galatians, too, about how the Son gave us&#8211;or, delivered Himself up for us, He gave Himself up for us, &#8220;paradidomi.&#8221; In John 19:30, we read about how Christ delivered over the Spirit.
So this whole idea of tradition is a lot broader than just a concept. What is tradition? It&#8217;s ultimately nothing less than the communication of the fullness of revelation. And the fullness of revelation is not just an idea, it&#8217;s the Word. It&#8217;s Christ Himself, right? So tradition is not just, &#8220;I got this idea,&#8221; right, or, &#8220;Here&#8217;s the truth: The Assumption.&#8221; It&#8217;s more than that, right? Tradition is the giving over of the fullness of the Word, the passing on of the Word.
Right, and so for us, where does that happen? Where does Christ&#8211;where is the Word fully communicated to us? Well, it&#8217;s especially linked with the Liturgy, right? It&#8217;s especially linked with the Eucharist, and you might think, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s a Catholic notion;&#8221; that&#8217;s actually a Pauline notion. So I&#8217;m actually working on a book right now, with Brant Pitre and John Kincade, called The Apostle Paul, it should be out, oh, hopefully next year. And one of the things, in researching and writing the book, that really stood out to me was what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul says, &#8220;I commend you because you remember me in everything, and maintain the traditions (&#8220;paradosis,&#8221; there&#8217;s that word, right, &#8220;tradition&#8221;) even as I paradidomi (even as I &#8220;traditioned&#8221;) them to you.&#8221;
Well, what is it that you &#8220;traditioned&#8221; to them, Paul? This is what he goes on to say: &#8220;For I received from the Lord what I also paradidomi (what I also &#8220;traditioned&#8221;) to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread&#8230;&#8221; and you know the rest, right? So for St. Paul, the idea of tradition is inextricably linked to what? The Lord&#8217;s Supper. And that shouldn&#8217;t be surprising to us, because elsewhere in his letters, that&#8217;s the word, &#8220;paradidomi,&#8221; tradition, to hand over, that&#8217;s the idea that you find in reading about, or in Paul&#8217;s preaching of the way God the Father gives us the Son, the Son gives us Himself, and so on and so forth. That happens especially in the Eucharist, when we receive His Body and Blood, and so in Catholic theology, tradition is especially linked to the LITURGY.
So, how do you know which books belong in the Bible? Okay, well, yes, the Church defines that, but we already mentioned that the whole list of the Biblical books is a sort of tradition. It really was; in the early Church, the reason they needed to know which books belong in the Bible was because they needed to know, &#8220;Which books can you read in the Liturgy?&#8221; They didn&#8217;t sell Bibles in a Barnes &amp; Noble down the street, right? If you went to Mass, you were gonna hear&#8211;if you went to the Liturgy, if you went to the Lord&#8217;s Supper&#8211;you were gonna hear Scripture read. The big question was, &#8220;Which books can you read in the churches?&#8221;
And so, right there, the question of the Canon is a tradition question, it&#8217;s a Liturgical question. See, all these things sort of come together there.
Host: Yes, and the Eucharist, as you said, is the full handing over, or &#8220;traditioning,&#8221; to use your term, the full handing over of Christ to us, and that&#8217;s what the whole thing leads to, and then the whole thing proceeds from.
Dr. Barber:That&#8217;s correct.

Do Non-Catholic Christians Have Tradition?

What Church did Jesus found?

What does the Church teach about Original Sin, and why Jews and Muslims view it differently?

The Orthodox believe that any validly consecrated bishop is the successor of Peter. And that Peter was called rock because he was the first to recognize the divinity of Christ. And Peter consecrated other bishops, so he cannot be the only foundation st...

What will happen to the Earth when Jesus returns?

Is loving your neighbor and loving God more important than sacrifice. Because Jesus said we live by every word that comes from God, and he said love God and love your neighbor. So is that more important than the Eucharist?

In the early Church is there more evidence for divine simplicity over the essence/energy distinction of the Eastern Orthodox?

Who were the Apostolic Fathers? How many were there?

&#8220;What Church did Jesus found?&#8221; This question opens a discussion on the foundational beliefs of Christianity, touching on the Church&#8217;s teachings about Original Sin and the differing perspectives held by Jews and Muslims. Additionally, the conversation addresses the Orthodox view of apostolic succession and the implications of Jesus&#8217; return for the Earth.
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What Church Did Jesus Found? Original Sin and the Eucharist

In this episode, Trent takes on the empty absurdities of liberal Christianity.
Transcription:
In a 2009 speech given at an atheistic conference, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term deepity to refer to statements that seem profound at first glance but upon closer examination turn out to be trivially true at best like (“Love is just a word”) or just nonsense (“Have faith in faith”). Some atheists say theology is just a bunch of “deepities” and in this episode I’m going to expose liberal theology that really are just a bunch of worthless deepities.
Before I do that though the existence of bad theology doesn’t prove there is no good theology just as pseudo-science doesn’t disprove real science or philosophy that is just word salad, like the word of Deepak Chopra, doesn’t disprove real philosophy.
One good example of “junk” liberal Christianity can be found in a 2019 New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/christian-easter-serene-jones.html">interview with Serene Jones</a>, a Protestant minister and president of Union Theological Seminary. Here are a few of her “deepities”:
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li3">“[The] empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.”</li>
<li class="li3">“Living a life of love is driven by the simple fact that love is true.”</li>
<li class="li3">“The message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death.”</li>
</ul>
When I hear this kind of talk, I think of <a href="https://comb.io/Z2xbyA">the episode of The Simpsons</a> where Rev. Lovejoy is selling ice cream flavors such as “Blessed Virgin Berry” and “Command-mint.” He then offers Lisa “Unitarian ice cream”. But it’s just an empty bowl. Lisa remarks, “There’s nothing here,” to which Lovejoy responds, “Exactly.”
According to their website: Unitarian universalists “beliefs are diverse and inclusive. We have no shared creed. Our shared covenant (our seven Principles) supports “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Liberal Christianity at least tries to pay lip service to Jesus but it often comes off more like a unitarian wannabe.
A good way to expose the emptiness of liberal Christian “deepities” is to ask some simple questions: How is love stronger than death? What makes love “true”? In doing this, you can show that the person is just dressing up secular, hopeful thinking with religious language.
I also notice that adherents of liberal Christianity often defend their position by casting traditional concepts of God and faith as being for simpletons. However, their hasty dismissals often reveal their own simplistic grasp of theology. For example, Jones says, “Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts.”
I expect this misrepresentation of the Trinity from village atheists, but not from a so-called “Christian” minister, who should understand that God became man to freely offer himself as a sacrifice of love that outweighs the evil of our sins.
Jones also says Christians who are “obsessed” with the Resurrection have a “wobbly faith.” She writes, “What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.” Well, tell that to St. Paul, who declared, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).
Jones tries to defend her assertion about the unimportance of the Resurrection by saying, “The stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves.”
Now, it’s true the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-fake-resurrection-in-marks-gospel">shorter ending of Mark</a> does not contain an appearance of the resurrected Jesus, but it certainly contains a resurrection account because the young man at the tomb tells the women, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:6-7, emphasis added).
This leads to another good question to ask: How is a non-miraculous Christianity different from morally upright atheism? Jones says hell is just the reality we create when we “reject love” and in this Easter represents “love triumphing over suffering.” But you can be an atheist who puts hope in love and patiently endures suffering, so why even bother being a Christian? Indeed, when the non-Christian interviewer asks if Jones is a Christian in spite of denying Jesus’ miracles, she answers, “Well, you sound an awful lot like me, and I’m a Christian minister.”
You might think she’s a Christian based on her saying all people are saved, which is what universalists teach. But when she was asked in the New York Times interview what happens after death she said ““I don’t know! There may be something, there may be nothing. My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife.”
Jones might say her theology isn’t equivalent to atheism because she believes in God, but her God is so limited and disinterested in human affairs that he might as well be nonexistent. For example, Jones says she doesn’t worship an all-powerful, all-knowing God, because that’s a product of “Roman juridical theory and Greek mythology” (even though Greco-Roman deities were limited in power, knowledge, and goodness). She also claims that God doesn’t answer prayers, and instead of “controlling the world,” he merely “invites” us into love, justice, and mercy.
This is fairly common among liberal Christians. William Lane Craig once asked John Dominic Crossan, one of the world’s most famous New Testament scholars, if God exists. Crossan gave a vague answer saying God is just what we believe in. So he asked if God existed during the Jurassic age when there were no humans to believe in him?
William Lane Craig:
During the Jurassic Age when there were no human beings? Did God exist?
John Dominic Crossan:
Meaningless question,
William Lane Craig:
But surely that&#8217;s not a meaningless question. I mean, it&#8217;s a factual question. Was there a being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe during that period of time when no human beings existed? It seems to me on your view, you&#8217;d have to say no.
John Dominic Crossan:
Well, I would probably prefer to say no because what you&#8217;re doing is trying to put yourself in the position of God and ask, well, how is God apart from Revelation? How is God apart from faith? I don&#8217;t know if you can do that.
The God of many liberal Christians might as well be a self-help book you pick up every few months for advice. By the way, I appreciate when you guys like our videos and subscribe to the channel, since that is one part of my work where self-help won’t help, your help is always greatly appreciated.
I also appreciate when atheists call out Christians who believe in such a concept. For example, the atheist B.C. Johnson once criticized liberal answers to the problem of evil that claim evil exists because God just isn’t powerful enough to stop it. He writes: Such a God if not dead, is the next thing to it. And a person who believes in such a ghost of a God is practically an atheist. To call such a thing a god would be to strain the meaning of the word.
With this understanding of God, it’s not surprising that places like the United Church of Canada that have ordained women like Gretta Vosper to be ministers in spite of the fact that Vosper is an atheist. One of her books’ titles perfectly summarizes the essence of liberal theology: With or Without God: Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe.
One of my favorite take downs of liberal Christianity comes from the late atheist Christopher Hitchens. In 2012 Unitarian Universalist Marilyn Sewell interviewed Hitchens and criticized him for not engaging more “liberal Christianity” instead of what she’d consider fundamentalism. Like Serene Jones, Sewell calls herself a Christian but she believes Jesus was merely a model of social justice and that salvation is a metaphor for how one can go from “being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life.”
In response, Hitchens bluntly said, “If you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
Our Easter joy is not found in something meaningless such as “hope in hope” or “faith in faith.” Our hope also isn’t grounded in the platitudes of liberal Christianity. Listen to how Serene Jones describes her faith and how hollow it is compared to God demonstrating his love for us through his life, death, and resurrection.
Serene Jones:
We are God created, Jesus grounded grace, bounded love founded church grounded. We proclaim the universal reach of God&#8217;s love and mercy, and we affirm that we are interwoven in the depths of the earth, bound together and in spirited with the breath of God&#8217;s life, and despite the harsh truth that we turn away from it and sin and seek our own destruction, the spirit moves back through us and calls us to seek life abundant. That&#8217;s it.
Whatever that is, it isn’t Christianity. And even within the Catholic church you can find nuns and priests members of the parish council preaching this kind of nonsense. And young people are sick of it. It’s why the Associate Press covered a story back in April about the growth of young traditionalists within the Catholic faith.
Christianity is grounded in Christ, the reality of who Christ is grounded in his resurrection from the dead. That is the only fact that explains the advent of Christianity in an ancient world that didn’t build religions around platitudes. The only reason the disciples did not think their rabbi was just another failed messiah like all the others is because he proved he was not a failure to them three days after his crucifixion. God proved “love is stronger than death,” not through humanistic platitudes, but through a glorious triumph over the grave. As Christ himself declared, “I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18).
*This* is the Faith in which we have faith and it is more comforting than the drivel of liberal Christianity. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a blessed day.

The Emptiness of Liberal Christianity

Jimmy Akin explains what the Church means in teaching that Muslims <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/do-muslims-worship-the-same-god-catholics-do">worship the same God</a> that Catholics do, despite their incomplete or erroneous understanding of Him.

Do Muslims Worship the Same God as Christians?

Although our salvation doesn’t depend on knowing the exact date of Christ’s birth, nor is the Church likely ever to make a dogmatic definition regarding this date, it is a matter of interest to anyone who knows and loves Jesus Christ. In this article, <a href="https://cybersky.software.informer.com/">modern</a> astronomy <a href="https://store.simulationcurriculum.com/products/starry-night-pro-8">software</a> and ancient historical documents (including but not limited to the Bible) will offer one perspective on the star of Bethlehem that heralded our Redeemer’s birth.
The three scholars who deserve the most credit for this research are <a href="https://bethlehemstar.com/">Frederick Larson</a>, <a href="https://a.co/d/6kaOiNC">Timothy Norris</a>, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/ddp/the-star-of-bethlehem-and-astrology">Jimmy Akin</a>. What follows is a partial timeline of the Christ Event, from his conception in Mary’s womb to the adoration of the Magi. Powerful new software and the regularity of Kepler’s planetary motion laws offer a plausible case for the precision of each date. After this timeline, verses from the Bible and other ancient documents will provide historical support for each claim.
<h2>September, 3 B.C.</h2>
Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb. After a close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus on August 12, Jupiter (the King Planet) began a rare triple conjunction with Regulus (the King Star), essentially crowning it with a halo pattern. The conjunction dates were Sep. 14, Feb. 17, and May 8. The celestial coronation took place in the constellation Leo. Just after sunset on Sep. 11, the constellation that rose in the east behind Leo was Virgo, the Virgin, literally “clothed with the Sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev. 12:1). It was a new moon at her feet, coinciding with the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah). The Magi, familiar with Jewish prophecies of the Messiah, definitely took notice.

<h2>June, 2 B.C.</h2>
Nine months after his conception, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. When Jupiter had finished crowning Regulus in May, it formed a close conjunction with Venus (the Mother Planet) on June 17, such that the separation between the two would have been imperceptible to the naked eye. Light from each planet added to the other, forming the most brilliant star that had ever been seen. (The Jupiter-Venus conjunction of June 17, 2 B.C. has been the brightest such conjunction in human history.) The Magi departed in haste from Babylon towards Bethlehem.
<h2>December, 2 B.C.</h2>
The first Epiphany: the Magi arrived in Bethlehem and adored the Christ child. Jupiter had proceeded ahead of the Magi, first leading them westward toward Jerusalem and then stopping (in full retrograde motion) on December 25 over the town of Bethlehem. Jesus would have been a six-month-old baby by this time, no longer in a temporary cave-stable but now in a small house built by Joseph.
At this point, let’s make the case for the claims above. The first fact to demonstrate is that King Herod died in 1 B.C., not 4 B.C. This is extremely important, because if Herod died in 4 B.C., as is widely believed, the star of Bethlehem would have appeared before then. In fact, the great mathematician and astronomer, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), wrote two books on the subject, De stella nova (1606) and De anno natali Christi (1614). Unfortunately, he didn’t find much in the stars of 7, 6, and 5 B.C. His careful calculations could reproduce the celestial map with astonishing accuracy, but he sadly missed the star because he was searching in the wrong years.
Kepler’s mistaken idea that Herod had died in 4 B.C. was based on the historical scholarship of his time. Historian David Beyer has argued that a widely accepted reading of Josephus, which suggests that Herod died in 4 B.C., came from a transcription error introduced in a 1544 printed edition of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (Book 18, chapter 4, section 106; see also David W. Beyer, “Josephus Re-examined,” available <a href="https://www.book-info.com/isbn/0-86554-582-0.htm">here</a>.) According to Beyer, nearly all the pre-1544 editions and manuscripts he reviewed in the British Library and Library of Congress stated that Herod Philip (who succeeded Herod the Great) died in the twenty-second year of Tiberius&#8217;s reign. The 1544 edition, however, changed this to the twentieth year of Tiberius. The “twentieth year” reading would place Herod the Great’s death in 4 B.C. Presumably working from a post-1544 edition of Josephus, Kepler would have accepted the 4 B.C. death date.
Besides the transcription error, there are more important reasons to reject the 4 B.C. date of Herod’s death. Historian Gerard Gertoux has published a tour de force of research <a href="https://www.academia.edu/2518046/Herod_the_Great_and_Jesus_Chronological_Historical_and_Archaeological_Evidence">here</a>, and Jimmy Akin’s findings agree with Gertoux’s. Although historian Emil Schürer’s claim that Herod died in 4 B.C. has retained widespread acceptance over the last hundred years, it rests on weak foundations. Akin critiques these foundations based on the following key points from Josephus and related evidence. He also builds a case for Herod the Great dying in 1 B.C. (specifically between the lunar eclipse on January 10, 1 B.C., and Passover on April 11, 1 B.C., likely closer to the latter).
1. Herod&#8217;s appointment as king in 40 B.C. leading to a thirty-six- or thirty-seven-year reign:
Josephus states that Herod was appointed king in the 184th Olympiad (ending mid-40 B.C.) during the consulship of Calvinus and Pollio (which began late 40 B.C.). This creates an impossible contradiction, as the dates do not overlap. External Roman sources (Appian and Dio Cassius) place the appointment in 39 B.C. Josephus reckons reigns non-inclusively (not counting partial first years in this period). Starting the count from the first full year (38 B.C.) and then adding thirty-seven years leads to a death in 1 B.C.
2. Length of reign after conquering Jerusalem (thirty-four years):
Josephus states that Herod died thirty-four years after obtaining his kingdom by slaying Antigonus (i.e., conquering Jerusalem), but he provides contradictory dates for the conquest. Some details point to 37 B.C., whereas others (e.g., exactly twenty-seven years after Pompey&#8217;s conquest in 63 B.C., and the end of 126 years of Hasmonean rule starting in 162 B.C.) point to 36 B.C. This inconsistency undermines using 37 B.C. as a firm anchor for a 4 B.C. death. However, using non-inclusive reckoning of the thirty-four-year period, we can infer a possible death date in either 2 B.C. or 1 B.C.
3. The lunar eclipse shortly before Herod&#8217;s death and Passover:
Josephus places Herod&#8217;s death between a lunar eclipse and Passover, with numerous events (requiring significant time and travel of many different people) in between. Advocates of a 4 B.C. death cite a partial lunar eclipse on March 13, 4 B.C., twenty-nine days before Passover. The twenty-nine-day gap is too short to accommodate all the events and travel Josephus describes between the eclipse and Herod&#8217;s death (estimated minimum forty-one days, more realistically sixty to ninety days). However, a total lunar eclipse occurred on Jan. 10, 1 B.C., eighty-nine days before Passover, which better matches Josephus&#8217;s description due to the sufficient time gap. Additionally, since Josephus does not specify a partial lunar eclipse, a total eclipse aligns better.
4. Evidence that Herod&#8217;s sons assumed office in 4 B.C.:
This does not prove that Herod died then, as it was common for aging rulers to appoint successors as co-rulers during their lifetime to ease succession and reduce pressure. Historical evidence shows that Herod did grant his sons governing authority before his death.
5. Testimony of the Church Fathers:
Many Church Fathers asserted a birth date of Christ in 3/2 B.C., necessitating a death date of Herod later than 4 B.C. and around 1 B.C. These Fathers included St. Irenaeus, St. Clement of Alexandria, Julius Africanus, St. Hippolytus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius, with Tertullian and Origen joining them.
Now that we’ve proven a 1 B.C. date for Herod’s death, let’s demonstrate the dates of the infant Christ’s timeline. We will proceed in chronological order:
<h2>September, 3 B.C.</h2>
The Magi weren’t just random stargazers. Most likely they were descendants of Daniel, the prophet brought to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. The Bible provides plenty of clues for this. In Daniel 2:48, Nebuchadnezzar makes Daniel the chief wise man (magus) of his court. In Daniel 5:11, Belshazzar’s queen reminds the king that Daniel, the chief magus, can interpret dreams and visions. In Daniel 6:28, we see that Daniel prospered in the reigns of Darius and Cyrus, implying his tremendous influence on the kingdom (including the school of magi). Daniel’s famous prophecy of weeks of years (sixty-nine sets of seven years each) in Daniel 9:24-27, predicted both the coming of Christ and the destruction of the Temple.
The point is that Daniel, a devout Jew whose God was respected and protected by King Cyrus, would have trained magi to watch the stars for signs of the Messiah. This is why the Magi took notice of the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Regulus in the constellation Leo, representing the Lion of Judah (a type of Christ mentioned in Gen. 49:8-10, 2 Sam. 7:12-14, and Rev. 5:5). It also explains how they knew the prophecy of Micah and why they wanted to worship the newborn King:
<blockquote>In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.  They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel” (Matt. 2:1-6).</blockquote>
<h2>June, 2 B.C.</h2>
The Gospel of Luke notes that John the Baptist began his ministry in the “fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar” (Luke 3:1). Tiberius assumed the throne after Augustus died in August A.D. 14, but Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius typically started counting an emperor’s regnal years from the following January 1, ignoring any partial year. Using this standard method, the fifteenth year of Tiberius would run through what we know as A.D. 29. (A regnal year is counted similarly to a person’s age: the “fifteenth year” spans from the end of the fourteenth year to the end of the fifteenth.)
Jesus began his own ministry shortly after John’s, so his public work probably started around A.D. 29 as well. Luke adds another key detail: at the start of his ministry, Jesus was “about thirty years old” (3:23). Counting back roughly thirty years from A.D. 29, and remembering there is no year zero in the transition from B.C. to A.D., we are brought to 2 B.C. as <a href="https://jimmyakin.com/2013/04/what-year-was-jesus-born-the-answer-may-surprise-you.html">the most likely birth year</a>.
<h2>December, 2 B.C.</h2>
In Matthew 2:9, we read, “When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was.” This was the town of Bethlehem, five miles south of Jerusalem. Jupiter was in full retrograde motion that night, the first Epiphany, on December 25. This is not why December 25 was chosen to celebrate Our Lord’s Nativity each year, but it is an interesting coincidence demonstrated by modern astronomy software.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Although history and science can never dictate our faith, it is always helpful to see that neither history nor science can contradict it. This is because truth can’t contradict truth. If Christ entered human history through the Incarnation, it is not surprising that he would allow us to use history and science to discover his birth date.
In any case, the most important thing to contemplate as we celebrate Christmas is that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

A Modern Take on Christ’s Birth Date

In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Jimmy Akin to discuss the relationship between Jesus and King David. Akin explains the complexities of royal lineage and how Jesus fits into the line of David, addressing common misconceptions and providing historical context.
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: It&#8217;s about Jesus and his relationship to King David. Because we know he&#8217;s from the house of David. We know that&#8217;s important for the Messiah. you know, that&#8217;s an important qualification for the Messiah. But we were thinking in our little meeting that we have, we don&#8217;t actually know how he&#8217;s related to King David. Like, you can be related to King David a thousand years before you and just be a member of the family or the tribe, you know. Or is he the direct royal line descendant of David, or is it something else? Like, how do we think about the relationship between Jesus and David?
Jimmy Akin: Well, it all depends on how the line of succession works in a given country. And different countries have different rules for how this works. For example, in ancient Egypt, and we don&#8217;t have a complete understanding here, but we do have a pretty good one. you needed, in order to become pharaoh, you needed to not be descended from the right person. You needed to marry the right person. and so there was a royal woman that you needed to marry, and she&#8217;s the one that needed to be descended from someone. And then whoever her chief husband was or her only husband was, that person became Pharaoh. but over the, you know, 3,000 years of Egyptian history, they had a bunch of different dynasties where there were interruptions, you know, like more than 20 dynasties, there were interruptions. And so it wasn&#8217;t one continuous thing. And periodically they&#8217;d get into difficult situations where they didn&#8217;t have any appropriate heirs and they had to kind of scramble to find, well, who is going to be a royal woman here. And sometimes they had to pick, people who didn&#8217;t have royal ancestry. And that&#8217;s pretty typical in any given line. Now, you can have lines of descent that get tracked over a thousand years, like the difference between David and Jesus. In fact, that&#8217;s the case, in England today. In England, you, you have, descendants of William the Conqueror, you can trace the line from William the Conqueror down to Charles iii. And in fact, you can trace multiple lines of descent from, William the Conqueror to Charles iii. Because one of the things about people, but it&#8217;s even more true about royalty, is they tend to marry within a certain fairly restricted circle. And sometimes that can get out of hand. Like, that&#8217;s why the House of Hanover in Europe got hemophilia, because they married too closely for too long. They didn&#8217;t have enough gene flow coming into the pool. But because people tend, and especially royals tend to marry in kind of the same circles, you get a modern person who&#8217;s descended from multiple different lines, from a person a thousand years ago. And so you can trace Charles III&#8217;s ancestry back to William the Conqueror through multiple different line lines. And then it becomes, well, so which line governs in terms of inheriting the throne? And they have different rules about that. Now, one of the rules about that is, you can&#8217;t be adopted in England, if you get adopted into the royal family, you do not inherit the throne, at least not the way the law is configured currently. But legal adoption does not count. However, that was not the case in Rome. In fact, in Rome in the first century, multiple Roman emperors were adopted. So, like, Tiberius was adopted, well, Augustus, the first emperor, he was adopted by Julius Caesar. Then Tiberius was adopted by, Augustus. Caligula was adopted by Tiberius. Nero was adopted by Claudius. And so you had lots of adoption going on. And in their culture, adoption would let you, pass on offices and things like that. So what about Israelite culture? Well, we don&#8217;t have a complete knowledge of how their rules worked. We do know that there were sometimes interruptions in the line and disagreements in the line of inheritance. like when one of the kings of Judah dies and his mother, Athaliah takes over and slaughters the entire she thinks royal family so that she&#8217;ll have no. I mean, she&#8217;s killing her own grandsons so she can be queen, except she missed one. And they kept him hidden for six years, and then they overthrew her and restored the line. So that was like an interruption in the line. And, you know, that kind of thing happens in the history of royalty. We do know that it&#8217;s normally primogeniture, of the main line. Whoever the eldest son is of the first wife, that son tends to inherit. But we also know fathers could make other arrangements. Like, for example, and you see this repeatedly in Genesis, where one of the fathers, one of the patriarchs, will pick his younger son to be his primary inheritor rather than the eldest son. So they could overrule the principle of primogenitor, which is the eldest son inherits in a special way. So remember that fathers get to do that. Okay. What about Jesus? Did he have a human father?
Cy Kellett: Not.
Jimmy Akin: Did he have a human father? Yes or no?
Cy Kellett: Yes. Okay.
Caller: Yes.
Jimmy Akin: Oh. So who was his human father?
Cy Kellett: Of an adoptive kind.
Jimmy Akin: Oh, of an adoptive kind.
Cy Kellett: Well, I mean, I was going to make a qualification, but then you jumped on me.
Jimmy Akin: Okay, okay. I&#8217;ll give you that. So Jesus does not have a biological father. So he would not inherit, under the ordinary rule. But he does if you require biological descent. But. He is the legal son of Joseph. And what we don&#8217;t know in Israel is if you do the adoption, would that count for inheritance? So that&#8217;s an open question. There&#8217;s also another related issue, which is. Well, even though he couldn&#8217;t have inherited biologically through Joseph, it&#8217;s possible that Mary was a descendant of David. in Romans 1, St. Paul says that Mary was. Was, that Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh. And if you take that to mean biological flesh, well, then the only place he could have gotten it is for Mary. The problem is, according to the flesh may just mean according to human nature, and it may incorporate human institutions like adoption. the other problem is that, Mary we know was some kind of a fairly close relative of Elizabeth, who was a Levite rather than a member of the tribe of Judah. And so there&#8217;s a question about, well, was Mary a Levite or a Judahite? And there are people who advocate both sides of that. But we can say with confidence that Jesus was at least legally descended from, David. And in more than one way. This is why I mentioned the multiple lines of King Charles, the current king of England, because he is descended from William the Conqueror in more than one way. Well, the same thing is true of Jesus. And you see that now it would be true anyway because Davidites would tend to marry other Davidites. But you can see it in Matthew&#8217;s Gospel and Luke&#8217;s Gospel because they both give us genealogies, and they both trace Jesus&#8217;s descent from David, but they trace Jesus descent from David in different ways. In Matthew, Jesus is descended from David through his son Solomon, the next king. But if you look in Luke, Jesus is descended from David through a different son named Nathan. Now, okay, well, that&#8217;s certainly possible, just like King Charles is descended from William the Conqueror in more than one way. But why would the gospels choose to record this descent in more than one way? We don&#8217;t know for sure, but here is a possibility. At the time of the Babylonian exile, there was a king of Judah named Jeconiah, and Jeconiah had displeased God. And God said, write this man down as childless. None of his sons will inherit. And he was a descendant of Solomon. And so, you could take that prophecy in different ways. It could mean none of his immediate sons, are going to be, king. But after that first generation, well, maybe he&#8217;d have a grandson who could be king. It doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean none of his descendants ever will be king, just none of his immediate sons. But other people didn&#8217;t take it that way. Other people took it as Jeconiah is disqualified or all of his sons are disqualified and all of his descendants are disqualified. And so it could be that Matthew preserves the line of descent through Solomon in order to make it clear that if you think Solomon is the right line, Jesus qualifies. And Luke could have preserved the Nathan line to make it clear that if you think the Solomon line is entirely disqualified, don&#8217;t worry. Still qualifies because he&#8217;s descended from David through Nathan. So we have both, lines pointing to Jesus, and whichever one, he would be qualified. No matter how you interpret the prophecy of Jeconiah, there&#8217;s still, though, that matter of we don&#8217;t know about the adoption situation because Jesus was clearly legally adopted into the line of David. He might have biological ancestry from David through Mary or, you know, but even if you assume that it wasn&#8217;t through biological. It wasn&#8217;t through the mother&#8217;s line that people inherited the kingship. It was through, the male line that people inherited the kingship. But remember what I said about fathers getting to choose who inherits?
Cy Kellett: Yes. Oh, yeah.
Jimmy Akin: Did Jesus have a father who determined he was going to inherit? Maybe not a human father.
Cy Kellett: He certainly did. One perfectly capable of making that choice. Yes.
Jimmy Akin: So his father and our Father in heaven made that determination, regardless of what the laws at the time would have said.
Cy Kellett: Jimmy, thank you. Thank you very much. We&#8217;ll, take a break.

Is Jesus Directly in King David’s Royal Line?

What is the Islamic Dilemma?

What are the theological differences in calling Jesus Yeshua and Eisaa apart from the linguistic differences?

Why does our leadership try to find so much common ground with Islam instead of highlighting the controversial side of it?

My sister converted to Islam. She sent us a video saying that sharia law is actually a scare tactic made up by Christians. What are your thoughts on this?

Do Muslims believe all Christians need to convert or be killed?

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? What about Christians and Jews?

What is the best way to evangelize Muslims?

&#8220;What is the Islamic Dilemma?&#8221; addresses the complexities surrounding Sharia law and its implications for evangelization. The discussion also touches on the theological differences in naming Jesus, the reasons behind seeking common ground with Islam, and the misconceptions surrounding sharia law as a scare tactic. Additionally, the episode examines whether Muslims believe all Christians must convert or face dire consequences.
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What Is the Islamic Dilemma? Sharia Law and Evangelization

Texas House representative James Talarico recently won the Democratic Senate primary, and his eloquent and reserved manner have earned him a lot of praise. He’s also a seminarian in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), so he gives sermons as well as speeches, like <a href="https://x.com/greg_price11/status/2029210425879892253?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2029210425879892253%7Ctwgr%5E24dc041994805985cc8225e662474453a32e0db7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2026%2F03%2Fgod-is-non-binary-our-trans-community-needs%2F">this one</a>, where he says he will give more sermons on how transgender men require access to abortion.
Indeed, Talarico has been heralded as a revival of the “religious left” because of his ability to wrap secular liberal policy positions in the mantle of a cozy Christian sermon. On <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jOGPvMftb8&amp;t=1939s">The Joe Rogan Experience</a>, he even defended keeping abortion legal with an appeal to Mary’s fiat being an example of how the Bible affirms “consent” and bodily autonomy.
<blockquote>I say all this in terms of in context of abortion because before God comes over Mary and we have the Incarnation, God asks for Mary&#8217;s consent. . . . That is a an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create.
Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings. But that has to be done with consent. It has to be done with freedom. And to me that is absolutely consistent with the ministry and life and death of Jesus.</blockquote>
Creation requires consent, but abortion isn’t the decision to “not create.” Abortion is the decision to destroy what is already created. To make an analogy, a pilot must consent before he decides to fly you in a private plane. But once he does that, he can’t revoke consent or abort the flight by parachuting out midway through the trip, leaving the passengers to crash.
Likewise, whenever a child has come into existence, he must be protected, just as we would protect a born person, who is also our neighbor, made in the image and likeness of God.
I would also ask Talarico, “Would it have been a sin for Mary to decide to abort Jesus after the Annunciation?” If he believes that women have complete autonomy, I think he would be forced to say it would not have been a sin to abort our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
But appealing to Mary’s fiat in defense of killing unborn children doesn’t just reveal the grotesque reality of Talarico’s worldview. It also reveals a glaring hypocrisy in the far “religious left.”
First, liberal Christians like Talarico will go through all kinds of exegetical gymnastics to explain away the Bible’s clear teaching on the sinfulness of things like sodomy. The Old Testament’s clear injunction that a man “shall not lie with a man as with a woman” (Lev. 18:22) and its re-affirmation in the New Testament (1 Cor 6:9-10, Rom. 1:21-27) are handwaved away as byproducts of a culture that knew nothing about “modern same-sex couples.”
But Talarico can also peer into the same ancient text and see in passages that say to “welcome the stranger” a divine condemnation of Republican immigration policies in 2026, without any concern about the Bible being situated in a different cultural context. Or he can read a story about Mary cooperating with God’s plan of redemption to be done according to “your will” as the prologue of a feminist manifesto that celebrates any evil done under the name of bodily autonomy.
Second, liberal Christians like Talarico will sound the alarm about the scourge of “Christian nationalism,” as he did in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A">a discussion</a> (07:55, 08:12) with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, but ignore the reality that they embody the very thing they warn against. On The Late Show, he said, “There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. And it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Of course, Talarico does want to use the power of government to enforce his view of what it means to “love your neighbor.” The Atlantic recently published <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/03/how-christian-nationalist-became-epithet/686279/">an essay</a> by Heath W. Carter called “Americans Should Stop Using the Term ‘Christian Nationalism’” with the subtitle “Religious beliefs have driven political change for centuries. The question today is which Christian values will prevail.”
Even The Atlantic admits that liberals don’t mind when Christians promote their faith through politics, as long as it aligns with their liberal values. So each side should just admit that it’s trying to do the same thing. Carter writes about Colbert’s appearance on The Late Show:
<blockquote>In one 2023 sermon, Talarico suggested that if the United States were actually a Christian nation, then it would embrace all of the policies for which he is fighting: student loan forgiveness, universal health care, gay rights, and basic support for the poor. Talarico would fit snugly into the tradition . . . of progressive Christians who have sought, across generations, to enshrine their religious convictions in the law.</blockquote>
What’s funny is that whereas the left-leaning Atlantic can see this, self-described conservatives like David French can’t. In the New York Times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/opinion/james-talarico-christian-democrat-texas-primary.html">French said</a> of Talarico,
<blockquote>When he&#8217;s arguing with the religious right about, say, Christian nationalism, he makes a specifically Christian argument to counter a poisonous Christian movement. &#8220;Jesus liberates,&#8221; Talarico said in a sermon in 2023. &#8220;Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. Jesus started a universal movement based on mutual love. Christian nationalism is a sectarian movement based on mutual hate.”</blockquote>
I have no idea what French is even talking about. His image of “Christian nationalists” is as fictional and over-the-top as a villain from Captain Planet who wants to pollute for the sake of causing pollution. Sure, there are probably some wackos who call themselves Christian nationalists and hate people, but you can bet that if you think marriage should retain its perennial, natural definition and that unborn children should be protected under the law, then to most liberals, you are a hateful, controlling, and maybe murderous “Christian nationalist.”
In his Joe Rogan interview, Talarico painted Christian nationalists this way: “I think that&#8217;s what we see across this Christian nationalist movement, is controlling what you do with your own body, controlling what you read, uh, controlling what you learn, controlling where you travel. I mean, this is religion at its worst, right?”
But liberals absolutely want to control people through the law, and often do so in the name of religion. They want to control what car you can drive or whether you have a gas stove in the name of climate change. They want to control if you can own a firearm or use your tax dollars on your own child’s education through vouchers.
In August of 2025, Talarico voted against ivermectin being made available over the counter while voting to make it easier to get abortion pills, even though abortion pills are much more likely than ivermectin to cause serious side-effects. Talarico also <a href="https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/177454/james-talarico">voted against a bill</a> that would prevent men from having access to women’s changing rooms. This shows that Talarico is not pro-“choice,” and he doesn’t just believe in bodily autonomy. The widespread liberal belief in forcing everyone to put COVID masks on two-year-olds, and in preventing women in public spaces from having the freedom not to have to see male genitals in a locker room, shows that liberals generally aren’t pro-“choice,” either. They are pro-abortion.
Ultimately, Talarico’s far-left Christian nationalism is a self-defeating venture. It will always trade away parts of its Christian façade to make it more palatable to its liberal supporters until nothing relevantly Christian remains.
In 1991, Camille Paglia <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/13/james-talarico-represents-christianitys-past-not-its-future/">wrote an article</a> responding to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s statement on sexuality. Paglia noted that not only does the liberal wing of the Presbyterian church dilute Christianity, but as long as it claims to be Christian, it will always be an obstacle to a truly transgressive sexual ethos. This led Paglia, the self-described “lapsed Catholic” with pagan sympathies, to pointedly ask her fellow liberals, “Why remain Christian at all?”
The question is haunting to those who belong to denominations enamored with human tradition, but easy to answer for those who hold fast to the one deposit of faith given two thousand years ago. Why remain Christian? Because as St. Peter said to our Lord, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Talarico Botches the Annunciation

Is fear a sin? Is it just an emotion? How are Christians meant to understand fear? Is there such a thing as fear that is actually a gift from the Holy Spirit? Father Hugh Barbour fearlessly tackles a host of questions about fear.

Is Fear a Sin?

So. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Let’s talk about this.
The idea is that theism is unreasonable (or just plain stupid) because it is no better motivated than believing in a creator or designer that is, essentially, a sentient ball of noodle appendages that can somehow fly. It’s a funny example—funny enough to have become a general symbol of religious parody. But is it effective?
Is belief in God really no better, rationally speaking, than belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
To address this, we need to consider relevant differences. In other words, are the motivations for theism the same as those for believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or is theistic belief different in important ways that make belief in God reasonable without having to accept belief in a Flying Spaghetti Monster? (Most of us, I think, would agree that belief in a Flying Spaghetti Monster is not well motivated.)
To answer the question of relevant differences, we need to look at the ways people have historically thought about or argued for the existence of God.
If we consider traditional arguments—such as those from Aristotle, Plotinus, or Aquinas—it becomes clear, almost immediately, that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not an effective parody. For example, one <a href="https://amzn.to/3YhTuYL">major line of thought</a> among Neo-Platonists is that all composite objects (anything “made up” of parts) must have a cause, and that whatever is truly fundamental or ultimate must be absolutely, ontologically simple. Reasons are then provided for why an absolutely simple being, whose essence just is its existence, is rightly called God. But the Flying Spaghetti Monster, being a composite entity with many different types of parts (both physical and metaphysical), clearly does not meet this criterion.
So we see a relevant difference: what motivates theism in this respect does not equally motivate belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In fact, if these traditional arguments hold any weight, they just as easily prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if it did exist, could not be truly ultimate. It would have to have some further cause or explanation for its existence.
Similarly, if we follow Aristotle’s argument from motion, where anything moving from potentiality to actuality—which is Aristotle&#8217;s metaphysical analysis of change—must ultimately be moved by that which is purely actual (I’m skipping steps), this also rules out the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Being susceptible to change—even in the angles of its noodly appendages—it could not be the immutable being of pure actuality. We have another clear relevant difference. What is good for the classical theist is not good for the Pastafarian.
I’m not detailing or defending these traditional arguments at length here—just highlighting enough of their features to show that, if—if, if, if!—one finds these traditional lines of thought convincing (which I do), then the Flying Spaghetti Monster is no real threat. The parody fails.
In fact, even if we consider more <a href="https://journalofabsolutetruth.substack.com/p/god-exists">modern arguments</a> from contingency (something is contingent insofar as it  is possibly nonexistent), the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn’t fare well. After all, it’s described in such a way as to exhibit all the usual features that imply contingency—features that suggest that it is not the sort of thing that could be necessary in itself (himself?) or truly existentially ultimate.
Philosopher Joshua Rasmussen, for example, argues that anything with <a href="https://joshualrasmussen.com/articles/the-argument-from-contingency.pdf">arbitrary limits</a>—sudden, unexplained cut-offs in terms of power, geometry, knowledge, etc.—always points beyond itself for further explanation. Clearly, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is arbitrarily limited—it has only so many noodly appendages of certain strength, length, and so on. God, however, is not arbitrarily limited, but qualitatively unlimited along relevant dimensions: immaterial (no restricting shape), omnipotent (no restricted power), omniscient (no restricted knowledge), and perfectly good (no restricted goodness or value).
Let’s turn now to another way of motivating God’s existence: inference to the best explanation. Perhaps the Spaghetti Monster will fare better here.
The basic idea of this approach is to compare different hypotheses and see which can explain the most with the least. That is, we want to hit the ideal balance, if we can, between explanatory comprehensiveness and <a href="https://journalofabsolutetruth.substack.com/p/when-simplicity-gets-complicated">theoretical simplicity</a>. As many theists argue, theism has enormous explanatory power, and there’s a strong case to be made that it’s an extremely simple and elegant theory—perhaps the simplest and most elegant of all, especially if we think simplicity matters most at the fundamental level.
Classical theism, in particular, with its commitment to the ideas that 1) God is pure goodness itself, and 2) goodness is naturally self-diffusive (naturally seeks to communicate itself), anticipates that if God creates, he will create a world with a vast hierarchy of beings that exhibits layered structures and is generally orderly, stable, and in many respects beautiful—and, importantly, will include persons. Why? Because people are good! God, being omnipotent, has the ability to bring this state of affairs about, since omnipotence is the power to bring about any possible being.
Finally, classical theism is a simple theory because everything that isn’t God is grounded in God (or God’s will), and God himself is a single ontologically simple entity with no arbitrary limits or complexity. That seems like a pretty good theory—indeed, I argue that it is one—even when we consider the problem of suffering and evil, often thought to be the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/121876322/An_Anti_Atheological_Argument_from_Suffering">strongest anomaly</a> for theism.
What about the Spaghetti Monster, then? Honestly, not so much. First, the being is obviously limited and not omnipotent, so there’s no reason to think it could produce much of anything. Even if it’s described as extremely powerful, it’s still clearly a physical being and so cannot possibly account for all physical reality (since self-causation is absurd), unlike God, who is not self-caused, but a necessary immaterial being. In this sense, the Spaghetti Monster is deficient in explanatory comprehensiveness. There is something—namely, the physical realm—that God can explain but the Spaghetti Monster cannot.
Given its other limitations, the Spaghetti Monster also doesn’t seem able to explain much else that God can, such as order, stability, integrated complexity, teleology, etc. The monster assumes all these things, whereas God—as <a href="https://journalofabsolutetruth.substack.com/p/why-classical-theism-isnt-just-about">classical theists</a> understand him, as the absolutely simple, incomposite, undirected director of everything—explains them. Moreover, even if the Spaghetti Monster could account for some things, there is no reason to expect that such a limited being, just by getting drunk, would create anything that resembles a world like ours. But theists have good reason to think that God, just by his nature (no alcohol required), would create a world like ours!
On all accounts, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a terrible objection, because it’s a terrible attempt at parody. There’s a reason you don’t find serious, sophisticated atheists throwing this objection around: they know it’s stupid!
However, I am grateful for the invention of the Spaghetti Monster. For one thing, it’s good for a laugh. Beyond that, it’s useful in allowing the theist to spell out why his belief is actually well motivated, whereas the Spaghetti Monster isn’t.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster!

<div>Which way is the proper direction to say the rosary: clockwise from the medal or counter-clockwise? Or does it not matter?</div><div>A traditional practice is praying in a counter-clockwise direction, but there’s no official Church rule on the matter, so be at peace in praying in either direction. In addition, one need not even use a rosary when praying the rosary. For instance, you can count the prayers on your fingers. This further reaffirms that our personal inner disposition is paramount in praying the rosary.
</div>

Rosary: Clockwise or Counter-Clockwise?

<div>If the saints are in heaven, then why is King David not in heaven (Acts 2:29-34)?</div><div><blockquote>My brothers, one can confidently say to you about the patriarch David that he died and was buried, and his tomb is in our midst to this day. But since he was a prophet and knew that God had sworn an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that neither was he abandoned to the netherworld nor did his flesh see corruption. God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses. Exalted at the right hand of God, he received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father and poured it forth, as you (both) see and hear.
For David did not go up into heaven, but he himself said:
&#8220;The Lord said to my Lord, &#8216;Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.&#8217;”
Therefore let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified (Acts 2:29-35).</blockquote>
The author is not saying that David did not go to heaven after the resurrection of Jesus. The context is that Peter is pointing out that in certain Psalm passages David was not talking about himself but about Jesus.
Peter began his preaching by saying, &#8220;For David says of him . . . you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld, nor will you suffer your holy one to see corruption&#8221; (Acts 2:25,27).
By saying David was buried in their midst and was not resurrected, Peter was saying that David could not have speaking about himself, because the Psalm clearly states that the person will not remain in the grave. Peter was preaching the fulfillment of Scripture in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.
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Is King David in Heaven?

Many Christians think constantly giving, never saying no, and exhausting themselves is a form of sacrificial love. Where does that idea go wrong?

How I balance my obligations to God and to my family?

Is there ever a time that a Catholic is morally obligated or allowed to defend one’s family by physical means? Or is it ever sinful?

Many of your examples are for married people with families. How would the principles here be applied to a single person?

I’m 18, and there is a girl I’d like to ask out. How do I deal with the fear of rejection?

I think I’m having a trauma response to my family. My family and I are moving onto the same property as my parents. Our family farm is falling apart and I’m worried how it is going to affect relationships.

&#8220;Should Sacrificial Love Be Exhausting?&#8221; Many believe that constant giving and never saying no is the essence of love, but this perspective can lead to burnout. The discussion also touches on balancing obligations to God and family, the moral implications of defending one&#8217;s family, and how these principles apply to single individuals.
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Should Sacrificial Love Be Exhausting? Balancing Family and God

Does the Church teach that only Catholics can be saved? Trent Horn explains this teaching to a caller on Catholic Answers Live.

No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church?

Favorite Apologist?!

<div>What is the Church's stance on giving money to the Shriners Hospitals for Children?</div><div>The Catholic Church has not formally pronounced on financially supporting Shriners hospitals, although we can apply Catholic principles to the question, given that the Shriners are a philanthropic endeavor of the Masons.
As the Masons note well on their official website, <a href="http://www.shrinersinternational.org/Shriners/MasonShriners/Masons">all Shriners are Masons</a>, and <a href="http://www.shrinersinternational.org/Shriners/Philanthropy/Origins">Shriners hospitals are one of their big service projects</a>.
The Church has repeatedly pronounced that Catholics may not become Shriners or otherwise members of Masonic societies, under pain of excommunication. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/masonry">Freemasonry</a> is at odds with Catholicism in key ways, and one of Masonry’s prime adjectives, particularly as it has existed in certain European countries, has been to destroy the Catholic Church. See our <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-does-the-church-say-about-freemasonry">presentation on Freemasonry</a>. See also <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/joe-biden-a-freemason">our related article</a> that elaborates further on Freemasonry’s problematic religious aspects.
In that light, we can apply Catholic principles to giving financial support to a Shriners hospital. One should never give to Masonic endeavor because it advances the mission of Masonry per se. Support for any Masonic endeavor to advance the fundamental mission of Masonry would be <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/answers/moral-cooperation-in-the-evil-of-another-23211" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">formal cooperation</a> in an intrinsic moral evil (see <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/1868.htm">CCC 1868</a>), which would be, objectively, a mortal sin (see <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a8.htm#1857">CCC 1857–1863</a>). It would be similar to voting for a pro-abortion politician precisely because he favors the legalized killing of unborn children (see <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a5.htm#2272">CCC 2272</a>). This is why formally joining the Masons is an excommunicable offense.
A Catholic might counter that he’d give financially to a Shriners hospital only to support the Masons’ care of disabled children, and that any support of the Shriners otherwise would be an unintended side-effect. Here one should consider the Church’s teaching on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/birth-control-for-medical-reasons">the principle of double effect</a>. We can never choose evil that good may come from it (CCC 1756).
In addition, as an application on the principle of double effect, one should consider whether such financial support is necessary to treat seriously disabled children in a given geographical area. If there are good Catholic hospitals that provide such care, then you should direct your funds there because, in doing so, you can expect that the care the children receive is sound medically and spiritually, and you’ll also be supporting the Church’s mission in general. However, if a Shriners hospital is the only means of serving seriously disabled children care in the area, then it can be a good thing for a Catholic to give money specifically to support the Shriners’ care of seriously disabled children.
</div>

Is It OK to Support Shriners Hospitals?

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

A Biblical Explanation for Pagan Gods

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In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss whether the wealth and power of the Catholic Church signal a great apostasy. Joe explains how financial growth can support good works and emphasizes the importance of generosity in the Christian life.
Transcript:
Caller: I&#8217;m Catholic, but I really struggle with this, and I don&#8217;t have an answer for my Protestant brothers and sisters for this. Why is it that the Pope and the bishops, when they do function infallibly and they are assumed then to be in Persona Christi? Why is it that they dressed in such ornate and expensive garments and live so comfortably and they are treated with such pomp and circumstance when Jesus himself never dressed that way, never demanded that kind of special privileged treatment, and actually preached against it?
Joe Heschmeyer: All right, fantastic question, Christy, and thank you for it. So, first of all, you mentioned ornate, expensive garments when they&#8217;re functioning within their role as pope and or bishop as bishops right now, that can be parsed out a little bit as well, depending on, like, which function we&#8217;re talking about. So if we&#8217;re talking about the priest celebrating the liturgy while the expensive garments and the beauty is order to visibly signifying the Persona Christi, that the priest is operating the person of Christ who is God made flesh and who deserves everything. Right. So the importance of the pomp and circumstance with regard to the garments of the priests and even the liturgical setting is to signify the great, the value of the reality that we&#8217;re entering into, experiencing and celebrating Jesus himself, the God, man and the heavenly existence. Okay. This is why God instructed Moses to build such an ornate temple in order to signify on earth the grandeurness and majesty of God in heaven. So if we&#8217;re talking about that, that would be sort of the approach that I would take in conversation, try to emphasize the beauty here on earth is meant to order us in our minds to become aware of the beauty of God and His majesty. Now, you mentioned also with regard to bishops and priests, l. In luxury. And that&#8217;s very important to bring up. And that&#8217;s something that we can talk about, but we&#8217;re going to have. It&#8217;s going to be a bit difficult to define. What do we mean by luxury? Like, where is that boundary that if you&#8217;re on this side of the boundary, well, you&#8217;re okay, you know, driving this sort of car to get from A to B. That&#8217;s okay. Jesus didn&#8217;t drive any cars. So must we go around not driving cars to get from place A to place, baby? No. Jesus didn&#8217;t wear, you know, clothes like we wear. He didn&#8217;t wear a watch. Right. He didn&#8217;t wear shoes. He wore sandals. Must we not wear shoes? I don&#8217;t think so. So, like, where&#8217;s that boundary of what&#8217;s going to constitute, you know. Well, this is a form of Luxury that&#8217;s imprudent and immodest and not good. But this form of luxury is okay and permitted. That&#8217;s going to be extremely difficult to determine. But I am sympathetic to the idea that there are some extremes I think, that we can identify and say, man, that&#8217;s a little bit too much. And Sy, we were talking over the break about a recent event where a bishop sold like a 35,000 square foot mansion or something like that. Actually, there&#8217;s two of them. Bishop Gallagher in Detroit sold the bishop&#8217;s mansion for two and a half million dollars. I guess that&#8217;s one of those. You know, the bishops have always lived in that because Detroit had a lot of money at one point, he just sold it and moved into something smaller. But there&#8217;s also this story from the Belleville diocese where the bishop, after Bishop Michael McGovern, after the Roe v. Wade decision came down, he said the diocese needs to do more to care for expectant mothers, mothers who are in troubled situation. So he sold his house and he gave the money.
Caller: Beautiful. Beautiful.
Caller: To helping women in those situations.
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah. So, Christy, in that sit, you know, when you got a bishop who has like a 35,000 square foot mansion or something, I mean, that seems to be a bit too much. Right. And so I think it&#8217;s a good thing, and I applaud that bishop for selling that in order to live in something more simple. I think we can also see an extreme of luxury. If a priest is going around, you know, driving some 65, $70,000 car or something, that&#8217;s going to cause some scandal and he needs to rethink his role as a priest. And I think we can identify those situations, Christie, and say, yeah, in these situations, these bishops and priests, they need to live more simply, not in perfect conformity to Christ, because that would entail not being able to wear our modern clothes and shoes and a watch, et cetera. Right. So we can&#8217;t go too far in a literalistic way, but I do think we can be sympathetic. And priests and bishops need to be cognizant and aware of their living situation, the cars they&#8217;re driving, and whether it would cause scandal or not to people. Right. Because they are called to a certain degree of simplicity that would be in conformity with the spirit of what Jesus is preaching in the Gospel. And finally, Christy, one last thought. I noted here that you had mentioned that Jesus preached against luxury wealth. It is true that Jesus preached against riches, but he only preached against riches insofar as they lead one to laziness. Say in the Gospel parable where you have the one who gets really wealthy and says eat, drink and be merry. We have everything stored up. Jesus is very condemnatory of that practice because it was an accumulation of wealth in order to be lazy, an accumulation of wealth in order to indulge fleshly desires apart from God&#8217;s design. Right. And thinking about the heavenly things, that&#8217;s when Jesus condemns riches and wealth. And even Jesus does say that it is difficult to live the Christian life order to the kingdom of God when you have wealth. That doesn&#8217;t mean wealth is bad, that just means it can be more difficult because the wealth can be a source of temptation for indulging in things outside of God&#8217;s plan or it being the source one that in which somebody sees their happiness and fulfillment. But Jesus did not preach against wealth or riches in and of itself as if being wealthy is bad in and of itself. It&#8217;s only when the wealth leads us. We allow it to lead us away from living in accord with, with how God wants us to live. That&#8217;s when it becomes sinful and bad.
Cy Kellett: Christy, I love your objection, however, and it&#8217;s a subtle one. It&#8217;s not just a matter of a simple this doctrine or that, but it&#8217;s a kind of generalized is the Church setting the right example in the way her bishops are? And that&#8217;s a legitimate question to ask. Amen. So I want to come back to you and see where you are after Carlo&#8217;s answer.
Caller: Yeah, like I said, I love my Catholicism and I would feel lost without it. But I, I really struggle so much, Carlo and sty with the wealth that, and the, and the, the luxury that is exhibited in the Church. And I know that it&#8217;s a human thing and I follow the Catholic religion because of Christ and not necessarily because of the foibles of the men and women in the, in the Catholic Church. But nonetheless I, I really, really, really struggle with that and I don&#8217;t have. I appreciate your answer, but I still don&#8217;t feel comfortable with that.
Joe Heschmeyer: Y understand, Christy. I completely understand how you would be uncomfortable with it. And there&#8217;s a legitimate concern there that we need to express to our leaders in order for them to be thinking to themselves, you know, am I setting a good example? One thing to keep in mind to possibly temper the concern, Christy, is to realize that a lot of this stuff is ordered to the purpose for which it exists is to signify the dignity of the office that the Pope holds, the office that the Bishop holds, the office that the priest holds, that&#8217;s sort of the order, you know, the design, the purpose for which the pomp and the circumstance exists. I mean, think about it. You know, if you go to a graduation ceremony, everybody, all the kids, all the graduates, they get in these fancy gowns, right? Well, is it order towards just like looking pretty? No. I mean, some, for some, it might be that, but like, they get on these fancy gowns and we have all this fancy, you know, introduction, master of ceremony, and all of these fancy, all of this fancy stuff for graduation ceremonies. But why do we do that? We do that to signify the good of the accomplishment of graduation for the students and to signify the importance of what is going on. Right. And so there&#8217;s nothing wrong with visibly using our bodies and everything to enhance the experience of the celebration for certain ceremonies. I mean, just think of weddings, right? We don&#8217;t wear tuxedos and wedding garments every day. When we go to the grocery store, we reserve that for wedding vows and the wedding day. Why? Because it signifies the importance of what&#8217;s going on. It sort of takes away, if you&#8217;re going to go to the wedding, just. And, you know, cut off shorts and flip flops in a muscle shirt, a beach shirt or something. It takes away from the dignity of the reality that is being celebrated. So just trans. In your own mind and your own prayer. Christy, as you&#8217;re thinking through this stuff, take look at those examples, graduation ceremonies, military ceremonies or something, right. Or burials, military burials for military personnel or weddings, and think about the principles involved there of what&#8217;s going on with all of the pomp and circumstance and what it&#8217;s meant for. And then just transfer that to the role of the Pope and the bishops and the priests and what they do when they exercise their ministerial roles. The pomp and the pomp and circumstance is appropriate and fitting in order to signify what&#8217;s going on there.